VI.

WORLD-CONSTRUCTIONS.

There are two methods of philosophising, one starts with ideas which are supposed not to need any explanation, the other starts from facts and uses facts as data. The former is the method of the constructionist or ontologist, the latter that of the positivist. The constructionist attempts to beget a world-theory in the same way that God was supposed to have created the world; he attempts to bring it into being either out of a real nothing or out of something like nothing. He constructs a world-theory out of the self-evident, out of the absolute, out of the indubitable, or out of that the contrary of which is inconceivable. The positivist, however, employs facts as the given material, which he works out into a consistent and systematic whole. The former view is synthetic and constructive, the latter is analytic and descriptive. The former view is the method of Hegel, Oken, and also of Mr. Spencer, the latter is the method of all scientists and the ideal of the positive philosophy.

Mr. Peirce although very positivistic in his logic of science, must in philosophy still be counted among the constructionists.

Chance is to Mr. Peirce as much absolute as was to Hegel the idea of “abstract being,” which as such, Hegel said, is equivalent to “non-being.” Non-being need not be accounted for. So Hegel starts with this idea, and finding that “becoming” is the oscillation between being and non-being launches his abstract thought upon the terra firma of reality.

In the same way and with similar ingenious ingenuity Oken starts the world with zero. Zero or non-being need not be accounted for. Its existence calls for no particular reasons. What is zero? We can conceive it as “0 = 1 - 1.” Thus we have “+1” and “-1,” two units. The whole world, according to Oken, is only a disintegration of Nothing, an equation of enormous complexity but always equal to zero. And that explains the world!

Mr. Spencer, adopts “the principle of setting out with propositions of which the negations are unconceivable,” without being aware that any inveterate belief or prejudice can be defended from that standpoint. The principle is purely subjective. It does not admit of any objective verification and limits knowledge to individual conception. If Mr. Spencer’s principle were admissible, we could not refute the adversaries of the Copernican system, when they declare that the rotation of the earth up on which we stand is inconceivable. The maxim that that proposition is most certain the negation of which is inconceivable might after all, and it actually did very often, come into conflict with facts. Many propositions are now confidently accepted which were formerly declared to be positively inconceivable.

Mr. Peirce, I say, starts the world with an abstract idea of a something of which he assumes we need not give any account, as did the great ontologists of former times. He constructs, agreeably to his reason, a theory of the way in which the world might have originated, and thus he falls into the mistake criticised by himself as the _a priori_ method. Yet the weakest point of Mr. Peirce’s system is that his “absolute chance” begets order; irregularity becomes law by practice, as if by a sufficiently prolonged shaking the dice would by and by acquire the habit of turning up the same faces each time.

The present world-conception of the scientist regards natural laws as eternal. The order that prevails in these laws constitutes the principle of evolution and changes the chaos of a nebula into a well-arranged planetary system. Thus the original chaos is properly speaking no chaos. It is in all its parts regulated by law and only appears chaotic in comparison with more advanced stages of evolution.

Desirous to account for the regularities of nature Mr. Peirce proposes the idea that nature in the beginning was a real, true chaos, without order, without laws, the single actions of reality taking place irregularly and in a sportive manner. Absolute chance prevailed. Everything was undetermined, exactly as much so as a man is undetermined in his action before his belief is settled. Yet a man, by and by, forms a belief and acts accordingly, not once or twice, but often, until a habit is formed. Thus Mr. Peirce assumes, Nature’s actions are first undetermined, they may be of this kind or of another kind. The same

## particle of reality may under the same conditions act in different ways,

yet it acts somehow; it acts again, and repeats a certain kind of action more frequently than others, thus forming habits. Laws according to Mr. Peirce are the habits acquired by nature.

The proposition of Mr. Peirce’s logic of science points out another method of constructing a world-conception. The recognition of reality in the sense as he conceives it, admonishes us that our world-conception should be a picturing, a mirroring, an imitation of the objective world of facts. It should not be the architecture of a theory, but first an analysis and then a reconstruction of experience; it should be a description of facts, methodically arranged.