IX.

CONCLUSION.

The contrast between Determinism and Indeterminism is old, yet Mr. Peirce has worked out quite a new aspect of Indeterminism and places it upon a basis that appears to be a more solid foundation than it ever before possessed. At the same time he succeeds in making some of its consequences so plausible, that in this new garb it will appeal more strongly than before to scientifically trained minds. With all deference to the logical acuteness of Mr. Peirce and with all admiration for the originality and depth of his thought, we cannot, however, accede to the new philosophy which he proposes.

Mr. Peirce’s propositions go to the core of all problems, they upset everything that has heretofore been considered as firm ground, they question the most fundamental concepts of the world-conception upon which all scientific reasoning and the methods of the positive philosophy rest. Thus they set us a-thinking and will help us to attain greater clearness on points which are to all of us of greater concern than may at first sight appear. For the fundamental problems of philosophy have a deep practical importance. Their importance is less noticeable, less obvious, but at the same time more sweeping the more fundamental they are.

Let us here in concluding this article consider only one, but the most striking one, of the consequences to which both views lead.

Indeterminism leads to a conception of God which although we may call it “mind” and place it at the beginning of the world, is pure chance or the indeterminateness of an arbitrary sporting. Determinism on the other hand leads to a recognition of God as that something in nature that is as it is, that has been and will be. Science, whose method of cognising the truth is and can only be to know in parts, attempts to describe the

## partial qualities of this something in natural laws.

It is of great consequence in practical life whether God is what the name Jahveh intends to convey, eternal and unalterable being, immutable sameness in the perpetual flux, irrefragable law in the changes of evolution, or whether it is the Τυχή of the pagans, i. e. indeterminable and absolute chance, unaccountable, irregular, capricious, and uncertain.

The God-idea is the basis of ethics. It matters little whether we use or avoid the name God, for the atheist has also a God-idea in his conception of that existence in which he lives and moves and has his being. This God-idea is always the ground from which we derive our rules of conduct; and whenever we change, not our terminology but our idea of God, we shall as a matter of consistency have to change our views of ethics also.

EDITOR.

FOOTNOTES:

[73] Italics are ours.

[74] See _Fundamental Problems_, p. 55.

[75] This is the position of the Societies for Ethical Culture which are not confessedly but practically agnostics. Professor Adler’s position is characterised in _The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 4, p. 567, 599, and _The Open Court_ Nos. 225 and 234. Mr. Salter bases ethics upon “the immovable rock of conscience.” (See his _Ethical Religion_, p. 295.)

[76] Ernst Schroeder in his great work _Vorlesungen über die Algebra der Logik_ adopts in the main the results of Peirce. A sketch of Mr. Peirce’s line of thought, (his _Gedankengang_, as Schroeder calls it,) is found in the _Einleitung_, pp. 107-118.

[77] I laid down my views on the subject in a short monograph of only 82 pages, entitled _Ursache, Grund und Zweck, eine philosophische Abhandlung zur Klärung der Begriffe_ (Dresden: R. von Grumbkow, Hof. Verlag, 1883). In all main points I maintain the same standpoint still. See also _Fundamental Problems_, the chapter on Causality, pp. 79-91 and 96-109.

Since the publication of my German pamphlet my confidence that we can, (not only in the special sciences such as chemistry, mineralogy, botany, etc., but also in philosophy) arrive at truth, has rather been confirmed than shaken. We can create a common ground on which all philosophers agree, as much as mathematicians agree concerning the Pythagorean theorem. But in order to achieve this ideal, philosophers must abandon all attempts at originality. The hankering after originality is an inherited evil in the family of philosophers. The first philosophers were poets, priests, and prophets; later on in the natural evolution of human culture, a differentiation of their combined functions took place. Originality is a virtue in the poet but a vice in his brother, the philosopher. The philosopher’s ideal must be to free himself of all individualism, subjectivity, and original conceptions; he must become strictly objective. He must renounce his personal likes and dislikes, and make his soul a mirror of nature, faithfully and correctly to represent the facts and nothing but the facts. This is the ethics of philosophical inquiry, and the philosophy that takes its stand on this principle we call positivism.

Almost all divergencies of importance in the different philosophical systems can be traced to different conceptions or rather misconceptions of causation.

This last century since Kant has been the most fertile age of original world-theories, all different in style and manner of construction, but all alike in so far as the author of each system had strained his utmost efforts to be original. Thus all these world-theories were so many beautiful poems on ontology, they were so many grand air-castles produced by the magic wand of a fairy-tale causation. The philosopher’s aspiration must not be to present original ideas but to reach that one solution which any other unbiassed thinker must find, to express that truth which in the end will have to be recognised universally, to formulate facts in objective exactness. The degree of originality in philosophic thought marks the degree of aberration from the common aim of the one sole solution, and the greatest source of original ideas is the confusion of cause and reason, of _Ursache_ and _Grund_, of event and law, of fact and truth.

[78] I expect to discuss the problems of sameness, of chance, of mechanicalism, and the freedom of will in the next number of _The Monist_ under the caption _The Doctrine of Necessity: Its Basis and its Scope_.

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