Number 1 Whole Volume XXX VIII January, 1929 Number 223

THE

PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.

REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS.*

O two terms in the whole vocabulary of philosophy have

changed their meaning and even reversed their application

so frequently as the words real and ideal, and no terms have

proved so indispensable. We may form the most determined

resolution to dismiss the distinctions implied in realism and

idealism. It is no use: we only furnish a new instance of the maxim Naturam furca expelles.

The terms real and ideal in fact express a distinction which is fundamental in human experience and is apparent in the first moment of reflection. Self-consciousness reveals us to ourselves in two kinds of relation to our environment: in a real relation and in an ideal relation. Real relations bind us to the material world of things, the physical world; ideal relations bind us to the spiritual world of persons; they are the basis of social, moral and religious institutions. The two kinds of relation, mutually exclusive and never identical, lead to a distinction of nature in our own self-consciousness, the distinction between a body which suffers and acts and a mind which knows and understands, between reality or fact and knowledge or truth.

Real relations are constitutive of the physical world of which our body is part; ideal relations are representative of the universe which our mind apprehends. Examples of real relations are: The conflict of Greeks and Trojans on the plains of Ilium—the clash of forces, the death-dealing blows, the fortified city, the ships on the sea-strand—in so far as the conflict was an actual occurrence under spatio-temporal conditions and involving phys-

* Presidential Address, Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Associ- ation, November 30, 1928.

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ical movements. We can indeed only represent these past oc- currences, but we distinguish them as real from the romantic interpretation of them which we represent as ideal. Examples of ideal relations are: The wrath of Achilles, the guile of Odysseus, the graciousness of Helen, the pride of Agamemnon, the motives and purposes of the conflict,—all that in Homer, and the gener- ations since Homer, and in our minds today constitutes the Iliad. Real relations are the notes given forth by the musical instruments in the concert hall, the vibrations produced by the bows drawn across the stretched strings. Idea! relations are the symphony, and the recollections and emotions associated with it. Real relations are the space we measure in inches or miles, and the time we measure in minutes or years, which separate us and bind us in one physical universe; ideal relations are the understandings and sympathies and antipathies which constitute our intercourse. Real relations are all those relations which form the physical basis of our lives; ideal relations are all those relations which give meaning and direction to our spiritual activity.

No one confuses these two kinds of relation, for no one can in fact fail to recognize the distinction between what concerns the material aspect of life and what concerns its spiritual value.

O, who can holt a fire in his hand By thinking of the frosty Caucasus?

Yet the very distinction and the terms which express it seem to determine in advance the status of the two classes of relations distinguished. The terms real and ideal bear witness to a bias in our nature which leads us to regard the material basis of our lives as more original than our spiritual activity, and as inde- pendent of it. The very opposition it implies seems to stamp on the ideal a character of unreality, and this conception of the unreality of the ideal agrees with common-sense. The plain man thinks that things are real and thoughts unreal. Ideas seem to him mere shadow things, the stuff that dreams are made of. It is a false opposition. Ideal relations are in no sense unreal. As belonging to human experience both the real and the ideal have equal claim to existence.

What appears to give real relations a privileged status is that

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 3

they are the subject-matter of the physical sciences. This seems to make them the fundamental basis of reality. For science is generally regarded as discovery, and the aim of scientific inquiry seems to be the laying bare of the real existences them- selves of which the universe consists, the revelation of the reals which are the terms of the real relations.

This generally accepted conception of science I shall argue is false in fact. Real relations I shall endeavour to show fare not relations between reals. The only relations possible between reals are ideal. It is an entire misconception of the nature of science to suppose that its end is discovery. Indeed I go so far as to say that if this is the scientific ideal, its enterprise is quixotic. For all our knowledge is of relations, and while we may infer that there are things, discovery or immediate intuition of them is in the very nature of knowing impossible. Science is a work of interpretation involving rational construction.

I propose in the first place to examine the way in which the two kinds of relations enter into and form an organic part of human experience. Then briefly to follow the speculations of philosophy in regard to these two kinds of relations. Finally to indicate the significance of the new method which has been forced upon science by the adoption of the principle of relativity and to define precisely the sense in which science may be described as idealistic.

I. How REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS ARE RELATED IN HuMAN EXPERIENCE.

The two kinds of relations enter into human experience under the familiar forms of knowing and acting. Every voluntary act of the conscious individual unites a system of real relations and a system of ideal relations. An individual experience appears to us as a development, progressing and enduring, forming itself continuously from moment to moment. At the focus of this activity there converge the two systems of relations forming two heterogeneous causal chains, one inserting the forming action in the material world, the other uniting it to the spiritual world. The one causal bond we name efficiency, the other finality. To will an end we must know; to effect an end we must act. Knowing is ideal, acting is real.

4 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vow XXXVIII.

What, then, is the relation to one another of these two kinds of relations? They are indissolubly united in experience and yet they are never identical. The question of their relation is of the first importance, not only on account of its theoretical interest, but also on account of its practical scientific interest, for in knowing and acting we have the immediate experience which leads us to the conception of a mind and a body. It is possible, therefore, by attending to the activity of knowing and acting in experiencing it, to intuit the relation of the relations before the hypostatization of a mind which knows and a body which acts. In fact when we are considering real and ideal relations we are making no assumptions at all, we are dealing with immediate facts of experience in theirimmediacy. Knowing and acting are facts of experience and we have only to refer to them to indicate our meaning. Knowing is an activity purely and entirely ideal, it is the relation of a subject to an object, a relation which is purely representative. We call the relation ideal because it has no efficiency. Acting is a relation which effects changes in reality. Acting is dependent on knowing for guidance and direction and it is this dependence which distin- guishes it from mechanical movement. Knowing gives to acting its finality but it does not supply its efficiency. Mind and body are hypothetical existences; knowing and acting are immediate experience. Ideal and real relations are the immediate content of consciousness.

The two kinds of relations which constitute knowing and acting have two different principles of unity. Ideal relations have an inner unity, that is, a unity within experience; real relations have an external unity, that is, a unity beyond or outside experience. Ideal relations refer to the subject of experience, real relations to the object of experience. Ideal relations are centripetal, real relations are centrifugal. Ideal relations converge, real relations diverge. We find accordingly two opposing principles in theories of knowledge. Realist theories regard knowledge or ideal representation as originating in the external object, whatever that object be, and imparted to the subject by outward impressions which become inner representations. Idealist theories, on the other hand, regard

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 5

knowledge as inwardly originated and outwardly directed towards actions. Real relations for the idealist are the objecti- fying of its own experience by the subject.

The difficulty in all realist theories is to discover, or even to imagine, how effectively independent objects can generate ideal relations. The difficulty of all idealist theories is to understand how ideal relations can represent real relations.

II. How IDEAL AND REAL RELATIONS ARE HYPOSTATIZED IN MIND AND MATTER.

Relations are not self-subsistent. If there are relations we say there must be things related. Relations require a support. While however we know relations immediately the things in relation can only be inferred. Modern philosophy arose in a revolt against authority and in a direct interrogation of experi- ence, and the first serious problem which presented itself was the nature of substance or real being. When we reflect on our experience we can become immediately conscious of our activity in thinking but we cannot find satisfaction in the identical proposition, ‘thinking is thinking,’ or in the existential propo- sition, ‘thinking is.” When in thinking we are conscious of thinking we go on to say there is a subject which thinks and an object which is thought about. The thinking about which alone we can make a categorical proposition, is a relation. The terms related, the subject and object, are hypothetical. If they are substances they are only known in their relation.

It is interesting to see the form in which this problem expressed itself at the beginning of the modern period, and to compare it with the form which it has assumed with the advance of modern science. The problem is persistent in the history of modern philosophy from Descartes onwards. The first attempts at its solution all found it necessary to introduce the conception of God. It was in this way that Descartes, Malebranche and Spinoza each sought a way out of the difficulty. Modern realist theories practically adopt the same device. The neutral monism of one form of modern realism and the panpsychism of another are simply forms of the God-substance theory of Spinoza, divested of theological associations by avoiding the use of the term God.

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It is worth while to consider the problem in the form which it presents to the {seventeenth century philosophers. The fundamental fact for them is the existence in experience of the two kinds of relations we have denominated ideal and real and their complete heterogeneity. It never occurs to them to suggest that the one set has a superior claim to existence or that the one has a derived existence dependent on the other. They differ only in the way in which each supposes the two kinds of relations to be unified in experience by God. For Descartes each kind of relations implies a substance; ideal relations imply a thinking substance, real relations an extended substance. God, the original first cause, is the creator of both substances. God has implanted the ideas in the thinking substance, the soul, and has imparted movement to the extended substance, matter. Ideas have formed the soul, movements have formed the body. Clear and distinct ideas correspond to fact and are true because God cannot be a deceiver.

Spinoza, identifying God with substance, regards the opposition between ideal and real relations as absolute. The mind for him is the idea of the body, the body the ideate of the mind, and both are modes of the existence of God. The attributes of thought and extension are as distinct in God as the two substances in Descartes’ view were distinct from God. Ideal relations are ideal and ideally related; real relations are material and mechanical. There is no identity of mind and matter, not even in God.

Malebranche follows the same principle of the absolute heterogeneity of ideal and real relations, and seeks the solution in the conception of God, but along a different line. It is by ideal relations alone that we are united to God and we know material things only ideally. It is in God that we see and know all things, ideal and real, spiritual and material.

In each system (Descartes, Spinoza, Malebranche) there is the recognition of the heterogeneity of ideal and real relations and the same principle of identity by reference to an intermediating reality. The principle of modern realism is essentially the same. Real relations insert us into the external world: ideal relations constitute our knowledge of this external world: truth is the

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 7

correspondence of ideal relations with real relations; but the external world itself to which both these kinds of relations unite us, which is both thing-in-itself and object of knowledge, is the substance which supports both kinds of relations.

The problem of modern realism is: Given ideas, which are subjective representations of the physical world, and movements which relate us to the physical world, how are ideal relations related to the real relations? And the realist solution is to posit a reality, autonomous and independent, which manifests itself in each mode. In this way it accounts for the double correspondence, namely, that between the real relations and the ideal relations, and that between the knowledge of reality which is subjective and the reality known which is objective. In the realist theory, accordingly, real relations are our insertion into the external world, and ideal relations are the representation we make for ourselves of these real relations. Truth is the correspondence of these ideal representations with the real relations. The concept of matter takes the place of the concept of God.

The recent psychological theory known as Behaviourism is the denial that there is any substantial difference between real and ideal relations. It affirms without any reservation the simple and direct identity of thinking or discursive reasoning and the movements of the muscles of articulation. The move- ments of the larynx, the tongue, the throat, the lips, which produce articulation, and the succession of images and ideas in the mind which produce thinking, are not different things but one and identical. This identification of real and ideal relations is put forward as the ground for rejecting any kind of substance or existence, anything spiritual as distinct from material, as the subject-matter of psychology. For the be- haviourist therefore psychology is not the science of soul or mind as distinct from physiology; it recognizes no psyche distinct from physis or hyle; it is one of the natural or physical sciences which takes as its subject-matter the particular kind of responses which certain forms of highly organized matter offer to particular kinds of stimulus. The psychological method which Behaviour- ism condemns is introspection, the method which claims to be

8 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vow XXXVIII.

able to turn the mind’s attention inwards upon itself and observe the soul directly in its activity.

It is clear that if we base all science on the direct interrogation of experience, and if we reject all hypothetical existences, or at least deny them any privilege on account of the immediacy of the inference, then we must admit that all observation of natural phenomena is on the same plane. A phenomenon is external or internal according to the point of view; or rather, the distinction between external and internal is unmeaning. On this ground the behaviourist is clearly right in saying that it is impossible by direct observation to discover the soul, or any kind of entity such as consciousness or mind, which we can then present as a spiritual substance. The observed phenomena which give rise to the idea of such spiritual substance are, he will say, on precisely the same footing as those which give rise to the idea of material substance.

Suppose we admit this, does it justify us in dismissing the distinction between real and ideal relations? Here it seems to me the behaviourist falls into evident confusion. It is intelligible to contend that real relations are ideal in the sense that they are a mental construction; or it is intelligible to say that ideal relations are an exotic exhalation of real relations; but most certainly real and ideal relations are not identical. In simple direct interrogation of experience they belong to different orders of phenomena; as relations they relate on entirely different principles. To refer them to one and the same substance is intelligible; to deny or reject substance and affirm their identity as relations is unintelligible.

Our experience, then, consists of the kind of facts we call relations and these relations are of two kinds, mutually exclusive. There is no principle by which we can reduce them to a single genus. Relations are not self-subsistent; we immediately infer from them the existence of terms. The relations alone, not the terms, are directly experienced. The terms are implied or inferred. Accordingly the metaphysical problem is to devise a scheme which will rationalize the existence in our experience of these two kinds of relations. From real relations we infer that there are things and that things are material; from ideal relations

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 9

we infer that there are minds and that minds are spiritual. The inference is immediate but not the things inferred. Matter and mind are known mediately by the real and ideal relations which alone are experienced. Matter and mind are not intuited, they are conceived. Concepts are not discovered by analysis of experience; they are a synthetic construction.

Every metaphysical analysis of experience must take into account the fact that there is no way of observing directly the genesis of consciousness from unconsciousness. Experience does not begin in some primordial act of awareness. We cannot observe the genesis of consciousness either by introspection or by outward observation. The genesis of our knowledge of the internal or the external world can only be theoretically con- structed. We can no more induce experience in a mind than we can impart life toastatue. We cannot analyze experience by the chemist’s method, separating out its constituent elements and determining by experiment the order and manner of their combination. Experience is a whole, indivisible, individual, complete at every moment and all-inclusive. It may present infinitely varied and infinitely variable aspects, but there is no principle by which it can be broken up into constituent elements, or by which one aspect can be studied in abstraction from the whole. This does not imply that the method of philosophy is unscientific; the same impossibility meets us in biology, the science of the organism. The first important question therefore which the philosopher has to decide is whether the object of his study, reality as a whole, the universe in its comprehension, is analogous to an inorganic object, or to an organism, whether the universe in the original conception of it is living or inanimate, for upon his answer depends the method he will follow.

How then is the philosopher to begin? He must by inter- rogating his own experience decide what mind is. Obviously this is a more fundamental and a more crucial question than what matter is. At the beginning of the modern period, when philosophy definitely emancipated itself from authority, the first question the philosopher had to ask himself was, What is mind? Two answers, diametrically opposite, were forthcoming. The first was the answer of Descartes. He conceived the mind

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to be a thinking substance, a substance whose essential attribute is thinking, a substance distinct from that of the extended world which is known not directly but by an idea. The other answer came later in the history of thought but seems to respond to an earlier stage in human reflection. It is the answer of Locke that the mind is the sensitivity of a material object to the impressions of other objects. In the first answer the philo- sophical problem pivots on the reality of the inner world of experience; in the second on the reality of the external world of material objects. The first tends to make real relations depend on the activity of the subject of experience, the second tends to make ideal relations depend on the reality of the spatio-temporal world of which they are a subjective valuation.

There is no way of reconciling the two answers. If one is true the other is false. On the other hand neither answer is final. Were we left with the bare alternative of choosing one answer or the other progress in philosophy would be impossible. There is something more important than the actual answers which Descartes and Locke respectively gave to the question: What is mind; is it a substantial soul or a sensitive ‘abula rasa? It is the divergent direction in the search for truth which each answer indicates. Descartes sought the primordial principle of reality in the activity of experience, Locke in the inert passivity of the external world, the object of scientific knowledge.

Real relations came to be regarded, both by the followers of Descartes and by the followers of Locke, as the relations between inert material things, and ideal relations as the relations between active thinking things or minds; and speaking generally this division has been accepted alike in science and in philosophy throughout the modern period. In philosophy it is the basis of the distinction between realism and idealism, and in science it is the ground of the distinction between physical science and psychology.

A challenge to the whole conception was thrown down by Leibniz, and an entirely new direction of philosophical inter- pretation was proposed by him on the basis of a new metaphysical theory. This theory was that substance is active and of the nature of force; that there is only one kind of substance and

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. If

that it exists in individual minds; there is no material substance. It is only today when the fundamental conceptions of physics are undergoing a radical revision that the full significance of

the Leibnizian theory is appearing.

III. WHAT THE REALS ARE.

Corresponding to the two kinds of relations it would seem there must be two kinds of things which furnish us with knowl- edge: spiritual things or minds which know and are known; and material things which are known but do not know. All knowledge, whether it be of minds which know, or of the world which is known, is mediated by ideas and ideas are relations. What then are the reals which we distinguish from the mediating ideas? The distinction in ordinary experience between real and ideal relations seems to provide a perfect answer. The reals, it will be said, are the terms which support the relations we call real relations. This is the answer of materialism. It is the answer which has been given with complete conviction and absolute confidence over and over again in the history of phi- losophy. It was the answer of Leucippus and Democritus in the pre-Socratic era. It was the answer of Epicurus and Lucretius in the later Greek philosophy. It was the answer of Gassendi and Hobbes in the modern world. It is the answer being put forward today, with adaptation to the newer discoveries in science, in the scientific materialism and psychological be- haviourism of the present time. It is an answer which has never given and cannot give satisfaction. It had to meet the direct challenge of Plato in the ancient world and of Leibniz in the modern world. It cannot make good in face of the fact that while matter claims to be real it is essentially ideal. The matter to which materialism appeals has not the immediacy of the ‘I think’ nor the directness of perception. It is only in perception that we touch reality and perception is an activity of the mind. The object in which we locate the reality to which perception relates us is only inferred from the relation. The relation alone is immediate.

But is the idealist’s answer any more satisfactory than the materialist’s? Clearly not if his answer implies an immediate

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relation between the mind which knows and the mind which is known. Another mind, or even one’s own mind, is only known by an idea, and the idea is not the object but the relation of the subject to the object. We cannot say then that real relations are relations between things and ideal relations relations between ideas. It is equally futile to hypostatize matter or mind if our purpose be to rationalize knowledge.

When Leibniz put forward the challenging theory that the relations between the real constituents of the universe are not real but ideal, it was with no intention of rationalizing knowledge. His fundamental interest was metaphysics. He was intent on demonstrating the true nature of the real units or simple sub- stances which compose the universe.

If we start from reality, and not from some assumption about reality, we cannot side-track the question: What are the reals? We have seen that it is impossible to give an answer by ab- stracting the terms of the knowing relation and hypostatizing them as material and spiritual substances, or entities, or things. The attempt to do so leads directly to the stultifying conclusion, so clearly demonstrated by Kant, that we have no knowledge of things-in-themselves. The only answer to Kant is to point to the immediacy of the knowledge of conscious activi 7. There is a direct contact between life and knowledge which does not imply the separation of the two terms of the knowing relation. The real is not an object thought, whether the object be spiritual or material. The real is the subject thinking.

The dilemma in the metaphysical problem: Do we know things-in-themselves? lies in the fact that in knowledge the universe is one, in reality it is composite. Were the universe not composite there would be no relations, or what is the same thing, relations would not relate. If the universe is composite there must be real components. Are, then, these reals inert or active? The criticism of the atomic theory shows the futility of positing these real units in matter. The only real units are in the living world and living units are essentially active. Clearly therefore we have an alternative to the old atomism. We may take as the type of simple unity the kind of unit we find in the living world. In the ordinary plain meaning of the terms this

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 13

is precisely what Leibniz did. When he found that the concept of atoms and void would not work, he considered the nature of spiritual units and found in them a concept which would work. The units of the living world are activities, they are individual and therefore indivisible. They satisfy the metaphysical require- ments that they should be simple, that is, indivisible, and that they should enter into compounds. For this illuminating concept we are indebted to Leibniz. I propose in what follows to deal with the concept itself from our own standpoint, con- sidering the problem as it exists for our modern world.

What then for us in our reflection on experience is the pri- mordial fact? Clearly it is not some simple entity which we can indicate as an object outside us, nor is it an internal object or self confronting an alien world. It is not an entity but a relation. Our first awareness is of activity, a relating activity. This and only this is our first form of reflective self-consciousness. The ‘I think therefore I am’ is not the discernment or discrimi- nation of a thinking substance but the direct awareness of activity in being, or rather of an activity conscious of itself in its activity. All our immediate knowledge is of relations and within this world of relations we distinguish without limit. Whenever we are conscious we are conscious of something going on. In actual experience this world of relations never transforms itself into a world of things related. There is no experience of inertia. Further, all this activity is individualized and also it is self-centred and self-referred. The reals then are self-centred, self-referring, individual activities and they constitute the universe.

It will be seen at once that in this way we affirm reals which are not inferred entities but directly known activities. There are two meanings in which I may refer to myself as ‘mind,’ ‘self’ or ‘ego.’ I may mean the subject in the thinking relation when I think of an object. I may then think of this subject, myself, as an object existing when I am not thinking. Such an existent subject or self could only be hypothetical. It may be a necessary logical inference, but I have no direct acquaintance with it. But also I may mean the self I am experiencing in my activity. In this case I am not inferring a self but I am

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conscious of myself in my activity. In this meaning I not only know reality by direct acquaintance but I know there is no other way in which I could know it. Here then is our first secure position. The reals are the individual activities of the universe in their immediacy.

At this point we are invariably met with the argument, supposed to be fatal to any claim to knowledge of the external world, that to identify the real with our experienced activity can only lead to a subjective solipsism. We have indeed to admit that so far as immediate knowledge of the real is concerned there is for each subject of experience only one real and it is all-inclusive. It is impossible to deny that the world I know is the world of my experience and there is no other. The manyness of the reals, if the reals are many, cannot be an immedi- ate datum of consciousness, it can only be an interpretation of what is immediately experienced in consciousness. So far how- ever from this being a disadvantage to our argument, it is in fact the very nerve of it, it supplies it with its interpretative principle. There is no need to disown or oppose the solipsistic conclusion, precisely because it is the recognition of the solipsistic character of my own experience which enables me to form the concept of a universe constituted of solipsistic experients. Such a universe is a rational hypothesis because it is based on indubitable and intelligible fact. If I know by my own experi- ence what a real is I know what other reals are. I can affirm with absolute logical necessity that if there be other reals they will be, like me, solipsistic individuals, who cannot pass out of themselves into me any more than I can pass out of myself into them.

IV. Tue ReaAt RELATIONS OF THE REALS.

If we assume the truth of our hypothesis that the reals which compose the universe are individual solipsistic subjects of experience, it will follow that the relations between reals cannot be real relations. The relations which give efficiency to actions will fall within individual experience and not lie between indi- vidual experients. The only relation possible between reals will be ideal. Yet real relations are what we all without exception

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regard as laws of nature, universal in their application, absolute in their working, independent in their activity. What then are real relations? How do they acquire universal recognition? And what is the nature of their independent validity?

Real relations are the order which the individual subject of activity introduces into its perceptions in the interest of its actions. No agent can act in a chaotic universe. The first need of action is codérdination. What is the nature of this codrdination and how is it effected? To answer this question we must first acquire a full comprehension of the nature of science and the limitations to scientific work.

There is a difference which strikes everyone on reflection between the real world of our ordinary perception and the real world of our scientific conception. Both worlds are appearance. The distinction between them is not that which philosophers make between phenomena and noumena, between things as they appear and things as they are in themselves. The perceptual world is the objective world as it actually appears, the conceptual world is the same objective world as we imagine it would appear were the limitations of perception removed. Moreover, there seems to be a direct passage from perception to conception. It is very difficult to divest ourselves of the idea that were the ordinary powers of our sense-organs heightened we should be brought nearer to a view of things as they really are, and that if we could know the world in an infinite intuition, as we suppose God knows it, we should have a perception of the real from which the need of conception would have wholly vanished. This common-sense view which underlies scientific realism can be shown to be a complete misunderstanding of the nature of scientific work. Two or three simple illustrations will make this clear.

First, we never really ‘see’ any object in the material world. Before there can be vision of an object there must be an image of it and this image is formed by the convergence on the retina of rays of light proceeding from the object. There is no con- vergence of rays of light in’nature; that is, the rays reflected by an object do not converge. Convergence is wholly contrived by the eye. Again, it is necessary that anything we see should

2

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be distant from the eye; an object which touches the eye is invisible; and the size of the image varies with the distance; accordingly we never perceive the real magnitude of anything we see. And yet we conceive magnitudes to be real and in- variable.

Secondly, in order that we may see anything it must be illuminated. The light which illuminates an object and renders it visible is no part of the object. Light is force and therefore must modify the momentum of the object illuminated. It is true that in ordinary sense objects the modification due to the force of light is negligible, but in the objects with which physics is concerned the momentum of the objects—atoms, electrons, radiation,—is of the same order as that of light.

Thirdly, when we turn from the microscopic to the macroscopic objects of science the same principle is illustrated. Mankind from the beginning of history has looked out on the starry firmament and observed that “‘one star differs from another in glory.”’ Inthe seventeenth century the invention of the telescope led to the discovery that our earth is one of innumerable masses of matter moving in an apparently limitless empty extension or space. The inventors of the telescope thought that theo- retically there was no limit to the aid which it would ultimately offer to the extension of vision. It is not the telescope, however, which has or could have given us the new cosmogony. No sort of aided vision would have revealed the galactic systems which the modern astronomer studies. Our conception of the stellar systems, in which distances are reckoned in light-years and intervals in parsecs, is presented to us indeed in sense imagery, as the view which would appear to us were our spatio-temporal dimensions magnified some millions of millions of degrees, but the actual conception itself of the universe is not a description of any sense-perceived objects; it is a purely constructive mathe- matical work, a mental speculation. The proof of this is that the materiality of the stellar universe and the materiality of the earth are conceived in quantitative terms only. All reality is reduced ultimately to simple unit positive and negative charges of electricity. In fact the ideal of science is to replace the infinite qualitative variability of perception with some simple qualityless unit which can be dealt with purely quantitatively.

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It should be clear, therefore, that the concepts of science are not reached by extending the range of sense perception. Yet scientific work is the search for truth, undertaken purely with the intention of discovering real relations, of laying bare as far as possible the reality behind the perceptual appearance. In science we do not become, as the epistemologist says, acquainted with reality, and we do not describe it. We cannot describe what we cannot apprehend. In science we are engaged in a work of extrapolation. Science, in fact, is what Kant called critical. It asks what it is which makes the perceived world possible. To answer such an inquiry it is clear that it is useless to point to anything in the natural world as having privilege or priority, such as the early Greek nature philosophers tried to find in water, air, number. There is no primordial substance in the natural world. The scientific conception of the universe is a schematism in the Kantian meaning. It is attained neither by perceptual insight, nor by introspection, nor by an inter- polation of mind into nature; it is a pure work of intellectual construction, an extrapolation.

This scientific extrapolation is neither arbitrary nor fanciful. It arises in a necessity of our intellectual nature which demands a sufficient reason of all that is or happens. It is the attempt to satisfy our demand to know real relations, the conditions under which we exercise our individual activity and the extent to which we can bring external nature under our control. These real relations have universal validity just because they are not perceptual but conceptual. The reals with which physics deals are not the subjects of conscious experience, nor the objective content of experience, they are concepts of the unperceived and imperceptible causes of objective experience. These concepts are fictions in the literal meaning of the word, that is, they are constructive schemes, diagrammatic in intention. But because they are fictions they are not invalid. Their appeal is not to imagination but to reason. We are as it were outside the concert hall and unable to penetrate it, we hear the symphony which is being played, and we set ourselves the task of recon- structing the various instruments which constitute the orchestra.

18 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. (Vow. XXXVIIL.

V. Tue IpeAt RELATIONS OF THE REALS,

According to our metaphysical theory there are reals in the unequivocal meaning of reality and we know these reals. This knowledge of reals is not mediated by real relations but entirely by the relations we call ideal. As soon as the nature of the reals is understood it is seen that they cannot stand in real relations to one another. The reals are not things; they are not perceived objects open to inspection; they are active forces and force can only be defined in terms of possibility, not in terms of actuality. An acorn, if we take it as an example of a real, cannot be defined by its actual form or its actual content. The most exhaustive chemical and physical analysis would leave out of account the essence of its reality, the force. Physics and chemistry deal with its real relations in terms of the objective extrapolation which these sciences represent; biology deals with it as a stage in the development of a living organism; for all these sciences the acorn is a phenomenon, they tell us nothing of its reality. The real acorn is the acorn as it exists for itself, and this existence is purely ideal, that is, its ideality is its reality. The particular acorn may be crushed under the foot, or eaten by swine, but its reality is what it is for itself, not what it is for another. Its reality is not its actuality at any moment but its potentiality at every moment, the potentiality of the oak tree which may never be actualized.

Each of us possesses in the activity of his own consciousness not only the archetype of an individual real but also the immedi- ate knowledge of that reality. This does not mean that in self-knowledge we introspect an object of knowledge, but that in the activity of perceiving we have knowledge of real activity. Knowledge of the self as an individual activity is not immediate or intuitive, it is mediated by the knowledge of other individuals. The relations of individuals to one another are purely ideal. The individuals are real and our knowledge of them is not scientific extrapolation and it is not mediated by real relations. This becomes clear if we consider human intercourse. Inter- course depends absolutely on ideal relations between individuals. Take, for example, speech. This depends on the significant

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 19

expression of one individual evoking responsive significant expression in another. There is no interaction of one on another in the mechanist meaning of interaction. There is no exchange of matter or form. I cannot think my thoughts into another or make another perceive my perceptions. When another person understands my meaning it is by thinking his own thoughts and perceiving his own perceptions. Images and ideas are not real in their own right, exchanged between minds on the principle of battledore and shuttlecock. Even those who believe in telepathy must admit that images and ideas are the active production of the individual mind which owns them. The human world consists altogether of ideal relations. This is recognized by realist and idealist alike. At this point, however, there is a parting of the ways. It brings me to the final problem with which I propose to deal, the problem of the concept of

nature as a closed system.

VI. THe PHENOMENON BENE FUNDATUM.

Ideal relations are subjective. They subsist only between active subjects of experience. It seems, however, that to be real in the full meaning of efficiency these ideal relations must have an objective reference. Consequently we assume for them a material substratum and a formal system of reference in absolute space-time. This makes the independence of an abstract objective reality appear an immediate intuitive cer- tainty. Is this abstract objective reality, this ‘nature closed to mind,’ a rational concept? Or is it illusion, essentially irrational, though justifiable perhaps by its practical utility?

Berkeley was the first to point out, with the clear and irre- sistible argument of self-evidence, that the object of the mind when it perceives is perception and not something unperceived and imperceptible, assumed to exist independently of the per- ceiver. Modern science accepts this position. The real objects which give its subject-matter to physics are neither perceived nor perceptible; though conceived as the cause of perceptions the objects of physics are frankly an extrapolation. Physics is primarily mathematical, handicapped rather than assisted by its dependence on sense imagery. What then is the driving force

20 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vow. XXXVIII.

which imposes on science this work of extrapolation? Whence arises the idea that perception is conditioned and that the conditions of perception are located on its outer or objective side? Why are we so much more confident in the truth of science when matter rather than spirit is in question? Hitherto the answer has come from philosophy and has been mainly a speculation; today the answer comes from science itself and with mathematical precision. Matter is a phenomenon, and no more than a phe- nomenon, but a phenomenon well-founded, for its foundations are in the actual nature of perception, that is, of conscious activity. A condition of the activity of a conscious individual, a human being, for example, is the codrdination of his world, the sphere of his activity, the range of his efficient action. He can only plan actions in a stable and enduring world. How then can he derive stability and endurance from perception which is variable, and changing continuously? Perception itself will not yield it. The phenomena he observes, his successive perceptions, have no order in themselves, the order must be imparted to them. Order is not given by nature, it is imposed by mind on nature. The new physics starts from this standpoint. The universe of modern physics consists of events, codrdinated by the mathe- matical schema of a four-dimensional continuum. For every observer there are conditions of observation. The observer codrdinates events by measuring the distances and intervals which separate them. This codrdination requires reference to an immobile system and the attachment of the observer to that system. Man, for example, measures distances and intervals by reference to the earth as he experiences it, that is, to the earth at rest in regard to the moving systems in the firmament. He can indeed choose any other system of reference and measure relatively to it the movement of the earth itself, but only on condition that for him while observing, the system he has chosen is at rest relatively to the earth and all other moving systems. This is the basis of the principle of relativity which declares that the phenomena of nature are the same for all observers in systems of reference moving relatively to one another.

The biological counterpart of the physical theory is equally significant. We have come to know that the immobility of the

No. 1.] REAL AND IDEAL RELATIONS. 21

earth is an illusion; the earth is rotating and our position on it, relatively to the universe, is completely reversed daily; the earth is speeding through space at a calculable velocity; also we know that we live on the floor of an atmospheric ocean which is weighing upon us with a force of about fifteen pounds to the square inch; we know that we hold ourselves erect by muscular force exerted against the force of gravity; we know that the images of visual objects are reversed on the retina; and yet of all these things and much besides, which we have been able to discover by reasoning, we are naturally unconscious and by our nature incapable of being conscious. We cannot feel our trans- lation through space on the moving earth; we cannot see the images which are actually projected on the retina; we cannot feel the muscular strain which holds our heads erect; evolution has created in us psychical dispositions, and in determining the range and mode of our organic functioning has determined in us also the objective aspect which the world shall assume to our perception.

The old materialism is gone. Science has outgrown it. Whether it will return in some new form we cannot say, but certainly we can point to nothing in modern physics or in biology which seems to be heralding its approach.

VII. Screntiric IDEALISM.

In conclusion let us consider in what definite meaning of the terms real and ideal we are now able to characterize science as idealistic.

Scientific realism has always meant that real relations, that is relations which define position in space and time, the relations of right and left, above and below, before and after, greater and less, fast and slow, are objective and absolute, and that science so far as it is a subjective activity of apprehension is discovery. The fundamental position of scientific realism is that real relations are the relations between real objects in the physical world, from which it follows that these real objects exist independently and on their own account. Ideal relations on the other hand are for scientific realism purely representative. They may be percepts or concepts but they are only subjective modes of

22 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.

apprehension. The conditions of observation, all important for the understanding of ideal representation, are thought of as in no way whatever affecting the objective reality observed. The truth of science for the scientific realist is the correspondence of ideal representation with objective fact. Since knowledge is ideal representation reality is posited by it, but the essence of scientific realism is its insistence on the absoluteness and inde- pendence of the objective world.

This scientific realism broke down with the adoption by science of the principle of relativity. This principle has called for an entirely new interpretation of physical reality. The phenomena which we observe are not static things revealing their nature in their relations. We observe not things but events, and events are entirely constituted of relations. Science therefore is not an observation of things, it is a codrdination of events. The codrdination of events is the measuring of distances and intervals and this measuring can only be from individual standpoints and chosen frames of reference. Codrdination must therefore take into account the observer and the conditions of observation. It is the recognition of this principle which has changed the modern scientific conception of the physical world from a realistic to an idealistic concept.

In philosophy it is usual to distinguish two forms of idealism. There is the subjective idealism of which Berkeley’s doctrine that the real object of knowledge is the perception and that the perception exists in the mind and not outside it, is the best known example; and there is the transcendental idealism, the example of which is Kant’s doctrine that all knowledge is of phenomena and that the mysterious reals or things-in-themselves are unknowable. It is not to either of these doctrines that we refer when we characterize modern science as idealistic. There is yet a third form of philosophical idealism. It is the meta- physical theory of Leibniz that the reals are active individual forces whose activity consists in perception and who accordingly each mirror the universe from an individual standpoint. It is to this type of idealism that modern science approximates.

HERBERT WILDON CARR,

UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA.

SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS.

HE problem of the status of sense qualities and their

relation to material things has been discussed abundantly, perhaps too abundantly, in recent philosophical literature. In many of these discussions there have been added few consider- ations which were not common in eighteenth-century thought. New terms, to be sure, such as sense-data and sensa, have been coined; but they have made little change other than an increase in our vocabulary. Some philosophers have become impatient and insist that the time has come to turn to other lines of dis- cussion. Yet the problem of the sense qualities is one which can hardly be shelved; for the solution which a philosopher gives of this problem is almost certain to affect his entire epistemo- logical and metaphysical position.

In venturing to discuss the old problem once more, I have one chief purpose in mind. I believe that the prominent solu- tions which have been given in the past rest on presuppositions which are not always explicitly defined but which are none the less crucial for the respective solutions. I wish, if possible, to lay bare these presuppositions. My point is not wholly new, and my indebtedness to several writers, from Locke to our own day, will be obvious.' But in repeating what I have borrowed from others, I have the hope that an emphasis on one point, apart from other considerations, may help to set that point clearly in the foreground of further discussion. The dis- closure of uncriticised presuppositions may not result in unani- mous agreement on any one solution of the problem. But it may result in transferring discussion from one level to another. At present much discussion of the problem amounts to little more than a dialectical development of the uncriticised premises

‘Of our contemporaries I must express particular indebtedness to Professor Dewey for his article on Locke in the Philosophical Review for January 1926 and for his Experience and Nature, and to Professor Whitehead for his Science and the Modern World, and his series of lectures given at the University of Illinois in the

spring of 1926. I do not of course fasten upon them responsibility for the par-

ticular form in which I express ideas which I owe to their influence.

23

24 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

of a single one of the opposed schools of thought, so that the outcome is barely a verbal victory. The discussion should involve a criticism of the presuppositions with which argument begins. Then at least, if we cannot hope for a final settlement of the problem, we shall get beyond the easy method of begging the question through the concealed assumptions with which we start.

I choose for treatment in this paper two contrasted solutions which are to-day offered to the problem of the relation of sense qualities and material things. Not simply are these solutions the most prominent among us in this country now, but also they may fairly be considered the chief types of which other solutions are but variations. One of these two prominent views is con- tained in the dualistic realism which had its origin in the seven- teenth century and finds vigorous expression still in our own day: it might be called the ‘orthodox tradition.’ The other is the realism which rejects dualism or opposes any “bifurcation of nature.’’ Professor Dewey has denoted this view by the phrase “realism without monism or dualism;’’ and Professor Murphy has recently coined for it the happy term “objective relativism.” I should prefer to employ the term naturalistic realism or natural realism;*? for a distinctive tenet of this view is that the realities designated by the antithetical concepts mind and body, or the psychical and the physical, or sense qualities and material things, lie within the one complex of events which constitutes the continuum of nature.’

2 The term ‘naturalism’ was for a time used to indicate a curious combination of materialism and agnosticism together with a dogmatic denial of the validity of religious faith. It has such a sense for example in Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism and in Professor R. B. Perry’s Present Philosophical Tendencies.

Attempts have been recently made to rescue the term for a non-monistic and non-

dualistic realism. And for the sake of convenience this attempt should be en- couraged.

* This usage of the term ‘nature’ differs from that of Professor Whitehead who says, for example, in The Concept of Nature, p. 4: “‘ Nature is closed to mind.” I should prefer to speak of the physical order when I mean that part of the real world which is the subject-matter of the physical sciences. Sense-awareness, emotion, reflection are, in my usage, as ‘natural’ events as any others. Nature is the entire body of events, where and when and as they occur, whatever their quality or kind or type. I believe I here differ from Professor Whitehead only in

terminology.

No. 1.) SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 25

Let us first examine the dualistic realism in order to see upon what presuppositions it rests. It came over into philosophy from science. Dualism was a methodological principle of scien- tific research in what Professor Whitehead so justly calls “the century of genius.” Scientific thought made a distinction between those qualities of bodies which could be expressed in mathematical formule and those which could not. It also made a distinction between qualities which seemed to be permanently present through all the changing course of nature (the ‘primary qualities’) and those which seemed to be occasional and unstable (the ‘secondary qualities’). These two distinctions were found largely to coincide. Scientific thought was interested to express the permanent features of nature in mathematical terms. So scientists took the primary and mathematical qualities as being external, genuine, and real. Whatever was of different nature they banished from external reality (making the mind the dumping ground for all which was excluded from the external world). Colors, sounds, and other sense qualities were thus irrelevant to the working conceptions which scientific thought developed of matter. As a methodological device the distinction between matter and the sense qualities was clear and useful. And as long as this methodological distinction worked, most scientists were too busy to investigate its ultimate philosophical validity. They generally assumed a causal connection, matter being cause and sense qualities being effects. The sense qualities were objective enough to be a sound and reliable indication of the nature of material things, but not so objective as to embarrass scientific thought in reducing the external world to mathe- matical expression. The external world was thus a world of extended bodies, with specific size, figure, and (usually) solidity and weight, moving in specific ways. All else which was given as the content of human experience was discarded from nature and spoken of as belonging to mind.

Now it was an event of outstanding importance that Descartes and Locke turned this methodological dualism of scientific thought into a metaphysical dogma. And it is important to note the philosophical device by which they accomplished this result. The device was not to be sure consciously adopted in

26 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

order to effect the result, nor was the result deliberately desired. Rather we find in the Cartesian-Lockian dualism the outcome of the force of tradition upon minds who prided themselves upon their emancipation from the scholasticism of past centuries. Descartes retained from scholasticism, and Locke took directly over from Descartes, a concept which had been basic in the whole scholastic period, the concept of substance. But in taking over and using this concept, Descartes transformed it. Des- cartes, using the term substance to describe the nature of the material world and wishing to protect the rights of science to free and untrammeled investigation of the material world, was led to emphasize one aspect of the medizval concept of substance. Thus he defined substance as “an existent thing which requires nothing but itself in order to exist.”"* And Locke followed suit in speaking of the real essence of substance as “that par- ticular constitution which everything has within itself, without any relation to anything without it.’’5 Thence there resulted for philosophy a fusion of the methodological dualism of seven- teenth-century science with the medizval idea of substance in its revised form. And thereby one of the most significant features of scientific thought became hidden from philosophical scrutiny. The concepts which were really fundamental to modern scientific thought—extension, motion, shape, weight— involved a world of interrelated events in which mutual influence determines the character of those events; and Locke was more prophetic than he knew when he defined knowledge as the per- ception of relations. The use of the concept of substance in the sense of a non-relational existent obscured this important feature of the new scientific movement of the seventeenth century. The implicit recognition in science that all realities owe their nature to the relationships in which they stand was overlooked; and in its place there was fixed upon subsequent philosophical thought the principle that things are what they are apart from relationships altogether. Thus it is tragic but consistent for Locke to write that relations are ‘not contained in the real

‘ Principles of Philosophy, Part I, Principle 51.

& Essay concerning Human Understanding, Book III, Chapter 6, Section 6.

* Ibid., Book IV, Chapter 1, Section 2; Chapter 3, Section 1.

No. 1.] SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 27

existence of things, but something extraneous and superin- duced.” ?

Descartes and Locke of course defined mind in terms of independent substance too. The qualities which science had chosen for methodological purposes to banish from the external world then became for Descartes ‘‘ modes of thinking substance.” And this concept, under such phrases as ‘modes of thought’ or ‘mental contents,’ assisted still further to perpetuate a working distinction and to make of it a metaphysical dogma. Nature and mind thus became two realms of being, causally related to be sure, but entirely disparate. Matter then never is the direct content of mental processes, and sense qualities are not located in the external world. As long as the theological interests of the seventeenth century remained keen, mind and its content were at least as real as matter and its motions. But as the generations passed, this theological interest died out. Mind and its ‘states’ came gradually to be real in an invidious fashion, if their reality was acknowledged at all. And matter alone remained real in an eulogistic sense. That is, though technically both matter and mind were put down as existing, matter was efficacious, operative, causal, and mind was shadowy, inconse- quential, irrelevant to the course of outer events. Dualism has therefore become in the post-Cartesian and post-Lockian days most concerned with the reality of matter, and dualists have dealt with ‘mental states’ only in order to insist that they were to be excluded from the external world. In other words, dualists are most vitally interested in the reality of that which they define as outside the realm of immediate experience. Experience is only a ‘subjective’ affair—it is hardly more than an ontological impertinence.

One historically interesting consequence of the philosophical resu!t of fixing scientific methodology into metaphysical dogma was scepticism. Descartes had to be sure a device for over- coming the sceptical results of dualistic assumptions: he had a rationalistic logic (defended in the Discourse and the Meditations by resort to a theological sanction) which enabled him to take clear and distinct ideas as true. But Locke’s empiricism was

? Ibid., Book II, Chapter 25, Section 8.

28 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

more in line with the subsequent procedure of both scientific and philosophical thought. As Locke came to realize during the years devoted to composing the Essay, we may, on his premises, develop to our heart’s content the ideas we have in our minds (cf. the treatment of ‘“‘mixed modes”’ in the Essay), but we cannot be sure that reality happens to conform to these ideas. We cannot with any assurance make the leap from ‘mental contents’ or subjective effects to ‘things’ or their objective causes. We must recognize that ‘‘natural philosophy is not capable of being made a science.’”’* We may indeed treat our “simple ideas’’ as if they had an objective significance: we may take them as “real,”’ “‘adequate,”’ and “‘true,’’ instead of fantastic, inadequate, and false.* But in so doing we must realize that our abilities are “‘suited not to the full extent of being, nor to a perfect, clear, comprehensive knowledge of things free from all doubt and scruple, but to the preservation of us in whom they are.” *® We must conclude that “the comprehension of our understandings comes exceeding short of the vast extent of things,’’ and is useful only for ‘“‘the com- fortable provision for this life and the way that leads to a better.’’"' That is, our knowledge consists of a lot of workable conventions, but it does not penetrate to the nature of the real

”

world which lies beyond our own minds.

Space does not permit even a cursory review of dualistic realism since Locke. It has had many vicissitudes, and has fought heroically against idealism even when the accepted premises made for idealistic conclusions. But one point may be laid down. Dualistic realism, no matter how much it is supposed to have outgrown the limitations of its seventeenth-century ancestry, has retained the (usually uncriticised) assumption that reality is non-relational. It has supposed that whatever ‘really’ or externally exists is a ‘substance’ in the sense of a self-determined and self-contained thing dependent for its nature on nothing outside itself. At least whatever exists in the external world is ‘substantial’ in the sense defined; and whatever is

8 Op. cit., Book IV, Chapter 12, Section 10.

* Ibid., Book II, Chapters 30, 31, 32.

1° Tbid., Book IV, Chapter 11, Section 8. Jbid., Introduction, Section 5.

No. 1.] SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 29

relational therefore must be relegated to another realm of being. Now sense qualities are of course constantly shifting, variable, elusive, dependent on relative position and light and the bodily conditions of the observer, etc.; and hence they cannot be qualities of external things, they cannot exist where external things exist, they must be put into a realm of subjective ex- perience apart from nature." Furthermore, since what objec- tively exists is not allowed to owe its nature to varying relation- ships, it is incapable of being now of one nature and now of another.“ Rather it must be what it is apart from relationships, and so it must be considered complete in nature before the casual event of its being perceived happens to it.“ And since only psychica! states are immediately given in experience, experience is not a handling of real things, but a ‘stream of consciousness’ or ‘succession of mental states’; and the items in experience are in striking contrast with the fixed, stable, non-relational realities apart from experience. Yet, as must be noted, the very sup- position of different types of realities apart from experience is only a pious hope based on emotional preference; it is at best an “instinctive and unescapable belief,’ an alogical position

12 F.g. Professor Drake in Essays in Critical Realism, p. 8, denies that “‘our perceptual data are actually portions of external existence’’ on the ground that they ‘‘are often different from any aspect of them which we can believe to be a part of their independent, physical existence.’ (Italics mine.)

13So Professor Lovejoy, in his recent Carus lectures, declared that sense-data cannot meet the requirements we demand of the physical order and so must be relegated to a different realm of being. I may be mistaken in interpreting Professor Lovejoy’s repeated statements of this point. But if the requirements we are supposed to demand of the physical order are not permanence and independence of relations, I fail to see the force of his relegation of sense-data to another realm. We may choose to call the more permanent aspects of nature the physical; but unless only the permanent and non-relational are real, I fail to see why other aspects of nature need be banished elsewhere.

14 F.g. Professor Drake in Essays in Critical Realism, p. 9: ‘‘The characters we conjure up in the world about us are not really there, except in so far as they really were there before perception took place.”

% Ibid., p. 6. It would seem that dualistic realism would do well to give up its realistic professions and stand rather with Hume, when, on the basis of equivalent presuppositions, he wrote (Treatise of Human Nature, Book I, Part III, Section V): ‘As to those impressions which arise from the senses, their ultimate cause is, in my opinion, perfectly inexplicable by human reason, and ‘twill always be impossible to decide with certainty whether they arise immediately from the object, or are produced by the creative power of the mind, or are derived from the author of

30 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

congenial but unverifiable, and at its worst a kind of soothing mythology. Indeed if one wanted to employ a phrase to indicate the outcome of the premises of dualistic realism, he might perhaps call it mythological realism.

Let us now turn to the contrasted type of solution to our problem of the relation of sense qualities to material things. This is what I have called natural realism. It is now a well- formulated theory, with defenders from several quarters. It is the culmination of a movement which began in this country about a quarter of a century ago. All the features which characterize the present statement of natural realism cannot, so far as I can detect, be found in the early literature of the move- ment, though hints of its future development are perhaps lurking in some passages. It is instructive to notice how and why the movement appeared and how it has developed.

This movement which has culminated in a natural realism (and which I here designate as natural realism in even its early and undoubtedly less realistic phases) began as a movement of protest. It was an attack upon several theories of knowledge which were current in this country at the turn of the century. Dualism was a minor opponent in the early days of the move- ment, though with the growing rejection of idealisms in the years since 1900 dualism has become a more prominent opponent. In any case the theories which natural realism opposed had in common that they ignored the biological setting of the knowing process. Natural realism had its inception in the attempt to point out the significance for philosophy of the new epoch in science which is symbolized by the name of Darwin.” The growth of biological science in the nineteenth century forced a thorough revision of the concepts and the philosophical pre- suppositions borrowed from seventeenth-century physics. Life is the name for certain processes which occur in the interactions of organic bodies and their environment. And knowing is one of the processes which some forms of life manifest. Experience, our being. Nor is such a question any way material to our present purpose.” (Edition of Green & Grose, Vol. I, p. 385.)

16 Indeed it might be said that natural realism is related to Darwin much as

dualistic realism is related to Newton.

No. 1.] SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 31

as it was now necessary to view it, was not the possession of a series of psychical states in a realm of being apart from the material world, but a give-and-take of a particular sort in the natural world. Epistemology, if it is to be an empirical de- scription of the actual processes of knowing, must, according to natural realism, be stated in terms of the struggle for existence. “Thought,” as Professor Dewey put it in one of his earliest essays, ‘‘comes after something and out of something, and for the sake of something.”"'7 The thing known, the means through which knowledge is gained, and the tests of the accuracy of knowledge are all of them located in the world of events which is the biological scene. The items of experience which we call mental are such, not because they are banished from the external world with which natural science deals and are found rather in an isolated realm of being, but because they come to serve as cues in knowing, as signs of further facts yet to be found as the termination of the knowing event. Any item selected out of the environment becomes mental by virtue of the réle it plays, by virtue of its function in indicating connections within the changing course of nature of which living beings had to take account, to which they had to react, and which they must utilize and transform in order to survive.

During the early years of Professor Dewey's activity his emphasis was primarily on the need of putting the problem of knowledge in its proper biological setting. To minds nourished on traditions, it often seemed that he had no metaphysics; and indeed he was often attacked as taking a position which made metaphysics impossible. The reason for these misunderstandings is now easily apparent. The prevailing philosophies all gained their metaphysical systems by taking the terms of epistemological analysis as defining the ontological status of the realities of the world. Professor Dewey, however, took knowing as one of many kinds of events going on in the natural order, and he regarded the rdle which things played in the knowing processes as incidental to their existence in many other relationships. There was implicit a metaphysics through the whole course of his work, though not a metaphysics which could be gained by

17 Essays in Experimental Logic, p. 75.

3

32 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIIL.

manipulating the concepts of epistemology. It was a meta- physics which took seriously and at face value the Darwinian conception of reality as a complex of more or less correlated processes, a constant becoming of many sorts of things, a going- on-ness in the course of which there appeared frequent novelties and unexpected eventuations as well as ordered uniformities and predictable repetitions. It was a metaphysics which recognized no single type of event as a norm by which the reality of other types of events might be judged. It was a metaphysics which took no moment in the cosmic process as the final event for which all other moments were but preparatory. It was a meta- physics according to which the diverse qualities which nature manifests are relevant to and relative to the existing correlations and integrations which are ever passing away to be succeeded by new integrations and correlations with their respective qualities.

As this biological philosophy was developing, the situation in the physical sciences was changing. I am unprepared to say how far the general theory of relativity requires a fundamental change in the basic concepts of physics. But at least it is true that the reconstruction of physics in our own day has called attention to the basic concepts in a way to result in a revolu- tionary intellectual movement. The intellectual revolution has made some scientists more aware of the way in which relations enter into the determination of the nature of objective realities, thereby making explicit the partial recognition of relational dependence in the old concepts of motion, figure, etc., and justifying (in a way which Locke never suspected) the definition of knowledge as the percepticn of relations. But philosophers much more than scientists have had to revise their intellectual tools. Philosophers had lagged behind science in woeful igno- rance of scientific work and were unduly complacent about their ability to construct metaphysical systems without knowing the results of scientific investigations. The recent, beneficial, even if confused, attempts to determine the significance of contemporary physical science have made at least one point clear. The idea of self-contained, self-determined, fixed, dis- crete, non-relational substances has had to be discarded com-

No. 1.] SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 33

pletely. And in its place, as perhaps the fundamental idea for philosophical speculation, there has emerged the concept of the event as the ultimate unit of reality.

Now at this point in our story of the influence of science on recent philosophy several threads begin to come together into a definite pattern. The philosophical point of view suggested by nineteenth-century biology is given strong corroboration in the new physics, and thus becomes available for a more inclusive interpretation of nature than at first seemed likely. What began as a movement of protest against ignoring the biological setting of the knowing process thus expands into a philosophy. Men who approach philosophy from other angles, as Professor Whitehead from the mathematical and physical sciences, confirm the use of the idea of nature as a-complex-of-events. The meeting of independent forces seems to conspire to validate natural realism as a legitimate metaphysical interpretation of the world.

The basic concept of natural realism is that of the event. “‘Events,”’ as Professor Whitehead expresses it, “are in some sense the ultimate substance of nature.’’'* The sense in which events are here called substantial is not the sense in which Des- cartes defined substance as a non-relational existence. Events are rather called substances in the sense that they are what empirically we find when we examine the course of nature: they are the ultimate subjects of which we are entitled to affirm predicates in any proposition about nature. They are the togetherness of the characters we note and discover and infer as present in reality. ‘‘An event is the grasping into unity of a pattern of aspects.””'® Analysis may break up any event into parts; but these parts, if they be actually existing units of the course of nature, will in turn be events. Analysis may also distinguish certain characters which mark events; but the characters thus selected and abstracted are not elements out of which events are built. The characters we select are, in Pro- fessor Dewey’s phrase, ‘adjectival’ of events. In nature the events are fluid and changing, and in discourse our terms for

18 The Concept of Nature, p. 19. 19 Science and the Modern World, p. 168.

34 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

the denoting of certain characters of events are rigid and fixed. We cannot hope, by starting with even a large number of these abstracted characters, to recover from their combination the richness of qualities of any single event or the dynamic flow of any single event. Having separated out certain characters of a given event, we cannot therefrom reconstruct dialectically the whole concrete event with which we started. There is no limit in theory, and there is no observable limit in fact, to the diversity of characters which events simultaneously and successively may have. Events are not like the hard chunky realities of those realisms which ignore the fact that things depend for their natures upon the relationships in which they objectively stand. Of events we can never say, according to natural realism, that they must always have or can never have at all certain qualities. Events may have such diverse qualities that we will be tempted to designate them at times by mutually opposed terms. Yet these diverse qualities or characters can all occur within the same texture of natural events. And this cam is not the can of dialectical inference,” i.e. the cam means more than that we can consistently affirm the co-existence in the same events of the various strikingly contrasted characters. This cam is rather the can of experimental observation, i.e. the can means that we really and empirically do find these characters combined existentially in the same events, and that we conclude that what is can also be. In spite of the great diversity of the characters present within any event, that event is ‘‘one entity, and not a mere assemblage of parts.’’*' Abstraction of certain qualities cannot be taken to destroy the concrete togetherness of qualities which is the reality we seek to analyze.

Natural realism, applied to the particular problem of the status of sense qualities and their relation to material things, holds that sense qualities and matter are terms which designate different characters of the same texture of events. Sense

20 There is here meant no disparagement of dialectics. Dialectical criticism is essential for developing the implications of our premises, and thereby enables us to test, in the fullest possible fashion, the truth of our premises. Rather it is meant that dialectics does not enable us to go on to affirm, apart from direct observation, that the premises we have chosen and consistently developed are

true of the realities we are attempting to know. 2! Science and the Modern World, p. 102.

No. 1.| SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 35

qualities and matter are not two kinds of stuff, but two adjectives to be applied to events. Sense qualities and matter are not two distinct realms of being, but two distinct types of character which we find in the same course of natural events. Before formulating their relationship to each other, we may perhaps profitably linger briefly with each in turn.

Consider matter. All total events have a structure to which the term matter points. This structure is not something which can be conceived statically. It is not something which exists at an instant and then passes casually through time.” It is not expressible in non-temporal or non-relational terms. ‘‘ There is no such thing as iron at an instant,”’ says Professor Whitehead ; for ‘‘to be iron is a character of an event.””* The character iron exists when and where it is found, and has, as a character, no temporal career. But the concrete existence of iron is an occurrence which requires at least enough duration for a certain process to take place. The alleged ultimateness of a timeless particle of iron or any other stuff is an unwarranted supposition which has survived from an earlier period and does not agree with the findings of science. The structure of events which makes us call them material (whether iron or any other form of matter) is regular, recurrent, mathematically formulable. As Professor Dewey puts it: ‘What we call matter is that character of natural events which is so tied up with changes that are sufficiently rapid to be perceptible as to give the latter a char- acteristic rhythmic order, the causal sequence. It is no cause or source of events or processes; no absolute monarch; no principle of explanation; no substance behind or underlying changes.” ™ We denote by the term matter certain spatio-temporal structures

2 Cf. Locke's Essay, Book IV, Chapter 10, Section 10: “It is impossible to conceive that matter, either with or without motion, could have, originally in and from itself, sense, perception, and knowledge; as is evident from hence, that then sense, perception, and knowledge, must be a property eternally inseparable from matter and every specific particle of it."" Locke, taking matter to be a fixed, independent, non-relational reality, concluded that it is always or never possessed of a certain other group of characteristics. In other words, matter must be what it is before it is considered as having a career in time and entering into various relationships. It is just this conception of matter which natural realism rejects.

*% Principles of Natural Knowledge, p. 23. Cf. also p. 90.

“% Experience and Nature, p. 73.

36 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

which nature exhibits at all times of its passage. Events may have, indeed usually do have, all sorts of further characters which we cannot deduce from our concept of matter; but at least they have the character of matter at all times.

Consider now the sense qualities—colors, sounds, odors, etc.— which occur at many moments in nature. Unless we have some reason for denying the validity of experience (and what reason could we have except its inconsistency with the implications of a suppressed and uncriticised presupposition’), it seems the part of wisdom to grant that these sense qualities exist when and where they are found to occur. We abstract the sense qualities from their natural setting in the course of events. We take this yellow color as a sign of sodium; we take this dull ache as a sign of tiring nerves and a need for recreation; we take this taste as a sign of spoiled meat dangerous to health; we take this rattle as a sign that a bolt in our car needs tightening. Or perhaps we are in an zsthetic mood without any practical problem of control. We then ignore the multiplicity of the events which are going on around us in order more fully to enjoy the rich tones of the organ, the delicate flush of evening on the waters of the lake, or the aroma of coffee. For both practical needs and for zxsthetic enjoyment, we isolate certain sense qualities of passing events and speak of them as separate items of our experience. But we must not interpret the status of these selected items wholly in terms of their function in human use and human enjoyment. We must remember that they are literally selected, selected out of their natural setting. We must remember that they would not be the useful cues to action which we find them to be, if they were not existentially continuous with the world of events of which they are integral aspects. We do not in experience begin with a series of such discrete items, and then face the task of creating out of them the full content of experience as concretely lived. Much less do we have the task of piecing together out of these abstracted bits the picture of an objective order of nature. Experience gives us large wholes, not a succession of items or ‘states’ of mind. We are ourselves events entering into bigger events, and we experience the course of those bigger events, not to be sure in

No. 1.] SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 37

their entirety but at least in a certain fullness. We experience sense qualities, not in a realm of being apart from the natural world, but in their concrete occurrence in the natural world. This point is so well expressed by Professor Whitehead that it is tempting to quote rather fully from him. “Perception is an awareness of events, or happenings, forming a partially discerned complex within the background of a simultaneous whole of nature. . . . Within this present stream the perceived is not sharply differentiated from the unperceived; there is always an indefinite ‘beyond’ of which we feel the presence although we do not discriminate the qualities of the parts. . . . There is a present-whole of nature of which our detailed knowledge is dim and mediate and inferential, but capable of determination by its congruity with clear immediate perceptual facts.” ** Or again, in his last book, he tells us on the one hand that “sense-data”’ like “‘spatial relations’’ are by themselves “ generic abstractions,” that there is really a “‘disclosure of a contemporary world by presentational immediacy,’ and “‘that presentational immediacy is that peculiar way in which contemporary things are ‘objec- tively’ in our experience, and that among the abstract entities which constitute factors in the mode of introduction are those abstractions usually called sense-data : for example, colours, sounds, tastes, touches, and bodily feelings;’"’ and on the other hand, that ‘‘so far as concerns the causal efficacy of the world external to the human body, there is the most insistent perception of a circumambient efficacious world of beings.’’** In these and other such passages it is clear both that sense qualities are regarded as selected items and that the whole from which they are selected is also ‘there’ in experience. The whole is not of course present in its fullness nor in discriminated detail. It is rather the business of further investigation more adequately to determine some of that further fullness and detail in sharply drawn out- lines. But at least the sense qualities are not floating before the mind without concrete setting in the world of which they are an integral part. In order to know more about nature than what any single item of sense experience gives we do not have to

% Principles of Natural Knowledge, pp. 68-69. 2% Symbolism, its Meaning and Effect, pp. 22, 23, 25, 55.

38 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vou.. XXXVIII.

leap to some other realm of being: we have only to investigate the realm of being to which the item of sense experience existentially belongs.

Natural realism as found in Professor Dewey’s writings, with all the differences of his approach and terminology, has taken substantially the same form. In logical analysis we are led to make certain distinctions, as between data and meanings, means and ends. But such distinctions involve no ontological dualisms of realms of being. Indeed Professor Dewey’s instrumental logic (concerned as it is with the specific r6le which sense-data play in reflective behavior) goes along with, and is fully intelligible only with, a metaphysical realism which takes the whole of human behavior and of experience as lying within a single com- plex of natural events. The items which are logically simple because they serve as bases for inference or which are zesthetically delightful in a moment of intense enjoyment are not the full substance of experience, and no human experience embraces more than a fraction of the total course of reality. But reality is at least all it is experienced to be, however much more it may also be.

Throughout the various works in which the view is set forth, natural realism abjures metaphysical dualisms. A single event often is the locus of the character we designate by use of the term matter and at the same time is also the locus of the character we designate by use of the terms color, pain, odor, etc. Our concepts of matter, color, etc., are sharp, static, formal, and exclusive of all reference to aught beyond; but the course of nature is interpenetrative, fluid, rich in manifold and surprising combinations, and inclusive of a constant reference to more comprehensive events. We should not erect the discreteness of our categories into ontological dogmas about realms of being.

The relationship between matter and sense qualities may now be stated quite simply. Negatively we may say that the relation is not one of substance and attribute: sense qualities do not inhere in matter. For sense qualities and matter are both attributes of events which alone are ultimate units of reality. We might as well deny that sense qualities are solid and heavy as

No. 1.) SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 39

deny that matter is painful or sonorous. For if both are ad- jectival of events, there is no more justification for taking one as substance and the other as attribute than vice versa.

Positively we may say that the relationship between sense qualities and matter, like most relationships in nature, is one of uniform and constant correlation. This statement is, how- ever, exceedingly general. We can go on to develop that general relation of correlation in a whole series of specific formule, of colors with vibrations, of sounds with air waves, etc. This development is hardly the immediate and direct business of the philosopher. The specific formulae must come from the minute and exact analysis of the events by experimental scientific work. What the philosopher should do in the matter is to prevent the distortion of the scientific formule of various correlations into theories of separate realms of being.

Furthermore we may say that in one sense matter is meta- physically more fundamental and that in another sense matter is metaphysically less fundamental than colors, sounds, and the other sense qualities. Matter is more fundamental, in that, as good evidence indicates, the course of natural events had material structure long before they also came to have the other characters. Events seem always and everywhere to have material structure, and only occasionally and under specifiable conditions to have the other characters. Sense qualities are contingent in their appearance upon the presence of animals with end organs and nervous systems (as well of course as upon other conditions). Moreover it has proved possible to predict, upon assuming healthy organisms of human beings, just when and where events will manifest the characters we call colors, sounds, etc.27 Thus it is natural for men, working as was Descartes with the material structure of events, to express other characters in terms of this structure: in other words it is natural for physical scientists to believe matter to be the most fundamental reality there is. And it is not unusual for others than physical scientists to

27 Cf. Professor Whitehead in The Concept of Nature, p. 170: “In science we have found out that when we know all about the adventures amid events of material physical objects and of scientific objects we have most of the relevant information

which will enable us to predict the conditions under which we shall perceive sense- objects in specific situations.”

40 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

accept what is constant and permanent as thereby more funda- mental than what is occasional and transient.

None the less matter is less fundamental in another sense, namely, in that it gives less of the specific, unique character of any single event than is denoted by the terms which point out the tone, tint, fragrance, or other sense quality of the passing moment. Also matter is not what gives to the events of our lives the meaning and value which they have in varying degrees for us. The evanescent is often the delightful; the fleeting is often the cherished. Natural events must become clothed with a host of sense qualities before we can find in them the satisfactions through which life gains worth and dignity. Only at times does ‘matter’ become living matter; yet we prize life more than atomic and molecular activities. Only at times does the texture of events manifest its full potentiality as glorious to sense and stimulating to rich emotion. But reality cannot be defined in terms of what it is at its least developed level. The course of nature is most completely understood when it is examined at the moment of its realization of its greatest possibilities. As for purposes of control, we may need to take account of the material structure of events, so for purposes of enjoyment we may need to take account of the colors, sounds, and other sense qualities which decorate events in their passage. Hence it is not sur- prising to find men of zsthetic sensitivity regarding the sense qualities as fundamental while atoms and molecules are but symbols or convenient fictions. But for purposes of under- standing we need to take account of every character which ever comes within the range of sense or is discovered in inference.*® Philosophical criticism cannot afford to describe reality from the standpoint solely of mechanical technique or solely of zsthetic experience. Metaphysics cannot afford to define reality in terms partial to one aspect of the course of events. The real

28 Cf. Professor Dewey's statement in Experience and Nature, p. 262: Materialistic philosophies hold “‘the doctrine that matter is the efficient cause of life and mind, and that ‘cause’ occupies a position superior in reality to that of ‘effect.’ Both parts of this statement are contrary to fact. As far as the conception of causation is to be introduced at all, not matter, but the natural events having matter as a

character, ‘cause’ life and mind. ‘Effects,’ since they mark the release of potentialities, are more adequate indications of the nature of nature than are just

‘causes’.

No. 1.] SENSE QUALITIES AND MATERIAL THINGS. 4!

world is that complex of events in which all sorts of characters have their locus. All these characters are real when and where they occur. If we choose some one character as essential to the development of our interests, we must not then treat it as a privileged metaphysical principle to which all others are sub- ordinate. Reality contains all our interests, but is guided by

no single one.

The aim of this paper has been to lay bare the presuppositions behind two opposed solutions to the problem of the relation of sense qualities and material things. Dualistic realism owed its classic formulation to the union in Descartes’ philosophy of two factors: (1) the working distinction of seventeenth-century science between primary and secondary qualities, and (2) the conception of substance as a non-relational fixed unit of stuff. Wherever realism has retained the Cartesian conception of sub- stance, it has inevitably been forced by the implications of that conception to a dualistic system. Indeed all dualistic arguments seem to rest on this conception, implicitly if not explicitly. Natural realism, however, rests on an antithetical principle, namely that reality is a complex of interconnected events, the characters of which depend upon more or less widely extended relationships. Dualism here would be highly gratuitous. Dis- tinctions can be drawn in abundance between types of characters which appear in the course of events. But such distinctions as natural realism discovers (e.g. matter and sense qualities, or the physical and the psychical) do not involve separate realms of being. Rather they involve contrasts, permanent or fleeting, within the complex of natural events. A recognition of the presuppositions on which respectively the two types of realism are based will probably not end the clashing of opposed opinions. But it should help to make the debate more profitable, and the opposition of opinions more intelligible.

STERLING P. LAMPRECHT. AMHERST COLLEGE.

THE ESSENTIAL DISTINCTION BETWEEN SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY.

1. The continuous expansion of Science, accompanied as it is by an increasingly intimate connection with Philosophy, renders the problem of their essential distinction alike more urgent and more difficult. In those earlier ages, when Philosophy was already a well-developed culture while Science scarcely existed at all, and equally during the last century, when Science was engaged in its indispensable pioneer work, the contrast between them seemed patent. But it is now becoming clear that despite its great achievements, the Science of yesterday was relatively so primitive that any statement of its own relations to Philosophy may be seriously misleading; in fact the modern sphere of purely scientific research has become so extensive—its content, in other words, has become so universal—that the specific claim of Philosophy to universality appears to be less and less tenable. In thus becoming universal, again, scientific conclusions are becoming so fundamental that in this respect also they seem to rival what have hitherto been accepted as the characteristic principles of Philosophy. Unkind critics of the latter, of course, might be tempted to add that scientific certainty is steadily replacing philosophic dubiety; while it is the logician, with methods and formulz as strictly scientific as the mathematician’s, who seeks to establish the ultimate basis of this certainty, rather than the philosopher.

This radical transformation of the situation has inevitably obscured the frontier of the two cultures; and it may simplify the problem to observe that the change is not due primarily to the adoption of new methods. In principle, scientific methods remain what they always were, although in their details and modes of application there are incessant variation and advance. But whatever specific forms these methods may assume, they are all alike justified in the first instance by success; formal logic, therefore, can never do more than discover its necessary con- ditions; only thus can logic do anything to ensure success, while

42

SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 43

at the same time it can never repudiate it. ‘“‘ Desperate positions demand desperate devices. On occasions it has been deemed necessary to sacrifice classical mechanics, on other occasions to sacrifice classical electrodynamics; if, further, a sacrifice of logic be demanded we must not be distressed.’”’' The closer rap- prochement between Science and Philosophy, again, has effected a somewhat more precise philosophical technique which is all to the good, but which is nevertheless of no more than secondary importance. Equally subordinate is the opposition between sub- jectivity and objectivity; for the realism of Professor Whitehead is in direct conflict with the prevalent quasi-Kantian sub- jectivism, which regards all scientific formulas and theories as nothing more than inescapable anthropomorphisms imposed upon phenomena by the mind. Nor, in this connection, can we accept Professor Whitehead’s assertion that ‘‘philosophers are ration- alists’’? in his own sense of the term ‘rationalism,’ which he defines as ‘‘the belief that the avenue to truth was predominantly through a metaphysical analysis of the nature of things, which would thereby determine how things acted and functioned.” * Very few great philosophers have ever adopted so extreme a position as this, while Hegel’s system constituted one sustained protest against all such futile abstractions. The philosopher, he contended, must appeal with the scientist directly to ex- perience, provided always, of course, that he includes the whole of experience and not merely some restricted aspects, no matter how important these may be.

2. On the other hand, it has frequently been suggested that it is precisely the limitation of Science that distinguishes it from Philosophy. ‘“‘Isolation,’’ as Bosanquet has said, ‘‘is the essence of the strictly scientific method. . . . Philosophy speaks about the whole complex of being without any reservation.’’* But this is true (as I have already suggested) only of the earlier—and therefore of the more primitive—stages of Science; and these, again, were influenced to a marked degree by the historical reaction against what was felt to be an altogether too sweeping

1 Andrade, The Structure of the Atom, p. 535.

2 Science and the Modern World, p. 176.

3 Ibid., p. 49 * Science and Philosophy, pp. 27, 25.

44 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

claim on the part of philosophers—that is, to conduct that ‘metaphysical analysis of the nature of things’’ which Professor Whitehead defines as the essence of rationalism. Quite naturally, therefore, the first advocates of scientific methods explicitly repudiated this attitude; they insisted that induction must assume the supremacy hitherto enjoyed by deduction, and that Science was from its very nature committed to limitation and analysis. But this, likewise, holds true of only relatively elementary Science; so that its steady advance causes other features to emerge which are becoming more and more characteristic of current research: (first) the rapidly increasing value and applica- bility of deduction; and (secondly) the extension of scientific investigation to many spheres hitherto regarded as the peculiar domain of Philosophy—to psychology and logic, to ethics, esthetics and religion. As a natural consequence, purely mathe- matical calculation is becoming increasingly reliable and revela- tory, while inseparably allied with this development are the accuracy and range of prediction, no longer (as in earlier days) in the physical sciences only, but in the biological and psychical also. “‘To me,” observes Professor Eddington, “Einstein’s theory gives much stronger assurance of the real existence of the spectral shift than does the observational evidence available.

. . Hitherto Ejinstein’s theory has been chiefly regarded by the practical astronomer as something he is asked to test; but now the theory is helping us to test something much more doubtful than itself."’> Such a fundamental change in method, combined as it inevitably is with a change in mentality, is by no means exceptional; and its further expansion must plainly deflect future Science in the direction of that ‘rationalism’ which has so long been out of favor, thus eradicating another supposedly absolute distinction between Philosophy and Science.

The truth is, therefore, that the claim of Philosophy to be both universal and ‘rational’ is thoroughly justifiable, since it is clearly being progressively adopted by modern Science for itself; so that all that distinguishes them from each other in practice is the success with which their common ideal is realised. It is here that experimental and inductive methods make themselves

5 Stars and Atoms, pp. 51, 52.

No. 1.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 45

felt so irresistibly; but, with all their high value, they can never | be more than preliminary and ancillary to deduction and its close ally prediction. Similarly with the contrast between abstraction and concreteness. For in becoming more universal Science must obviously become more concrete, even though abstraction, carried to its extremest degrees, will always remain one of its most effective weapons. Only (once again) such abstraction and analysis must always be subordinated to synthesis and—therewith—to concreteness; to these the solution of every problem and the final establishment of every theory make their own specific contributions. We can no longer hold, then, that while Philosophy is essentially concrete, Science is essentially abstract; the latter is true only of each particular science con- sidered independently of its fellows. Such isolation is however only another unavoidable condition of primitive research; and the ideal of every investigator is the unification of his own narrow field with as many others as possible, no matter how remote these may at first appear to be. The practical difficulties, which are steadily increasing, of pursuing specialised enquiries without a wide knowledge of other branches is only the natural consequence of the fundamental unity of all forms of truth, and therefore of the ultimate concreteness of Science as a whole. In its own way, then, Science is perfectly justified in pursuing the theoretical consideration of even beauty and goodness. From earlier—that is (again) from primitive—Science these realms were as a matter of fact excluded. But so was much else that has in the interval been engulfed by the rising tides of scientific investigation; if then geology is the science of earth structure, what objection is there to regarding theology as the

science of the divine nature?

3. Equally fallacious are the criteria of value and of empiricism, since the first cannot be exclusively attributed to Philosophy, nor the second to Science. For both cultures alike possess values of their own, while neither pure mathematics, nor indeed any pure theory as such, can ever be empirical. In the realm of teleology, on the other hand, we seem at first sight to attain a firmer basis of distinction. Purpose, end and final cause are essential to all complete Philosophy, while to Science they appear

:

46 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

at first sight not only superfluous but even deceptive. Science, it is often maintained, can never enquire ‘Why?’, but only ‘How?’; and yet this issue likewise depends solely on the progress made in investigation. Undoubtedly the more primitive stages of every science must content themselves by asking ‘How?’, although the biological and sociological sciences soon transcend this level by combining their ‘How?’ with a ‘Why?’. They are in fact just as inherently teleological as Philosophy itself; and the reason for this is simple; it lies in their spheres of research being relatively narrow and at the same time more or less analogous to man’s own purposive experience. Consequently it soon becomes comparatively easy to acquire a clear insight into the relations between the constituent factors—between organism and environment, between one genus or species or society and others—and also into the entire evolutionary scheme which binds the infinite diversity into unity, assigning to each dynamic element its relative place and value within the whole. Thus knowledge about the separate constituents must bring with it some knowledge of their interconnections and specific functions. In the end, therefore, structure becomes inseparably associated with purpose, as is most readily seen in the relation between anatomy and physiology, or between statistics and national policy. But exactly the same principle holds true in the mechanical sphere also, provided only that the entire mechanism can be brought within our purview. An intelligent Martian, e.g., even if he had no previous knowledge whatever about watches and motor engines, could speedily infer their purpose from an exact and complete acquaintance with their dynamic structure. On the other hand, whenever mechanical structure is either too intricate or too extensive to be exhaustively under- stood, its purpose must remain so obscure as often to appear non- existent. Under such conditions, therefore, Science must con- tinue to enquire ‘How?’ until its widening knowledge of the ‘How?’ of itself begins to reveal the inseparable ‘Why?’. In principle this transition from the first stage to the second is continuous, so that the one logically and inevitably expands into the other, as with a child’s knowledge about his watch or a savage’s about a gun. If we substitute here atom and solar

No. 1.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 47

system, we see that the modern physicist and astronomer are in precisely the same position as the child; and it is extremely significant that, with all our knowledge of atomic structure, ‘“‘no fully satisfactory model of even the simplest molecule, that of hydrogen, has so far been constructed.” * This plainly means that, although the fact that atoms combine into molecules has long been familiar, we do not yet know sufficient about atomic structure to perceive how this of itself necessitates molecular combination. In other words, we are too ignorant to say definitely that the purpose (or final cause) of atoms is to form molecules, of the latter to form crystals and organic compounds, and of these, in their turn, to form living cells and tissues; all we know is that they do so combine as a mere fact of empirical observation. Similarly as regards the solar system, of which every atom seems an infinitesimal miniature. Here we find complexity associated with so vast a spatio-temporal range that it is quite impossible to conjecture what relations bind the sun to its fellow stars. It must be observed, however, that our present ignorance by no means justifies the positive denial of purpose in cases such as these; and to exclude purpose cate- gorically, in any important instance, is really as illogical as for a child to regard a watch as nothing more than an interesting toy.

Thus exactly as Philosophy and a relatively complete Science must both alike be concrete, so they must equally be teleological; although it may be conceded that the conjectures of philosophers, based as these have often been on too scanty data, have perhaps been too far-reaching and audacious. But this makes no differ- ence to the principle involved; it means only that Science can defer employing the concept of purpose to a much later stage in its own development than Philosophy. The latter, in being a more direct expression of man’s inherently purposive experience, naturally seeks for final ends almost from the beginning. The governing ideal of both cultures alike, therefore, is that ‘‘con- nected vision of the totality of things” which Bosanquet has erroneously assigned to Philosophy alone. ‘The essence of Philosophy lies in the connected vision of the totality of things,

* Andrade, op. cit., p. 632. Models based on stationary electrons have certainly

been highly illuminating, but these ignore the difficulties arising from swiftly

moving electrons. 4

48 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIIL.

maintaining in every point the subordination of every element and factor to every other element and factor as conditioned by the totality.’’’ But this is equally true of the genuinely scientific attitude and spirit. Mathematics, e.g., may be studied purely by itself; but, no matter what success is thus attained, the science can neither be fully understood nor properly appreciated until its own principles are connected with those of physics and astronomy, to say nothing of practical invention and engineering; and similarly the recent constitution of bio-chemistry into an independent science plainly expresses the intimacy of the relation between chemistry itself and biology.

4. Thus the essential distinction between Science and Phi- losophy still eludes us; it can be discerned neither in method nor subject-matter, neither in teleology nor totality, in empiricism nor rationalism. But before pursuing the enquiry farther I shall deal with the question—What, essentially, is Science? Science is best defined, in my opinion, as the knowledge con- cerning reality that has become as comprehensive, definite, precise and systematic as is possible at any given moment; the distinction between ‘definite’ and ‘precise’ being that between the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of existents,*® and the term ‘systematic’ meaning interconnected or coherent. Further, scientific knowledge always approximates as closely as is attainable to absolute certainty; and in pure mathematics and pure formal logic such absolute certainty has been actually attained, although this achievement is counterbalanced by the characteristic abstraction and limitation of the two sciences. But even these defects are gradually being eliminated, as is obvious equally from their historical development, their rapidly expanding employment in many other sciences both theoretical and applied—particularly of course the physical sciences—and (finally) from the steadily increasing success in the prediction of hitherto unobserved phenomena by purely deductive or a priori methods. This last feature is the most significant of all, since it clearly means that not merely the past and the present, but also the future, are all alike falling within the sphere of

7 Op. cit., p. 25. ® Thus biological definition of species, efc., is definite, while mathematical measurement is precise; obviously each has its specific range of application.

No. 1.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 49

absolutely certain knowledge. Unless therefore an “explanation will enable us to predict phenomena for the future, 1.e. to assert that they must of necessity occur, and to calculate their amount from known data, then the explanation is very unsatisfactory”: * such prediction being thus inseparably linked with both absolute necessity and precise calculation, whose further possibilities are quite unimaginable. Thus mathematics, long recognised as the peculiar realm of certainty, is steadily invading and dominating its sister sciences—a tendency which, though still in its infancy, is the intellectual Hercules of future research.

In its bearing upon cur present problem, this irresistible tendency of all scientific knowledge towards an ever fuller and at the same time more absolute certainty is of vital importance. For it seems at first sight to threaten the very existence of Philosophy, by making the scientist “the spectator of all time and of all existence,” to a degree of which Plato himself could never have dreamed. Nevertheless this apparently obvious con- clusion is premature; for by carrying our analysis still further we shall find scientific certainty itself becoming the basis of that distinction between Science and Philosophy for which we are searching.

5. The governing ideal of Science, then, is the attainment of certainties, of any and every kind, and in any suitable way, which have all been rendered as ‘“‘comprehensive, definite, precise and systematic as possible.’’ The essential element throughout is certainty; and while theories, hypotheses, analogies and even imagination must all be judiciously employed, still these all remain subordinate and ancillary to certainty. This, finally, is a logically objective certainty, never to be confused with the merely subjective feeling of assurance which so often proves to be illusory. Nor can it be contended that such objec- tive certainty is merely intellectual, and can never therefore be philosophically satisfactory. For Philosophy itself, despite its inseparably associated aspects, must be predominantly intellectual —"‘the thinking contemplation of things,’ as Hegel called it; so that emotion and conduct, so far as Philosophy is concerned, always remain subordinate to thought.

Thus Science, as such, is constituted by the entire and in-

* Professor W. de Sitter, Nature, Vol. 121, p. 104.

SS

Se =

5° THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

cessantly expanding sphere of intellectively established cer- tainties. Now all certainty, whatever its subject-matter may be, is inseparably linked with probability. In other words, every unquestionable truth is in its nature and mode of origin the core or nucleus of a wider realm of probability—every scientific and historical fact may be made the foundation of some more or less probable theory or hypothesis; so that the unceasing advance of knowledge consists in the uninterrupted transformation of part of the entire mass of probabilities into actual certainties, as happens whenever any given theory or hypothesis becomes finally established as true. At the same time every certainty, and every probability of any importance, are either directly or remotely connected with emotion and conduct. Still further, this ‘entire mass of probabilities’ must be distinguished into two markedly contrasted types: (a) those that are based on some limited group of specific certainties, as e.g. physical or chemical theories, astronomical or economic hypotheses; (0) those that are based on all the certainties at our disposal, so far as it is possible to relate these more or less systematically to one another —e.g. some far-reaching theory of the material world derived from all the astronomical, physical and chemical facts at present known, or some theory of the nature of mind which rests on the combination of innumerable, biological and psychological facts with each other. It will be useful to call the first group ‘minor probabilities,’ and the second ‘major probabilities’; and from this standpoint the philosophy of a great thinker (or of a historic school of thought) is constituted by the explicit formu- lation of his own ‘major probabilities,’ together with the system- atically interrelated certainties from which he affirms these probabilities logically to emerge. At the same moment his major probabilities inevitably determine his emotional and practical reactions to the universe; and thus they are (a) explicitly maintained as being logically implied by all his certainties; (b) accepted as the determinants of his personality and conduct; while (c) they still remain, from the intellectual or purely logical point of view, probabilities and nothing more, although they are treated, in their relation to conduct and character, as if they possessed the higher status of certainty; in this sense, therefore, every great philosophy presents an indestructibly

No. 1.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 51

pragmatic aspect which need not necessarily, however, be final nor exclusive. All this plainly means that the thinker’s major probabilities are indissolubly fused with his certainties, so that the two aspects of his entire intellectual experience are clearly distinguishable, but never separable.

6. Philosophy as such therefore, and as distinct from any given philosophic system, is constituted by the major probabilities of human experience, together with their basis in the largest group of certainties that can at any given epoch be brought into more or less systematic interconnection; the ultimate criterion throughout being essentially a rational or, provided always that the term is not too narrowly interpreted, a logical criterion. Science, on the other hand, as constituted by all the particular sciences taken together, consists of the entire mass of certainties, whether they can be systematically interrelated or not, together with all those minor probabilities—those hypotheses and theories

which logically attend every specific certainty. Thus Science and Philosophy, in spite of this fundamental distinction between them, are kept in direct mutual contact along the line of the certainties which they share in common, although since many of the certainties of Science at any given moment still lack the bond of definite interrelation, they must plainly outnumber the certainties which Philosophy can legitimately employ. It should be equally clear that this represents an ideal situation which no actual philosophy can ever fully attain, although the successive historical systems may always approximate thereto more and more closely. But every thinker regards some principles as being certain which are either only probable or, as widening knowledge shows, are even false: e.g. Descartes’ theory of the location of the soul, and the analogous anatomical errors of Greek speculation. On the other hand, and in spite of the defects of every outstanding thought-system, Philosophy as such must inevitably play its own part in the entire advance of knowledge, since its major probabilities are all logically inferred from the slowly expanding nucleus of interrelated certainties which Science constantly discovers.

This philosophical derivation of major probabilities, then, may be described as a ‘process of interpretation,’ provided (once again) that this remains a predominantly rational, and not an

52 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

exclusively emotional nor pragmatic, process; and since every alert mind instinctively attempts some such interpretative process, it follows that every such mind must elaborate its own philosophy, no matter how incomplete and indefinite this may be. But although it thus remains implicit instead of being explicit, it nevertheless determines the individual’s general attitude to his world; while whenever his attitude is criticised the under- lying implicit philosophy immediately assumes, in self-defence, a more or less explicit form. This is the reason why our choice always lies, not between philosophy and no philosophy, but between a faulty philosophy and a more self-consistent one; so that whenever the scientist turns from that restricted field which mainly interests himself, and endeavors to correlate its own specific certainties—physical or biological or economic as the case may be—with all other regions of certainty, and also to discern their resultant major probabilities, he thereupon combines his earlier purely scientific standpoint with the philo- sophic standpoint, as so many leading investigators have already done with marked advantage to Philosophy itself. It must be observed that this involves nothing artificial nor antagonistic to knowledge; for while the certainties of Science are all restricted to begin with, nevertheless they incessantly tend to become inseparably linked with each other in totally unsuspected ways, as when some newly discovered facts of heredity throw a flood of light on remote and obscure psychological problems, or the anatomical details of fossil remains settle some puzzling racial kinships. Every truth and every fact, in short, protest against isolation and demand inclusion within some wider whole of knowledge.

This distinction between ‘major probabilities’ and ‘minor,’ again, is paralleled by the distinction between the mental attitudes of the scientist and the philosopher respectively. For since the former is concerned with only minor probabilities, he can regard these critically and tentatively until they are either finally established or disproved; '® thus he sits loose to his theories and hypotheses, and is always eager to change his mount for a better one. But whenever, as occasionally happens, he defends

1° Of course I do not mean carelessly; nor are such ‘minor probabilities’ of merely slight importance; tout au contraire.

No. 1.] SCIENCE AND PHILOSOPHY. 53

some theory so strenuously and passionately that he is prepared to stand and fall by it," he is obviously adopting a philosophic attitude in place of the distinctively scientific. For the phi- losopher, in dealing with the major probabilities of human experience, becomes so deeply committed to these that to sever him from them is as fatal an operation as to bisect the ancient centaur. In more technical terms, the philosopher treats his major probabilities, though they are logically never more than probabilities, as if they were certainties. Thus he embraces a persistent, but always rational, A/s Ob which determines his entire conduct and personality and upon which (as it were) he stakes his soul, while the scientist, as such, never stakes more than his reputation.

It is then always possible to affiliate some scientific theory, or group of theories, to one’s entire experience, and thus to elevate it from the status of a minor to that of a major probability. One’s attitude to any given atomic theory e.g., such as Bohr’s or Rutherford’s or Langmuir’s, remains purely scientific; for any such theory long remains tentative; it is undeniably important, but never becomes all-important, since it concerns only a limited realm of reality and has no bearing on art nor ethics nor politics. Quite similarly with evolutionary theories; these also may be restricted to the biological or sociological sphere, and then a definitely scientific attitude is maintained towards them. The evolutionary principle may thus always remain no more than probable; but if, while recognising this fact, one fuses the principle not simply with biology but with one’s entire experience—as Darwin and Spencer appear to have done—then one’s attitude becomes no longer scientific but philosophical, while at the same time one can pass from either point of view to the other as occasion demands. Intermediate between specialised atomic theories and far-reaching evolutionary theories stand such theories as those of relativity and quanta—fundamentally im- portant without, however, being all-important. Upon these therefore no one would stake any absolutely final issue; and if we apply this general criterion universally we discern, in my opinion, the essential distinction between Science and Philosophy.

UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL. ., E. TURNER.

" The recent suicide of the biologist Kammerer is a sad instance of this.

METAPHYSICAL IMPLICATIONS OF HUMAN ASSOCIATION.

EVERAL years ago, in the course of a discussion at a philo- sophical meeting, an opponent in argument accused me of defending dualism. When I replied that in my opinion a good deal might be said for dualism, he answered with an air of finality: ‘‘Well, you won't find many in these days to agree with you.” Doubtless, so far as contemporary opinion was concerned, he was right. Indeed, for the past century, dualism has scarcely figured at all except, perhaps, as the last refuge of theologians. Idealism, naturalism, pragmatism, and neo-realism, while dis- agreeing on nearly every other point, were unanimous in rejecting and repudiating dualism. Critical realism, to be sure, has affinities with dualism and might be expected to show a greater tolerance. But critical realism seems to mean a different thing to every critical realist; hence no definite view upon the issue of dualism versus monism can be fairly attributed to it.

The strife continues, however, between opposing schools of philosophy. And the root-cause of this interminable strife for which philosophy is so often reproached is found in the con- flicting claims of two different and opposing principles of expla- nation. These explanatory principles forever force themselves in one guise or another upon the philosophic mind because they are grounded upon the two fundamental but radically different factors in our human experience. The ubiquity of these factors and the duality of experience to which their opposition gives rise is signaiized by the many pairs of contrary but correlative terms which come at once to mind: matter and thought, body and mind, nature and spirit, existence and value, realism and idealism, mechanism and teleology.

These facts do not, to be sure, prove the case for dualism. What they do show is that the synthesis or reconciliation of these opposing principles achieved by contemporary philosophies is too easy and, in some cases at least, too superficial, to endure. This has been successfully established by Professor Sheldon in

54

HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 55

his searching and instructive study: The Sirife of Systems and Productive Duality. ‘And it is no arbitrary assertion,”’ he says, “to say that these correlative categories, law and freedom, mind and matter, etc., are opposites. We found in our study of each type that however much one type tried to reduce its opponent to terms of itself, it mever succeeded. There was always something exclusive about consciousness: something which the great-objective formula never quite reached, always some- thing about universals which no heaping together of individuals could attain, etc. The lesson of history would seem to be that these categories are mutually exclusive. Is not the quarrel between each system and its correlate then unavoidable?” !

If we seek a formula to express what is most essential to these two principles in their opposition, it seems to me that Professor Sheldon is right in choosing externaliiy and internality of relations. I shall find it convenient for purposes of the present argument to use the familiar terms mechanism and teleology, but shall define them primarily in terms of the contrast just mentioned. By mechanism I shall understand the view which conceives the real object as a physical event whose existence or occurrence is determined by other events in the space-time-mass order. By teleology I shall understand the view which finds the reality of an object not in the conditions or circumstances of its physical existence but in its distinctive character as a unity of diverse qualities which integrate it by ties of mutual implication within a coherent and meaningful system.

The best evidence of the radical, the insurmountable, character of the opposition in question, is furnished by the attempts which have been made to transcend it. The synthesis or reconciliation has invariably been achieved by reducing one factor to terms of the other, thus virtually denying its existence. After some preliminary wandering in no man’s land, the ambitious thinker finds safety in one camp or the other. He adopts a mechanistic substitute for teleology or a teleological substitute for mechanism. We are, for example, all familiar with the way in which idealism deals with physical existence. The existence of sense-objects is admitted; yes. They are granted at least ‘actuality.’ But just

1 Sheldon, op. cit., p. 414.

56 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

so far as physical objects are characterized by isolation and externality they fall short of Truth which is a self-contained and self-consistent whole, and Reality which is an organic unity.” Physical categories and mechanical formulations are therefore infected by contradictions which drive thought on to teleology as the only principle capable of expressing and interpreting the self-determined unity of the Real.

Adherents of instrumentalism claim it as a merit of their theory that it overcomes or avoids the long-standing opposition of mechanism and teleology. But in this case the synthesis is at the expense of teleology. Idealism is declared to be wrong in affirming any Universal or Absolute End, any enduring system which, in its unity and completeness, realizes the demands of our reason and will. All we find in the world of experience, as the pragmatist sees it, is process, activity, development. And in this temporal process within which all our doings and our sufferings fall, must be found the full meaning of teleology as well as of mechanism. If by causation we mean the relation of an event to the antecedent event or events which condition it, by teleology we mean the relation of an event to the subsequent event or events which are its consequences. The full significance of this latter relation does not appear, to be sure, until in the course of evolution, vital process becomes intelligent. Then antecedent events are perceived in the light of the consequences they induce and thus the end becomes an operative influence in its own fulfillment.* But we are warned against supposing that the ends we pursue and realize possess any systematic inter- connection or permanent organization. The attention of thought is always directed along the axis of future movement. Ends are not goals of action to be realized at some future time. Their realization in the form of an emotional appreciation accompanies the reorganization of activities forecasted by the plan. In Professor Dewey's example of the man building a house, the end is not realized at that future time when the house stands complete in every detail. Its realization begins when first he adopts definite plans and takes the initial steps to carry them

2 Cf. Bosanquet, Logic, Vol. I, Chap. IV. * Dewey, Experience and Nature, pp. 371 f.

No. 1.] HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 57

out, and it continues after the house is completed, in the various uses to which the house may be put and the manifold activities it makes possible. This may be admitted; but is not the value of the house primarily determined by the contribution which it is able to make to the life of social intelligence organized in family, in local community, and in nation? This is what teleology in the objective sense always has reference to: participa- tion in some enduring and meaningful system which by virtue of these characteristics reflects and expresses the comprehensive whole. Pragmatism, therefore, by denying reality to anything outside the temporal order, the evolutionary series, rules out real teleology from the start.

Now the lesson to be learned from this is not that philosophy should abandon all efforts at synthesis, which would after all be a confession of failure. It is rather that no lasting synthesis can be attained by ignoring or suppressing the opposition of essential factors in human experience. This is what the history of philosophy teaches if it teaches anything. Instead, the opposi- tion must be explicitly admitted, must be exhaustively explored, must be encouraged to express itself, in every aspect and from every angle. Only on these conditions can it in reason be expected that the opposing factors will disclose a functional interdependence.

In search of suggestions of real synthesis, I wish to turn now to a somewhat neglected field. At least it is a field whose importance has not been fully appreciated by metaphysicians— that of the social relation. And in conformity with the conditions noted in the last paragraph we shall, after noting the form which these opposing factors or principles take in the social field, find out if we can the points at which their opposition appears most thoroughgoing and insurmountable.

The presence of the two aspects, mechanical and teleological, is quite evident in the field of social relationships. Society from the standpoint of teleology (or internal organization) is a com- munity of selves possessing, gua rational, a common world and participating, consequently in a common experience.* It is a

‘ This aspect of social life is treated with impressive clearness and adequacy by Creighton in his essay, ‘The Social Nature of Thinking.”” Cf. Studies in Specu-

58 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIIL

group of monads each reflecting, by virtue of a harmony pre- established by the intelligence common to them all, the same universe, but from its own unique, personal point of view. Viewed mechanistically, society appears as an aggregate of interacting individuals whose reciprocal relations are all reducible to modes of physical and physico-chemical causation. The scope and the adequacy of this mechanical explanation have been greatly enlarged by recent discoveries on the part of physiological | psychology of the bodily responses of the speech-apparatus and ;

the larger muscles which accompany intellectual and volitional activity. It seems possible now to extend the application of physical causation to provinces of social life hitherto regarded as explainable only through the direct influence of intelligence and purpose, such as the power of moral ideals over individuals widely remote in time or space and the continuing authority of } a compact social tradition over succeeding generations of man- kind.

Now let us grant that neither of these interpretations is false and that both reflect authentic and undeniable aspects of, or factors in, human social life. At what point do they come into sharpest conflict? At two points, I should say. The first is between the uniformities of natural causation which determine the sequences of human behavior along with all other classes of { physical events and the originality, the inventiveness, the creative | power of individual selves. Here of course we are confronted with a special form of the old and hopeless antinomy of necessity and freedom. The universal laws of external determination leave no room whatsoever for spontaneous, for self-determined, activity on the part of the intelligent individual; they render it inconceivable. On the other hand, for individual intelligence to be conscious of itself at all is to affirm its own freedom and | spontaneity: it cannot act on the assumption or tolerate the | thought of its own complete domination by physical necessity. The second point of conflict is between reason or knowledge in its general or social form, as the inclusive and enduring system of . ideas in which all intelligent subjects participate, and the bodily

lative Philosophy. With characteristic breadth of view he recognizes the im- portance of interaction in the form of verbal discussion (p. 67).

No. 1.] HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 59

adjustments, the motor responses, of human individuals. Social intelligence is organized internally on the basis of intrinsic meaning and content. It admits of individual differences, to be sure, but only differences within one common experience. It admits of reciprocal influence among individual selves but only by mutual acknowledgement and the efficacy of a common reason. Hence it is impossible for individual subjects as unique expressions of general intelligence to affect one another externally or to engage as causes or effects in the sequences of external nature. They have no foothold in the order of physical existence. But the bodily adjustments of human individuals are events occurring at particular times and places, in response to specific stimuli, and with sequences of after-effects. The conflict in this second case is between the internal relations which organize a rationally coherent system and the external determination which holds among physical existents.

Let us next consider whether the facts of associated human life and history furnish any hints of solution of these two antinomies. Decidedly, I believe that they do, in both cases of ‘irreconcilable’ opposition. So far as social practice is concerned (to take up the first case) mechanical regularity instead of preventing free creation on the part of human individuals is its indispensable basis and condition.’ Except for the invariable sequences of pliysical causation, mechanical invention would be impossible. If vital functions and psycho-physical tendencies could not be depended on to operate uniformly, progressive social organization would be impossible. If natural materials and agencies did not have fixed ways of acting and reacting artistic creation would be impossible. Indeed, except for a certain constancy of external determination and cyclical regu- larity of physical process, constructive scientific enquiry would be impossible. In fact all along the line it is the uniformity of

’ This fact is forcefully stated with convincing illustrations from the biological field by Professor Lillie in an article, ‘‘The Nature of the Vitalistic Dilemma,” in the Journal of Philosophy, Vol. XXIII, No. 25, p. 673. He writes: ‘We conclude that finalism, so far from being inconsistent with mechanism (i.e., physico-chemical determinism), in fact presupposes it and rests upon it. No end can be regularly attained unless the methods used for its attainment can be relied upon, i.e. are

constant or invariant in their operation.”

60 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIIL.

4 existing nature that makes possible and efficacious the exercise 1 of individual originality, spontaneity and freedom. . Likewise (to take up now the second case of acute opposition) it is the existence of a common human intelligence, and this alone, | which makes the motor responses of individuals effective as qe modes of social influence. For these bodily movements by I themselves are simply physical events; as such they are, or might be, modes of physical interaction between human individuals but never modes of social interaction. To fulfil the latter function they must have a meaning which is understood by all parties to the transaction; and this is made possible by, and would | be impossible without, the presence of general intelligence in | which all individuals share. This fundamental fact is the one | which our behaviorists so persistently ignore; that the motor responses which they are so successful in analyzing and de- scribing always presuppose as the indispensable condition of their social significance and efficacy, the existence of common human intelligence. They themselves bear unwilling witness to the | existence of this ineluctable factor when by speaking and writing ) they try to make their peculiar views intelligible to us.

In actual practice then, the opposition between the mechanical and the teleological factors in the social world is overcome. Despite mutual contradiction they work together and their continued coéperation is necessary to organized social life and progress. How are they thus brought into functional harmony? Is there any connecting link through whose mediation opposites are turned into complementaries? There is, and it is the same in both cases of apparently exclusive opposition alluded to. It is what I shall call the sign. (The term symbol would in many respects be preferable. As a word, it is more concrete and convincing; but it is so because of a variety of associations many of them irrelevant and positively misleading in the present connection. So I choose the more abstract and colorless term sign.) A sign is a motor response or its physical resultant or product which is open to general perception and can be identified by its distinctive sequence or pattern of sense-qualities. Such a , sense-object becomes a sign when it signifies to all who perceive it certain of the persisting differences of character, uniformities

No. 1.] HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 61

of relation, and possibilities of development, which social in- telligence discovers in the real world. It is true that signs are of individual production and manufacture, hence in their use are subject to individual initiative and control. But what they signify, their meaning, is determined by social agreement subject to the authoritative standards of universal human intelligence. Of signs there are several, three or perhaps four, classes. The first and most obvious is that of verbal signs, of words spoken, written and printed. With their function in expressing thought we are quite familiar: from vocal sounds signifying emotion to words and phrases communicative of passing ideas and beliefs, to articulate language which reflects in its modifications and constructions the logical interrelations of the body of accepted knowledge. Secondly, there is the class of mechanical signs: all the standardized methods and appliances and tools and machines of mechanical art and industry. For take note: these mechanical methods and instrumentalities are not merely material objects with a particular passing utility; they signify the adjust- ment of existing materials and forces of nature with their own uniform modes of interaction to the needs and uses of social intelligence. As a third class of signs are the manners and customs, the forms and ceremonies, the procedures and insti- tutions of social life and intercourse. These signify the adjust- ment and regulation of organic strivings and vital urges, of animal appetite and psycho-physical tendency, of individual disposition and hereditary aptitude, to the purposes of organized social life. In the fourth place, there is the class of emotional- esthetic signs. Beginning with the differences of facial ex- pression and bodily posture which signify the principal varieties of human emotion and their exciting causes this class of signs has been enlarged to include sense-objects and imagery of the various art-forms, starting with song and ceremonial dance and dramatic portrayal and extending to pictures and instrumental music and sculpture and architecture. That such artistic cre- ations are signs or symbols scarcely needs to be said: they present patterns and harmonies of sense-imagery which through their effect on feeling and imagination signify the common, the funda- mental, reconciling features of the human experience and the

human world.

~—-peltigeg arc

62 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

Through the intermediation of these ‘signs’ the creative intelligence of human individuals comes into operative contact with the world of physical necessity. For these signs, while they exhibit the uniformities of physical process and, in some cases, have themselves physical effects, are at the same time under human control and in their meaning reflect the power and the purposes of human intelligence. Hence the intelligent indi- vidual in the execution of original purposes need not attempt to deal directly with a physical order, alien and intractable, but indirectly through the instrumentality of external media them- selves akin to the materials and forces of nature but already adapted to the uses and purposes of free intelligence. Through the manipulation of these symbols and instrumentalities, in imagination or by actual experiment, he is able to find out how his design may be accomplished under the conditions fixed by external nature. So the investigating mind does not apply itself directly to the complex and baffling properties of nature but through the intermediation of words and mathematical symbols and experimental procedures which signify the salient and enduring attributes of physical objects, and their uni- formities of connection. So the mechanical intelligence does not deal directly with physical materials and forces but with the properties and capacities of these as expressed in words and revealed by technical methods and tools and appliances, which signify also their relation to the rational uses and endeavors of mankind. The material which the carpenter uses is ‘wood’ of a specified variety, wood with the properties of its kind, wood that can be split and sawed and nailed, wood that can be fitted and joined, wood that can be planed and polished. The producer of fine art also deals with his material through the standardized technique of his craft. The social reformer does not attempt to cope with human capacities and dispositions in the raw (so to speak) but as they are revealed through procedures and insti- tutions by which they have been brought at least in part under intelligent control.

Through the intervention of these signs the opposition between the generality and inclusiveness of rational thought and the particularity and transiency of individual action is overcome.

No. 1.] HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 63

These signs express the socially attested meanings of universal intelligence, yes—but they are also the specific motor responses of particular human individuals, or the physical effects of these responses. These bodily movements (along with the sequence of events consequent upon them) occur in the external world of common perception, can be observed by others, can be reproduced by them. Hence they act as media for the communication of intelligible meaning among individuals, and instrumentalities whereby one individual exercises influence over the thought and behavior of others. Their employment is directed by individual intelligence which uses them for its own purposes; but when thus used they communicate to the agent some of the meaning and value which social intelligence has realized through their efficacy. So it certainly is with language. The speech-forms acquired by the child serve the needs of his growing intelligence; of course verbal expression would be out of the question for him if he had no intelligible ideas to express. But these speech-forms come to him freighted with meaning, the articulated meaning which generations of mankind have found in the natural world and in the relations of associated human life. And the value which verbal expression has for the individual as a means of influencing the thought and behavior of others springs from this its derivation from the social intelligence of mankind. So it is with the forms and the manners of civilized deportment and polite intercourse. They are indispensable to the attainment of individual aim and ambition in civilized society, but they have this social potency because they reflect the conditions which social intelligence has discovered to be requisite to decorous and humane living. So it is with the methods and procedures of political codéperation. Casting a ballot is a trivial act physically considered, but the ballot symbolizes the value of political codperation and if thought- fully employed brings home to the voter the significance of citizenship in a self-governing nation. So it is with industrial implements and appliances. Plough and binder are tools which the farmer finds useful and necessary to his purposes; to him they may appear to be just this—useful tools—and nothing more. But as signs and symbols of man’s severe and protracted struggle to extract from the earth a sufficient food-supply, these

5

64 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

familiar and prosaic instruments take the acts of ploughing and of harvesting out of their purely physical setting and invest them with a new and wider meaning. They appear as necessary factors in the far-reaching industrial enterprise of producing and distributing the amount of suitable food required to keep the members of human society in health and strength and thus as ; essential parts of the great codéperative task of mankind in | developing and utilizing the resources of this planet and of the 4" natural world.

l Four rather than two factors may be said to constitute the | social relationship, because the mechanical and _ teleological qo factors each appear in two forms, a universal or general and a particular or individual. Intelligence appears in the socially- . attested system of knowledge and in the original insights and | inventions of individuals; mechanism in the universal order of .

;

ae

physical causation and in the specific responses of particular individuals.

The relations between these four factors may be illustrated by a diagram. Suppose we draw a square and call the four corners A, B, C, and D, beginning at the upper left-hand corner and t going around clockwise. Then A will represent the system of i general knowledge, B the insights and inventions of individuals, C the motor adjustments of individuals, and D the order of | physical causation. Let us also draw diagonals from A to C and from B to D. i Now there appears to be no irreconcilable opposition between the successive pairs of factors as we go around the sides of the square. There is no necessary contradiction between the gener- | ally accepted body of knowledge and the insights and inventions i} of individuals; for despite temporary clash and enforced readjust- ment the discoveries of individuals are eventually integrated within the expanding organization of universal truth. Nor between the insights and inventions of individuals and their motor adjustments; a genuine functional psychology will correlate them. Nor between the universal system of physical causation and the actions of particular individuals; emergent evolution will account for such different types of determination as may be involved. Nor, finally, between the order of physical causation

No. 1.] HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 65

and the system of organized knowledge; this is indicated by the recurring appeal of metaphysical parallelism. But along the diagonals A—C and B—D acute and apparently exclusive opposi- tion declares itself. The order of physical causation comes into genuine conflict with the freedom and originality of individual intelligence. And no place can be found in the system of knowledge organized strictly on principles of internal consistency for the actions of individuals which, while they occur in the physical world, are not subject to its laws of causal determination.

Since, moreover, it is through the intermediation of signs that these cases of opposition are overcome in social evolution and conflict is converted into functional codperation, we may place the letter S within a circle at the point of intersection of the two diagonals.

Our diagram may also be used to illustrate the cyclical move- ment of social progress, what we may call in brief the ‘social circuit.’ The system of social culture is transmitted to indi- viduals by communication. In this system they by virtue of their intelligence participate. But within it each one having his own outlook and preferences develops his own ideas and purposes, which he expresses in outward action. These actions through which individuals make their contributions to social culture leave permanent physical after-effects in the accumulating material of human culture: books, houses, machines, pictures, etc. This material equipment and paraphernalia of civilization endures (at least until it is reproduced or improved or replaced) to impress the minds of subsequent generations and thus make the insights and inventions it embodies the permanent spiritual heritage of humanity. Thus circuit A—B—C—D repeats itself endlessly in the progressive expansion of social culture.®

So far as human association is concerned it is therefore a mistake to think of mechanism and teleology as principles which exclude one another. We are not shut up to alternatives of

* It is not, I think, a mere fancy to see in our square a way of illustrating the relation of contemporary schools of philosophy. Idealism occupies the corner A and from this standpoint seeks to envisage B and D; pragmatism in the same manner occupies the corner B with outlook upon A and C; neo-realism and be- haviorism occupy C with outlook on B and D; materialism from the standpoint D

envisages A and C.

66 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

viewing society as a community of conscious selves each reflecting the same intelligible order from its own point of view, or as an aggregate of living individuals in interaction reducible in last analysis to terms of physical causation. The monadological conception has its truth but it is an error to suppose that it rules out interaction—that the monads are windowless. Both teleo- logical and mechanical principles are necessary to explain the expansion and enrichment of the social consciousness through the codéperative activities of a multitude of individuals.

What light does the social relationship throw upon the opposi- tion between mechanical and teleological factors which declares itself in every department of our experience? I believe that the fundamental facts elicited by the foregoing enquiry have im- portant metaphysical implications. An analysis of the conditions of human association and social progress shows that these two factors act in functional interdependence. But not this simply; the social process proves to be much more complicated. The two factors, mechanical and teleological, coéperate in two different lines of activity which turn out to be interdependert and complementary. Only such a world as the physical could furnish a field for the exercise of the creative powers of individual intelligence, being unsubdued (in its externality) to the purposes of intelligence yet at the same time susceptible (in its uniformity) to intelligent adaptation and control. On the other hand it is only through the inclusive unity of an intelligence in which all individuals gua rational participate that the constructive achieve- ments of individuals in the external world can be appreciatively realized by their fellows and thus made the property of the social community.

The product of these two joint activities of individual creation and social communication is the sign whose nature and position in the evolutionary scheme make it, possibly, a key to the meta- physical puzzle. Signs are sense-objects and, like all sense- objects, they belong to the physical order. Like other sense- objects they have their physical conditions and can be reproduced by a repetition of these conditions. (The great variety of signs should be kept in mind. Four principal classes were distin- guished: (1) oral and written discourse, (2) mechanical methods

No. 1.] HUMAN ASSOCIATION. 67

and appliances, (3) social and political procedures and insti- tutions, and (4) objects of esthetic perception and artistic creation.) But these are unique among sense-objects because they stand, by virtue of their significance, also and at the same time in another relation. They are members of the organized system of objects integrated by diversities and identities of intrinsic character in a self-consistent and enduring whole, un- folding an ever-increasing variety of interrelated differences, and reflecting its own unity in the subordinate harmonies of constituent parts. This is the objective system of values realized by social intelligence through its intellectual, practical and esthetic activities. To its enduring reality and inexhaustible potentialities of further development the mechanical order with its recurring sequences of external determination contributes, contributes as the indispensable condition of individual con- struction and discovery, and the necessary medium for the inter- communication and social appropriation of the fruits of individual initiative and invention.

But it may be asked: What of human individuals? Have we not neglected them in dwelling upon the importance of their material productions, their mechanical inventions, their verbal expressions? Living human beings are, I would answer, them- selves signs or, rather, complexes of signs, each one combining verbal responses, bodily movements and changing facial ex- pressions and bodily postures in a unique fashion and thus conveying a distinctive, a coherent, a continuous, meaning. Especially do human individuals appear to their fellows as signs very similar to the ones we have been discussing. But they differ from these latter in one important respect which gives them decisive superiority. They respond to their physical environ- ment not (or not merely) in accordance with the uniformities of physical causation, but under the guidance of ends freely chosen from the realm of rational possibility. This power of response to selected possibilities inherent in the objective system of rational meaning and value makes them self-conscious and self-determined. In virtue of this power they are capable of themselves producing through their intercourse with the physical environment signs in the social sense of material embodiments of

68 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW.

universal meaning and value. But this superiority they purchase at a cost, the cost of dependence upon an intricate and unstable conjunction of physical conditions in an organism which because of the necessities of organic maintenance and reproduction limits opportunities for rational self-expression, soon goes to pieces, and cannot be identically reproduced. Hence while the insights, inventions and creations achieved by the living indi- vidual remain embodied in social signs, his uniqueness of personal outlook and aspiration disappears—unless, to be sure, it is permanently incorporated in some manner we cannot under- stand within the organization of the comprehensive or universal

intelligence. H. W. WRIGHT.

UNIVERSITY OF MANITOBA.

REVIEWS OF BOOKS

La Philosophie de Plotin. By Emite Bréuter. Paris, Boivin & Cie,

1928.—pp. xix, 189.

La Philosophie de Plotin is the reproduction of a course of lectures given by Professor Emile Bréhier at the Sorbonne in 1921-1923. The author modestly says that he has not attempted to give a complete exposition of the philosophy of Plotinus, but has limited himself to what Plotinus himself calls “divine things”’; i.e., to a consideration of the Ong, the Intelligence, and the Soul. We are therefore warned not to expect a meticulous study, such as that of Dean Inge, who writes with all the fervour of an ardent disciple. Chapter First is an attempt to characterise the main features of the third century of our era. That century bears witness to the definitive ruin of the dogmatic philosophies which for five centuries had been the guide in morals of cultivated men. Commentators now take the place of thinkers. Nor is Plotinus an exception. ‘Our theories,’’ he says, “are not new: they were set forth long ago, though they were left undeveloped; we are but exponents of their doctrines” (Vol. 1, 9). No doubt, as M. Bréhier points out, this disclaimer of originality rather overstates the case: in reality, the philosophy of Plotinus bears the distinct impress of his age: in the decadence of scientific and moral speculation, the religious sentiment developed with a fervour unknown previously in the West, capturing both the imagination and the intellect. We have only to read Plotinus’ defence of his doctrine against the Gnostics to see how clearly he realised the opposition of the new religious conception of life and the old Hellenic conception. In Plotinus we find at once an affinity for the new form of religion and a repulsion from it: an affinity, because of his intense feeling of the spiritual life; a repulsion, because of his reasoned conception of the universe. From this complex historical position results the tension that one feels in the philosophy of Plotinus and in its mode of expression. To this fact is largely due the divergences of expositors. Plotinus was at heart a Greek, but the problems that interested him were unknown to early Greek philosophy, being in reality religious in their character.

A treatise of Plotinus has as a rule a fairly precise form. It begins with the statement of a problem, followed by a demonstration in

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dialectical fashion, continuing with a statement of the reasons for the acceptance of the conclusion reached, and ending with ‘‘a sort of hymn celebrating access to the intelligible world.’"” The Aporia, for example, may start from a traditional question of the philosophical schools, such as, What is Man?, or it may be of a physical nature: say, How can we see at a distance?, or again it may start from a con- sideration of a Platonic formula, such as ‘‘ Virtue consists in resem- blance to God.”

Plotinus often employs the symbolism and the terminology of the mystics, but, in M. Bréhier’s view, he cannot be called a pure mystic. On the one hand, the universe is divided into the sacred and the profane; on the other hand, as Dean Inge points out, there is an in- evitable conflict between the two conceptions. Plotinus must be ranked with those thinkers who have attempted to get rid of the conflict between a religious view of the universe and a rationalistic representation which seems to deprive the problem of the destiny of the individual soul of all significance. In Plato the destiny of the soul is expressed in a mythical way as a succession of events, while in Plotinus it tends to become a sequence of efforts involved in the eternal structure of the universe. At the same time, knowledge becomes for him an internal act of contemplation, emphasis being laid much less on the objects of knowledge than on the modifications which result from the ascent of the soul towards the Absolute.

The Intelligence (Nous) is on the one hand an articulate system of definite notions, and on the other hand, universal being, in which all distinctions are absorbed, even the distinction of subject and object. The former aspect is obviously the result of the exegesis of Plotinus on the systems of Plato, Aristotle, and the Stoics; but there is much greater difficulty in determining how far Plotinus was influenced by oriental modes of thought. He continually employs metaphors to explain the nature and the action of the First Principle. No doubt he was influenced by Plato’s comparison of the Good to the Sun, but he employs this metaphor in a way that shows he is acted upon by other influences. He was, M. Bréhier contends, influenced by the speculations of India, and more particularly by the Upanishads. Nor is there any doubt, in my opinion, that those speculations had a certain influence upon Plotinus; but it seems to me important to recognise that, while the Indian mind was moving towards a sort of abstract pantheism, and an asceticism which renounced the world as illusory, the philosophy of Plotinus does not deny the reality of the world of sense, but affirms the identity of the human spirit with the

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First Principle of all things; in other words, there is all the difference between Plotinian and Indian speculation that distinguishes Pan- theism from Mysticism. The pantheist sees God in all things; the mystic views Him as transcendent of all things, and absolutely complete in Himself, though none the less present with His power in all things.

It is universally agreed that there are two main problems in the philosophy of Plotinus: first, the religious problem concerned with the destiny of the soul; secondly, the problem as to the structure of reality. Some interpreters make the one predominant over the other, but M. Bréhier, rightly I think, maintains that the two problems ire regarded by Plotinus as of equalimportance. The aim of Plotinus is to prove that as these two conceptions are at bottom identical, ratiocination has a religious value. This is evident from the fact that the hypostases are interdependent.

In M. Bréhier’s view it is important to bear in mind that Plotinus regards the heavens as constituted by concentric spheres, the largest being that of the fixed stars, beneath which are the spheres of the various planets. The regularity and periodicity of the spheres make the process of the world an object of rational knowledge. The world never came into being in time, but is eternal, and the periods follow and reproduce one another. The sensible world is a certain order realised in space, and its principle must be an intellectual order, the relations and harmonies of which are discernible by the pure intel- ligence. Thus the Intelligence is the central hypostasis of Plotinus’ metaphysic. Above the unity of the intelligible world must, however, be placed the Absolute One, the ultimate principle of all things. Below the intelligible world there is another hypostasis, the hypostasis of the Soul. Thus we have, (1) The Absolute One, (2) the Intelligence, which proceeds from the One, (3) the Soul, which is projected by the Intelligence. The One comprehends all being without distinction; the Intelligence contains all beings, but these in distinction from one another; in the Soul things tend to distinction until they arrive at their limit, and are dispersed in the sensible world. Plotinus makes use of various metaphors in illustration of his doctrine, the best known of which is that of emanation, and all of them presuppose an Intuition xpressive of the continuity of the spiritual life.

The Psychology of Plotinus is a study of the different levels at which the Soul is found, the highest being the ecstatic communion with the One, and the lowest the organising force of the sensible world.

Between these stand the understanding, the memory, sensation, and

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the passions. To the animistic theory Plotinus gives unlimited extension. Every active force in nature is a soul, or attached to a soul. Not only the world, but the stars and the earth, have a soul. There is no inanimate being in the universe, and for this reason the sensible is transparent to the spirit.

Plotinus found himself in presence of a difficulty. On the one hand, the various souls are united to bodies; on the other hand, the descent of the soul into a body has resulted in a variety of evils. The effort of Plotinus to reconcile these two conceptions M. Bréhier regards as ending in failure. Here then we find an irreconcilable conflict. The normal functions of the mind are for Plotinus derivative. In the highest degree of spiritual life there is no memory, no reasoning, no discursive thought, and therefore logically no immortality of the individual.

The theory of the Intelligence, the next hypostasis above the Soul, contains so many heterogeneous elements that its analysis is especially difficult. The Intelligence is in its essence intuitive or contemplative. It implies (1) the intelligible and eternal order of the universe, and (2) the thought of a Self, in which all distinction of subject and object disappears, and the Self finds itself in universal being. This second mode of thought M. Bréhier regards as alien to Greek tradition. According to it all moral and intellectual relations are lost in pure contemplation, and spiritual life is the relation of “the alone to the alone,” a relation which excludes all union with other beings or persons.

The doctrine of “‘the One”’ has naturally given rise to the greatest diversity of interpretation. M. Bréhier’s view is as follows. Accord- ing to Plotinus there is no veritable Intelligence until the One gives it illumination. In this way Plotinus would reconcile the transcendence of the One with the existence of the Intelligence. The activity of the Intelligence is purely spiritual. At first there is a vague idea of measure, and so far no definite object; but contact with the One results in discrimination and distinction. It is characteristic of all Mysticism to maintain that the One is the ever-present principle of all acts of the Intelligence, and therefore the condition of all spiritual life. Reasoned knowledge of the Good is different, as Plotinus himself says, from the Vision of the Good; yet he holds that the ascent to the Good is by way of reason. Thus he is at once a mystic and an intellectualist. God is at once the object of a direct intuition, in which finite things disappear, and the first term in the rational com-

prehension of things. This very hurried summary of M. Bréhier’s treatise may be enough

No, 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 73

to show with what precision and insight he has presented the con- flicting elements in the philosophy of Plotinus. From this point of view it would be hard to provide a more convincing exposition. What some readers may feel, however, is that the author has not attempted to indicate, at least not clearly, how he would provide a more satis- factory account of the universe. The combined rationalism and mysticism of Plotinus seem to me to arise from a fundamentally erroneous conception of the world. He passes upward from indeter- minate matter to an indeterminate Absolute without realising that he has virtually split up the universe into fragments. He speaks of an absolute unity, but in reality it is no unity; he declares it to be a concrete whole, but it is neither a whole nor concrete. What he really assumes is that the ultimate nature of things cannot be com- prehended at all. It is no genuine solution to fall back upon an Intuition, which, as he conceives it, has no definite content; an Intu- ition so empty, indeed, that we cannot even admit that it implies the distinction of subject and object. A pure subject, divorced from all relation to the objective world, is no doubt indefinite: it is indefinite, because there is no subject which can exist in separation from the object. Plotinus so far recognises this truth as to affirm that the One is presupposed in all that is; but he cannot possibly explain how an absolutely transcendent Being can have any relation whatever to the world. Thus in the end all the contrasts signalised by Plotinus remain staring at each other in unrelieved abruptness. We pass upwards or downwards along the various hypostases, but we never in any way account for their differences. Only a philosophy which recognises that as we pass from matter to soul, from soul to intel- ligence, and from intelligence to the Absolute, we really transform each of the lower levels of being, can succeed in giving a self-con- sistent theory of the universe. For the same reason Plotinus’ doctrine of the basis of conduct is marred by the fallacy that only by rising above all definite impulses can man live a truly moral life. What he never begins to see is that the least enlightened individual may yet be fully conscious of the divine. This truth, which makes an end to the intellectually aristocratic Greek ideal of life by absorbing and transcending it, is the only religious view that can bring peace to the human soul, and it is also the key to any philosophy of religion worthy

of the name. JoHN WATSON.

QUEEN'S UNIVERSITY.

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74 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIILI.

Paradoxes of Legal Science. By BENyAMIN CARDOZO. New York,

Columbia University Press, 1928.—pp. 142.

This new book of Chief Judge Cardozo of the New York Court of Appeals finely expresses the new spirit which is moving and molding our law. Until quite recently the indictment which Goethe, himself a trained jurist, brought against the methods of legal thinking would have been justified:

Es erben sich Gesetz und Rechte

Wie eine ew’ge Krankheit fort;

Sie schleppen von Geschlecht sich zu Geschlechte, Und riicken sacht von Ort zu Ort.

Vernunft wird Unsinn, Wohlthat Plage;

Weh dir, dass du ein Enkel bist;

Vom Rechte, das mit uns geboren ist, Von dem ist leider nie die Frage.

It is true, it is the devil who pronounces this judgment, but Goethe's devil is a critical thinker. At any rate, the new leaders in American jurisprudence agree with Mephisto, who thus establishes the claim that he is “‘a part of that power which always wills the evil and always creates the good.”

‘‘New times demand new measures and new men” in the field of law as elsewhere; and our judges and lawyers have found a way to interpret the corpus juris in order to meet the changing times. Instead of breaking our constitution, James Bryce declared, we have bent it. Indeed, it may be said that we did not even bend it: disregarding the mere letter of the law, we have found “the purpose of the law,”’ “the spirit of the law,”’ “the common-sense of the law,”’ as witness the titles of the epoch-making books. To do justice it became necessary to see things in their social relations and in their historical development. The judge’s function became more difficult: the ‘phonograph’ method would no longer suffice. It is to the credit of the American judiciary that it met the new situation sanely. And the forward- looking judges received the support of the younger legal scholars, of men like Roscoe Pound, who possessed marked intellectual gifts and a sound knowledge of the law. It is not likely that their names will be forgotten when the history of American jurisprudence comes to be written.

And the new school is fortunate in the possession of Chief Judge Cardozo, a highly cultivated man and a born scholar, remarkable for the breadth and the depth of his knowledge as well as for the acute- ness and clearness of his thinking. Indeed, he is an outstanding per-

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 75

sonality; there are few men who possess his erudition and his sanity of judgment, few who can tell their story in so small a compass. The task which he has set himself—the understanding of the law—calls for more than specialistic research in his own field, in which, however, he seems to be a master. To grasp the meaning of the law, or of any human institution, one must understand life; one must know its social setting, its relations to other institutions, and also its historical background. That is the philosophical problem: to see things whole, to know them thoroughly. The understanding of a people implies a knowledge of its various activities: economic, ethical, political, religious, social, and even esthetic. The philosopher must hear the music of the spheres.

It is also to be noted that Judge Cardozo makes intelligent use of the Hegelian method in his work: the truth is reached by the recon- ciliation of opposites, of antinomies: rest and motion, one and many, self and not-self, freedom and necessity, reality and appearance, absolute and relative. It is for this reason that he entitles his book Paradoxes of Legal Science. The tendency of every principle is to create its own antithesis or rival (p. 62): the truth is reached by the union of opposites. It is the nature of reason to heal the wounds which it inflicts. We are, for example, to reconcile liberty with equality, and both of them with order. Property rights of the individual we are to respect, and yet we are not to press them to the point at which they threaten the welfare or the security of the many. We must preserve justice in its universal quality, and yet leave it capacity to be individual and particular. Mere conservation without change cannot conserve. He also finds support in Einstein's theory, emphasizing the law of relativity in the adaptation of the law to conduct. We have to consider an act not as an abstract entity, separate and alone, but in its interrelations and results. He quotes Hobhouse: “In ethics custom and theory are in constant and close interaction; and comparative study of ethics must embrace them both” (p. 16). The sanction or source of obligation for moral rules is the pressure of society on the individual, and the same process is ever at work in the making of the law by courts (p. 18). Long ago, for example, a master was only responsible for the acts of his agents if he had actually ordered them to act, or if he had by words or conduct subsequently ratified their acts (p. 21).

It is easy to see what an important place ethics takes in Judge Cardozo’s system. A code, he tells us, needs to be supplemented by reference to norms of morals. ‘“‘The law appropriates the norms

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76 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

of morals as its own.”” ‘The whole system which judges develop has been built on the assumption that it is an expression of the mores.” (Indeed, he goes to the literature of ethical theory to obtain help, even drawing on Vaihinger’s Philosophie des Als Ob, which, he says, is no stranger to the law (p. 33).) Law accepts as the pattern of justice the morality of the community. It will follow or strive to follow the principle and practice of the men and women in the community whom the social mind would regard as intelligent and virtuous (p. 37). That is, in the words of Jellinek: “ The jural norm of justice is a minimum of ethics, that is to say, the whole combined requirements of morals whose observance, at a given stage of social development, is absolutely indis- pensable”’ (p. 42). In other words, we read the quality of legal justice in the disclosures of the social mind, in the same book in which we read the values of all the social interests, moral, economic, edu- cational, scientific, or esthetic; and the judge goes to the same source. There are also values of expediency or of convenience or economic or cultural advancement, values that are not final but merely means to others which are to be ascertained and assessed and equilibrated. When objective tests fail him, he must look within himself. And there are principles and precedents and analogies which may be pressed into the service of justice if one has the perceiving eye to use them. We have here something not unlike the divinations of the scientist whose experiments must be made significant by the flash of a luminous hypothesis. Indeed, there is a creative process in the law, as in science generally, which is akin to the creative process in art (pp. 54 ff.).

There are times, however, when rest should be preferred to motion; there are fields in which fundamental concepts have been developed to their uttermost conclusions by the organon of logic. In such cases the finality of the rule is in itself a jural end. Judge Cardozo, however, warns us that logic has been more remorseless here, more blind to final causes than in other fields. He also points out that the tendency of principle and rule to conform to moral standards—the true avenue of growth for law—should not be confounded with the suspension of all principle and rule and the substitution of sentiment or unregulated benevolence, which pushed to an extreme is the negation of all law. Moreover, the need is obvious for a balancing of social interests and choice proportional to the value. In the case of negli- gence, for example, we find involved at every turn the question of the equilibration of social interests, moral and economic (pp. 67 ff.). Judge Cardozo also reveals his powers of synthesis in his study of the

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 77

paradox of the one and the many, which is, to my mind, the most important part of his work. The individual in the group—trade union or political party or state—is not the same as the individual out of the group: his will has been transfigured by association with the wills of others. This is the so-called doctrine of internal relations. It is the old problem of nominalism and realism that here confronts us in a new field. For Judge Cardozo the group is a real living thing, quite independent of any permission to exist as an incorporated person that may have been given by the state. Indeed, this real, living thing has made some curious breaches only lately in the doctrine held for orthodox. There are groups, persistent and pervasive; the law could not ignore them if it would: the outer one is the state itself. Liberty as a legal concept also contains a paradox: it is a negation of the law» and law means restriction, while anarchy would leave liberty the exclusive possession of the strong or the unscrupulous. Liberty has come to mean more than the reign of law: the end of law is not to abolish or restrain, but to preserve and enlarge freedom. Liberty may have meaning as a concept of social science. We must search for some codrdinating principle whether the principle be rooted in history or in philosophy (pp. 86 ff.).

History and reason unite in warning that liberty is impaired by statutes clogging or diverting the free development of personality. This is the American tradition; repression of thought and speech, and above all repression of conscience were vivid and portentous evils. The deliverance of the soul proclaimed in the forefront of our bill of rights is the cornerstone of our political philosophy. ‘“ Ye shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free.’ And equality is the necessary condition of liberty, or at any rate of social liberty as contrasted with liberty that is unsocial or anarchical. We note the growing acceptance in our law of the power of the legislature to regulate industrial conditions—to establish some degree of equality of oppor- tunity between the affluent and the needy. And in our constitutional law the concept of liberty as formulated by social science must be so re-interpreted that there shall be no undue impairment of rights of private property; here again there is need of compromise. A like antithesis confronts us in morals as in law. The institution of private property is the tribute that is paid by the law to what is self- regarding in the mind of man. But it must be molded in response to human needs; it must be the expression of egoism that is shorn of brutality: it has a social function to fulfil. Property like liberty has been taught that some of the most cherished immunities are not

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absolute but relative. The fact is, the opposites of liberty and restraint, the individual and the group, are phases of those wider opposites—the one and the many, rest and motion—at the heart of all being. One of the marks by which we recognize a social interest as worthy of protection is the spontaneity and persistence with which groups are established to conserve it: they are tokens not to be ignored that the associative process is moving toward a social end, as witness the trade union. The process by which the law grows is above all a social process (pp. 102 ff.).

Judge Cardozo’s book will prove useful to students of philosophy not only because of the light which it sheds upon the meaning of the law, but because of its value as a study of the problem of method. Indeed, one might call it an Erkenntinistheorie of jurisprudence. And after all, the mind which thinks in the field of the law is the same

mind that thinks everywhere, and, nota bene, is guilty of the same

fallacies everywhere. FRANK THILLY. CORNELL UNIVERSITY.

The Good Will: a study in the Coherence Theory of Goodness. By H. J. Paton, Fellow of the Queen’s College, Oxford. London: George Allen and Unwin Ltd. New York: The Macmillan Company, 1927. Pp. 448.

The appearance of this important book in the field of Ethics is a tribute to the vitality of the Oxford Idealist tradition of Green, Caird and Bradley. The lines of emphasis may have altered with the lapse of years and new inspiration been drawn from such diverse thinkers as B. Croce and S. Alexander. But Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, are still the spiritual masters recognised. Mr. (now Professor) Paton makes no claim in this volume to cover the whole field of Moral Philosophy. His concern is with the chief problem of Ethics, the meaning of moral goodness, and his book a continuous argument intended to establish the theory that it is essentially relative to and constituted by coherence of willing. The skill and perseverance with which a theory, unpromising in its abstract formulation, is gradually built up into a structure which sheds a real light on our ordinary

moral experience exacts the reader’s admiration.

Of the five books into which the work is divided, the first is pre- liminary and the other four a continuous argument with its plan of exposition dictated by the under-lying metaphysical character of the theory itself. It reaches its climax in Book IV but the formulation is not complete until the concluding chapter of the last book. It

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would, perhaps, be ungracious, in view of the author's deliberate provision for the general cultured reader, to wish that the book had been shorter; the very wealth and richness of detail, the range of aspects from which the central principle has been illustrated, and the very gradualness of the approach, tend a little through repetition to blur the clear and consistent outline of the whole. As it is, Professor Paton is to be congratulated on a work which endeavors and succeeds, in spite of the difficulty of its underlying conceptions, in remaining truly ‘dialectical’ and pleasingly free from unnecessary jargon.

The general thesis can be stated in the author’s words (p. 20): “(The] theory has two main sides, indicated by the title and the sub- title respectively. The first is that goodness has its roots in the spiritual activity called willing; that it belongs to things, not in them- selves, but as objects of some kind of willing; and that the appre- hension of goodness is not merely an intellectual matter, but demands for its possibility the presence of a particular kind of will. The second is that goodness belongs to the coherent will; that different kinds of goodness, whether in actions or in things, are due to the different kinds of coherence in the will which wills them; and that moral goodness in particular belongs to a will which is coherent as a member of an all-inclusive society of coherent wills.”

At first sight the view resembles that of Alexander. But when developed along the lines of Idealist logic, and when ‘will’ is under- stood in the light of a very different view of the self, its complexion is entirely altered. The precise meaning of ‘coherence’ is left for sub- sequent determination; but it is here termed ‘concrete’ and ‘internal’ and contrasted with ‘mere formal consistency’ or ‘an external relation between independently existing realities’ (p. 28).

The four chapters of Book I are all preliminary. Chapter II is an admirable criticism of Mr. G. E. Moore’s attempt in Principia Ethica It is maintained

‘‘to secure a strangle hold upon all idealist ethics.’ that Moore’s arguments depend upon a view of definition to which he himself fails to adhere consistently, and a logic of identity which need not be accepted; furthermore that he has missed the point of the analogy between truth and goodness. (Acceptance of Mr. Paton’s conclusion, however, cuts both ways. For if there are objections to the coherence view of truth, which he accepts, a theory which derives moral value from coherence of willing would seem to stand in similar case.) The conception of the self developed in chapter III is funda- mental for the subsequent course of the argument. Following the lines of the Italian idealists, it is interpreted as a spiritual activity, 6

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“self-transcendent and self-mediating,’’ with unity through time (p. 60). Within this unitary activity are the lesser activities of knowing, feeling and willing. As he says later “the self or spirit is a process or, better, an activity. It is not something which is, but something which becomes. It is not something given, but something which makes itself and is its own making. . . . It is in activity alone that the self is and enjoys its being’"’ (p. 108). The parts of every activity are determined by their place in the whole and “the whole is present in the part” (p. 61, etc.).

Interpretation of the self’s identity through the category of sub- stance is deprecated and psychological terms connoting éfe:s such as ‘character,’ ‘disposition,’ ‘instinct,’ are dismissed as abstract terms for recurrent features of mental activity and as mythological if re- garded as entities. An acute discussion of the two main types of self- knowledge is followed in chapter IV by an account of the general nature of the world within which spiritual activity emerges. Books II, III, IV contain the successive stages of the argument which proceeds from the relatively abstract to the fully concrete. The assumption is made that non-moral uses of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not unrelated to the strictly moral use, and that an understanding of their usage at different ‘levels’ of willing, where the relativity to human will and purpose is most obvious, will shed light on the goodness of the good man and vindicate here too the relation to will. Following Croce the term ‘economic good’ is employed to connote a good which is non-moral but yet a ‘moment’ in true moral good. In each book a psychological analysis of the appropriate level of willing precedes an ethical discussion of the correlative good. ‘Will’ is taken in a broad sense covering all phases of our conative activity, impulse, desire and volition proper: the element of decision or choice is tacitly neglected as not of ethical relevance.

Book II (“The Will as Immediate"’) examines momentary impulse, the most elementary type of will, and shows that even at this level we have an activity which is not merely immediate but includes inter- nal diversity and involves rejection of other actual impulses. Chapter VI discusses the ‘immediate good’ and finds room for an acute dis- cussion of Hedonism and the three main forms of Intuitionism.

Book III (‘The Will as Individual’’) considers will as the response of an individual to a wider situation, abstraction being made from all social relationships. Such a wider volition is termed a “policy of action”’ which is willed implicitly as a whole in willing the momentary actions composing it. Similarly an individual's policy of life as a

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whole determines the character of all lesser policies within it. When the wider policy is overcome by the impulse of the moment as in the case of a bibulous burglar, the incoherence gives rise to non-moral ‘evil.’ Chapters VIII and IX discuss the individual good at this abstract level. Three kinds of goodness are considered but the proper goodness of the policy is shown to lie in its ‘coherence.’ Coherence is very liberally interpreted to include not only consistency in time but spontaneity to the changing needs of the situation.

With Book IV (‘The Social Will’’) we enter the arena of moral action proper. Moral goodness springs from the coherence of an individual's will with the wills of others in a social whole where each, in willing his contribution to the common good, consciously wills the whole of which it is a part, and ‘enjoys’ the codperating activities of the rest. Two chapters (X and X1I) analyse the psychological implica- tions of such social codperation in the various social institutions with special attention to the character of the State as the ‘society of societies.’ Chapter XII discusses the goodness of the man who thus coéperates loyally with the societies to which he belongs. He exhibits genuine, though not perfect, goodness.

The four chapters of Book V (‘The Will as Moral’’) complete the account and draw out the various implications for ethical theory. The concepts of duty, right and virtue are discussed in relation to good (Chapter XIII). There follows a discussion of the significance of moral judgments for action, and the relation of those of the philos- opher to those of the ordinary man (Chapter XIV). Chapter XV shows how self-sacrifice is capable on this theory of rational justi- fication. The last chapter (“The Saint and the Divine Society”) deals with the man who is better than his society, in whom the hope of future moral progress lies. It is seen that the coherent whole of which the good man is a member cannot be identified with any actually existing society of men however inclusive. We are driven to conceive of it as that completely coherent whole of willing which the moral will is always striving to attain and which, if more than an ideal, is realised in a Divine Will, immanent in men, with which their wills strive to harmonize. A brief consideration of the mutual relations of morality and religion and of the features of the ‘saintly’ life concludes a most suggestive chapter.

Despite the admirable skill and convincingness which the author has displayed in the detailed working out of his theory there are legitimate grounds for hesitation before we can accept it as an adequate account of moral experience. Criticism must be brief and dogmatic.

80 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

“self-transcendent and self-mediating,’’ with unity through time (p. 60). Within this unitary activity are the lesser activities of knowing, feeling and willing. As he says later ‘“‘the self or spirit is a process or, better, an activity. It is not something which is, but something which becomes. It is not something given, but something which makes itself and is its own making. . . . It is in activity alone that the seif is and enjoys its being" (p. 108). The parts of every activity are determined by their place in the whole and “‘the whole is present in the part” (p. 61, etc.).

Interpretation of the self’s identity through the category of sub- stance is deprecated and psychological terms connoting é£es such as ‘character,’ ‘disposition,’ ‘instinct,’ are dismissed as abstract terms for recurrent features of mental activity and as mythological if re- garded as entities. An acute discussion of the two main types of self- knowledge is followed in chapter IV by an account of the general nature of the world within which spiritual activity emerges. Books II, III, IV contain the successive stages of the argument which proceeds from the relatively abstract to the fully concrete. The assumption is made that non-moral uses of ‘good’ and ‘evil’ are not unrelated to the strictly moral use, and that an understanding of their usage at different ‘levels’ of willing, where the relativity to human will and purpose is most obvious, will shed light on the goodness of the good man and vindicate here too the relation to will. Following Croce the term ‘economic good’ is employed to connote a good which is non-moral but yet a ‘moment’ in true moral good. In each book a psychological analysis of the appropriate level of willing precedes an ethical discussion of the correlative good. ‘Will’ is taken in a broad sense covering all phases of our conative activity, impulse, desire and volition proper: the element of decision or choice is tacitly neglected as not of ethical relevance.

Book II (‘The Will as Immediate’’) examines momentary impulse, the most elementary type of will, and shows that even at this level we have an activity which is not merely immediate but includes inter- nal diversity and involves rejection of other actual impulses. Chapter VI discusses the ‘immediate good’ and finds room for an acute dis- cussion of Hedonism and the three main forms of Intuitionism.

Book III (“The Will as Individual’’) considers will as the response of an individual to a wider situation, abstraction being made from all social relationships. Such a wider volition is termed a “policy of action” which is willed implicitly as a whole in willing the momentary

actions composing it. Similarly an individual's policy of life as a

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 8I

whole determines the character of all lesser policies within it. When the wider policy is overcome by the impulse of the moment as in the case of a bibulous burglar, the incoherence gives rise to non-moral ‘evil.’ Chapters VIII and IX discuss the individual good at this abstract level. Three kinds of goodness are considered but the proper goodness of the policy is shown to lie in its ‘coherence.’ Coherence is very liberally interpreted to include not only consistency in time but spontaneity to the changing needs of the situation.

With Book IV (‘The Social Will’’) we enter the arena of moral action proper. Moral goodness springs from the coherence of an individual's will with the wills of others in a social whole where each, in willing his contribution to the common good, consciously wills the whole of which it is a part, and ‘enjoys’ the codperating activities of the rest. Two chapters (X and XI) analyse the psychological implica- tions of such social codperation in the various social institutions with special attention to the character of the State as the ‘society of societies.’ Chapter XII discusses the goodness of the man who thus coéperates loyally with the societies to which he belongs. He exhibits genuine, though not perfect, goodness.

The four chapters of Book V (‘The Will as Moral’’) complete the account and draw out the various implications for ethical theory. The concepts of duty, right and virtue are discussed in relation to good (Chapter XIII). There follows a discussion of the significance of moral judgments for action, and the relation of those of the philos- opher to those of the ordinary man (Chapter XIV). Chapter XV shows how self-sacrifice is capable on this theory of rational justi- fication. The last chapter (“The Saint and the Divine Society’’) deals with the man who is better than his society, in whom the hope of future moral progress lies. It is seen that the coherent whole of which the good man is a member cannot be identified with any actually existing society of men however inclusive. We are driven to conceive of it as that completely coherent whole of willing which the moral will is always striving to attain and which, if more than an ideal, is realised in a Divine Will, immanent in men, with which their wills strive to harmonize. A brief consideration of the mutual relations of morality and religion and of the features of the ‘saintly’ life concludes a most suggestive chapter.

Despite the admirable skill and convincingness which the author has displayed in the detailed working out of his theory there are legitimate grounds for hesitation before we can accept it as an adequate

account of moral experience. Criticism must be brief and dogmatic.

82 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

The main assumption of the argument that ‘economic’ good offers a clue to the nature of ‘moral’ good is open to grave question. If we doubt it, we have Kant on our side, though the consensus of Greek ethical opinion is against us. It seems prima facie strange that the concept of utility should illustrate the absoluteness of the moral claim. Equally questionable (though necessary on his theory) is the primacy accorded by Mr. Paton to volition over moral judgment in moral action. It is partly justified as a protest against over-intel- lectualised theories of Ethics which ignore the part played by feeling and will in moral approval. But the pendulum swings too far in the other direction if it is implied that reflective moral judgments perform as a rule in developed moral action only a critical and ‘ owl-of- Minerva-ish’ function.

But these issues are subordinate to the two main contentions which Mr. Paton offers for our acceptance: (a) that morality is essentially social in character; and (b) that coherence of willing adequately defined constitutes the sole standard, and indeed the very meaning of goodness. The necessity of (a) to a theory which maintains (5) is obvious; for if goodness is created by a kind of willing, the appeal to a wider whole than an individual policy of life is essential if objectivity is to be secured. The argument offered in support of the first contention that “the willing of ourselves and of other men may be in the same sort of relation as the relation between our own willings at different times’’ (p. 284) is plausible and the analogy between the individual life and society suggestive, as Plato found. But the common assump- tion of Idealist logic that the wider whole always exhibits a higher type of unity and coherence than that of any of the individuals which go to constitute it seems in this case to be disproved by a plain appeal to experience. The contrary assumption of good as explicable from a personal rather than from a social standpoint does not necessarily ignore the claims of society to bulk largest in a good man’s life, or ignore man’s fundamentally social nature. And it leaves room for the so-called ‘self-regarding’ virtues which constitute man’s duty to himself and stand in no direct relation to the good of society.

With the second contention we arrive at the heart and crux of the theory. Itis difficult to define ‘coherence’ in the exact sense intended, bound up as it is with the character of the willing activity. But after all provisos and qualifications, can it ever suffice as an adequate criterion of goodness? Coherence may be the flower and bloom of the perfectly good life, a consequence rather than a cause, but is degree of

coherence at each stage a safe indication of the stage of development

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 83

reached? Mr. Paton admits (p. 407) that “‘ perhaps the highest kind of human goodness is inseparable from a kind of wildness’’ and not merely the exemplification of a “wooden and self-conscious con-

’

sistency.”’ Itis only by a wide extension of the term that ‘coherence’ can be made to cover the element of spontaneity. It may be that the claims of the moral life demand of some a certain straitening and we read of those who “enter into life halt and maimed.’’ The Greek ideal of the Bios réXevos may not do full justice to the moral struggle.

Again it may be granted that the definition of ‘coherence’ excludes the possibility of a coherently bad society except on a restricted scale. But does it exclude a coherent society of lotus-eaters such as Mr. Paton envisages (p. 377)? He consistently allows them moral good- ness, but a “goodness low in the scale’’ as compared with a highly cultured society. But whence this ground of discrimination if coher- ence be the only test? The necessity of supplementing it by another standard is suggested also by the frequent use of the terms ‘truer’ or ‘higher’ self.

And this leads to the final point. The analogy of truth and good- ness forces us to raise the wider question of the relation of the self’s activities to the values which it apprehends. Is the value created by the activity or does any attempt to ascribe the initiative in this matter to the activity rather than to the objective side of the relation- ship introduce an ineradicable subjectivism into one’s theory either of truth or of goodness? One may agree with Mr. Paton that “few things seem to be more certain than that the understanding of good- ness is bound up with the understanding of human life’’ (p. 56). Moral goodness is meaningless unless realised in the voluntary actions of men. But is it not the formal ideal embodied in the concrete context of the will’s satisfactions which confers value on the life that intuitively apprehends and consciously strives to realise it?

But it is not fitting that the review of a book like the present should end on a note of criticism. Any theory which undertakes to define the moral ideal has its own difficulties to face, and in this case the chief difficulties are bound up with a type of Idealism which leads Mr. Paton in devotion to the logic of the whole to transcend the individual self in search of a wider whole by which to determine the meaning of its life. Yet he has a clear eye for the concrete realities of the moral life, and excels in the catholicity of his appreciation of these facts and in the sincerity of his moral outlook. His style main- tains a quiet dignity and non-controversial tone appropriate to high and dispassionate argument. In exemplification of a neatness of

84 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

expression and forcefulness of metaphor one is tempted to quote in conclusion two samples:

“The instincts are not solid little bits, which we fit into a whole like a picture puzzle. Rather they are the paints with which we have to paint our picture of life’ (p. 177).

“Duty itself is only a shadow, the shadow that is cast by the intrusion of our passions between us and the light of goodness. But there are some men who, like the Spartans, seem to fight better in the shade” (p. 329). Atex. J. D. Porteous.

SmitH COLLEGE.

Die Idee der Toleranz im England der Grossen Revolution. By MICHAEL

FrREUND. Halle, Max Niemeyer, 1927.—pp. 293.

That gem so precious to civilisation which Dr. Freund here exhibits, the idea of tolerance, came as no meteoric gift to earth, but was mined out of the historical rough, winning its faceted form through the grinding incident to human conflicts, its polish and ideal significance from interested reflection. The contributions to the idea of tolerance made by individuals who took mental (and often physical) part in the religious, political and social struggles of Stuart England are here considered.

The idea of tolerance may appear timeless (an idea of tolerance may be characteristic equally of ancient Buddhist and seventeenth- century Baptist) but the investigator discovers the idea ever interlaced with time, place and circumstance; the idea may be considered simple, but the analyst reveals a mosaic complexity. It has sources which lie in heterogeneous experience, including purely ideological experience. Therefore, Dr. Freund would study the idea of tolerance in relation to the religious, political and social thought of the time, for “jeder Toleranzgedanke ist ... nicht eine einfache Idee, sondern eine Vielheit von Vorstellungen.”” But of ideas only will he treat. Of an earlier day, he mentions Sir Thomas More’s theoretical tolerance; the intolerant acts of More as Chancellor of England receive here no relation.

The fundamental partition of the work in two parts devoted to the thinkers who derived respectively from Renaissance and Reformation cultures is justified by the author in this suggestive thesis: the whole tolerance movement is an aspect of the great culture-conflict of Renaissance and Reformation, and is most clearly portrayed through grouping contributory ideas according to intellectual inheritance; the overlapping of ideas, their interplay and conflicts will be apparent. Milton, undeniably, was heir to both strains.

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 85

Whether of Renaissance or Reformation inclination, every thinker on tolerance inevitably concerned himself with certain concrete questions implying basic theories: he asked, and we are led to inquire, ‘What justifies tolerance, what sanctions intolerance, and what is to limit each? What are the sanctions and functions of Church, State, Society, how ordered and related? What are the fundamental religious truths, and how are they known? Is truth progressively discoverable?’"” The advocate or opponent of freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of conscience, thus finally drew upon, or was led to, a theory of knowledge.

The Renaissance thinkers tended to a scepticism which severely limited the stock of biblically-revealed truth, and progressively enlarged the harvest of knowledge gleaned by man’s ‘natural reason.’ They were historically-minded, and history reported discovery, engendered optimism, argued for freedom of the will, spurred research. To their minds, the state, society, the form of the church, were ever undergoing change at the instance of that vehicle of progressive divine revelation, man’s natural reason. Emancipated from absolute re- ligious control were the state and all social institutions. With what result for tolerance? Dr. Freund assists us to discriminate the possibilities of gain and loss:

(1) The monopolistic basis of intolerance was dissipated. The ‘one, universal Church’ ideal remained, but adopted the tolerant program of ‘Comprehension.’

(2) In so far as religion came to be regarded as a private concern, scepticism led to ideas of tolerance.

(3) Since truth was ever to be discovered, free investigation, untrammeled research were indispensable.

(4) Not as an inalienable right of man could freedom of conscience be regarded. History founded no rights on immutable decrees independent of time, place and circumstance.

(5) For purposes of order in the political and social world, the sovereign state must bound tolerance by external, positive law, at least until democracy is perfectly realised. (Some thinkers—e.g., Laud—justified civil intolerance with respect to questions of cult and form, because these were no longer considered within the sphere of religious belief.) é

Within the circles friendly to Renaissance culture, Dr. Freund finds the humanistic rationalism developing from More through Bacon, Hooker, and Laud not intellectually so impressive or influential as the Arminian trend dominant in Falkland, Chillingworth, Taylor,

86 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

Fuller, Hales, Stillingfleet, Clifford, Selden, Harrington. The ecclesi- astical tendency in both groups was toward a tolerant ‘Comprehen- sion’ within a State Church. So Hooker, surely the most important predecessor of the seventeenth-century thinkers, termed perse- cution an absurdity, but would tolerate none but a comprehensive Established (Anglican) Church. So Chillingworth, whose tolerance, and whose optimism as to knowledge of truth were rooted confidently in reason (which is “a public and certain thing and exposed to all men’s trial and examination’’), would accommodate all men in a diffuse accumulation of believers—the Church—for omnes christiani sumus. This comprehensive church might be, for Jeremy Taylor, a definite part of the established public order. Those threatening that public order, so decided Taylor, were not to be tolerated. And uncertainty of

“e

yet, due to the “variety of understandings” and the things,’’ Taylor regarded persecution as fruitless. It was, we notice here, the strong desire to endow the sovereign state with unlimited power which effectively limited tolerance. Of individuals Arminian thought was exceedingly tolerant—their persecution Clifford termed as efficacious as amputation for gout!; what it held suspect was the religious institution outside the State Church, because it would spring the national unity. So it should be the state’s business, said Matthew Hale, to decide the form of church and cult; while for John Selden there could be no distinction of good or bad outside the positive decrees of the authoritative state, and no abstract right of freedom of conscience. Yet John Selden thought it senseless to talk of heresy and advocated the practical tolerance of Jews and Catholics. In order to realize complete tolerance Arminian thought was forced to the conclusion of Harrington that it is possible only in a perfect democracy, ‘“‘a commonwealth being nothing else but the national conscience.”

The Renaissance lacked in zeal; the Reformation was Messianic, elemental, possessing a positive momentum within whose tidal flow the idea of tolerance was an accidental or incidental current. But that current shaped intellectual promontories in the world of ideas. Its principles of free biblical interpretation, the priesthood of all believers, the separation of secular and religious spheres, predestina- tion, resulted in special and pertinent contributions to the idea of tolerance:

(1) ‘Truth’ emerged from strife; error was the necessary foil of truth; tolerance allowed that brotherly conflict which alone assured the happy, spiritual springtime. Only earnest, untrammelled research

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 87

amid the relativity and variety of things, so history showed, revealed truth.

(2) Every believer being a priest, monopoly was intolerable. The principle of ecclesiastical organization must be the independent gathering of the like-minded.

(3) Church, state, society being separate, distinct orders, the state’s jurisdiction was purely secular. Reason (belonging to the natural order) bounded its activity; conscience (of the spiritual order) dictated to it. Religiously, men were subjects of God alone.

(4) Intolerance must appear as an absurdity to adherents of the doctrine of Predestination.

(5) Whatever was fundamentally intolerant and destructive of religion and the state, such as Catholicism and open superstition, must not be tolerated. (Corporal punishment was usually thought unjustifiable, however, for religious offences; excommunication was the ultimate penalty.)

If these were fundamentals of Reformation thought, the modifica- tions and additions of sectarians were naturally many among Inde- pendents, Baptists, Levellers, etc. Most Independents thought God particularly honored in the very variety of sectarian congregations. An anonymous tract of 1645 carried relativity to the point of explain- ing man’s cultural and religious life by his economic situation. John Milton, sensitive to both Renaissance and Reformation, feared not only prelacy but the aristocracy of the learned, and called for the cherishing of the “ homespun verities’’; it was the necessity and law of conscience, above all, which secularised social life and negatived the doctrine of state-omnipotence. Truth is wrought out of strife, never living amid cloistered conformities, and a heretic pari passu one who accepts belief on authority! Milton was almost alone in fighting for freedom of conscience as a general right of mankind, but his hatred of Roman prelacy led him to the qualification: “‘ We have no warrant to regard conscience which is not grounded on Scripture.” It was John Goodwin who dispensed with this limit, to advocate full liberty of conscience for Papists, Jews, Turks. The Baptists believed religion a matter of free decision; they were anti-traditional, often uncultivated and of missionary conviction. Among them Roger Williams was the most notable exponent of tolerance; engaged in lively controversy with John Cotton (who advocated Comprehension, intolerance in fundamentals and even state execution of heretics), he adduced arguments for regarding church and state as sovereign and sharply separated worlds, pronounced the people the “civil magistrate,”

88 THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. [Vor. XXXVIII.

declared the religious constitution entirely voluntary, and termed persecution a “‘ bodykilling, soulkilling, statekilling doctrine” leading inevitably to religious, nay to world war. His difficulty in tolerating Catholics lay in their opposition to state-sovereignty, for “‘ All perse- cutors hold the pope’s traitorous doctrine of deposing heretical princes”; hence, he would demand of them a special oath of civil allegiance. Williams’ tolerance found other interesting bases: the uncertainty of human knowledge (one may be persecuting the Lord in persecuting a ‘heretic’), his Calvinistic belief in election (‘‘Who can pluck these sheep, the elect out of his hand?’’) and its consequent egoism caring nought for those in the “lamentable shipwreck of mankind”’ outside the congregation, whom Roman Catholics, believing in free will, would attempt to save through compulsion. The attain- ment of genuine political democracy, which Milton and Williams ap- prehended as an ultimate necessity to complete religious tolerance, was a definite program of the Levellers; while as an utmost guarantee of religious freedom they would limit the sovereignty of the democratic state through recognition of the inalienable rights of the people, and firstly in “‘ matters of religion and the ways of God’s worship (which) are not at all entrusted by us to any human power. “4

That Dr. Freund has not exhausted all the pertinent possibilities of his fertile subject nor pursued all their philosophic implications is not surprising. There is much enlightening literature on the involved question of the relationship of church and state in Stuart England which he has not utilised; there is a cue in John Selden’s assertion— that men draw from the reservoir of ideas what suits their interests and pleasure, discovering Biblical texts and interpretations to hearts’ desire—which would fruitfully recompense his consideration. If Hooker considered biblical revelation no more divine than the Law of Nature, of Society, of the State, we remember that he could find no warrant for episcopacy in the Bible! But those who realize the fundamental importance of the idea of tolerance for the development and the richness of modern culture will thank Dr. Freund for relating the idea to life, place, time, and circumstance, for exhibiting its mani- fold bases and for suggesting philosophic implications: for the demon- stration, indeed, that this is stuff of the mind’s life and not the

“Coffined thoughts of coffined men.” ERNEST W. NELSON.

DuKE UNIVERSITY.

No. 1.] REVIEWS OF BOOKS. 89

Research in the Humanistic and Social Sciences. Report of a Survey Conducted for the American Council of Learned Societies. By FREDERICK AusTIN OGG. New York, The Century Co., 1928.—pp. viii, 454.

We seem to be experiencing an epidemic of research into research. Having for a generation spun the fine web of ‘system,’ the social scientists—especially the sociologists—are now bent on escape from the snug cocoon of subjectivity into the free air of scientific method. For thirty years Albion W. Small filled the pages of the American Journal of Sociology with essays on ‘methodology,’ which nobody read. Then suddenly everyone began to talk scientific objectivity, pure science, correlation coefficients, ratio charts, and ‘projects.’ To one whose academic memory extends back a quarter century or so, and who can compare the present commotion of interest with the relatively placid atmosphere of pre-war decades, the change in the meantime looks like an intellectual revolution. The man who got his graduate training twenty-five or thirty years ago must sometimes look with envy upon the present generation of graduate students, so much greater are the resources, in material equipment, libraries, fellowships, grants-in-aid, and above all research spirit, at their disposal. Twenty years ago Professor Giddings said it was time for social scientists to stop writing essays and get busy with tables of logarithms. Younger scholars wearied of ‘systems’ and thin lines of ‘ principles’ excogitated far from any supporting base of facts. They asserted that a long era of monographic study would be necessary as a preliminary to any real, social science.

The monographs have been coming, in quantity and in confusion. How much nearer we are to a true, scientific approach to the study of human affairs is perhaps open to question. That the question is being raised is evidenced by the flood of books—individual productions and sympcsiums—on ‘methods’ and ‘relations’ which has been pouring from the eager presses. The frequency of such books, and the superficiality of some of the contributions, suggest a doubt. Are our social scientists temporarily marking time? Are they recoiling from the arduous task of objective, constructive research of the type demanded by the modern cry for ‘scientific’ and ‘quantitative’ method? Or are they merely pausing to gird their loins, to count their forces, and to counsel on tactics for a concerted frontal attack over the broken and difficult terrain which they know, better than any preceding generation, lies before them?