THE 
 
 HISTORICAL METHOD 
 IN ETHICS
 
 THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 AND OTHER ESSAYS
 
 THE 
 
 HISTORICAL METHOD 
 IN ETHICS 
 
 BY 
 
 JOHN HANDYSIDE 
 
 M.A. (EDIN.), B.A. (OxoN.) 
 
 LATE LECTURER IN PHILOSOPHY IN THE UNIVERSITY OF LIVERPOOL 
 AND 
 
 SECOND-LIEUTENANT IN THE KING'S (LIVERPOOL) REGIMENT 
 18TH BATTALION 
 
 LIVERPOOL 
 THE UNIVERSITY PRESS 
 
 LONDON 
 CONSTABLE AND COMPANY LTD.
 
 e> 
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ..... vii 
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS . . 1 
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND 'INTELLECT' ... 40 
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 72 
 
 -f OQrn o/i
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE 
 
 THE papers here brought together are all that 
 remains of the work of one of the acutest and 
 most thoughtful of the younger generation of 
 philosophical teachers. Their author fell in the 
 war, being one of those who counted his life 
 a little thing to give in so great a cause. He 
 was thirty-three when he died, and he had pub- 
 lished next to nothing in his lifetime. These 
 three essays were found in their present form 
 among his papers. The first and longest was 
 clearly intended for publication, either by itself 
 or as part of a larger work on ethics ; the other 
 two bore traces of having been originally prepared 
 for some Philosophical Society, but both would 
 have been sent as articles to the philosophical 
 reviews by any one with a less exacting standard 
 of work than Handyside. The three are now 
 published together, both for their own intrinsic 
 value and as a tribute to his memory. 
 
 John Handyside was born at Leith in 1883 and 
 received his school education at the Royal High 
 School of Edinburgh, of which he was Dux in 
 1899. In the autumn of that year he entered the
 
 viii THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 University of Edinburgh, and as soon as he reached 
 the philosophical classes his vocation was clear. 
 After carrying off all the distinctions open to 
 undergraduates, he graduated M.A. with First 
 Class Honours in Mental Philosophy in April 
 1903, and in the autumn of the same year gained 
 the Ferguson Philosophical Scholarship open to 
 graduates of the four Scottish universities. Edin- 
 burgh awarded him in succession a Baxter Scholar- 
 ship and the Sir William Hamilton Fellowship, 
 and the funds thus placed at his disposal enabled 
 him to continue his studies at Oxford. He 
 gained an Exhibition at Balliol, and subsequently 
 won the Jenkyns Exhibition in the subjects of the 
 school of Literae Humaniores. He graduated 
 B.A. with a First Class in 1907, and in the follow- 
 ing year he was elected to a Prize Fellowship at 
 St. John's College. 
 
 So impressed had I been by the promise of Handy- 
 side's work that I kept my Junior Assistantship open 
 a year for him till he should have taken his Oxford 
 degree; and he returned to Edinburgh in that 
 capacity in the autumn of 1907. He held the 
 position for four sessions, being given latterly the 
 status of Lecturer, and lecturing independently 
 to the Honours men on Advanced Logic and on 
 Spinoza. On the basis of his distinguished aca- 
 demic record and his successful teaching experience 
 in Edinburgh, he was appointed in 1911 to the 
 independent Lectureship in Philosophy in the
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE ix 
 
 University of Liverpool. His new work lay 
 mainly in the direction of ethics and political 
 philosophy and proved sufficiently absorbing, 
 combined as it was usually with a tutorial class 
 for workpeople under the University Extension 
 Board. For one session at least, owing to the 
 illness of Professor Mair, the main burden of the 
 philosophical department was laid upon his 
 shoulders, a severe test for a young man, but one 
 which served to show the genuine stuff of which 
 Handyside was made. He was also Examiner 
 in Philosophy in the University of Edinburgh at 
 the time, and I remember admiring the way in 
 which, without fuss or complaint, he accepted and 
 efficiently carried through all the additional work 
 thrown upon him. When the war broke out, 
 Professor Mair's health was not yet fully restored 
 and Handyside remained at his post for the first 
 year ; he literally could not be spared. But he 
 was restless, for he had heard the call. During 
 the session he sought to prepare himself as far as 
 possible by training with the O.T.C., and in July 
 1915 he received a commission in the 16th King's 
 Liverpool Regiment. In a letter written at the 
 time he expressed vividly the sense of peace which 
 this decision brought with it, the complete cessa- 
 tion of all anxieties about the future. After nearly 
 a year's training in England, he was sent to France 
 towards the end of June 1916, and attached to the 
 18th King's Liverpool Regiment. It was the
 
 x THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 opening of the battle of the Somme. On July 16th 
 he wrote to me, ' I have now been out for some 
 weeks, chiefly at an interesting point of the line, 
 where I learnt what it is like to go across the open 
 under shell-fire, both by day and by night ; but 
 now back in rest billets.' Three months later, on 
 the morning of October 18th, he was mortally 
 wounded, ' while gallantly rallying his men in a 
 particularly awkward and desperate situation.' 
 4 It required,' said one of the messages, ' a truly 
 brave man to do what he did under very adverse 
 circumstances.' He was carried to the aid-post 
 of his battalion, and after a few hours was sent 
 further back to an advanced dressing-station, but 
 all that could be done was to alleviate the pain of 
 his wounds. He was himself perfectly conscious 
 of his situation, and remained wonderfully cheery 
 and brave. He was able to dictate to the padre 
 a letter of farewell to those at home. ' Do not be 
 broken-hearted,' he said in a tender message to 
 his mother ; 4 it is curious how little one minds 
 dying, for oneself, but how much for you.' So 
 he sought to comfort her ; for himself he was 
 content. 
 
 To these few facts it may be sufficient to add the 
 concluding words of Professor Mair's sympathetic 
 notice at the time in the University of Liverpool 
 students' magazine : ' In the place where he lived 
 and worked for nearly five years,' he wrote, ' it 
 is needless to say much of the qualities of our dead
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE xi 
 
 friend. He was a man of acute and fine under- 
 standing, widely read in the history of human 
 thought and sensitive also to whatever was good 
 and notable in the intellectual life of the present 
 time. He never showed any desire to impose his 
 views upon others, but was decisively ready when 
 he judged they were really wanted. He was not 
 a friend of the turgid or frothy. With his 
 students his influence was always on the side 
 of sobriety and clarity of thought. Cheap 
 gospels and ready-made solutions did not thrive 
 under his auspices. He had, it is well worth 
 mentioning, a special kindness and attraction 
 for children. He remembered a number of his 
 child friends in the stress of warfare, and from 
 the trenches would send them, individually, gay 
 messages. 
 
 'The contemplative interest was perhaps the 
 strongest in him, but when the issue became 
 big enough he had no difficulty, as we see, 
 about entering the arena of action. His was too 
 critical a mind to accept a simple formula for a 
 complex situation, and it is doubtful whether 
 he would have adopted literally the saying 
 of M. Paul Bourget: "C'est que nous sommes 
 les soldats de la chretiente et que nous avons 
 devant nous les soldats d'Odin," but he saw 
 the business on that scale at least, and had no 
 doubts as to his part in it. All the distinctions 
 he won at Edinburgh and at Oxford cannot
 
 xii THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 rival the unforgettable distinction he has thus 
 won.' l 
 
 Handy side's mind was naturally of the acute 
 and analytic order, not sceptical in the sense of 
 having settled beforehand the impossibility of 
 philosophical construction, but fundamentally 
 critical in the best sense of the word, distrustful 
 of easy solutions and premature syntheses. On 
 some minds philosophy breaks like a sudden light, 
 an insight carrying its own evidence with it, and 
 making all things new. They are caught up, as 
 young men, in the sweep of some great philosophical 
 system ; the principle of explanation is accepted 
 and the rest of their thinking is nothing but its 
 application. But Handyside's mind was less 
 simply built. Audi alteram partem was the in- 
 stinctive maxim of his trained and impartial 
 intelligence. Hence, however attractively a 
 philosophical theory might present itself, however 
 strong its appeal to his sympathies, he had first to 
 bring it face to face with all the difficulties which 
 the history of thought or the theories of modern 
 science might suggest to a well-stored mind. 
 It had to be repeatedly taken up and patiently 
 meditated before he could determine his own 
 position in relation to it. Eminently philosophical 
 as this attitude must be pronounced, and greatly 
 as it enhances the value of the positive conclusions 
 
 1 The Sphinx, vol. xxiii., No. 1 (January 24, 1917).
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE xiii 
 
 reached, it was obviously unfavourable to rapid 
 and copious production. For Handyside was 
 disinclined to write merely to display his own dia- 
 lectical ability. Though naturally critical, nega- 
 tive criticism by itself did not seeni to attract him ; 
 he preferred to wait till he saw the prospect of 
 disengaging some positive result. 
 
 These qualities of mind and this method of 
 approach will be perceptible to any attentive 
 reader of the following essays. The order in which 
 they are printed is probably the reverse of that hi 
 which they were composed. The second and the 
 third are closely connected and may be assigned 
 on internal evidence to the close of the writer's 
 time in Oxford or to the period of his Assistant- 
 ship in Edinburgh. They are the work of one 
 fresh from the study of constructive idealism as 
 presented in the writings of Bradley and Bosanquet, 
 and the author is in the main in sympathy with 
 that position. 
 
 The third essay is a very thoughtful criticism 
 of the ideas of mechanism, organism, teleology, 
 and free activity, discussing in particular the 
 tendency of certain recent idealists to make free- 
 dom and purposive activity imply an element of 
 indeterminateness which contradicts the idea of 
 uniformity and law. On this view the relation 
 between mechanism and * the higher categories ' 
 becomes one of contradiction or mutual exclusion ; 
 but the contention of the essay is that we cannot
 
 xiv THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 get rid in this way of the uniformity and necessity 
 of causal sequence. ' Teleology can only exist in 
 a world which has the characteristic of a mechan- 
 ism,' and ' the process within the mind itself does 
 not exclude what we must call natural causation.' 
 Freedom means * self-determination,' that is ' de- 
 termination by grounds that are wholly internal 
 to itself,' and it seems obvious that nothing finite 
 can possess such complete self-determination ; 
 yet, from the point of view of ' a complete 
 system ' there is no contradiction between the 
 determination ' of part by part,' which is the 
 point of view of ' mechanism,' and the ' deter- 
 mination of whole by whole ' which is the point 
 of view of philosophical ' system.' 
 
 The second essay, starting from Spinoza's denial 
 that intellect is predicable of God, broadens out 
 almost immediately into a penetrating analysis 
 of the act of knowledge in its two correlated and 
 mutually essential aspects of thought and sense, 
 conception and perception, relation and quality. 
 Bradley 's view of the judgment as ' reference to 
 reality ' is criticised as tending to make the reality 
 to which we ' affix ' our predicates a Beyond or 
 Other which we can never really know. 'The 
 reality to which every judgment refers is not thus 
 external . . . but is just the concrete system of 
 the related qualities which we have already 
 thought, and of those which, consistently with 
 the existent system, we may think.' Similarly
 
 BIOGRAPHICAL NOTE xv 
 
 the * subject of knowledge is not a soul-unit outside 
 of the knowledge and somehow appropriating it, 
 but the very form of the knowledge, the " unity of 
 consciousness " or " synthetic unity of apper- 
 ception " which reflective analysis shows us, or 
 may show us, to be an essential element in the 
 description of knowledge.' The ideal of ' thought ' 
 as aqualityless system of relations is next examined 
 and repudiated. Such pure or merely relational 
 thought must always have an * other ' over against 
 it ; the general character of immediacy and the 
 particular qualities of sense cannot be reduced to 
 terms of thought conceived as merely a relating 
 activity. ' We are bound to define our " intelli- 
 gence " in terms which will include ** sentience " ; 
 we must unify intellect and sense ' ; and an 
 absolute experience conceived as such a unity is 
 at least a * regulative idea.' 
 
 These two essays deal with questions of epis- 
 temology and pure metaphysics. In the first 
 essay, Handyside passes from these to the problems 
 and the method of ethics. As has been already 
 mentioned, his work at Liverpool lay largely in 
 the direction of moral and social philosophy. This 
 was the first time the teaching of ethics had been 
 placed in his hands, and the fresh work attracted 
 him. He was naturally led to reconsider the 
 methods and principles of the science, and he told 
 me (in 1912 or 1913) that he was thinking of a book 
 on the subject. This essay evidently represents
 
 xvi THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 what he had put on paper with that intention, and 
 is therefore his maturest and most independent piece 
 of work. It is on a larger scale than the other 
 essays and differs from them also in being written 
 with a view to publication. Although dealing 
 primarily and specifically with the place of ' the 
 historical method in ethics,' it is in effect an im- 
 portant instalment of what might ultimately have 
 been entitled the author's Prolegomena to Ethics, 
 and contains, explicitly or by implication, much of 
 what he had to say on the scope and proper defini- 
 tion of the science, its postulates or presuppositions, 
 its methods of procedure, and the nature of the 
 conclusions at which it may be expected to arrive. 
 I will not attempt to summarise what seems to me 
 a singularly ripe and suggestive piece of writing. 
 It is full of matter for any one interested in the 
 foundations of moral theory, and its value can be 
 appreciated only in a careful reading. 
 
 A. S. PRINGLE-PATTISON. 
 
 UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH, 
 August 1919.
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD 
 IN ETHICS 
 
 MORALITY is not static, but has had a history, 
 has been developed, has passed through a course 
 of evolution. Just as, for instance, positive law 
 has changed, just as man's economic functions 
 have changed, so have his moral code and his 
 social relations. Fashion, habit, and custom ; 
 moral sentiment, opinion, and belief ; social re- 
 lation, observance, and institution ; all these are 
 the ways in which what, in the abstract, we call 
 the morality of a nation or of a period, shows 
 itself concretely, and each of these changes with 
 change of time. Morality has a genesis, that is, 
 a point at which it started out of the pre-existing 
 physical and psychical conditions. It has a de- 
 velopment, of differences within itself, differences 
 yet connected for us by this link of identity, that 
 they are all within the moral sphere an evolu- 
 tion or genesis and development considered to- 
 gether as taking place in a system which includes 
 them, and whose various aspects vary reciprocally, 
 and a history, which is the record of its evolu- 
 tion. So much may now be asserted without 
 qualification ; but on the question of the signific-
 
 2 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 ance, the value, and the proper end of the applica- 
 tion of the historical method to Ethics, or of the 
 historical consideration of morals, there seems 
 to be still room for diversity of opinion. The 
 question presents itself sometimes as one concern- 
 ing the nature of Ethical Science, sometimes as 
 one of the relative claims of origin and validity 
 within that science two aspects of the problem 
 which it is not necessary for us to distinguish here. 
 Ethics, as usually and traditionally understood, 
 is the science of morals, in the sense that it 
 determines the principles, the code of laws, on 
 which acts, conduct, and character are validly to 
 be judged good, right, meritorious, or evil, bad, 
 wrong. Its province is to determine what virtue 
 is, what vice is, and, hence, what is virtuous, and 
 what is vicious ; it is to tell us what our duties are, 
 what is obligatory upon us, what has a claim upon 
 our wills, what we ought to do, what has value, 
 worth, dignity. From all this we may select three 
 ways of formulation which state this view best : 
 
 1. Ethics is the normative science par excellence, 
 is the science of the norm of will, conduct, character. 
 
 2. It is the science of the ' ought ' as opposed to 
 the science of the ' is.' 
 
 3. It is the science of the determination of values. 
 
 But of Ethics in this sense it is easily seen how 
 small has been the success, as it has usually been 
 attempted. When moralists have tried to arrive,
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 3 
 
 by means of demonstration, at laws which 
 should have a universal claim on human conduct, 
 they have invariably failed, no matter how few or 
 how general their laws. The last attempt, and 
 that distinguished by the greatest ' common sense ' 
 of all, was that of Sidgwick, and Sidgwick (I believe 
 demonstrably) failed. And it is easy enough, 
 especially after the fact, to give the abstract 
 principles which show that such an attempt must 
 fail. If your conclusion is to be a moral judgment, 
 a judgment of value, your premises also must in- 
 clude such a moral judgment. Thus, ultimately, 
 every moral judgment which it may be attempted 
 syllogistically to prove must rest upon at least 
 one moral judgment which is merely assumed ; and 
 to assume any moral judgment, when all can be 
 doubted, is absurd. And thus it is certain that 
 those most ultimate propositions, on which Sidg- 
 wick and his predecessors base their proofs of 
 laws or maxims, either are not moral judg- 
 ments, and in that case do not prove the con- 
 clusions, or, being such, are themselves equally in 
 need of proof, and equally unprovable. 
 
 And so it seems not possible by this method to 
 reach any general or universal propositions, or 
 categorical imperatives, of the sort that the ration- 
 alising demonstrationists want. And, if so, it be- 
 comes relevant to point out that we do not, as 
 a matter of fact, in an unsophisticated state, 
 base our moral judgments on universal principles
 
 4 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 or on the recognition of categorical imperatives ; 
 that our moral judgments are rather the expression 
 of intuitions, which are themselves the result of 
 the inexhaustibly complex system of our individual 
 characters and of our social environment ; that, 
 therefore, no ' law ' yet formulated has given the 
 exact content of customary morality, or of any 
 recognised section of it ; and, finally, that even 
 if it did so for the morality of one time, yet, 
 ultimately, it would still be inadequate since 
 customary morals vary with time. 
 
 And so we are driven to conclude that this con- 
 ception of ' law ' is not adequate to our moral 
 experience, that morality is not, in any deep sense, 
 legality. If, then, we give up such an inquiry for 
 abstract and universal forms in the moral life, as 
 a practicable * Method of Ethics,' we must betake 
 ourselves, it would seem, to some kind of considera- 
 tion of the particular elements of content in 
 that life. We pass, in short, from a rationalist to 
 an empiricist account of morals, from the point 
 of view of the universal to that of the particular. 
 And, from this point of view the variety and 
 variability of moral phenomena gains in import- 
 ance ; empirical Ethics is led to pay attention to 
 the changes in morality from time to time (as 
 well as from place to place), to the evolution of 
 morals, to some sort of a historical method. 
 With this view comes usually the other, which 
 seems, prima facie, to be naturally connected with
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 5 
 
 it that, in opposition to the dicta of the previous 
 view, Ethics is a positive science, a science of the 
 ' is,' a science about men's notions of value. Such 
 a view is, of course, easily to be combined with a 
 purely naturalistic view of morality, with a com- 
 plete denial of the reality of obligation. This 
 question is, however, too wide to be more than 
 referred to here, where the validity of the moral 
 standpoint is, for the most part, postulated merely. 
 The view, then, that the science of Ethics is 
 a historical or evolutional science if this be a 
 correct way of describing the view which lays 
 emphasis on the History of Morals as the datum 
 of Ethics presents several aspects for considera- 
 tion. And first, as to the possibility of such a 
 science. It seems to me that there is un- 
 doubtedly room for a science with such data. 
 Similarly, I should say, there is room for, e.g., an 
 evolutional Economics, an evolutional Politics, 
 an evolutional Aesthetics, an evolutional Science 
 of Religion, and an evolutional Science of Know- 
 ledge. And in fact we find that evolutional or 
 historical methods have been applied to each of 
 these spheres. Even in the last of them, I find, 
 for instance, Windelband translated as speaking 
 of a ' Science of the History of Philosophy ' ; and 
 it seems clear that any attempt to treat system- 
 atically the development of knowledge that is, 
 of Science and Philosophy has a right to the title 
 of ' science,' or is debarred from it only by the
 
 6 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 absence of a consensus of experts. And so it 
 seems that, with the growing fullness of data, and 
 growing accuracy and impartiality of inference, 
 each of the above-named branches of inquiry 
 might be awarded the name of science. 
 
 But while we thus judge an evolutional Science 
 of Ethics possible, this other conclusion seems also 
 inevitable, that even the beginnings of such a 
 science are as yet non-existent. Ethics, in this 
 sense, is teachable, but where are the teachers ? 
 It would be difficult to point to any systematic 
 treatment, or attempt at such, of the development 
 of morals, either universally or within limits. 
 Even the most purely narrative and least system- 
 atic treatment of moral history would be some- 
 thing ; but even here there appears to be much 
 less accomplished than in the spheres of Religion 
 and Knowledge, each of which has found numer- 
 ous historians and innumerable investigators. And 
 the obvious remark is possible which may be 
 regarded either as a defence or as an admission 
 that the facts of moral evolution are so widespread, 
 as compared, for instance, with the facts of the 
 History of Philosophy, which is chiefly confined to 
 the learned, that they become almost impalpable 
 for Science. But this is no more than the ascrip- 
 tion of a cause for the fact that Stephen's Science 
 of Ethics, for example, does not depend on, and 
 scarcely even contains, a single empirical fact as 
 to the development of morality. The Science, in
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 7 
 
 fact, of which that work may be taken as represen- 
 tative, offers a certain parallel with Economics. 
 In the latter, despite the insistence of some schools 
 on the necessity of making a historical science 
 of it, the main work done is easily distinguished 
 into the two main departments of abstract theory 
 and concrete history. So it seems to be, as yet, 
 with Ethics, the second-born of these sciences of 
 Humanity. Here we have a little historical 
 material like Lecky's History of European Morals 
 from Constantine to Charlemagne, and much more 
 as yet uncollected and unsystematised, on the 
 one hand, and theory comparatively abstract on 
 the other too abstract, as I am convinced typi- 
 fied by Stephen's book already mentioned. But 
 this, of course, does not go far into the matter. 
 The science of Ethics, like those other actual or 
 possible sciences of Humanity, works, it is to be 
 presumed, from certain data, and arrives at certain 
 conclusions, by certain methods on certain assump- 
 tions. And the problem is : What part does the 
 history of the evolution of morals occupy in the 
 science? Is the history the datum from which 
 conclusions are drawn, and is it the sole such 
 datum ? And in what sense can the method and 
 the assumptions also of the science be called 
 ' historical ' ? And especially (to some the all- 
 important question) what sort of conclusions can it 
 enable you to arrive at ? a question formally separ- 
 ate from the others, and here to be treated last.
 
 8 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 I. The other questions, however, suggest an 
 examination of some general characteristics of the 
 evolution of such a group of human facts. And 
 first, the assertion that the earlier facts are the 
 simpler. We may take this in two senses. 
 Either the facts are simpler in themselves, notiora 
 naturae, or they are simpler to us, notiora nobis. 
 And even in the former of these senses, the state- 
 ment seems one not to be so easily accepted as it 
 has been by some. The natural use of ' simplicity ' 
 seems to be to indicate relative degrees of abstrac- 
 tion ; thus, mathematical facts are simpler than 
 physical or chemical facts. But within one kind 
 of facts, of uniform degree of abstraction, the 
 notion of simplicity seems not naturally applic- 
 able ; we can scarcely say that a circle, e.g., is 
 more or less simple than an ellipse, or the motions 
 of a nebula than those of a planetary system. 
 And can we be sure that we are stating any signi- 
 ficant truth when we say that a totem-group, for 
 example, or a nomad tribe is in itself a simpler 
 phenomenon than a modern European village ? 
 We should answer, I suppose, that it, barely, may 
 be, but (to leave this point) that a large part of 
 its apparent simplicity arises from our ignorance 
 of some elements in the fact : which brings us to 
 our second point. Whether the earlier fact be 
 simpler in itself or no, there can scarcely be any 
 doubt that it is less simple to us, who are ignorant 
 of half the fact, and half its conditions. And so,
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 9 
 
 although the earlier facts may have been simpler, 
 we cannot say that we know a larger proportion of 
 the truth about them than about the complex con- 
 temporary fact. An element of a present fact may 
 be found, perhaps, in an earlier and less complex 
 stage of the evolution, in isolation from its present 
 context, but with another context, which, if it has 
 the advantage of being simpler, has the great dis- 
 advantage of being comparatively unknown. 
 
 II. It may be worth while to indicate the 
 dangers of interpreting human evolution exclu- 
 sively on the lines of biological evolution, i.e. of 
 Natural Selection. The fit organism survives, 
 and therefore the fit species ; the unfit organism 
 or species perishes : that is the emphatic point 
 in biological evolution. But in human history 
 the extinction of a race is among the rarest of all 
 events, and has probably not occurred sufficiently 
 often to render possible a natural selection view 
 of human history. This evolution is of ideals, 
 not of individuals ; the selection plays its part 
 hi the sphere of customs and institutions, not by 
 selecting societies, nations, or races themselves. 
 It is the rejected ideal that perishes, the accepted 
 ideal that survives. The changes of animal species 
 are accidental variations selected by natural con- 
 ditions ; but a society is not a species, and the 
 differences with which moral science has to do are 
 not things unchangeable like differences of colour 
 or of skin texture, but things entirely in the hands
 
 10 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 of the society itself. And this differentiation from 
 biology is the reason why discussions, e.g., of moral 
 heredity, and similar topics, are really irrelevant 
 to all the important questions of ethical science. 
 
 III. It seems sometimes to be made one of the 
 assumptions of Historical Ethics that ' earlier ' 
 and * lower ' shall be equivalent, and so, also, 
 ' later ' and ' higher.' Now, the statement may 
 be true and may be provable, that human evolu- 
 tion is an unbroken advance or progress ; it may 
 even be postulated for special purposes ; but it 
 surely can not be postulated as a general basis for 
 the science of morals. As long as Nietzsche con- 
 siders Christianity a regress, while Tolstoy condemns 
 almost every movement since its introduction, or 
 as long as the mass of men think the Middle Ages 
 to have been on a lower level than some that 
 preceded them, so long will the statement require 
 proof, and refuse to be merely postulated. 
 
 IV. By what methods, then, do ' historical ' 
 sciences seek to reach true propositions ? The 
 question is partly one of General Logic, or of the 
 Philosophy of Science, and may be answered 
 differently according as we have different ideals 
 of knowledge, or different modes of formulating 
 our ideal, such as the ' establishment of uniformi- 
 ties of co-existence and succession,' the ' discovery 
 of laws of nature,' the 'description of phenomena,' 
 the ' construction of a system of necessary truths,' 
 or the * attainment of judgments of systematic
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 11 
 
 necessity.' Now the difficulty in the way of 
 applying these ideals to the sciences which have 
 as their datum human history is simply the com- 
 plexity of that datum, its concreteness and lack 
 of abstraction. All facts, all data, are given in 
 temporal series, and in this respect human his- 
 tory is like other facts. But physical facts, from 
 their being defined as such by a previous abstrac- 
 tion, are in this sense simple, and so capable of 
 the artificial isolation of parts from their context, 
 for purposes of understanding and control. 
 Thus, to take a usual example, the conjunction of 
 hydrogen two parts, oxygen one part, is followed 
 in a large variety of contexts by the production 
 of some drops of water, and we arrive at the 
 relative universal : ' Given H 2 and 0, you get water,' 
 or: * Water is H 2 ' ; the varying context being here 
 treated as irrelevant, by that very abstraction 
 which isolates certain facts to form the physical 
 universe. But for the most part even such uni- 
 versals as this are unattainable in human affairs, 
 which are essentially concrete. We do not arrive, 
 in them, at any notable amount of separation of 
 facts from a context recognised as irrelevant. 
 Every contingent aspect of a man's character 
 seems, for instance, to be able to have a bearing on 
 any particular act of his ; and we are consequently 
 much more narrowly confined to mere narrative 
 judgments, instead of reaching judgments of 
 systematic necessity. It is as if, in the physical
 
 12 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 instance, we could do no more than describe, more 
 or less exhaustively, but never with absolute ex- 
 haustiveness, each case of the production of water, 
 with its context. We can, as a rule, do nothing 
 more than this in matters of human history. 
 Another way of putting what is really the same 
 difficulty is to say that the historical series is 
 not repeated nor repeatable. This is the same 
 point as before, for of course the physical series 
 also is not repeated ; only, through the abstract 
 nature of the latter, certain events in it can be 
 so taken by themselves that they may be repeated, 
 if their context be neglected ; and this is practic- 
 ally impossible in history, i.e., in the case of con- 
 crete human facts. 
 
 V. But there are other propositions about human 
 affairs which seem to attain a very high degree of 
 universality, far beyond that of mere statements 
 of fact and of empirical connections of fact, and 
 some notice may be taken of these. Take, for 
 instance, the ' law of the three stages,' that human 
 progress is from the mythological, through the 
 metaphysical, to the positive method of science and 
 explanation, a statement which is often called a 
 ' law.' It is clear that, in the most natural sense 
 of this, the ' law ' is as much a narrative judgment 
 as any particular statement of historical fact, and 
 can be stated thus : ' Human progress has been so, 
 and has been found to be so.' But, again, it may 
 be taken as a ' law ' in the sense that ' human
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 13 
 
 progress must be so, or must have been so,' a 
 judgment of systematic necessity, which, it is there- 
 fore implied, would be true for any 'humanity.' 
 And why does this interpretation look absurd ? 
 Because only one side of the relation expressed in 
 this judgment is really specified. We know what 
 we mean by this kind of progress, but what do 
 we mean by ' a humanity,' or humanity, in 
 general? Something, surely, of inexhaustible 
 complexity, composed of elements of varying im- 
 portance for this predicate (' progress '), on whose 
 relative importance we are not agreed. If this 
 notion of ' humanity ' were through and through 
 comprehended and analysed, the fact of such a 
 progress characterising such a complex would 
 thereby be understood, its cause assigned, and 
 the ' law ' would be a judgment of necessity. 
 But 'humanity' is inexhaustible (or at least un- 
 exhausted) in complexity, and our judgments 
 about it are far from being scientific universals. 
 This one example may serve, being a large one. 
 Of course the mass of our judgments are of much 
 narrower scope, and the possibilities of reaching 
 truth much greater. But we can scarcely expect 
 to exhaust the nature, and therefore the condi- 
 tions, of any fact of human history, e.g., the 
 Ionian Philosophy, the economic state of the 
 Middle Ages, the art of the Italian Renaissance, 
 or (to return to Ethics) Greek morals, the com- 
 promise of the Early Church with the world, or any
 
 particular case of modern moral reform. The facts 
 of human history are there, largely opaque to us, 
 and we can construct only too little on the basis of 
 those facts. 
 
 VI. It seems, then, that a ' historical ' science 
 of Ethics can scarcely aim at ' laws,' whether of 
 development or of static connection. But the 
 same, or similar, aims may be otherwise ex- 
 pressed. The Hegelian, for example, may postulate 
 the significance or universality of human moral 
 history, in such a way that the particular con- 
 nections of fact known to us must be supposed to 
 have the value of scientific universals, as taking 
 their place in a reproduction of the system of the 
 categories. And it seems necessary to reply, in 
 the first place, that of course we must postulate 
 the necessity, and therefore the universality 
 of the connections of fact in the real evolution 
 itself, but that we cannot therefore assert the 
 universality or necessity of our seeming know- 
 ledge of the evolution ; and, secondly, that the 
 development of the categories in history can, from 
 the point of view of history itself, be a mere pos- 
 tulate, requiring empirical proof like any other 
 law. Or, as Hegel himself says, Universal History 
 must be examined as a particular case in which the 
 theory (of the world's being constituted by reason 
 and its categories) is to be confirmed or refuted. 
 
 It may seem that by these qualifications I have 
 left myself no room for admitting that the historical
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 15 
 
 consideration of morals can have any results. But 
 I think that if the claims of the historical method 
 be more modestly stated if, after failing to be 
 other things, it confines itself to being History- 
 there is still a sufficient sphere for it, namely, that 
 of the genesis and development of particulars. If 
 the method does not attempt to formulate ' laws,' 
 but is content to narrate connections of fact at the 
 first degree of remove from the mere datum 
 (if there is any such datum apart from con- 
 nections), then the understanding, the practical 
 and theoretical control, of the particulars so 
 connected may be greatly increased. In fact, it 
 is arguable that it is only in so far as we remain 
 at this level the narrative of genesis and develop- 
 ment that we can be said properly to use a 
 historical method at all. Otherwise, the Moral 
 (or other) History is the datum, and the method 
 pure scientific construction on that datum. Here 
 the method and the datum are one. This con- 
 ception, then, of the historical method (which I 
 take to be essentially that put forth by Dewey), 
 as facilitating our comprehension and command of 
 particulars by a knowledge of their genesis, or 
 rather, as I should say, of their development, 
 seems to be the only one by which the value of that 
 method, for Ethics, as for the other human or 
 humane sciences, can be validated, if ' history ' 
 be taken at the level of the empirical knowledge 
 we possess of it, and if, for the present, we leave
 
 16 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 out of consideration the final question as to the 
 relation of the method to judgments of value. 
 The conception requires, however, more elabora- 
 tion. If we take, for instance, the history of 
 those virtues now generally classed together under 
 some such name as Honour, and lay clear the 
 course of their evolution, we may thereby attain 
 a fuller insight into the significance in modern 
 society of those virtues, and into their essential 
 nature. Starting, thus, with the Hebraic eighth 
 and ninth commandments, and the Hellenic con- 
 ceptions of Veracity and Justice, we might consider 
 the Christian combination, and consequent eleva- 
 tion, of the two, the mediaeval literal and rigorous, 
 but narrow, understanding and acceptance of 
 certain fundamental rules, the feudal ideals of 
 chivalric and knightly honour, puritan and piet- 
 istic ideas of truthfulness and honesty, and the 
 modern emphasis on commercial honour, conse- 
 quent on the industrialism of modern civilisation. 
 Such an application of historical method would 
 give knowledge worth having, real insight. If it 
 put modern Honour in line with Hellenic Justice, 
 it would lead us to a better understanding of the 
 part played by each, through comparison with 
 some part more obviously played, under different 
 circumstances, by the other. The value of the 
 knowledge will not depend, as Dewey well insists, 
 on the extent of the positive identity between the 
 two. If the Hellenic ethical, i.e., moral and social,
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 17 
 
 system differs from the modern as a whole, corre- 
 sponding elements in the two systems will have 
 implicated differences ; and it will be from the 
 differences, quite as much as from the identity, that 
 we shall be able, when starting from the elements, 
 to construct the systems as wholes. 
 
 As to the advantages, however, of going back to 
 the beginnings of things, the earliest conjecturable 
 stages of morals, I must confess myself somewhat 
 sceptical, for these reasons : (1) The fact whose 
 primary genesis is thus traced has usually very 
 little real identity with any facts of more advanced 
 periods with which it could conceivably be com- 
 pared, too little identity to serve as the basis of 
 a fruitful comparison. Dewey's comparison of 
 primitive customs of infanticide with a certain 
 aspect of industrial civilisation, almost the only 
 real instance that his papers contain, is itself 
 sufficiently artificial to serve as a verification 
 of this assertion. Another aspect of the same 
 is, (2) that in primitive societies the conditions 
 at work to produce facts, of whatever degree 
 of similarity to modern ones, are often super- 
 seded in later days. In savage epochs, e.g., 
 it may be true that natural selection of societies 
 is at work to a certain extent. The tribe that 
 sinneth, it shall die ; the group with a bad 
 custom may be exterminated. But throughout 
 the historical period this state of things is past. 
 Ideals may change, but that is because the same
 
 18 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 man or society more or less consciously changes 
 it, not because the society with the lower ideal 
 perishes. And, similarly, other conditions of the 
 details of the ethical systems of societies do not 
 survive into the historical epoch, and are for the 
 most part, therefore, unknown to us. And so 
 we come to the difficulty, mentioned by Sidg- 
 wick, that our knowledge of distant and early 
 times is very really dependent on our knowledge 
 of times nearer to us. We have, for one thing, 
 direct record of historical facts, which supply us 
 with a known and certain basis from which our 
 constructions and inferences may proceed ; but 
 for prehistoric periods and societies we have to 
 rely on inference from the beginning. And (which 
 is the point) the principles and analogies by which 
 we infer and construct in such cases must be 
 entirely derived from our knowledge of general 
 moral facts in periods with which we are more 
 directly familiar. And, thus, consideration of pre- 
 historic facts can scarcely be an application of 
 historical method, since we do not interpret the 
 present and that indefinite past in the light of 
 each other, but confine ourselves to one side of 
 this, and that the least instructive, namely, con- 
 struing the unhistoric past in the light of the historic 
 present. 
 
 In consequence, Ethics, qua historical, is con- 
 cerned not so much with the genesis of morality 
 from the non-moral if such a genesis is even
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 19 
 
 conceivable within Ethics as with the genesis 
 of differences within morality, not with moral 
 beginnings, but with moral development. And 
 for this we can find the reason, that a pre -moral 
 state is one which we cannot certainly construct 
 for ourselves in imagination or conception as we 
 construct other possibilities within morals. It is 
 not an object of Ethical Science, and cannot, there- 
 fore, take a place in the historical development 
 with which Ethics deal. The historical method, 
 for Ethics, must start from the genesis, not take 
 account of it, must consider the history of morals, 
 not of something else which includes the beginning 
 of morality as an event within it. 
 
 In this connection it is natural to touch on another 
 point, viz., the view which attributes a greater 
 reality to the earliest moral phenomena, or even 
 negates the reality of moral phenomena as such in 
 favour of pre-moral and non-moral facts. This 
 general view may receive various concrete fillings. 
 It may be held, e.g., that all action was originally 
 selfish ; and it may on this ground be further 
 maintained that, somehow, all action is really 
 selfish, though apparently not so. It is the same 
 view which seems to show itself when Mill argues 
 that all action is pleasure-seeking, and appears to 
 find this consistent with the miser's seeking money 
 for its own sake. Mill might, indeed, defend his 
 position otherwise, but it seems impossible to 
 validate it apart from some such assumption as the
 
 20 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 present. But that assumption it is clearly not 
 necessary to make. As has often enough been said, 
 sometimes too flatly and with too little compre- 
 hension, the fact is what it is, whatever it has been 
 preceded by ; morality is none the less real, though 
 it may have been preceded by, and evolved out of 
 non-moral elements. Or, to put the reply other- 
 wise, the preceding elements can be called properly 
 * non-moral ' only by those who hold them apart 
 and in abstraction from the result of their com- 
 bination. The view we are considering looks upon 
 the earlier fact, the pre-moral elements, as a sub- 
 stantive (if we may put it so), and yet forgets that 
 substantives can only be defined hi terms of 
 adjectives that this pre-moral substantive must 
 essentially be denned and qualified, and therefore 
 modified, by its relation to moral facts, by the ad- 
 jective, namely, that in combination the non-moral 
 elements had such a moral product, evolved into 
 such a moral result. And, surely, a complete view 
 will negate all such sharp divisions of phenomena 
 as this into moral and non-moral, simply on the 
 basis of the true evolutionary idea of the con- 
 tinuity of process in all phenomena. 
 
 This leads on to another imperfect view which may 
 be more briefly dismissed. It is the counterpart 
 of the view already mentioned, that the later is 
 higher, essentially, than the earlier, and it presents 
 itself in many forms, from the sentimentalist 
 ideals of primitive societies, to scientific beliefs
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 21 
 
 that earlier morals are, as psychologically more 
 real, so nearer also to moral reality than later. 
 Perhaps something of the same view may be found 
 in the proposal to consider morally valid only what 
 is common to all moral codes, which might, on 
 certain views, be taken to correspond pretty nearly 
 to the ethical system of the first moral beings. 
 But all of this is, of course, quite unwarranted, 
 really requiring us to suppose a special agency at 
 work at first and later exhausted, or quiescent at 
 first and active later, to account for the difference. 
 And such a supposition is quite contrary to any 
 consistent view of evolution, however much it 
 may claim connection with that standpoint. The 
 process is one throughout. 
 
 Our empirical knowledge, then, and our insight 
 into, and appreciation of, ethical facts, seem 
 capable of advancement by means of the histori- 
 cal method, as we have here conceived it. But 
 while this is so, there seems still to be room for a 
 revival of another and most important question, 
 important as one not yet even approximately 
 settled. The knowledge we are supposed thus 
 to attain is positive knowledge, and from that 
 very fact it seems to be, strictly speaking, 
 not moral knowledge. It is knowledge about 
 the ' is,' not knowledge about the ' ought ' : this 
 antithesis seems so far to remain unsolved. And 
 whilst, as we have seen, it seems impossible to 
 give any determination of values by pure thought
 
 22 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 or universal a priori principles, the rationalist's 
 method, it seems equally impossible to give any 
 proof of the values of conduct from the facts of 
 history, the empiricist's method ; and so, it may 
 seem impossible to give any such determination 
 of values at all. In the abstract this is clear enough, 
 and it has been said often enough. Let us con- 
 sider a few ways that have been adopted of getting 
 over the difficulty. 
 
 I. Clearly, if ethical history be all looked at in 
 the light of the Utilitarian formula, that formula 
 will remain at the end as the ultimate and 
 unexplainable. If aspects of the moral evolu- 
 tion be appraised on the standard of ' greatest 
 happiness,' that standard may seem proved by 
 the evolution. Could we prove that every moral 
 code has been of Utilitarian tendencies, we might 
 represent ourselves as proving the validity of the 
 Utilitarian criterion. Or rather more strictly 
 if the human constitution were such that no act 
 could be performed except as having utilitarian 
 consequences, it would seem thereby to be made 
 certain that no other ethical standard could be 
 valid for men, though it would still be unproved 
 that even the Utilitarian standard was so. But, 
 as the human constitution is admittedly not so, 
 even the exclusion of other criteria can only be 
 the consequence of the (illegitimate) postulating 
 of the Universal Hedonistic criterion from the 
 first.
 
 II. Similarly, if it be postulated that the 
 criterion is something called social 'efficiency,' 
 ' adjustment,' ' adaptation,' ' vitality,' ' health,' 
 ' equilibrium,' the end of the historical inquiry will 
 at least leave us with what we started with, and in 
 addition some knowledge of how this end is to be 
 reached, if any of these phrases really denotes a 
 definite end which can be aimed at. But how, 
 so far as such a definite social end is meant, one 
 is to prove it to be the true end of conduct, 
 from history as usually understood ; or how, 
 from such history, one is to prove that definite 
 characteristic which all these criteria have in 
 common their social character, which Bradley, 
 e.g., denies I know not. 
 
 III. We may, again, start with Green's obviously 
 true proposition, that man has certain potential- 
 ities, and that his good activities from time to time 
 are the realisation of these. And our danger here, 
 though I do not mean to imply that Green himself 
 fell into it, is of overlooking the fact that wrong 
 action is comprehended under the same formula. 
 If we neglect to notice this, we are apt to take it 
 for granted that any course which moral evolution 
 has taken at any period was the right course, and 
 so to come again to the view that human history 
 must be a progress. But, of course, we have no 
 real reason, a priori, for thinking the historical 
 choices of nations more likely to be right than 
 the choices of individuals ; if we do postulate this
 
 24 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 providential Tightness of choice, we are likely to 
 be reduced to the point of treating the choice as its 
 own justification, and a guarantee of the validity of 
 the impulse to it; which in morals is Intuitionism, 
 and in historical theory makes all judgments of 
 comparative value arbitrary, unmotived, and 
 unscientific. 
 
 IV. There are other dangers when we start with 
 an inadequate formula, one which is, therefore, 
 unable to supply itself with content. Alexander's 
 formula of ' equilibrium ' is, I think, an example 
 of such ; and here it is easy to slip into the view 
 that since, as is true, all conduct, and all social 
 orders, are in equilibrium from the very fact 
 of their existing one kind of conduct or of state 
 is as good as another, so that progress as dis- 
 tinguished from process becomes impossible. 
 Comprehensiveness or extensiveness of the 
 equilibrium may, of course, be taken, in such a 
 theory, as the basis of comparative values, but 
 even these seem to take us beyond the meagre 
 notion of equilibrium as such. 
 
 In the light of these instances, and of our pre- 
 ceding remarks, we may say, in general, that on 
 ordinary views one seems either (1) to start with 
 no criterion and to end with none ; or (2) to start 
 with some assumed or postulated, but at all 
 events unproved, definite criterion, and to end as 
 one began ; or (3) to start with an analytic pro- 
 position, or empty formula admitting of all
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 25 
 
 possible diverse fillings, and then, (a) either to 
 make one's valuative judgments arbitrarily, or 
 (6) to refuse to make them at all, either of which 
 is, ultimately, the denial of the existence of a 
 criterion, and therefore of value. 
 
 If, then, we put aside such views as partial, we 
 seem brought face to face with the need of our- 
 selves stating some tenable view of the nature or 
 form of the criterion, in connection with which 
 a view of the significance of historical method 
 in Ethics may be developed. We have already 
 said that lateness is not a sufficient guarantee 
 of validity ; ethical retrogression is possible. 
 The criterion, then, cannot be merely the latest 
 evolved moral and social system, i.e., that in which 
 we live. But when we seek to determine how any 
 system in which we live can be, by us, theoretically 
 condemned, in whole or in part, we must beware 
 of taking up again that point of view already dis- 
 missed as inadequate that of moral ' laws ' as 
 such. Of course, if there is to be any morality, 
 there will have to be in some sense laws of 
 morality, maxims, obedience to which is obliga- 
 tory on the individual. But such laws are not 
 adequate to the expression of moral good. As 
 such, they do not find a place in the moral universe 
 at all, but have to be transmuted, transcended in 
 a higher standpoint. This may be stated as an 
 opposition between formal and teleological Ethics, 
 as Paulsen, e.g., puts it. The law, the formal
 
 26 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 maxim, has, transmuted, its place in the ethical 
 system, but is not the whole of that system, nor 
 its essential aspect. Our view, at once of the moral 
 criterion and of moral evolution, is, then, to be 
 dominated rather by the idea of system than of 
 law. The morality of any place and period is 
 a systematic whole, an ethical (i.e. a moral 
 and social) system ; and the criterion of validity 
 in Ethics is to be a criterion applicable to systems 
 rather than to laws. 
 
 When I speak of taking up this view of system 
 from the beginning of all historical inquiries, I 
 must not be taken as meaning that some specific 
 moral criterion is right, and therefore may be 
 adopted, while those other views, of ' social vitality, 
 ' general happiness,' etc., are wrong, and may not. 
 The point is that, so long as any criterion remains 
 at the standpoint of ' law,' it cannot be validated, 
 either by history or by demonstration, and so 
 cannot make real use of the historical method : 
 for these purposes it must be taken at the level 
 of system, and it is this general and formal char- 
 acteristic, which must be borne by all theories, 
 that the formula I here use is designed to indicate. 
 For ethical system is not itself, directly, an 
 ideal, but only the general form of all ideals, a 
 schema left to receive some concrete filling, which 
 may be essentially identical with the content of 
 any of those rejected legal conceptions, and may 
 be supplied, I believe, through a certain kind of
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 27 
 
 historical consideration, which is at the same time 
 demonstrative. 
 
 How, then, is this validation of a system possible ? 
 Validity is, of course, equivalent to rationality, 
 and we have found it impossible to demonstrate, 
 to exhibit, the rationality of a law : can we do 
 so for a system ? 
 
 (A) Kant, in whom the legalistic or formal view 
 of Ethics is consummated, has often been proved 
 to have made the only criterion of a law, in effect, 
 its consistency with itself, its non-contradiction ; 
 and I think it clear, both that no other criterion of 
 a law can be offered, and that this is insufficient. 
 But if we transfer even this criterion to system, we 
 seem to find a difference. The theory of knowledge 
 seems ultimately to hold that the criterion of the 
 truth of any new judgment is simply its consist- 
 ency with the system of truth already accepted, 
 and that the only possible criterion of the system 
 of truth as a whole is its consistency with itself, 
 its exclusion of contradiction. And this, if we 
 may argue by analogy, seems to be a first indica- 
 tion that the test of consistency may be of more 
 value in the case of a view of morality as system 
 than in the other view of it as law. Consistency, 
 of course, must be taken in Ethics, as in Meta- 
 physics, in its strict and absolute sense, in which 
 even a concept of pure understanding, for example, 
 or a pure form of sense, may be shown, when taken 
 by itself and carried to its logical extreme, to
 
 28 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 involve a contradiction which is implicit in its 
 nature. 
 
 (B) We must, in the second place, view all human 
 sensibility and choice as the construction of an 
 ethical (a moral and social) system, in which man 
 4 finds himself ' ; which, by the fact of his response 
 to it, he judges to be suitable to himself, to re- 
 spond to his nature. 
 
 (C) Any system so constructed by human voli- 
 tion can be binding, obligatory on the wills of 
 individuals, only so far (we have already seen) as 
 it is in some sense rational. But of rationality 
 we have in a moral and social, as in an intellectual, 
 system, no external test. And as, in the latter, 
 consistency or non- contradiction, 'harmony,' 
 1 comprehensiveness or inclusiveness,' or, as Brad- 
 ley expresses all these in another formula, ' in- 
 dividuality,' is the only possible internal test, so 
 it seems it must be with the former, the ethical 
 construction. And, consequently, it is open to us 
 to interpret many of the shorthand formulae of 
 ethical thinkers as so many expressions of the 
 various modes in which this abstract rationality 
 of consistency concretely shows itself. Thus, for 
 instance, with reference to the individual, we have 
 the norm of conduct defined, in increasing degrees 
 of isolation from the true source of obligation, as 
 rational action or rationalisation of sensibility ; 
 choice of the proper, or fitting, amount, choice of 
 a mean relative to us (both in Aristotle) ; equili-
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 29 
 
 brium of conduct (Alexander) ; personality (' Be a 
 person ') ; harmony or individuality of character 
 (Bradley). With reference to society, the norm is 
 defined as social equilibrium, social vitality, social 
 adaptation, social adjustment, none of which, I 
 believe, can be really thought out without involving 
 some idea of a right proportion of elements a 
 choice of neither too little nor too much, to use an 
 old suggestive phrase which brings us back once 
 more to rationality as criterion, which brings 
 us, in turn, to systematic consistency. 
 
 Nothing, it seems to me, could be more disastrous 
 than to represent these various formulae as con- 
 flicting, discrepant, mutually exclusive. They are 
 all, fundamentally, expressions of various sides or 
 aspects of the one ideal, which derives the obliga- 
 toriness, which it imparts to them, from the fact 
 of its being the rational hi relation to us. And it 
 is only less harmful that any one of these formulae 
 should be unduly exalted and worshipped, as, e.g., 
 Alexander tries to exalt his formula, to the oblivion 
 of the all-important point that it is nothing unless 
 it makes concrete the ideal of rationality. Take 
 ' equilibrium,' for example, and examine it to 
 see what worth it has, if taken to be more than a 
 formula, and an inadequate formula. Surely it 
 is obvious that any sort of conduct, bad as well as 
 good, is in a sort of equilibrium as making allow- 
 ance, in some proportion, for the various wants of 
 man, and that any sort of social order is in a sort
 
 30 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 of equilibrium for the same reason. But for the 
 concrete work of determining in what proportions 
 such allowance is rational, or of comparing different 
 states of such equilibrium as to their relative value, 
 the formula of * equilibrium ' as such, and while 
 it stays within its own limits, is useless, and shows 
 up plainly as a mere formula. Aristotle's formula 
 for good conduct, and still more Plato's, derive all 
 their value when once they have been acknow- 
 ledged to be, as formulae, inadequate from their 
 close connection with the keen analysis by each 
 of these thinkers of the whole moral and social 
 system. Formulae like that of Alexander are 
 practically valueless in so far as they are not so 
 connected, and do not naturally lend themselves 
 to such a connection. 
 
 From these implications of the idea of a con- 
 sistent, and so rational, system we may return 
 to consider directly the value of History to ethical 
 theory and practice. Men now are confronted 
 with the same problem which man in all ages has 
 had to face ; they have to create, or at least to 
 maintain and gradually to remodel, a moral and 
 social system in which they may find their true 
 selves, and so be truly satisfied ; they have to 
 posit in and out of themselves an ethical order 
 which shall be rational, in the sense of appro- 
 priate, harmonious, individual, and, ultimately, 
 consistent, and comprehensive or exhaustive, as 
 including all its relations within it, and so, once
 
 more, being consistent ; and this is what all 
 men have been doing since the world began. Now, 
 so far as we are shut in to the present, we are 
 prejudiced, neglect possible alternatives to what 
 comes naturally to us ; we lack the material of 
 criticism, either (a) by not being aware of alter- 
 natives, never having conceived them, or (b) by 
 not understanding and appreciating them aright. 
 And this is a defect both in moral practice and in 
 ethical theory. It was through such a narrowness 
 of outlook, both geographical and historical, we 
 may say, that Aristotle was led to justify slavery 
 in theory, just as it led his countrymen to be 
 slaveholders in practice. Aristotle and his coun- 
 trymen did not appreciate or understand were 
 not, we may in a very real sense say, aware of, or 
 were blind to the possibility of any life system 
 outside of the free corporate life of the city-state, 
 and deemed it * natural ' that the alien should be 
 taken from the life-system he shared to serve 
 them, thinking it no loss to him. But modern 
 Europe, with better appreciation of the cosmo- 
 politanism of history, can scarcely persuade itself 
 to reduce black or yellow to practical slavery ; 
 Europe is conscious of the numerous possibilities 
 of ethical type, and conscious also of its own 
 savage ancestry. And so, in less momentous cases, 
 knowledge of moral history may mean insight into 
 moral values through the consciousness of alter- 
 natives to which the unenlightened mind is blind,
 
 32 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 and the consequent capacity of criticism. The 
 ethical thinker, similarly, who in some ways is but 
 the moral man sublimated, receives from historic 
 studies a fuller understanding, a more adequate 
 power of evaluation, of ethical phenomena. 
 
 Or, more abstractly, we may formulate the 
 position thus. The moral criterion is not the 
 abstract non-contradiction of a single proposition, 
 or ' law,' which may thereby be set up to preside 
 and keep state in blank universality over the 
 particular acts of men. It is a concrete con- 
 sistency non-contradiction on a higher level 
 which involves the inclusion of all relations within 
 it, and so implies the greatest possible compre- 
 hensiveness, or exhaustiveness, the allowing and 
 accounting for all imperfect and one-sided views. 
 And, just as systems of truth are tested, often, 
 rather by neglect of aspects than by positive error, 
 so ethical systems may most easily be judged, hi 
 the first place, as f ailing in comprehensiveness. The 
 system lacks in consistency, in internal harmony, 
 what it lacks in comprehensiveness. And from 
 this arises the value of history to the student of 
 ethical system. One historical system may con- 
 tain an aspect which others omit, or omit an aspect 
 others allow for. And if the student really knows 
 moral and social systems other than that which 
 he lives in, and the points in which they differ, he 
 will be at last supplied with a datum which is at 
 the same time a criterion, on which he will be able
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 33 
 
 to make real estimates of value. And this datum- 
 criterion can be derived iiowhence else. The claim 
 of an aspect or element to be included in a thor- 
 oughly exhaustive system can be but this, that it 
 has found a place in some imperfect life-system, 
 even though such imperfect system be at the 
 level of what we should judge mere sensibility. 
 Further to define this method would take me too 
 far. Some additional characteristics and conse- 
 quences may, however, be given. 
 
 (1.) Ethical systems, in the secondary sense 
 of theories about morality and society, find a 
 place in this historical datum and method, along 
 with the various actual moral and social orders. 
 Thus, Plato's ideal of the Republic, and of perfect 
 virtue, the construction in Aristotle's Ethics and 
 Politics, have a high significance for the historical 
 method because of their completeness. And it 
 is because the writings of most modern moralists 
 fail in this that they lack this historical value. 
 They do not give really systematic constructions ; 
 their principles are usually too detached, too 
 little coherent with one another, their outlook 
 on life too narrow or too sophisticated, to be 
 adequate to any actual moral or social system. 
 The chief value of such theories is often to serve as 
 representative of some aspect of the actual system 
 in which they are produced. Just because the 
 theoretic insight of man is limited, systems con- 
 ceived by one man are more likely to be one-sided 
 
 c
 
 than systems built up by the living of a whole 
 society. But such theoretical systems are of 
 course through and through influenced by, and 
 dependent on, the ethical conditions of their 
 place and time, and must be understood in the 
 light of them, and complemented by sides of that 
 reality which they neglect. 
 
 (2.) It follows directly from our description of 
 the true method that, as there can be 110 external, 
 but only an internal, test of the validity of systems, 
 so there can be no external method of supply- 
 ing aspects which a complete system must not 
 neglect. All our knowledge of such aspects must 
 be gathered from the various systems themselves, 
 and the exhaustiveness, and therefore the consist- 
 ency, of one, can only be decided upon in the light 
 of a consideration of the others. Thus the method 
 of Ethics is an immanent criticism of systems, 
 a criticism, that is, which does not go, for a criterion 
 of systems, beyond all systems for there is no 
 ethical knowledge, datum or construction, be- 
 yond all systems but stays within the limits of 
 the historical evolution, to criticise system by 
 system, and part by part. And, as the principle 
 of this criticism can only be consistency, the 
 method of Ethics is dialectical in that sense. 
 A system can be refuted only by being shown to 
 involve, in one part, principles which it elsewhere 
 negates, or to imply a self-contradictory concep- 
 tion. Thus, Aristotle criticises Plato's social con-
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 35 
 
 struction dialectically when he says that it involves 
 at once the conflicting ideas of blank unity, and of 
 the organic unity of differently functioning members 
 if we may represent his argument so or that, 
 while its end is a strong mutual affection of all 
 members of the state, its means involve the de- 
 struction of the intensest affections and the 
 substitution of a general watery sentiment. In 
 the former of these examples, again, a more 
 fundamental case of dialectical refutation seems to 
 be involved, namely, that the conception of mere 
 unity is, as in Metaphysics, so in Ethics, contra- 
 dictory. This dialectical method, made at once 
 more subtle and more comprehensive, is the 
 method of Ethics. 
 
 (3.) It may seem, indeed, that, by this emphasis 
 on self-consistency, there is neglected a distinction 
 which would supply in a different way, a criterion 
 of morals, viz., that between sensibility, as such, 
 and moral construction as such. Here sensi- 
 bility in a limited sense is regarded as ultimate, 
 and the province of ethical construction is looked 
 on as the building of a system in which these 
 ultimate sensibilities may attain equilibrium, 
 proportion, a mean state, harmony. But 
 such a construction may, or even must, be an 
 object for sensibility ; thus, those elements of 
 sensibility called moral sense, conscience, 
 conscientiousness, morality (subjective), soci- 
 ality, ethicality, even sympathy unless this
 
 36 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 be regarded as ultimate seem to be on a 
 different level from the primary sensibilities, and 
 seem therefore to be left out of account in the 
 primary construction. This is the first objection to 
 such a theory. Many readers of Stephen's Science 
 of Ethics must have felt some perplexity, when 
 a new feature of sensibility, e.g., the conscience, 
 appeared, as to how it was to be disposed of. 
 And there is the same source for the confusion 
 besetting Mill's proposal to treat the individual, 
 in the first place, apart from his society. Of course, 
 the individual has a certain sensibility by himself ; 
 but it always seems to be implied that the social 
 sensibilities are less real than others, and not data 
 for the moral and social construction in the same 
 sense as they. Now, if we had such a primary 
 and ultimate sensibility, we should have an 
 external datum of some sort which every con- 
 struction would have to include, a criterion, there- 
 fore, external to every mere construction, and 
 prescribing the limits, and therefore to a large 
 extent the nature, of every construction. We 
 might, e.g., have ten or twelve fundamental wants, 
 and the criterion might be the mean of each of 
 these, or the equilibrium of all. But then, as 
 already said, such constructions cannot take 
 account of all sensibility, but leave out the moral 
 and social sentiments on one side, and cruelty, 
 for example, on the other. The good character 
 does not, e.g., possess an equilibrium between the
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 37 
 
 moral sentiments and cruelty, nor does the good 
 will choose a mean amount of conscientiousness. 
 Morality, then, seems not to be a construction 
 qualitatively different from its datum, sensibility, 
 since there are moral sensibilities, but is qualita- 
 tively identical with the datum, and the datum 
 with the construction. 'The form of all con- 
 sciousness is judgment ' ; i.e., the lowest element 
 of sensibility is a construction, differing from 
 moral volition of the highest kind as the one-sided 
 and self-transcendent from the comprehensive and 
 self-consistent. Thus sensibility becomes, not an 
 external thing which must be allowed for, but an 
 element in the total construction itself, which 
 must justify for itself that place by the same 
 criterion as other elements, consistency with self 
 and with the whole system. Thus, in brief (a) 
 primitive morality, once more, cannot be ranked 
 higher, on this ground, than later ; one is as much 
 construction as the other ; and (b) the criterion 
 of comprehensiveness cannot be interpreted in 
 this external way. It has more analogies with 
 Stephen's saying that the true view must not only 
 refute, but allow for and account for, imperfect 
 views. It would be a poor metaphysical theory 
 that had to deny the reality of error ; and similarly 
 the perfect ethical system must include and perfect 
 all imperfect ones. The aspect of comprehensive- 
 ness, we might say, corresponds to the empirical, 
 the aspect of consistency to the rationalistic
 
 38 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 
 
 moment of the true method, and each aspect, 
 rightly understood, is involved in the other. 
 
 As to this consistency, finally, about which I 
 may seem to have talked too much and said too 
 little, it is of course difficult exactly to define it 
 without developing a system of philosophy. For 
 practical purposes it will exhibit itself in a manner 
 comparable to an aesthetic intuition. For pur- 
 poses of all theory, other than ultimate theory, 
 harmony and individuality, as we have said, 
 will be the media axiomata which will serve as 
 criteria. Ultimately, I conceive, we have grounds 
 for believing that only certain forms of Being, of 
 relation, and of system, or only one form, can 
 be self-consistent, and such a form, if any, must 
 be found for the ethical system, if ethicality is 
 to be adequate to the Absolute. All this may 
 seem a digression from the question of the his- 
 torical method, and is yet, I think, necessary for 
 the full explication of the part I conceive that 
 method to play in ethics. Meagrely, or even 
 strictly, conceived, it is not adequate to the 
 science of morals. But, broadly taken, it is an 
 essential aspect of the critical, or dialectical, 
 or speculative, method of Ethics, supplying all 
 the real matter, or material, as we may rela- 
 tively call it, for that criticism, or immanent 
 dialectic, which, as the true method of Ethics, is 
 the truth of, and takes up into a higher syn- 
 thesis, the two imperfect and inadequate methods,
 
 THE HISTORICAL METHOD IN ETHICS 39 
 
 the empirical and historical, on the one side, and 
 the rationalistic and demonstrative on the other. 
 And the further one stops short of that absolute 
 science which is the aim of all knowledge, of the 
 more value, I opine, will be the help that History 
 affords. Practical thought, opinion as distin- 
 guished from science, works with intuitions ; and 
 there is nothing to produce intuitions but 
 History.
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 * NOTHING ' so says Spinoza ' is more clearly 
 perceived than the very act of understanding ; 
 for we cannot perceive anything without adding 
 to our knowledge of the act of understanding.' 
 
 Such a statement, indeed, may be taken as 
 involving the at least disputed point whether it is 
 true that we cannot be conscious without being 
 conscious that we are conscious, cannot know 
 without knowing that we know. But, apart from 
 this, it at least affirms definitely, what we must 
 start from, that understanding or intellect- 
 two terms sadly out of fashion is a fact of our 
 finite experience. As an empirical fact, it is or 
 exists. But, although existent, it may not be 
 in Bradley's sense real ; may not, as such, be 
 predicable of Reality ; or, as we say nowadays, 
 may not be attributable to the Absolute. 
 
 The alternative possibilities excluding such pre- 
 dication are capable of expressions as numerous 
 as metaphysical theories ; for convenience we 
 may dichotomise. First : Intellect may not be 
 predicable of the Real universally, as when, for 
 instance, the Absolute is taken as a World or a 
 Nature in the ordinary sense of these words, or as 
 
 40
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 41 
 
 God and the World (in Deism), or as, say, a Society 
 of Spirits. In this case, one element or many 
 (even all) elements in the Real may have intellect 
 truly predicated of them, but not the totality. 
 
 Second : Intellect may be predicated of the 
 Real, but not absolutely, not as such. This view 
 which, I suppose, it would be correct to attribute 
 to Bradley, and, in some sense, to Spinoza also 
 holds that the Absolute is a unitary experience 
 (or, in the case of Spinoza, possesses such an ex- 
 perience as one aspect of its being), but that this 
 experience transcends intellect, contains it only as 
 transmuted into something that is not intellect. 
 The first of these two denials of intellect to the 
 Absolute we may formulate : intellect is not 
 predicable of Reality as such ; the second : 
 intellect as such is not predicable of Reality ; 
 though, of course, it is not necessary to maintain 
 that the distinction between the two is an absolute 
 one. 
 
 The question involves numerous difficult and 
 disputed questions as to the nature of that intel- 
 lect we are to affirm or deny of the absolute Reality. 
 Spinoza himself, though, in the Ethics (i. xvii'., 
 note) he says, ' Neither intellect nor will pertains 
 to the nature of God ' (ad Dei naturam neque 
 intellectum neque voluntatem pertinere), else- 
 where speaks regularly of the intellect of God. 
 His object here is to bring out a view to which 
 Bradley's is comparable, that the intellect we
 
 42 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 can attribute to the Absolute is toto caelo different 
 from the intellect we find in finite experience. 
 As he puts it, further on in the same note : ' If 
 intellect and will appertain to the eternal essence 
 of God, we must take these words in some significa- 
 tion quite different from those they usually bear. 
 For the intellect and will, which should constitute 
 the essence of God, would perforce be as far apart 
 as the poles from the human intellect and will, 
 in fact, would have nothing in common with them 
 but the name.' 
 
 Why, if the difference be so essential as this 
 extreme and emphatic statement represents, even 
 the name should be the same in the two cases, is 
 not explained ; but it is easy to see the naturalness 
 of Spinoza's trying to make the distinction as 
 sharp as possible. 'The intellect in function,' 
 he says (i. xxxi.), 'whether finite or infinite, must 
 be referred to natura naturata, not to natura na- 
 turansS This brings his distinction between the 
 two kinds of intellect into line with another of 
 his distinctions that between natura naturata 
 and natura naturans. By the former, in which 
 intellect in function is now included, Spinoza 
 defines himself to mean ' all that which follows 
 from the necessity of the nature of God, or of 
 any of the attributes of God, i.e., all the modes 
 of the attributes of God, in so far as they are 
 considered as things which are in God and which 
 without God cannot exist or be conceived.' And
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 43 
 
 it is clear, also, that the intellect of God is to be 
 placed, as distinguished from intellect in function 
 (intellectus actu), in the antithetic class, natura 
 naturans. For by the latter we mean that which 
 is in itself, and is conceived through itself, or, the 
 attributes of substance which express eternal and 
 infinite essence, in other words, God, in so far as 
 he is considered as a free cause. And 'the in- 
 tellect of God,' it is similarly said (in the note to 
 prop, xvii.), ' in so far as it is conceived to constitute 
 God's essence, is, in reality, the cause of things, 
 both of their essence and of their existence.' 
 
 The distinction, between intellect absolute and 
 intellect finite, is thus, for Spinoza, the same as 
 that between God and the World, between sub- 
 stance with its abstract attributes on the one hand, 
 and the infinity of particular modes, which are 
 to be subsumed under those attributes, on the 
 other ; it is on a level with that between exten- 
 sion and the modes of extension which together 
 make the world in space, which, as Spinoza himself 
 declares (Letter 72), cannot be deduced from 
 the attribute of extension. The problem of the 
 absolute intellect seems thus to be identified with 
 the most general problem of Spinoza's system, 
 viz., how that abstractly indeterminate sub- 
 stance indeterminate because purely positive, 
 while all determination is negation can, I do 
 not say explain the world, but even allow of the 
 existence of a multitude of finite things, modifica-
 
 44 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 tions of itself. The intellect as universal seems 
 to have only a negative relation to the intellect 
 as particular, to particular intellects and acts of 
 intellect, and such a negative relation a relation 
 of mere exclusion cannot be the end of the matter. 
 For the universal intellect cannot but be denned 
 even by such a relation to the particulars from 
 which it is differentiated ; cannot even be so 
 differentiated from them except on the basis of 
 some identity with them. There could be no 
 reason for speaking of an absolute intellect unless 
 what were meant by the term had something in 
 common with what we know as intellect in our 
 finite experience. 
 
 Or, again, however we emphasise the distinction 
 Spinoza expresses in the words, ' The intellect of 
 God in so far as it is conceived to constitute God's 
 essence,' we must nevertheless remember that the 
 finite, conditioned world cannot be conceived 
 except as, in some sense, constituting God's 
 essence; every mode follows as necessarily from, 
 and, therefore, is as necessary to, the Absolute as 
 any other similarly finite and conditioned mode. 
 If, therefore, the absolute intellect is to be con- 
 ceived as more especially constituting the divine 
 essence, it may be interpreted, according to the 
 usual ambiguity of Spinoza's system, either as 
 the abstract, universal unity, under which the 
 finite modes can only be subsumed, or as the 
 concrete, individual totality, in which every finite
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 45 
 
 mode has its place. And these two interpretations 
 may perhaps be taken to correspond to the two 
 views here possible (alternatively) as to an abso- 
 lute Intellect. If the former be chosen, then, 
 indeed, by abstracting from all the finite modes 
 of intellect we may arrive at something to which 
 the name of intellect must be given, but which, 
 if supposed actual, must be toto genere different 
 from those finite modes ; but if the latter, the 
 result we arrive at is, prima facie at least, the 
 existence of an intellect more perfect indeed 
 than ours (the finite modes), but more perfect 
 in the same kind; an absolute intellect which is 
 the systematic unity of the finite modes of our 
 experience, and which may, therefore, be in large 
 measure beyond our present knowledge, but, as 
 containing or including elements we do know, 
 cannot be supposed, as a whole, altogether un- 
 knowable, but only in large measure unknown. 
 
 Spinoza, however, does not offer much oppor- 
 tunity for a discussion of the question here actu- 
 ally at issue. That involves, ultimately, perhaps, 
 the whole problem of knowledge, and, directly, 
 at least a fuller discussion of the nature of in- 
 tellect itself, to which, accordingly, we now turn. 
 The question seems mainly this how broadly we 
 may, how narrowly we must, take the term for 
 our present purpose. 
 
 Intellect is, in general, taken to be the faculty 
 by which we think, and thought may be taken as
 
 46 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 exhausted by conception, judgment, and infer- 
 ence. But, of course, this * faculty ' is not some- 
 thing separate ; thought cannot be taken as a 
 part, merely, of our conscious life, but must be 
 viewed as one aspect of all experience. And, hi 
 this way, the thought-aspect comes to be opposed 
 to the feeling-aspect, intellect to feeling, taken, 
 in the first instance, mainly as sensation. 
 But, of course, when we consider the con- 
 stituents of the ideational continuum our 
 ' ideas,' in the narrower sense of fainter images 
 which are the vehicle of thought it is plain that, 
 as psychical existences, they are on exactly the 
 same level, are as truly feelings as ' sensations ' 
 pure and simple, from which they are distinguished, 
 as Hume said, only by their smaller intensity. 
 The element immediately characterising the feel- 
 ing-side of our consciousness is quality ; sentience, 
 as such, is a play of mere sense qualities. And 
 equally characteristic of the thought-aspect is 
 that to which it has been endeavoured to reduce 
 all thought, viz., relation ; ' relational thinking ' 
 and ' the relating activity of mind ' are phrases 
 which indicate this characteristic. 
 
 The view of the duality of the mind in know- 
 ledge is, of course, old, even in the more special 
 form which is expressed in the antithesis of quality 
 and relation. For this antithesis is expressed 
 with sufficient clearness in Plato's Philebus. There 
 ' all existing things ' are divided into four new
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 47 
 
 classes, i.e., four new categories are selected for 
 use. The first of these is aireipia or TO atreipov, 
 the infinite, unlimited, indefinite, or indeter- 
 minate. The example given is heat, in general, 
 as admitting of varying degrees, but not limited 
 to any one of them, thus indicating that the class 
 is to be understood as quality. The second is 
 TO trepas, ' limit,' the determining element ; the 
 examples given are quantitative ratios, like equal 
 or double, * which cannot exist in a greater or less 
 degree.' The emphasis, however, seems to rest 
 not on their quantitative character which pro- 
 ably is due only to Plato's mathematical bent and 
 the facility of the instance but on their being 
 examples of definite relations. The third class 
 is formed by combination of the first and second, 
 i.e., by the introduction of definite relations 
 into the sphere of given qualities. It includes 
 such things as health, music or harmony, fine 
 weather, and, finally, the ' mixed life ' (which is 
 the best life for men), all of them, it is to be noted, 
 good things, * the delights of life.' That is to say, 
 partly perhaps owing to his main subject here 
 being ethical, but partly for deeper reasons, Plato 
 regards the introduction of relations into indefinite 
 qualities as the condition of all that is good (and, 
 therefore, one would naturally be led to suppose, 
 of knowledge), while at the same time it is the con- 
 dition of all real existences, since the third class is 
 the only one of the four into which these can fall.
 
 48 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 As for the fourth class, in which ' mind ' is placed 
 alone, it is defined as 'the cause of the mixture.' 
 It would be rather difficult to see the reason for 
 such a ' cause ' apart from the elements which 
 combine ; but the placing of * mind ' under this 
 denomination seems to suggest that it is the ' cause ' 
 only in the sense that those elements are aspects 
 abstracted from it, and that their ' combination ' 
 only realises what is implicit in their original unity. 
 Thus we arrive at a sort of idealism, in which 
 quality and relation are the constituent elements 
 of the world of things, ' sense ' and ' thought ' 
 the complementary aspects of the absolute mind. 
 
 There is, however, in the suggestion that, though 
 our mind (used as equivalent to knowledge, the 
 thought-side) is not the good, absolute mind may 
 be, a hint that the absolute mind may, according 
 to the ideal of later idealism in Green, be a purely 
 relational thought, to the exclusion of sense qualities. 
 And this leads us back to our discussion of the 
 difference and distinctions of the two elements. 
 
 If we compare and contrast the two, we note 
 that qualities of sense are in the mind ; relations 
 can only be meant by it ; sensation is immediate 
 presence to the mind ; the object of thought is 
 only * intended.' And at this point we are brought 
 into line with a number of other parallel distinc- 
 tions. One of these is the old distinction of 
 particular and universal : what is in the mind 
 can only be particular, a single, fixed unit of
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 49 
 
 sentience, a sole ' idea ' or image ; but what is 
 meant by the mind is a universal, which can be 
 said to be ' in the mind ' only in a different sense 
 from that in which the sensation is so. This is 
 the same distinction as that between perception 
 and conception, to use the Kantian antithesis. 
 Or, again (in a different sense of perception), it 
 is comparable to the distinction between the per- 
 ception and the percept, as object perceived. 
 Here the distinction presents itself in the form of 
 that contradiction, noted by Ward, between the 
 two chiefs of the Scottish school, Reid and Hamil- 
 ton. ' Ten men looking at the moon all see the 
 same moon,' says one; 'All see different moons,' 
 says the other : and the difficulty of course is that, 
 though we must say that in some sense they all see 
 the same moon, we yet cannot explain this from 
 the psychical state of the different individuals. 
 In the same way, the totality of all objects, 
 i.e., the world, however immediately, when we 
 simply look at it, it may thrust itself upon us, yet 
 involves relations in its constitution, and so cannot 
 be in our minds in the same sense as a particular 
 sense quality. And, finally, this is the distinction 
 implied in Mr. Bradley 's phrases, such as content 
 'working loose' from existence, i.e., ' meaning ' 
 from quality. 
 
 The thing-thought-about, then, is not in 
 consciousness, in a sense ; and the thought-about- 
 the-thing, we have to add, so far as it is in con- 
 
 D
 
 50 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 sciousness, is merely a sensation, an image, an 
 idea (and these properly do not belong to thought 
 at all, but to sense). This position, which, taken 
 by itself, is the result of Sensationalism, is easily 
 verifiable. For we cannot look, say, on a judgment, 
 nor, so far as they are distinctively acts of thought, 
 on a concept or an inference, as a psychosis. My 
 judgment or thought about a certain thing is, 
 psychically, merely an image of it ; if I think of 
 it as in a definite position, all that is added is a 
 cephalic sensation, say a movement of the eyeball 
 in that direction. And such sensations are cer- 
 tainly not judgment, nor conception. Just as 
 Hume could find no Ego by introspection, just 
 as Professor James can find no ' activity ' by that 
 means (he even includes affirmation in the list of 
 activities he found to be no activities but merely 
 cephalic movements), so one is certain not to find 
 a judgment, or, more widely, a meaning of any 
 kind in the mind by introspection. All one can 
 so find are particular psychoses, which, just be- 
 cause they are such, are neither ' judgments ' nor 
 ' meanings.' And in the same way, when Pro- 
 fessor James analyses what he calls ' the Emotion 
 of Belief,' one is immediately certain that this 
 cannot be belief in the sense in which it is identi- 
 cal with judgment. Introspection will carry us 
 so far as the analysing of these things into ' sen- 
 sations ' or ' feelings ' ; but it will carry us no 
 further ; it will not reveal that on account of which
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 51 
 
 we term some things true and others false ; it will 
 not carry us to a ' meaning,' a ' thought of a rela- 
 tion,' a ' reference to an object.' 
 
 That is to say, by this mode of inquiry we never 
 reach ' intellect ' or ' thought ' at all, and, if we 
 confine ourselves to this, we are logically forced to 
 the denial of its reality even finitely. And this, 
 it seems, can scarcely be the whole truth, for 
 the possibility of truth contradicts it. Judg- 
 ment, as indicated by its occupying the place of 
 chief importance in modern logic, supplies us with 
 the crux of the question, and we certainly seem 
 entitled to postulate or take for granted, that 
 we do judge ; the reality of conception and in- 
 ference as acts of knowledge seems, at first sight, 
 to be implicated with that of judgment. Bradley 
 feels himself entitled to start from the position 
 that we judge, i.e., that some statements are true, 
 and some false ; and what he thinks it necessary 
 to say, every one else, whether justifiably on his 
 own principles or not, assumes. 
 
 But yet the insufficiency of this mode of ex- 
 plaining knowledge does not guarantee the cor- 
 rectness of what may perhaps be fairly taken as 
 its opposite, the purely Rationalistic view, which 
 makes it proceed by analysis of concepts. For, 
 allowing it for the moment the possession of con- 
 cepts, this view cannot explain judgment, except 
 either as the mere analysis of a given concept, 
 which is not properly judgment at all, but much
 
 52 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 more truly an essential of conception; or, if 
 it admits any other sort, regards such judgment 
 as the mere external attribution of predicates, 
 which has the fault (for which, under "the name 
 of the Judgment of Reflection, it is con- 
 demned by Hegel) of never possibly exhausting 
 the subject, but always leaving it, ultimately, 
 unknowable, the basis for agnosticism and 
 the thing-in-itself . Similarly, on this view there 
 can be no real inference. And, finally, the adop- 
 tion of this view brings us back in the end to 
 the need for sentient experience even for con- 
 ception. For (1) general concepts of qualities 
 must primarily be so derived ; and (2), once 
 derived, they cannot be re-thought as conceptions, 
 without some faint image and therefore sentient 
 experience of the qualities themselves. This is 
 simply an application of the well-known fact that 
 all thinking is accompanied by a train of images, 
 taken to mean, as it must, that thought, as we 
 understand it, depends on accompanying sentiency, 
 in the form of images of not more than a certain 
 degree of irrelevancy. (3) Concepts of relation 
 cannot be attained except as dependent on qual- 
 ities, seeing that relations are not self-existent, 
 but can be only as subsisting between what are 
 not mere relations, viz., in this case, qualities. 
 (4) These relational concepts, even when so 
 attained, cannot, more than others, be re-thought 
 without accompanying sentience. And (5), and
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 53 
 
 perhaps most important, is the objection that, 
 while it fails to explain the ' empirical ' concepts 
 (of qualities) which the opposing theory does in 
 a way explain, it shares with that theory its in- 
 ability to explain, or give any account of, those 
 concepts of relation (or ' pure ' concepts) which 
 it uses a difficulty perhaps the chief of those 
 which any theory of cognition has to encounter. 
 
 While then, of the two theories, first, that judg- 
 ment is nothing distinguishable from the particular 
 feeling, and second, that it consists in analysis of 
 concepts, thinking in the predicate part of what 
 is already thought in the subject, the former severs 
 sense, the latter thought, and each uses its selected 
 element in abstraction, the true theory, it would 
 seem, must keep them together, and in thus keep- 
 ing them together find its salvation. Judgment, 
 such as can be true or false, cannot be, as on the 
 one theory it would be, mere feeling, nor, as on 
 the other, mere tautology, and so neither theory 
 explains it, nor, consequently, conception and 
 inference, whose fate is bound up with that of 
 judgment. And yet, as one of those theories 
 reduces judgment to conception in the sense 
 of image- thinking or ideation, and the other re- 
 duces it to conception in the sense of mere 
 analytic thinking, so the true view may find the 
 essence of judgment to lie in conception taken 
 in its proper sense of thinking together, or to- 
 gether-thinking. The sense quality, as imme-
 
 diately existent, is not thereby predicated of reality. 
 This predication can only be taken as constituted 
 by the thinking of the quality so given into a 
 context of related qualities, a system to which 
 both quality and relation, and therefore both 
 sense and thought, must be taken as essential. 
 The essence of knowledge, therefore, must be 
 found to lie in the unity of consciousness which 
 makes the * thinking-together ' of things possible, 
 and it is by this unity of consciousness that our 
 ideas of relation, the possibility of the existence 
 of objects for us, and even, more generally still, 
 the possibility of our having meanings beyond 
 the particular presentations of sense, must be 
 explained, as, by this means, Green tried to ex- 
 plain them. 
 
 It is, then, so far as they are grasped by the 
 unity of consciousness, and so thought into a 
 system of related elements, that the mere qualities 
 given by sentience are elements in a knowledge ; 
 and, so far, the mere presentation of a sense 
 quality is implicitly, or potentially an act of 
 knowledge, since it is the first step to the thinking 
 of that quality in relation to others. In this sense 
 judgment is the form of all consciousness ; i.e., the 
 quality presented is, ipso facto, taken up into the 
 unity which constitutes knowledge. And thus we 
 can regard even sentience as an act of knowledge, 
 by anticipation of the possibilities latent in it ; 
 and, of course, it is only in the light of the realisa-
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 55 
 
 tion of such possibilities that we can judge as all 
 schools admit we safely may that such a quality, 
 qua presented, is, or exists. In its immediate 
 existence, however, the feeling is a much more 
 primitive act of knowledge than those of developed 
 thought. The ' assertion,' as Hobhouse calls it, 
 cannot, of course, be represented as knowledge at 
 all except by being represented as a judgment, a 
 predication of reality, a statement that something 
 is true. But this judgment cannot be said to be, 
 let us say, * redness is ' for the existential 
 judgment is too developed and reflective a form 
 correctly to represent so low a stage but rather 
 
 * Reality (" the Real," " x ") is red(ness) ' ; that is 
 to say, what we have is an immediate qualification 
 of reality by the given. To awakening conscious- 
 ness the world is just this chaotic, confused, 
 presented blur. Bradley's contention that all 
 such 'judgments,' and those on the next stage, 
 
 * analytic judgments of sense,' are all false, follows 
 at once, and is well exemplified in such an 
 instance. Into this mere * infinite, ' indefinite,' 
 ' indeterminate ' quality, to follow Plato, ' limit,' 
 i.e. relation, has to be introduced for the attain- 
 ment of truth ; and indeed the falsity of such 
 ' sense- judgments ' may be taken as the ground 
 of, and occasion for, relational thinking. * The 
 relational form,' as Bradley says, ' is a compromise 
 on which thought stands, and which it develops. 
 It is an attempt to unite differences which have
 
 56 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 broken out of the felt totality. Differences forced 
 together by an underlying identity, and a com- 
 promise between the plurality and the unity 
 this is the essence of relation.' 
 
 At the lower level, then, and right through 
 knowledge, there are the two aspects of thought 
 and sense, conception and perception, relation 
 and quality. 'Right through,' I say, because, 
 as we have seen, we can think neither quality nor 
 relation without an image of some sort, some 
 corresponding sentiency from which the pure 
 thought-content may work loose. And this is 
 a fact from which it seems impossible that we 
 should free ourselves. Even the ideal of knowledge, 
 so far as we can conceive it, seems not to have got 
 beyond involving the same two aspects ; and if 
 knowledge, in any sense in which we can 
 understand it, or even what we call thought 
 or intellect, is to be predicable of the Absolute, 
 it must be a thought which at the same time is a 
 sentient experience. Even the purest of all pure 
 thoughts, ' I am I,' means nothing to us thinking 
 it except as we at the same time feel. 
 
 Knowledge, then, is the relational thinking of 
 qualities, to which both sense, and intellect in 
 the narrow sense, are essential ; and judgment 
 is the thinking of a new characteristic (a quality, 
 or a system of qualities) into a place in the system 
 of knowledge so formed. For this, I think, is a 
 point of view which must be taken as a corrective
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 57 
 
 to the necessary, but, after all, somewhat external 
 view of judgment as 'reference to reality' simply, 
 as Bradley often puts it. He often amplifies this, 
 it is true, by the addition : to the reality given 
 in sense ' ; but even this requires to be supple- 
 mented ; for the reality is given not merely in 
 sense but also in the construction within, and on 
 the basis of, sense which is our thought, and, there- 
 fore, in the whole system of our knowledge. 
 This point of view, I say, must be kept well in 
 mind, for, if we forget it, our phrase ' reference to 
 reality ' tends to have for its import a somewhat 
 external predication which cannot exhaust the 
 reality it refers to, but always leaves an un- 
 known somewhat in it; because this reality is, 
 before predication, a mere x, so, it comes to seem, 
 it must be, after it. But the reality to which 
 every judgment refers is not thus external, is not, 
 properly, a beyond or an other to knowledge 
 at all, but is just the concrete system of the re- 
 lated qualities which we have already thought, 
 and of those which, consistently with the existent 
 system, we may think. 
 
 From this standpoint the view of judgment as 
 a synthesis has a greater relative truth than 
 that which expresses it (merely) as reference to 
 reality. For, just in so far as we do judge, and are 
 able to do so, both the reality referred to and 
 the predicate referred are within our grasp, and 
 it is the thinking of the predicate into definite
 
 58 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 relation with remaining reality as similarly con- 
 stituted that constitutes the essence of judgment. 
 The same outlook may be conveyed otherwise, 
 as, e.g., in the statement that concepts are the end 
 of science, and so the concept is more ultimate than 
 the judgment. Or we may put it in the form of 
 a criticism of the self-consistency of the three 
 forms of knowledge (concept, judgment, infer- 
 ence) when each of these in turn is supposed the 
 Absolute. In such a criticism it might be pointed 
 out: First, that inference could not be supposed 
 the form of this absolute knowledge in the 
 (usual) sense of a passing from point to point 
 by links of necessary connection, for such a 
 transition would be a limitation of what has been 
 supposed absolute, but only in the sense of the 
 known presence of such necessary connections 
 in the present whole. For inference, then, as 
 it is loosely conceived, there would be sub- 
 stituted hypothetical and disjunctive judgment, 
 and these would be seen to be the essence (as they 
 are the end) of all inference. But, again, judg- 
 ment cannot, in this limiting case, be conceived as 
 a ' reference to reality,' to an ' other ' or * beyond,' 
 for there is, by hypothesis, no reality beyond the 
 knowledge itself, and, if we press the idea home, 
 it can come to mean nothing more than a meaning- 
 less positing of the whole content of the know- 
 ledge. I say ' meaningless,' for such positing, as 
 it adds nothing to the content, corresponds to no
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 59 
 
 clear idea in our minds, and can finally be taken 
 to mean nothing more than the existence of the 
 knowledge itself. We thus come to taking, as 
 Plato did, the concept, or Idea, as the form of this 
 absolute knowledge, and, rightly understood, 
 conception seems clearly to include the essential 
 features of both judgment and inference, in the 
 reference of every element to the whole, and the 
 connection of element with element within the 
 whole. 
 
 Such a discussion of the relative consistency of 
 the different forms of knowledge is, of course, 
 only relevant as bearing on the possibility of the 
 Absolute having intellect predicated of it, and 
 hi what form. In this connection may therefore 
 be considered the question : In what sense, given 
 a knowledge as the Absolute, can personality 
 be predicated of it ? It is easy to say, on the one 
 hand, that it is mere prejudice which keeps us 
 from thinking a knowledge which is not the know- 
 ledge of any one, and equally easy, on the other 
 hand, to say that it is inherently impossible to 
 think a knowledge which is not the knowledge of 
 any one, or of any subject, or ' of any person.' 
 And such opposing dogmatisms might fight for 
 ever without coming to any agreement. But the 
 essence seems to be relevant here. The difficulty 
 is that, if knowledge has to be the knowledge of 
 some one, then knowledge cannot be the Absolute, 
 for the subject or person whose knowledge it was
 
 60 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 would still be outside it, while, on the other hand, 
 the denial that the Absolute is knowledge may 
 appear essential to the assertion of an absolute 
 subject of knowledge, an absolute person. And 
 this seems to be an inadequate way of looking at 
 the problem. For the subject of knowledge is 
 not a soul-unit outside of the knowledge and, 
 somehow, appropriating it, but the very form of 
 the knowledge, the unity of consciousness or 
 ' synthetic unity of apperception ' which reflective 
 analysis shows us, or may show us, to be an essential 
 element in the description of knowledge. Just so, 
 the doctrine that all consciousness is self-conscious- 
 ness, the consciousness of a self, may be taken in 
 a one-sided way, so as to exclude (as Ward ex- 
 cludes Bradley 's description) any account of 
 soul-life or consciousness which does not involve, 
 somehow, a self outside of that consciousness : 
 the truth surely being better expressed as, that all 
 consciousness involves within itself an element 
 which can only be described as self-consciousness. 
 The self is not added to the consciousness by 
 synthesis, but found within it by analysis. And, 
 analogically, we may say that the subject of know- 
 ledge or of thought is rather the form in which 
 thought is cast, the self-conscious unity of it, and 
 so, nothing apart from and outside the thought 
 itself, nothing for the sake of which it need be 
 denied that a knowledge should be the Absolute. 
 I have said that knowledge has always, and
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 61 
 
 essentially, the two aspects of feeling, and 
 thought in the narrow sense, but so far this 
 question has been regarded only from the lower 
 level, and it is necessary also to take into considera- 
 tion the further question, whether, in the ultimate 
 sublimation of thought, it may not be seen to 
 be possible to reduce sense or feeling to thought. 
 This, of course, is the position of Plato, pos- 
 sibly of Hegel, and of Green. And what I take 
 to be the same position is explicitly advanced 
 by Bosanquet. He says (Logic, vol. n. p. 82) : 
 ' In returning from the consideration of abstract 
 necessary relations to that of concrete real total- 
 ities, we must remark that, ideally speaking, every 
 concrete real totality can be analysed into a complex 
 of abstract necessary relations.' Here, I suppose, 
 the ' ideally speaking ' means nothing more than 
 ' hi an absolute knowledge.' And, if this posi- 
 tion were to be taken as true, the difficulties, of 
 taking intellect pure and simple, in the sense of 
 pure thought, as the absolute reality, disappear; 
 for there is not even any quality left which is an 
 other to thought ; thought, being all embracing, 
 can be absolute. 
 
 And it seems clear that, if you are to think out 
 the idea of a pure thought, you must come ulti- 
 mately to such a qualityless system of relations. 
 Bradley, indeed, seems to think qualities admissible 
 even into such an absolute of pure thought, when 
 he says, ' Let us imagine a harmonious system of
 
 62 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 ideal contents united by relations, and reflecting 
 itself in self-conscious harmony.' 1 Here the ideal 
 contents, being set alongside of relations, must, I 
 suppose, be taken as qualities, pieces, therefore, 
 cut out of sentience. But, if so, there seems an 
 end to Bradley's objection that feeling must be 
 something beyond this perfect thought. For 
 the very presence of ideal contents, i.e., qualities, 
 to thought, means the feeling of them, since they 
 can be so present only through images of some sort 
 which, in their private existence, are mere feelings. 
 And so (to postpone further consideration of 
 Bradley's view) thought, if it is to be taken as 
 pure, must in the last resort be considered as a 
 system of qualityless relation, as Green and 
 Bosanquet consider it. 
 
 And just as such a view, taken absolutely, seems 
 too slight for reality, so, taken finitely, it seems 
 too slight for thought. For, first, such thought 
 does not exhaust feeling ; the general character 
 of immediacy, and the particular qualities of sense, 
 it seems impossible to reduce to terms of thought 
 conceived as merely a relating activity. And, 
 second, even such a thought implies feeling ; 
 relations cannot exist except as between qualities, 
 and such qualities cannot be thought (even if the 
 relations themselves could, which I doubt, for 
 even relations are always of some definite sort, 
 spatial, temporal, etc.) without sentiency. Apart 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 170.
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT * 63 
 
 from such sentience, finally, it seems meaningless 
 to say that any operation can be conscious ; a 
 mere system of relations, even if existent, would 
 be non-conscious, and, therefore, not even properly 
 to be called thought. Intellect, then, is mean- 
 ingless, if taken as independent of sense, and must 
 be kept in organic connection with it. For 
 Spinoza, one might say, sense and intellect, as 
 metaphysical objects, were not yet distinguished. 
 To him 'idea' (as to Descartes 'cogitatio') meant 
 indifferently an organic sensation or a thought 
 embracing the universe, and * ideatum ' either the 
 bodily affection or the thought's object. And what 
 he held in undifferentiated unity we must en- 
 deavour to recombine. 
 
 And hi this point of view we may perhaps find 
 an answer to one at least of Bradley's objections. 
 // thought is to be taken as the mere relating, we 
 must agree (and this is what he evidently intends) 
 that we have, immediately to hand, an ' other ' 
 - to thought, namely, feeling ; and so thought 
 cannot be the Absolute. And here Bradley stops, 
 not choosing to adopt any other view of thought. 
 And yet another view of thought, it seems to me, 
 he implicitly does adopt elsewhere, when he denies 
 ' the existence of any content which was not an 
 actual or possible object of thought,' and judges 
 the supposition self -contradictory. 1 All reality, 
 that is, can be, according to Bradley, thought 
 
 1 Appearance and Reality, p. 176.
 
 64 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 through and through ; there is nothing which cannot 
 be adequately grasped by thought. But what, 
 then, of feeling, emotion, ' those burning ex- 
 periences,' ' the agonies and raptures of the soul ' ? 
 For these, and indeed the immediacy of all 
 sentience, have been affirmed by Bradley to be 
 an other to mere relational thought. If, by 
 such thought, they were thinkable through and 
 through, what objection could there be to the 
 assertion that they exist only in its medium ? 
 For, on that hypothesis, nothing whatever in them 
 would fall outside an absolute thought. ' Every- 
 thing, all will and feeling, is an object for thought, 
 and must be called intelligible' (ibid.). But, hi 
 so far as it is ' thought,' its existence in the think- 
 ing mind must be merely the existence of a thought 
 or of thoughts. Even ' these burning experiences ' 
 can, it seems, be ' mere pieces of thought's heaven.' 
 And, if so, we seem driven to the conclusion 
 that the thought to which there is an other, 
 is not the same as the thought to which all 
 reality is intelligible, which can think reality 
 through and through. The former thought is 
 pure, merely relational, thought ; the latter is 
 the thought which alone we know, sentient 
 thought, to put it strongly, at least qualitative 
 thought. And it seems clear that it is only to 
 a thought which is partly sentience that a reality 
 which is, at least, partly sentience can be through 
 and through intelligible, a possible content of
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 65 
 
 thought. And if, as Bradley does, we stick both 
 to the ultimate reality of feeling and to the ulti- 
 mate intelligibility of reality, we are bound to 
 define our intelligence in terms which will in- 
 clude sentience, we must unify intellect and 
 sense. 
 
 That such a unification is not impossible it is 
 perhaps possible even here to indicate. Suppose 
 it granted that we cannot think ' redness,' 
 without feeling it, that the content, or universal 
 meaning, implies the particular existence of 
 the idea. Here we have the primary unity of 
 thought and sense, which forms an individual 
 experience. And, of course, if we, from our 
 experience thus including thought, are allowed to 
 possess intellect, there can be no reason for attri- 
 buting at least the possession of intellect to an 
 absolute experience similarly endowed. But, fur- 
 ther, experience may be more or less organised, 
 with reference to thought, and this in two ways. 
 (1) Our ideas, in the sense of the images through 
 which we think, are of a fluctuating nature ; their 
 transitions are often irrelevant to, and so hinder, 
 the logical course of thought. Now our finite idea- 
 tional experience may be organised, for purposes 
 of thought, by concentration, selective attention, 
 fixed associations, habitual trains of ideas and 
 such like. When these conflict with the meaning, 
 we have volition proper ; in so far as they are 
 subdued to it, volition, wiD, disappears. At the
 
 66 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 limit, when the ideational continuum is per- 
 fectly organised for thought (when, consequently, 
 will no longer exists), knowledge attains its highest 
 development. If, as a further stage, we abstract 
 from time-process in that continuum, as Royce 
 does, and arrive at the idea of a timeless conscious- 
 ness, we seem to be brought to (2) Royce's idea 
 of a perceptual (and not merely ideational) con- 
 tinuum, organic to, and organised for, thought. 
 For, if there is to be no change in the ideas, no 
 procession of the train of images, such an ideal 
 continuum seems to become at once perceptual, 
 and to be that world of perceptual experience ' in 
 which the answers to all questions are contained,' 
 and in which, therefore, the Absolute Thought 
 mirrors itself. From such an organisation of 
 perceptual experience human beings are, of course, 
 still further removed than from a satisfactory or- 
 ganisation of their ideational or ideal experience ; 
 we can only catch faint glimpses of its possibilities 
 in the significance of carefully trained observation 
 in carefully arranged experiment ; but the idea 
 is at least permissible a regulative idea 
 though, at the point I have at present reached, 
 it seems to be no more. 
 
 For, so far, it may be said, this paper has been 
 employed rather in clearing up the idea of intel- 
 lect, and in developing it in such a manner as will 
 render the existence of an Absolute Intellect a 
 tenable hypothesis, one, i.e., not immediately
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 67 
 
 self-contradictory, than in displaying the positive 
 grounds for the acceptance of such a hypothesis. 
 An Absolute Intellect, in the sense in which it is 
 here meant, ought to be proved, not merely dis- 
 played as possible. And what grounds of proof 
 can be offered ? 
 
 If we start, with the old Sensationalism, from the 
 view of the contents of our minds as exhausted by 
 sense qualities, we may, like Berkeley, construct 
 an argument for a similarly constructed Absolute. 
 For, on this hypothesis, we have no idea, because 
 no experience, of anything other than sense 
 qualities or sensations or feelings. If therefore, 
 and so far as, we are to think anything existent, 
 we cannot think of it as consisting of anything 
 else than of what we think and know. The 
 Absolute, therefore, as the totality of all exist- 
 ence, must, it would seem, be a conglomerate of 
 sensations. This, of course, is not Berkeley's 
 conclusion, which depends entirely on the non- 
 sensationalistic element in this thought, viz., the 
 ' notions ' of spirit and of volition, which, 
 as not derived from sensation in the ordinary 
 way, are not properly ideas. But neglecting 
 this element, the conclusion to a sensational 
 Absolute, solipsistic or otherwise, seems justified, 
 so far as any argument can have validity at all 
 on such a system. For our reality, ex hypothesi, 
 consists of that whose esse is percipi, which cannot 
 be conceived as existing out of consciousness
 
 68 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 because being in consciousness is of its essence, 
 and, indeed, merely abstracted from it. And such 
 a Reality, taken as all reality, or as the Absolute, 
 we might dignify with the title of an Infinite or 
 Absolute Mind, could we forget that even a 
 conglomerate of sense qualities, such as this 
 Absolute would be, contains facts, viz., relations 
 between qualities, which are not allowed for on the 
 Sensationalistic theory, and which therefore must 
 fall outside the content of its Absolute. 
 
 This sort of Idealism, however, has probably 
 never been held. When, on the other hand, we 
 consider the implications of the existence, as an 
 element in knowledge, of relational thinking, 
 or thoughts of relations, we arrive at another 
 idealistic result. For when, by our thought, we 
 relate elements, we imply that those elements were 
 already in reality joined, or related ; that is to say, 
 the relation we think is a fact, a reality. But, 
 in the case of a relation (or a law of relation such 
 as Lotze objectifies) which we think, just as much 
 as in that of a quality which we feel, there is a 
 limitation on our supposing it real independently 
 of our thinking it. Just, in fact, as a quality 
 means a felt quality, a feeling, and cannot be 
 supposed actual but not felt without contradiction, 
 so a relation means a thought relation, a thought, 
 and cannot be supposed actual apart from thought. 
 This, I think, is the essential significance of Boyce's 
 consideration (in the supplementary * Essay on
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT * 69 
 
 the Conception of God') of realist arguments, 
 that what is outside of all consciousness may be in 
 relation to what is inside. The answer is that we 
 cannot think such a relation ; all relations we do 
 or can think have both their terms in consciousness. 
 But the further implication, of course, is that only 
 thinkable relations are real, and that these are 
 real only in so far as they are, in some conscious- 
 ness or other, thought. 
 
 But neither this argument nor the Sensational- 
 istic one is final so long as we do not allow that, 
 in the one case, relations, or, in the other, qualities, 
 are the only element or aspect in our knowledge ; 
 and a combination of the two can only be final 
 (as regards the attribution of intellect to the 
 Absolute) on the basis of a theory that quality 
 and relation sense and thought exhaust know- 
 ledge, or are its only aspects. And it is for this 
 reason that it may be useful once more to insist 
 that ' affixing a character to reality, to a reality 
 beyond the act,' or ' reference to reality,' are not 
 additional characteristics of knowledge on a level 
 with those others. For 'reference to reality' is, 
 after all, not an ultimate description of knowledge, 
 but, when taken as more than a metaphor (like 
 ' affixing a character '), must in the last resort be 
 defined in terms of ' thinking into the context ' 
 of those related qualities which, as thought (and 
 therefore felt) by us, are our world which we have 
 ourselves constructed for ourselves. It is only by
 
 70 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 
 
 taking ' reference to reality ' in this sense that we 
 can suppose ourselves really to know what is the 
 object of our knowledge, i.e., reality. If we take 
 it, for instance, in the literal sense of the metaphor 
 of * affixing,' then we have a process too external 
 ever to give us knowledge, one which will ' never 
 let us know the thing itself, but only its predicates,' 
 which seems to leave the * beyond' or 'other,' after 
 the affixing, just as much a * beyond ' as it was 
 before it. It is this view which, in ordinary 
 common sense and ordinary science, supposes the 
 world to exist as we know it, in the sense that it 
 is what our knowledge states it to be, but not as we 
 know it, in the sense that it does not exist in the 
 atmosphere of knowledge, does not exist as a 
 knowledge, i.e., as combined thought and experi- 
 ence. And it is, I think, from holding this view 
 that ordinary science, and even, in some instances, 
 the first efforts of metaphysical reflection, tend 
 towards agnosticism ; for the object known must, 
 on this view, in one aspect at least, namely, in re- 
 spect of its existence, be entirely impenetrable by 
 thought. 
 
 If, then, we omit such secondary characteristics 
 as ' reference to reality,' as being definable in 
 terms of the two primary characteristics, which 
 alone are essential, vi-z., quality and relation, 
 sense and thought, then the argument of Sensa- 
 tional, and that of Relational Idealism return 
 upon us combined, and therefore with completer
 
 THE ABSOLUTE AND ' INTELLECT ' 71 
 
 insistency. Quality and relation constitute the 
 World ; sense and thought constitute knowledge, 
 which is the realisation of the ' faculty ' intellect. 
 Quality cannot exist except as the content of 
 sense ; relation cannot exist except as the con- 
 tent of thought. The World, therefore, or Reality, 
 cannot exist except as the content of sense and 
 thought combined, the content of an absolute 
 knowledge, the functioning of Absolute Intellect.
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 SYSTEM, in some wide sense, we probably all regard 
 as the ideal of knowledge, but such a statement 
 is confessedly abstract. As ideal of knowledge, 
 system must also be stated as general determina- 
 tion, or formal description, of Reality. Therefore 
 it must be capable of as detailed development, of 
 as concrete formulation, as Reality itself. And, 
 short of this, it may fairly be demanded that, as 
 most general determination, system be exhibited 
 as containing more particular and concrete deter- 
 minations under it. We want, in fact, some in- 
 sight into the categories which fall under this 
 most general concept. 
 
 For instance, if we say in general that the 
 system which we are trying to attain in know- 
 ledge, or to find to be the general description of 
 Reality, is a whole of parts, then, of course, we 
 do not mean a quantitative whole. The form of 
 wholeness is not given by the mere addition of 
 the parts. Something else is relevant. Ap- 
 parently this is the interconnection of the parts ; 
 and a system is a whole of interconnected parts. 
 Then the mode of interconnection in a whole 
 becomes relevant, and according to different 
 
 72
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 73 
 
 possible modes there will be different kinds, or 
 categories, of system. 
 
 The most frequently mentioned oppositions be- 
 tween such kinds fall into a group, and in each 
 case the mechanical kind of whole forms one side 
 of the opposition, as against something which is 
 usually considered much better and higher than 
 mere mechanism. Thus we speak of a mechanical 
 whole as opposed to an organic whole ; or, again, 
 of a mechanical system as opposed to a teleological 
 system ; or, again, of mechanical determination 
 as opposed to freedom, or self-determination. 
 We have, in fact, the trite opposition of Mechanism 
 to Organism, Freedom, or, in general, Teleology. 
 
 Now, when this opposition is made by Idealistic 
 or pseudo-Idealistic philosophers, ' mechanism ' is 
 often made to carry the implication of something 
 very concrete indeed, e.g., of the Atomic theory 
 of the constitution of matter. And hence, perhaps, 
 a somewhat ludicrous tendency to magnify the 
 importance of the modern theories which seek to 
 go beyond the atom, and to suggest that they 
 upset the whole mechanical theory of the Uni- 
 verse. That would imply a much more concrete 
 and definite meaning for mechanism, denning it 
 by reference to matter and motion, which in its 
 own sphere may be necessary. 
 
 For philosophical purposes, however, and as a 
 category which is to apply generally, and not 
 merely to Nature, something much more general
 
 74 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 is wanted. For this purpose mechanism is, I 
 conceive, to be taken as an expression, more 
 concrete than system, but still abstract, of the 
 general point of view usually involved in the 
 scientific way of looking at facts. It is, as the 
 Law of Causality, again, is sometimes explained 
 to be, an expression of the abstract uniformity of 
 Nature (whether that is an axiom or a postulate 
 being indifferent to our present purpose). In 
 this light we may define it, as a first approxima- 
 tion, thus : ' A mechanism is a whole of inter- 
 connected parts, such that all process taking place 
 in the whole is conditioned entirely by universal 
 rules concerning the parts, or, otherwise expressed, 
 by universal relations holding between the parts.' 
 
 The point of this attempt at a definition lies 
 in the universality ascribed to the laws or rules 
 holding within the system. This, when the sum 
 of things (Reality) is conceived as a mechanism, 
 involves what is known as, and called sometimes 
 with a certain theologic odium, the reign of Natural 
 Law, or the universality of natural causation, or, 
 again, the doctrine of the merely mechanical 
 determination of events, of all that is and comes 
 to be. 
 
 In the abstract this is all somewhat uninterest- 
 ing. The point, as a matter of fact, of more direct 
 interest to me is a marked difference between the 
 attitudes of the older idealism and the newer 
 idealism towards what is involved in the category
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 75 
 
 of mechanism, conceived somewhat as I have 
 conceived it. 
 
 The older idealism, in this, of course, following 
 Kant, regarded itself as supplying the only possible 
 basis for scientific method, by proving, demon- 
 strating, ' deducing,' such categories or laws as 
 Causation, Uniformity, as of universal application. 
 The necessity of such a deduction was, in fact, 
 Philosophy's primary justification. The mechani- 
 cal categories received an important and independ- 
 ent place. They were necessitated by, and there- 
 fore necessary to, the higher philosophical unity, 
 and to those ' higher ' categories in which that 
 unity found itself more congenially expressed, 
 organism, freedom, teleology. The relation of 
 mechanism to these, therefore, was not opposition. 
 Mechanism was supplemented, * transcended,' in 
 however indefinite a way, not contradicted, by 
 the ' higher ' categories. 
 
 With this attitude certain tendencies in later 
 idealism stand sharply in contrast. Teleology 
 and freedom are now most frequently - - by 
 Professor Ward, for example, by Pragmatists, 
 by many unintelligent pupils and successors of 
 the older idealists conceived as directly in 
 opposition to the uniformity, universality of 
 sequence, constancy, definiteness, and deter- 
 minateness, which are the most general char- 
 acteristics of mechanical system ; and scientific 
 laws, e.g., become, not by mere failure to reach
 
 76 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 their ideal, but essentially, mere rules of thumb, 
 true not universally but only, at best, os cVl TO 
 TroXv. The difference of these possible attitudes 
 is really my main subject. We may note that the 
 newer attitude has a great advantage in point of 
 definiteness. It does a great deal in pointing out 
 the various ways and points in which mechanism 
 seems to fall short as an account of reality. An 
 organism, e.g.., in the sense of a living thing, is a 
 whole, we are told, which not only cannot be ex- 
 haustively described in terms of mechanism, but, 
 in the nature of the determination of the parts 
 by the life of the whole, is a refutation of the al- 
 leged universality of mechanism. The novelty and 
 spontaneity of the reactions of an animal vindicates 
 teleological causation, as an alternative to, and 
 in contradiction of, mechanical determination. 
 Human conduct, again, is determined not by 
 natural causes, but by ends, and so is self-deter- 
 mined or free in a sense which not merely tran-? 
 scends, but excludes, causality and uniformity. 
 
 This is all at least definite, and, so far, compares 
 favourably with the older method which, having 
 expounded the validity of the mechanical view, 
 left very indefinite the way in which it was ' tran- 
 scended by,' ' taken up into ' the higher unity, or 
 even, with Kant, made those higher categories 
 not properly susceptible of being ' known ' at all, 
 as the mechanical categories were. 
 
 Definite conceptions are however, I am con-
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 77 
 
 vinced, possible on this side also. And what I 
 should like to do is to attempt to defend the older 
 as against the newer Idealistic position by showing 
 that the higher categories, which both uphold, do 
 really involve, and can be exhibited as containing 
 within them, the lower or mechanical. 
 
 Let me take the conception of an organism in the 
 first place, and show in what way I believe this to 
 be possible. The conception is notoriously difficult 
 to define, and its relation to the narrower, literal 
 sense in which it is applied to actual living things 
 is difficult satisfactorily to determine. But I think 
 that, prima facie, what differentiates an organism 
 from a mechanism is the reference to the whole as, 
 in some way, an independent factor in the relations 
 formerly stated as between the parts. An organ- 
 ism is a whole of interconnected parts such that 
 the parts are determined by the whole. This is trite 
 enough. What does it involve ? Is the determina- 
 tion, of the changes which the parts go through, by 
 the whole, something quite novel, different from 
 and opposed to the determination of those changes 
 by the parts according to the rules of their ' mech- 
 anical ' interconnection ? This is, I suppose, the 
 view of Vitalism, in Biology, as the theory of a 
 special Vital Energy ; and it seems to be the 
 general view of the newer idealism. Or is this 
 determination of parts by the nature of the whole 
 only the reciprocal determination of the parts 
 looked at from a new point of view, viz., the point
 
 78 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 of view of the whole ? This is the position I 
 should prefer to adopt. 
 
 If we try to consider in detail how we are to 
 conceive the determination of parts by whole in 
 an organic system, the latter view, I think, carries 
 the day, so far as we admit that such detailed 
 understanding is possible so far, that is, as the 
 concept of organism is regarded as admitting of 
 being thought out. Short of some unintelligible 
 spontaneity on the part of the whole, we may re- 
 gard the parts, in their action and change, as 
 determined by the need for the preservation of the 
 whole, or by the general plan which constitutes the 
 whole, or by the end or interest or good of the 
 whole. Let me take these up briefly in that order. 
 
 The nature of the activities of a natural organism 
 is, no doubt, determined in some sense by the need 
 for the preservation of the whole. The parts of 
 an organism do not, as a rule, act in a way showing 
 complete indifference to whether the whole con- 
 tinues in being or not, whereas a group of material 
 particles in empty space will follow, we suppose, 
 their own laws of motion, attraction, and repulsion, 
 without any determination by the necessity of 
 the mechanical whole, the group, which they con- 
 stitute, being permanent. The actions and re- 
 actions of the members, the parts of an organism, 
 have then a further characteristic. How is this, 
 determination by the existence of the whole, 
 related to that, the determination of the parts by
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 79 
 
 one another ? Now, on this point it is usually 
 recognised, whether with elation or with dejection, 
 that the tendency of Science is to make the organic 
 determination a complex product, a special kind, 
 of mechanical determination. Within a certain 
 organic kind, e.g., there is, to a certain kind of 
 stimulus, a variety of possible responses ; by 
 Natural Selection those organisms that make 
 certain responses are eliminated, others survive, 
 and thus, by this Natural Selection, a purely 
 mechanical process, a specialisation of the activi- 
 ties of the organism to those which preserve the 
 organism is, on the whole, effected. When it is 
 effected, it still is by a mechanical process that it 
 goes on ; stimulus and response are connected by 
 habituation, involving a mechanical intercon- 
 nection between parts. And the organic char- 
 acter of the whole involves only a summation of 
 mechanical determinations of action and re- 
 action. 
 
 Of course it is clear that no natural organism 
 is a perfect organism, comes up to the conception 
 of an organism. A perfect organism would be 
 one in which there was a satisfactory response to 
 every environment or stimulus. But to every 
 natural organism upon this earth death cometh 
 soon or late ; and by its termination it demonstrates 
 its imperfection. And so it may be argued that 
 the natural organism is not relevant to a dis- 
 cussion of organism as a philosophical category
 
 80 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 meant to be applicable to the sum of things. 
 For such a category the notion of determination 
 by preservation of the whole becomes inapplicable ; 
 or we have to say that what has to be preserved 
 is not the mere existence of the whole, but its 
 existence as of a certain nature, as a system 
 constructed according to a certain plan. An organ- 
 ism, accordingly, is now ' a whole of parts which 
 in their action and reaction are determined by 
 the plan of the whole.' This is obviously very 
 abstract. To be determined by the plan of the 
 whole must mean to go on according to the plan 
 of the whole, since we do not regard the plan 
 as an independent agent. But if it is merely 
 according to the plan of the whole, it does not 
 differ from mechanism, for a mechanism also 
 proceeds according to a fixed plan, which is the 
 plan of the whole. The only difference will be 
 that in mechanism you look at the thing from 
 the side of the parts for which a plan is fixed ; in 
 organism from the side of the whole. And 
 thus TCLVTO p.ev eon, TO Se eu/eu avr&J ercpov, 
 Organism is compatible with Mechanism even so 
 far that every organism is a mechanism. 
 
 This does not seem, of course, to make sufficient 
 allowance for the difference in the concepts which 
 we started by trying to indicate. But I think that, 
 to enforce such a difference, one has to pass 
 definitely forward into another category from that 
 of Organism, namely, into Teleology. Trying to
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 81 
 
 introduce into Organism the distinction we have 
 lost, we may seek to do it in this way. ' It is true 
 that Organism and Mechanism are at one in being 
 determinations of parts according to a ground 
 plan of the whole. The point we have missed is 
 that in Organism it is a different kind of plan.' 
 This is likely enough. But when a description 
 of the kind of plan proper to Organism is pressed 
 for, it is likely, I think, to be that, as against the 
 determination by mere consequent and antecedent 
 which characterises mechanism, the plan of an 
 organism is determination of events as means 
 towards an end. And this is Teleology. 
 
 To Teleology, then, let us proceed. And, first, 
 as to this matter of means and end, which are the 
 simplest terms to define it in. Clearly, if the end 
 is fixed, the means must be supposed fixed. That 
 is to say, the conception of a means is something 
 which universally produces a certain result, the 
 desired end. That is, there is a uniform, universal, 
 cause and effect relation between the item we 
 choose as means and the item we desiderate as 
 end. And so Teleology, as determination of 
 events as means towards an end, must presuppose 
 mechanical determination, and so cannot contra- 
 dict it. Teleology, in fact, can only exist in a 
 world which has the characteristics of a mechanism. 
 
 I shall return to some of the deeper implications 
 of this view shortly. Meanwhile, note that ordin- 
 ary human teleology, prima facie, at all events,
 
 82 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 involves beyond itself an order which, so far as 
 the particular purpose of the individual is con- 
 cerned, is merely uniform, and so mechanical, 
 unteleological. And we may clearly affirm that 
 human teleology is the original teleology ; that 
 is, that the concept of Teleology, however far it 
 comes to be extended, applies originally to the 
 sphere of human practice, as determined by 
 conceived ends to the choice and use of particu- 
 lar means. And though, to obtain a generalised 
 category of teleology, of universal import, it may 
 be necessary to rid ourselves, in thought, of some 
 of the limitations of human or merely finite 
 teleology, I do not think that the reference to an 
 independent order which is used, and which non 
 nisi parendo vincitur, can be so dispensed with. 
 For, subtract this, and what is left seems to be 
 not Teleology at all, but Creation. The ideal 
 content, which is conceived as End, produces 
 itself, or its object, independently of any conditions 
 which could constitute means to its attainment. 
 And this unconditioned activity is not what we 
 can recognise as meant by the word Teleology. 
 
 This becomes plainer when we attempt to use 
 the concept so understood in the sense of ' un- 
 conditioned activity ' as a philosophical category 
 for the interpretation of the sum of things. For 
 in this absolute case, at any rate, there can be no 
 distinction between an end for the sake of which 
 other things are, and those other things as means.
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 83 
 
 If the activity is really unconditioned, really 
 creative, only what strictly belongs to the end 
 is created. Thus the end or object of such an 
 activity must be the whole order of existent 
 things. The world does not, hi this case, exist 
 for some realisable end not fully revealed in it ; 
 the world as a whole, and in its every detail, is 
 the end. God made all created things * for his 
 own glory,' i.e., because he chose to make them, 
 and to make them so and not otherwise. 
 
 All this holds, and holds perhaps even more 
 clearly, when we try to drop the quasi-theological 
 formulation, and try to regard Teleology as simply 
 an abstract truth about the world as it is. . This, 
 so far as I understand it, is what Prof. Bosanquet, 
 for instance, is trying to do. Teleology is some- 
 how to lose its reference to a special purpose, and 
 to become only a form, a more concrete form 
 than Mechanism, in which to express the nature 
 of the system which is Reality ; and with this 
 endeavour one may have all sympathy. But this 
 way of doing it does not seem altogether satis- 
 factory. If there is no special purpose or end to 
 determine the scheme of things as teleological, the 
 whole sum of things must once more be the end, 
 and, again, the sum of things must likewise be 
 the means. And if we do not make any further 
 distinction between the aspect in which it is end 
 and the aspect in which it is means, this seems 
 valueless. Sometimes, however, when the system
 
 84 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 is described as teleological, as by Mr. Joachim, 
 there seems to be a somewhat obscure implication 
 that the aspects distinguished are (1) the whole 
 conceived as a system of universals or rules, and 
 (2) the whole as a sum of things acting according 
 to those rules : the system of rules, as the plan of 
 the whole, being the end fulfilled, and the sum of 
 particulars determined by that plan being re- 
 garded as a means to the fulfilment of that end. 
 So at least I interpret Mr. Joachim's expressions, 
 otherwise very difficult, about the ideal of know- 
 ledge being a ' teleological system, self-fulfilling 
 and self -fulfilled.' 
 
 I am not concerned to know whether this inter- 
 pretation of Teleology really comes up to the 
 requirements of the notion, though I know what 
 people of a Pragmatic turn would say of it, and 
 have said of similar attempts. It is rather my 
 business to point out that once more, as reduced 
 to this generalised formula, Teleology is not in- 
 consistent with, and indeed implies, Mechanism. 
 When we distinguish the plan as determining from 
 the parts as determined, we imply just what was 
 stated in Mechanism as a multiplicity of parts 
 connected according to definite laws. The dis- 
 tinctions of Mechanism, Organism, and Teleology 
 as thus conceived are dependent on point of view. 
 In Mechanism we neglect the whole and regard 
 the parts as determining one another according 
 to rules ; in Organism we take cognisance of the
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 85 
 
 whole, identify it with the general character of the 
 system, and regard it as determining the special 
 parts or members of thesystem. In Teleology, again, 
 we take cognisance of the whole, identify it rathir 
 with the sum of members, and regard it as det - 
 mined by and 'fulfilling' the plan, which thus 
 appears to take up the position of an independent 
 part, as End of the whole. 
 
 This, no doubt, seems too symmetrical to be 
 true ; and indeed I do not regard it as satisfactory ; 
 for we seem once more to have lost the differentia 
 of the concept we were seeking. Yet perhaps 
 when we do find that differentia we shall not be 
 inclined to call the category that contains it 
 Teleology. But before we go on to Activity or 
 Freedom, or whatever we call the final stage, I 
 should like to be permitted some further liberty 
 of digression by way of illustration. 
 
 Clearly, if Teleology as we first wished to de- 
 scribe it as presupposing a fixed order, which it 
 cannot alter, but, obeying it, can use if such 
 Teleology exists, there must be some point at 
 which the purposive train of events begins to 
 evolve itself within the mechanical, a point where 
 the will towards a certain end is imposed upon 
 the indifferent order of things. And here, it would 
 seem, there is a contravention of the mechanical 
 order, since some additional change, however slight, 
 must be made in the order of things if any real 
 progress is to be made towards the end. This
 
 86 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 seems obvious : yet there are possible criticisms. 
 A miracle, for instance, may be conceived as 
 uch an interference with an established mechan- 
 1 -al order. It presents, at any rate, the funda- 
 mentally paradoxical character of a miracle. The 
 miracle must, it would seem, be an interference 
 with a universal order, otherwise there would be 
 no miracle, but only an unusual occurrence ; yet 
 it must interfere with, contradict, this order, or, 
 once more, there would be no miracle, and this 
 seems to make the order cease to be universal. 
 But is the miracle, then, conceived as itself un- 
 conditioned ? By no means. For those for whom 
 there can be question of miracles, the miracle 
 proceeds from the same world-ground as does the 
 order which it contradicts, viz., the will of God, and 
 the combination of world-order and miracle is 
 conceived as, in its wholeness, the means to the 
 divine end. And so we have a new, higher order, 
 in which miraculous occurrences have their legiti- 
 mate place. And with this, so far, we need not 
 quarrel. For, when the miraculous takes its place 
 in the whole, it is now no longer a means to a far- 
 off divine end in any sense in which the rest of the 
 whole is not. The real divine end must be that 
 certain results should be achieved, indeed, but by 
 and through certain conditions ; and the special 
 conditions are as essential as the special results. 
 Thus the real and final end is, once more, just as 
 it was before, the whole system or order.
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 87 
 
 And so, once more, we get out of the range of 
 Teleology, as usually understood, into the sphere 
 of Free Activity or Creation ; Creation being the 
 theological name, we may take it, for a something 
 that still remains to be discussed. I should per- 
 haps here remark, if only because it is obvious, 
 that neither this nor, as I consider, any other 
 philosophical discussion of the concept of a miracle 
 can have any bearing whatever on the determina- 
 tion of the question whether a certain event or 
 group of events regarded as miraculous took place. 
 To say that one can prove a priori that miracles 
 cannot happen is, in one point of view, a truism ; 
 in another it indicates only a certain personal point 
 of view. And it is by such points of view, person- 
 ally and experientially attained points of view, 
 not, of course, ultimately removed from philo- 
 sophical criticism, but certainly disconnected from 
 this kind of criticism of concepts it is by such 
 points of view that it is determined into what 
 scales shall be put the evidence for any set of mir- 
 acles. And every particular miracle is, of course, 
 a question of evidence. 
 
 But there is an important aspect of the system 
 or order which we have just been led to consider, 
 the higher order which, in one sense, is wholly 
 miraculous. Though such a world is systematic 
 or orderly, though, therefore, every part or event 
 has its definite, regular and, therefore, in some 
 sense, universal relations to all others, yet some
 
 88 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 of these events have the further aspect of being 
 unique. This does not, I contend, then, contra- 
 dict the character of the system as conforming to 
 the concept of mechanism. Let the unique event 
 be, e.g., a certain incarnation, and let it be granted 
 that such an event in no other instances occurs 
 under those directly connected circumstances 
 which accompanied and conditioned it in this 
 case. Then the universal rules seem to be broken ; 
 but in fact they must, in a completed whole of 
 knowledge, be restated, with a vast and far- 
 reaching qualification; to the effect that under 
 certain spiritual conditions of the race, at a 
 particular point in the history of a certain people, 
 in a particular condition of world empire and 
 social disintegration, these laws shall be sus- 
 pended in a definite way, and a determinate 
 alternative shall have place. Thus we do not get 
 away from Law, but only from a seeming law to a 
 real law much more deep-reaching in its provisos. 
 My digression has gone further than I intended. 
 Yet perhaps it has indicated another thread which 
 may now be picked up. Absolute Teleology, when 
 pushed to its extreme in one direction, the theo- 
 logical one, becomes Creation, an absolute, that 
 is unconditioned, activity or spontaneity proceed- 
 ing outwards. And it is in such an activity that 
 Teleology on the finite scale also seemed to 
 terminate, in a conception which may have various 
 names applied to it, such as Freedom, Liberty,
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 89 
 
 Self-Determination, Self-Activity, or simply, as 
 I prefer to call it, Activity. The point at which 
 finite human Teleology seemed likely to present 
 itself as really free activity was the consideration 
 that, while the series of means to an end presup- 
 posed, and took place in, and so did not contradict, 
 the mechanical order of causes and effects, the 
 initiation of the series, such as was necessary if 
 the natural order was really to be diverted towards 
 the production of the end, seemed to involve a 
 direct change of the natural order, and so a per- 
 fectly free and unconditioned activity exerted 
 upon that order at a certain point. 
 
 Of course though perhaps I ought not to point 
 it out this is, as applied to human beings, the 
 whole question of Free Will, which it is somewhat 
 hazardous to tackle as a concluding item. Since, 
 however, the substance of the question raised by 
 this category of Activity concerns the human will, 
 one cannot be blamed for drawing one's illustra- 
 tions from that sphere. Consider first, as inter- 
 mediate between Teleology and Activity, what is 
 presupposed in the interference of a purpose, an 
 end, with the natural order. This is, that a certain 
 end should be conceived as an idea present to the 
 thought of a particular subject; and that the 
 content of this idea should be desired and willed. 
 Now, in this attitude of desire and will itself, it 
 may be sought to find the heart of the mystery. 
 Desire, or will, or both, may be said to be ulti-
 
 90 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 mate, or a still more ultimate metaphysical 
 principle may be introduced to explain them. 
 But, independently of such entities, it may be made 
 clear, I think, that the process within the mind 
 itself does not exclude what we must call natural 
 causation. The content of the idea presented is 
 in a certain kind of harmony with the character- 
 istics of the individual mind, its temperament, 
 natural or acquired, its tendencies permanent or 
 temporary ; and the idea in consequence sets in 
 motion certain processes, within the masses of 
 feeling which constitute the ' self,' which lead to 
 its being identified, ' felt as one,' with the ' self ' ; 
 and this, which is desire, is also will when the 
 consciousness of the presence of certain necessary 
 conditions of action is added to the consciousness 
 of the end. Now in this and in this or some 
 similar way it seems to me necessary to describe 
 the phenomena of the conative attitude though 
 the attitude as a whole is teleological, the processes 
 which constitute it are such as can be described 
 and might be definitely formulated in laws. Given 
 certain conditions, viz., certain characteristics of 
 the mind as a whole, certain characteristics of the 
 ideal content, the processes which we recognise 
 as a special instance of desire and will necessarily 
 follow. The whole process is distinguished, in- 
 deed, from an ordinary mechanical whole, but 
 distinguished only by the nature of one of the parts 
 or factors, as being the content of an idea, not by
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 91 
 
 the nature of the processes and relations in which 
 it is concerned. These have the uniformity and 
 necessity of causal sequence which distinguish 
 mechanism ; and the whole is, in consequence, 
 a mechanical whole. 
 
 For, if it is not this and this is my main point 
 it cannot even be teleological. If the ideal content 
 does not act upon the self as a condition with 
 consequences ; if self and conceived end do not 
 interact in definite ways determined by their 
 several natures, relations and environment, then 
 nothing at all can be said about the attitude they 
 jointly form. You may call it conation or will, 
 but it is not teleological ; it is a mere indeterminate 
 chaos. Teleology is always something wider and 
 larger than Mechanism, and here, as in a previous 
 case, when we try to analyse Teleology to see how 
 it works, we find, as its fundamental cog-wheels, 
 Mechanism. 
 
 If, then, the process by which an idea becomes 
 such an end as can be active in promoting its own 
 realisation, is itself mechanical, what is the mean- 
 ing of the character of Self- Activity, Freedom, or 
 Spontaneity which undoubtedly in some sense is 
 to be attributed to our conative or practical atti- 
 tudes ? I can only mention and dismiss one alterna- 
 tive before taking up what I consider the true one. 
 
 It may be thought that, even if it be admitted 
 that the outer order is fully mechanical, and the 
 inner order, the process of conation, is likewise
 
 92 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 determinate, at the point where the two meet, at 
 the point where desire becomes will to act, the 
 fiat to change hi some particular the order of the 
 external world, there is an exercise of an indeter- 
 minate spontaneity, and that in this consists our 
 freedom. The problem of freedom of the will at this 
 point becomes as it is treated, for example, by Mr. 
 Boyce-Gibson in Personal Idealism confounded 
 with the problem of the relation of mind to matter. 
 And I can only indicate that here there is, on no 
 theory, any room for that complete indetermin- 
 ateness which this view demands. There are two 
 general views of the relation of the mental to the 
 material ; the parallelistic view, of which the 
 epiphenomenal is for our purpose a case, and the 
 interactionist view. On the former theory there is 
 no transference of power from the mental to the 
 material world, and therefore a fortiori no indeter- 
 minate transference. On the latter view there is 
 a transference ; but if, on the material side, there 
 is mechanism, and on the mental side there is, as 
 I have maintained, also, in the phenomena of 
 conation, only a more subtle mechanism, the 
 reasons for contravening the mechanical order in 
 the relations of these mechanisms disappear. Both 
 become part of one larger, all-embracing mechan- 
 ism, of which the mental and material are alike 
 parts ; and the transferences from the one to the 
 other will be ' mechanical ' in our general sense of 
 constant, determinate, according to universal rule.
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 93 
 
 On the other hand, if we try to determine to our- 
 selves what, apart from such sophisticated notions 
 of indeterminateness, we really mean to ourselves 
 when we think of our freedom, it is possible enough 
 to arrive at a conclusion not inharmonious with 
 the general trend of this paper. I am free if, 
 when I will, it is really / who will, and so far as 
 what I seem to will is really the object of my will. 
 Just as I am not free when undergoing physical 
 coercion, so I am not free when what I will is other 
 than it appears, and, finally, when the I who appear 
 to will it am merely the sport of blind accident, 
 the product of a cosmic coincidence, determined by 
 an illimitable background of irrelevancies that lie 
 outside of me, and not at all by the characteristics 
 that belong to my own nature. If the self is to 
 be free, in short, it must not be determined by 
 anything that really lies outside it; it must, 
 therefore, be determined by grounds that are 
 wholly internal to itself. And in determination 
 by an idea, the self inasmuch as it is only as 
 a self of such and such a nature that it is moved 
 as it is by the idea approximates to the condi- 
 tion of self-determination, and feels itself free as 
 identifying itself with, realising itself in, the idea. 
 On this view of Free Activity as self-determina- 
 tion, then, the freedom depends upon the degree of 
 completeness in which the self is really determined 
 by conditions which he within it ; anything is free 
 or active in so far as it embraces such a totality of
 
 94 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 conditions of its own further states. And ultimately 
 as a philosophical category, we must regard Activity 
 as being the determination of a whole by itself. 
 Such complete self-determination, it seems ob- 
 vious, nothing finite can possess. A man, e.g., is 
 controlled by accidental circumstances which force 
 him, in spite of his likings, one way rather than 
 another ; and he is controlled from without not 
 less in so far as those very likings, his whole 
 character, all that presents itself to' him as truly 
 himself, have been made not by him, but for him, 
 ' before God fashioned star and sun,' and thus 
 also he fails to include in himself the totality of hie 
 own conditions. This determination by a partially 
 unrealised self, for which one is not ever quite 
 responsible, pervades our most deliberate actions ; 
 for if we had been made different the idea would 
 have struck or attracted us differently. 
 
 It is therefore only in its absolute use that we 
 can hope to find pure freedom ; and in its absolute 
 use, as we have seen, it seems to mean mere com- 
 pleteness of conditions, or determination of a 
 whole by its whole self. As such it goes well 
 enough into a sort of schema that can be drawn 
 up of the four categories I have dealt with : Thus : 
 
 Mechanism = Determination of Part by Part. 
 Organism = Determination of Part by Whole. 
 Teleology = Determination of Whole by Part. 
 Activity = Determination of Whole by Whole.
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 95 
 
 For this schema I claim nothing except that it 
 helps to put the four categories in relation, and 
 by being put thus into relation they perhaps show 
 more clearly in what way I conceive that Organism, 
 Teleology, and Activity are all consistent with, 
 and indeed imply, Mechanism, as the uniform 
 determination of part by part. The real essence 
 of each category lies, of course, in the determina- 
 tion of the sense that is involved for Whole or Part 
 in each case, and this I have in previous cases only 
 attempted to indicate. 
 
 But, in connection with Activity, I may, to 
 conclude, try to say something more of what such 
 wholeness implies. For it is not, after all, a 
 truism that the world is, and can be thought as, 
 a whole. As it presents itself to us, Reality is 
 not a whole, but infinite infinite in extent, infinite 
 in depth of content, and so infinite in potentiality 
 of analysis. Any part of the universe might turn 
 out to be unique, and, similarly, the Reality in 
 general is through and through unique, has an 
 unanalysed infinity of relations. 
 
 But this uniqueness involves that the deter- 
 mination of such part by other parts must be 
 carried out in thought until it becomes a deter- 
 mination of the part by the whole ; and this is 
 always an ideal, for the whole is never exhausted. 
 Hence the apparent disparateness of the character 
 of Mechanism, as a category implying no explicit 
 reference to the whole, and of the higher categories,
 
 96 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 
 
 which do introduce such a reference. We can go 
 on construing any part of our experience hi terms 
 of uniformity and law and causation, and so 
 Mechanism seems to be something ever present 
 and real ; but we never get to the point of seeing 
 those uniformities, causes, and laws, as constituting 
 a complete system, and so the higher categories 
 present themselves only as ideals. Thus, for Kant, 
 the distinction between the mechanical categories, 
 as constitutive of experience, and the teleological 
 view, as merely regulative, and an ideal of Reason, 
 was absolute. And it may seem that the only 
 legitimate application of such categories must be, 
 after all, to those objects from which they were 
 in the first place derived, their imperfect instances 
 of natural organism, animal teleology, and human 
 free will, since hi this application no demand is 
 likely to be made that the finite instance shall 
 come fully up to the conception. And thus 
 Mechanism, as having the more universal applica- 
 tion, would seem to have the superior value, and, 
 even on Pragmatic principles, to be the ' truer ' 
 category. 
 
 But we must note that this is only true in so far 
 as we regard a wholeness in things as being for 
 ever beyond our reach so far (I may say) as we 
 doubt whether things really form a whole at all. 
 And so far as we lose this doubt, so far as, by 
 deeper analysis and wider comprehension, we 
 approximate to a view of the universe as a single
 
 SYSTEM AND MECHANISM 97 
 
 and unique whole, so far the concepts which in- 
 volve a reference to such a whole will be of value 
 for us. 
 
 The final difficulty, perhaps, is, that, in fact, 
 the wholeness of Reality seems to be connected 
 with that aspect in which it is most opposed to 
 analysis and comprehension of any sort. So far 
 as it is Reality as it first presents itself to us, 
 unique and unanalysed, it seems to have, for 
 feeling, a sort of wholeness ; but, so far as we 
 analyse it, it seems to resolve itself into a series 
 of interconnections of parts, without limit. Its 
 wholeness seems to be opposed to its compre- 
 hension. But this raises questions with which I 
 am not here concerned to deal. 
 
 Printed by T. and A. CONSTABLE, Printors to His Majesty 
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