II.
GERMANY.
Productions of a literary-historical character are under certain circumstances also entitled to mention in a philosophical magazine, especially if they present to us the intellectual development and physiognomy of an individual or of a community in a scientific manner, as is done in the _Essays_ of KARL WEIGAND which have just been published by Merhoff, of Munich. Of the larger essays contained in this book we will especially mention those on Voltaire, Rousseau, Baudelaire, and Taine, to which in psychological respects a high value is to be accorded, and which although not exactly easy are nevertheless pleasant reading.
Viewed from this standpoint the _History of North American Literature_ by KARL KNORTZ (Berlin, 1891, Lustenöder) hardly admits of consideration; not even Edgar Allen Poe, who in the psychological point of view is of unexceptionally great importance, is in any respect profoundly treated. The work is made up of a series of well written articles which first no doubt were published in newspapers and magazines for the public at large. We deem it proper, however, to mention the work in this place, because it contains a chapter on the philosophical literature of North America, in which, we must admit, philosophy does not appear to the best advantage. The representatives of philosophy in North America, the author says, are in the main doctors of divinity and securely installed university professors, and this department of study has therefore no dangerous connections; the gentlemen calmly wend their way along the ancient and well-trodden path of the aprioristic philosophers and proscribe without any ado all modern innovations, Darwinism in particular.
As they have not as yet consigned the belief in God and immortality and the freedom of the will to the lumber-room of traditional opinions, and as they are as a rule only superficially acquainted with the results of the exact sciences, despite the fact that many assure us of the contrary, they accordingly fancy that they are easily able to solve the imagined chief problem of philosophy, the reconciliation of religion and science.
This judgment may contain much that is true, but from the little that we personally know of things in North America, is to be decidedly restricted. Moreover, we by no means share the low opinion which the author entertains of all attempts to reconcile religion and science. Religion is a phenomenon of too great antiquity and its influence in the life of nations is too thoroughly established to entitle us, on the ground of science with which it is still involved in violent conflict, summarily to disregard it; and consequently every attempt at reconciliation is worthy of the best efforts of the noblest. It is of course a question whether we shall ever arrive at the point where we will completely understand _all_ religious things, but we certainly must with time arrive at a point where religion shall no longer contain inconsistencies, contain nothing, that is, of which the absurdities are patent.
There was indeed, in Germany also, a time when the belief was very widely spread that religion as compared with science might be ignored completely; it was the time when Ludwig Büchner and Karl Vogt were so much read, when the magazine _Gartenlaube_ counted its greatest number of readers. But this time is long since past, and just as since that time employment with philosophy, especially with ethics, has become more comprehensive, so also the interest in religio-philosophical questions, which aim at a reconcilement of the two hostile powers, has been considerably augmented. Aside from the German productions which have been written in a conciliatory tone, like the book, to give an example, of Moriz Carrière on Christianity and the Modern World Conception, foreign works of this same class have also been much read, particularly Drummond’s _Natural Law in the Spiritual World_, to which indeed in our judgment no particular value is attributable, as it does not help us to any real knowledge but contents itself with analogies which scientifically are absolutely worthless.
Recently the little treatise _Ernste Gedanken_ of the Saxon officer VON EGIDY (Leipsic, 1891, Wilh. Wigand) has been much talked about. The reformatory effect of this brochure has, indeed, hitherto been very slight and will hardly become more extensive in the future, but the response that it has met with in the widest circles of the German public, proves that many ardent friends of religion anxiously desire that the dogmatic shackles and integuments shall be stripped from the body of the Christian beliefs, and that it shall appear, in the clearest and purest light, that which it is, the religion of love.
Theological criticism has not taken an exactly favorable attitude towards the little book of Lieut. Egidy, and even the liberals, who pay the fullest credit to the good intentions of the author call attention to the fact that the greater part of what Egidy advances has been said before and said better, and that there is an almost absolute lack of positive proposals to be adopted. The Egidy movement will thus probably have, they conclude, no lasting effects.
We cannot indeed absolutely say that these critics are wrong, if we are at all conversant with the development of protestant theology. A very instructive and opportune work in this respect is a book of the well-known Berlin professor OTTO PFLEIDERER, who, as his religio-philosophical treatises evidence, himself belongs to the reconcilers of Christianity and the modern world-conceptions. In the year 1889, at the instigation of the editor of the Library of Philosophy issued by Swan, Sonnenschein, & Co. of London, he published in the English language a work on _The Development of Protestant Theology since Kant and in Great Britain since 1825_, and this same work has now just appeared in German (published by Mohr of Freiburg) in a somewhat more extended form. As its title proclaims, and as its belonging to the Library of Philosophy would signify, the work is chiefly concerned with the influence which philosophy has exercised on theological thought. To make this influence plain, the author presents at the start, in the form of an introduction, a concise but extremely lucid exposition of the philosophical doctrines that especially demand consideration in this direction. Of German philosophers, Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, and of English, Herbert Spencer are treated of at length.
In view of the great respect which Hegel still enjoys in America, it will perhaps interest many of the readers of _The Monist_ if I give here an utterance of Pfleiderer, which in the point of view of the history of religion is also deserving of consideration, at least on the part of those who are recognised adherents of evolutionism.
“No other branch of inquiry,” says Pfleiderer, “owes so much to Hegel as History; the arbitrary construction of details from the philosophical concept which had crept in by Hegel and his immediate followers, has of course been discarded by exact historical inquirers, but there has remained that profounder conception of historical life generally as a development of the common mind of all ages and nations, conformable to law, dominated by ideas, and aiming at necessary general purposes; there has remained that profounder insight into the intricate play of phenomena, into the kernel of things and men, into the dominating ideas that lie as guiding impulses at the foundation of even the apparent disharmony of individual passions; there has remained that unprepossessed understanding for the necessity of even the contrarieties and struggles, for the errors and passions of men, for conflict is the father of all things, as Hegel says with Heraclitus, and as it is only through the struggle of partial rights and one-sided truths that the whole truth of the idea can force its way into existence; there has remained finally that intelligent respect for the heroic figures of history in which the genius of a people and of an age have been incarnated, which as the instruments of a higher power have awakened the thought that slumbered in all souls, given it clear expression, and infused in it life by their mighty deeds. Neither a Leopold Ranke, nor a Thomas Carlyle, nor a Ferdinand Christian Bauer would be conceivable without Hegel’s philosophy of history.”
Pfleiderer expresses himself here very cautiously concerning Hegel, and in other passages his caution is extended further still. Nevertheless, it will seem to many as if that philosopher has been too highly estimated by Pfleiderer. Especially will the followers of Herbart be dissatisfied, who was involved in violent combat with Schelling and Hegel. It is not the place here to enter minutely into this subject; but it is to be mentioned that the name of Herbart does not occur once in this large book. Perhaps Pfleiderer is of Edward Zeller’s opinion who says in his “History of Modern Philosophy,” that the philosophy of Herbart has proved itself unfruitful. It must be confessed, indeed, that the philosophy of Hegel has proved itself for religious doctrine very fruitful; but whether we should be satisfied with its results is quite a different question. Be that however as it may; still, after Schoel has presented Herbart’s ideas concerning religion in a special work, since men like Drobisch, Thilo, and Strumpell have further elaborated these ideas; since particularly Ziller in his Ethics has also profoundly treated religious problems in the sense of Herbart, it is no longer allowable to omit the name of Herbart when we treat of the modern philosophy of religion.
In other respects also we are not always in full accord with the author. So, for example, in Hausrath’s _Neutestamentliche Zeitgeschichte_, a work to which we ourselves are very much indebted, the perfection of the form of the presentment is justly praised, as is also the merit of having inserted into the greater setting of universal history the development of early Christianity; but it is not mentioned that Hausrath has often allowed himself to be misguided into combinations whose flimsiness cannot escape the notice even of the lay student.
But these are only slight deficiencies of a work that is otherwise excellent and full of matter, closing with the words: “This much is certain, that the labors of the best and wisest of all the theologians of our century, who have here been passed in review before the eyes of the reader, however different the paths may be which individually they have entered upon, have yet been all directed to the one end that Christianity shall strip itself of its dogmatic coverings and fetters and evince its world-conquering power in the ethical idealism of a love that unites us with God and joins together the hands of humanity into the federation of brotherhood.”
If this aim were universal, that is if it were also recognised by the theologians, a not inconsiderable portion of the dispute between religion and science would be done away with, and the sole question would then turn on the contrariety of theological and philosophical ethics. But even respecting this point a settlement would be much sooner brought about, if those concerned would evince the same spirit of reconciliation as HANS GALLWITZ, city pastor of Sigmaringen, has recently done in his book _Das Problem der Ethik in der Gegenwart_ (Göttingen, 1891, Vandenhoeck and Ruprecht). The author, it is true, deals critically not only with the philosophical ethics of a Paulsen and a Wundt, but also with the theological ethics of a Hermann and a Kaftan; still the settlement of things with the philosophers forms the bulk of this rather extensive work, the contents of which we cannot of course give here. Gallwitz also speaks in considerable detail of Kant, whom he opposes in respect of the psychological questions here involved, wholly rejecting anything like a transcendental will. If we must agree with him in this respect, we can nevertheless not follow him in his assumption of a special ethical constitution of the soul.
In conclusion let me note the titles of two works to which I shall revert in a subsequent letter. On _The Psychology in Kant’s Ethics_ Dr. ALFRED HEGLER of Tübingen presents a meritorious and compendious treatise of 300 pages (Freiburg, 1891, Mohr), and Professor HOSTINSKY of Prague publishes an exposition and interpretation, based on the sources, of _Herbart’s Æsthetics_, in which, as is well known, ethics and æsthetics in the restricted sense are wholly severed from psychology.
CHR. UFER.
CRITICISMS AND DISCUSSIONS.
THOUGHT AND LANGUAGE.
_To the Editor of The Monist_:
SIR—I am glad to hear that Prof. Max Müller intends to answer our double-barrelled criticism of his article on the above subject. Meanwhile, however, I should like to say a few words with regard to the point which he selects for immediate response (see _The Monist_, Jan. 1892, p. 286). And my object in saying these few words is to remove from his mind the idea that with regard to the point in question I had the smallest intention of bringing against him “a serious charge of want of accuracy, unpardonable in a scholar.” On the contrary, as regards this point I was simply defending myself from _his_ charge against _me_—to wit, the charge of arrogance.
In his article on “Thought and Language” he observed, “Professor Romanes has no right to speak of men like Noiré, Huxley, Herbert Spencer, to say nothing of Hobbes, with an air of superiority.” In answer to this charge I stated the bare facts of the case,—viz. that in my book I had alluded to Noiré merely for the sake of stating his theory as to the origin of speech, and of expressing my large measure of agreement therewith; that I had quoted Huxley only in places where my argument needed authoritative opinions on matters of comparative anatomy; that I had only once mentioned Hobbes, and then in order to back by his authority a philosophical doctrine for which I was contending; and, lastly, that I had never mentioned Herbert Spencer at all. Now, if my critic feels that a mere statement of these facts amounts to a serious charge against him as a scholar, I can only express my regret that he should have imposed on me the necessity of stating them.
But what now is his reply to this simple statement of facts? Briefly, he drops his own “serious charge” as regards Noiré, Huxley, and Hobbes, and takes his stand upon the case of Herbert Spencer. “It is true,” he says, “Mr. Spencer’s name does not occur in the index. But on p. 230 we read: ‘So here again we meet with additional proof, were any required, of the folly of regarding the copula as an essential ingredient of a proposition.’ Now it is well known that it is Herbert Spencer who regards the copula as an essential ingredient of a proposition.” As if it were one man alone who takes this view, and that man Herbert Spencer! Or as if Herbert Spencer’s name were so specially identified with it, that in calling it a philosophically foolish view I expected my readers to understand a disrespectful allusion to him! Surely my critic knows as well as I do that this question touching the function of the copula is one which has been debated for centuries; and therefore that with much more show of reason he might accuse me of making an attack on the President of the United States, on the ground that I had expressed a decided opinion in favor of free trade.
But more than this. So far is it from being “well known that it is Herbert Spencer who regards the copula as an essential ingredient of a proposition,” that I am under the necessity of asking Prof. Max Müller for references in proof of such a statement. Chapters X and XI of the “Principles of Psychology” (Vol. II) are those which, as far as I am aware, most nearly approach the subject. Yet the word “copula” does not once occur in them. Moreover, with all that Mr. Spencer has there said upon the nature and structure of propositions I am, and always have been, in full agreement.
Yours faithfully,
GEORGE J. ROMANES.
Oxford, Feb. 12.
A DEFENSE OF LITTRÉ.
_To the Editor of The Monist._
If all the readers of _The Monist_ for October were acquainted with the life and writings of Littré I should not have to defend him against your criticism, as everyone could see that there is more truth than poetry in my sonnet. But I fear that “the voice, the spirit, and the soul of Positivism” is not so well known as he deserves to be, and I venture to ask for space to reply.
Proceeding in order, I should like to correct the impression left by the following passage: “Comte had not nominated a successor who should in his place be the _Directeur du positivisme_. Littré had forfeited this honor on account of his quarrels with Comte in which he strongly sided with Madame Comte against her husband.” The misunderstanding between the two men had a more serious origin than these family squabbles and arose from the fact that Littré would not follow Comte through the mystic vagaries of the _Politique Positive_. He admits that being under his intellectual ascendency he went too far on the new way, but he soon found that the master was violating his own method and, having to choose between them, he held to the method. Littré’s refusal to join Comte in his adhesion to the régime of the coup d’état of 1851 was the immediate cause of the rupture. His “excessive tolerance” did not extend to the Bonapartes, whom he detested cordially. It is characteristic of the man that he continued his yearly subscription to the fund that he had created for his friend’s support notwithstanding this break in their relations.
As to his tolerance, I think with you that he carried it a little too far in his own family. Greater firmness might have spared us the vision of priests bedeviling him in his agony and dragging his body in triumph to holy ground. But the case that you take as an example does not seem to me conclusive. It was not necessary to possess his knowledge of history in order to appreciate the difficulties attendant upon interference with his catholic wife in the education of their daughter, and as success was impossible he wisely limited his endeavor to fields unobstructed by the “eternal feminine.”
Seriously, we admit that Littré was tolerant to excess, but not that the attitude of his philosophy is, as you say, “mere scepticism leading to indifferentism.” In the words of M. Wyrouboff, who aided him for many years in editing the magazine called _La Philosophie Positive_, “men, no matter how superior they may be, are never abstract formulas interpreting with equal facility all the parts of a mental conception; they always represent a mixture of strength and weakness in variable proportions.... It seemed as if intellectual activity had absorbed all the living forces of his (Littré’s) being, leaving in the place of physical activity only the faculty of passive resistance to the will of others.” This refers to the man in his old age but in youth he was an athlete of remarkable strength. Renan said of him: “While his temperament was calm his mind was revolutionary, and therefore he never gave way. In July 1830, he was in the first line of those who broke into the place du Carrousel and George Farcy was shot through by his side.” I am tempted to quote a little more from this master of words. “So great was his love of truth that, perhaps alone in our century, he could retract without lessening himself. Truth led him like a child.... It is not well to be too perfect.... His apparent negations were only the extreme reserve of a mind that dreads hazardous appreciations. He was so much afraid of going beyond what he saw clearly that he often stopped short of it. Hesitation that implies a thousand times more delicate worship of the eternal ideal than the rash solutions that satisfy superficial minds.”
Even in old age there were no signs of “indifferentism” in his conduct. In the words of Pasteur, “At the Mesnil he was consulting physician for the whole village (always gratuitously). Continuing his labors till three o’clock in the morning, the light of his lamp shone afar during the night like a beacon that reassured the sick. It was known that at the first call, M. Littré would leave his work and go wherever his aid was needed.”
These are the words of men that knew him, but my first-hand opinion of him was formed solely from his writings and his public acts as senator, etc.; fancy such a man in _our_ senate!
The note in which you say that I attended positivistic lectures (Comte’s?) in France together with Mr. Frederic Harrison is a flattering anachronism.
Littré’s father received a sword of honor while in the navy for beating off an English ship of superior force, and the son’s philosophy prompts not only to action but to action, if necessary, in the good old fashioned positive way.
My second objection refers to the line where you say that your positivism “has nothing to do with Comte or with any of Comte’s disciples,” and, leaving Comte aside, I hope to show that you and Littré are much better friends than you imagine. A view noted by him on p. 27, Vol. 1, of his magazine, _La Philosophie Positive_, ought to assure this happy result.
In the preface of your valuable work entitled “Fundamental Problems” you draw particular attention to the part that treats of “Form and Formal Thought,” which, you say, discusses a subject of fundamental importance. “A correct conception of form and the laws of form will clear away many mysteries; it will afford a satisfactory explanation of causality and shed a new light on all the other problems of philosophy.”
The part referred to begins thus: “In the introduction to his ‘Critique of Pure Reason,’ Immanuel Kant proposes the question: How are synthetical Judgments _a priori_ possible? on the solution of this problem the whole structure of his philosophy rests, which he characterises as _Transcendental Idealism_.” (“A priori, as used in the limited sense by Kant, is purely formal knowledge, while a posteriori is identical with experience.”)
Further on I read, “Our own views grew out of a study of Kant’s Transcendentalism”; and the first words of your “Conclusion” are these: “Although Kant’s Transcendental Idealism cannot be considered as a final solution of the basic problem of philosophy, it nevertheless pursues the right method and has thus actually led us to a solution which, we hope, will in time be recognised as final.”
In looking for the difference between the two solutions to find the
## part in yours that belongs to you alone, I see on p. 50 of “Fundamental
Problems” that “Kant thinks it is a strange and wonderful fact that our formal thought (the rules of arithmetic, mathematics, logic, etc., which are _a priori_) agrees so precisely with the highest (i. e. the most general) laws of nature, which can be ascertained and verified by experience. Kant sees only two ways of solution. Either the laws of pure reason, he says, have been gathered by experience from nature, or, on the contrary, the laws of nature have been deduced from our _a priori_ rules. The former solution is impossible, since the formal sciences are proven to have been formulated with the exclusion of all sensory experience. ‘Therefore,’ says Kant, ‘the second solution only remains. Reason dictates its laws to nature’; i. e. ... the sensory impressions are the raw material only from which the well-ordered whole of nature, as an object of science, is created by the synthetic faculty of reason.... Kant has taken into consideration two ways only. He overlooks the third and most obvious explanation.... The third possibility is that which has been propounded in the foregoing pages. According to our explanation, the formal (the highest or most general) laws of nature and the formal laws of thought are identical. Their agreement is not wonderful but inevitable as both are expressions of the forms of existence in general.”
This then is your “solution of the basic problem of philosophy.”
Turning back to page 34, I find under the title “The Origin of the A Priori”: “Kant answers the question ‘How are synthetic judgments _a priori_ possible?’ by showing that such synthetic judgments undoubtedly exist.” “He might have ventured a step further by proposing another question: ‘What is the origin of the _a priori_?’ Only by answering this question could he have shown _how_ synthetic judgments _a priori_ are possible. This he did not do, and the omission has produced great confusion among German, French, and English thinkers.” On the next page, 36, I find “According to our view, form is a property of reality as well as of our cognition. Formless matter does not exist. Form and matter as they exist in reality, are inseparable.... Knowledge also in its primitive shape, when it is, so to say, natural and crude, is an intimate combination of sense-perceptions and formal cognition. The sense-perceptions are the real substance of knowledge, while formal cognition is the principle which arranges and systematises sense-experiences.” ... “Logic does not create order and system in our brain, but it makes us conscious of the order that naturally grew in our mind.”
In the division entitled “The Order of Nature” you say that “Formal thought represents the mere laws of thought in their abstractness, and has been acquired by abstraction. The mere forms of thought exhibit a wonderful regularity.... This regularity of formal thought, which is expressed in all logical laws, arithmetical calculations, and in all mathematical conceptions, has naturally grown in our mind as the psychical expression of a physical regularity in the arrangement of the various brain-structures and their combinations. The arrangement of brain-structures in certain regular forms has been effected in accordance with the same laws that govern the development of forms generally.”
This answer to the question, “What is the origin of the _a priori_” is what you call the corner-stone of your positivism, which, you say, “it is to be hoped, will prove the only true Monism.”
Now I give my translation of Littré’s view, which he published in 1867, in an article entitled “The Three Philosophies.”
“The effective certainty that the mathematical laws of number, of figure and of motion are at the base of physical phenomena, and the inductive belief that they are equally at the base of chemical and of biological phenomena induce me to note here a view upon the relation that must be found between subjective phenomena and objective phenomena, that is to say upon the relation that causes the subject to draw from the object a science and laws. The nervous substance, which is the organ of all intelligence, is made up of material elements which arrive with their conditions; and when this substance becomes capable of thinking, it passes under the conditions proper to the elements that form it; which results in (_se traduit par_) a science and its laws. The material work that takes place in the brain while it fulfils its office, is, as is known, a work of nutrition, which consists of a chemical exchange of molecules. Every chemical action is, in turn, equivalent to a certain quantity of heat; and again, this heat is equivalent to a certain quantity of motion. Thus thought, no matter how we represent to ourselves the relation to nervous substance, is connected with mathematical modes of which it becomes conscious when it becomes luminous. Not that I would in any way have it understood that thought is but an equivalent of heat or of motion. Far from that, equivalence is not identity; and whenever we change from one degree to another in the natural and scientific order we meet a new unknown which is the characteristic of this degree. The induction that leads us to connect thought with mathematical conditions, leads us also to connect it with physical, chemical, and biological conditions, of which it is necessarily
## participant. Finally, when, at the highest point, it arrives face to face
with itself, it studies itself experimentally like the rest, and forms its own doctrine. If it attempts to go out metaphysically into space, it is reduced to combining subjectively its own elements, turns in a circle without issue and falls back upon itself. If, on the contrary, it makes the same attempt towards nature from which it emanates, then the ways open, science is established, and positive philosophy appears. The material constitution of the nervous substance is the point of junction between the human mind and laws or general facts. If I had been younger, I should have made a work of this view, not a paragraph; but old age must hasten.”
I have translated more than was necessary so as to give the “view” as a whole. Does it not contain the answer to your question, “What is the origin of the _a priori_”?
Though Littré solved your “basic problem of philosophy” he did not attach so much importance to this solution as you do because his philosophy is based upon a generalisation from all facts and not upon any one fact, however important it may be.
“Positive Philosophy is the conception of the world that results from the systematised ensemble of the positive sciences” and does not depend upon the solution of any psychological problem, although it recognises the importance of all psychological facts.
Your originality lies in your application of Littré’s discovery.
The reader has his choice between Littré’s positivism and your neo-Kantism, but if he side with you he must at least thank Littré for the solution on which your philosophy is based.
You say that “Comtean Positivism, especially as it is represented by Littré, consists mainly if not exclusively of the doctrine to ‘let metaphysics alone.’” Is this fair to the man that solved your “basic problem of philosophy” in a paragraph?
Positivism as represented by Littré gives due importance to the subjective element. He recognised that three essentials were necessary to the completion of Comte’s philosophy: a political economy, a cerebral theory, and what, for want of a better name he termed the subjective theory of humanity. This last comprised ethics, æsthetics, and psychology. Speaking of a confusion that obscures the whole discussion relative to psychology, he says: “_Cerebral theory_, _mental_ or _psychological theory_ are taken in two very different senses, which are never distinguished. These terms signify sometimes the organic conditions under which intelligence manifests itself, sometimes the formal conditions under which the intellect operates. As soon as these two significations are separated we perceive the means of settling the debate as to the place of psychology; for to the question: Where should these two orders be studied? it will be answered that the first should be studied in anatomy, physiology, zoölogy, the evolution of ages, pathology, it belongs therefore without contest to biology; but it will be answered that the second should be studied in the total development of history and in the application to all the modes of cognition; it belongs incontestably to philosophy. Thus there are two psychologies, one biological, the other philosophical, one relating to the individual man, the other to the collective man, one furnishing what is necessary in order to pass from biology to sociology, the other examining the subjective instrument by the light of all positive knowledge. But this complement of philosophy I do not call psychology, I call it the _subject-theory_ of _humanity_; because while including psychology, it includes much more.” That is to say; ethics and æsthetics.... “In the order of the positive method it is at first by means of the object that human knowledge is built up, and we end with the subject.” “The theory of the subject is the indispensable complement of the theory of the object.”
Of positive philosophy Littré says: “While it constructs the series of the partial philosophies and thus embraces all objective knowledge, it constructs at the same time the series of effective methods and thus embraces all logical power. I borrow this expression from M. Comte, who so happily named these effective methods the logical powers of the human mind. When it has terminated its first series it is found to have also terminated the second. Thus the ensemble of the methods represents the function of the subject; the ensemble of the partial philosophies, the function of the object.”
Is this what you call a “one-sided philosophy”?
You say that Littré is the worst kind of a metaphysician because he maintains that we can know nothing about first and final causes; I quote him to show his position: “Positive philosophy is at the same time a system that comprises all that is known of the world, of man and of society, and a general method including all the ways by which things have been learned. What is beyond, either, materially, the depths (fond) of boundless space, or, intellectually, the endless enchainment of causes, is absolutely inaccessible to the human mind. But inaccessible does not mean null or non-existent. Immensity, both material and intellectual, holds by a narrow tie to what we know and becomes by this alliance a positive idea of the same order; I mean to say that by touching and bordering it, this immensity appears in its double character, reality and inaccessibility. It is an ocean that washes our shore, and for which we have neither bark nor sail, but whose clear vision is as salutary as it is formidable.” _Aug. Comte et la Phil. Pos._, 2d Ed., p. 519.
As Littré had found this shore encumbered with the wrecks of expeditions that had started out in search of first causes and final causes, it is no wonder that he was a little timid. His metaphor needs explanation in the light of other passages, otherwise it might seem to discourage pursuit of the unknown. He did not discountenance hypotheses but he was very much afraid of our inclination to take guesses for truth; and this, by the way, is the reason why he is not appreciated in this country, where we are so fond of guessing. What he really did was to discourage those navigators who would go in search of the Jumping-off-place, for the best that can befall them is to come back to where they started. The men that know the earth is round are the only men that find new worlds.
In answer to your statement that Littré’s philosophy “is an inventory rather than a plan to guide science in its further evolution” I will only repeat in his words, what he has shown so well, that “positive philosophy is the ensemble of human knowledge, disposed according to a certain order which enables us to grasp its connections and its unity, and to draw from it the general directions for each part and for the whole.”
You say that “Littré rejects the evolution theory and its attempts to explain ethics.” I quote him from _La Philosophie Positive_, March, 1880: “Positive philosophy does not deny the evolution of ethics; far from doing so, it maintained and inculcated this evolution long before the utilitarian doctrine made it its ethical pivot.”.... “General morality, born of the gradual culture of the sentimental basis of the human soul under the social protection of progressive centres, is entirely disinterested, and this is what makes its purity and its force.”
In your philosophy you have a god and a religion, in his we have the same things, but as they are so different from what is generally understood by these terms, we use others. Here are some of the _Paroles de Philosophie Positive_: “In the eyes of history, there are no false religions, there are only incomplete religions which make their way through time and perfect themselves.... The definition of religion is taken from its office, which is: to put education, and consequently moral life, en rapport with the conception of the world at each phase of humanity. Whoever examines this definition will find that it satisfies all the conditions of religion, either in the past, the present, or the future. It will be perceived that theology is not inherent in the religious idea. It was not always there in the past; for we cannot give the name of theology to primordial fetichism, which addressed its worship to neighboring objects, nor to the religions that adore natural agents, such as air, wind, night, dawn; it is with polytheism that theology begins. As for the future, general science, conceiving the world differently from the way in which it was conceived during the reigns of the successive religions, takes an office equivalent to the religious office, and must in its turn place education and moral life in accord with the universe as it appears to us.”.... “We do not outrage the old doctrine, whose past is glorious and venerable; but there is a public for which it is a dead letter; and it is to this public that we address ourselves and for this public that we labor.”
Is this not aspiration to be in unison with “the order of the world,” which you call God? And when Littré traces this aspiration back to its organic origin is he not explaining what you affirm?
Our philosophies are not perfect, but we must apply them, such as they are, to the needs of the day. The most pressing of all these needs, in my opinion, is unity of action among those who are animated with the new spirit.
Let us pull together.
Very truly yours,
LOUIS BELROSE, JR.
ÉMILE LITTRÉ’S POSITIVISM.
An editor cannot make it a rule to accept criticisms of considerable length which have reference to a remark incidentally made in a book review. The present case, however, although it belongs in this category, is of a peculiar nature. First, the remark on Littré was made by the editor himself, and accordingly he feels personally responsible for it; secondly, it contains a brief delineation of Littré’s character as a man and as a philosopher in the way in which he is usually regarded by the most prominent historians of philosophy. Mr. Belrose presents Littré in quite a new light and quotes passages in corroboration of his conception of Littré which are perhaps not generally known, for they are buried in articles of the positivistic journal _La Philosophie Positive_, and this journal enjoyed neither a long life nor a large circulation; nor is it to be had in any of the libraries accessible to me. Seventeen editorial articles were republished in bookform, (_La Science. Au point de vue philosophique, par_ É. LITTRÉ. Paris, 1873), but the article “The Three Philosophies” is not among them.
If Mr. Belrose’s conception of Littré proves to be true, I shall not only gladly correct my own wrong view of Littré, but I wish also to call attention to the fact that he has been misrepresented by almost all and certainly by the best and most painstaking philosophical historians.
I cannot however in the main points accede to Mr. Belrose’s view and will have to sustain my former opinion that M. Littré was an agnostic. He made it a matter of principle to suspend his opinion on some of the most fundamental philosophical problems, which he considered as inaccessible. His positivism, accordingly, differs _toto cœlo_ from the positivism presented in _The Monist_. His philosophy, like that of Comte, is so far as I understand it, a policy of let-metaphysics-alone. It gives up the struggle with metaphysics as a hopeless undertaking. Therefore, I should say, Littré’s positivism has not conquered metaphysics, and although it lets metaphysics alone, metaphysics plays an important part in it. Littré is an agnostic and like every agnostic that believes in the unknowable, a metaphysician without knowing it.
The doctrine of the three stages of knowledge, viz., the theological, metaphysical, and positive stages, appears to me of less importance. The doctrine of the three stages is at the same time not properly a Comtean idea; Comte adopted it from Turgot, the great statesman and one of the greatest men as a thinker and also as a character that ever lived and who is too little appreciated as such.
The main doctrine of Comte’s positivism is the doctrine that first and final causes cannot be known, and we must abandon our search for them; that human knowledge is limited to the middle, while the two ends are inaccessible. These insoluble questions, he declares, have made no progress from the beginning. Mr. Lewes in his book “Comte’s Philosophy of the Sciences” expresses this agnosticism in the following words (p. 31): “Our province is to study her [nature’s] laws, to trace her processes, and, thankful that we can so far penetrate the divine significance of the universe, be content—as Locke wisely and modestly says—to sit down in quiet ignorance of all _transcendent_[61] subjects.”
This idea has so far as I am aware never been given up by Littré; it remained the basis of his belief in the unknowable and his works abound in expressions that concerning the main problems of life, “the positive philosophy will neither assert nor deny anything.”
Littré concludes the last article of his volume “La Science” with the following words:
“Le domaine ultérieur est celui des choses qui ne peuvent pas être connues. La science positive professe de n’y rien nier, de n’y rien affirmer; en un mot, elle ne connaît pas l’inconnaissable, mais elle en constate l’existence. Là est la philosophie suprême; aller plus loin est chimérique, aller moin loin est déserter notre destinée.”
This quotation alone, I think, settles the first main point at issue.
Now I maintain that Comte’s view of causation where he refers to first and final causes is fundamentally wrong; causation is transformation and causality is the formula under which we comprehend the changes of matter and energy that take place. The expressions first and final causes are misnomers (see “Fundamental Problems,” the chapter The Problem of Causality). First cause is either the starting point of a series of some longer chain of causes and effects, or as the term is generally applied or rather misapplied, stands for the last ground or reason, i. e. the answer given to the ultimate question why?, which is the most general _raison d’être_ that would explain and contain all the other and less general _raisons d’être_ regarding the nature of existence. The term final cause, again, means either the last cause in a series of causes or (and so it is generally used) it is a misnomer for purpose; and the final cause supposed to be inaccessible to human comprehension is the purpose of the existence of the world at large. I object to there being three kinds of causes. There is one kind of causality only, and the causes of this causality in all the causal processes with which we are confronted are perfectly intelligible.
The problem of the first cause of the origin of our world, viz. the solar system and the milky way, was attacked first by Kant and later by Laplace, and the latter, without knowing of Kant’s solution, solved it in the main in the same way. All recent investigations stand upon this Kant-Laplace hypothesis so called, having added corrections only as to details. Shall we declare that these labors are vain and gratuitous efforts of vague speculations? Littré says, with reference to such speculations, concerning the past and future states of the world (le monde):
“La dissémination primordiale de la matière qui devait le composer, la dissémination future de la matière qui le compose, dépassant toute expérience, dépassent toute conjecture.”
If I misunderstand Littré, it appears to me a pardonable mistake.
Yet is not the problem as to the origin of the world at large, why matter and energy exist at all, insolvable? Littré says that the positive cosmogonies, such as the doctrine of evolution do not touch the absolute; they have nothing to do with first and final causes. He says: “Les cosmogonies positives la [i. e. la place des cosmogonies religieuses] remplissent, non pas qu’elles aient la prétention ni le pouvoir de pénétrer dans l’absolu et d’embrasser, les causes premières et finales.”—l. c., p. 560.
That kind of causality which is sometimes called “ontological,” having reference to the existence, not of single things as transformations from other things, but of the world at large and formulated in such questions as how did the universe itself, the world as a whole, originate, is properly speaking no causality, it is not a question concerning a cause, but concerning a _raison d’être_. However without haggling about the words cause and _raison d’être_, this ontological causality so called is by no means beyond human comprehension. The ontological question has found a very definite answer in the formulation of the law of the conservation of matter and energy; which declares that existence at large did not originate, the total amount of matter as well as of energy existed always and will exist always. It has not been created; it is uncreatable and indestructible; it is eternal.
Littré is quite explicit in declaring that the positive philosophy lets alone all theological and metaphysical problems. It is neither atheistic nor theistic, and does not side with either materialism or spiritualism. He says:
“Ni spiritualiste, ni matérialiste, la philosophie positive écarte de la science générale les débats que la science
## particulière a depuis long temps et à son grand profit
rejetés.”—Preface d’un disciple in Comte’s “Course de Phil. pos.” p. xxvii.
Littré characterises as the main object of the positive philosophy, “to give to philosophy the positive method of the sciences, to the sciences the idea of the unity of philosophy.” He says: “Ainsi fut accompli ce qu’on doit appeler l’œuvre philosophique du dix-neuvième siècle, donner à la philosophie la méthode positive des sciences, aux sciences l’idée d’ensemble de la philosophie.” Preface, p. viii.
I am in perfect agreement with Littré that this is the object of positivism; but, if I understand Littré correctly, I disagree from his conception of the positive method. He limits the positive method to what he calls “experience,” and excludes every notion of the _a priori_. Littré apparently misunderstood the proper meaning of Kant’s idea of the _a priori_, for he used as a matter of course the _a priori_ method wherever it was indispensable, so for instance in mathematics and in the application of mathematics.
Mr. Belrose says:
[Littré] “solved your basic problem of philosophy [i. e. what is the origin of the _a priori_] in a paragraph.”
The problem of the _a priori_ reasoning is the question “Why can we know certain things before we have tested them by experiment? Man has not arrived by experience but by pure reasoning at the conclusion that the sum of the angles of every plane triangle has 180 degrees. How is he justified in declaring _a priori_ that the angles of a certain plane triangle make up 180 degrees, although he has not measured them?” This problem is the fundamental problem of the scientific or positive method; it is the same problem which Mr. Charles S. Peirce discusses in his article (see pp. 321 et seqq. of the present number of _The Monist_), for the problem of apriority is identical with the question of necessity.
Littré has, so far as I know, never discussed the problem of apriority and necessity. He has simply rejected the idea of the _a priori_ as the method of a false metaphysics, which is incompatible with the _a posteriori_ method of positive science. The passage quoted by Mr. Belrose most certainly does _not_ contain a solution of the problem. Littré declares therein that every chemical action is equivalent to a certain quantity of heat; and again this heat is equivalent to a certain quantity of motion. Thus, he says, thought is connected with mathematical modes of which it becomes conscious. Thought, he adds, is not an equivalent of heat or motion, for equivalence is not identity, but it is connected with mathematical conditions. This means that that kind of brain-action which represents conscious thought, depends upon definite proportions. But what in all the world has this idea to do with the problem of apriority? The phrase “mathematical modes” (which is misleading in this passage) is an unfortunate expression for “proportions” and we must add that Littré is mistaken when he says that the nervous substance when it becomes luminous, becomes conscious of these mathematical modes with which it is connected. Aside from “luminous” being simply an allegorical expression for conscious, it is wrong to say that the nervous substance becomes conscious of the mathematical modes of heat as they are proportioned in the brain. A sentient being knows through sensation nothing about the mechanism or the mechanical proportions of its own sentient structure. Sensation is the act of a becoming conscious not of the sentient structure itself but of the meaning which this sentient structure has acquired, and a consciousness of the mathematical modes which according to Comte’s hierarchy of the sciences ought to be the beginning of knowledge develops at a very late period. Any explanation of the origin of _a priori_, be it ever so brief, would lead us too far away from the points of our controversy. It is sufficient here to point out that the passage quoted by Mr. Belrose, contains no solution of the problem of our knowledge and certitude of mathematical, arithmetical, and other purely formal laws. On the contrary, this very passage is replete with error; it is a misstatement of facts and does not even bring to light the difficulties of the problem.
Littré was prejudiced against the _a priori_, and his prejudice induced him to underrate its importance. I read in one of Littré’s passages quoted by Mr. Belrose:
“If it [thought] attempts to go out metaphysically into space, it is reduced to combining subjectively its own elements, turns in a circle without issue and falls back upon itself.”
The _a priori_ method of thought subjectively combining its own elements, is by no means a turning in a circle without issue so that in the end it will fall back upon itself. The _a priori_ method of thought subjectively combining its own elements is employed by arithmetic, mathematics, and logic, and we are confronted with the astonishing fact that rules, or formulas, or calculations which were made by pure thought subjectively combining its own elements, are applicable and hold good as reliable guides in our experiments. If there were no _a priori_, how could we foretell or, what is more still, how could we predetermine the course of nature? The _a priori_ has been wrongly employed by the so-called metaphysical philosophers to give us information about the substance and essence of the world. But the misapplication of the _a priori_ is no reason for denouncing it as radically wrong.
The existence of the _a priori_ is an undeniable fact. Kant was right in recognising it in its sweeping importance, yet he was wrong in his interpretation of the _a priori_, which according to his transcendentalism was based exclusively upon a peculiarity of the mind and not upon the nature of things. The positivists in France did not only object to the wrong interpretation of the transcendentalists but also denied the existence of the _a priori_. Accepting the principle that every knowledge must ultimately be a statement of facts, the question How is the _a priori_ to be based upon facts? became in my conception of philosophy the burning problem which was next in order as a conciliation between Kant and Comte.
The French positivists, foremost among them Comte and Littré, have not given us an explanation of what is true and false in the theological and metaphysical notions of first and final causes, of the _a priori_ of God, of substance, of force, etc.; they have simply abandoned the investigation of these ideas which are after all the most important tools in the household of the human mind for scientific and ethical purposes; and thus they have, in spite of their positivism in questions of detail, retained the metaphysical method of _a priori_ reasoning which is quite legitimate in the formal science but out of place concerning facts. Take for instance the following argument concerning the materiality of things:
“Là, c’est à dire dans les sciences positives, on ne connaît aucune propriété sans matière, non point parce que, _a priori_, on y a l’idée préconçue qu’il n’existe aucune substance spirituelle indépendante, mais parce que, _a posteriori_, on n’a jamais rencontré la gravitation sans corps pesant, la chaleur sans corps chaud, l’électricité sans corps électrique, l’affinité sans substances de combinaison, la vie, la sensibilité, la pensée, sans être vivant, sentant et pensant.”—_La Science_, p. 307.
I do not mean to say that there are immaterial or spiritual substances, but I should say that any purely _a posteriori_ argument in favor of their non-existence is insufficient. Would Littré mean that a Zulu should declare that ice cannot exist because he has never seen water frozen as hard as a stone? Any amount of experience, i. e. all _a posteriori_ evidence, is in parts and will out of itself never acquire universal validity.
How strongly Littré is still implicated in the metaphysical method of applying _a priori_ ideas to _a posteriori_ experiences can be learned from the following statement:
“Le monde est constitué par la matière et par les forces de la matière: la matière dont l’origine et l’essence nous sont inaccessible; les forces qui sont immanentes à la matière. Au delà de ces deux termes, matière et force, la science positive ne connaît rien.” Preface, p. ix.
The metaphysical ideas, matter and force, are _a priori_ notions of mystical entities or things in themselves, and thus it appears natural that experience should know nothing of them. But real matter and actual force are not unknowable existences. They can be known. We know something of them and positive science is engaged in broadening and deepening this knowledge. Says Littré:
“Les propriétés physiques sont manifestes en toute substance, dans quelque état qu’elle soit, isolée ou non isolée, et s’exercent sur les masses; les propriétés, n’apparaissent qu’entre deux substances, ont besoin de la binarité et s’exercent sur les molécules; enfin les propriétés vitales dépassant la binarité, ne sont compatibles qu’avec un état moléculaire plus composé.” Preface, p. x.
One of the fundamental principles of positivism, as I conceive it, is the definition of knowledge as a description of facts or of their properties. We call certain properties of the facts (i. e. the objects of our experience) matter and others force. When we say that we do or do not know a certain phenomenon we mean that we have or have not as yet succeeded in placing them properly in that system of thought-symbols of which our mind consists. Yet there is no sense in speaking of matter and force as being unknowable while the properties of matter and force are said to be manifest and appearing under certain conditions.
I have presented the main reasons why I still hold that there is a radical difference between Littré’s view of positivism and my own. Littré is an agnostic and he was an agnostic before that name had been invented. His objection to metaphysicism consists in the doctrine not that the object of metaphysics is a chimerical non-existence, but that the object of metaphysics exists yet it cannot be known. Thus Littré is as much a metaphysician as those philosophers whom he censures for their metaphysical views. He does not censure them for believing that the metaphysical exists, but for believing that it is knowable and attempting to investigate its nature.
As to the hierarchy of the sciences I shall simply quote a few extracts from Eugen Dühring’s criticism of Comte. Dühring says (_Krit. Gesch. der Phil._, p. 486):
“If Comte’s _positivism_ were nothing more than what we have here laid down, its main contents would, strange enough, consist in _negativity_. The criticism of a certain kind of metaphysics, viz. of an ontology phantastical to a greater or lesser extent, would form its most significant character. The other element which consists in presenting a hierarchy and unitary conjunction of some of the sciences which are called positive in the usual sense of the term, cannot pretend to be philosophy in the higher sense of the word or even to be useful for science. A general view of knowledge, whether it consists of six or sixty volumes, does not add the least iota to the contents of our knowledge.... We cannot expect that a specialist should be pleased with a hierarchical sketch of his science, especially if the delineations are filled out with details of which he would be a better judge.”
It is true, and I concur in this with the French positivists, that a positive philosophy must be a systematic arrangement of knowledge. But I conceive it to be the philosopher’s work, not to take an inventory of the sciences, but to define the fundamental concepts of scientific enquiry and to elucidate the methods of cognition. Such fundamental concepts are the ideas, truth and criterion of truth, cause and effect, mind, thought, knowledge, ethics, etc. Concepts are the tools of thought and the practice of using them correctly has to be learned.
Positivism is not the original invention of a world-system, but the systematising of statements of facts so as to produce a world-system. The old philosophers gave us first a world-system, from which and in accord with which they defined their views of truth, cognition, cause, etc. They began to build their philosophy from the top down. Positivism begins from the bottom and is building up to the top with the assistance of the special sciences. A positive philosophy is inseparable from, but it cannot be replaced by, the sciences. The field of philosophy is to superintend the method and the plan of building, so as to compare the details and bear in mind the unity of the whole. In this sense Dühring says in criticising Comte (p. 486):
“However, concerning the form of the connections of methodical reflections, something can be done. Yet it must be possible to separate everything of such a kind and also new insights, so as to constitute a special branch of knowledge. Otherwise they will escape the specialists’ attention.... Not only Comte but all philosophers given to the idea of systematisation and construction of particular knowledge have made attempts in this direction which at most may range as sketches or popular presentations in a higher sense.”
Concerning Littré’s view of Comte’s religious vagaries Dühring says (p. 483):
“His [Comte’s] biographer, the Academician Littré of Paris, and also Stuart Mill are right in considering ‘The Course of Positive Philosophy’ as the main and fundamental work which is decisive as a contribution of his and a source of instruction to the world. However, they are very one-sided when they overlook that the philosopher even in his vagaries exhibited a universality of mind which remains superior to the standpoint of either Littré or Mill.”
I agree with Mr. Belrose that Comte’s religion as he conceived it consists of vagaries, but the main idea of developing the religions of the past which, as Littré says, are not false but only incomplete religions, into a religion that shall be in accord with the science of our day is no vagary, but a great and an important ideal.
Far be it from me to belittle Littré because I disagree from him in some fundamental questions. He was in his time, he is still, and will remain for ever a star of first magnitude in our philosophical galaxy. That which I consider as his errors does not detract from his greatness. Were not Kant’s mistakes in a similar way closely interwoven with his greatest merits? It is flattering to me that Mr. Belrose finds an agreement between his master’s and my views concerning the basic problem of philosophy, but I cannot discover it. Yet I gladly acknowledge that there exists an agreement of aim, and this agreement of aim which finds its truest expression in the word “positivistic” is perhaps of greater importance than the agreement of views.
P. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[61] Italics are not mine.
OBSERVATIONS ON SOME POINTS IN JAMES’S PSYCHOLOGY.[62]
In calling attention to some objections to the views advanced by Professor James on the subjects of Belief, Emotion, and Will, it is only justice to myself to express the admiration I feel for his work as a whole. The thoroughly scientific spirit which pervades it, the author’s candor in admitting and his skill in surmounting difficulties, his learning and his originality, his aptness in illustration, and the energy and vivacity of his style combine to make it full of interest as well as instruction. It is because it should be, and doubtless will be widely influential, that it is important that any doubtful positions assumed in it should be subjected to a careful examination.
I shall endeavor to avoid any misrepresentation of the views which I combat, but space will not allow me to do full justice to the arguments by which they are supported, if such a thing is possible for an antagonist. For this, I must refer the interested reader to the original book. If what I have to say should have the effect of increasing the number of its readers, I shall not have written altogether in vain, whether I succeed or fail in setting the truth in a clearer light.
I. BELIEF.
Professor James entitles the chapter devoted to this subject “The Perception of Reality,” and defines belief to be “the mental state or function of cognising reality.” He explains that, “As used in the following pages, ‘Belief’ will mean every degree of assurance, including the highest possible certainty and conviction” (Vol. II, p. 283).
According to this definition, erroneous beliefs, such, for instance, as the belief that the earth is flat, stationary, and the centre of the universe, or the delusion of an insane man that he is Jesus Christ, are cognitions of reality. Professor James would probably say that they are realities to the mind entertaining them, and it is true that the feeling of belief is the same, whether the thing believed be true or false. I think, however, that it is more customary to use the verb which he employs in connection with beliefs which agree with the objective facts, and that the “feeling” or “sense” of reality would be a better term than “perception” or “cognition.”
This, however, is not, to my mind, the most serious objection to the definition. Although Professor James does not use the word “knowledge” in this connection, it seems evident, from the passage quoted above, and from what he says elsewhere, that he considers all kinds, as well as all degrees of certainty to be beliefs. It seems to me evident, on the other hand, that many of our cognitions of reality are not properly called beliefs. As an instance, I will quote the illustration with which he opens the discussion of “The Various Orders of Reality” (p. 287).
“Suppose a new-born mind, entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin. Suppose that it begins in the form of a visual impression (whether faint or vivid is immaterial) of a lighted candle against a dark background, and nothing else, so that whilst this image lasts it constitutes the entire universe to the mind in question. Suppose, moreover (to simplify the hypothesis), that the candle is only imaginary, and that no ‘original’ of it is recognised by us psychologists outside. Will this hallucinatory candle be believed in, will it have a real existence for the mind?
“What possible sense (for that mind) would a suspicion have that the candle is not real? What would doubt or disbelief of it imply? When _we_, the onlooking psychologists, say the candle is unreal, we mean something quite definite, viz. that there is a world known to _us_ which _is_ real, and to which we perceive that the candle does not belong; it belongs exclusively to that individual mind, has no status anywhere else, etc. It exists, to be sure, in a fashion, for it forms the content of that mind’s hallucination; but the hallucination itself, though unquestionably it is a sort of existing fact, has no knowledge of _other_ facts; and since those _other_ facts are the realities _par excellence_ for us, and the only things we believe in, the candle is simply outside of our reality and belief altogether.
“By the hypothesis, however, the mind which sees the candle can spin no such considerations as these about it, for of other facts, actual or possible, it has no inkling whatever. That candle is its all, its absolute. Its entire faculty of attention is absorbed by it. It _is_, it is _that_; it is _there_; no other possible candle, or quality of this candle, no other possible place, or possible object in the place, no alternative, in short, suggests itself as even conceivable; so how can the mind help believing the candle real? The supposition that it might possibly not do so is, under the supposed conditions, unintelligible.”
I readily grant that it is, under the supposed circumstances, unintelligible that the candle should be thought to be unreal, but it seems to me equally so that it should be believed to be real. What does Professor James mean by a belief in the reality of the candle under such conditions? Nothing more than that the mind is conscious of a sensation which we know, but it does not, is like that produced by the sight of a candle. This sensation is certainly a reality, and the only possible reality to that mind. Professor James must, then, be understood as maintaining that a sensation, pure and simple, is a belief in an object exciting the sensation. If, for instance, the first consciousness of the supposed mind were the odor of a rose, or the whistle of a locomotive, he must admit that the mind would believe in the rose or the locomotive. If I have a headache, or am hungry or tired, I not only have beliefs about these sensations, but the headache, the hunger, the weariness, are themselves beliefs. Now I submit that this is contrary to all ordinary use of language. It is, perhaps, impossible for an adult, with his mind full of memories of past experiences, to have a sensation without some sort of a belief about it, but although the sensation and the belief may be inseparable, they are not indistinguishable, and, as a matter of fact, every one does distinguish between his sensations and his beliefs about them. I do not think it would be quite correct to say even of an adult who had never seen or heard of a candle, that, on seeing one for the first time, he would believe in the reality of the candle, although doubtless he would believe he saw something real—a real flame, for instance.
If it be admitted that sensations are entitled to be called beliefs, it seems impossible to stop short of the conclusion that all states of consciousness are beliefs.
Emotions and volitions are as much realities as sensations, and are known as such by the mind that experiences them. That memory and imagination involve belief, is too evident to need discussion. But if this be the case, the chapter on belief could have been very greatly abbreviated—need not in fact, contain more than four words. To say that all consciousness is belief would perhaps simplify matters, but it would not advance our knowledge very much, nor would it accord with the ordinary use of the word, which has reference to a particular kind of consciousness, which every one knows, however hard he may find its definition.
It seems to me, therefore, that Professor James’s definition of belief is defective in two ways. There are beliefs which are not cognitions of reality, and there are cognitions of reality which are not beliefs. Especially in regard to the latter class, I think that the definition confuses a distinction that is real and important, between different kinds of knowledge. We know our sensations, emotions and volitions in a way which differs not only in degree but in kind from any usual, or, I think, legitimate sense of the word “Belief.”
Perhaps it would be the safer course to rest content with pointing out the objections to the author’s definition without laying myself open to retaliation by attempting one of my own, but it does not seem to me impossible to give one which will include all that is understood by the term and nothing more. I should say that belief is the sense or feeling of relation between mental objects. That we have belief whenever we have this feeling, seems to me too plain to require argument, and I am unable, after a good deal of reflection, to call to mind any belief that is not included in the definition. If I see, or imagine that I see a lighted candle, it may excite in my mind a great variety of beliefs, as, that the flame is hot, that the light and heat are caused by the chemical union of oxygen with carbon and hydrogen, that the material of which the candle is composed is wax, paraffine or tallow, that it has a cotton wick, that it is of a certain size, weight, and color, and so on indefinitely. All of these are evidently ideas of relation. To say “flame,” or “hot” does not express a belief, unless something else is understood, but to say “flame is hot” does so. If I say that the color red is equal to the square of the hypothenuse of a right-angled triangle, I fail to express a belief because the mind perceives no relation between the objects, and the answer to such a statement would be, not that it is or is not true, but that it has no meaning. The only cases which occur to me in which it might be plausibly argued that a belief did not involve the feeling of relation are such impersonal expressions as “it rains,” or, “it is cold.” The exception, however, is only apparent, arising from the erroneous idea that everything which is implied in language must be expressed. When we say, “it rains,” we mean, “rain is falling.” In either form of language, the thought conveyed is that of the relation of the drops of water and their motion. The stock-broker, with his prearranged code, may communicate the ideas of a long sentence in a single word, or the Freemason may do the same to the initiated by a gesture. In such a case, it would be absurd to contend that no relation is felt or communicated because there is no formal subject or predicate.
Whatever may be thought of the sufficiency of my definition, I risk the assertion that it includes all beliefs that can be affirmed, denied or doubted. We never question our sensations, emotions or volitions—we have them, are aware of them, and that is the end of the matter. It is the relations of our sensations to each other, and to our pleasures and pains, our choices and rejections, that involve us in all sorts of perplexities. The whole question of the grounds of belief in general, and the truth or falsehood of particular beliefs is a question of relations. It is, then, in the sense indicated above that I shall use the word hereafter.
Having settled the definition, it may be worth while to consider for a moment whether this feeling of relation, which can only be known by experience, is enough like any other mental states to be classed with them. On this point Professor James says: “_In its inner nature, belief, or the sense of reality, is a sort of feeling more allied to the emotions than to anything else._ Mr. Bagehot distinctly calls it the ‘emotion’ of conviction. I just now spoke of it as acquiescence. It resembles more than anything else what in the psychology of volition we know as consent. Consent is recognised by all to be a manifestation of our active nature. It would naturally be described by such terms as ‘willingness’ or the ‘turning of our disposition.’ What characterises both consent and belief is the cessation of theoretic agitation through the advent of an idea which is inwardly stable, and fills the mind solidly to the exclusion of contradictory ideas. When this is the case, motor effects are apt to follow. Hence the states of consent and belief, characterised by repose on the purely intellectual side, are both intimately connected with subsequent practical activity. This inward stability of the mind’s content is as characteristic of disbelief as of belief. But we shall presently see that we never disbelieve anything except for the reason that we believe something else that contradicts the first thing. Disbelief is thus an incidental complication to belief, and need not be considered by itself.” (P. 283).
I am unable to satisfy myself whether, in the above passage, Professor James has in mind the feeling of belief or other feelings which often accompany it. The “cessation of theoretic agitation,” “willingness,” “turning of our disposition,” are accompanied by feelings which I should say are not only like, but identical with emotion. In the case of old, confirmed beliefs, however, theoretic agitation ceased, and the turning of the disposition occurred, if at all, long ago, and I am unable to recognise anything resembling emotion in my belief that two and two make four, that cows eat grass, that iron is a metal, and many others that might be mentioned. Nor do these beliefs, at the present time, give rise to motor effects, which, so far as I am able to see, only result from such beliefs as are, directly or indirectly, associated with emotion. If such beliefs as I have mentioned are not purely intellectual, as distinguished from emotional phenomena, I should be at a loss to know where the distinction is to be made between “the head” and “the heart.” The sense of relation seems to me to be the most purely intellectual of all the mental functions, and, although it may give rise to all sorts of emotions, the more settled, undisturbed and unquestioning the belief, the less likely is it to give rise to any but the feeling of calm, which seems to me to be the antithesis of emotion. I should say that belief is a feeling _sui generis_, without enough analogy with any other to justify classing them together.
I have already quoted the illustration with which Professor James opens the discussion of the subject of Reality. After quoting from Spinoza, to the same effect, the supposed case of a horse with wings imagined to be real in the absence of any contradictory thought, he goes on to say: “The sense that anything we think of is unreal can only come, then, when that thing is contradicted by some other thing of which we think. _Any object which remains uncontradicted is ipso facto believed and posited as absolute reality._” (P. 288). Elsewhere he says:
“... _all propositions, whether attributive or existential, are believed through the very fact of being conceived, unless they clash with other propositions believed at the same time, by affirming that their terms are the same as the terms of those other propositions._” (P. 290).
This, I think, is stated too strongly, at least, in the latter quotation. A proposition that is uncontradicted will be believed, but it is not necessary that the contradictory proposition should be believed in order that the first may fail of belief. I believe nothing, at present, contradictory of the proposition that it is now raining in Boston. I think it not improbable that such may be the case, but at the same time the contrary proposition is present to my mind, that it may not be raining in Boston, and the result is the state of mind which Professor James very properly regards as the opposite of belief—doubt. But supposing that a proposition is presented to the mind, which, being for the time uncontradicted, is believed, and that subsequently another, contrary proposition is presented, is it certain that the latter will be disbelieved? May not a state of doubt replace belief in this case also? Or supposing that two propositions, which have been believed independently, are brought into juxtaposition in such a way as to show that they are inconsistent, how are we to determine which if either, shall be believed? Professor James seems to teach that it is a matter of choice.
“That we can at any moment think of the same thing which at any former moment we thought of is the ultimate law of our intellectual constitution. But when we now think of it incompatibly with our other ways of thinking of it, then we must choose which way to stand by, for we cannot continue to think of it in two contradictory ways at once. _The whole distinction of real and unreal, the whole psychology of belief, disbelief and doubt, is thus grounded on two mental facts—first, that we are liable to think differently of the same; and second, that when we have done so, we can choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard._[63] The subjects adhered to become real subjects, the attributes adhered to real attributes, the existence adhered to real existence; while the subjects disregarded become imaginary subjects, the attributes disregarded erroneous attributes, and the existence disregarded an existence in no man’s land, in the limbo ‘where footless fancies dwell.’” (P. 290).
The doctrine that belief is, in the last analysis, a matter of choice is a prominent feature of Professor James’s teaching, to which I shall have occasion to refer again. It seems to me to involve him in some inconsistencies. For the present, it should be noted that he admits the reality of every mental object in its proper relations.
“If I merely dream of a horse with wings, my horse interferes with nothing else and has not to be contradicted. That horse, its wings, and its place are all equally real. That horse exists no otherwise than as winged, and is moreover really there, for that place exists no otherwise than as the place of that horse, and claims as yet no connection with the other places of the world. But if with this horse I make an inroad into the _world otherwise known_, and say, for example, ‘That is my old mare Maggie, having grown a pair of wings where she stands in her stall,’ the whole case is altered; for now the horse and place are identified with a horse and place otherwise known, and _what_ is known of the latter objects is incompatible with what is perceived of the former. ‘Maggie in her stall with wings! Never!’ The wings are unreal, then, visionary. I have dreamed a lie about Maggie in her stall.” (P. 289).
Here, the dream is a reality, and the winged horse is as really a part of it as the mare Maggie is of the outside world. The reality of the winged horse in the one case, and his unreality in the other, depend on his relations to other mental objects. So, for instance, if any one should say that a mermaid was a creature with the portion of a man from the waist up united to the body and limbs of a horse, I should be justified in contradicting him, and saying that it was not a mermaid but a centaur that he had in mind. It would not be a valid answer to say that there were really no such things as mermaids and centaurs. In mythology, a centaur has as definite a structure as a giraffe has in zoölogy, and it is as inexcusable to confound the one as the other with anything else. This point is amplified by the author in a section on “The Many Worlds,” in which the various objects of thought are found in their proper relations, and out of which each one selects a world of practical realities, according to his dominant habits of attention. _In the relative sense_, in which we contrast reality with unreality, or consider one object more real than another,
“_Reality means simply relation to our emotional and active life_ ... in this sense, whatever excites and stimulates our interest is real.” (P. 295).
“_Whatever things have intimate and continuous connection with my life are things of whose reality I cannot doubt._” (P. 298).
This power of exciting and stimulating our interest, Professor James finds to be possessed in a pre-eminent degree by sensations, which thus become, directly or indirectly, our tests of reality, and among which those which are pleasurable or painful hold the first rank. Next to them, if not of equal power, are emotions.
“The greatest proof that a man is _sui compos_ is his ability to suspend belief in the presence of an emotionally exciting idea. To give this power is the highest result of education. In untutored minds the power does not exist. Every exciting thought in the natural man carries credence with it. To conceive with passion is _eo ipso_ to affirm.” (P. 308).
Professor James’s account of the grounds of belief seems to me inadequate in that it fails to show the connection between our sensations and emotions and other mental states and our beliefs. Why is it that the sight of the heavenly bodies, for instance, awakens in different minds such diverse beliefs as the Ptolemaic and the Copernican systems of astronomy? What does a man who is frightened believe? What belief would necessarily result from a colic? It is not enough to say that sensations and emotions are connected with belief; we want to know how they are connected.
Bearing in mind the definition of belief as the sense of relation between objects, the question resolves itself into the origin of feelings of relation. As relations are of various kinds, they may be suggested to the mind by different circumstances. They may, I think, be divided into three classes:
1) Relations of likeness and unlikeness. These result from the comparison and discrimination of objects. All the beliefs involved in the recognition and classification of objects arise in this way. When, on seeing a certain object, I say that it is a bay horse, and will weigh about eleven hundred pounds, I give expression to relations of comparison. The comparison may be immediate, between objects simultaneously present to the senses, or alike present only to memory or imagination, or between a present object and a remembered one, or mediate, by comparison of two or more objects with some other. All mathematical truths are of this kind.
2) Relations of cause and effect, of substance and quality, of whole and component parts, of order in time and space, are due to association. When I say of the horse that his movements are caused by muscular contractions, that he is of a gentle disposition, that he has a bony skeleton and red blood, that he is five years old and is harnessed to a carriage, I express relations of association. In his chapter on Association Professor James says:
“_Belief_ in anything _not_ present to sense is the very lively, strong, and steadfast association of the image of that thing with some present sensation, so that as long as the sensation persists the image cannot be excluded from the mind.” (Vol. I, p. 598).
I do not think it is a fact that the image of the thing believed in need be associated with any present sensation. I am not aware, for instance, that there is, at present, any such association in my belief in the existence of the city of Constantinople, or that Queen Victoria is reigning in England. The associations in these and similar cases are with objects of memory and not with present sensations. On the other hand, what we mean by belief in a present object always involves memory of the past. When we say that we believe in anything, we either mean that it is like other things of the same sort of which we have had experience, or that it stands in some other relation to them. Complete loss of memory would not only destroy all our past beliefs, but, if it were permanent, would prevent our ever forming any new ones. The universe, in such a case, would be a mere chaos of sensations.
In order that things may be associated, they must first be discriminated, otherwise, as Professor James has shown, in his chapter on Discrimination and Comparison, they are thought of, not as associated things, but as one thing. In like manner, when discriminated things have once been associated, the tendency is, in the absence of contrary experience, to think of them as belonging together. A child, attracted by the brightness of the teapot, touches it and burns his fingers. He naturally expects the teapot to be hot the next time he sees it. He is told that his Christmas gifts were brought down the chimney by Santa Claus. Until the statement is contradicted, he believes it. Why should he not? Or the association of things in the mind may come about without any external suggestion. I remember that the first time that I ever heard a person snore, the thought came into my mind that the strange noise was made by a bear, and I lay awake most of the night, in fear of being devoured. The tendency is to think of things as related in the way in which they are first presented to the mind, until they come up in some different relation. This seems to be the explanation of the tendency to “believe as much as we can,” to “affirm immediately the reality of all that is conceived,” of which Professor James speaks. With increased experience, we find that there is a difference in the uniformity of associations, and accordingly the coincidence of two or more things is associated with the doubt whether or not the association is a constant one.
3) In addition to the relations considered above, there are some which, although expressed in terms of association and comparison, seem to me to have a different origin. That the whole is greater than any of its parts is a relation of comparison; that a thing cannot be in two different places at the same time, that every event has a cause, that there is an external world, are relations of association. Although they do not arise independently of experience, they contain more than is given in experience, and the uniformity and firmness with which they are believed can, it seems to me, only be accounted for by the assumption of an innate propensity to look upon things as related in these ways.
So far as I am able to judge, beliefs always arise in one or another of these three ways. But a still more interesting question, from the practical point of view, than that of the origin of beliefs, is that of the comparative validity of the various grounds of belief. Are they all of equal worth, and if not, is there any way of determining which are to be given the preference, or is belief, like taste, a matter about which “_non disputandum_”?
Professor James does not go very deeply into the discussion of this question. As we have seen, he assigns to sensation the greatest efficacy in producing belief, and discusses the comparative power of various sorts of sensations in this respect. Emotion he makes a close second. But the question which gives us the more reliable information, in cases in which they conflict, he does not discuss at all. As a matter of fact, there is no doubt that a man under the influence of strong emotion often draws different conclusions from the evidence of his senses from those at which he would arrive in its absence. Is he warranted in doing so? Would any degree of personal interest warrant a man in believing or disbelieving the doctrine of transubstantiation, the Newtonian theory of gravitation, the Mosaic or the Darwinian view of the origin of species? There is no doubt that belief on such subjects as these is influenced by our interest, real or supposed, in one or the other view, and perhaps Professor James would say that he deals with the working of minds as they are, not as we imagine that they ought to be, but the general knowledge that a class of considerations is reliable or the reverse is another thing that not only ought to, but actually does affect our beliefs, and the question of the method to be pursued in ascertaining the actual relations of things, of forming true beliefs instead of false ones, is one which hardly ought to be ignored in a discussion of the subject.
Referring to the three classes of relations already considered, it is, I think, evident that there are differences in the way in which they affect our belief. In comparison, the essential thing is the accuracy of the observation. One who has once fully comprehended the proof that the sum of the angles of a triangle is equal to two right angles, is as sure of it as he could be after any amount of experience. In comparing sensible objects, we may, it is true, and our belief confirmed by repetition, but this is only in case that we doubt whether the comparison was rightly made in the first place. That red does not look like blue, nor sweet taste like sour, we are as certain on one trial as a hundred. If we apply a foot measure to an object eight inches long, nothing can add to our certainty that they are not of the same length. In matters of association, on the other hand, a great deal depends on the uniformity of the association—the number of times that we have experienced it without contrary experience. When I hear a crow, for instance, I believe that it is black, because all the crows that I have ever seen have been so. A sheep I assume to be white, but with a less degree of confidence, because black sheep are more numerous than white crows. In the case of a horse, I have no belief in regard to the color within a certain range, unless I have some means of knowing about the particular animal in question. If I were told that my friend had bought a horse, I should have no idea whether it was bay, or black, or white, or some mixture of these colors. If, however, I were told that the natural color of my friend’s horse was green, I should be much more confident that the statement was false than if the same person should tell me he had seen a white crow, for, the same reason that I should more readily believe in a black sheep than in the latter. In the customary use of the word, I might say I _knew_ it was not so. In the case of intuitive judgments experience has little or nothing to do with the strength of belief. The adult man is no more firmly convinced of the existence of something external to himself than the child, and, although he may come to doubt it on speculative grounds, he no more fails than the child to show by his actions that he has a practical faith in it.
In many, if not most of our beliefs, all of these elements are present. If I see an orange, for instance, I have the intuition of externality, the comparison with other oranges that I have already seen, and associations of internal structure, taste, smell, and the like. All of these, and very possibly some emotion, as, for instance, a desire to eat it, may arise, simultaneously or so nearly so as not to be distinguished in time, as parts of a single mental state.
There is one kind of association, of importance enough to deserve mention, of which Professor James makes no mention. The beliefs, or alleged beliefs of other people have an influence on our minds which is, I think, not inferior to that of emotion. The man who can, without misgiving, maintain an opinion which contradicts all that he learned in childhood and all that is held by those whose good opinion he most values is, I fancy, quite as rare as he who can suspend judgment in the presence of an emotionally exciting idea. Most of us take our religious, political, scientific, and practical beliefs at second hand, from the friends with whom we associate or the books and papers we read. Take a young man out of his home and put him, for instance, in college, and it will probably work a change in his moral standards, not necessarily for the better. At home, if he knew of a theft, or an assault, he would very probably be ready to bring the offender to justice, but if the offender is his classmate, and the sufferer a member of the succeeding class, he will very probably think it a more shameful thing to report the wrong than to do it. At the same time, he doubtless considers it utterly reprehensible that ignorant Italian peasants should feel in the same way about betraying their neighbors who are guilty of robbery or murder.
Coming now to the influence of emotion on belief, it will not, I presume, be disputed that it comes about by way of association. Professor James, as we have seen, holds that “every emotionally exciting thought, in the natural man, carries credence with it.” I suspect that this is true only in the sense that, in the absence of experience, not only every exciting thought, but every thought is believed. However this may be, in respect to the natural man, I think it is pretty certain that, in the case of such artificial beings as those who reflect on the causes of their emotions and beliefs, it will be found that in order for an idea to excite our emotions, a certain degree of belief is necessary. Professor James illustrates his position by the fact that a man can walk along a curbstone without any apprehension of falling, because the thought of falling awakens no emotion of dread, while on the edge of a precipice the emotion caused by the thought of the consequences of a mis-step may quite overcome his belief in his ability to keep his balance. But a chamois-hunter or an acrobat will pass along the same place without the slightest apprehension, not because he does not think of what would happen if he should fall, nor because he has more liking than any one else for being dashed to pieces, but because he has what the inexperienced man lacks, entire confidence in his ability to avoid the danger.
Since I began writing the last paragraph, a number of thoughts have passed through my mind, any one of which would be sufficiently exciting if I believed in them, as, that I may die within the next half hour; that I may fall heir to a fortune, and the like, none of which have produced any emotional disturbance, because I do not believe that there is any probability of their being true. Why was it that not only the medical profession but the public in general became so much interested, recently, in the announcement that Dr. Koch had discovered a substance that promised to be a cure for tuberculosis? Partly on account of the interests involved, but at least equally because his reputation was such as to inspire confidence in what he said. There are plenty of medicines advertised in the newspapers for which greater claims are made than Dr. Koch made for his discovery, which fail to arouse any such general interest. These examples are probably enough for illustration of the familiar fact that belief is the most common cause of emotion, and that a thought that is not believed is apt to leave us unmoved.
Nevertheless, it is a notorious fact that emotion has a great deal to do with determining the sort and degree of evidence which is satisfactory to us. Love and hate, respect and contempt, affect our beliefs in regard to the character of their objects in matters entirely independent of the qualities which originally inspired the feelings. We find it an easy matter to believe that a man whose religious or political opinions we think pernicious is a bad man in matters which have nothing to do with his opinions, and may find it almost incredible that one whom we like personally should think differently from ourselves on matters in which we are deeply interested. But what particular evil we shall believe of the person whom we dislike, or good of the one whom we like, depends entirely on circumstances. A man, for instance takes a dislike to a stranger on account of some lack of good manners. Whether he shall suspect him of being a clergyman or an infidel, a drinker or a prohibitionist, a Sunday-school teacher or a gambler, or both, is likely to depend very largely on his own tastes and principles in regard to such matters. So, on the other hand, his views in regard to religion, temperance and gambling, are probably due in great measure to the practice of the people whom he likes. A woman who has been brought up with a horror of drunkenness hears that a man with whom she is violently in love is a drinker. She will probably disbelieve it at first, but if she becomes convinced of the truth of the report, she will very likely come to think that a drunkard need not be such a bad fellow after all. If there is any one thing that more affects our beliefs than what the people we like say, it is what they do.
In like manner, emotional states without any definite object, such as we call moods if they are transient, and disposition or temperament if they are habitual, color our belief, not by originating any definite propositions, but by making us receptive to those that tend to confirm them. It is not when a man is broken in spirit by repeated calamities that he is most ready to believe that “where there’s a will there’s a way,” nor in the flush of youth, health and triumph that the doctrine that “all is vanity,” comes home to his heart. In whatever way such states of mind come about, whether as a result of original constitution, or of experience, or of disease, they make the mind inhospitable to whatever does not harmonise with them. In the case of insanity, this disposition may outweigh the plainest evidence of the senses, so that a man may believe that he is rolling in wealth and luxury when he is destitute of the ordinary comforts of life, or that his wife and children are dead when they are present before his eyes. In a lower degree, most of us probably have experience of something of the sort in “fits of the blues,” but while the general character of the belief may be decided by the emotional tone of the mind, its precise form is determined by the man’s interests. Low spirits would not be likely, for instance, to effect a man’s opinion as to the probable course of the stock market, unless he were in some way interested in stocks, and the view favored by his emotional condition would depend on the side of the market on which his interest lay. Beliefs which, in our ordinary state of mind, are not associated with any strong feeling, such as mathematical truths and the physical and chemical laws of matter, remain unaffected in all kinds and degrees of emotional disturbance.
It seems clear, then, that, as a matter of fact, emotions affect our beliefs through association. It is not difficult to see how this comes about. Emotions tend to perpetuate themselves. A man who is in high spirits will laugh at vexations which, if he were in an irritable frame of mind would seem intolerable. We allow liberties to our friends which would offend us in persons to whom we are indifferent. The same inertia of the mind which is shown in these cases offers a resistance to any thought that tends to disturb it. If I like a man and hate dishonesty, evidence that the man is dishonest calls up at the same time two contrary emotional states, which cannot subsist together. One of three things must happen; either the association of the feeling of liking with the person of the man, or of that of repugnance with dishonesty, or of the quality of dishonesty with the man must be given up, or at least impaired. But the feeling of affection for my friend and that of hatred for the alleged fault are old established associations, while that of dishonesty with his personality is a new one, which, in order to find lodgement, must expel the original inhabitant. Although I may have formed no definite association of honesty with him, the difficulty is of precisely the same sort as if I had. In either case it is the breaking up of an habitual association.
Such being the way in which emotion affects belief, its value as a ground of belief must be determined in the same way as in other cases of association. If any emotion is so exclusively connected with some definite object that the one is never present without the other, we are warranted in inferring the existence of the object from the presence of the emotion, as Robinson Crusoe inferred from the human footprints on the sand that men had been there. As a matter of fact, there is comparatively little uniformity in associations of this kind. The same things affect different persons differently, and the same persons differently at different times. Our hopes and fears are sometimes realised and sometimes disappointed, and people to whom, on slight acquaintance, we feel attracted, often develop qualities of a different kind from what we expected as we come to know them better. If I am fond of money, and also of idleness, or of friendship, and also of having my own way at all times, it does not follow that taking my ease is the way to get rich, nor that always insisting on my own way is the course to make friends. The most, I think, that can be said in favor of emotion as a ground of belief is, that its existence presupposes the existence of some object adapted to excite it. Avarice may be said, in a sense, to prove the existence of wealth—if there were no wealth there would doubtless be no avarice—but not that a particular avaricious man will be wealthy. Fear implies the existence of harm, but not necessarily that harm is coming upon the one that fears. These are matters in which we can apply the test of experience to our beliefs, and it seems evident that emotion adds nothing to our knowledge. We know the things independently of the emotions they excite, and every one recognises that to expect a thing merely because we either desire or fear it is, in matters which we can test by experience, utterly fallacious.
But there are matters lying outside the range of our experience in regard to which it is often confidently asserted that our desires and fears are sufficient proof of their reality—a view in which I cannot agree. If it could be shown that we long for something of an entirely different kind from anything we have known, that might perhaps be an argument in favor of its existence, but such is not the case. The wish for immortality, for instance, is nothing more than the wish for life. Probably there are but few who would not rather have immortality without death than after it, but experience has at last convinced the most hopeful that this is not to be expected, and the search for fountains of youth and elixirs of life has few devotees. We want life, and we have life; we want happiness, and we know happiness, whether we ourselves have it or not, but to say that the fact that we want more than we get of both is a reason for supposing that we shall ever have all that we want of either is to reason in a way which we should all see to be fallacious if applied to things of every-day life. I conclude, then, that the emotions which a belief excites are utterly valueless as a test of its truth, and that we may expect that, both with individuals and the race, emotion will play a smaller and smaller part in belief as true knowledge and culture increase. This is not saying that, in cases of doubt, it is unreasonable to hope that things may turn out as we wish.
As to innate beliefs, it is enough to say that we cannot altogether rid our minds of them, and that they answer perfectly the purpose of working hypotheses. A man may question the reality of an external world to his heart’s content, but if he runs his head against a wall, or drops a brick on his toe, it will hurt him just as much as the most thorough-going materialist. The consequence is that such a doubt does not affect our conduct. Abstractly, these beliefs do not all impress us with the same degree of certainty. That the same thing cannot be in two different places at once, is, I think, felt to be more absolutely and necessarily true than that there is such a necessity in the order of events as is implied in the idea of causation, but for all practical purposes we are as sure of the one as of the other.
I have already quoted Professor James’s assertion of our ability to choose which among different ways of thinking of the same we shall adhere to and which disregard. Perhaps the most prominent feature of his teaching on the subject of belief is that it is an active, not a passive state of the mind—a choice, not a necessity. One or two more quotations on this point will make this plain.
“As bare logical thinkers, without emotional reaction, we give reality to whatever objects we think of, for they are really phenomena, or objects of our passing thought, if nothing more. But, _as thinkers with emotional reaction, we give what seems to us a higher degree of reality to whatever things we select and emphasise and turn to WITH A WILL_. These are our _living_ realities, and not only these, but all things that are intimately connected with these (p. 297).
“Now the important thing to notice is that the difference between the objects of belief and will is entirely immaterial, as far as the relation of the mind to them goes. All that the mind does is in both cases the same; it looks at the object and consents to its existence, espouses it, says ‘it shall be my reality.’ It turns to it, in short, in the interested emotional way” (p. 320).
Although the doctrine is stated, in these and other passages, without qualification, it is hard to reconcile it with some other statements. He devotes a chapter to “Necessary Truths,” and says:
“We _must_ attach the predicate ‘equal’ to the subject ‘opposite sides of a parallelogram’ if we think those terms together at all” (p. 617).
I do not know that it makes much difference whether we say that, in a case like this, we cannot think differently of the same, or that, having thought so, we cannot choose which way of thinking to adhere to and which to disregard. The proposition that a horse is a vertebrate animal cannot be called a necessary, _a priori_ truth, but I find it as impossible to think of a horse that is not a vertebrate animal as of a parallelogram with the opposite sides unequal. A figure with the opposite sides unequal would not be a parallelogram, and anything that was not animal and vertebrate would not be a horse. Whether the difficulty in the two cases is the same or not, it is clear that, by Professor James’s admission, here is a restriction of our choice as to what we will believe.
Again, he speaks of pleasurable and painful sensations as “belief-compelling.” Compulsion, so far as it exists, excludes choice, and if this expression is justified it implies another limitation on the freedom of belief.
With regard to painful sensations, it seems to me that the fact is that they, and their associations, force themselves on our attention, rather than that we “select, and emphasise and turn to them with a will.” If I have a toothache, I may believe that if I retain the tooth it will keep me in pain for a long time, and if I have it extracted, that will also be a painful process. It does not seem to me that the expressions quoted above accurately describe my state of mind in regard to either of these beliefs.
According to Professor James, when a man becomes convinced that he is financially bankrupt, or that he has lost his good name, or that he is suffering from an incurable and fatal disease, it is because he “espouses” this view of the matter, “consents to its existence,” says “it shall be my reality.” This notwithstanding that such a belief may drive him to determine that, so far as in him lies, all existence, all reality shall cease; to consent to death and espouse the grave. Would not the criminal who hears his death-sentence pronounced prefer, if he could, to disbelieve his eyes and ears, and to feel that it was all a bad dream? So far as I can judge with regard to many unwelcome beliefs, they are not like the highwayman who offers the alternative of “your money or your life,” but like him who throws you down, binds and robs you without offering any choice.
Perhaps the most striking example of the view under consideration is found in a foot-note on p. 318, in which, after quoting, with approval, a statement of Royce that “The ultimate motive with men of every-day life is the will to have an external world,” he goes on to say:
“This immixture of the will appears most flagrantly in the fact that although external matter is doubted often enough, minds external to our own are never doubted. We need them too much, are too intensely social to dispense with them. Semblances of matter may suffice to react upon, but not semblances of communing souls. A psychic solipsism is too hideous a mockery of our wants, and, so far as I know, has never been seriously entertained.”
Leaving aside the question whether any one who really disbelieved that there was any reality, outside of his own mind, in objects of sense, could believe in the existence of that which he only infers from the conduct of those objects, it seems to be distinctly stated that the reason of these beliefs is, not that we cannot help believing so, but that we choose to believe so, and not otherwise, and that we are able, having so chosen, to believe as we wish. That there may be no doubt as to the sense in which the term “Will” is used, I will quote the explanation with which he opens his chapter on that subject:
“We desire to feel, to have, to do, all sorts of things which at the moment are not felt, had, or done. If with the desire there goes a sense that attainment is not possible, we simply _wish_; but if we believe that the end is in our power, we _will_ that the desired feeling, having or doing shall be real; and real it presently becomes, either immediately upon the willing or after certain preliminaries have been fulfilled” (p. 486).
Now each one must judge for himself whether this, or anything like this is the way in which he came to believe in an external world. Judging from my own experience, I should say that the reason we originally have such a belief is that it arises spontaneously in our minds, and that, for a long time, it never occurs to us that it can be otherwise. However that may be, I am certain that when the contrary possibility was presented to my mind, it struck me as strange, rather than dreadful, and that I firmly believe many things that seem to me far more hideous than the doctrine that I am the universe. So far as society is concerned, if I can _be_ Shakespeare and Milton and Goethe, Plato and Bacon, Newton and Darwin, Luther and Columbus and Washington, as well as all the people of my acquaintance, it strikes me that I can be pretty good company for myself. To use the universality of the belief as a proof of its voluntary nature seems to me very much such an argument as to say that because all bodies attract each other in the ratio of their mass and inversely as the square of the distance, the falling of a stone must be a purely voluntary matter. I do not see what stronger argument, in a case like this, could be made for the necessity of a belief than the alleged fact that no one, under any circumstances, is free from it.
Now, if we substitute the term “Propensity” for “Will” in the passage quoted above, it would seem to me an entirely accurate description of the facts, and I can only understand how the authors quoted could take the ground they do except on the assumption that all propensities, or at least all which prevail, are choices or volitions. That such is not the case seems to me clear enough in regard to belief from some of the instances which I have already mentioned, but it will perhaps be still more evident from cases in which belief is not in question. The propensity to remember and constantly think of painful and distressing things, which we would gladly banish from our thoughts, or such things as silly rhymes and trifling tunes; to tremble and lose our presence of mind in danger, when we have most need of the full use of all our faculties; to express our emotions by muscular movements when we wish to conceal them, and many others that might be mentioned, are examples of the fact that an invincible propensity may be quite the reverse of a choice.
That belief is an activity of the mind may be freely admitted. The mind—whatever the substratum of our states of consciousness may be—is not a receptacle, to hold indifferently whatever may be poured into it nor a sheet of blank paper, on which this or that may be written by circumstances; it has a character of its own, and reacts to its environment. What the reaction shall be depends both on the character of the mind and what is presented to it, but it seems incorrect to assume that all the dispositions of the mind are of the nature of desires or aversions. In the last analysis of which we are capable, our character is probably due to our physical constitution, original and acquired, and our beliefs may be profoundly affected by a few glasses of whiskey or an attack of fever. Whether the reactions of the matter of which our brains are formed are as invariable as those of inorganic matter need not be discussed here; the present point is that while belief is a sense of the relations of things as they are, the essence of will is the desire to have them otherwise than as they are. To make belief a matter of choice is the same as to say that I may at the same time choose that things shall be as they are and otherwise.
Professor James closes the chapter with a practical observation:
“If belief consists in an emotional reaction of the entire man on an object, how _can_ we believe at will? We cannot control our emotions. Truly enough, a man cannot believe at will abruptly. Nature sometimes, and indeed not very infrequently, produces instantaneous conversions for us. She suddenly puts us in an active connection with objects to which she had till then left us cold. ‘I realise for the first time,’ we then say, ‘what that means!’ This happens often with moral propositions. We have often heard them; but now they shoot into our lives; they move us; we feel their living force. Such instantaneous beliefs are truly enough not to be achieved by will. But _gradually_ our will can lead us to the same results by a very simple method; _we need only in cold blood act as if the thing in question were real, and keep acting as if it were real, and it will infallibly end by growing into such a connection with our life that it will become real_. It will become so knit with habit and emotion that our interests in it will be those which characterise belief. Those to whom God and Duty are now mere names can make them much more than that, if they make a little sacrifice to them every day. But all this is so well known in moral and religious education that I need say no more” (p. 321).
The above passage seems to me to illustrate at the same time the force of Professor James’s rhetoric and an occasional tendency on his part to be carried away by it into statements that are altogether too sweeping. In an immense proportion of cases, the method that he recommends is precisely the surest way to convince ourselves that the thing in question is _not_ real. It is the method which the small boy takes to convince himself that the gun is not loaded; the drunkard and spendthrift to satisfy themselves that their vices will not bring them into poverty and disgrace. A man may sit all day at the fork of the road, and believe that the broad way does not lead to destruction, but when he puts his belief in practice he discovers the truth. So far as practical matters, capable of being brought to the test of experience, are concerned, it can only be said that _if they are real_, we shall convince ourselves that such is the case by acting as if they were real. Doubtless Professor James had not such prosaic things as these in mind when he wrote the passage, but a method that will not serve us in regard to such questions as whether water will wet us or fire burn us, can hardly be called infallible. But even in regard to questions that must always remain matters of opinion it is not true in the unqualified sense in which Professor James puts it. Probably many men, brought up in the belief that it was their duty to observe the first day of the week by religious worship because the Hebrews were required to abstain from labor on the seventh day, have come to modify their belief without any material change in their practice, and even the belief in regard to the nature and attributes of God may be affected in advance of a change in the conduct based upon it.
The law of association in this regard is subject to the same limitations as we have already found to hold in respect to other matters. Associations of action with belief have a tendency to strengthen it, but, as in the case of emotion, they may be overcome by other considerations, and it is entirely possible for a man to go on for the better part of a lifetime in punctilious conformity to usages which in his heart he despises, and break out in open rebellion at last. From the ethical point of view, the advice which seems to be implied, of deliberately choosing a way of setting doubts at rest which is as efficacious on the side of error as of truth, of vice as of virtue, seems to me, to say the least, of doubtful tendency. We must often act in doubtful cases, and take the risk, amongst others, of thus confirming ourselves in error, but certainly there can be no more solemn motive for weighing well our beliefs before committing ourselves to them by action than the fact that we may, by habit, pervert our moral sense, blind our judgment and stifle our conscience.
To the man who believes that there is a universe, of which he forms an infinitesimal part, and that all his interests depend on his attitude toward the power that works in it, it is of infinitely more interest to know how he can know the truth than how he can convince himself of this or that. Shall truth be our master, to be followed and obeyed, though he command us to give up all else that we hold dear, or our servant, to be employed as suits our passion or caprice, and dismissed when he will no longer serve our purpose?
This is perhaps the most momentous question that we are called on to decide. The man who makes the wrong choice may or may not attain what he seeks, but though he gain the whole world, he will lose his own soul.
W. L. WORCESTER.
FOOTNOTES:
[62] _The Principles of Psychology_, by William James, Professor of Psychology in Harvard University. In two volumes. New York: Henry Holt & Company, 1890.
[63] The italics, in this and my other quotations, are the author’s.
THE NATURE OF MIND AND THE MEANING OF REALITY.[64]
Professor William James’s supposition of “an hallucinatory candle” seen by a “new born mind entirely blank and waiting for experience to begin” is an impossible and self-contradictory figment. We might as well speak of the dry Niagara falls employed in the manufacture of some material goods out of nothing. For, first, a mind entirely blank is no mind and, secondly, a blank mind if it could exist at all, would have no hallucinations. An hallucinatory candle can be produced only out of the memories or the combination of memories of former candle-sensations. A blind man sees in his dream no colors, and a deaf man hears no symphonies.
A new-born babe is already in possession of many inherited memories. Thus the first sense-impressions after the babe’s birth find the organism, especially its skin, nerves and muscles predisposed for their reception. The babe’s organism accordingly presents an instance of a relative but not of an absolute blank; an absolute blank of a something that is to develop into mind can mean only a lump of sentient matter at the moment of formation. As soon as it is formed it is exposed in every second of its existence to innumerable impressions which fill the blank with contents and these contents are the mind that is developing.
Sentient substance is not at rest, but like a flame it is possessed of an incessant activity. The form of this activity is both extraordinarily plastic and stable. It is plastic, for every impression together with the reaction of the impression modifies it and leaves a trace: it is stable for the traces of all the impressions and reactions are preserved.
The first sense-impression of a lump of sentient substance produces an irritation which objectively considered is a commotion of the sentient substance and subjectively considered a feeling, the substance being sentient _ex hypothesi_. This first and primitive feeling is meaningless, for it has not, and cannot have, any reference to any other feeling, memory or mind, and meaning is created through the interaction of feelings with memories of feelings.
Some later sense-impression of the same kind will not only produce the same irritation but also serve as an irritation to awaken the memory-trace left by the former sense-impression. The new feeling will melt into one with the reawakened memory of the former feeling. In the long run many traces of the same kind which are, as it were, deposited in the same place will constitute an organ predisposed to receive the correspondent impressions; and now a sense-impression received by such an organ may be called a sensation. A sensation is not merely a feeling, it is a feeling of a special kind and it is felt to be of a special kind. In other words, a sensation is a feeling that has acquired meaning; and this meaning is the product of the interaction and coöperation of feelings and memories. Sensations have become symbols representing the cause of the sense-impression which produced the sensation, and ideas are symbols of a higher order representing either whole classes of a certain kind of causes of sense-impressions or certain features thereof, or certain relations among them.
Thus every mind is a system of sentient symbols. These symbols being as it were pictures intended somehow to represent or allegorically speaking to portray things are called “ideas,” while the things symbolised are in their totality called objective existence or “reality.”
Considering the nature of mind, it is obvious that there cannot be an entirely blank mind. We might as well speak of an entirely blank picture. But an entirely blank picture is a canvas and no picture at all. That a mind which is not as yet a mind can have neither sensations nor hallucinations is almost self-evident. Similarly there is no sense in saying that a picture that consists of an utter blank and thus is properly speaking no picture at all but an empty canvas, either does or does not correctly represent a certain object.
The word “real” is used in two senses (1) as a name for everything that exists and (2) to signify that kind of existence which is the object of our sensory and mental experience, i. e. the objective world so-called. The former of these two definitions is more comprehensive; for it includes the realm of mentality, the ideal world of subjectivity. The latter is used in contrast to the subjective world of mental life and thus expressly excludes the ideal realm of the mind and of mental symbols.
The questions as to What is reality? and Is there anything real at all? must not be formulated as they are by Professor James, in terms of belief but in a statement of facts and by defining certain facts as real.
An hallucination is real in the first sense of the word; it is an actual existence; it is a feeling taking place in the mind of some organism. It is also real in the second sense of the word in so far as it is a vibration of a brain structure. However an hallucination is not real in the second sense of the word in so far as its meaning has not its correspondent analogue.
Let the meaning of a certain mental symbol be a candle, under which name we comprise a certain group of experiences, and let the cerebral structure of this mental symbol be awakened by another stimulus than that which is generally called a candle. Those experiences which as a group are called a candle are of a certain kind. If a piece of paper approaches the lighted candle, it will burn. An hallucinatory candle will leave the paper intact, although the person who has the hallucination may see the paper burn. Thus the ideas or images of objects are built up of experiences which have taught us that under certain conditions certain events happen; in consequence of certain actions there are constantly certain reactions taking place. Reality consists of such facts; it is the sum total of all reactions; reality is the nature of objects which react somehow.
Those who jump at the conclusion that our subjective sensations, such as colors, tastes, sounds, etc., must be regarded as objective properties of things, are grossly mistaken. Our sensations are not qualities of things but subjective phenomena: they do not inform us about the nature of things, but reveal to us how things affect our senses. Those however who deny or doubt objective existence are no less mistaken. The world is not a subjective phenomenon of sensations, but an objective existence symbolised in sensations.
The question is not “Does reality exist?” but “What is Reality?” or “What is the meaning of ‘real’?” When we say “Objects are real,” we mean that they resist, they react, their presence produces somehow some effect. When we say, We ourselves are real, we mean that we react upon the objects with which we come in contact, we mean, that in our bodily existence we are objects in an objective world.
## Actions and reactions are taking place. This is a fact. He who denies
it is like the man who declares that he is not at home; he contradicts himself: for the denial of a question is a reaction upon an action. The term reality is the symbol of the nature of actions and reactions in their efficacy, it denotes the essence of facts and thus the question “Does reality exist?” has no sense. We denote that which exists, that which acts and reacts, that which is a fact, or howsoever we may express it, by the word “reality.” We might deny that the reactions of the objective world are constant, or that a certain idea of a certain reaction is erroneous, viz. that the reaction if put to the test would prove to be different from what it was expected—but all these denials and doubts which are of daily occurrence in the domain of science presuppose that there are reactions taking place and reality or objective existence is only a collective name for these reactions and their nature. The name object still preserves the idea of reaction, for object is that which reacts upon touch, which resists, which is objected.
We shall lose ourselves in inextricable confusion by making a matter of doubt and belief what is really a statement of facts. To speak of a doubt or belief in the reality of things in general is tantamount to speaking of a belief in our experiences which, whatever their particular nature may be, are facts. And to doubt our experiences, not the correctness of a particular experience, but experience in general, i. e. the very existence of experience is tantamount to doubting our own being.
A consideration of what we mean by an hallucination can best make clear what we mean, and rationally can only mean, by reality. A real candle is a mental symbol of something which will under certain conditions react in a certain way. An hallucinatory candle is also a mental symbol, but the thing which it purports to mean, does not exist; i. e. there is nothing that will react. The symbol is there, but not that something the existence of which the symbol of the idea “candle” would indicate.
This method of dealing with the problem of the old naïve realism and the pseudo-critical idealism of former times is not based upon the assumption of the reality of things (which means, of the reality of reality); it is simply a careful formulation of the problem to prevent our being entangled all about with contradictions; it is the method of rendering clear the basic principle of positivism, that all knowledge is a description of facts, which description of facts is made for the purpose of, dealing with facts.
P. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[64] This article was suggested by Dr. W. L. Worcester’s criticism on Professor James’s Psychology. When Dr. Worcester discusses Professor James’s supposition of an hallucination in a blank mind, saying that it would be “the only possible reality of that mind,” he almost seems to adopt Professor James’s views of the subject himself. Clearness about such fundamental terms as mind and reality, are so much needed that the following remarks may not be out of place as a further explanation of the subject. Exactness in fundamental and general terms will save much labor in detail work.
MONISM NOT MECHANICALISM.
COMMENTS UPON PROF. ERNST HAECKEL’S POSITION.
Prof. Ernst Haeckel’s Anthropogeny, the fourth edition of which appeared of late,[65] brings again into prominence that conception of monism which identifies the monistic view with mechanicalism.
A review of this book has appeared already in _The Open Court_, No. 231, in which we called attention to the great merits of a work which has become a household book, not only for the scientist, but for every educated reader who is interested in man and the origin of man. Our knowledge in Anthropogeny, certainly, will influence not only our general world-conception, but through our general world-conception it will extend its influence not only over every branch of science but also into the broader fields of man’s daily life and his practical morality.
Professor Haeckel is the most popular naturalist of to-day and there is no one, perhaps, who has made a more effective propaganda for the monistic world-conception than he. So it is almost a matter of course that his definition of monism is generally accepted as the standard. We have formulated our view of monism in a way which in principle and general outlines concurs with the commonly accepted usage of the term, yet it deviates from it in some important points which are perhaps not merely matters of detail. It will be difficult to say how far we agree and how far we disagree with Professor Haeckel’s monism because those subjects in which we disagree, have never been elaborated by him, and we are inclined to believe that he would modify some of his expressions, if he devoted a quiet hour’s thought to the objections we have to make to his definitions.
Professor Haeckel’s monism being mechanicalism savors strongly of materialism. He says in the latest edition of his “Anthropogenie” which is now before us, Vol. II, p. 851:
“There can be no doubt that a thorough consideration and unprejudiced deliberation of these facts will lead to a decisive victory of that philosophical conception which with one word we call monistic or mechanical in opposition to the dualistic and teleological. Upon the latter are based most of the philosophical systems of antiquity, of the mediæval times, and also of the present time. The mechanical or monistic philosophy declares that certain and immutable laws obtain everywhere in the phenomena of human life as much as in nature generally, that a necessary causal connexus obtains everywhere in phenomena and, accordingly, that the knowable world forms throughout a unitary whole, a monon. Monism moreover maintains that all phenomena are produced alone through mechanical causes (_causæ efficientes_) not through premeditated purposive causes (_causæ finales_).”
And in the first lecture “The History of Evolution and Philosophy,” (p. 15) he says:
“We shall clearly recognise in the following investigations how the most wonderful enigmas of human and animal organisations, heretofore considered as inaccessible, have become accessible to a natural solution through Darwin’s reform in the doctrine of evolution by a mechanical explanation of purposeless efficient causes.”
In agreement with these views, Professor Haeckel regards the terms necessity and mechanicalism as equivalent terms. He rejects any kind of teleology, any kind of final causes, and also the freedom of the will. He opposes the so-called moral world-order as contradictory to the idea that the world is regulated by mechanical law and he adopts the latter to the exclusion of the former. All these points come out very strongly and clearly in Professor Haeckel’s letter to the editor of _The Open Court_, where his view of monism is graphically presented in a concise tabular form.
We here reproduce this table from No. 212 of _The Open Court_, for the convenience of our readers:
=======================+=======================+======================== MONISM. | FUNDAMENTAL CONCEPTS. | DUALISM. -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------ Inseparable. | Matter and force. | As a matter of | God and world. | principle distinct | Soul and body. | entities. -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------ Mechanicalism. | Life. | Vitalism. Necessary evolution. | | Teleological creation. -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------ Universal (conservation| Immortality. | Individual. of energy). | Freedom of will. | A person’s will being Determinism. | | absolutely free. -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------ Causæ efficientes. | Causation. | Causæ finales. (Efficient causes.) | | (Final causes.) -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------ Regulated by mechanical| World-order. | So-called “Moral.” law. | | -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------ Inseparable and subject| Inorganic and organic | As a matter of to the same laws. | nature. | principle distinct | | and subject to | | different laws. -----------------------+-----------------------+------------------------
Now we agree with Professor Haeckel in one main point, viz. “that certain and immutable laws obtain everywhere in the phenomena of human life as much as in nature generally, and that the knowable world forms throughout a unitary whole, a monon.” But we cannot agree to his proposition that “the wonderful enigmas of organised life are accessible to a natural solution by a mechanical explanation of purposeless efficient causes.” We grant willingly that mechanical explanations will serve for all motions that take place in the world; even the motions of the brain take place in strict obedience to the laws of molar and molecular mechanics. But a mechanical explanation is not applicable to that which is not motion. If it were applicable it would not be desirable, for it would be of no avail. Mechanical explanations are to be limited to mechanical phenomena. Feeling however is not a mechanical phenomenon, and an idea, being a special and a very complex kind of a feeling, or rather and more accurately expressed, being the special meaning of a very complex feeling, is not a mechanical phenomenon either. It is true that when a feeling takes place and when an idea is thought in the brain of an organised being, that a certain nervous action takes place. The nervous action is a motion and this motion represents a definite amount of energy. There is no theoretical difficulty, although there are almost insurmountable practical difficulties, in measuring the definite amount of potential energy that is changed into kinetic energy when a man thinks. Yet the brain-motion is not the idea and by a mechanical explanation of the brain-motion we have not even touched the problem of what the nature of the idea is, why ideas originate and how they act.
We know that Professor Haeckel when he so vigorously insists on mechanicalism, opposes those philosophers who believe that there are motions which cannot be explained by mechanical laws. We side with Professor Haeckel against any one who maintains that some motions are mechanical (molar or molecular) and others are exceptions to the laws of mechanics, representing a kind of hypermechanics. But we cannot admit the explanation by mechanical laws of non-mechanical phenomena.
Professor Haeckel speaks of purposeless efficient causes—_zwecklos thätige Ursachen_. He speaks of efficient causes, as excluding final causes. He is right in his objection to final causes as the term is commonly used. But while there are causes that are _zwecklos_, there are no causes that are _ziellos_. Every process of causation takes a definite course, it has a certain and definable direction. The end of this direction need not be a conscious aim, but it is an aim whatever it be, it is a _Ziel_. In this sense every efficient cause is at the same time a final cause. The gravitating stone has no purpose, yet it has an aim. So the evolution of organised life is a natural process having a very definite aim. And this aim of the evolution of organised life is determined by factors of a very complex nature. One of these factors is almost imperceptible at the beginning, but it is of a constantly and rapidly growing importance; and this factor is the psychical element that appears with organised life. This factor is nothing supra-natural, nothing extra-natural, and yet it is not something material or mechanical. It is this factor which in its highest efflorescence changes aims into purposes, and with this change it creates again a new factor of evolution which is the purposive aspiration to conform to the world-order and thus to advance the further progress of mankind. This aspiration is in one word called morality.
When we speak of a moral world-order we mean that such moral behests as were formulated in prescripts by Confucius, by Buddha, by Moses, by Jesus, and other moral teachers of mankind have an objective and immutable foundation in the nature of things. The mechanical law in the province of motions, the logical law in the realm of thought, geometrical proportions in mathematics, the regularity of natural laws, etc., form in our world-conception a part of this moral world-order. The laws of social life are not opposed to them but correlative.
The purpose of a man’s action reveals his character, and the character of the man is his innermost nature. In an analogous way the aim of evolution and especially the aim of the evolution of organised beings reveals the character, the innermost nature of the universe. Psychic life is absent so far as we can see in the primordial world substance as it appears in the form of a nebula; it is absent still in the primordial state of planets. It appears with the subjective states of awareness that rise into existence in organised life. The subjectivity of unorganised matter is, in comparison with man’s subjectivity, to be considered as a blank; i. e., if there is in it a state of awareness, which we have reasons to doubt, it is apparently without meaning; it does not symbolise external objects; it is no mind; it is, as it were, blind. Yet the aim of evolution being the development of psychical life, shows that the subjectivity of unorganised matter is spiritual in its innermost nature. And the aim of psychical life being the development of moral ideals, we are very well justified in speaking of the world-order as moral. When speaking of the world-order as moral we mean that the moral prescripts of the great ethical teachers of mankind are founded in and derived from the world-order of nature.
There is one objection to calling the world-order moral, and we therefore dislike to use the phrase. It is this: Morality means conformity to a certain standard. The standard is not moral, but those who do or do not conform to it are moral or immoral. Therefore if there is any truth in the idea of God it is this that there is a standard for human conduct to conform to, there is an authority which has to be obeyed and this authority is God. To speak of God as moral or immoral is anthropomorphism. If “God” means anything, it means that power of the world-order obedience to which is called morality. If we say God is moral, God ceases to be God, the moral authority above him to which he has to conform would be the really true God. Thus logically the personal conception of God leads to a superpersonal conception of God.
These are in brief our objections to Professor Haeckel’s definition of monism as being identical with mechanicalism and perhaps also with materialism. My opinion that Professor Haeckel may after all accede to our view of monism is based upon an interesting and friendly conversation which I enjoyed with him several years ago in Jena. Professor Haeckel is not the one-sided naturalist that he is often represented to be by orthodox clergymen. He does not see the workings of the natural laws only, he sees also the moral aspect to which a consideration of the natural laws leads. That his books emphasise the former without entering into the problems of the latter is natural for a scientist, but he personally is certainly even broader than are his books, and I should say that his very opposition to certain errors which have been foisted by an antiquated dogmatism upon our religious institutions, show the deeply religious spirit of his character.
P. C.
FOOTNOTES:
[65] _Anthropogenie oder Entwickelungsgeschichte des Menschen._ Keimes-und Stammesgeschichte. By Ernst Haeckel. Mit 20 Tafeln, 440 Holzschnitten und 25 genetischen Tabellen. Vierte, umgearbeitete und vermehrte Auflage. Leipzig: Engelmann.
MR. CHARLES S. PEIRCE ON NECESSITY.
Mr. Charles S. Peirce is one of those thinkers who in the investigation of a subject go right down to the bottom of the problem. This appears to me the more conspicuously so, as the result to which his investigations lead stand in a strong contrast to my own views. Yet I cannot help admiring the boldness of his trenchant critique which finds the difficulties at the point where really the main difficulty of all philosophical inquiry lies buried. It lies buried, i. e. it does not appear on the surface of things. If it lay on the surface, our most superficial thinkers would naturally light on it; but most of them walk their way in peace, unmolested by the question, Is there any truth in the idea of necessity. An editorial treatment of this problem may be expected in a forthcoming number of _The Monist_.
P. C.
BOOK REVIEWS.
EINLEITUNG IN DAS ALTE TESTAMENT. By _C. H. Cornill_, Professor at the University at Königsberg.
When Darwin and his followers first gave to the world the astonishing results of their studies, few were those who at once recognised the importance of the new theories and still fewer those who readily accepted them. But within the last thirty years, gradually but steadily the number of those who have adopted as virtually true the hypotheses of the new school, has been increasing until to-day those are in the minority who teach a view different from Darwin on the origin and evolution of the universe. The history and fate of the new studies in Biblical criticism bear a striking analogy to the reception accorded to Darwinian researches. At first they were met with well nigh universal opposition. They were declared to be subversive of the holiest interests of religion. They were held to rob the Bible of its glory. But by slow degrees the first passion yielded to wiser counsel. Curiosity led to the examination of the new positions; and in consequence in ever widening circles the conviction gained ground that far from taking away from the dignity of the old Hebrew literature, these new investigations and the method upon which they footed, lent new lustre to the collection of ancient writings. And to-day the battle has been won by the school of Wellhausen and Kuenen. Few are those who to-day urge the old views on the authorship date and historical succession of the several parts composing what is called the O. T. or even on the canonisation of the whole collection.
The startling assumptions of Wellhausen, Graf, and their Dutch colleagues had their forerunners, as had Darwin and Wallace. But when George and Vatke in the fourth decade of our century and Reuss, in his first academic lectures, virtually anticipated the lines of research of their later successors, the world was too busy with other matters to give their labors much attention. (Cfr. this work, p. 8.) For all this, primitive orthodoxy had only few representatives in this domain, at least in Germany. While Hävernick and Keil and Hengstenberg, are ranged on the extreme right of the line defending with all the resources of a vast erudition the traditional views, the middle ground is occupied by such men as Ewald, and Hitzig, and the teacher of these De-Wette, a school of critics that to-day yet counts among its protagonists such men as Dillmann and Schrader and Kittel. With Graf, a new era may be said to have begun for Biblical criticism. Notwithstanding the violent opposition encountered, the school has won the day. Its greatest triumph was perhaps the acquiescence in its positions shortly before his death by that master of Biblical science, Professor Delitzsch of Leipzig. What the cardinal point of contention is between the warring camps, is well known. It is the relative age and position of what is technically designated as the Priestly code, in the Hexateuch. According to the new school this portion is the capping stone of the edifice, as it were. For Dillmann it is pre-exilic; for Wellhausen post-exilic.
The book before us places itself without equivocation on the standpoint of this latest criticism. It is thus another leaf in the laurel wreath crowning the men of the new dispensation. For the name of the author is guarantee of the scholarly character of the work; and views which have the endorsement of a man of the renown and the scholarship of Professor Cornill carry the presumption of having truth on their side. Professor Cornill is however, a new-comer in this special field. His life work, as he himself says, lies in another province of the vast realm of Biblical critical studies. His fame is associated with his critical edition of the text of Ezekiel, a work which will forever stand as the best guide for all who would venture on the dangerous ground of conjectural textual emendations. For Cornill was the first to lay down the method which above all must be followed in so venturesome a task and his new version is the classic illustration of the correctness of his method of proceeding. That a man who has established for himself the reputation of being methodic and painstaking almost to a fault, a man who is dowered with critical acumen of the highest order, should after going anew over the whole ground cast the weight of his scholarly authority in favor of the views of the new critical school is a fact the significance of which cannot be blinked. We are indeed glad that the publishers entrusted this number of their intended series of manuals for theological students, to a scholar who had hitherto not written _ex cathedra_ on this particular subject. Thus was ensured a new and impartial examination of all the points involved.
The ends which this series of manuals is to serve, decided of course the style and scope of this work. Of introductions (_Einleitungen_) to the O. T. there was no scarcity; but (see preface) they were either too bulky and too full and thus did not answer the requirements of the student, not yet a scholar; or they were too brief, mere “ponies” as we here in America would say, intended to be learnt by heart for the purpose of passing a good examination. The difficulty thus consisted in combining thoroughness with the necessary brevity without sacrificing lucidity. No mere results on the other hand were to be stated. The student was to be initiated into the course of the investigations, the reasons for the conclusions and thus his interest was to be awakened and the way prepared for independent research on his own part. That the author has succeeded in carrying out this his programme, every section of the book confirms. His fear that the full analysis in paragraph 12, of the priestly code will be found to be out of place in an “outline of this kind” is groundless. We do not hesitate that this very section is the gem of the whole work full as it is of numerous passages which cannot but stir to profitable reflection the student. None can lay this book aside without confessing that he has gained a “Gesammtanschauung,” an insight into the unity and coherence of the new views, apt to convince all earnest and unbiased minds of the truth that in this science (_Wissenschaft_) criticism is standing on firm ground. In the selection of the books named at the head of each chapter, or in the course of the discussion, the Professor has displayed most consummate skill. There is scarce one important work which with profit may be consulted but is mentioned; and what is more in the right connection. This feature is not the least valuable in the whole work; the student thus has at ready command a bibliography which excludes the chaff and stores the wheat.
But let us dwell a little more specifically on the plan and execution and the contents of this book. Two plans may suggest themselves to the writer of an “introduction” of this kind. He may attempt to give a picture of the rise of literature among the ancient Hebrews and treat of the different writings which have come down to us, often the fragments of larger works, in the order of their composition and at the same time connect with this discussion the reasons for departing from the traditional views as to their dates and so forth and for assigning them to a new age. This would be virtually writing a history of the literature. It is this plan which Reuss adopted. But according to our Professor, investigation has not proceeded far enough to make such a history possible. He even doubts whether it ever will (p. 2). Perhaps his verdict is justified. At all events he is right when he urges that in such a sequence much which belongs to the branch which he is to teach, will scarcely find its proper or organic place. And therefore it was a wise conclusion of his to adhere to the second plan, the traditional, for such _Einleitungen_ which treats of the different books in the order of the Hebrew canon and finally takes up the discussion of such questions as the collection of the canon, the condition of the text, the different ancient versions and their value for the reconstruction, if possible, of the true original. But what is an _Einleitung_? It is that theological “discipline” which concerns itself about holy scripture as a book. It is its business to fix the time when and the manner how the several writings were composed, which now collectively form the holy scriptures, again it is one of its main objects to understand at what period and under what conditions the several writings were collected and also the manner of the tradition of this collection down to us. The method of this inquiry can be none other but the historic critical. To this definition of the character of this discipline, to retain this German name, none will take exception. It is both succinct and complete. The second paragraph gives a full survey of the history of the studies in this field. It covers within the brief space of ten pages the results of scholarly labors extending over a period of over fourteen hundred years. It is not a dry enumeration of names and book titles. Under each scholar, the salient element of his contribution is emphasised. The living principle of these studies is thus illustrated in its growth and successive development. Take for instance this description of Wellhausen’s method, and in a similar manner that of all other predecessors or co-laborers is brought out: “At the hand of the history of the cultus and that of tradition, he shows how these two lines of development run parallel to each other, how the religious process of evolution at every halt and turn finds its expression and at the same time its corroboration in the productions of literature: Israel and Judaism are two concepts radically different from each other; it is the canon that differentiates Judaism from old Israel.” Paragraph three states the author’s reasons for treating the single books first before taking up the discussion of their collection into a canon, and also why the apocrypha are excluded. These not being in the canon, are foreign to the purposes of an introduction into the canon books. None will deny that the Professor’s arguments on these points are irrefutable. His inquiry into the age of the art of writing among the Hebrews concludes this general preliminary. He is of the opinion that as far back as the memory of the Hebrews goes, they were acquainted with this art as nowhere there is a sign that among them there was a dim recollection of an analphabetic period. Recent finds have made it plain that during the reign of the Pharaoh of the exodus a lively correspondence was kept up between Palestine and Egypt, while for the reign of David the names of his court officials is documentary proof that there were writers at his court. The use of the pen must have been pretty general among the people as is shown by Judges viii, a chapter which belongs to the oldest layer of historical compositions.
Our space is too limited to abstract every chapter of this remarkable book. Much as we should like to do this, and especially as in this manner alone we can hope to do justice to its merits, we must confine ourselves, now that we come to the “special introduction” to a few selections taken from the discussion of the main points in reference to books which have been the centre of critical study. The Pentateuch as is natural receives the lion’s share of the author’s attention. We have no hesitancy in saying that his is the best exposition of the modern views which has yet come under our notice. The Pentateuch cannot be the work of Moses; internal evidence, as already pointed out by Aben Esra, Hobbes, Peyrerius, and Spinoza, render the traditional assumption of Mosaic authorship untenable. But the Pentateuch cannot be the work of one author. The critical labors of one and a half century, sketched most skillfully, has made it plain that the Pentateuch has been “worked together” from four independent original writings, (_Quellenschriften_) a yahwistic work, J. an elohistic, E. a Deuteronomistic D. and a priestly which after Kuenen is denoted as P. On this general division the scholars are agreed, the relative age of the separate parts alone is yet under controversy. In paragraph seven an analysis is given of the first four books as assigned to the three sources. Deuteronomy occupies a position of its own. It is characteristically different in language and thought from the others; it is something essentially new and is in itself homogeneous. In the main Deuteronomy is the book of the covenant mentioned in II. Kings xxiii; this original D. is now incorporated in chapters xii, xiii, xiv-xvii, where however certain verses and even parts of verses must be eliminated. Perhaps xxviii, or as Professor Cornill argues, something more succinct but of the same general nature, a curse, may have belonged to the original D. This must have been the book published under such extraordinary circumstances in 621. Who is its author? It presents itself as the work of Moses. But this is characteristic of the tendency of the age to take a great man as the father of a new literary production, a tendency which was perfectly well understood and was far above the level of a literary deception. Its early manifestation in D. is merely proof that even then Moses was among the people the law-giver _par excellence_. The author of D. must be looked for in the circle of the pious who in consequence of Manasse’s retrogression were bound all the more closely unto each other. In other words among the men of the prophetic party, who must have had influence also over certain priestly orders, for D. is a compromise and an alliance between the prophets and the priests. Besides these components of original D. the book contains in its present form additions and duplicates which partly are historical and hence are denoted by D.h, partly parenetic, hence D.p; but again in these are many later interpolations. For the particulars in this regard, we must refer to the work of Cornill itself. His analysis displays a keen eye and will on the whole be sure to be accepted as final. The date of D. being 621, what is the time of the other great sources of the present Pentateuch. It is clear that D. is acquainted with the “book of the covenant” Ex. xx, 23.-xxiii, 33. and with both Decalogues (?). Thus it was acquainted with JE. P. on the other hand is totally unknown. The historical portions of D. confirm this deduction from the legislative pieces. JE is clearly known to D. while of a knowledge of P. there is not the least trace. How far back of 621 may we go to fix the date of both J. and E.? The period of the first kings seem to be the limit, or more particularly the reign of David. But which of the two is the elder, J. or E.? There can be no question that J. is. For he is more naïve as appears from a comparison among others of chapters Gen. xx, 1-17, xxi 22-32 which belong to E., with chapter Gen. xxvi. 1-33 which is J.’s. E. appears to be a theological recasting of J. E. is the work of the Northern kingdom. Joseph always appears as the leader of his brothers and other features confirm this impression. The year 722, when in the Northern realm national consciousness was at its high water mark may then be supposed to be the _terminus ad quem_. But is E. as we have it a literary unit? Kuenen has proven that it is not. A century after its original composition a second edition so to speak must have been made with a view to meet the requirements and prejudices of the Judaic population of the South. Ex. chapters 32-33, are of great decisive importance in this connection. They are a rebuke for the golden calf worship at Dan and Bethel. Thus E. is divided again into two E.1 and E.2, to which come yet other later amplifications f. i. Num. xxi, 32-35. E.1 then belongs to the reign of Jeroboam II (750); and E.2 is the work of a later author living in Judah and under the influence of prophetic ideas. The locality of J. is a point of controversy. Cornill sides with those who maintain that his home is the Southern kingdom of Judah. The incidents in the Patriarchal biographies which seem to weaken such an assumption are explained as original traits of tradition which J. had no interest to change. J. again is not a literary unit; it compromises J.1, J.2, and even J.3. The reasons for these subdivisions are clearly given in the book. J. must have been composed in its different parts between 850-625. The priestly code occupies a whole paragraph, the signal merit of which we have noticed above. This is indeed the master-piece of a great critical master. The many points which are involved in the discussion of this mooted problem are treated with a clearness and a calmness which carry conviction to the most sceptical. P. presents a spiritual unity but not a literary. P. is the offspring of P.1 an old priestly record and P.2 a narrative and legislative composition which is as it were the substance and skeleton of P. around which younger accretions have gathered at different times for which Cornill in order to simplify his symbols proposes the designation of P.x. J. S. Vater as early as 1805 has proven that in the so-called Mosaism, of the influence in literary and legislative respect of our P. there is no evidence before the captivity. Wellhausen and Kayser and Kuenen have demonstrated what for Vatke was a dim suspicion. Dillmann, Kittel, and Delitzsch as little as Baudissin have succeeded in saving the pre-exilic character of P. Certain it is that before Esra 458 (444), this code had no official recognition. From Nehemiah we have the proof that our P. corresponds to the “Book of the Law of Moses” which was read at the great assembly in October 444. On the other hand the book of Chronicles is based on P. as it details history, as it would have been, if P. had been the law regulating life and liturgy and temple service. Had P. been known before D. what reason should the priest have had who promulgated it to substitute for it another code less advantageous for his own order? P. is clearly a development of D. D. presents itself as something new in all of its demands, in its insistence on centralisation, in one sanctuary and in one priestly order on the legitimacy of the tribe of Levi exclusively. Of the tabernacle there is not one syllable in the whole of the pre-exile literature. It is a clear projection into antiquity of the Deuteronomic Central sanctuary. The relations of P. to Ezekiel make this still plainer. This prophet is the link of transition between D. and P. The omissions in the festal cycle of E. can only be explained that this prophet-priest was unacquainted with P. The captivity is thus the time for the composition of P. in the main. Its emphasis on circumcision as the sign of the covenant which decides the connection with the chosen seed and nation, is proof of this. And the chronology finally corroborates all previous inferences as the chronology of Genesis which is so important a part of P. is unmistakably a reconstruction after certain principles of the Babylonian history of the beginnings. (Oppert.) P. was written during the century from Ezekiel to Esra (570-458). It was not merely P.2 that Esra read before the assembled people. P.1 and P.2 seem thus to have been united even at this time. But it is not to be assumed that under Esra P. was already a part of the other portions of our Pentateuch. P. itself contains parts which are later than Esra. P.x is undoubtedly later and these additions are easily explained on the very assumption of the official introduction of P. P. is not the work of an individual; it is that of a whole school, a school which naturally formed in the captivity. Besides these “source-writings,” the Pentateuch contains smaller pieces of great antiquity mostly of a poetic character which had for a long time an independent existence. Such is Gen. xlix, Exodus xv, and others. Exodus xxi-xxiii, the so-called book of the covenant, requires also a treatment by itself. It is characteristic of this book that it ignores totally the Decalogue. Kuenen has solved the difficulties in which this collection of judicial precedents is involved by pointing out that it is the predecessor of D. D. is merely the substitute for this. As it is older than E. and is the precipitate of the unwritten law of the earlier kingly period, we place its date in the ninth century. Lev. xvii-xxvi while betraying in many regards affinity with P. is still distinct from it. It stands between Ezekiel and P.; it is one of the many priestly Thoroth which undoubtedly were current among the class whom they concerned. How now did these component parts finally combine? This is elucidated in paragraph fourteen. First J. and E. were put together, by an editor of Jehovistic leanings, whom Wellhausen has styled Rj. (R. standing for German Redacteur, Editor). This Rj. worked over, and that often decidedly, his materials in keeping with his own convictions. This Rj. probably lived about 650. His position is pre-deuteronomic. A second editor combined the work of Rj. with D. He is designated as Rd. His was the placing of the old book of the covenant near Sinai in order to gain room for Deuteronomy. He thus became the cause of much confusion. He lived during the second half of the Babylonian captivity. JED. was finally combined with P. by a third editor (Rp.) who is characterised by considerable reverence for the old documents. He omitted much to guard against repetition but at the same time where the relations differed he preserved them most faithfully and endeavored to place them into their proper position and connection. Rp. was thus virtually the author of our Pentateuch. But living after Esra even with him the Pentateuch was not yet closed. Many younger hands had a share in its final shaping. Glosses were added or crept into the text, as is shown by comparison with the lxx. The book of Joshuah is a necessary continuation and complement of the Pentateuch.
But here we must stop quoting in detail. Much as we should desire to reproduce Cornill’s own words relating to other Biblical books, want of space precludes even the attempt. Suffice it to say that as in his treatment of the Pentateuch, so every question bearing on Biblical criticism is handled with the skill of the master. At whatever turn we ask information of this book we receive it most abundantly. This is indeed a students book. It stimulates while it instructs. It leads while it describes the road passed over. In the discussion of the critical problems on the Psalms, the prophets Isaiah and Zechariah, on the final collection of the canon, the translation of the Bible and the relation of the different recensions to each other, the historical books as distinct from Chronicles, and Esra, and so forth, every point is treated with a lucidity of style and a fulness of material which is the rare gift of a man who is saturated with his science and loves it for its own sake. This book is destined to rank among the classics. Its earnest study and repeated consultation can therefore be recommended to all who wish to inform themselves about the method and the achievements of the critical schools. The kindred book by Driver, recently published will not make a translation into English of Cornill’s manual less desirable. We take leave from the author with a feeling of great gratitude for the pleasure and the profit we derived from his contribution to the literature of Biblical scholarship. The book is well printed and singularly free from typographical errors.
DR. E. G. HIRSCH.
THE PRESENT POSITION OF THE PHILOSOPHICAL SCIENCES. An Inaugural Lecture. By _Andrew Seth_, M. A. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood and Sons. 1891.
As stated by the author, this lecture deals, not with the circle of the philosophical sciences, but only with the subjects traditionally associated with a Chair of Logic and Metaphysics in Scotland. These subjects belong to the three-fold classification of logical, psychological, and metaphysical, or philosophical in the strict sense. They therefore embrace the study of the conditions to which valid reasoning must conform, the investigation, introspectively and otherwise, of the phenomena of consciousness, and the study of the two-fold question of knowing and being, which as epistemology and metaphysics are included under the designation of Philosophy. These three lines of learning are cognate, and the first two are in a measure introductory to the third, or at least, says Professor Seth, if we go beneath the surface they lead us into the very heart of philosophical difficulties. The lecturer refers in his sketch of the present outlook in these three departments of science to the marvellous activity displayed in the department of psychology. All the influences at work may be said to meet and come to fruition in Mr. Ward’s “masterly treatise” in the “Encyclopædia Britannica” and “the rich and stimulating volumes” of Professor James, of Harvard. Experimental psychology is now widely spread in Germany and has been enthusiastically taken up in America, “where every well-equipped college aims at the establishment of a psychological or psycho-physical laboratory.” Professor Seth thinks, however, that the experimental psychologists magnify their office overmuch. The field of experiment is necessarily limited to the facts of sensation, the phenomena of movement, and the time occupied by the simpler mental processes. The results are often so contradictory as to leave everything in doubt, and where definite results are obtainable, their value is often not apparent. Moreover, many of the results are of a purely physiological nature, and are only by courtesy included in psychological science. We would remark on this, that without the experiments the results would not have been obtained and that their value will become apparent when the methods of experiment are perfected. After referring to the critical function of philosophy as a doctrine of knowledge, Professor Seth states that as constructive it should lay special stress on a _teleological_ view of the universe. By this is meant, that philosophical teleology should concentrate itself upon the proof that there is an end of evolution, “that there is an organic unity or purpose binding the whole process into one and making it intelligible—in one word, that there _is_ evolution and not merely aimless change,” such as is supposed in a purely mechanical view of the universe. As to the nature of the end, although the lecturer accepts Hegel’s view that all things are relative to man as rational, he cannot accept “the abstraction of the race in place of the living children of men.”
Ω.
DER MENSCHLICHE WELTBEGRIFF. By Dr. _Richard Avenarius_, Ord. Professor der Philosophie an der Universität Zürich. Leipsic: O. R. Reisland. 1891.
This monograph is as it were a self-confession. The author endeavors to attain clearness in his own philosophical standpoint. He looked back upon the path he has traveled and feels that “the solution of the problem-attained is fundamentally a personal self-liberation” (Preface, ix). This book is most commendable reading to all idealists and agnostics. It is an interesting and instructive little work, tracing with a keen psychological criticism the vagaries of certain philosophical conceptions, through which not alone the author but the thinkers of mankind in general have strayed. The philosopher begins with what Avenarius calls the “natural world-conception.” But this natural world-conception leads to contradictions and the evil spirit of speculation leads us in a circle through the barren fields of idealism. Avenarius asks: “Is the world really of such a nature that it appears unitary and consistent only to the superficial thinker, while it leads every one astray who attempts to grasp it more precisely in its entirety—the more so the more consistently the thinker proceeds?” (p. xiii.)
The author proposes the question: “In what consists the inevitableness of the contradiction to which every general world-conception seems to have led? Or, if the world really be unitary what is the evil spirit that leads those astray who hunger and thirst after a true cognition of the world?”
The author has entirely abandoned the idealistic standpoint, an inclination to which he showed in his first publication, “Philosophie als Denken der Welt gemäss dem Princip des kleinsten Kraftmasses.” He says: “Doubt of the correctness of my way heretofore pursued was induced through the barrenness of theoretical idealism in the field of psychology; and yet cognition and experience should belong to this science as psychological ideas.”
The author in explaining the development of thought as it takes place in man proceeds in a personal way, so much so that every idealist ought to be satisfied. There are whole pages which teem with _ME_’s and _I_’s. The method of notation is what might be called American. Europeans often complain about our abbreviations, the Y. M. C. A., the S. A. S., the C. B. & Q. Ry., etc., which are great puzzles to the uninitiated new-comer. In a similar way Avenarius introduces such algebraic signs as _R_ and _E_, which means reality and the sensations which our fellow-men are supposed to have. _M_ is Man, _T_ is fellow-man. _T₁_ is the bodily appearance of _T_, it is _R_; while _T₂_ is the _E_ of _T_, i. e. his soul or spirit. _C_ is the nervous central organ, etc. Thus Avenarius says (p. 18):
“I can in a relative consideration assume _R_ to be the condition of changes in the _E_ values, supposed to exist in _M_, only if _M_ and in _M_ the system _C_ are parts of my supposition,” and in a note (p. 117) he adds:
“The skeleton in Goethe’s poem, ‘The Dead’s Dance,’ scents without an organ of smell, sees without eyes, thinks without a brain; it also moves without muscles. To consider such acts as true is now universally declared to be superstition. The time will come when the assumption of psychical phenomena without the coördination of the system _C_ will universally be considered in the same way.”
The first three chapters remind us very much of W. K. Clifford’s article “On the Nature of Things in Themselves.” But the article is nowhere mentioned and it is most probable that it is unknown to the author. If Avenarius had known Clifford’s view, he might have presented his ideas with more economy of space. But if he did not know Clifford’s article, the coincidences of procedure and to a great extent also of the result attained are the more remarkable. What Avenarius calls the _E_ values are termed by Clifford “ejects,” and the formation of ejects is called by Avenarius “introjection.”
On page 52 we read the following sentence on the three phases of the cognition of the data of experience:
“The first phase alone, that of ingenuous empiricism, cognises, i. e. explains the totality of these facts without the assistance of a non-sensible ... the second that of ingenuous realism conceives the non-sensible as supersensible, and the third, that of ingenuous criticism, as the pre-sensible. The epithet ingenuous has reference to the foundation, not to the doctrinary system built upon it. That which makes the said realism and criticism ingenuous is a survival of the ingenuous empiricism.”
The theory which conceives the external cause of an experience as an object, effecting _in_ the subject sensations, passes successively through the following views. The object is said to be (1) not within the range of experience, (2) not within the range of cognition, (3) not-existing. Thus it reaches _via_ agnosticism its climax in idealism and “pure experience becomes a something that is never truly experienced, it becomes the totality of mere or pure sensations” (p. 62).
The third part of the pamphlet is devoted to “the restitution of the natural world-idea.” Here the author comes, at least in some expressions, very close to the solution editorially upheld in _The Monist_. Avenarius says: “The task is ... to _describe_ the what of my experience so as to make a practical application of it in my dealings with my fellow-men” (p. 79).
Professor Avenarius sums up his conclusions in the term “empirio-critical principal-coördination” which he defines as the inseparability of the ego-experience from the surrounding experience. “The ego and the surrounding belong in the same sense to every experience. It is a co-ordination peculiar to all experience” (p. 83). If we understand Avenarius correctly he means to say, to express it in our terms, that there is no object but there is a subjective aspect of it, no subject but it appears objectively. Thus there is no subjectivity in itself and there is no objectivity in itself. This is exactly our position, which we call Monism.
The “introjection” was according to Avenarius the evil spirit that led speculation astray. To get rid of this evil spirit the proposition is made to discard “introjection” and replace it by the empirio-critical principal-coördination. But closely considered the latter is only an improved modification of the former, and this plan would better be characterised as discarding the error implied in that kind of introjection theory which assumes that sensations alone are given. The data of experience are not mere feelings, not mere subjectivity, as is maintained by the idealist; nor are they mere objectivity, as is maintained by the ingenuous realist; the data of experience are states of subject-objectness, they are feelings of a certain kind possessing objective significance, and the ideas subject as well as object are abstractions made in a late stage of mental development from this one inseparable whole of subject-objectness (see _The Monist_ I, No. 1, pp. 78-79).
Avenarius says in a note (p. 132), “The question should not be ‘Why do we believe in the reality of an external world?’ but ‘Why did we not believe that the external world is real?’” We should say that neither question is admissible. We should first ask: What do we mean by real? Reality is the sum total of our experiences, including the meaning of sensations and ideas, and finds its special application in their reliability. The question, Is the candle I see real? means, Does it react in special ways? Every name of a special object signifies a certain group of actions or reactions observable by the subject. This is what we _call_ real and the idealist would have to deny the existence of his own experience to deny the reality of objects in this sense.
Avenarius’s books are not easy reading to the English and American student, for his style is sometimes heavy and his constructions are involved. So are his thoughts. But his thoughts show the earnest thinker; the evolution of his views goes in the right direction and his works deserve the attention of his co-workers in the philosophical field.
κρς.
DIE BEDEUTUNG DER THEOLOGISCHEN VORSTELLUNGEN FÜR DIE ETHIK. By Dr. _Wilhelm Paszkowski_. Berlin: Mayer & Müller. 1891.
Religion originates everywhere, according to the author, in the self-consciousness of man who feels himself an acting and willing being limited by and dependent upon greater and higher powers. The religious relation consists in the regulation of his actions as well as his will with reference to the ordinances of these powers. Dr. Paszkowski lets all the best known religions pass in review before our eyes, tracing in all of them the connection between the properly religious elements and morality and singling out those religious factors which are most effective in determining man’s will in a moral way. In the second part of the little volume he endeavors to show in how far the ecclesiastical organisation of religion in dogma and cult have strengthened and in how far they have weakened this result.
Concerning the most important dogma, which is the belief in immortality, Paszkowski declares that it had its undoubted effects favorable and unfavorable upon the social and moral life of mankind. It has prevented some crimes while it has enhanced others. The question is, he says, whether an individual immortality such as the religions usually picture it, is tenable or not. Modern science and anthropology seem to have proved it an illusion. Yet, as Paulsen says, the belief in immortality is not a mere imagination. Every reality and so also man’s life is eternal. It is nonsensical to think of death as a finality. That which has been alive is a necessary, an eternal and inexpugnable part of reality and can never again be blotted out. Through death the continuance of a man’s life is cut off, but the contents of his life can never again be annihilated. The real is in its very nature eternal. Paszkowski adds to Paulsen’s remarks that man should find the norm of moral action in his relation to his fellow-men and posterity, so that morality need not depend upon any religious views. He will also have to act morally after he has resigned the belief in the reality of the beautiful immortality-dream as it is presented by enthusiastic religiosity.
It appears to us that if the usual conception of immortality is scientifically untenable it devolves upon the moral teacher to present an immortality conception that is tenable. The true immortality conception will never enhance crimes, it will always have a favorable effect upon the morality of mankind. Furthermore man’s relation to mankind and also to the universe is of a religious nature. The social order to which man has to conform is one part of those powers a recognition of which constitute religion. If these powers are conceived to be outside the world we have a supernatural deity, if they are the highest, best, and greatest of, and in the world itself, we have an immanent deity and ethics still remains intimately connected with and dependent upon religion.
This it appears must be after all the author’s meaning, for he says in prominent print, p. 89: “So long as there are men religion will not cease, for it is one of the constitutional elements of human nature.” “In the same measure as religion becomes spiritual, the moral conceptions also will be purified, the mere ceremonial and the cult-element will lose their importance in religion” (p. 92). “To divide the ethical factor from the religious, as a matter of principle, will be seen to be impossible. We can only conciliate the one with the other, both having originated out of the same source of emotions” (p. 90).
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DAS WAHRNEHMUNGSPROBLEM VOM STANDPUNKTE DES PHYSIKERS, DES PHYSIOLOGEN UND DES PHILOSOPHEN. Beiträge zur Erkenntnisstheorie und empirischen PSYCHOLOGIE. By Dr. _Hermann Schwarz_. Leipsic: Duncker & Humbolt 1892.
Dr. Hermann Schwarz treats the most fundamental problem of philosophy—viz. that of perception. He says in the preface: “There is a triple state of facts to which obvious yet strange as it appears to thought, the attention of the naturalist and the philosopher is drawn: the physical, the physiological, the psychical.” The physical is the empire of mechanical motion that can be observed with great accuracy to take place everywhere. The physiological is the fact that when certain impressions produce mechanical effects upon the nerves, the result consists in certain sense-data; nervous action is accompanied with sensation. The psychical state of things exhibits the fact that whether or not we want it to be so, colors, sounds, odors, tastes, and touches are always referred to external things, never to the own internal states of the mind. Every one of these facts is strange in itself, for every one represents the contrary of what might be expected _a priori_. Who would expect that the machine-like world of jostling atoms and the glorious world of colors and sounds should have anything in common? And the sense-organs appear to the physiologist as mere physical apparatuses modifying the ether-vibrations somehow. We do not see on the one hand how consciousness can acquire information concerning the external world and on the other hand, how motions can develop something so heterogeneous as is consciousness. If we were confronted with one set of facts only, everything would be plain, but this triple set of facts produces a problem, it makes an explanation necessary and to this explanation Dr. Schwarz has devoted a careful investigation of some four hundred and odd pages.
Schwarz distinguishes two elements in what he calls “ingenuous realism,” (1) its methodology and (2) its metaphysics. The methodology of physical science consists in arranging the sense-data, while the metaphysics assume that the objectivity of the sense-data is correctly represented as “things, qualities, and effects.” Natural science arrived at a scepsis of the usual metaphysics of naïve realism by a correction of the ingenuous-realistic method, and Kant by critically investigating the background or frame of its theory of cognition. The question is, What is altered by physical science in the conception of ingenuous realism, what by physiology, what by philosophy and why?
In the consciousness of an ingenuous realist the data of touch receive a preference over those of the other senses, which is due to their greater stability. The color of an object disappears, the sounds cease, while the objects remain comparatively the same things to the sense of touch. Thus they are considered as the real objects having certain qualities which produce the phenomena of the other senses. This view is called by Schwarz the first methodological dogma of ingenuous realism. The second dogma is the conception that sense-data are considered as relatively permanent. So colors are conceived to exist objectively in the dark, an error which has been sufficiently explained by Helmholtz in his “Physiological Optics,” § 26. The third dogma completes the second; it is the view that the relative permanence or disappearance of the qualities of objects depends upon causes. Fire is said to be the cause which makes a wire red-hot. The ingenuous realist knows no reciprocal causation, no action and reaction, no _Wechselwirkung_. He assumes in addition to the objects certain force-beings which are regarded as the causes of all change. The sun is said to produce light.
Schwarz explains very well how this view of ingenuous realism naturally arises and also how in the progress of thought it naturally corrects itself. Suppose there were thinking beings with whom smell took the place of touch and sight, would not their world-conception be based upon the data of the sense of smell as is ours upon the data of mechanical motions? If the females of a certain butterfly (_Frostspanner_) are caught in the country and placed at a great distance in some house of the city, the males will be seen on the next morning in great numbers fluttering before the window of the room in which the females are kept. What a perfection of the sense of smell while the senses of touch and sight are very poorly developed! The dog owes his intelligence mainly to the development of the sense of smell. Would not beings whose intelligence is mainly due to the sense of hearing rather attempt to hear the world than to grasp or comprehend it,—to _behorchen_ rather than to _begreifen_?
Ingenuous realism is not consistent, and its methodology leads to alterations of its metaphysics. We shall have to attribute either to all the sense-data objective reality or to none of them. The data of touch cannot be treated as exceptions and thus we have the alternative either to return from our scepsis to realism, not to the ingenuous but to a critically modified view of it, or to adopt the extremest form of idealism, be it that of Berkeley or the subjectivism of Fichte.
The author (not unlike Professor Avenarius in his book “Der menschliche Weltbegriff”) takes the former view. He says in the concluding chapter (_Die Mängel der Ding-an-sich-Hypothese_): “This view, viz. that of ingenuous realism, will in the end of our inquiry be seen to be not only the most natural, and practically considered the most useful metaphysical theory, but also that conception which is freest from all theoretical obscurities” (p. 381).
We believe that the book which contains much valuable material, would have been more useful than it actually is, if a chapter had been added containing a summary of the whole inquiry and delineating in great outlines the critically modified form of realism whose most appropriate name we should say is monism—not materialism or mechanicalism which allows all facts to be swallowed up by the conception that the world consists only of matter in motion, but that monism which is a unitary view of the whole, mindful of the fact that the sense-data as well as our concepts are one-sided aspects only of the one and all. If we bear this truth in mind we shall avoid from the beginning the three dogmas (alias errors) of ingenuous materialism.
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DIE ENTWICKELUNG DES CAUSALPROBLEMS IN DER PHILOSOPHIE SEIT KANT. Studien zur Orientirung über die Aufgaben der Metaphysik und Erkenntnisslehre. (Part II.) By Dr. _Edmund Koenig_. Leipsic: Otto Wigand.
The present work forms the conclusion of a volume published by Dr. Koenig in 1888, entitled _Die Entwickelung des Causalproblems von Cartesius bis Kant_. This same subject is here pursued in the history of modern philosophy since Kant.
The problem of causality, according to Dr. Koenig, has two aspects, an epistemological and a metaphysical. The pre-Kantian efforts dealt chiefly with the latter, the post-Kantian more principally with the former. The latter, the metaphysical question, is, How do things in the world of reality produce effects in one another? The former, or that which relates to the theory of knowledge, is, (1) What is the logical foundation of the idea of causality, what do we imply when we set up two objects as cause and effect, and (2) By what right and to what extent are we justified in imputing to the axiom of causality an objective validity? With respect to the latter, the epistemological, point of view, Hume and Kant believed they had established indisputably that experience as given does not furnish sufficient grounds either for the idea or the axiom of causality. On the other hand, others, like Maine de Biran, Schopenhauer, and Trendelenburg, hold, that causality is given us in experience, that we apprehend the causal relation subsisting between things, together with the things. Herbart maintains that the idea of the causal relation has been reached by the logical elaboration of experience in conformity with the general laws of logical thought. Mill and Spencer see in this idea an element that goes beyond experience, but justify it only psychologically, not logically. According to Lotze, Riehl, Wundt, v. Hartmann, Volkelt, the idea is either wholly or partly of intellectual origin. Finally, Comte and a few modern scientists look upon the idea of causality as logically valueless and scientifically superfluous.
This is, in brief, the opinions of the greatest thinkers whom Koenig treats of, respecting the logical composition of the idea of causality. But another question, that namely as to the character of the relation in which in the causal judgment the notions of the concrete causes and their effects exist, is one closely allied with this. Some hold, (Trendelenburg, Goering, Herbart, Hamilton, Spencer,) that the relation is one of identity; others that it is synthetical. This aspect is also developed in connection with the last-named thinkers.
With respect to the axiom of causality, we find diametrically opposed to each other the doctrines of empiricism and apriorism; but a number of intermediate opinions have also established themselves. Of the first, Schopenhauer, Lotze, and Volkelt are representatives, but only the theory of the first-named is developed at length. The empiricism of Mill and Goering meets with exhaustive treatment, as does the opposed view of Laas, Riehl, and Wundt and the conciliatory view of Spencer.
With respect to the metaphysical aspect of the question, above-mentioned, we find the modes of conception of phenomenalism and realism opposed. The latter only is, in the nature of its doctrine, required to explain ontologically the coming about of the causal relation in reality; the former does not recognise Being in itself, and hence there can be no causal connection of such. Schopenhauer’s attempt (the view of the forces of nature as the emanation of a Universal Will), and the splendid ontological theories of Herbart and Lotze are regarded by Dr. Koenig as being no more a solution of the problem than were the efforts of their famous predecessors Spinoza, Malebranche, and Leibnitz. These dogmatic realists, as Koenig calls them, proceed from the assumption of the knowableness of the absolute; opposed to them, in this regard, are Spencer, Von Hartmann, and Volkelt, the critical realists, the first of whom gives an ontology that is a vague and metaphysical rendering of the principle of the conservation of energy, the two last of whom impute a transcendental ontological significance to the idea of causality.
The connection, Dr. Koenig concludes, is thus apparent and definite between the metaphysical and epistemological divisions of the question. The ontologist, unless he proceed dogmatically, must prove, that the notion of causality in the form in which critical analysis has established it as a valid and indispensable empirical idea, calls inevitably for the notion of an absolute reality and of a state of things in that reality corresponding to the forms of the connection given. Therefore, the logical analysis of the idea of causality is in any philosophy, pre-eminently determinative of its whole position and bearing.
On the whole, then, in the treatment of the problem forming the subject of this work, four comparatively independent views are found opposed to one another and considered in this opposition; viz., Sensualism and Intellectualism, Positivism and Rationalism, Empiricism and Apriorism, Realism and Phenomenalism. The author views the result of his researches to be, the proof of the untenability of Sensualism, Rationalism, Empiricism, and Realism, so far as this, by an historico-critical analysis, is possible.
This is but a brief sketch of the treatment pursued by the author. The author’s own view has been barely hinted at. He is a Kantian. He calls himself a “transcendental idealist.” Dr. Koenig’s developments, appreciative, acute and pointed as they are, are too detailed and exhaustive to be separately taken into discussion here; but we may illustrate his point of view by a summary of a few remarks of his on the ontological problem as solved by physics. They are as follows.
The _natural_ modes of thought cling irresistibly to the notion of a constant substratum; this being so, how does process, how does change spring from an invariability of existence? Physical science answers, by _force_; which exists as a constant potentiality of the substratum, is now active, now latent. Dr. Koenig maintains that in this physical science accomplishes nothing towards the solution of the present problem; it does not by its notion of force make intelligible the _acting_ of bodies on each other, for when it comes to define the mode of action of force it involves itself in hopeless difficulties. What is the consequence then, of this dilemma of science, where it can neither render plain the “nature” of the material substratum, nor the nature of “force,” which is, so to speak, the source of the activity of the substratum? It is either agnosticism, which places limits to our knowledge, and which Dr. Koenig rejects as unbecoming true thought, or it is that theory which regards the phenomena alone as real and views the concepts of theoretical physics as the mere shifts and helps of thought whereby we bring the phenomena into connection with one another. This latter view also Dr. Koenig cannot accept. His express contention is, that we can interpret, _ontologically_, the phenomena of reality by the notions of substance, force, etc.; he holds that the position of transcendental idealism is the correct theory here, the position namely that matter and force conceived as transcendent, independent entities cannot be _thought away_, because substantiality and causality are _forms_ of transcendental apperception, which alone can make nature an object of cognition; matter and force must, for purposes of empiric observation, of necessity possess the same reality as phenomena themselves.
In connection with this subject Dr. Koenig contests Mach’s doctrine, that natural laws are simple economical descriptions of phenomena; he contends that “law” is the foundation of natural science, and particularly so the law of causality.
This, however, does not say much. For the formal laws _in themselves_ are empty. The law, the axiom of causality may, _a priori_, be without exception; but this circumstance, the _conviction_ we may call it, offers us no hold on nature. When we investigate nature we have to perceive _definite facts_; about which we formulate particular laws or statements. The law of causality, however, does not help us to _discern_ the determinative facts or features of any phenomenon. It simply says that _if_ we have hit upon the determinative facts and formulated a law describing them, that law holds good throughout all nature. But what is to tell us _what_ the characteristic and determinative features of a given event are and when we have lighted on them? The law of causality? Surely not. The law of causality cannot tell us that for falling bodies _v_ = _gt_, i. e. that _t_ is decisive. It simply says that when once this fact has been _discerned_ it holds universally good. But it would have asserted the same thing with regard to Galileo’s first (false) assumption, namely that _v_ = _Cs_. If, then, the law of causality cannot tell us what those features are between which the causal connection is assumed to exist, what is to tell us? Our observation simply, which must be tested by experience. But our observation has no limits placed to it except this, that it shall select some fact that _represents_ the phenomenon and best and most easily enables _us_ to represent it. And there is nothing that requires that there should be only _one_ feature or _one_ aspect of an event by which it is representable; there may be several, as the development of science proves. Accordingly, what selection we make may depend on arbitrary and historical circumstances. And this, as we take it, is Prof. Mach’s contention. If it is true, Dr. Koenig’s criticism of Mach’s view does not hold in its whole extent.
Dr. Koenig’s treatment of the separate representative thinkers is exhaustive and in an eminent degree scientific. His work is distinguished by accuracy and pointedness of characterisation, and by special knowledge of great range. It is a valuable contribution which he has given us, to the study of the theory of knowledge and metaphysics, and he has been true to his promise, as we judge, critically to discuss and not summarily to dispose of the opinions of others.
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EINE NEUE DARSTELLUNG DER LEIBNIZISCHEN MONADENLEHRE AUF GRUND DER QUELLEN. By _Eduard Dillmann_. Leipsic: O. R. Reisland, 1891.
The author is an admirer of Leibnitz’s monadology which he considers as “the most beautiful, most perfect fruit of philosophic thought and the most glorious system to be found in the history of philosophy.” This enthusiasm however is not shown in panegyrics but in a careful investigation of the great master’s work and we should scarcely know the attitude of the author toward the philosopher whose thoughts he discusses, if he did not give vent to his feelings in a few sentences of the concluding chapter. The rest of the book consists of purely critical and historical studies by a sober and cool-headed scholar. Leibnitz’s system as it is represented in our histories of philosophy and as it is currently conceived lacks a unitary and leading idea, so that many of its most fundamental propositions appear to be at variance. Mr. Dillmann maintains that Leibnitz’s philosophy as it really is does not lack this unity; he has made an extensive and most diligent study of Leibnitz’s works and proves with great plausibility through the assistance of many pertinent quotations the justice of his cause.
Leibnitz’s monadology is according to Dillmann essentially a conciliatory system. It attempts to reconcile the world-conceptions of his time. The mechanical explanation of nature as it was proposed in modern times and according to which all processes should be conceived as motions of bodies is harmonised with the formalistic views of classical antiquity and of the schoolmen which seeks for the causes of all phenomena in substantial forms. In aiming at such a combination, he had to show that all single phenomena of bodies and also their qualities had some ground and that the principle of the body itself consisted in a substantial form. This led him to conceive of bodies and of all things not as phenomena of an external world but as representations in the mind, and thus an entirely new standpoint was gained (p. 511). Representations are the inner states of Monads (p. 318). Monads are substances because representations are units; for representations are the many expressed in a unity (p. 319). Every monad is a concentration of the universe (p. 313). It is as if God had multiplied the universe as often as there are souls (p. 314). Every substance is a little world in itself, expressing the great world of the universe. The substance imitates in its little world what God does in the universe (p. 313).
Leibnitz’s God-idea has suffered most from a misconception of the fundamental idea of his system. Dillmann declares that the traditional view, especially Fischer’s, is in conflict with the philosopher’s own words. While Fischer says that Leibnitz’s God has created the substances and arbitrarily endowed them with their natures, Dillmann maintains on the ground of ample quotations that Leibnitz considers the forms of all possible existences as given: not even God can alter them. God however can and did compare all possible worlds, and then created that which his wisdom found to be the best world. “God,” says Leibnitz, “does not select a general Adam, but such a one,” i. e. an individual Adam, “whose perfect representation is found among all the possible beings which exist in the ideas of God. The nature of every creature is determined by eternal truths which are in the understanding of God independent of his will.” “God’s decree consists alone in the decision arrived at after having compared all possible worlds and having admitted into existence that one which is the best of all.”
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LEITFADEN DER PHYSIOLOGISCHEN PSYCHOLOGIE IN 14 VORLESUNGEN. By Dr. _Th. Ziehen_, Docent in Jena. Mit 21 Abbildungen im Text. Jena: Gustav Fischer. 1891.
The merits of these 14 lectures on physiological psychology are thoroughness, lucidity, and conciseness; the whole book is a pamphlet of 174 pp. only. The method of presentation is in all its detail work positive, stating the facts as they have been found to be by experience and as they are corroborated by experiment. Upon the whole it is a good résumé of the present state of knowledge. A translation would be very desirable and it is to be hoped that some of our psychologists will undertake the work.
The contents are briefly as follows: I. Contents and scope of psychology. II. Sensation, association, action. III. Stimulus, sensation. IV. Taste, smell, touch. V. Hearing. VI. Vision. VII. Affective aspect of sensation (pleasure and pain). VIII. Sensation, memory, concept. IX. Association of ideas. X. Judgment and syllogism. XI. Attention, voluntary thought, the ego (Ziehen says: “psychologically considered the simple ego is a theoretical fiction,” p. 139). XII. Diseased thinking, sleep, hypnosis. XIII. Action, expressive motions, language. XIV. Will, general conclusions.
Although Dr. Ziehen’s pamphlet is upon the whole an excellent treatise, we cannot agree with the author in several questions which are of great importance in their consequences.
Dr. Ziehen acknowledges that the specifically nervous processes, a sensible stimulus and a reaction, which latter is a motory effect, cannot be explained from physical laws alone (p. 4). Yet at the same time he denies that the fact that the reflexes are adapted to a purpose (_Zweckmässigkeit_) proves the presence of a psychical parallelism. “Pflüger,” he says, “was wrong in attributing for this reason to the spinal cord a spinal-cord-soul.” The _Zweckmässigkeit_ of reflexes (i. e. their being adapted to a purpose) has originated not otherwise than the _Zweckmässigkeit_ of the color of the bird’s plumage, i. e. through natural selection and inheritance. This argument might be admissible, if we had not to account for the gradual origin of consciousness also. There was a time when our personal consciousness did not exist, and there was also a time when no conscious being lived upon the earth. Unless we assume that consciousness suddenly appeared, creating out of its own subjectivity alone the objective world which appears to us as what we call matter in motion, we shall have to adopt some monistic view of the subject. To consider the psychical states as known and the objectivity of existence as utterly unknown is no monism.
Dr. Ziehen is opposed to the idea of psychical parallelism which he conceives to be dualism, but he proposes a spiritual monism in its stead, the difficulties of which he does not explain. It is to be regretted that Dr. Ziehen has not understood the main idea of the parallelism doctrine. He says in a foot-note (p. 6): “In the most extreme way, but with quite insufficient reasons Lewes has maintained the omnipresence of consciousness.” This is a misstatement of Lewes’s view, which by the bye is held by the reviewer also, although he confesses that the term parallelism is inappropriate and leads to misunderstandings. The theory of parallelism, (at least as the reviewer holds it) is not dualistic but monistic. It implies that the subjectivity and objectivity of existence are two different abstractions of one and the same reality. Its parallelism is a parallelism of these two sets of abstraction, while the reality from which they have been derived is one throughout. There exist no subjects that are not objects to other subjects, and every object admits of a subjective aspect. There is a something supposed to be present throughout nature which under certain conditions appears as consciousness. This certain something is called by Clifford elements of feeling, by Lloyd Morgan metakinesis, it has been characterised in the editorials of _The Monist_ as the subjectivity of existence, and the presence of this something in the spinal cord was called by Pflüger _Rückenmarksseele_.
It appears to me that if we could explain the well adapted reaction of nervous substance without assuming a psychical element in it, we could explain the whole process of evolution and the historical development of mankind, without the assumption of consciousness. Yet it is obvious that even the explanation of the color of the bird’s plumage by the theory of natural selection and heredity presupposes the presence of psychical elements somewhere. Either the bird and his mates show a color sense, or his enemies do, whose persecution he escapes, or the animals upon whom he preys do. Man’s entire existence, physical and psychical, including his feelings of pleasure and pain, can be explained by the theory of natural selection and heredity; yet this is no proof that psychical elements do not exist in him.
It has become customary at present to define “psychical” as that only which appears in states of consciousness, and to exclude subconscious and unconscious states. Dr. Ziehen says: “Everything given in consciousness and that alone is conscious” (p. 3). Yet he introduces after all the expression “psychically latent,” “latent memory pictures,” and similar expressions. Dr. Ziehen says, “We cannot even have a conception of that which an unconscious idea can be”; yet what is a latent memory-picture but an unconscious idea?
There are two kinds of unconscious ideas: (1) Latent ideas. Every man’s brain is full of latent ideas, i. e. of memory-pictures which are at present unconscious but can become conscious at once if their activity is roused by an appropriate stimulus. (2) Ideas unrelated to the centre of consciousness. Those active ideas which, although at present in a state of activity, are unrelated to the centre of consciousness that constitutes the ego of the man, remain unconscious. Unconscious cerebration (which takes place in dreams, in diseased brains and also in certain phases of healthy brains being, as it were, a by-play of their conscious activity) need not be destitute of feeling. Any pain may be lessened when our attention is called away from it. The nervous disorder remains the same, the feeling substance of the nervous structures in which the pain was perceived also remains the same, its activity and throbbing pulsations do not cease. Yet if we succeed in separating its immediate relation to the centre of consciousness it sinks down into subconsciousness. There is no reason for assuming that the feeling, no longer perceived, is wiped out entirely.
While Dr. Ziehen’s pamphlet is a presentation of the results of positive science, we were astonished to find in the first chapter the following statement: “Later on we shall have to investigate whether there are for all psychical phenomena such material parallel processes in the central nervous system, and our answer will be decidedly in the negative.” And again we find in the schedule of psychology a distinction between (_a_) psychical processes _not_ contingent upon cerebral functions (transcendental psychology), and (_b_) psychical processes contingent upon cerebral functions (physiological psychology). These statements are the more perplexing as the author joins the opposition made by Münsterberg against Professor Wundt’s idea of apperception, which is rejected as metaphysical, mystical, and even animistic. While we cannot in all points agree with Professor Wundt’s theory of apperception, which received a critical examination by Professor Delabarre (see _The Monist_ II, No. 2, p. 297), we can most positively say that Dr. Ziehen in so far as he classes Wundt’s view among the dualistic theories, misunderstands Wundt’s position. Wundt’s physico-psychical parallelism cannot be identified with the metaphysical fiction of a subject, be this subject called ego or soul.[66] Wundt says in a late publication of his: “Psychology of to-day, since Kant has shown the way, seeks the nature of the soul again, as did Aristotle of yore, in the facts of the spiritual life themselves and not in an unknowable ‘thing in itself’....” _Deutsche Rundschau_ of 1891, p. 203. Wundt’s “apperception” is no metaphysical being, but simply means the focus of perception, the centre of consciousness. Wundt is certainly not infallible and we are inclined to believe that in some details he is mistaken. He is nevertheless one of the very greatest leaders among the investigators of the soul and his monism as well as his antimetaphysical tendencies cannot be doubted.
Ziehen reaches his monism by considering objective existence, as it appears to us and which we call matter, as “something utterly unknowable.” He says, “The psychical series alone is given.... Thus the psycho-physical dualism or parallelism is apparent only. Considering that the psychical series alone is given, we shall understand, that we had repeatedly to face in our investigations such factors in which the material foundations are missing. I here remind you of the projection of our sensations into space and time, for which we could not find a psycho-physical explanation.”
We hope that Dr. Ziehen will soon find occasion to explain his philosophical views. Such an explanation may throw light on his psychological theory. We do not as yet see how he can solve without inconsistency the many difficulties in which his philosophical standpoint will involve his psychology.
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PSYCHOLOGIE DER SUGGESTION. By _Dr. Hans Schmidkunz_. Stuttgart, 1892,—pp. 425. Large 8vo.
The rapidly increasing devotion to the study of Hypnotism has yielded many valuable results, both practical and theoretical. Its application to the cure of disease—psychotherapeutics—has been most extensively introduced and bids fair to become the representative in scientific form of the germ of truth buried amongst the vast rubbish-heap of suspicious practices and pseudo-scientific “isms.” New light has been thrown on the questions of responsibility and the legal aspects of slightly abnormal states. Education and ethics, it has been more than hinted, are to find practical aids in hypnotism; while in the light of modern scientifically recognised phenomena, many of the events influential in the development of religions find a rationalistic interpretation. But the science which more than all others, the study of hypnotism is destined to enrich, is that of Experimental Psychology; and it is this phase of the subject to which Dr. Schmidkunz has devoted his volume.
The central core of the whole subject is the fact of suggestion,—a fact so comprehensive that it is almost easier to say what it is not than what it is. If we make allowance for that portion of our conduct that is based upon individual acquisitions and proceeds by logically reasoned steps, all the rest is more or less the result of suggestions, of one kind or another. To appreciate the psychology of this process it is necessary to appreciate its varieties and universality. We receive suggestions from things and deeds; the sight of food makes us hungry; the sight of our neighbor consulting his watch induces a strong desire to know what time it is. Words are powerful implements of suggestion; we accept those doctrines that we hear about us and are influenced much more frequently than we are convinced. The personal factor in suggestion is important; to some we feel attracted and accept as leaders, while others excite repulsion and antagonism. The indirectness of the process of suggestion is to be noted; in most cases we are quite unconscious of the influences exerted upon us and by which our conduct is guided, and this ignorance of the motives of our acts, Spinoza tells us, is the cause of the illusion of free will. Sympathy, imitation, the contagion of masses, the action of the mind upon the body, the formation of public sentiment,—all exemplify the process of suggestion and add their testimony to its power and domain.
We must recognise, too, that our suggestibility is a variable phenomenon; at some moments we are self-assertive and determined, at others passive and readily following another’s lead. Sometimes we take the reins in our own hands, and again allow the vehicle to find its way as it will. Every night we pass into a condition in which conscious control is abandoned and logic gives way to suggestion. A trifling illness, a dose of medicine may increase our suggestibility, and place us in a position allied to that of the hypnotic subject. All this prepares the way for recognising as the distinctive characteristic of the hypnotic condition, an exaggerated suggestibility. Not alone is there a ready yielding to every suggestion of the operator, but functions normally not under volitional control may be appealed to and utilised by the slighter and subtler processes of hypnotic suggestion. The variable threshold between the voluntary and the involuntary is shifted to a surprising extent. That complex interrelation of centres with which the sense of personality is intimately connected yields to the same influences and makes possible an experimental study of this vexed problem.
This, then, is the Psychology of Suggestion, the contribution that Hypnotism makes to Psychology. It lays stress upon the great rôle this process plays in every day mental life and thus asks us to see in hypnotism a condition closely allied to the normal, and simply illustrating in an unusually striking way, one great factor in our mental composition. It rearranges the hierarchy of mental faculties and finds a more important place for suggestion than has been before accorded to it. From a somewhat obscure and sporadic phenomenon occasionally entering into mental states, it is raised to the dignity of one of the most frequent, most important, most fertile generalisations of scientific psychology. Whether one fully agrees with this position or not, it is certainly a service to have it so comprehensively, even if at times prolixly stated, and to be assured that the study of Psychology is deriving as much benefit from the researches in hypnotism as are the more practical sciences.
J. J.
HYPNOTISME, SUGGESTION, PSYCHOTHEROPIE. Études Nouvelles par le _Dr. Bernheim_, Professeur à la Faculté de médécine de Nancy. Paris: 1891. Octave Doin, pp. 518.
The literature of the new science of Hypnotism continues to increase with unabated pace; most of the contributions consist of studies of a few cases or a brief exposition of a single point, in most cases of points relative to the application of hypnotism to disease. The present volume, however, is of special importance not alone because of the authority that Dr. Bernheim’s name brings with it,—but because of the comprehensiveness and the skill and interest of the exposition. It is supplementary to Dr. Bernheim’s former volume, “Suggestive Psychotherapeutics,” (1886-87, English translation, 1889) and reflects the progress that has resulted from continued and systematic observation. The therapeutic interest in it naturally finds most complete representation and about half the volume is devoted to the description of cases cured or benefited by suggestive treatment. Although nervous complaints predominate in these well arranged and well described cases, yet the method is shown applicable to all the ills that flesh is heir to. While this portion of the volume will be of greatest interest to the medical world, the psychologist will find most food for reflection in the first and more theoretical half of the book. He will find there an interesting historical sketch illustrating how processes similar to those now studied as hypnotism have been in use from ancient times; how all the various healers, and the various processes and agencies used by them, involve different modes of application of the one principle of suggestion. “It is the human imagination that works miracles.”
Suggestion is defined as the act by which an idea is introduced in the brain and accepted by it, and thus many of the means by which one person influences another under every day, normal circumstances would be included in the term. Hypnotism is simply one of the most important and efficient methods of producing a state of increased suggestibility. In every day life we have abundant evidence of the tendency of ideas to be realised in actions; with every change in thought and emotion there is associated some motor expression, too subtle perhaps for analysis and description, but still present and significant. Under excitement and nervous strain these motor accompaniments of thought are increased and serve as the basis of the muscle reader’s skill. Again the possibility of disbelief and of recognising the illusory character of a sensation involve the control of higher directing powers; the accumulated experience of the past passes sentence upon the new candidate. If we imagine a condition in which this form of control is abolished, we should have a subject accepting as real almost any idea or sensation that is suggested to him, and expressing freely and unreservedly his acceptance of the same. And this it is that hypnotism does. It builds upon the natural credulity which it is the difficult task of reason to shape and control, and brings into prominence the automatic, subconscious phases of mental action. It does not endow subjects with new faculties or deprive them of their individuality, but shows in a strangely perverted perspective the various faculties and processes that go to build the endlessly complex elements of a personality. This “suggestion” view of hypnotism is the contribution of the Nancy School, and is fast becoming the recognised view of science; one will nowhere find a clearer and more convincing exposition of it than in Dr. Bernheim’s pages.
It is clearly impossible to summarise the various details that make up the body of the volume; but all the important topics are discussed and result in conclusions unusually free as well from vagueness as from narrowness. The processes inducing the state, the proportion of susceptible individuals, the various kinds and stages of hypnotism, its relation to sleep and other normal states, the rôle of memory in hypnotism, the interesting post-hypnotic, negative and retroactive hallucinations, its relation to hysteria, its possible use in crime,—these are some of the chief topics treated. The volume is a valuable contribution to the literature of the subject, reflects its most recent acquisitions, and would well merit a presentation in an English translation.
J. J.
HANDBOOK OF PSYCHOLOGY. In two volumes; Senses and Intellect, and, Feeling and Will. By _James Mark Baldwin_, M. A., Ph. D., Professor in the University of Toronto. New York: Henry Holt & Co., 1891.
These are two books diligently worked out, the former of 343, the latter of 397 pp. They cover almost the entire field of psychology excluding however the treatment of such abnormal states as are Mental Pathology and Hypnotism. The author is a disciple of Dr. McCosh, and is strongly influenced by Wundt, of Leipzig, and Rabier, of Paris; yet he has developed an independent view of the nature of the soul which perhaps comes nearest to that of Prof. William James, of Harvard. The two books are actually two parts of one work, the one complementing the other. The former however is not, as the name suggests, an exposition of the nature of the senses in their relation to or as the basis of the intellect; it is an inquisition into consciousness, sensation, perception, association, imagination, rational thought, and kindred subjects. The latter, after an introduction of 50 pp., characterising the mechanism of the nervous system, treats of feeling as sensation, as pleasure and pain, as interest and belief, as emotion, and passes over to the subject of a motor consciousness, or will, ending in a chapter on volition.
Professor Baldwin states that “after we enter consciousness we find a principle of apperception to which there is no analogy in physiological integration,” adding in a foot-note: “Since the section of the ‘Unity of Composition’ theory was written, Professor James has published an acute criticism in substantial agreement with it, and the passage quoted makes reference to the sixth chapter of Professor James’s Psychology in which he rejects the so-called ‘mind-stuff,’ theory, declaring a self-compounding of mental facts to be inadmissible and proposes at last what he calls ‘soul-theory.’” Professor James in this chapter commits the mistake indicated in the editorial of the last number of _The Monist_ (p. 248) that he considers things as things in themselves and then looks for a relation producing principle. He says:
“In the parallelogram of forces, the ‘forces’ themselves do not combine into the diagonal resultant; a _body_ is needed on which they may impinge, to exhibit their resultant effect.”
“Take a sentence of a dozen words, and take twelve men and tell to each one word. Then stand the men in a row or jam them in a bunch, and let each think of his word as intently as he will; nowhere will there be a consciousness of the whole sentence.”
Thus Professor W. James is in need of what he calls a “medium.” He says:
“_All the ‘combinations’ which we actually know are EFFECTS, wrought by the units said to be ‘combined,’ UPON SOME ENTITY OTHER THAN THEMSELVES._ Without this feature of a medium or vehicle, the notion of combination has no sense.”
We observe that feelings which originate through the impressions of the outer world upon some sentient organism, enter into relations to each other, as naturally as things are in relations, or under certain circumstances will enter more closely into relations with each other. The “soul” accordingly is postulated by Professor James as a medium to combine the effects of the manifold brain processes in order to “escape the absurdity of supposing feelings which exist separately and then ‘fuse together’ by themselves. The separateness is in the brain-world, on this theory, and the unity in the soul world, and the only trouble that remains to haunt us is the metaphysical one of understanding how one sort of world or existent thing can affect or influence another at all.” This is dualism and we suppose that Professor James is conscious of it.
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UNTERSUCHUNGEN ZUR PHYSIOLOGISCHEN MORPHOLOGIE DER THIERE. II. ORGANBILDUNG UND WACHSTHUM. By Dr. _Jacques Loeb_. Mit 2 Tafeln in Lithographie und 9 Figuren im Text. Würzburg: Georg Hertz. 1892.
Dr. Jacques Loeb formerly of Zürich and lately returned from the Zoological station at Naples has been appointed Professor at Bryn Mawr College, Pennsylvania. Former publications of his were reviewed in _The Monist_ I, No. 2, p. 300. The present pamphlet is a continuance of his investigations in physiological morphology. Some of his experiments are made with _Antennularia antennina_ (a hydroid polyp) and the author describes how without mutilation, simply by giving the creature a fixed position he succeeded in making it develop certain organs in certain places, thus proving gravitation to be an important factor in determining the growth of certain limbs. Dr. Loeb adds a few articles on the dependence of the longitudinal growth and also of the regeneration of Tubularia upon the concentration of the salt-water. His experiments with _Ciona intestinalis_ (a solitary ascidia) prove that (1) a section in the side of the oral orifice as well as of the anus will cause the formation of ocelli on the margin of the section, (2) after an extirpation of the central nervous system the reflexes continue although with a higher threshold of the stimulus, and (3) the ciona is capable of developing the central nervous system again.
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DAS DASEIN ALS LUST, LEID, UND LIEBE. Die altindische Weltanschauung in neuzeitlicher Darstellung. Ein Beitrag zum Darwinismus. Mit 2 Tondrucken, 24 Zeichnungen und 10 Tabellen. By Dr. _Hübbe-Schleiden_. Braunschweig: C. A. Schwetschke & Sohn, 1891.
The author of this book is Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden, editor of _The Sphinx_, a monthly magazine published in Germany which professes to “lay down historically and experimentally the supersensible World-Conception upon a monistic basis.” Love of Mysticism is the main feature of _The Sphinx_ as well as Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden’s book. _The Sphinx_ contains reports of cases of telepathy and is quite serious in investigating the spook of a haunted house. The present book contains the author’s confession of faith. The symbols by which he depicts his world-conception reveal a cabalistic taste, and we believe that the illustrations will be rather repugnant to the man of science, as they give the impression of fantasticism. The main idea of the book is to modernise the old Hindoo view that “Kama” desire or _Lust_ is the ground of all being, as is said in the Brihad-Aranyaka Upanishad (IV, 4, 5): “Man consists entirely of desire (_Kama_); as is his desire, so is his will (_Kratu_); as is his will, so is his life (_Karma_, i. e., activity); as is his life, so is his fate.”
Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden rejects the Hindoo view of a migration of soul in so far as it suggests the idea of something personal; he prefers to speak of a transformation of soul. This, he says, has been and it may be called “metaphysical Darwinism”, and we must confess that the nucleus of the idea touches the most vital point of all the problems of life. We cannot explain ethics and the ethical instinct of man without taking into consideration that man lives and aspires for something that will outlast his individual existence. The author says: “Why do you strive for something higher, for perfection, for completion or whatever your aim may be called? Why all that, if you imagine that your individuality has only this one life upon earth and you can realise only a very small part of what you strive for? Why all your trouble, if the main thing is in vain?” We agree with the author that our moral instinct, our ideals and aspirations which are most powerful realities in life point to a life beyond the grave, they indicate that death is no finality and evolution teaches us that our souls actually continue to exist. Our souls in their individual features are parts only of the whole evolution of our race and these very individual features of our souls can be and will be preserved in the future generations.
Dr. Hübbe-Schleiden’s book is characteristic of a strange tendency of our time to combine the results of modern science with the old notions of occultism. There is in it a psychological and ethical truth overgrown with a fanciful imagination.
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MAX MÜLLER AND THE SCIENCE OF LANGUAGE. A Criticism. By _William Dwight Whitney_, Professor in Yale University. New York: D. Appleton and Company. 1892.
The Professors W. D. Whitney and F. Max Müller are not on good terms. They do not only disagree on several fundamental and many minor points, concerning the science of language, but their warfare, as is well known, is at the same time of a personal nature. The present little volume is a criticism of the new edition of Max Müller’s “Science of Language.” The great Yale philologist recognising that this work of his antagonistic Oxford colleague “is still the principal and most authoritative text-book of that study,” and noting that “its author has gained no new light from the criticisms that have been made upon his work,” feels called upon to warn the reader that “it may not be trusted where it is untrustworthy and so do harm to the science which it was intended to help.” The title of the book, according to Professor Whitney, ought to be “Facts and Fancies in Regard to Language and Other Related Subjects.”
Schleicher says: “Languages are natural organisms which, without being determinable by the will of man, grew and developed themselves in accordance with fixed laws.... Its method is on the whole and in general the same with that of the other natural sciences.” Professor Whitney censures Max Müller for calling the first part of Schleicher’s proposition “sheer mythology,” and then adopting the inference made therefrom considering the science of language as a physical science. Now it is true that the expression “organism” must not be taken literally; languages are not animals or plants, but they have some quality that is comparable to animals and plants. Their life and the development of their life is in many respects analogous to the life of organisms. Professor Whitney regards language as “a body of conventional signs for ideas” and protests against Prof. Max Müller’s usage of the word “conventional” as if it implied “a convention of people gathered to discuss and decide on the words and forms by which conceptions should be represented.” In contradistinction to Max Müller who holds that philology is a physical science, Professor Whitney regards it as an historical science. “Physical science,” says Max Müller, “deals with the works of God, historical science with the works of man.” Thus optics is a physical science, painting an historical science. Whitney declares that individuals initiate changes and the community either accepts and uses them, making them language by its use or rejects and annuls them by refusing to use them. In one word Max Müller says language is φύσει, a product of nature, and Whitney says it is θέσει, an institution of man. We believe that Professor Whitney stands almost alone in his conception of language.
Another no less important point is Professor Whitney’s objection to Prof. Max Müller’s proposition of the Identity of Language and Thought. Here Professor Whitney will find many supporters for his case; but we must add that Prof. Max Müller does not exactly mean what he says. He means by identity inseparableness. It is not so much Max Müller’s position that should be attacked as his misleading terminology. Concerning the origin of language Professor Whitney finds an instructive parallel in the beginnings of writing which were mutually intelligible signs, or in the written language of mathematics. “So we do no longer see,” he says, “the two and three strokes in our figures 2 and 3, although they are really there disguised from view.” This is a good simile, and undoubtedly _cum grano salis_ true. But it is rather strange that Professor Whitney should find Noiré’s theory of the origin of language “utterly fantastic.”
These are fundamental differences. There are some more, less important points such as the etymology of king being the Sanskrit _janaka_. Max Müller proposes a very improbable reason for the change of meaning in the Lat. _fagus_, O. Germ. _boka_ (beech), Greek _phegos_, Lat. _quercus_, and Germ. _foraha_ (fir). Professor Whitney might have mentioned that a more probable reason for this change has been proposed of late by those who seek the home of the Aryans in Europe. A migrating people would naturally have called in their old home the beech, in their new the oak “a tree with edible fruit.” The same method is applicable to explain the change of meaning in _forah-a-quercus_ which means in northern countries a fir and in Italy an oak.
Professor Whitney sums up his case as follows (p. 77): he finds “language study ... declared on transparently false grounds, to be a physical science, and language an existence which man had no part in making and changing; dialectic growth misunderstood, families of language regarded as exceptional, and a ‘Turanian’ barathrum arranged to catch all little-known varieties of speech; antecedent unity of dialect taught in one case and denied in another; a word held to be killed by the least mispronunciation; _conventional_ explained to mean ‘voted by a convention’; thought and its expression viewed as inseparable, and even identical; the origin of language seemingly ascribed to an instinctive ding-dong of the tongue—and so on; to complete the list would be almost to give a table of principal contents of the two volumes—and a style of discussion used throughout which indicated that the author was playing with his subject rather than investigating it seriously.... The book is not science, but literature. Taken as literature, it is of high rank, as the admiration of the public sufficiently testifies; its author has a special gift for interesting statement and illustration, for lending a charm to the subjects he discusses; and he carries captive the judgments of his hearers and of many of his readers. He is a born _littérateur_.”
Professor Whitney concludes: “Now as heretofore, I rest my defense on not the just intent alone, but the real substantial justice of my criticisms; if they are unfounded, I deserve reprehension for making them; if they are right, then there is nothing, either in the degree of importance of the subjects to which they relate, or in the personality against whom they are directed, to call for their condemnation.”
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SEIFENBLASEN. Moderne Märchen. By _Kurd Lasswitz_. Hamburg and Leipsic: Leopold Voss. 1890.
“Märchen,” in the province of science, we are inclined to believe are a prize problem for our modern poets. Who will solve it? Kurd Lasswitz has made an attempt and considering the great difficulty of the problem, we are not inclined to criticise him. The author, who has worked in scientific fields and has proved his ability as a close student, exhibits in these “soap-bubbles” a fertile imagination and poetic invention. Most of his sketches fall short of the ideal märchen of science as we conceive it, but their reading is suggestive and deserves the attention of those whose disposition favors the creation of a middle ground between science and poetry.
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FOOTNOTES:
[66] Ziehen declares (p. 129) that the problem of physiological psychology consists in reducing the different forms of thinking up to the most complex argumentation to simple associations of ideas and its laws. Wundt says, that there are many psychical idea-combinations which cannot be explained simply by association of ideas. So, Ziehen continues (p. 130), Wundt assumes above idea associations a special faculty of the soul called apperception, which serves now as attention, now as will, but is in either case a metaphysical faculty of the soul, the active subject which independent of mechanical causality is said to be the cause of these phenomena.—I do not think that anyone who knows Wundt will accept this as a fair representation of his views.
PERIODICALS.
REVUE PHILOSOPHIQUE.
CONTENTS: December, 1891. No. 192
UN PROBLÈME D’ACOUSTIQUE PSYCHOLOGIQUE. By _L. Dauriac_.
LES ORIGINES DE NOTRE STRUCTURE INTELLECTUELLE ET CÉRÉBRALE. II. L’ÉVOLUTIONNISME. By _A. Fouillée_.
LÉONARD DE VINCI ARTISTE ET SAVANT. By _G. Séailles_.
SUR LES DESSINS D’ENFANTS. By _J. Passy_.
SUR UN CAS D’INHIBITION PSYCHIQUE. By _A. Binet_.
CONTENTS: January, 1892. No. 193.
LE PROBLÈME DE LA VIE. By _Dunan_.
LA MALADIE DU PESSIMISME. By _B. Pérez_.
PHILOSOPHES ESPAGNOLS DE CUBA: F. VARELA, J. DE LA LUZ. By _J.-M. Guardia_.
VARIÉTÉS: LE PROBLÈME D’ACHILLE. By _J. Mouret_.
CONTENTS: February, 1892. No. 194.
LES MOUVEMENTS DE MANÈGE CHEZ LES INSECTES. By _A. Binet_.
LE PROBLÈME DE LA VIE (2nd article). By _Dunan_.
PHILOSOPHES ESPAGNOLS DE CUBA (concluded). _J.-M. Guardia_.
REVUE GÉNÉRALE: JUSTICE ET SOCIALISME, D’APRÈS LES PUBLICATIONS RÉCENTES. By _Belot_.
One of the problems of the unique and great work of Carl Stumpf’s “Tonpsychologie” is the subject of L. Dauriac’s essay. The question is when several sounds enter the ear at the same time, the plurality of which is not directly known, do you have your information through an inner sense? Does every unit of the irritation correspond to a distinct unit of sensation? Is there in consciousness a simultaneousness of sensations similarly as outside of consciousness there is a simultaneousness of vibrations? M. Dauriac maintains that Stumpf’s question can be answered only on the ground of metaphysical postulates, and if preconceived solutions are to be excluded, it must be considered as insoluble.
Alfred Fouillée, in his second article on the origin of our intellectual and cerebral structure, which treats on evolutionism, comes to the conclusion that the hypothesis which in the most simple way explains the agreement of thoughts and objects is the doctrine of a radical unity generally called Monism.
J. Passy notes certain characteristic and psychologically interesting features of the drawings of children.
M. A. Binet presents two physiognomical pictures of the same face, one representing disgust or scorn, the other a good-humored and happy smile. The upper parts of both faces are exactly alike and yet the eyes of the former look disdainful while the very same eyes of the latter are full of jest and merriment. This is the fact. M. Binet psychologically interprets the fact as a phenomenon of automatic inhibition. The fact is interesting, but its interpretation seems doubtful.
Charles Dunan discusses the metaphysical aspect of the problem of life.
B. Pérez’s article is a contribution to pathological psychology with special reference to M. Magalhâes’s work on the subject. Pessimism, M. Pérez says, is a disease only if exaggerated, yet he believes that medico-psychological studies which consider the relation between the physical system and morality are very helpful even if carried too far.
M. J.-M. Guardia’s article will have a special interest for Americans. Three men arose in Spain of late, Valentin Almirall, M. L. Mallada, and J.-M. Escudor, who spoke bold and hard words of truth to their country. Cuba is the hen that lays golden eggs for Spain, but the Cubans are treated with great contempt in Spain; and yet the Spaniards are by no means their intellectual superiors, for while Spain is poor in philosophy, Cuba is the only country of Latin America where philosophy has taken root. M. Guardia sketches in the first article the history and philosophy of Don Félix Varélay y Moralès who is the harbinger of the other Spanish-Cuban philosopher, José de la Luz. The second article in the February number treats of the latter (1800-1862) whom Guardia calls the master.
George Mouret with reference to Frontera’s book on Zeno’s argument against motion makes a few remarks concerning the Eleatic sophism about Achilles and the tortoise.
An injury of a thalamus opticus produces in horses and other animals the effect of their making rotatory movements when intending to walk straight on. Forel proved that a similar effect is produced in ants by a lesion of one of their lobes. M. Binet publishes in the present essay his experiments on certain water-beetles, exhibiting diagrams of their normal and abnormal walk. (Paris: Félix Alcan.)
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ZEITSCHRIFT FUR PSYCHOLOGIE UND PHYSIOLOGIE DER SINNESORGANE. Vols. II and III.
CONTENTS: November, 1891. No. 6.
UEBER BRÜCKES THEORIE DES KÖRPERLICHEN SEHENS. By Dr. _C. du Bois-Reymond_.
MEIN SCHLUSSWORT GEGEN WUNDT. By _C. Stumpf_.
ERWIDERUNG. By _O. Flügel_.
LITTERATURBERICHT.
CONTENTS: December, 1891. No. 1.
VERSUCH, DAS PSYCHOPHYSISCHE GESETZ AUF DIE FARBENUNTERSCHIEDE TRICHROMATISCHER AUGEN ANZUWENDEN. By _H. v. Helmholtz_.
UNTERSUCHUNGEN ÜBER BINOKULARES SEHEN MIT ANWENDUNG DES HERINGSCHEN FALLVERSUCHS. By Dr. _Richard Greeff_.
BEMERKUNGEN ZU DEM AUFSATZE VON DR. SOMMER “ZUR PSYCHOLOGIE DER SPRACHE.” By Prof. _A. Pick_.
LITTERATURBERICHT.
Dr. C. du Bois-Reymond believes that corporeal vision is either produced by one eye running in succession over several places or two eyes viewing two aspects of the object. Mach’s theory of the influence of shade upon the production of the third dimension in vision which affords quite a new and a better explanation of the phenomenon is not mentioned. Stumpf closes his controversy with Wundt with a few remarks in answer to Wundt’s reply (in _Philos. Studien_ VII, pp. 298-327); and Flügel objects to Professor Rehmke’s proposition made in a criticism of Flügel’s book “Die Seelenfrage,” that Herbart’s psychology, being atomism, is at bottom materialism.
Dr. Richard Greeff describes Hering’s apparatus for investigating the cause of binocular vision. Wheatstone believes that the perspective of the two retina pictures produces the effect of corporeality while Brücke declares that it is mainly due to muscle-sensations. Hering sides with Wheatstone, and the experiments as described by Greeff prove that the third dimension is unfailingly perceived whenever the ocular axes diverge, while in other cases the same result is not attained.
Dr. Sommer had presented in a former article the facts of an interesting case of aphasia, (see _The Monist_, Vol. I, No. 4, p. 629) where the patient, his name is Voit, could remember and pronounce words only when writing them. Prof. A. Pick objects to Dr. Sommer’s regarding the case as contrary to our present experience and following two French authorities Ballet and Bernard, adduces cases of Aphasia by right-sided hemiphlegia where patients could read only when they were able to write or represent to themselves the writing motions of their hand. Thus one patient of Charcot could only read print, and not written words “because,” as he said, “it was easier for him to reproduce in his mind the written letter.” This reminds one of the case a deaf-mute who said: “I feel whenever I think of the motions of my fingers although they are perfectly at rest. I see internally an image of my moving fingers.” Professor Pick concludes that the case Voit is a good argument against Max Müller’s proposition of the identity of language and thought. Max Müller however includes in his conception of word any symbol of an idea. The finger motion of a deaf-mute is a word, and the writing motion of Voit is also a word, according to Professor Max Müller’s theory.
Prof. H. v. Helmholtz publishes the tables of his experiments in applying the psycho-physical law upon color differences of trichromatic eyes, and presents the three fundamental colors diagrammatically in an equilateral triangle in the centre of which lies white. A curve winding round this centre shows the relation of the rainbow spectrum in the system of three fundamental colors. The results do not as yet agree with the investigations of A. König and C. Diterici who make similar inquiries with bichromatic eyes. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
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VIERTELJAHRSSCHRIFT FÜR WISSENSCHAFTLICHE PHILOSOPHIE. Vol. XVI. No. 1.
CONTENTS:
BEITRÄGE ZUR LOGIK. (Erster Artikel.) By _A. Riehl_.
DIE DIMENSIONEN DER WAHRSCHEINLICHKEIT UND DIE EVIDENZ DER UNGEWISSHEIT. By _Ad. Nitsche_.
UEBER DIE FORTSCHREITENDE ENTWICKLUNG DES MENSCHENGESCHLECHTS. II. By _F. Rosenberger_.
ERNST PLATNER’S WISSENSCHAFTLICHE STELLUNG ZU KANT IN ERKENNTNISSTHEORIE UND MORALPHILOSOPHIE. I. By _B. Seligkowitz_.
UEBER SPRACHREFLEX, NATIVISMUS UND ABSICHTLICHE SPRACHBILDUNG. X. By _A. Marty_.
Prof. A. Riehl begins in this number a series of articles on logic. The first two chapters are (1) concepts and definitions. Riehl distinguishes between a definition and a predicating sentence (_Aussage_), for instance, “Space has three dimensions,” is a mere definition, but “Space is the form of our intuition,” is an _Aussage_. (2) Conceptual sentences and judgments. The former are merely representative and cannot as the latter be said to combine or separate ideas.
Ad. Nitsche criticises Johannes v. Kries’s idea that the calculus of probabilities is admissible only if the chances are equivalent. Equivalent Chances (_gleiche Spielräume_), he objects, are apparently impossible, yet he admits that upon the degree of a knowledge of the conditions will depend the reliability of the probability.
The Object of B. Seligkowitz’s article is to rescue from oblivion a philosopher who especially as a critic of Kant deserves to be better known than he is, Ernst Platner (1744-1818.)
The tenth and concluding article of A. Marty on the origin of language reviews Paul Regnaud’s work _Origine et philosophie du langage_. (Leipsic: O. R. Reisland.)
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THE AMERICAN JOURNAL OF PSYCHOLOGY. December, 1891. Vol. IV. No. 2.
CONTENTS:
A SKETCH OF THE HISTORY OF PSYCHOLOGY AMONG THE GREEKS. By _Charles A. Strong_.
STUDIES FROM THE LABORATORY OF EXPERIMENTAL PSYCHOLOGY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF WISCONSIN. By Prof. _Joseph Jastrow_, Ph. D.
THE SIZE OF SEVERAL CRANIAL NERVES IN MAN AS INDICATED BY THE AREAS OF THEIR CROSS-SECTIONS. By _Henry H. Donaldson_, Ph. D.
VISUALISATION AS A CHIEF SOURCE OF THE PSYCHOLOGY OF HOBBES, LOCKE, BERKELEY, AND HUME. By _Alexander Fraser_, B. A.
ANATOMICAL OBSERVATIONS ON THE BRAIN AND SEVERAL SENSE-ORGANS OF THE BLIND DEAF-MUTE, LAURA DEWEY BRIDGMAN. II. By _Henry H. Donaldson_, Ph. D.
PSYCHOLOGICAL LITERATURE. I. Nervous System. By Prof. _H. H. Donaldson_.
A LABORATORY COURSE IN PHYSIOLOGICAL PSYCHOLOGY. II. By _E. C. Sanford_.
PSYCHIATRY. PSYCHOSES FOLLOWING ACUTE SURGICAL AND MENTAL AFFECTIONS AND IN MULTIPLE NEURITIS. By _William Noyes_, M. D.
The post mortem examination of Laura Bridgman shows a brain in which the olfactory bulbs and nerves, the optic nerves, the auditory nerves, and possibly the glossopharyngeal, had all been more or less destroyed at their peripheral ends. This destruction caused a degeneration—most marked in the optic nerves—which extended towards the centres and involved them indirectly.... This case represents a maximum loss in these defective senses with a minimum amount of central disturbance, thus offering the very best sort of opportunity for education by way of the surviving senses.... Mental association was for Laura Bridgman limited to various phases of the dermal sensations and the minor and imperfect senses of taste and smell.... The motor centre there had lost some, but not all its associative connections. (Clark University, Worcester, Mass.)
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INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF ETHICS. January, 1892. Vol. II. NO. 2.
CONTENTS:
THE ETHICAL ASPECTS OF THE PAPAL ENCYCLICAL. By _Brother Azarias_.
THE THREE RELIGIONS. By _J. S. Mackenzie_, M. A.
THE ETHICS OF HEGEL. By _Rev. J. Macbride Sterrett_.
A PALM OF PEACE FROM GERMAN SOIL. By _Fanny Hertz_.
AUTHORITY IN THE SPHERE OF CONDUCT AND INTELLECT. By _Prof. H. Nettleship_, Oxford.
DISCUSSIONS AND REVIEWS.
Brother Azarias paraphrases and praises the ethics of the Papal Encyclical. J. S. Mackenzie starts from Kant’s famous remarks that two things fill our minds with reverence, the starry, heavens above and the moral law within. The worship of these two separately and the worship of them in combination are set forth as the three great religions of the world. Fanny Hertz pleads for the abolishment of war. She quotes largely from Bertha Suttner’s novel, “Die Waffen nieder,” and from Friederich’s letters. Authority, according to Professor Nettleship, is “the power which in the sphere of conduct, in the long run determines our practice and in the sphere of intellect in the long run determines our assent.” There are roughly speaking four kinds of authority: (1) the authority of law, (2) the authority of religious bodies, (3) the authority of society or public opinion and (4) the authority of great men. Where is the seat of authority? “For each individual,” Professor Nettleship maintains, “the absolute guide can, in the long run be no other than his own conscience.” The origin of conscience and the criterion whether the voice of conscience be true or not are not explained. (Philadelphia: _International Journal of Ethics_, 118 S. Twelfth Street.)
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MIND. New Series. No. 1. January, 1892.
CONTENTS:
PREFATORY REMARKS. _The Editor._
THE LOGICAL CALCULUS. (1) General Principles. By _W. E. Johnson_.
THE IDEA OF VALUE. By _S. Alexander_.
THE CHANGES OF METHOD IN HEGEL’S DIALECTIC. (1) By _J. Ellis McTaggart_.
THE LAW OF PSYCHOGENESIS. By _Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan_.
DISCUSSIONS: The Feeling-Tone of Desire and Aversion. By _Prof. H. Sidgwick_. Sur la Distinction entre les Lois ou Axiomes et les Notions. By _George Mouret_.
CRITICAL NOTICES.
W. E. Johnson says: “As a material machine is an instrument for economising the exertion of force, so a symbolic calculus is an instrument for economising the exertion of intelligence. And, employing the same analogy, the more perfect the calculus, the smaller would be the amount of intelligence applied as compared with the results produced.” He continues:
“But as the exertion of _some_ force is necessary for working the machine, so the exertion of _some_ intelligence is necessary for working the calculus.”
Here we feel inclined to stop our author. That which makes of a certain amount of metal, brass, and wood a machine, is the form in which they are composed, and this form is instrumental in using a certain amount of energy for doing a certain kind of work. Intelligence is not analogous to force but to the form of force. Not intelligence is necessary to run the instrument of intelligence, but some power, some force, some energy, and this power needed for running the instrument of intelligence, as it exists in man, is generally called will. So we are at variance with Mr. W. S. Johnson from the outset. Mr. Johnson from his standpoint considers it “important to examine the kind and degree of intelligence that are demanded in the employment of any symbolic calculus. It will appear that the _logical_ calculus stands in a unique relation to intelligence; for it aims at exhibiting, in a non-intelligent form, those same intelligent principles that are actually required for working it.”
We abstain here from discussing the details of this highly suggestive article which contains much that is of interest to logicians. The author claims especially with regard to his interpretation of the universal and
## particular that his results exactly correspond with the interpretation
given by Dr. Venn and Mr. Peirce, and worked out by Dr. Keynes.
The Germans distinguish between _Urtheil_ and _Beurtheilung_, the first being judgment in general, the latter a judgment that declares something to possess value from the view of truth, beauty or goodness. In this sense Mr. S. Alexander deals with the idea of value. He states two main principles. (1) That value is “the efficiency of a conscious agent to promote the efficiency of society” and this, the author says, was maintained indirectly in opposition to the view that value was determined by pleasure. (2) That value is itself no something separable from other mental facts by a wide gulf, but was itself a fact of a purely natural order. “Sollen” is one kind of “Sein.”
Mr. J. Ellis McTaggart in discussing the changes of method in Hegel’s Dialectic arrives at a conclusion which according to the author must be admitted to be quite un-Hegelian. Hegel apparently regarded the procession of the categories with its advance through oppositions and reconciliations as presenting absolute truth. From this the author dissents, “for,” he says: “the true process of thought is one in which each category springs out of the one before it, and not by contradicting it, but as the expression of its deepest nature, while it, in its turn, is seen to have its deepest reality in again passing on to the one after it. There is no contradiction no opposition, and consequently no reconciliation. There is only development, the rendering explicit what was implicit, the growth of the seed to the plant. In the actual course of the dialectic this is never attained. It is an ideal which is never quite realised, and from the nature of the case never can be quite realised. In the dialectic there is always opposition, and therefore always reconciliation. We do not go straight onward, but more or less from side to side. It seems inevitable, therefore, to conclude that the dialectic does not completely and perfectly express the nature of thought.”
Prof. C. Lloyd Morgan starting from the proposition that “the business of consciousness is the control of action” shows that “we identify ourselves rather with the action of our control centres than with our lower animal instincts. Through experience we learn, and habits being formed by individual repetition become innate.” Professor Morgan reviews use-inheritance natural selection, sexual selection, the law of beauty, and conduct and verification with regard to psychogenesis. “Our nature,” he says, “is intellectual, æsthetic, moral, and sensitive”:
“The false is rejected as incongruous to our nature as intellectual; the ugly is avoided as incongruous to our nature as æsthetic; the wrong is shunned as incongruous to our nature as moral; so is the painful, so far as possible, avoided as incongruous to our nature as sensitive.... The guidance of pleasure and pain is of great importance—so great that some are found to argue that in moral matters we are influenced solely by considerations of happiness.... Only by extending the meaning of the words pleasure and pain so as to be coextensive with what I have here termed congruous and incongruous can it be said that our actions and our thoughts are determined by pleasure and pain.” (London: Williams & Norgate.)
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THE PHILOSOPHICAL REVIEW. Vol. I, No. 1. January, 1892.
CONTENTS of No. 1.
PREFATORY NOTE.
THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND IDEALISM. By Prof. _John Watson_.
PSYCHOLOGY AS SO-CALLED “NATURAL SCIENCE.” By Prof. _George T. Ladd_.
ON SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE CHINESE MUSICAL SYSTEM. By _Benj. Ives Gilman_.
REVIEWS OF BOOKS AND SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
CONTENTS of No. 2:
PSYCHOLOGY, EPISTEMOLOGY, AND METAPHYSICS. By Prof. _Andrew Seth_.
A PLEA FOR PSYCHOLOGY AS A “NATURAL SCIENCE.” By Prof. _William James_.
ON SOME PSYCHOLOGICAL ASPECTS OF THE CHINESE MUSICAL SYSTEM. II. By _Benj. Ives Gilman_.
DISCUSSIONS: Dr. Münsterberg’s Theory of Mind and Body and its Consequences. By _Charles A. Strong_.
REVIEWS OF BOOKS AND SUMMARIES OF ARTICLES.
This is a new magazine which will be an additional proof that the philosophical interest in America is by no means so poor as the inhabitants of the old world generally suppose it to be. The character of the journal, it is to be expected, will be in harmony with the publications of its scholarly editor, Prof. J. G. Schurmann, whose position is clearly set forth in a little volume of his “Belief in God,” in which he conceives God in three ways (1) as the cause or ground of the world (2) as the realising purpose of the world, and (3) as the father of spirits.
Professor Watson reviews in an elaborate article Edward Caird’s work “The Critical Philosophy of Emanuel Kant.” “The philosophy of Kant,” says Watson, “was accepted at first by submissive disciples, but it had afterwards to submit to a severe process of criticism which culminated in the Absolute Idealism of Hegel. The synthesis of Kant, as based upon an untenable opposition of the phenomenal and the real, was weighed and found wanting.... We must be grateful to any one who helps us, not merely to see Kant, but to see beyond him. This is the task which Professor Caird, in his exhaustive work on the Critical Philosophy, has set himself to perform,” and adds Watson, “he has done it in a way that leaves nothing to be desired.”
Professor Ladd criticises Professor James’s Psychology as so-called natural science.
“What we wish to have in the name of cerebral psychology, is a description, in terms of a comprehensible theory of molecular physics; and, also, a statement of the formulæ which define the relations between the molecular changes and the ‘corresponding’ orders of mental phenomena. But this is precisely what Professor James avoids doing, even to the extent which so-called ‘nerve-physiology’ makes possible. And, nothing worthy of the name ‘science’ _is_ possible for any one in this branch of cerebral psycho-physics.”
Professor James replies to the criticism in the second number of _The Philosophical Review_. He says:
“Psychology is to-day hardly more than what physics was before Galileo, what chemistry was before Lavoisier. It is a mass of phenomenal description, gossip, and myth, including, however, real material enough to justify one in the hope that its study may become worthy of the name of natural science at no very distant day. I wished, by treating Psychology _like_ a natural science, to help her to become one.”
Professor Ladd is a transcendentalist and Professor James has great expectations of the work inaugurated by the Society for Psychical Research.
Theoretically they stand much nearer than practically, as well indicated by Professor James’s remark:
“In Professor Ladd’s own book on ‘Physiological Psychology,’ that ‘real being, proceeding to unfold powers that are _sui generis_, according to laws of its own,’ for whose recognition he contends, plays no organic
## part in the work, and has proved a mere stumbling block to his biological
reviewers.”
He adds in a foot-note:
“I mean that such a being is quite barren of particular consequences. Its character is only known by its reactions on the signals which the nervous system gives, and these must be gathered by observation after the fact. If only it were subject to successive reincarnations, as the theosophists say it is, so that we might guess what sort of a body it would unite with next, or what sort of persons it had helped to constitute previously, those would be great points gained. But even those gains are denied us; and the real being is, for practical purposes, an entire superfluity, which a _practical_ psychology can perfectly well do without.”
Andrew Seth, the well-known coryphæus of philosophy and psychology at Edinburgh, presses the importance of distinguishing the different standpoints of psychology, epistemology, and metaphysics. Locke, Berkeley, Hume and other English as well as Continental thinkers “speak sometimes from one point of view, sometimes from the other without being aware that the two points of view are different.”
“Psychology, assuming the existence of a subject or medium of consciousness, seeks to explain, mainly by the help of association or processes practically similar, how out of the come-and-go of conscious states, there are evolved such subjective facts as perceptions, the belief in an independent real world, and the idea of the Ego or subject himself.... Metaphysics has to do with the ultimate nature of the reality which reveals itself alike in the consciousness which knows and the world which is known.... The epistemological thing-in-itself to be identified with the metaphysical essence.... The problem of knowledge and the Real, is the question which Epistemology has to face.” (Boston, New York, Chicago: Ginn & Co.)
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VOPROSUI FILOSOFII I PSICHOLOGII.[67] Vol. III. No. 11. January, 1892.
CONTENTS:
POSITIVE PHILOSOPHY AND THE UNITY OF SCIENCE. Part V. Sociology. By _B. Tchitcherin_.
COUNT GIACOMO LEOPARDI AND HIS PESSIMISM. Part IV. Continued from No. 10 of this review. (Conclusion.) By _V. Stein_.
AN HISTORICAL SKETCH OF THE CONCEPTIONS OF NATURE. (Conclusion.) By _M. Menzhir_.
J. V. KIRYEBSKII AND THE ORIGIN OF MUSCOVITE SLAVOPHILISM. Public lecture delivered November 20, 1891, for the benefit of the rural districts suffering from the bad harvests. By _Paul Vinogradoff_.
FOUILLÉ AND THE METAPHYSICS OF THE FUTURE. Part III. General estimate of Fouillé’s views. Continued from No. 10 of this review. (Conclusion) By _Aleksei Vnedenskii_.
TELEPATHY. To be concluded in the next number. By _M. Petrovo-Solovo_. [This is a review of the publications of and the work done by the Society for Psychical Research in England.]
SPECIAL PART: (1) Wundt’s System of Philosophy. By _K. Ventzel_. (2) Hegel’s Ontology. By _N. P. Hilyaroff-Platonoff_. New Researches on Plato. By _A. Kozloff_.
CRITICISM AND BIBLIOGRAPHY. Review of Russian and Foreign Periodicals. Book Reviews. Bibliographical Index of recent Philosophical works. Answer to an anonymous letter received by N. Strachoff on the subject of his article: “Opinions concerning L. N. Tolstoï.” By _N. Strachoff_. Transactions of the Moscow Psychological Society. (Moscow, 1892.)
FOOTNOTES:
[67] _Questions of Philosophy and Psychology._
VOL. II. JULY, 1892. NO. 4.
THE MONIST.
OUR MONISM.
THE PRINCIPLES OF A CONSISTENT, UNITARY WORLD-VIEW.
The question, What are the essential features of Monism? was brought home to me when I read in the last number of _The Monist_ the critical remarks made with reference to the new edition of my “Anthropogeny.” I shall here endeavor briefly to draw up the outlines of my conception of the world in a manner which will indicate the most characteristic features of my views. Thus both the agreements with and the divergences from the position editorially upheld in _The Monist_ will plainly appear.
As is the case with the majority of philosophical differences, so also in the present instance I find that the divergences which exhibit themselves in our respective unitary conceptions of the world are in part only apparent and in part occasioned by the divergent significances of our fundamental ideas. But this will, perhaps, be made clearer by the following methodically arranged eight theses.
I. MONISM.
Like all general concepts of fundamental scope, that of monism also is liable to different definitions and divergent modifications,—the natural result of individual differences of subjective conception. In the determinate sense in which monism is at present employed by the majority of philosophers and physical inquirers, the sense which I believe I was the first to establish in 1866 in my “General Morphology” (Vol. I, p. 105), it denotes a unitary or _natural_ conception of the world, in opposition to a _supernatural_ or mystical one, that is, in opposition to _dualism_. For us, accordingly, there exists (in the sense of Goethe) _no_ opposition whatsoever between nature and mind, between World and God. Mental existences, “spirits,” outside nature, or in opposition to nature, do not exist. What are commonly termed the “mental sciences,”—for example, philology, history, and philosophy,—are in reality simply a part of _physical philosophy_, of _Natur-philosophie_. The latter discipline embraces, in our opinion, the entire body of human knowledge; it is based upon _empiricism_, on the experiences, the observations, and the experiments of physical inquiry; but it does not become _philosophy_ until it has brought together and united its empiric products, abstracted general laws from its isolated experiential facts, and _synthetised_ the isolated results which _analysis_ has empirically ascertained.
II. MECHANICALISM.
Since an early date, this important fundamental concept has frequently been used in three different and divergent senses, namely:
_A._ In its widest sense, as synonymous with _monism_; wherein mechanical causes (_causæ efficientes_), in the sense of Kant, are assumed as the sole effective causes and are placed in opposition to the teleological causes (_causæ finales_) in the sense of dualism. “Mechanical conception of the world” is in this sense synonymous with “monistic conception of the world.”
_B._ In its more restricted sense, as a universal _motion_-principle of physics, so that, for example, the postulated ether-vibrations of optics, of electricity, and so forth, as well as the grosser material oscillations of acoustics, heat, and so forth, are designated as mechanical processes subject to definite laws. “Mechanical natural philosophy,” in this sense, is identical with _physics_.
_C._ In its narrowest sense, as that _branch_ of physics which deals with the grosser and visible processes of _motion_; as gravitation, locomotion, and the phoronomy of organisms. Mechanics, in this the most restricted sense, is viewed as opposed to optics, acoustics, etc., as the usages of the schools indicate.
Since, now, the phrases “mechanical laws” and “mechanical explanation,” at the present day even, are frequently understood in these three distinct senses, no end of misunderstandings arise. Such misunderstandings may be best avoided, perhaps, by retaining the notion of mechanics in its narrowest (_C_) sense, and by substituting _physics_ for the next narrower sense (_B_) and _monism_ for its most extended sense (_A_).
III. PSYCHISM.
In exactly the same way as the idea of mechanicalism, so also that of psychism is employed in a three-fold divergent sense. As in the former case _motion_, so here _feeling_ is conceived, now as a universal world-principle, now simply as a vital activity of all organisms, now simply as the particular mental activity of man.
_A._ In its widest sense: _Panpsychism_. All matter is ensouled, because all natural bodies known to us possess determinate chemical properties, that is to say react uniformly and by law when subjected to the determinate chemical (i. e. molecular-mechanical) influences of other bodies: _chemical affinity_. Simplest example: sulphur and quicksilver rubbed together form cinnabar, a new body of entirely different properties. This is possible only on the supposition that the molecules (or atoms) of the two elements if brought within the proper distance, mutually _feel_ each other, by attraction move towards each other; on the decomposition of a simple chemical compound the contrary takes place: repulsion. (Empedocles’s doctrine of the “love and hatred of atoms.”)
_B._ In its more restricted sense: _Biopsychism_. The _organisms_ alone are regarded as “ensouled,” because here the chemical processes are more complicated and more striking (producing motions in cyclically repeated succession) than in the case of the so-called “dead matter” of the inorganic bodies. In particular does organic “irritability” appear here as a higher form of the physical reaction called “_Auslösung_” [the setting free, disengagement], and “soul-activity” (reflexes) again as a higher form of irritability. However, all the phenomena of organic life ultimately admit of being reduced to “mechanical” (or “physico-chemical”) processes that differ from the processes of the inorganic world only in point of degree or quantitatively, not qualitatively. (“General Morphology,” I, Chap. V; VII, pp. 109-238. “Natural Creation,” VIII, First Edition, Lecture XV.)
_C._ In its narrowest sense: _Zoopsychism_. Irritability, or universal organic soul-activity, such as is the attribute of all organisms, (identical with “life,”) reaches a higher stage through abstraction, through the formation of _ideas_. _Feeling_ and _will_ become more distinctly separated. This real soul-life, which is the attribute only of the higher animals, passes through a long succession of different stages of development, the most perfect of which is the soul of man. The so-called “freedom of the will” is apparent only, as each single volitional action is determined by a chain of precedent actions which ultimately rest either upon _heredity_ (propagation) or upon _adaptation_ (nutrition). As these last are (“mechanically”) reducible to molecular motions, the same also holds true of the former.
IV. THEISM.
The idea of god that alone appears to be logically compatible with monism, is pantheism (or “cosmotheism”) in the sense of Goethe and Spinoza. God according to this view is identical with the sum-total of the force of the universe, which is inseparable from the sum-total of the matter of the universe. In opposition to this view stands _anthropotheism_. This is the outcome of dualism, which places God as a personal being in opposition to the “world” created by him, and consequently is always forced in its reasonings to resort to anthropomorphic expedients.
V. MATERIALISM.
The most important differences of form in which this much misunderstood and variously interpreted movement of philosophy has presented itself, may be classed as follows:
_A._ In its most extended sense: as synonymous with _monism_ (or with mechanicalism). All the phenomena of the world are founded upon material processes, upon _motions_ (mechanicalism) or upon _feelings_ (psychism), both of which, as fundamental qualities, are inseparable from matter. Immaterial forces or immaterial “spirits” (minds) are unknown to us. As Goethe once said, “Mind can never exist and act without matter, matter never without mind.”
_B._ In its more restricted sense: originally matter alone exists and creates _secondarily_ force (or “mind”). The fallacy of this view lies in its regarding the two things “matter and force” as disjoint and separate. According to our view the two are inseparably connected,—united in each atom from the very first.
VI. SPIRITUALISM.
This phase also of the world-conception has been the subject of the same misunderstandings and perverted conceptions as its apparent opposite, materialism.
_A._ In its most extended sense, spiritualism is susceptible of identification with _psychism_—consequently also with monism. For _feeling_ (pleasure and pain) is just as much a thoroughly universal and fundamental property of matter (of each atom!) as is _motion_ (attraction and repulsion). Every single “spirit” is inseparably united with some “matter.”
_B._ In its more restricted sense: originally force alone exists and creates _secondarily_ matter. This view, which is very old and very widely spread (“creation of the world”), is just as false and as one-sided as its contrary (5 _B_).
VII. IMMORTALISM.
The “belief in immortality” is scientifically (_critically_) tenable only as a _general_ proposition, and is in this case identical with the most universal law of physics, the _conservation of energy_ (coincidently, of course, the conservation of matter). On the other hand, the widely disseminated _dogmatic_ belief in a _personal_ immortality, a belief supported by the mass of the ecclesiastical religions, and of utmost importance as the consciously or unconsciously assumed _base_-axiom of a great number of philosophical systems, is, _scientifically_, absolutely untenable. The “human soul” (i. e. the sum-total of the individual life-activity: feeling, motion,—will,—and idea) is simply a transient developmentary phenomenon—a very highly developed “vertebrate-soul.”
VIII. COSMISM.
The determinate, and, as I believe, logical, form of the conception of the world, the principles of which I have advocated for thirty years, and whose most important aspects have been briefly outlined in the preceding paragraphs, may also be designated _cosmism_, to the extent that it proceeds from the fundamental idea that _cosmogeny_ or the “world-process,” as world-_development_, is, within certain limits, (within the limits namely of a reduction to the basic notions: matter and its two inseparable fundamental qualities motion and feeling,) a _knowable_ natural process. Cosmism is opposed, thus, to _agnosticism_.
* * * * *
One highly important principle of my monism seems to me to be, that I regard _all_ matter as _ensouled_, that is to say as endowed with _feeling_ (pleasure and pain) and with _motion_, or, better, with the power of motion. As elementary (atomistic) attraction and repulsion these powers are asserted in every simplest chemical process, and on them is based also every other phenomenon, consequently also the highest-developed soul-activity of man. For the comprehension of this _graduated_ psychical development of matter perhaps my three stages will be useful: III _A._ (Panpsychism), III _B._ (Biopsychism), III _C._ (Zoopsychism). So too consciousness, as the highest psychical action and the one most difficult to be explained, is in my views imply a higher stage of brain-activity, based upon the association, the abstraction, and centralisation of groups of ideas. Perhaps I have expressed myself poorly in these expositions, as I am little accustomed to dealing with philosophical axioms abstractly, and am too exclusively engaged in the concrete activity of my own special department. I cherish the hope, however, of being able within two or three years to devote more of my time to purely philosophical labors; when my work with the Challenger material, which has now absorbed twelve years of unremitting toil, is ended, my special zoological activity will have been completed; and I shall then find the opportunity of contributing more frequently to your highly valued magazines _The Monist_ and _The Open Court_.
ERNST HAECKEL.
THE MAGIC SQUARE.