'^\ .■ •■..,. sir tf i" ■i^.^iiiV;; ■;**■*: ?s*h3si;i« i¥V LIBRARY UNIVERSITY Of CAllfO'iMA B A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM MACMILLAN AND CO., Limited LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA • MADRAS MELBOURNE THE MACMILLAN COMPANY NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. TORONTO A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM SOME QUESTIONS & CONCLUSIONS BY MAY SINCLAIR MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON 1917 COPYRIGHT TO A. M. A. A„ W. E. S.-M. INTKODUCTION^ There is a certain embarrassment in coming forward with an Apology for Idealistic Monism at the present moment. You cannot be quite sure whether you are putting in an appearance too late or much too early. .'' It does look like personal misfortune or perversity that, when there are lots of other philosophies to choose from, you should happen to hit on the one that has just had a tremendous innings, and is now in process of being bowled out. As long ago as the early 'nineties Idealism was supposed to be dead and haunting Oxford. I know that the New Realists have said that it is now a fashionable philosophy. But either they do not really mean it, or they mean that only philosophies in their last decrepitude become fashionable at all. They mean that nineteenth -century Monism is a pseudo-philosophy of the past, and that twentieth-century Pluralism is the living philosophy of the future. It is possible to agree with this view without accept- ing the programme of the pluralists. I think it may be said that certain vulnerable forms of IdeaHsm are things of the past ; and that the new atomistic Realism is a thing of the future ; at any rate of the immediate future. But we know of Old Realisms that died and decayed, and were buried, and of New Idealisms that died and rose again. In India the Sankya philosophy of the Many fought the Vedanta philosophy of the One. vii b viii A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM It can hardly be said to have driven its opponent from the field. Pragmatic Humanism and Vitalism are going from us in the flower, you may say, of their youth. And they were robust philosophies. M. Bergson even made Philosophy the vogue in Mayfair for a whole season. And so I think that some day (which may be as distant as you please) the New Realism will grow old and die, and the New Idealism will be born again. It will be born, not out of its own ashes, nor out of its own life only, but out of what is living in the system that for the time being has superseded it. The drastic criticism of their opponents is what keeps robust philo- sophies alive. And, seeing the great part that Idealism has played in the past, I cannot think that to choose it (if you have any choice in these matters) is perversity. It is, however, a personal misfortune when your choice causes you to differ, almost with violence, from those for whose accomplishment you have the pro- foundest admiration. You cannot help feeling that it would be safer to share some splendid error with Samuel Butler and M. Bergson, or with William James and JVIr. Bertrand Russell (if the uncompromising virtue of Mr. Russell's logic left him any margin for error), than to be right in disagreeing with any of them. In Samuel Butler's case I feel no sort of certainty that, on the one point where I have differed from him, I am even approximately right. His theory of Personal Identity is free from certain complications which are serious drawbacks to mine. Mine, if tenable, would solve the one serious difficulty of his. It would also go far to support the argument for Human Immortality. This, however, must tell against it rather than for it, by suggesting an unscientific parti pris. Pan-Psychism has an irresistible appeal to the emotions. I like to think that my friend's baby made its charming eye- INTRODUCTION ix lashes, that my neighbour's hen designed her white frock of feathers, and my cat his fine black coat of fur, themselves ; because they wanted to ; instead of having to buy them, as it were, at some remote ontological bazaar. But emotion doesn't blind me to the possibility that things may not, after all, have happened quite in this way. And this is the only " appeal " of any sort that Butler does make. He is pure from the least taint of what Mr. Bertrand Russell, quoting Mr. Santayana, calls " maliciousness." As for Personal Identity, both his theory and mine are open to the objection that they are not theories of personal identity at all. In this matter I feel as if I had used Butler (and perhaps abused him) for my own purposes. He has given me an inch and I have taken an ell. Still, I think my ell was very fairly suggested by his inch. Discovering dilemmas in M. Bergson's philosophy is an enthralling occupation while you are about it ; but it leaves no solid satisfaction behind. It does not, as Samuel Butler would have said, give you " peace at the last." When it is all over you feel as if it had not been quite worth wHle. What do a few logical dilemmas more or less matter in the work of a poet and a seer ? I said just now that Vitalism is a robust philosophy. It is nothing of the sort. It is subtle, exquisite, fragile. To try to analyse it, to break through that texture of beautiful imagination, is to lay violent hands on a living, palpitating thing that endures only on the condition that you do not handle it. One other part, at any rate, of what I have written calls for some apology — my criticism of Pragmatism which is associated with an honoured name. The monist who hates Pragmatism and loves the prag- matist ; who, let us say, abhors William James's way of X A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM - thinking and adores his way of ^v^iting ; who, in the very moment of hostility, remains the thrall of his charming personality and brilliant genius, that monist is in no enviable case. But what was I to do ? I believe the issue between Pragmatism and Idealism is vital. I believe in Pragmatism as a branch, and a very important branch of casuistry. I do not believe in it as a philosophy. It is a method and not a philosophy. It is not even a philosophic method. Pragmatism is one long argumentum ad hominem, and it is nothing more. Now, the argumentum ad hominem is all very well in its way, but that way should be purely supplementary. It is a perfectly fair and legitimate method when em- ployed as an outside prop to the clean metaphysical arguments by which a clean metaphysical case must stand or fall. Anybody may use it for all it is worth, provided he gives due notice and isolates it to guard against infection. Mr. McDougall, for instance, defends Animism with a long array of arguments ad hominem ; but he uses them under protest, as if he were a little bit ashamed of them ; and he is careful to keep them in the strict quarantine of a chapter to themselves. Prag- matism, by its very nature, knows nothing of these precautions. It does not sterilize its instruments before it uses them. It does not want to sterilize them. It is courageous. It courts rather than fears infection. It must stand or fall by its appeal to the pragmatic instinct, the business instinct in men, or it would not be Pragmatism. And so I do not think that the pragmatist is always fair to his opponents. I do not mean that he weakens their case by misstatement before he demolishes it. Far from it. You might say that the mere statement of the monist's case was far safer in William James's INTRODUCTION xi hands than it is sometimes in his own. I mean that the pragmatic method, faithfully followed, lands the prag- matist in misrepresentation, not of his opponent's case, but of his opponent's attitude. To call Monism the philosophy of the " Thin " and Pluralism the philosophy of the " Thick " is fair enough controversial practice. Rationalists may not like it, but they have brought it on themselves. But would it have occurred to any- body but a pragmatist to preface a serious course of lectures on his subject with a classification of Idealistic Monists as " Tender - minded," and of Pluralists as " Tough-minded " ? You might just as well call your opponent a fat-head at once and have done with it. It is deadly ; it is damning ; it is unforgettable. Such epithets stick and sting to all eternity. They keep people off Monism. They must have prejudiced William James's audience against it from the start, before he could get in any of his logic. And that is precisely what it was designed to do. What was that audience to think when it was told that the tender - minded are : Rationalistic, intel- lectualistic, idealistic, optimistic, religious, free-willist, monistic, and dogmatical ; and that the Tough-minded are : Empiricist, sensationalist, materialistic, pessimistic, irreligious, fatalistic, pluralistic, sceptical ? Observe how Pragmatism appropriates all the robust and heroic virtues, and will not leave its opponent one of them. Think of the sheer terrorism of the per- formance. Could you wonder if, covered with that six-shooter. Professor James's audience plumped for Pragmatism before it had heard a single argument ? Each member of it must have registered an inward vow : " Tough-minded ? Fll be that ! " But does the classification really hold ? Are the virtues and vices justly apportioned ? Nobody thinks -"I xii A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM of Kant and Hegel as nice comfortable philosophers whose bosoms they could lay their heads on. The Third Book of Hegel's Logic is not exactly an Education sentimentale. And the Triple Dialectic is not regarded by anybody except pragmatists as suitable reading for the mentally deficient. Kant's Pragmatism (of which, of course, I shall be reminded) was an after-thought ; which doesn't prevent pluralists from using him as a whipping-post when they want to. The author of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung was not precisely one's idea of an optimist. There are passages in Dr. McTaggart's Studies in Hegelian Cosmology from which you gather that he is not inaccessible to human tender- ness ; but, with a toughness that no pragmatist has ever equalled, he denies his Absolute to be a " person." He has stripped it bare of everything that is comfortable and nice. If it comes to that, what about the Pragmatic- Humanist's God who is so tender-minded that he cannot be held responsible for pain and evil, and collapses under the sheer emotional strain of his own universe ? The God of Pantheism may have his brutal moments and his moments of unbending, but his worst enemies can't say he isn't robust. And there is no tenderness at all about Mr. Bradley's Principles of Logic. As for the Mr. Bradley of Appearance and Reality, if he has a fault, it is that, in the interests of his Absolute, he carries hard-headed, hard-hearted, thorough-paced scepticism to excess. By no possible manipulation of phrases can you make it appear that Mr. Bradley is even soft in places. He is, in fact, a " tough " whom one would have thought few pragmatists would care to meet on a dark night. Mr. Bertrand Eussell is about the only living philosopher who can stand up to him. And we have heard before now of dogmatic Realism. And after all, is it so very certain that logical ideas INTRODUCTION xiii are tender and that facts are hard ? Can you find a fact that's harder, more irreducible, than the principle of contradiction, or than any axiom of pure mathe- matics ? Facts have a notorious habit of elusiveness and liquescence. As for thinness, is there anything more tenuous than matter, apart from our sensations of so-called material qualities ? Matter of which William James says that it is " indeed infinitely and incredibly refined." The physicist is he who deals in phantasms of thought, invisible, impalpable, compared with which even Dr. McTaggart's Absolute is a perfect Falstaff. It looks as if the only things that stand firm in this universe are Ideas. Truth, Goodness, Beauty : there is not a " fact " that bears their imprint and their image for long together ; yet they, eternal and immutable, remain. The backbone of Philosophy is Logic. Pragmatism has no logic ; it is spineless. Idealism may have too much logic ; it may be too rigid. But this, surely, is a fault on the side of hardness rather than of softness. At any rate, the method of Philosophy should be purely logical. The idealist does claim purity for his method ; and with some reason. The method of the pragmatist is contaminated with its genial contacts, its joyous commerce with the metaphysically irrelevant. Pragmatism is an unsterilized Philosophy. I do not say it has not done good service in criticism ; that it has not reminded us of the existence of things that idealistic philosophers forget. But if it were passionately adopted, consistently held, and carried to its logical conclusions, the eternal ideas of Truth, Good- ness and Beauty would lose their meaning and we our belief in them. Luckily, people are seldom logical, and consistent, and passionate in their adoption even of wrong methods in Philosophy. xiv A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM It is painful to differ from M. Bergson and from AVilliam James ; but it is dangerous to differ from Mr. Bertrand Russell. If there is dismay just at present in the ranks of Idealistic Monism, it must be mainly- owing to his formidable methods of attack. I hope there is dismay. I should be very sorry for the idealistic monist who did not feel it. His complacency would do more credit to his heart than to his head. Humanism, Pragmatism and Vitalism have all " gone for " him ; but, barring the shrewd thrusts of William James, they have " gone " with no particular " flair " for his special vulnerability. And when touched he could always point to some wider chink in his opponent's armour. The assaults of Vitalism, at any rate, left his position practically intact. But the Realistic Pluralism of Mr. Bertrand Russell, of Mr. Whitehead, of Mr. Alexander and the New Realists is a very different thing. For the logical structure of Vitalism is faulty, though you feel instinctively that M. Bergson " has vision," and that his vision is right. With Atomistic Logic it is the other way about. Its structm*e is almost flawless ; though you may feel instinctively that its vision is, not wrong, but simply not there. I do not think that even an atomistic logician would go so far as to maintain that instinctive feelings and algebraic logic have nothing to do with each other, since feelings can be subjects of propositions. But he would say, and he would be perfectly justified in saying, that, if intellectual truth is your objective, you must get your logic right first, and settle it with your instincts and your feelings after- wards as best you may. Now Atomistic Realism gives no support to the " Belief in the Beyond," and very little encouragement, if any, to the " Hope of the Hereafter." And in this world there is an enormous number of people (probably the INTRODUCTION xv majority of the human race) whose instincts and feelings are passionately opposed to any theory which would deprive them of the Belief in the Beyond and of the Hope of the Hereafter, Many of them who would surrender the belief with composure still cling to the hope ; many would give up the hope if only they could be sure of the belief. Others again, like William James, are quite genuinely indifferent to the event. The idea of life after death is even slightly disagreeable to them. Personally I do not share either the indifference or the repugnance. But those who do not desire personal immortality for themselves may desire it for others who are dearer to them than themselves. They cannot face with equanimity or indifference the thought of the ever- lasting extinction of these lives. And many of them care for intellectual truth as passionately as they care for their hope and their belief. And between these two passions the new Philosophy draws a hard and fast line. It says : "If you are out for truth you must play truth's game. Your feelings and your instincts must take their chance. They must not be allowed to load the dice." That is the gist of Mr. Russell's austere and beautiful charge to the students of Philosophy ; as it was Plato's ; to " follow the Argument wherever it may lead " ; to wait patiently when it " puts on a veil." There are passions and passions ; and it is to the passion for intellectual truth, fiery and clean and strong, that he makes his irresistible appeal. There are still a great many people who think that the Belief and the Hope are more compatible with some form of " Idealistic Monism " than with " Realistic Pluralism." They think that if Atomism is pushed to its logical conclusion there will be very little chance for God and Immortality. And I gather that Realistic Pluralists think so too. xvi A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM Is Realistic Pluralism really true ? If it is, every hope and every belief that is incom- patible with it must be given up. But if it is not true, if it is even doubtful, it would be, to say the least of it, a pity that anybody should be lured from his belief and hope by its intellectual fascina- tion. I have tried to disentangle what is true in it from what I believe is merely fascinating. I have tried to disentangle what is untrue in Idealism from what I believe to be sound and enduring. Above all, I have tried to disentangle in my own conclusions what is reasonable supposition from what is manifestly pure conjecture. I have tried to state my adversary's case to the best advantage for him. If I have failed in this, it will have been through misunderstanding, and not, I hope, through " maliciousness." Some misunder- standing may have been inevitable in dealing with the purely mathematical side of Mr. Russell's argument ; since mathematics are, for me, a difficult and unfamiliar country. It is here that I have every expectation of being worsted. In all this it has been hard to free myself from the fascination of Pluralism. When exercised by Mr. Russell it is so great that almost he persuades me to be a Pluralist. If I have not surrendered it is for reasons which I have tried to make clear. There is one side of the New Realism which is not directly touched in these essays — ^its Ethics. This ground is covered by what has been said about its theory of concepts or " universals " ; the " Platonic Ideas." But I believe that Ethics owe a greater debt to the New Realism than to any philosophy that has been its fore- runner in modern time. If " Goodness " and " Justice " are not eternal realities, irreducible and absolute, INTRODUCTION xvii " moral sanction " is a contradiction in terms ; there will be no ethical meaning and no content that dis- tinguishes " goodness " from " usefulness," or " pleasant- ness," or " justice " from " expediency." The work of Mr. 0. E. Moore is a perfect exposure of the fallacies and sophistries of Hedonism, Utilitarianism, Pragmatism, and Evolutionary Ethics. The clearest and strongest statement of the case for " Absolute " Ethics is to be found in his Principia Ethica, and in Mr. Bertrand Russell's Philosophic Essays. The reader must judge whether Absolute Ethics and the moral sanction are securer on a basis of Spiritual Monism or on the Pluralistic theory of " outside " realities. They will remember that a purely external sanction is no sanction at all. The metaphysical basis is crucial in the ethical question. It may be that it is too late to reconstruct what Realism is destroying. It is certainly too early to fore- cast the lines on which reconstruction wiU proceed ; and it would take a very considerable metaphysical genius to do it. These essays, therefore, only suggest the possibility of the New Idealism. No doubt many people will find that my " Questions " are out of all proportion to my " Conclusions," and that the Conclusions themselves are too inconclusive. To these I cannot give any answer that would satisfy them. Others will object that my Conclusions are out of all proportion to their grounds, and that far too much has been taken for granted. They will protest against the appearance of an essay on " Mysticism " in a volume professing to deal seriously with serious problems. They may even look on its inclusion as an outrageous loading of the dice. To them I can only reply that that is why I have xviii A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM given to Mysticism a place apart. I agree that mystical metaphysics are an abomination. But metaphysical mysticism is another matter. I would remind my readers that some psychological questions were part of the programme too ; that mysticism is of immense interest and importance in Psychology ; and that I have criticized certain aspects of it as severely as its bitterest opponents could desire. I am as much repelled by the sensuous variety of mysticism as I am attracted by its austere and metaphysical form. I am as con- vinced as any alienist that its more abhorrent psycho- logical extravagances are the hysterical resurgence of natural longings most unspiritually suppressed. These exponents are worthy only of the pity we give to things suffering and diseased. But there is another side even to what may be called the Saints' Tragedy. There is a passion and a strain and a disturbance of the soul, born of its struggle between religious dualism and its unconscious longing for the Absolute. And there is also a pure and beautiful Mysticism that springs from the vision or the sense of the " One- ness " of all things in God. It knows nothing of passion's disturbance and its strain. Its saints are poets and its counterpart in Philosophy is Spiritual Monism. The fact that this sense has been evolved steadily and perceptibly from the primitive savage's sense of the supernatural is no ground for depreciating it. You might as well depreciate the mathematical attainments of a pluralist philosopher on the grounds that they have been evolved from the primitive savage's calculations with the fingers of one hand. The question for students of comparative religion is, not whether it is a survival (for all life is a survival), but whether its presence marks a reversion or a progression — whether it is a sort of INTRODUCTION xix vermiform appendage, or a form inspired with the secret of the life that was and is and is to be. But I am painfully aware of the extreme uncertainty of my " Conclusions," too. If it had been possible to give them the form of Questions, without making a mess of my sentences, I would have done so. It would have shown, perhaps, a greater courtesy to the Inscrutable. In any case I do not want to be wholly identified with my imaginary monist, who is so undaunted and cock- sure. Under the horrible mauling he gets from vitalists, and pragmatic humanists, and pluralists, he does not, I am afraid, always display the very best metaphysical temper. Though I think the pragmatic method a wrong method in philosophy I have used it in one section of my final chapter ; but I have followed Mr. McDougall's good example in placing it where it could do no harm. So many sources have been drawn on that but a small part, if any part, of this book can claim to be an original adventure. The best of it is only a following of good examples. Where I have touched on General Psychology I have invariably followed Mr. McDougall as the best available authority ; but readers who are not familiar with his work should realise that he is not responsible for any theories I may have based on it, and most likely he would not endorse them. My thanks are specially due to my friends Mrs. Stuart-Moore (Evelyn Underbill), who first introduced me to the classics of Western Mysticism, and to whose work in this field I am more indebted than I can say, and Mr. Cecil Delisle Burns, who made me acquainted with the New Realists and held continually before me the risks I ran in differing from them. And to Mrs. Susie S. Brierley, for criticism relating to an im- portant point in experimental psychology. Also to XX A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM Dr. Beatrice Hinkle of Cornell University, for kindly allowing me to use her admirable rendering of the Hymn " I am the God Atum," which appears in her translation of Dr. Jung's Psychology of the Unconscious ; and to the Editor of The North American Review for leave to reprint my article on the " Gitanjali of Sir Rabindranath Tagore." MAY SINCLAIR. London, January 25, 1917. CONTENTS Introduction . . . . , I. The Pan-Psychism of Samuel Butler . II. Vitalism ..... III. Some Ultimate Questions of Psychology IV. Some Ultimate Questions op Metaphysics V. Pragmatism and Humanism VI. The New Realism VII. The New Mysticism VIII. Conclusions .... Appendix .... PAOE vii 1 49 75 123 145 173 269 325 381 XXI THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLEE THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER The plain man is supposed (by philosophers who are sure of nothing) to be sure that, whatever else he is or isn't, he is himself. He may or may not believe that he has a soul, or that, if he has one, it is the least bit likely to be immortal ; but he is quite, quite sure he has personal identity ; that he is not his own grand- mother or his own son ; and certainly not one of those objectionable Robinsons. He may even flatter himself that he has what he calls Individuality. It is these happy certainties, and this pride of the plain man, that Samuel Butler shatters with his theory of Pan-Psychism. If he does not positively strip every one of us bare of those three things, he maintains that, so far as we can be said to have them at all, they are what we have least cause to be proud of. As there certainly is a sense, and a very distinct sense, in which a man may be said to be his own grand- mother and his own son (if he has a son), it may be worth while asking what we mean by Individuality, by Personal Identity, and by a Self ? It is sometimes assumed, both by philosophers and plain men, that when we talk about these three things 4 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM we mean, or ought to mean, the same thing. Yet it is pretty evident that we don't, and that we oughtn't to. We say that a man has individuality if he has certain striking characteristics that mark him out from other men. And though, no doubt, by " individuahty " we mean something rather more subtle and intimate than, say, a boisterous manner or a taste for Cubism, or for remarkable and distinctive neck-wear, we are very far from knowing precisely what we do mean. Anyhow, the term individuality would seem to stand, not so much for personal identity as for the marks and signs of it, and for something belonging to a self rather than for selfhood. In the same way, " personal identity " is not a term we can play ducks and drakes with. It does, I think, imply something that either has identity or has it not, that either is or isn't the same something wherever and whenever it appears to be. And that " something," again, would seem to be what we call a self. But it is by no means certain that the something that we call a self exists. It is, indeed, highly problematical. And as the existence of the Self happens to be the problem before us we must not assume it at the start. The trouble is that we have got to make some attempt at a definition, and that our definition must be wide enough to cover all the ground on which the problem has been previously debated. For this purpose we are driven to assume, most improperly, that the terms Self, Selfhood, Personality, Personal Identity, and Individuality all stand for one and the same thing. For the moment, then, I shall take the simplest of these terms, Self, and define it as that which is jnxsent to all states of consciousness in any one conscious organism, and even this is a hazardous definition. Still, I can't think of any other that is more likely to satisfy any I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 5 of the disputants without begging the question in dispute. Consider what a question it is. For materialists the Self is an illusory by-product of consciousness, which is itself an illusory by-product of the physical processes of the organism and the world it lives in. For idealists like Mr. Bradley the Self is one horn of the interesting dilemma which lands him in the Absolute as his only refuge. For idealists like Dr. McTaggart it is a fundamental, though imperfect, " differentiation of the Absolute " ; a paradox that does not quite amount to a dilemma. For pragmatic psychologists like William James it is Individuality, the bundle of its own characteristics ; so its appropriate place is, quite clearly, with the things that are not selves. Which is the o'ther horn of Mr. Bradley's dilemma. Again, for psychologists intimidated by William James and anxious not to compromise themselves, it is " psychical disposition," whatever that is. Souls were " out of fashion " when William James was lecturing at Harvard ; but they are coming in again with the courageous psychology of Mr. McDougall, for whom a self is, in plain, honest language a Soul. For biology the self is the Individual, and the Individual is the living organism. For biologists like Samuel Butler, so far as individu- ality is more than numerical identity, it is the sum of the characteristics acquired consciously by the organism after its birth, — a contemptible sum compared with the vast capital it carries over from the experience of the race. All that experience (by which it has incredibly profited) the individual keeps stored in his unconscious memory, and draws upon for every occasion in his daily 6 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i life. His unconscious memory is thus a vast pantech- nicon of knowledges and aptitudes that serve him far better than any that he can learn or cultivate on his own account. According to Samuel Butler our uncon- scious life is the only life that is complete and perfect and worthy to be lived. And he drives us to the conclusion that individuality is the most insecure of our possessions, and that, any way, the individual does not greatly matter. We should have had to leave it at that but for certain recent developments in the study of abnormal psychology. Psychoanalysis, which is based on a minute and detailed observation of the same facts of unconscious memory, suggests the opposite conclusion. It is odd that the only light that has so far been shed on this dubious question should come from that region of profound murkiness. This is not the place either for a defence or for a critique of Psychoanalysis (1). Psychoanalysis is on its trial. The result of the trial need not concern us. Psychoanalysts themselves appear to be divided into two camps. Their differences need not concern us. For our purposes they do not amount to a row of pins. For all psychoanalysts are agreed that the Unconscious is a vast pantechnicon ; but a pantechnicon murky to the last degree, and chock- full of liideous and repulsive things. But its murkiness need not concern us either. Granting for the moment that we know what we mean by the Unconscious, and that the Unconscious is, or can be, a pantechnicon, and that it is full to overflowing, I see no reason why it should overflow with things hideous and repulsive any more than with beautiful and attractive things. It seems fairly obvious that all sorts of things must have I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 7 been put away there, and that psychoanalysts have not laid their hands on all of them. Enough that both the psychoanalysts and Samuel Butler find the main- spring of evolution in the organism's Will-to-live and to-make-live. Both assume that the Life-Force is a psychic rather than a physical thing. For our purposes it does not matter whether the New Psychology of the psychoanalyst lays too much stress on the Will-to-make-live and too little on the Will-to- live. On both theories the Will-to-live is indestructible. It persists in the unconscious memory of the individual. And through his unconscious memory the individual is one with the race psychically as well as physically. But whereas Samuel Butler says our only sane and perfect life is the life we live unconsciously, the whole theory and practice of psychoanalysis rests on the assumption that we only live sanely and perfectly so far as we live consciously, so far as our psyche lifts itself up above its racial memories and maintains the life which is its own — that is to say, so far as we are individuals. The secret of individuality lies in the sublimation to consciousness of the unconscious Will-to-live. To me this theory of sublimation is the one thing of interest and of value that Professor Freud and Professor Jung have contributed to Psychology. Unfortunately the classic literature of the subject leaves this part of it a little vague. The student is told all about psycho- analysis — more indeed than he may care to know ; all the horrific contents of the pantechnicon are turned out for his inspection. But it is left to his own in- genuity to discover precisely what sublimation is and how it works. Eoughly speaking, it is the diversion of the Life-Force, of the Will-to-live, from ways that serve the purposes and interests of species, into ways that serve the purposes and interests of individuals. Roughly 8 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM speaking, all religion, all morality, all art, all science, all civilization are its work. Now it may be objected that (unlike Samuel Butler) the psychoanalyst is a specialist, and a specialist in abnormal psychology at that. And, as his conclusions are drawn from minute and incessant observation of the behaviour of abnormal psyches, they can be of no possible use to us (2). We are not concerned with the eccentricities of neurotics and of moral lunatics. But though we are not concerned with them, they have a vital bearing on our problem all the same. For the net result of the psychoanalyst's investigations can be summed up in three words : Neurosis is degeneration. - In this sphere every transgression is retrogression. Every perversion is reversion. The neurotic, or the morally insane person, has turned back on the path by which he came. He is the slave or the victim of his own unconscious memories and instincts, of that forgotten yet undying past that preys upon the present and the future. Individuality, on this theory, is the outcome of a successful resistance to racial tendencies. The normal grown-up individual has no longer any need to struggle against the forces that would drag him back and back to the life of the child, the savage, and the ape ; but the more individual he is the more he will resist the pull of the generation just behind him. And all individuality — the first time it appears — is genius. Clearly, this triumph of the individual would be impossible if the Will-to-live were incapable of sub- limation, and if there were not more of it going, as it were, than what suffices for the needs of the species. We have, therefore, to assume this incalculable amount over and above, and this capacity for sublimation. And here we are up against that bogy of the psychoanalysts — Repression. I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 9 At first sight it seems obvious that sublimation should involve repression. The instincts of the primitive savage must be repressed in the interests of civilization. The baby's sucking instincts must be repressed if the child is to be fed from cup and spoon. Adolescence must break the child's habit of dependence if it is ever to become manhood. At any age there is a limit to the desires the individual can satisfy and the pursuits he can follow with success. Sooner or later a selection must be made ; and, other things equal, the beauty and worth of the individual will depend on the beauty and the worth of the interests he chooses for his own. All sublimation is a turning and passing of desire from a less worthy or less fitting object to fix it on one more worthy or more fitting. In the healthy individual there is no more danger in this turning and passing than in the transition from infantile baldness to a head of hair. But for the neurotic every turning, every passage bristles with conflict and disturbance. He goes through crises that the normal individual never knows. Repression seems to be positively dangerous to him. He cannot take even a little mild correction without it hurting him. He cannot take anything like other people. Now the psychoanalysts tell you that wherever there is repression without sublimation there is a neurosis or psychosis. It would be truer to say that wherever there is repression there is no sublimation, and wherever there is sublimation there is no repression. The Will- to-live has found another outlet, the indestructible desire another object, and all is well. For the happy normal individual, desire is never repressed ; it is either directed and controlled, or it wanders of its own accord into the paths of sublimation. (Psychoanalysts, out to vilify the Unconscious, have not paid sufficient attention 10 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM to the facts of unconscious sublimation and all that they imply.) It is not quite clear whether with the neurotic every attempt at normal control issues in a repression. Most cases seem to point to some inhibition of the process of sublimation. The neurotic is so ticklish that both righteous reproof and tender admonition may have this arresting tendency. Anyhow, it seems pretty certain that, whatever may cause it to occur, genuine repression, the damming up of every outlet for the Will-to-live, does really, sooner or later, set up some form of neurosis. When this happens, the repressed Will-to-live, the frustrated desire, whatever it may be, turned back again into the Unconscious, is stamped down there, forsaken by the psyche and forgotten. But it is not destroyed. You cannot destroy what is indestructible. Cut off from the psyche's real life, it sets up an unreal life of its own. It lives again, as all unaccomplished desires live, in the dream world, and in the haunted world below our waking consciousness. There it plays its part disguised in fantastic and sym- bolic forms that have an ancient history. For when Professor Freud began analysing the dreams and waking phantasies of his patients, he discovered that the persistent and recurrent symbols of the neurotic dream and the insane phantasy are the same symbols that we find, persistent and recurrent, in aU primitive ritual and myth and folk-lore. For instance, in the dream — which he defines as " the disguised fulfilment of a repressed wish " — a serpent, fije, wood, water, a tree, an arrow, a sword, an eagle, a wheel, a circle, a cross, a ram, a lion, a hat, have the same symbolic meaning and are used with the same psychological intention of revelation and disguise as in the oldest rituals and mythologies. Wherever they 1 THE PAN-PS YCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER il appear they stand for the Life-Force, the Will-to-live and to-make-live ; and their ritual intention represents man's primitive and incomplete effort at sublimation (3). They are there, in the Unconscious, just because they were there from the beginning. The very fact that the repressed desire finds them there and arrays itself in them shows how far it has turned back along the path by which it came. The psyche has forgotten these things, and knows nothing. But the Will-to-live has been there before and remembers. It knows its old playground and is at home on it. And there it stays, horribly, forlornly enchanted ; beyond the reach of consciousness, its vehicle a symbol, its clothing a dream. You see how dreadful it all is, and how easily the cause of neurosis and of insanity might lie there ; in the cutting and casting off, the miserable isolation and abandonment of the Will-to-live, its powerlessness to answer to the psyche's call. If the neurotic cannot sublimate his Will-to-live it is because his Will-to-live has been turned back so far that all conscious links with it are broken. If this is not psychoanalysis, it is the purified spirit of psychoanalysis. It is, I believe, the truth that under- lies its theory. The reality that underlies its practice is the breaking of the spell of forgetfulness ; the deliver- ance of the Will-to-live from its bondage to the Un- conscious. With its restoration to the psyche's conscious life sublimation becomes possible to it. And with sublimation the individual comes again into his own. In this healing process it is clear that we have to do not so much with the disclosure of a shameful secret as with the recovery of a lost Will. It does not look at first sight as if Psychoanalysis had given us anything that amounts to very much. Only 12 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i three conceptions more or less coherent : a conception of the Will-to-live, valid as far as it goes, but vague, and bound up with a conception of the Unconscious worse than vague, because it betrays its inherent self- contradiction as soon as you begin to work with it : a conception of Sublimation by which this Will-to-live perpetually transcends itself and is made manifest in higher and higher and more and more complex forms of life, — a process described in terms which sound morally satisfying, and are still anything but clear : a conception of the Individual as a being of immense importance, seeing that just those forces within and without him which arrest and retard his individuality are backward forces ; that the worst misfortune that can befall him is the backward tm^n that lands him in his own past, and that the peculiar malignity of his worst maladies is that they rob him of his power to assert his qualities against the general characteristics of the race. Still, this conception of Individuality is something. The individual, at whatever stage we find him, appears as the forerunner, the master builder, that superior, swifter vehicle of the Will-to-live which carries it forward and upward. By virtue of his individuality he serves the higher functions of the Will-to-live. The plot thickens, widens, deepens, and grows infinitely richer as the individual gets his hand in more and more. We have there a perfectly valid and comparatively precise conception. And yet it is only when we come to the Individual and ask ourselves what we mean by Individuality that our real troubles begin. This conception of the Individual that Psycho- analysis gives us is bound up with our vague conception of the Will-to-live, which is itself bound up with the still I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 13 vaguer conception of the Unconscious. And it is this conception of the Unconscious which blocks the way. Until now, here and elsewhere (4), to avoid confusion, I have followed my authors in using this term — using it in any sense which happened to serve any purpose of the context at the time. In slavish subservience I have spoken of instincts and desires, symbolic meanings and ideas hidden away in our Unconsciousness, as if our Unconsciousness were a cupboard or a cellar. Just now I spoke of stamping them down into the Uncon- scious, as if it were so much damp earth, and of lifting them up out of it and carrying them into the Conscious, as if this operation were performed with a spade and wheel-barrow. I even suggested, and not so very figuratively either, a going down into the Unconscious to fetch back the Will-to-live. And all the time I was doing it, it seemed to me that my authors and I were describing a perfectly credible performance. It seemed to follow from the grounds and from the whole trend and purpose of Psycho- analysis that the performance was credible ; and with each step the Unconscious acquired more and more an almost discernible substance and a palpable power. There it was, underlying everybody's psychic processes, and doing people — quite innocent people — all sorts of harm. And if I did not speak of unconscious psychic processes it was more by good luck than good management. Now, by the Unconscious you may mean, properly, either things without consciousness, such as chairs and tables, and thunder and lightning ; or living things, including ourselves, in their moments of unconscious- ness. Or a metaphysical Reality conceived as un- conscious. The first sense was not contemplated in any of our 14 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i contexts. (You cannot talk about stamping instincts and desires down into the inorganic.) And we should have had to be very sure of our " selves " and the " selves " of other organic beings before adopting the second. The third will appear later, but we have no need for it yet. So our real meaning emerges. When we talk about unconscious psychic states and unconscious psychic processes, we mean psychic states and processes of which we are not conscious. It is owing to the limitations of the language that we are obliged to talk about the states as if they were or could be conscious or unconscious of themselves. We have no business whatever to hand over our consciousness or unconsciousness to them. We may have to go on talking about conscious and uncon- scious states, for the sake of convenience in handling sentences, but we should be very sure that we know what we are doing. On the other hand, we cannot talk about states of unconsciousness as if the term were interchangeable with states we are not conscious of. For we have nothing immediately before us from moment to moment but the states of consciousness. A state of unconsciousness may mean any condition of unawareness, from profound sleep to mere forgetfulness, or inattention to what is going on around me, or ignorance — say of what President Wilson is going to do about the Blockade, or of what my neighbour is doing in his back-garden. A state of which we are not conscious is a state whose existence we infer from its results when we happen to be conscious of them. Such are our so-called inherited instincts, the hidden " complexes," the hidden ideas, meanings, and associations revealed under hypnotic suggestion and psychoanalysis ; and all states of so-called " uncon- scious cerebration." I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 15 Now at any moment I may wake from my sleep, I may remember what I have forgotten, my attention may be drawn to what is going on around me, even my ignorance of what President Wilson is going to do will cease when, if ever, he should finally make up his mind, and with a little trouble 1 can inform myself of what my neighbour is doing in his back-garden. But of my states of " unconscious cerebration " I am never con- scious ; and I may go all my life without being conscious of a single one of my " inherited " instincts or of those hidden things. And the probability is that I shall in no circumstances ever be conscious of by far the greater number of them. Even of the things I merely do not attend to — to say nothing of the million impressions that assail my sense organs every instant, of which every instant I remain profoundly unaware — the chances are that, though they must be faithfully recorded some- wliere, I shall never be more conscious of them than I am now. I am insisting on these distinctions — familiar to every student of psychology— because they help to clear up the original confusion, and because we shall have to consider them very carefully later on. For the moment, then, we must assume that the terms Unconscious and Unconsciousness stand for any or all of those psychic or psychophysical states of which we are not conscious. And by the " Conscious " and the " Consciousness " we have been talking about we mean states of consciousness and nothing more ; other- wise we shall be begging the question of the existence and the nature of the ultimate principle we desire to re- establish later on. We ought to mean this, and we must mean it ; for, whatever else we want to mean and intend ultimately to mean, it is all that discreet Psychology will allow us to mean at present. 16 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM " Unconsciousness," or the " Unconscious," then, resolves itself into a negative abstraction. But we must not forget that in our context its function was neither negative nor abstract ; it played a very positive and concrete psychological role. And if we are asked whether in dismissing it we have anything half so good to put in its place, we may say that states, or processes, of which we are not conscious will do extremely well ; and if we want to keep the old terms, " the Unconscious " or " Unconsciousness," understood as a sort of convenient shorthand for these fuller and more precise cerms, we may. Or we can use them as equivalents for the sum of those processes and states. As we have seen, by far the most important part among them was taken by the Will-to-live. It is this Will-to-live that we have conceived of as transferred and transformed, or sublimated, and as passing over from the Unconscious to the Conscious, as if it belonged veritably and by its own nature to both worlds. If it did it would be as good a bridge as any we have a right to ask for ; and it may prove to be all the bridge we are entitled to have. But we found the greatest difficulty in representing to ourselves at all intelligibly its double role. And as far as our conception of Individuality and Personal Identity is bound up with this conception of the am- phibious nature of the Will-to-live it will be affected by its vagueness and confusion. It may be that this is inevitable, and that we cannot form any intelligible conception of either, or of their relations to each other ; in which case we shall have to accept the problem as insoluble and put up with the vagueness and confusion. Let it be clear that this trouble is the old trouble carried a step farther, and that the vagueness, confusion, and unintelligibility arise from nothing more or less than I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 17 the intrusion of the Unconscious, with a big U, into the region of the Conscious with a big C. As a matter of fact, unconscious states, states we are not conscious of, always are intruding, that is to say, conditioning, deter- mining, generally influencing, and for all we know to the contrary, actually causing conscious ones. They can do this to the disturbance and the detriment of our Individuality, or perhaps (a most disagreeable thought) even of our Personal Identity. Now, if it could be shown that there never was an unconscious psychic state that was not, at some time or other, a conscious one, and may be, at some time or other, a conscious one again ; if it could be shown that all unconsciousness at least of what we call " past " states is simply a forgetting which is never final and complete ; if, further, it could be shown that what we call forgetting is never fortuitous or arbitrary, is never even involuntary, that we forget not because we must, but because we will and for our own purposes, and that we remember for the same reason, remembrance being selection and selection an act of will, and that both remembrance and forgetting serve the interests of our individuality, and are part of the everlasting process of sublimation, we shall be very much nearer the solution of our problem than we are now. I confess that I should not have known where to turn for the precise evidence which will show this if it were not for the work of Samuel Butler (5), the only thinker, so far as I know, except his predecessor, Professor Ewald Hering(6), who has succeeded in making the subject of Heredity thoroughly intelligible. I might have said, who has made it thoroughly amusing at the same time. The undeserved neglect of Butler's scientific work is probably owing to his incurable habit of being amusing, not mildly and academically, but startlingly, recklessly. 18 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM extravagantly amusing throughout the entire course of a serious argument. What was the scientific world of the 'seventies and 'eighties to think of a man who could dream of immortalizing his Address on " Memory as a Key to the Phenomena of Heredity " under the title of Clergyman and Chickens ? (7) It seemed to consider that a man who couldn't control himself far enough to be serious over a serious subject like that was not to be taken seriously. Besides, though Butler could dissect clergymen very skilfully, it was evident that he had never so much as skinned a chicken in his life. So the scientific bigwigs of his day neglected Butler. And I am afraid that even at this moment Psychoanalysts who can talk about the " polymorphous perverse " and the " Father-Imago " without the ghost of a smile will have no use for Butler either. Still, they ought to have, for he has done more to make them intelligible than they have themselves. I cannot help myself to as much of Butler as I should like, for I should get into trouble with the holders of his copyright. So I must refer my readers (if I am lucky enough to have any) to the four books on evolution and heredity : Life and Habit, Evolution Old and New, Unconscious Memory, Luck or Cunning? and all the passages in The Note-Books of Samuel Butler which bear on those subjects and on Individuality and Personal Identity. And if in the end I accept Butler's theory of Heredity and reject his theory of Individuality and Personal Identity it is for his own reasons and for others which I hope will be made clear. First of all (readers of Butler must forgive me if I take them over ground already familiar to them), first of all he starts with certain observations of experience. Actions which we once performed with difiiculty and with attention, with immense effort of will and intense I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 19 consciousness, such as playing an instrument, writing, reading, talking and walking, we now perform auto- matically and unconsciously, and with a success increas- ing according to the extent of our practice, that is to say, according to the numbers of times those actions have been repeated, the point of perfection being only reached when the action is performed unconsciously. All these actions, constantly repeated, have become habits of our body. Still, a certain amount of consciousness goes with the action of walking, and a greater amount with the action of talking, and so on, while (Butler might have added) continuance of all of them past the point of fatigue will bring us back to effort and consciousness again. So that we can realize how great must have been the effort and how intense the consciousness thev started with. But the older actions and habits, such as the beating of the heart, breathing and digestion, are unaccom- panied by consciousness and effort, or any memory of consciousness and effort (8). And Butler asks : " Is it possible that our unconsciousness concerning our own performance of all these processes arises from over- experience ? " (9) His entire theory of evolution is thus based on the simple truism that Practice makes perfect (10). When he finds an action performed with a supreme perfection, a supreme unconsciousness, he concludes — not that these actions have always been unconscious, but — that ages of practice, of effort that has been conscious, have gone to the result (11). He argues that we do these things so well only because we have done them before, because in the persons of our parents and our ancestors we have practised doing them for untold ages. (Observe that Butler regards the experience of our parents and our 20 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM ancestors as our experience just as much and in as much as our bodies are our bodies.) Because — in short — we " know how " to do them. " What is to know how to do a thing ? Surely to do it. What is proof that we know how to do a thing ? Surely the fact that we can do it. A man shows that he knows how to throw the boomerang by throwing the boomerang. No amount of talking and of writing can get over this ; ipso facto, that a baby breathes and makes its blood circulate, it knows how to do so ; and the fact that it does not know its own knowledge is only proof of the perfection of that knowledge, and of the vast number of past occasions on which it must have been exercised already " (12). And what holds good of the baby and its body after birth holds good before birth. " A baby, therefore, has known how to grow itself in the womb and has only done it because it wanted to, on a balance of con- siderations, in the same way as a man who goes into the City to buy Great Northern Shares. ... It is only unconscious of these operations because it has done them a very large number of times already. A man may do a thing by a fluke once, but to say that a foetus can perform so difficult an operation as the growth of a pair of eyes out of pure protoplasm without knowing how to do it, and without having done it before, is to contradict all human experience. Ipso facto that it does it, it knows how to do it, and ipso facto that it knows how to do it, it has done it before " (13). And what holds good of the unborn baby holds good of the primordial germ-plasm. " There is in every impregnate ovum a bona fide memory, which carries it back not only to the time when it was last an impregnate ovum, but to that earlier date when it was the very beginning of life at all, which same creature it still is, whether as man or ovum, and hence imbued, as far as time and circum- stances allow, with all its memories " (14). That neither the baby nor the germ consciously know I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 21 and remember any longer is what we might infer from the present ease and perfection of their performances. " We must be all aware of instances in which it is plain we must have remembered, without being in the least degree con- scious of remembering. Is it then absurd to suppose that our past existences have been repeated on such a vast number of occasions that the germ, Hnked on to all preceding germs, and, by once having become part of their identity, imbued with all their memories, remembers too intensely to be conscious of remember- ing, and works on with the same kind of unconsciousness with which we play, or walk, or read, until something unfamiliar happens to us ?" (15) This " something unfamiliar " that happens to it being birth. And when we look at the life of the grown-up indi- vidual and of the baby and of the germ as an unbroken series, it is a, " singular coincidence " that " we are most conscious of and have most control over " our distinct- ively human functions, and that we are " less conscious of and have less control over " our prehuman functions, and that " we are least conscious of and have least control over " those functions " which belonged even to our invertebrate ancestry, and which are habits, geo- logically speaking, of extreme antiquity " (16). Surely an utterly incomprehensible arrangement if we exclude consciousness and design from evolution, perfectly comprehensible, not to say inevitable, if we admit them (17). There are other facts in evolution which are perfectly explicable on Butler's theory, and utterly incompre- hensible if we exclude desire and design and the con- tinuity of consciousness in all organic beings. Such are the sterility of hybrids, the instincts of neuter insects ; and, to some extent, the effects of use and disuse, which fit into it without exactly calling for it (18). 22 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i His conclusion is, not that memory and instinct are habit, but that all habit and all instinct are memory (19) ; that both are the result of practice ; that both, unerring and perfect in adaptation as they have become, pre- suppose knowledge and volition on the part of the individual that displays them, and not, as we are accustomed to imagine, merely on the part of its ancestors ; that when we talk about inherited memory or inherited anything, we have fallen into confused thinking and are using words without meaning ; that every reflex is a lapsed volition, and all unconsciousness a lapsed consciousness ; that change and growth arise in fulfilment of a need, a want, a " libido," having at one time been brought about with consciousness, with design and with volition ; that the individual inherits his own and not another's, and therefore knows it again so perfectly that he is not " conscious " of it, he himself, the irreducible entity, having been present in all experi- ences and in all memories we call racial or ancestral. " What is this talk that is made about the experience of the race, as though the experience of one man could profit another who knows nothing about him ? If a man eats his dinner, it nourishes him and not his neighbour ; if he learns a difficult art, it is he that can do it and not his neighbour " (20). But when we come to ask Tiow the Individual has been present in the experiences of his ancestors, and in what way his ancestors, on this theory, differ from him, Butler's answer, though transparently clear, is hard to reconcile with any conception of the importance of the Individual. Not that there is the smallest confusion in his mind on this crucial point : "... an impregnate ovum cannot without a violation of first principles be debarred from claiming personal identity with both its parents. . . ." I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 23 "... We ignore the offspring as forming part of the personaUty of the parent . . . the law . . . perceives the completeness of the personal identity between father and son. ..." " The continued existence of personal identity between parents and ofTspring." {Life and Habit, pp. 85, 95, 97.) " But can a person be said to do a thing by force of habit or routine when it is his ancestors and not he that has done it hitherto ? Not unless he and his ancestors are one and the same person." {Unconscious Memory, p. 17.) It is also expressly stated that " oneness of person- ality between parents and offspring " is the first of the " four main principles " laid down in Life and Habit. {Unconscious Memory, p. 19.) " Personal identity cannot be denied between parents and ofTspring without at the same time denying it as between the different ages (and hence moments) in the life of the individual." {The Note-Books of Samuel Butler, p. 375.) On this showing the individual has but little that he can call his own. It is not so much that the memories of his ancestors are platted in with his memories as that his memories — all but the comparatively few and in- significant ones contributed by his experiences after birth — are platted in with theirs. To say that this is impossible, because he has never appeared as an indi- vidual before birth, is to beg the question of his appear- ance and his individuality. It is clear that Butler had no particular prejudice in favour of his own conclusion, but that he was driven to it by an impartial survey of the facts. We shall see later on that he was driven into the very last place where we should expect to find him, the last place where he would have wished to be. I repeat, there is no confusion and no hesitation in Butler's mind on this point. We were our own parents and grandparents, we were our entire prehuman ancestry. Even after birth we are 24 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i little else besides, and before birth we were notliing more. He even regards the individual's life while yet in the bodies of his parents as superior to his life after birth, because he considers that all perfect knowing is un- conscious. " When we were yet unborn our thoughts kept the roadway decently enough ; then we were blessed : we thought as every man thinks, and held the same opinions as our fathers and mothers had done upon nearly every subject. Life was not an art — and a very difficult art — much too difficult to be acquired in a lifetime ; it was a science of which we were consummate masters." {Life and Habit, p. 60.) And yet, Butler has just pointed out that unless we have maintained our own personal identity throughout the experiences of our forefathers, those experiences will in no way profit us. On his own showing this must be so. Equally on his showing it is difficult to see how it can be. For, through- out the entire argument the individual is identified with his own experiences after birth, and with his own and his parents' memories before. (Their experience as individuals is presumably what he does not share.) All his embryonic experiences are " vicarious," and more vicarious his experiences further back. At the same time he is said to have " participated " in these experi- ences. The trouble is that when Butler talks about a man's being identified with his parents he does not seem to have considered all that is implied in identification. A is identical with B in this that B is identical with A. If a man is identified with his grandfather his grand- father must be identified with him. But, according to Butler, identification is a lop-sided affair in which A persists and B disappears, while everything depended upon B's persistence. So where, by what chink, does I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 25 " lie " come in ? And in what cranny does he lodge ? If the most that he can show for himself is this cellular, prenatal existence in the bodies of his parents and his grandparents, and of all his countless ancestors, each of whom must have enjoyed precisely the same sort of existence in the bodies of their parents and ancestors, we are still no nearer the secret of his being. Granted that he thus participated in each and all of their experi- ences in his primordial cellular way, still the manner of his participation remains mysterious, even if we assume, as we perfectly well may, a most extraordinary capacity for participation and for storage of experiences in the cell. How are we to imagine participation — practical and intelligent participation, such as will enable him to perform creditably a series of complicated co-ordinated actions as soon as he is born — without a participator ? Butler's arguments are unanswerable. We cannot explain or account for the most ordinary facts of our life and consciousness without presupposing that we have lived and been conscious before. And yet there is not one of his unanswerable argu- ments that cannot be turned against his own conception of Personal Identity. Unless the Individual carried through all his previous experiences some 'personal identity over and above that of his progenitors, their experience will remain theirs, and be no earthly good to him. For he could not profit by it, to the extent he has been proved to have profited, if, at every stage of his past career, he had not been capable of absorbing and assimilating it — of taking it to himself. Therefore he must have a self, a continuous, inde- structible self, distinct from his progenitors' selves, yet in direct communion with them, to take it to. It is precisely that self, that personal identity over 26 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i and above, that Butler denies to him. And in denying it to him he denies it equally to each of his progenitors all along the line. There is none to participate and none to profit. Grant him that self, and the whole process of evolution and the whole problem of heredity are transparent as a pane of glass. Deny it, and we are where we were in the dark days of Darwinism. But whereas Darwin and Wallace at least left us free to take what Natural Selection could not give us, what Butler's right hand gives us his left hand snatches from us again. It is as if Buffon and Lamarck had opened a window on the dark side of our house, looking towards our past. And it is as if Butler had found that window and cleaned it, and made it bigger, and called to us to look through, and then, in sheer perversity, had closed and darkened it before we could look again and be sure of what we had seen. Without a self, over and above organism, over and above memory, the whole series of past memories and past experiences is unthinkable. For we start with an individual. Even if we could conceive him maintaining his divided identity fairly well in the persons of his parents, and perhaps of his grand- parents, what of the generations behind them ? What of his infinite division, the scattering of him, the in- divisible, throughout those geometrically increasing multitudes ? But even his pre-existences are not much more un- thinkable than the poor and precarious existence which is all that Butler allows him as an individual after birth. For if it is not quite clear how he persisted in his parents, and whether anything of him persisted over and above them at all, there is no sort of doubt as to how his parents persist in him and in what ravaging and overwhelming proportion (21). I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 27 Could there be a more shocking irony of fate than that Butler, who did more to destroy the prestige of parents than any writer before or after him, who so abhorred the idea of parentage that he resisted " the clamourings of the unborn " rather than commit the cruelty of giving any child a father however much it might desire a father — could there be a more shocking irony than that this great repudiator of parents, this passionately original and individual soul, should be driven by his own terrible logic to identify himself in- distinguishably with his father and his mother and his grandfather and his grandmother, and so on backwards with all his ancestors, and that he should have regarded the life identified with theirs as infinitely richer and more important than anything that he could claim and call his own ? Nor could he have answered that he only objected to parents as individuals, for he has made it clear that he objected to them most emphatically as parents ; so that this plea would only impair his logic without diminishing the irony of his case. Now, I think it can be shown that he was not really driven to this suicide, but that it happened to him because he put the cart before the horse, and attached personal identity to memory, and memory to organism, instead of attaching both to personal identity. All the same, as an account of the gathering together of memories, and of the apparent miracles of psychic synthesis performed as a matter of course by every living organism, as a view of evolution which makes every stage in its process transparent as a pane of glass, Butler's theory is perfect. It is a clear vision of all life as one organism, and of that organism as God. That he could not allow God to be anything over and above an organism, and was pained by the merest suggestion that he might possibly be more, was the logical conse- 28 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i quence of his refusal to admit that the Self could be anything over and above its memories. This consistency should not be charged too heavily against him. Nor can we hope to substitute anything clearer for that clear vision of his. Let us see whether we cannot keep it intact while adding to it the very factor that Butler left out of the account. The problem of the relation of psyche to organism would be comparatively simple if living beings descended from one parent. It is obvious that we are following up not one thread but two threads, each of which is soon lost in a multiplying network of threads, and we must faithfully concede the self to be present in each and all of them if it is to gather together the experience which will enable it to burst on the world as an expert in psychic and biological behaviour. Could anything well be more unthinkable than a theory which compels us to this vision of selfhood maintained in such a multiplicity as that ? Identity where all identity is lost ? Were we not better off with the old simple idea of hereditary transmission which we had accepted before Samuel Butler came among us to disturb our peace ? Well — were we ? We have an idea, a vague idea, it is true, but still an idea of the unity of individual consciousness, of the holding together in one synthesis of a multiplicity of states, and even this idea does little justice to the astounding complexity of that synthesis. It is identity in multiplicity with a vengeance. But we have no idea at all of how hereditary instincts are transmitted. The physical theory of the trans- action leaves the essence of the thing — its psychic complexity — untouched. The idea that a complicated I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 29 system of experiences can be handed over as it stands to a psyche innocent of all experiences, and used by that psyche instantly with the virtuosity of an expert, is about as thinkable as the idea that the Central London telegraph and telephone system could be handed over to and successfully worked by a single operator ignorant of the first principles of telegraphy. Of the two I would back the operator. You do not make it a bit more thinkable by regarding the heritage as accumulated by imperceptible increments from generation to generation, since in the last resort the whole of it has to be handed over en bloc. I said it would be simpler if living beings were descended each from one parent. And as it happens, if we follow it far enough back, the bewildering process simpUfies itself, since eventually we do trace them all to one. Supposing that we turn from our present and oui future, and set our faces backwards, and imagine that network of the generations — our generations — spread out before us and streaming away from us to our past, and that we hold the hither end of it by the single thread of self. The network is broken in many places where individuals have remained single and left no issue, and where whole families and species have dropped out. But, on the whole, it is a comparatively con- tinuous network. If we could follow all the unbroken threads of all the meshes to their beginning on the farther end of the net, we should find them all united again in one thread, one single living being. A being of extreme primordial simplicity, but not simpler or more primordial than our own very complicated organism was when it began as a single germ-plasm. And thus the Individual that we saw so scattered has become one again. Somewhere, in some time and 30 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM earthly place, he and all the individuals he sprang from have existed in some relation to one simple, indestruct- ible, primordial speck of protoplasm. What is the nature of that relation ? Only five relations are possible. 1. We may suppose that the speck of protoplasm produces the personality, and in reproducing itself pro- duces another personality, and that reproduction of organism and production of personality go on till we come to reproduction through the union of two pri- mordial cells, which so far from altering the essential nature of the process only knits it tighter. This process of reproduction, which is what actually happens on the physical side — on the part of the organism — is, on the psychic side, unthinkable because open to all the objec- tions which have been brought against the theory of transmission. That is to say, a personality which has been produced brand-new with each organism, by each organism, has ipso facto been absent from the past experiences it is supposed to profit by. To say nothing of the enormous difficulty of conceiving the production of a psyche, a consciousness, from a speck of protoplasm by a speck of protoplasm. A difficulty which will meet us again. 2. Or we may suppose that all the innumerable personalities that have been and shall be are present somehow with or in that one original speck of proto- plasm, and are simply transplanted with or into succeed- ing specks of protoplasm as they multiply, and are developed with the development of the organisms. This theory would account all right for the sharing o the experiences, but it may be dismissed as putting rather too great a strain on one small speck of protoplasm. 3. We may suppose that the burden of reproducing its own kind is borne by the self, and that it takes an 1 THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 31 even share in tlie labour of a psychophysical association, each self looking after its own future development, the business of the protoplasm being limited to producing more protoplasm and building itself up into organic forms. This theory ignores the influence of the organism, through which the self gains its experiences and there- with its development, and the influence of the self by which the organism is built into just such forms as are adapted to the needs and the ends of the self. We are not helped by any theory of the mere production of self by self. For, again, unless some portion of the original self endures in the selves it produces it cannot impart to them its own experience or benefit by theirs. And unless the selves — again — have been present with it in all its past experience, they cannot share and benefit by it. 4. Let us suppose, then, that the greater strain (which is, after all, a purely metaphysical one) is borne by this hypothetical self ; that the self and not the protoplasm contains within itself all selves that are and shall be, and that the relation of the self to the original speck of protoplasm, and to all succeeding organisms throughout all generations, is that of the association of an un- divided, unappaient being with the means of its division and appearances. We have here a much more workable conception of the self, inasmuch as our difficulties are shifted to the metaphysical sphere where anything may happen. Some awkward things are bound to happen to an unapparent metaphysical being when once for all it makes up its mind to appear. Still, they need not be too awkward. On this theory the integrity of the original self must suffer severely if it does not endure throughout all its multiplied experiences, that is to say, if it is lost in the multiplicity of selves, and the integrity of the selves suffers if they are lost in it. 32 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM Either, then, there is no such thing as the integrity of the self, or : 5. Each self is something over and above all other selves, over and above its own organism and all organisms in which it has had part ; over and above its own ex- periences and memories gained through association with all the organisms. Until they are actually born as individuals the selves will be members of many groups, associated through the organisms they share, in such sort that the experiences and the resulting benefits are mutual. Neither experience nor benefit being obtain- able unless we presuppose in each self a " personal identity " over and above all other selves in its own organism. On this hypothesis, which I believe to be the one in strictest accordance with the theory of Pan- Psychism, the relation of self to organism will be by no means the simple affair of one self, one organism, but will stand somewhat thus. At one end of the scale, entire ownership of the first speck of protoplasm which it finds itself associated with, in the sense of one self, one organism. At the other end of the scale, practically entire ownership of the organism it is born with as an Individual. In between, starting from below upwards, half ownership of two specks of proto- plasm, supposing the original speck to have split up into two, and to have taken up with two other selves ; owner- ship of one-fourth of each member of the next two pairs similarly formed ; ownership of one-eighth in the four succeeding pairs, and of one-sixteenth in the next subdivision ; and so on till his share diminishes to a thousand -millionth part, say, in a thousand million organisms. But always, through all his thousand million incarna- tions, his thousand million shares in other people's THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 33 undertakings, though his experiences are scattered and subdivided, Jie is never lost. He is only lost if, with Samuel Butler, we insist on identifying him with his business and his innumerable partners in the business, and ignoring his constant and indestructible presence. He is only scattered and divided if we think of him, not in his own metaphysical (or for the matter of that metapsychical) terms, but in terms of protoplasm. You might just as well think of him in terms of the colour that would indicate his presence in a diagram. As for his infinitesimal share, it is decidedly better, from his point of view, to hold an infinitesimal share in an infinitely great undertaking than to be entire owner of one speck of protoplasm. As we have seen, the most awful consequences for the Individual follow if we hold the theory of heredity precisely as Samuel Butler held it. I do not see how they are to be avoided as long as we persist in identifying the self with its memories, and with the organism by means of which it acquires them. On the other hand, it must be admitted that the difficulties of the hypothesis of independent selfhood are great. But I do not believe them to be insuperable if we bear in mind that selfhood is not necessarily interchangeable with " individuality," or numerical personal identity in the sense of one in- habitant of one body. In that sense an individual is not an individual until he is born ; and in any case our bodies may very likely have more psychic inhabitants than ourselves. It may be objected that on this view of the self the origin of its own and of all succeeding organisms looks a bit inadequate. But if its own original and inde- structible germ-plasm was, as it certainly seems to have D 34 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i been, a sufficient organism, to begin with, for a self tliat has drawn together innumerable past memories, why should not the original speck of protoplasm be an organism sufficient to begin with for a self that harbours innumerable future possibilities ? If we conceive of the organism as nothing more or less essential to the self than its means of appearing, of manifesting itself, we do greatly simplify the problem of their relation, that everlasting subject of contention for biologists and psychologists and philosophers. Let us think, then, of the self's relation to its organism as the seeking, finding, possession, and more and more perfect use of a means to manifestation. Obviously, it can only manifest itself through its behaviour and its experiences. Instantly, then, it begins to behave and to experience. Even at this very earliest point in its extraordinary career, it knows how to behave and to experience. The first experience of any account that comes to it is when it finds that the original speck of protoplasm, sufficient for a start, is absurdly insufficient to carry on with. (If we like, we may imagine that other selves, baffled by this insufficiency, have given up their protoplasms in disgust, but that our self is more patient and more adventurous.) So, in obedience to its inner urging, the speck of protoplasm grows. But still this humble self-contained existence cannot satisfy its unquenchable longing to appear. ^ And so, it compels its organism to reproduce itself, and the first Scattering begins. Only by scattering, by incessant subdivision, can it acquire sufficient experience and sufficient practice in behaviour to fit it for the life it is to lead, the really personable appearance it is ultimately to present. When the self has acquired enough animal experiences, and enough practice in animal behaviour, and an organism so obedient to I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAIMUEL BUTLER 35 aDimal promptings that it can be trusted to run itself without perpetual interference from higher authority, then, and not till then, it becomes human. Literally, we can only do our work as men because, as Samuel Butler has shown, we have done all the animal part of it for ourselves so efficiently in the past. Just imagine how we should get on if, before we could cook our dinner and while we were eating it, we had to give our personal attention to each one of our visceral functions separately ; if in order to digest we had to superintend our digestion, or in order to breathe we had to superintend our breath- ing. Or if in order to fight we had to see to the working of each separate unit of the fighting machine which is our body. Or if in order to write a poem (I do not want to labour my instances, but the case of the poem-writer has points of special psychological importance), if in order to write a poem we had to superintend each separate operation of our hand, each separate operation of our brain, to turn back on our path in time to recover all our meanings, to travel in space to find and capture the loveliness we know. We can understand the why and wherefore of the process of our evolution when we reflect that all the selves that we have ever been, that we have put under us in the successive stages of our ascension, are working for us now, clearing up all the troublesome and boresome jobs we are tired of and so repudiate, and leaving us free for our own affairs, the work of the proud individuality we now are. Whatever he may have been and is, the scattered one does not and cannot appear as a complete and full- blown Individual until he has made up his mind once for all to gather himself together and be born. And this presumably is precisely what he has done. Therefore, throughout all the generations he has existed as want, striving, desire, will-to-live, to burst forth and 36 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i be born. If we were puzzled about the striving of the One to become Many, what about this striving of the Many to become One ? II The question now arises : What of his immortality ? Is this outcome of his supreme effort his one and only appearance as an individual ? Does he scatter himself again in his descendants and find his immortality only in them ? Has he come to nothing if he leaves no descendants ? Now on Butler's theory, which identifies the indi- vidual with his own organism and his own parents, he has no immortality of his own, only a scattered and vicarious life after death in the persons of his descendants (if he has any) ; only a subjective immortality in the memory of posterity, if he has had sufficient forcefulness to impress posterity. In fact, on Butler's theory, his chances of existing as an individual in the first place, of ever being born at all, depend on circumstances over which he has no control. For all Butler's belief that it is " the clamouring of the unborn " that is responsible for each individual existence, so that the entire culpa- bility of the enterprise rests with the unborn, and no child has a right to blame its parents if the enterprise should turn out badly, still, as the potential parent can and frequently does turn a deaf ear to the clamouring, the actual decision rests with him. And his refusal, or the mere accident of his death, even if he is well- intentioned, dooms untold millions of personalities to extinction. The individual, then, has but one chance of existence to several million chances of extinction, and he has no possible prospect of any immortality that counts. And, I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLEE 37 if we narrow him down to his bare achievements as an individual, the small experience he acquires for himself in his short lifetime, compared with his immense accumu- lations in the persons of his progenitors, doesn't really amount to a row of pins ; so that existence itself, when it does happen to him, hardly seems worth the trouble of being born. Why all those tremendous labours of the generations for such a poor result 1 Why all those strivings and longings to be made manifest for such a pitiful appearance at the end ? If you say it is all for the Race and not for the individual, and that the individual only exists in and for the Kace, that doesn't make the affair a bit more intelligible or a bit better. In fact it makes it worse, for we are sacrificing a reahty, a poor, perishing reality, but still a reality for as long as it lasts, to an abstraction. For what is the Race but an abstraction, if it is not the sum of the individuals that compose it ? And for the matter of that, races themselves are doomed ultimately to extinction. It may be so, and if it is so we must bear it ; for we cannot help it. But we are only driven to the conclusion that it is so if we accept Butler's view of personal identity, or the view of all those persons who, on this point at any rate, are agreed to agree with him. If it can be shown, in the first place, that the achieve- ments of the Individual are not quite so insignificant as has been made out ; and in the second place, that, so far from personal identity being dependent on memory (and ultimately on organism), memory (and organism ultimately) are dependent on personal identity, to the extent that not the simplest fact of consciousness, and not the simplest operation of building up a primordial germ-cell, is possible without the presupposition of personal identity ; if further, there is even the ghost of a reason for inferring, in the absence of any other assign- 38 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM able cause, that the mysterious thing we call Personality behaves as we know causes do and can behave, then, though immortality will not follow as an absolutely certain conclusion (how could it ?), there will at least be a very strong presumption in its favour. Whether there will be evidence to satisfy the authority whom Butler called " any reasonable person " is another thing. People show their reasonableness in such different ways. Even from the foregoing brief review of the latest findings of Psychoanalysis it must have been obvious that they are the corollary of the conclusions Samuel Butler drew from the processes of evolution. It is not necessary to go over all that old ground again in order to point out the correlations. The reader cannot have failed to identify that need or want, which Butler traces for us as the spring of all evolution, with the Will-to-live, the " libido " which the psychoanalysts have traced for us as the source of all life and the spring of sublimation. Only when it comes to the relative value of racial and individual qualities, of unconscious and of conscious being, do the psychoanalysts part company with Samuel Butler. First of all, then, if they did not openly declare the supreme importance of the individual, they showed us that his grown-up individuality, be its quality what it may, is a far more highly sublimated thing than the bundle of racial functions and qualities he " inherits." To say that I am inferior to my own grandmother, as I very well may be, simply means that my grandmother was the superior individual, that is to say that the fimctions and qualities that distinguished her from her progenitors had a higher sublimative value than the functions and qualities that distinguished me, not that the functions and qualities, she in common with all my other ancestors, bequeathed to me are more highly I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 39 sublimated than mine. Yet, wretched individual that I am, coarse where she was fine, most stupid where she was most intelligent, ungraceful and unlovely where she was all grace and all beauty, still, by the one fact that I refused to be submerged by my racial qualities and functions, that I lifted my head above the generations and added another living being, another desire, another will, another experience to the sum of human experiences, by the mere fact that, after all, here I am, playing my part and not any of their parts, I prove the superiority (as far as it goes) of my sublimation. Besides, if it comes to that, who is to say whether these undesired and undesirable traits of mine are really mine, and not part of my " inheritance " ? It is when I fall short of my part, when I return on my path and go hack to them, or when I simply refuse to grow up, and persist in being a child, and not a very enterprising, or intelligent, or original child at that, it is when, in four words, I resign my individuality, that I become inferior. And the one word for it is Degeneration. To be degenerate is to fail to add the priceless gift of individuality to the achievement of the race. (There- fore it seems an inappropriate word to apply to those very considerable individuals who have given their priceless gift in the form of genius,' however far they may have fallen short of the ethics of the family and the crowd, and supposing this falling short to be a more frequent attribute of " true genius " than it actually is. We may suppose that this failure in one direction is the price they have to pay for their supremacy in another ; and posterity that benefits by their loss should be the last to remember it against them. As a matter of fact, in spite of the efforts of biographers to fix it firmly in its mind, posterity very seldom does remember it at all.) And if it comes to that, what debt can the indi- 40 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i vidual owe to the race that is greater than the debt the race owes to the individual ? What, after all, was the origin of our much -valued, much-talked-about racial characteristics ? The instinct of self-subHmation, the desire and subsequent effort of certain enterprising individuals to outdo themselves, to be something that they are not yet, something, however small, that their progenitors were not. Think of the enterprise (com- pared with foregoing enterprises), the daring originality of the creature that first " improvised " a stomach because it wanted one. Can you deny an individuality, and, all things considered, a very startling individuality to that creature ? And to go back to our much-valued, much-talked-about, and possibly overrated progenitors, every single one of them was an individual once ; and his value for posterity was chiefly his individuahty ; if he only showed it in the choice he made of one female rather than another for his mate. Individuals, in their successive (and successful) sublimations, raised the pri- mordial will-to-live from the level of mere need and want, through the stages of desire, to those supreme expressions of individuality — love and will. There is too much talk about the Race. The race is nothing but the sum of the individuals that compose and have composed it, and will compose it. Not only so, but without the individuality, the very marked and eccentric individuality of individuals, races, and the Race itself would not exist. It is the outstanding individuals, the '' sports," that have been the pioneers of evolution. They have enriched and raised the species by compelling it to adopt their characteristics. And yet it looks as if in the welter of unconscious and subconscious memories and instincts the individual had little, if anything, that he could call his own. He is dwarfed to utter insignificance by the immensity of I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 41 his ancestral heritage. But I do not think we have to choose between the views of the comparative value of the Individual and the Race, and the comparative amounts of their respective debts to each other, for we cannot separate them. Our problem is more fundamental. We have to choose between a difficult (I admit it is a very difficult) theory of the continuous identity of one self in many organisms, associated for a while with the equally continuous identity of many selves to one organism, and a self-contradictory theory which insists on continuous memory as the clue to the mystery of the individual's past evolution, and yet regards him as a momentary, insignificant spark of consciousness struck out from the impact of the masses of rolled-up un- conscious memories ; each individual, in the series of generations that come together to form the masses, being himself such a momentary, insignificant spark. At this rate continuous consciousness, that is to say, continuous memory, vanishes from the whole performance. Between difiiculty and self-contradiction there can be only one choice. The alternative to the spark theory is not handicapped by any inherent contradiction. The individual's heritage is his, if we allow him, not only that " sense of need " which Lamarck and Bufion allowed him, and that " little dose of judgment and reason " which Huber claimed for his insects and Samuel Butler claimed for all organisms, but " a little dose " of self- hood over and above his sense of need, over and above reason and judgment, over and above memory. The Individual is not his heritage. His heritage is his. It is the stuff he works with and sublimates and transforms ; it is the ladder he has raised himself by, the territory he has conquered — or it is nothing. There is, of course, that alternative. 42 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM Call we justify our assumption that selfhood is over and above ? Now there is a very strong consensus of opinion among psychologists and " mental physiologists " that Personal Identity does depend, and depend absolutely upon Memory. So strong that I have considerable qualms about putting forth any opinion that runs counter to that consensus. It is strongest among those who, like Mr. William James, M. Bergson, and Mr. McDougall, by no means regard mind as entirely de- pendent on its physical basis. It is upheld by arguments that appear at first sight to be unanswerable, and that on no theory should be lightly set aside. So far, I have been going all along on the assumption that we conceive Personal Identity as something which, whatever its ultimate nature may be, " holds conscious- ness together." We must not assume the thing we have got to prove ; so we cannot take for granted that what we call Personal Identity amounts to anything we think of as a substance, or a self, or a soul, or as a being in any way separate from and independent of conscious- ness. For all we know, it may be no more than the relation of each conscious state to another and to the whole. We take the term as equivalent to " the unity of consciousness." Consciousness certainly appears to be a unity, whether there be a self to make it one or no. We have nothing immediately before us but states of consciousness, yet they appear to arrive in a certain order and to hang together with a certain cohesion of their own. Describe conscidusness in terms deliberately chosen so as to exclude the Personality we must not take for granted ; say that its states are only fortuitously associated ; still, association involves, perhaps I ought to say constitutes, a certain unity. Say that conscious- I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLEE 43 ness is nothing but a stream, and that though it appears to have islands in it, the islands are really only part of the stream ; still the stream would not be a stream if it had not a certain unity. It must be borne in mind that, for all we are justified in saying about it beforehand, this unity may be nothing more than the relation of states of consciousness among themselves. But when we have reduced consciousness to the simplest, the least assuming terms, we have still this unity to reckon with. Even if the dream of Professor Huxley came true, and the " mechanical equivalent of consciousness " were found to-morrow, even if consciousness were proved to be nothing but a strange illusory by-product of the brain, the queer spectral illusion of its unity would still confront us. And here is my opponent's main argument. How, on any theory of consciousness, could these appearances be kept up without memory ? If, as impression super- vened on impression (to take consciousness at its " lowest "), each were instantly effaced ; if we forgot our states of consciousness — I mean if consciousness forgot its states — as fast as they occurred ; that is to say, if consciousness kept on continually forgetting itself ; if there were no sort of even illusory registration anywhere, what becomes of even that illusory unity ? And what on earth becomes of personal identity, sup- posing there was such a thing anyway ? If we could never remember anything that happened to us we might just as well not exist at all, for we should never be conscious of our existence. Personal identity may or may not be provable, but without memory it is unthinkable. I hope the adherents of memory as the presupposition of personal identity will not find fault with this way of putting it. I do not think it is an unfair statement of their position. I do not want to weaken their position 44 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM in order to have the poor pleasure of demolishing it. It is not at all easy to demolish. And perhaps it is I and not they who are responsible for the only palpable flaw in it, the ultimate argument ad Jiominem ; for it is clear that we might exist without being in the least aware of our existence ; in fact, that is the way most of us do exist ; it may even be the only terms on which it is possible for us to exist at all. I think there is some- thing in the point ; but let it pass. Let the case stand without it. Personal identity may or may not be provable ; without memory it is unthinkable. But — ^is it ? It may be that neither is possible, or at any rate actual, without the other. But thinkable ? If you can prove the existence of personal identity, of a self, a soul, a principle, call it what you like, that is conscious, but is not consciousness, that is inseparably present to all its states of consciousness and identifiable with none of them, unless it be with the act of will, I will undertake to " think " it. You say you can only prove it from consciousness, that is to say, from memory. Perhaps, very likely. But that is only saying that it is dependent on memory for its consciousness, its mode of existence, not that it is dependent on memory for existence itself. We have just seen how Samuel Butler landed himself in the very bosom of the progenitors he abhorred, as well as in a certain amount of self-contradiction, just because he would insist on identifying personality with memory. Even the " plain man," to whose common sense he was always appealing, could have told him better than that. For the plain man does not place his identity in the fact that such and such things happened to him at such and such a date, but that at such and such a date they happened to him, to such and such a I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 45 person. The whole point and poignancy of their happen- ing, and of his remembering them, is that they happened to him, and not to another, and that he and not another remembered them. The plain man very properly assumes that he has a self, that he personally was present at such and such dates, that he is personally present to each state of consciousness as it arises, and to the piling up of each state on another, and to the whole. If you choose to say that he himself is only another bit of consciousness added to the pile — that the affirma- tion of self - consciousness comes for ever and from moment to moment to the top — that is a theory like another. But I do not think it is a very good theory, because it overlooks the fact that he was at the bottom too, and went through all the layers. And most certainly the plain man would have none of it. But let us say that personal identity presupposes memory and is dependent on it. Then it follows rigorously that whenever we forget our personal identity ceases. It goes out for long hours together in deep sleep, when we have no memory and no consciousness at all. And it comes to life again with the return of con- sciousness and memory. I am afraid I do not see any- thing in the theory of its independent existence half so unthinkable as the recurrent miracle of its death and resurrection (22). Let alone the inconvenience of not knowing whether it is we who have come back and not somebody else. If you say we do know, because the revived memories are the same, and that we have no other means of knowing, the answer is that in the first place we do not know that they are the same, and in the second place that they are not the same ; for even in continuous memory all we get is a succession and a synthesis of states, a memory of a memory, and identity 46 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM i of them there is none. Sleep has so divided to-day's " unity of consciousness " from yesterday's that to talk about identity of states is absurd. So it looks as if memory and unity of consciousness, so far from con- stituting personal identity, depended abjectly upon it. And are we so very sure that Personal Identity is unthinkable without Memory ? I do not mean merely inconceivable or unimaginable. I suppose, for that matter, we can conceive, or imagine, or present to ourselves any state of consciousness as existing independently of any other, or the whole of consciousness as existing without anything to " hold it together " ; in fact, it is in this self-sufficiency that consciousness does present itself immediately and before reflection. By ruling out all presuppositions of thinking we may and do conceive it so ; and many philosophers have refused to conceive it otherwise. In the end it must be shown that personal identity is more than a presupposition of our thinking, if we are to avoid the fallacy of concluding that what is first in thought is necessarily first in existence. It must be what Kant called a " Voraussetzung der Erfahrung," a presupposition of Experience, something without which experience would not be what it is and what it appears to be. But for the moment let us suppose that personal identity is unthinkable without memory. With what memories or memory did our conscious life, then, begin ? Say that it started with unconscious memory (the " heritage "). Well and good. But for consciousness that is the same thing as starting with no memory at all. To all intents and purposes, I, or if you prefer it, my conscious states, start with an absolute blank behind as well as before them. In this case it will be truly my body that remembers, and not I or they ; and though its memories will affect very pro- I THE PAN-PSYCHISM OF SAMUEL BUTLER 47 foundly my conscious states when they do arise out of the blank, for me or for consciousness they do not exist ; nor can they exist on the theory of unconscious memory, or on any theory that precludes personal identity ; that is to say, the existence of a self before memory. We saw that " the heritage " itself, the instinct, the knowledge made perfect through long ages of practice, all that we have learned to call unconscious memory, is meaningless unless it has once been conscious, and would be utterly useless to us if it were not our memory ; we saw, that is to say, that our past consciousness like- wise presupposes personal identity, a self. I admit that the argument from forgotten memory cuts both ways. But when we consider that our con- scious life, the life of each individual in the series, began with a forgetting, and that in order to know perfectly we must know how to forget perfectly, it looks as if the argument that presupposes memory has, if anything, the more dangerous edge. And if, to avoid both edges, we turn for safety to the obvious alternative that memory and selfhood, or that memory and consciousness, are neither afore nor after another, but simultaneous and mutually dependent, consciousness becoming memory before we are conscious of it, we are faced again with the annihilating fact of forgetting. All these dangers and dilemmas are avoided if we do but put selfhood where the plain man puts it, and where our everyday thinking puts it— first. II VITALISM 49 E II VITALISM I SHALL be reminded that dangers and dilemmas would be avoided much more easily and surely if we would only consent to put memory where the physiologist puts it — in the brain-cells of the organism, and leave it there. This would certainly be one way out, if memory were really that simple affair of neural association fixed into habit which the physiologist takes it to be. But does not memory presuppose two things which are not simple — Space and Time ? Time for the order of events in memory, space for their juxtaposition ? It is not easy to see how any set of neural associations could yield either. Whether as presuppositions or as forms of arrangement (schemata), they stand, as it were, between memory and that hypothetical self, removing memory a stage farther yet from its supreme place as the first. Memory itself is so dependent on them that we can make no valid statement about it that does not take them into account ; and it will be no use trying to show that personal identity is independent of memory unless we can show also that it is independent of space and time. And space and time draw with a large net. The view that M. Bergson has set forth in Sur les Donnees immediates de la Conscience and La Matiere et la Memoire does more to make clear the relations of &i 52 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n Time, Space, and Memory than perhaps any philosophy before the day of VitaHsm. This clearness is not altogether due to M. Bergson's metaphysical theory ; for, as we shall see, that theory lands him in many hopeless contradictions by the way. But his view of time and space does not stand or fall with his theory of the Elan Vital ; and, whatever the ultimate destiny of Vitalism may be, no metaphysic that comes after it can afford to ignore M, Bergson's really very singular view. It is mainly owing to its author's brilliant and reckless inconsequence that Monism can suck advantage out of- it. M. Bergson makes things apparently easy for himself at the start by letting the work of the mere intellect (in his own phrase) " filter through," and plunging into the thick of immediate consciousness. In order to preserve its integrity he has to break with all past conceptions of time as quantity, discontinuous, infinitely divisible. But as this idea of time as discontinuous, divisible quantity has an awkward way of cropping up in spite of him, he distinguishes between Pure Time (Duree) and, as you might say, popular or spurious time. Pure Time, or Duree, is intensive, and neither divisible nor measurable ; that is to say, it is not quantitative but qualitative. For Time is pure succession, and never simultaneity. Simultaneity is juxtaposition, and juxta- position is a spatial thing. " La duree toute pure est la forme que prend la succession de nos etats de conscience quand notre nioi se laisse vivre." {Donnees immediates de la Conscience, p. 76.) " On peut . . . concevoir la succession sans la distinction, et comme une penetration mutuelle, une solidarite, une organisa- tion intime d'elements, dont chacun, representatif du tout, ne s'en distingue et ne s'en isole que pour une pensee capable d'abstraire. Telle est sans doute done la representation que se n VITALISM 53 ferait de la duree un etre a la fois identique et changeant, qui n'aurait aucune idee de I'espace. Mais familiarises avec cette derniere idee, obsedes meiiie, par elle, nous I'introduisons a notre insu dans notre representation de la succession pure ; nous juxta- posons nos etats de conscience de maniere a les apercevoir simultanement, non plus I'un dans I'autre, mais I'un a cote de I'autre ; bref, nous projetons le temps dans I'espace, nous ex- primons la duree en etendue, et la succession prend pour nous la forme d'une ligne continue ou d'une chaine, dont les parties se touch ent sans se penetrer." (Ibid. p. 77.) Time thus conceived is a bastard conception, due to the intrusion of the idea of space into the domain of pure consciousness. Space, in which all juxtapositions occur and no successions, is purely quantitative, discontinuous, and divisible ; and this bastard time, of which clock-time is the glaring example, takes on all the quantitative char- acteristics of space. Past, present, and future, the time we divide into moments, days, and years, is quantitative, is spatial. In pure Time there is no past, present, and future, only duree, the past which " bites into " {qui mord sur) the present, the present that bites into the future. There are no interstices in time. Let us take it at that and see what happens. You can never say of pure Time that so much of it has passed, an hour, a minute, or a second. This is the spurious time which is really spatial, measured by the shadow on the dial, the sand in the hour-glass, the hands on the clock. Moreover, shadow and sand-grains and hands move, and movement is in space. This is plausible — and we shall presently see why. It must follow that if I beat time : tum — tumty — tum — tum : tumty — tumty — tum, I am really beating space. For, though a tumty is equal to a tum, their equality is of space and not of time. For all the time 54 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n they take, there is no difierence between one hundred and twenty-five tumties and one turn, seeing that there are no interstices in Time's turn where its tumties could creep in. In fact, time is taken by M. Bergson as a convenient stuffing for the interstices of space. And, since Time is pure succession and not simul- taneity, no two events can happen in the same pure Time. And there is no time left for them to happen in but that impure time which is really space. So that " Every minute dies a man, Every minute one is born," can only mean that the death and the birth occupy the same space ; which is precisely what they are not doing and cannot do. Then there is Pure Space, which is quantitative, measurable, infinitely divisible. Space is responsible for the awkward interstices we do not find in Time. And though we think of space as divisible, we perceive it as extended, that is to say, continuous. According to M. Bergson, in pure perception, immediate conscious- ness, all contradictions are solved and all difficulties overcome. Let us say, then, that we do actually per- ceive space, or at any rate objects in space, as extended. It is in space and space alone that objects can lie peace- ably side by side. But I am afraid it follows that they cannot succeed each other, for succession is of Pure Time. Therefore there can be no movement. The movements of molecules in bodies, and of atoms and of electrons in ether, or wherever it is they do move, the course of the stars in heaven, and the long succession of motor buses and vans and taxis on earth, in the Strand, is occurring, not in the Strand, and certainly not in Pure Space ; but where the long succession of my thoughts is occurring, in Pure Time. You see what has happened ? Under M. Bergson's n VITALISM 55 skilful manipulation space and time have simply changed roles. For if quantitative time, in which events are simul- taneous, is an impure and spurious time that is really space, you may as well say that continuous space, in which objects succeed each other, is an impure and spurious space that is really time. Again, M. Bergson's Pure Time is Duree, continuous duration. But surely duration and succession con- tradict each other every bit as much as extension and divisibility ? I do not think that M. Bergson can be allowed, more than anybody else, to have it both ways. But his contention is that in action, and in immediate percep- tion which is based on action and on action only, you do as a matter of fact get it both ways. You have got it both ways before you have time to go back on the performance and see ivhat you have got, and how you have got it. It is a performance that sets at nought all mathematical laws of space and time and motion ; that takes no account of the behaviour of hypothetical electrons in a hypo- thetical medium. M. Bergson gives a reality to sensible space and sensible movement which he denies to mathematical space ; consequently he has no difficulty in assuming " real " movement. He argues that, because differences of sensation depend on differences of movement, and because differences of sensation are intensive, and qualitative, and absolute, are of kind and not of quantity or degree, therefore movement is absolute. " In vain we try to base the reality of movement on a cause distinct from it ; analysis always leads us back to movement itself." And this whether you watch the movements of 56 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n objects in external space or are conscious of your own movements in muscular sensation. "... I touch the reality of movement when it appears to me, within me, as a change of state or of quality." Exactly as in my other sensations which are obviously qualitative. " Sound differs absolutely from silence, as also does one sound from another sound. Between light and darkness, between colours, between shades, the difference is absolute. The passage from one to the other is, also, absolutely real. I hold, then, the two extremities of the chain, muscular sensations in me, the sensible qualities of matter outside me, and neither in one case nor the other do I seize movement, if movement there be, as a simple relation : it is an absolute." (La Matiere et la Memoire, p. 217.) Between these two extremities M. Bergson finds the movements of external bodies properly so called. And you would have thought that these bodies and their movements might have given him pause. But no. Some objects move ; others remain stationary. How, he asks, can we distinguish between them ? How can we distinguish between real and apparent movement here ? These questions he leaves unanswered. They are beside the point. The question is, not how changes of position in the parts of matter are accomplished, but how a change of aspect is accomplished in the whole. You see what has happened ? M. Bergson has shifted the terms of the problem from movement and immobility, that is to say, from that change of position which is the very essence of the question raised, to change of aspect of the whole, which was not in question. If you accept change of aspect of the whole, as the equivalent to change of position of the parts, you have n VITALISM 57 committed yourself, without further argument, to the proposition that movement of objects in space is on all fours with my sensations of movement ; it is qualitative ; it is absolute. And the real problem, change of position, with its burden of quantitative spatial relations, of distance, and the rest, has been quietly burked. M. Bergson does not tell us how we can distinguish — on his theory — between stationary and moving objects, between real and apparent movement " here." The question was trembling on my tongue long before he asked it ; it excites still my burning curiosity. But he is not going to satisfy my intellectual prurience. Never shall I know how he squares it with a theory of move- ment as absolute and qualitative. Having demon- strated that extension or space, as we perceive and feel it, is continuous (" le caractere essentiel de I'espace est la continuite ") ; that only the unreal constructions of mathematics put asunder what the God of immediate consciousness hath joined ; and that science is in accord with immediate consciousness in returning, after all, in spite of appearances, to the " idea of universal con- tinuity " (p. 219) ; and that all breaking up of matter into independent bodies with absolutely determined contours is artificial, he finds that the irresistible tendency to constitute a discontinuous material universe comes from Life itself. " A cote de la conscience et de la science il y a la vie " (p. 219). " Quelle que soit la nature' de la matiere, on pent dire que la vie y etablira deja une premiere discontinuite. . . . Nos besoins sent done autant de faisceaux lumineux, qui, braques sur la continuite des qualites sensibles, y dessinent des corps distincts. lis ne peuvent se satisfaire qu'a la condition de se tailler dans cette continuite un corps, puis d'y delimiter d'autres corps avec lesquels celui-ci entrera en relation comme avec des 58 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n personnes. !^tablir ces rapports, tout particuliers entre des portions ainsi decoupees de la realite sensible, est justement ce que nous appelons vivre " (pp. 220, 221). You could not have a more brilliant, nor, I believe, a truer picture of the evolution and behaviour of living organisms. But it is not a metaphysic that M. Bergson has given us here. Unless we are to insist that the operation of carving portions, as with a knife, out of presumably pre-existing " sensible reality " lands us in a metaphysic, and a bad one at that. What I would like to point out is that the " faisceaux lumineux " of our needs have taken the place of the old exploded " thought-relations " of idealism, the " diamond net " into which the universe is cast, and that while the function of the diamond net was to hold together, the function of the " faisceaux lumineux " is to break up and carve. That is to say, Life does what Thought was blamed for doing. It gives rise to the discontinuities and dis- tinctions just now declared to be unreal, contradictory and artificial. Vitalism may steal a horse, but idealism mustn't look over the hedge. And now the contradictions thicken. When we carry Life's operations further we are prolonging vital movement and turning our backs on true knowledge (p. 221). Yet it is science that exacts this prolonga- tion, and in the process " the materiality of the atom dissolves, more and more, under the gaze of the physicist" (p. 221). We have Life itself aiding and abetting him by starting the disastrous process which represents, for M. Bergson, " an ordinary form of useful action mal a propos transported into the domain of pure knowledge " (p. 221). Why mal a propos ? If it belongs to the domain of n VITALISM 59 pure knowledge, it belongs ; if it does not belong, we have no grounds for complaint ; and anyhow Life began it. However, the further the process is carried into that domain, the more the physicist is forced to renounce all hypotheses of solid atoms, of bodies formed of solid atoms, and of real contacts between bodies — of such a universe, in short, on which we have " most manifestly a grip." ' ' Why do we think of a soUd atom and why of shocks ? Because sohds, being bodies on which we have most manifestly a grip, are those which interest us most in our relations with the external world, and because contact is the only means of which we can apparently dispose in order to bring our body into action upon other bodies. But very simple experiments show that there is never real contact between two bodies which move each other ; besides, soUdity is far from being a state of matter absolutely cut and dried. SoUdity and shock, then, borrow their apparent clarity from the habits and necessities of practical life — images of this kind do not throw any Ught on the ultimate nature (fond) of things " (p. 222). These considerations, far from leading M. Bergson to suspect that both in practical life and in the hjrpotheses of pure knowledge we are dealing with appearances, far from throwing doubt on the absolute reality of that time and space and movement of which we have immediate consciousness, confirm him rather in his view that here, if anywhere, is the absolutely real world. And so, while nothing can bridge for him the gulf between this reality and pure knowledge — his whole philosophy is based on this distinction — we have the apparent contradiction that it is life, desire, action, the very things held to be most manifestly " real," that are responsible for the work of division, which, on the theory 60 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM that life puts together and thought divides, should belong to the intellect. And on the very next page we are told, indeed, that, while science tends to dissolve it more and more into forces and movements, the atom " will preserve its individuality for our mind that isolates it " ; the only atom which science knows being, to Faraday, " a centre of forces," each atom occupying " the whole of space to which gravitation extends," and " all the atoms interpenetrating each other " ; while, according to Professor Thompson, it is " ' a ring of invariable form, whirling round and round in a perfect, continuous, homogeneous, and incompressible fluid which fills space.' " (I am translating M. Bergson's translation of Faraday and Professor Thompson.) And, M. Bergson, caught between continuity and discontinuity, and com- mitted to the theory that the difference between all qualities is absolute, while confronted by the view of science and of common sense that movements go on independently of us in space, which he admits to be quantitative, concludes that " real " movement is the " transport of a state rather than of a thing'" (p. 225). There will, however, owing to that admission, still be an irreconcilable difference between quality and pure quantity, between the world of our " heterogeneous " sensations and the world of " homogeneous " move- ments independent of our sensations, unless it can be shown that differences between " real " movements are more than quantitative — that real movements are " quality itself." To this hopeful idea of real movement as quality M. Bergson takes his flight. Let us say, then, that " real " movement is quality and see what happens. All difierences of movement, differences in direction, distance, and velocity, will then n VITALISM 61 be qualitative, absolute. There can be no degrees between approach and distance and between fast and slow. We are compelled to think of fastness and slow- ness, and of distance and of approach and flight in terms of absolute, irreducible moments. A strange doctrine this for a philosopher who insists on the continuity of real space and real movement and of real or pure per- ception. I said " compelled to think " ; but this is not an affair of the compulsions of out thinking ; when you come to quality it is an affair of immediate percep- tion and of life itself. And this " absoluteness " of quality makes, not for continuity, but for discontinuity, as far as " external realities " are concerned. True, M. Bergson distinguishes between this qualita- tive " real " movement and the movement which is the subject of mechanics. But when it comes, as it must come, to the relation between the two we are faced with another difficulty. The movement which is the subject of mechajiics " is nothing but an abstraction, or a symbol, a common measure, a common denominator, which permits comparison of all real movements among thetn- selves'' (pp. 225, 226). (The italics are not M. Bergson's.) Now how, in heaven's name, can movement, thus declared to be purely quantitative, serve as a common measure and common denominator of all movements declared to be purely qualitative ? In movement, as such, not even immediate consciousness, the all-recon- ciler, can discern the ghost of absolute quality. Not until you (and science) have translated movement into terms of energy, into intensity, which is quality again, can you escape from quantity. Nor can you altogether escape it here, since science presupposes amounts of energy and degrees of intensity which immediate per- ception knows nothing of. Not even in the interests of Vitalism should we confuse those " absolute '' 62 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM qualities, those immeasurable intensities of sensation whicli accompany the putting forth of energy with the measurable intensities of energy itself. In the same way the movements of our bodies are attended by muscular sensations and sensations of freedom and well-being which are purely qualitative, but, I think, we have no business to argue from them to the quality of movements. But to return to these real and qualitative movements of which quantitative movements are the common measure and denominator. Looked at in themselves {envisages en eux-memes) they are " indivisibles which occupy duration, presuppose a before and after, and bind together the successive moments of time by a thread of variable quality, which," M. Bergson says, " should not be without some analogy with the continuity of our own consciousness. ... If we could draw out this duration, that is to say, Kve in a slower rhythm, should we not see, in proportion as this rhythm slowed down, colours fading and lengthening out into successive impressions, still no doubt coloured, but more and more ready to merge in pure vibrations {ehranlements)V' (p. 226). That is to say (unless the brilliance of M. Bergson' s style blinds me to his meaning), that those differences in the movements of molecules, differences of which I am not immediately conscious, by determining the qualities of my sensations, of which I am immediately conscious, take on continuity and quality, so that their world, the world of " unreal " vibrations, reflects in some sort the continuity of consciousness. We have seen that M. Bergson uses time as stuffing for the interstices of space. We now see him using qualities of sensation as stuffing for the interstices of movement, which is as good as a confession that he can no more get continuity out of his " real " movements than he can out of any other movements. And his n VITALISM 63 adroit suggestion of " some analogy " does not disguise the essential truth of the matter, that from first to last it is the continuity of consciousness that has done the trick. What are we to make of a theory which seems, now, our only clue to the very heart and secret of reality, and now a splendid mass of incoherences ? We have the " real " movements of which M. Bergson has just said that the movements known to mechanics are the common measure and denominator ; we know that the laws of physics are based on those very laws of mathe- matics which are not real in M. Bergson's sense of reality, being the work of the intellect that divides ; we have the qualities — sensations of which we are told that they are absolute, that is to say, irreducible as any atom ; and we have movements which, but for the quality which is called in to stop their gaps, would be as discontinuous as space itself. And with these irre- ducibles M. Bergson builds up his certainty. And the Elan Vital does not help him, since it began the whole business of defining and dividing, of burrowing and digging holes, as it were, in real space, and drawing the contours of bodies to suit its own purposes. And supposing we were justified in transferring the quality of sensations to the molecular movements to which we are obliged to refer them, quantity being thus transformed into quality, the common quantitative measure and the common denominator would no longer apply. What M. Bergson does not appear to admit is that all space, even " real space," may be an intellectual construction ; that there is no perception of extension so immediate as not to presuppose it, so pure as not to include it ; that, as the work of thought, it is as discrete or as continuous as thought pleases, that is to say, it 64 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n may be both ; and that, if it were continuous only, as continuous as the real space of M. Bergson's immediate perception, it would be no less quantitative on that account. I do not want to dispute M. Bergson's conclu- sions : that matter is the vehicle and plastic tool of the Elan Vital ; that pure remembrance is a spiritual Aianifestation ; and that with memory we are actually in the domain of spirit. These are precisely the con- clusions to which I believe the balance of the biological and psychological argument inclines. But I do not see that these conclusions are supported by a theory which begins and ends in metaphysical dualism, that tries to establish " reality " on the far from stable ground of action plus immediate perception, and that, in spite of having coolly let " filter through " every consideration inimical to its argument, lands itself in perpetual con- tradictions in its efforts to escape from the position it has created for itself. For, while it takes its stand on action and immediate perception as alone affording the clue to the Real, and asks us to suppose such absurdities as that homogeneous space is logically posterior to " material things and the pure knowledge that we have of them " — knowledge that it declares, four pages later on, to be tainted with the impurity of the sensations, " qui s'y melent " (p. 262) — and that extension precedes space (p. 258), at the same time, we are to suppose that it is this very same homogeneous space that " concerns our action and our action alone " (p. 258). M. Bergson's aim is to escape the pitfalls of Realism and Idealism alike, to " resoudre les contradictions," to " faire tomber I'insurmontable barriere," and at the same time to " rejoindre la science." VITALISM 65 He finds a common error in the realism of tlie vulgar herd that takes for granted a world of things existing plump and plain outside and independent of any con- sciousness, and the realism of Kant that presupposes a Thing-in-itself independent of and inaccessible to con- sciousness : " I'une et F autre dressent I'espace homogene comme une barriere entre I'intelligence et les choses " (p. 258). You wonder why Kant should be lumped with the vulgar realist when he made of homogeneous space and of time, not barriers erected, but forms of the intelligence for the co-ordination of the data of sense. The common error is that both realists made space a condition a priori of experience ; whereas immediate perception has no a priori elements, nothing is afore or after another ; but our experience, consisting mainly and primarily of action, so to speak, gathers space and time with it as it goes along. Space and time will thus be " given " with the sensations, co-ordinated by means of them. It is not quite clear whether M. Bergson means that sensations occur ready co-ordinated in space and time, and that our perception reflects, as it were, the given co-ordination, or whether it is we who co- ordinate as we go along. From his theory of perception co-ordination (of objects in space) would seem to be given ; from his theory of action that we co-ordinate would follow. Anyhow, co-ordination proceeds hand- in-hand with experience, and is not provided for it beforehand. The shipwreck of Idealism, rather, is in " the passage from the order which appears for us in perception to the order which succeeds for us in science " (p. 253). And Idealism and Realism proceed from a common error, in that, on both theories, " conscious percep- tion and the conditions of conscious perception are F 66 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM directed towards pure knowledge, not towards action " (p. 258). Here M. Bergson, and the great body of modern philosophy with him, part company with the meta- physics of the past. He has put his finger on the weak spot of all the transcendent theories — ^their neglect of action : " toujours elles negligent le rapport de la perception a Taction et du souvenir a la conduite" (p. 254). Let us see how a philosophy fares that is directed towards action and action alone. In order to escape Eealism and Idealism M. Bergson identifies perception with " preparation for our action," having " laisse filtrer," the work of intellect, its logical constructions and presuppositions and the account that science gives us of the real or assumed action of external things, on the grounds that thought-relations and " real " action are not given in immediate perception ; but, having decided that pure perception is concerned with action and with action alone, and that " the body is an instrument of action and of action only," he has less difficulty than might have been supposed in establish- ing the correspondence between perception and cerebral states. Yet we find in this correspondence that the cerebral State is " neither the cause nor the effect, nor in any sense the duplicate," but simply the " continuation " of perception ; perception being " our virtual action and the cerebral state our action begun " (p. 260). It is a " correspondence," and yet it is a " continuation." It is a continuation of perception, and yet not perception itself. Now the only way in which one thing can be the continuation of another without being that thing itself is for it to be an effect of that thing, the cause passing n VITALISM 67 over into, that is to say, continuing in tlie effect. And yet this continuation - cum - correspondence of percep- tion is not its effect. And this perception — already doubly tainted by identification with our virtual action of which our body is the instrument, and the action of " things " upon the instrument — ^is what M. Bergson calls " pure." And the taint does not end there. This theory of pure perception must be " attenuated and completed." Pure perception is mingled, further, with affections (sensations) and recollections (memories). We have to " restore to body its extension and to perception its duree," to " reintegrate in consciousness its two sub- jective elements, affectivity and memory " (p. 260). We have seen what has happened to extension and duree. We have now to see what happens to perception and memory. M. Bergson, plunging into the very thickness of experience, starts with the extremely one- sided proposition that our body is an instrument of action and of action only. The true role of perception is to prepare actions. Perception is " nothing but selection. It creates nothing ; its role, on the con- trary, is to eliminate from the ensemble of images all those on which I should have no hold ; then, from among the images retained, to eliminate all which have no interest for the needs of the image I call my body" (p. 255). " The body is a centre of action and of action only. In no degree, in no sense, under no aspect does it serve to prepare, still less to explain, a representation ... all in our perception that can be explained by the brain are our actions begun, or prepared or suggested, and not our perceptions themselves." So much for perception. When it comes to memory, the body preserves motor habits capable of bringing the past again into play ; also, by " repetition of certain cerebral phenomena 68 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n which prolong ancient perceptions, it will furnish to remembrance a point of attachment with the actual, a means of reconquering a lost influence over present reality" (pp. 251, 252). We might ask how cerebral phenomena can " pro- long " what they have never been concerned with. But let that pass. We shall be involved in still more serious contradictions before we have done with this theory of perception as a preparer of actions only. We are not quite sure whether we are to suppose that the function of perception is not to perceive, or whether it is to perceive only those things that make for action. " Here," says M. Bergson, " is my body with its ' perceptive centres.' These centres are shaken and I have a representation of things. On the other hand, I have supposed that these shakings can neither produce nor translate my perception. It is, then, outside them. Where is it ? " M. Bergson has no hesitation in deciding that it is " in " material objects. My perception " ne pent etre que quel que chose de ces objets eux-memes ; elle est en eux plutot qu'ils ne sont en elle." His grounds for this view of perception are that in " posing " his body he " poses " a " certain image," and with it " the totality of other images " ; because his body has its place in this assembly he concludes that his perception must be there also. And though the body and its cerebral shakings have nothing whatever to do with his perception, which exists outside them (can he mean as an independent object in space ?), the unique role of these shakings is to prepare the reactions of his body and to sketch out his possible actions (" actions virtuelles "). Lest we should con- clude rashly that in this case the roles of the cerebral shakings and of perception are one and the same, he tells us that perception consists in detaching from the VITALISM 69 ensemble of objects — not particular objects or groups of objects, but " the possible action of my body on them " (p. 255). So that, whatever else it may be, the primary function of perception is not to perceive. Perception, therefore, is selection. Now this is surely giving a somewhat incompre- hensible and contradictory account of a complex but perfectly intelligible performance. Because perception, in addition to its obvious function of perceiving — of being aware of — and its less obvious and possibly dis- putable function of posing its own objects, has a dis- tinct reference to action, just as it has a distinct reference to appetite and love and aesthetic emotion and moral attitudes and intellectual interest and cosmic rapture and mystic passion and every conceivable mode of conscious experience, because both attention and in- tention play a part in determining what perceptions shall dominate our experience, making all allowances for the part they play, we are still not justified in con- tending that perception is nothing but selection with an exclusive reference to action. And it is the same with memory. Its primary function is "to evoke all past perceptions which have analogy with some present perception, and to recall to us what went before and what followed after, and thus to suggest to us the most useful decision among possible decisions" (p. 254). True, this is not all. M. Bergson distinguishes between physical memory, which is an affair of motor habit associations, and " pure " memory. Pure memory holds together " in one unique intuition the multiple moments of duree, it disengages us from the movement of the flux of things, that is to say, from the rhythm of necessity." But this unique intuition again has a primary reference to action. " The more 70 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n memory serves to contract these movements into one, the more solid the grip on matter that it gives us ; so that the memory of the living being seems to measure beforehand the power of its action on things, and to be nothing but the intellectual repercussion of it" (pp. 254-255). After all, pure memory is not so very pure. Like pure perception, it is tied and fettered to action of which alone our bodies are the instrument. " Observe," M. Bergson says, " the position we thus take between realism and idealism." We do observe it. We observe that in the interests of the Elan Vital, M. Bergson has ignored everything in consciousness that does not bear upon action ; and that, in consequence of his wholesale rejections, his position is between the devil and the deep sea. The deep sea holds all the " relations " that he has let filter through ; not only those despised ones which are the logical framework of the actual, but those which science reveals as part and parcel of the real ; and the devil has run away with the possibilities of sensation and the " intermediary perceptions " which have " escaped " him. But, however irrelevant they may be to M. Bergson's action, however slender their " grip " on matter, they are not destroyed. The devil and the deep sea still wait for the thinker who denies them. " Supposing that my conscious perception has an end {destination) which is altogether practical, that in the ensemble of things it emphasizes (dessine) only those which interest my possible action on them : I understand that all the rest escapes me, and that all the rest, never- theless, is of the same nature as that which I perceive " (p. 257). How do I, how can I know this if " all the rest " has " escaped " me ? n VITALISM 71 In order to suppose that conscious perception has " une destination toute pratique," I have had to suppose a lot of things besides : that " homogeneous space is not logically anterior, but posterior to material things and to the pure knowledge that we have of them ; that extension precedes space, . . . that homogeneous space concerns our action and our action only, being like an infinitely divided band that we hold below the con- tinuity of matter in order to make ourselves masters of it, to break it up in the direction of our activities and of our needs " (p. 258). This is all very well as long as we are considering the psychology of animals and babies, whose adventures in space and experiments in action are neither delayed nor hampered by considerations of the logically anterior ; but it is to ignore immense departments of adult psy- chology, and it is not what is meant by a metaphysic. If it were, if what is first in experience were first in reality, why not start at once with the human embryo or the protozoon ? Why bother about human psy- chology at all ? Only you ought to know exactly what you are doing. If you may light-heartedly " laisser filtrer " everything that makes Realism what it is, plus everything that makes Idealism what it is, on the one hand, the " real " space of mathematics on which all the laws and conclusions of physics are based, on the other hand, all psychic and logical processes which have no immediate relation to action, of which action is not the object and the aim, this is indeed to escape both Realism and Idealism ; it is to escape all metaphysics ; but it is hardly to " resoudre les contradictions," or to " faire tomber les insurmontables barrieres," or to " rejoindre la science." But, when criticism has shown up all its weak points, it remains a superb attempt to reduce the phenomena of 72 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM n consciousness, with all its multitudinous references and loves and interests, to a unity which shall not leave life and action out of the account. For it is true that in action, in life taken in the thick as it is lived, we do get a fusion of perception and of memory and interest and will, of time and space, in a continuity and one- ness which knows nothing of the contradictions, the dilemmas, the presuppositions, the infinite dividings and limitings of the intellect. It is no less true that neither Life nor action in itself will deliver the secret of that fusion and that continuity. In the very effort to escape those contradictions and dilemmas M. Bergson has added to them those special contradictions and fallen into those special dilemmas of his own which I have just tried to make clear. And what has happened to M. Bergson is what happens to every philosopher who is out looking for his unity in the wrong place. That is to say, he has put Pure Time before the Self. He has given to Time that special form of continuity, the duration that belongs only to a self. He has made Pure Time, in which action happens, the beginning that it cannot be, and thus brought it again under all the categories of spurious time. To avoid the pitfalls that await him as the result of his ra^h choice in priorities, he has transferred all the contradictions and dilemmas of spurious time to space, in the evident hope that they will find reconciliation and solution there. Moreover, to escape the net of illusion he has thus prepared for himself, he gives to space — which he has identified with spurious time — the purity and reality he denies to spurious time. He is bound to do this in the interests of that " outside world " which is the playground of the ^lan Vital — that is to say, in the interests of that ultimate dualism in which Vitalism begins and ends. n VITALISM 73 But he has shown us that time and space are corre- latives, and that neither is to be thought of without the other, that they work in and out of each other and play into each other's hands. We are aware, both of the position of objects in space and of the movement of objects from point to point in space, which is, as it were, a sort of succession in space. We are aware both of the succession of events in time and of their simul- taneity, which is, as it were, a sort of stationariness in time. But it is neither space in itself nor time in itself which is holding objects together. With pure space alone you will never construct a synthesis of objects in space, nor with pure time alone a synthesis of events in time ; but if either construction is to be valid and intelligible, a synthesis must be made of both. And that construction and that synthesis, if it is to he at all, will depend in the last resort on personal identity, on an unchanging self. On any theory except that of the " mechanical equivalent," the construction and the synthesis will be made in the last resort in consciousness, whether it repeats or whether it corresponds with the arrangements of the independent " Real," or whether construction and synthesis in consciousness is all the construction and synthesis there is. For, if the self changed to each member of a final synthesis, or to each member of an incomplete and provisional synthesis, if it changed to each term of the intricate system of relations within each synthesis — to all the multitudinous changing events in time, to all the multitudinous changing objects in space — if it had no unity and no duration, there would not only be no final synthesis, but no synthesis anywhere at all. There would, obviously, be no time, and (not quite so obviously) no space. Certainly no perception of space. 74 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM And this is positively the last opportunity for the upholders of the superior necessity and priority of Memory. They may say, with the most perfect obvious- ness : Much more obviously there would be no time and no perception of space without memory. For, if time is the form of inner perception, and space is the form of outer perception, is not memory the synthesis of both ? But is it ? Could it be ? Because memory holds together all remembered objects in space and all re- membered events in time, does it follow that it is re- sponsible for the synthesis of time and space taken together ? Or for the entire synthesis under each head ? It would not be possible unless all consciousness, and time and space themselves, were nothing but memory. But what of the original synthesis — the perception of objects in space ? What of the perception of the j&rst member of a series in time ? Because they have been buried under layers upon layers of repeated images that are memories you cannot say that there never was any original synthesis, never any perception of a first member of a series. And we are continually confronted with new arrangements of old material, new successions in time, new juxtapositions in space ; and though the material is old, recognized, therefore, and remembered as much as perceived, the synthesis is new. The new perceptions, the new synthesis escape for ever the net of memory. What, then, holds perception and memory together ? And is it more truly memory or the Self that makes us " seize in one unique intuition the multiple moments of duration, frees us from the movement of the flux of things, from the rhythm of necessity " ? Ill SOME ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY . 76 Ill SOME ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY In what, then, does Individuality consist ? Not in our memories, even supposing that they are pure, for we have seen that they presuppose us. Not in our individual experiences, in the fact that such and such things happened to us and to nobody else ; for this is to plant our individuality outside ourselves in pre- cisely those events over which it has least control. Besides, we have no reason to suppose that our experi- ence is unique and every reason to suppose the contrary. Still, when we reflect, we do suppose it, in the sense, not that our experiences are in any way extraordinary, but that precisely this order and arrangement of experi- ences which we call ours has never occurred before. But no possible arrangement of experiences will yield or make recognizable a self that is not presupposed in the arrangement and has had no hand in it. We have a sense of individuality ; we find, if we look for it, that we have a sort of self-feeling. I do not mean self- consciousness. I am not thinking of our general feeling of possessing a body, a feeling which is made up of muscular sensations more or less insistent, and of visceral sensations more or less vague. I am not thinking of what is called feeling-tone (23), for this may differ, if not from moment to moment, from day to day, or even from hour to hour. All these feelings which come to 78 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m us through our bodies help our sense of individuality. But I am thinking of something more akin to memory, of that feeling which is not memory, but which accom- panies it and gives it the quality which makes it ours, saturating it like a perfume, staining it like a colour, always recognizable as the same perfume and the same stain. To place our individuality in self-feeling is so far satisfactory that it does at least attempt to explain why our memories are recognizable as ours. It is as if we scented ourselves out all along our track. I may say I do not know whether my experience is really mine, or whether I am simply part of an experience labelled mine for convenience' sake ; or, granting that I am I, I still do not know from moment to moment whether I am the same self, or whether another self arises on the top of me and takes possession of my memories ; but I do know that something reacts with the same feeling to all my memories all along the line, that it is reacting now to the contents of my immediate con- sciousness, and that when I dream I shall find it in my dreams ; and I take it that this something either is me, or involves somewhere a continuous and not a dis- crete me. Does self-feeling yield the secret of individuality ? No. Self -feeling helps to fix our floating sense of individuality, and so far justifies us in calling it self- feeling ; and no doubt it enters largely into the building up of the superstition of the self. But our sense of in- dividuality is one and the existence of the self another. Mere self-feeling goes no way towards proving that the self is more than a superstition. Self-feeling, though a fairly continuous accompaniment of memory, is vague ; and from its peculiar vibrant emotional quality we may suspect it to be nothing more than a sort of general reverberation of the memories themselves. Even if it m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 79 be something more than that, it is something that accompanies consciousness and not anything that could conceivably bind it together and make it one. And if Personal Identity is nothing more than such an accompaniment, it will fare no better than if it were nothing more than memory. But what about that peculiar vibrant and emotional quality we noted ? This accompaniment of self-feeling is not always the same. It has degrees of intensity ; it attaches itself more to some memories than others ; it is stirred to a stronger glow by some associations than by others. It seems to know and to remember almost " on its own." It, then, has preferences. In short, self - feeling, this indestructible haunter of memories, has about it more than a suggestion of the Will-to-live in its aspect of interest and desire. Are we to say, then, that the secret of Personal Identity and Individuality is to be found in Will ? This certainly seems to bring us nearer to the root of the matter. And it has the advantage of being definitely thinkable as antecedent to experience, and therefore to memory, and of being traceable in the lowest con- ceivable germ of Personality — the will-to-live, the need to appear, to grow, to reproduce the self, to gather experience and appear more and more. In a sense it is the stronghold of individuality. For it is with his will that, the individual fences himself off and asserts himself against other individuals. It is with his will, in the form of interest and love, that he draws near to them and is drawn, and so makes his personality greater through theirs and theirs through him. And at every stage of his biological ascension it is his will that is the mainspring of his sublimations. It is through his will, through his need, want, desire, interest, affection, love, that he appears as self-determined. 80 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m It is his will as energy that, whether in resistance or obedience, knits him to the forces of the " real " world outside himself. It is his will that in submitting or aspiring, in adora- tion or in longing, links him to the immanent and transcendent Reality that he calls God. The perfect individual is the person perfectly adapted to reality through the successive sublimations of his will. It is clear that the will of such a creature is not, any more than his perception or his memory, concerned with action only. Before we go farther let us take stock of our results so far. We have refused to identify the self entirely with its own memories, to find the secret of personality in the fact that such and such experiences have been ours ; for this is to plant our personality outside, in extraneous and probably accidental happenings, without taking account of its interior reactions ; besides begging the possible question of its existence. We found a faint aroma of selfhood in the self-feeling that accompanies consciousness ; and though this may be, and very probably is, due to some inner working of a self, and though it has a warmth and intimacy that we look for in vain in what we call " self -consciousness," it was not comprehensive enough for us to hope to find in it the secret of selfhood. So far as that secret is discoverable at all, we seem to find it in the Will. The will seems to us at once the most ancient, the most comprehensive, and the most intimately self-revealing of the powers of self. It seems the surest and the most conspicuous bridge from the inner to the outer world. Also we have seen every m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 81 reason for supposing that processes and actions which are now involuntary and unconscious were once conscious and willed ; we had even some reason for supposing that the very machinery of such processes may have been built up gradually under the impulse of the will ; that the will, working through countless generations, may be itself the builder and the engineer of our bodily and mental machinery. We considered the theory of Vitalism, with its assumption of Matter as an independent outside solid substance offering itself to the " grip " of Spirit and carved by our needs as by a knife. We found that this theory, and its attempt to base perception and memory upon action only, ends in contradiction and dilemma ; and we concluded that to refer will likewise to action only is to ignore the actual range of desire and interest and love. So wide is that range that we might well rest in the conclusion apparently forced on us that the will is the Self. And yet, if we were to put our conclusion to the test, we should find that, though it has served us so far infinitely better than self-feeling and memory, though, so to speak, there is more self in will than in memory or self-feeling, it still falls short of complete selfhood ; because, though intimate and comprehensive — more intimate than either memory or self-feeling — it is not comprehensive enough ; not nearly so comprehensive, in fact, as memory. It will not give us the synthesis we want ; the synthesis of all our states of consciousness, itself included ; so far as will is a state of consciousness at all. That is to say, so far as consciousness includes states which are not states of willing, but states of feeling, perceiving, remembering, conceiving, judging, reasoning, G 82 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m and imagining, the unity of consciousness cannot be found in Will. We have now three alternatives. A complete irre- concilable dualism between Will and Idea ; a dualism that may fall " outside " consciousness, between the Will as the Unconscious and consciousness as the Idea ; or that may fall " inside " consciousness itself, in which case it is all up with the unity of consciousness ; or a partial dualism within consciousness, which allows of the interpenetration of Will and Idea, and of interaction between them, without necessarily admitting selfhood as the unity of all conscious states. (These two forms of dualism will face us equally, whether we regard consciousness as a by-product of the physical mechanism, or as wholly or partially independ- ent of it.) Or there is a unity of selfhood, of personal identity, prior to consciousness as its condition, or arising with it, at any rate, in no sense arising from it, a unity in which alone Will and Idea can be held together. For it may be argued — it is argued with extreme plausibility — ^that Will and Idea are in no more awkward position than any other two states of consciousness considered out of relation with each other ; and that when they are taken in relation, the very relations themselves provide all the plaster necessary to stick them together ; that this will hold good whether the relations are regarded as thought relations in conscious- ness, or as " real " relations outside it ; that if these relations do not and cannot bind, there is no conceivable unity that, added to them, will do their binding for them ; while if they do bind that is enough ; it is at any rate all we have any right to ask. For instance, will and idea come together and are sufficiently held together in m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 83 purpose or design. Thus the unity of selfhood is either powerless or superfluous. This argument is much more formidable than it looks at first sight. So formidable that it can only be dealt with later on when we are considering the ultimate questions of metaphysics. For the moment our problem is psychological. Needless to say, the hypothesis of unity is thoroughly incompatible with the mechanical by-product theory of consciousness, and does not necessarily " go with " the partial independence theory in itself. Now I have tried to make it clear under separate heads that personal identity is not memory, is not self- feeling, is not will ; but it may be just possible that this disposing of under separate heads was the secret vice of my whole procedure ; and that, though the self cannot be any one of the three, it may very well be all three taken together. Personal identity, the self, the unity of consciousness may be the sum of our states of con- sciousness taken together, and it may be nothing more ; in such sort that when there are no more states of consciousness there is no more personal identity. And though I have stated repeatedly that this unity and this sum presuppose personal identity, I am aware that logical presupposition is not enough unless it can be shown that this unity is more than a sum, and that it is of such a sort that it is not only unthinl^able, but un- workable without personal identity. It should not be forgotten that there was another alternative, the mechanical by-product theory, the theory on which consciousness is, as it were, given off (like a gas) by the neural processes which are its physical antecedents and correlates, is resolvable into them, and ceases when they cease. If I have not paused to dispose of this theory before 84 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m going further it is because I mean to return to it also later on. Meanwhile, if we succeed in establishing personal identity as a working hypothesis, the indis- pensable condition of consciousness as we know it, the importance (for Psychology) of the by-product theory will collapse in the process (24). But Personal Identity must do something for its living before we can be allowed to presuppose it in the hght-hearted manner of the foregoing. And as I took Samuel Butler as a classic authority on the behaviour of the psyche in its human and pre- human past, I am going to take Mr. William McDougall as a classic authority — and on the whole, the clearest, simplest, and most convincing authority — on the behaviour of the psyche here and now. Not that the two behaviours can be separated, or that any modern psychologist would dream of separating them, but that, while one large part of Mr. McDougall' s work necessarily overlaps Butler's, a still larger part deals with psychic powers and processes, all the synthetic and higher mental functions which Butler leaves untouched. And though a great deal of Mr. McDougall' s work is necessarily founded on that of William James (every psychologist's work is bound to cover the same ground as his pre- decessors, and Mr. McDougall would be the last to claim a superior originality), it also covers ground that has appeared since the publication of William James's Principles of Psychology, besides emphasizing several important points of difference, and disengaging the ultimate issue, if anything, with greater clearness and directness and simplicity. So simple and direct and clear is Mr. McDougall that he puts a pistol to our heads and presents us with two alternatives and two alone : Psychophysical Parallelism and Animism. m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 85 It should be stated at once, for fear of misappre- hension, that Mr. McDougall does not make his psychology a diving-board for a plunge into metaphysics. He tells us in his Preface that metaphysical Dualism is an " implication " he is " anxious to avoid." But he will have none of Psychic Monism on any system. He affirms a distinct dualism between soul and body. And it should be borne in mind that, in the absence of any higher unifying principle, his Animism lands us logically in the Pluralistic Universe of William James. Still, he not only allows us to have a soul, but his aim is to make us see that, our consciousness being what it is, Animism is the only theory which will be found to work. Before he consolidates his position he overhauls all the alternative philosophical theories, and finds that all but two are reducible to some form or other of Psycho- physical Parallelism. The two outstanding forms are both Monisms and both by-product theories : Physical Monism or Materialism, which regards con- sciousness as the illusory by-product of the mechanical processes of Matter (Epiphenomenal- ism), and Subjective Idealism or Solipsism, or Complete Egoism, which regards the whole universe, including matter and its mechanical processes, as an illusory by- product of the Self Alone. The three remaining forms are grouped under the head of Parallelism : namely 1. Strict Psychophysical Parallelism, which regards physical processes and psychic processes as running on two parallel lines that never meet, 86 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m and have no branch Hnes that intersect them, each line representing a distinct and different system of causation. According to this view there is no sense in which the two may be considered one. 2. Phenomenal Parallelism, which regards physical processes and psychic processes as two aspects, modes or appearances of one underlying Reality. They run on purely phenomenal parallel lines that never meet. The underlying Reality is Spinoza's Substance or God, Kant's Thing-in- Itself, Herbert Spencer's Unknown and Un- knowable, Schopenhauer's and von Hartmann's Unconscious. All these philosophers agree in regarding their underlying Reality as neither mind nor matter, and in declaring that, though it might be a necessary postulate, it could not be known. They all affirm the complete phenomenal Dualism of mind and matter. And Mr. '^^ McDougall is one with their opponents in demon- strating that their metaphysical Monism does nothing at all to bridge the gulf. But in deference to the underlying Unknown they all figure as holders of Identity-Hypothesis A. 3. Psychical Monism, or Objective Idealism (Identity- Hypothesis B), which regards all physical processes and Nature, the sum of them, as products of Thought. It is the redoubtable theory of the world as " arising in consciousness." I am following Mr. McDougall rather than my own inclination in including the Objective Idealist as a Parallel-liner. But Mr. McDougall's classification will serve my purpose as well, for his sinister intention is to m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 87 expose the latent dualism of that system, not in the interests of any metaphysical Monism he may have up his sleeve nor yet of a Pluralistic Universe, for he does not exalt his souls to ultimate principles, but for the sake of the cross correspondence he is to prove. I do not think that Mr. McDougall's dealings with " Psychical Monism " are always entirely satisfactory. Objective Idealists might object to being called Psychical Monists, and they would certainly be surprised to find their universe described as the " shadow of thought." Again, I think Mr. McDougall somewhat underrates the importance of strict Psychophysical Parallelism, which is, after all, his real, or at any rate, his legitimate adver- sary. For in an encounter with any of the alternative systems he runs the risk of attacking ultimate meta- physical principles with merely psychological weapons ; that is to say, he may be carrying an argument that holds good in one sphere into another where it may not hold good at all. Moreover, his own theory of Animism — interaction and all — is by no means incompatible with " Identity-Hypothesis A," for which the soul itself may figure as a phenomenon or aspect of the underlying Reality. We will see how he disposes of his five alternative theories. Materialism, and Subjective Idealism, the mechanical by-product and Self- Alone theories fall an easy prey. Materialism has on its side a formidable array of arguments from facts. It can point to certain un- deniable and invariable sequences of cause and effect. All sorts of disturbances and alterations of consciousness arise when poisons are introduced into the blood, from the excitement or stupor of intoxication to the profound coma of Bright's disease. Again, my brain processes slacken down, and I pass into the unconsciousness of 88 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM dreamless sleep. They are interfered with by the rupture of a blood-vessel, and, either special departments of my consciousness are interfered with, or I lose con- sciousness altogether, or for so long as the interference lasts, that is to say, according to the extent and persist- ence of the lesion. My brain processes cease alto- gether, and — the inference seems too obvious to state. And yet the extreme conclusion does not follow unless materialism can show that physical processes give rise to consciousness in the first place. If they cannot, there will be no need to infer that their ceasing must cause its extinction. And ultimately the argument for materialism rests on two laws and a corollary : the law of causation, according to which the cause passes over into its effect, and is discernible therein ; and the law of the conservation of energy, according to which all the energy in the universe is a constant quantity which can neither be added to nor diminished (25) ; the corollary being the biological law of the continuity of evolution. Mr. McDougall points out {Body and Mind, pp. 150-151) that the mechanical theory of consciousness saves the law of conservation of energy at the expense of the law of causation ; for there is no sense in which it can be said that molecular change, the presumed " cause " of sensation, passes over into its effect. It also breaks the biological law ; since, however undefined, however dim the borders between the conscious and the un- conscious, there could hardly be a greater breach of continuity than the appearance of consciousness when it finally emerges at some point in the course of evolution. As for the Subjective Idealist or the Self-Aloner, Mr. McDougall does not take the trouble to demolish him, regarding the mere statement of his case as suffi- cient demonstration of its absurdity. " With the ni ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 89 Solipsist we cannot argue, but all of us are agreed that Solipsism is an impossible attitude for a sane man " (26). So that the true alternative, the real opponent is Psychophysical Parallelism in its three forms : Identity- Hypothesis A, Identity-Hypothesis B, and Strict Psycho- physical Parallelism. The theory of the " two aspects " and the Underlying Identity (Identity-Hypothesis A) is open to the objection that as the " aspects " are " two events of radically different orders and are apprehended in two radically different ways," that is to say, are incommensurable and devoid of any common term, they are not intelligibly referable to any real process underlying them. I confess I cannot understand Mr. McDougall's " still more serious objection." He says very truly that a thing can appear under two different aspects " only if and when both aspects are apprehended by the mind of some observer " ; and he argues that because " in the case of the physical and the psychical processes which are said to be the aspects of one real process, there is no such observer occupying the inner standpoint and apprehending the inner or psychical aspect of the real event, except in the altogether exceptional case of the introspecting psychologist " {Body and Mind, pp. 157, 158) ; therefore, neither the real event, nor the physical event nor the psychic event are apprehended at all. All we know of the real event is its two aspects ; and all we know of the physical event is known, not in its own terms, but in terms of consciousness which is the other aspect ; and only a consciousness that was aware of its own brain processes could occupy the position of observer of the inner event. 90 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m Surely all that the theory takes for granted is the undeniable fact of a stream of consciousness, and the undeniable fact of a stream of physical events ; on the one hand, the mysterious behaviour of mind, on the other the mysterious behaviour of matter, including our brain processes (which are part of the outer and not of the inner event), and is not obliged to presuppose an inner spectator of the entire inner stream. You might as well argue that, as the physical events are only apprehended partially and not entirely, the underlying reality is not manifested in them. The real crux of the position being, not that there is no spectator of the inner event, but that there is one inner spectator of both outer and inner events ; while of the real event there is not any spectator at all ; and while both aspects are to some extent given, and both to some extent known, the underlying reality (substance or process) in which both are one, remains unknown and unknowable. A situation baffling to the intelligence ; yet its supporters might answer that they can't help it if it is, and that intelligences were born to be baffled. Next comes the theory of Psychical Monism or Objec- tive Idealism ; the theory of Consciousness as the All, the Only Reality, and of the world as arising in con- sciousness. This theory is held in too many forms to be broken quite so easily as Mr. McDougall breaks it, on the " unity of consciousness," though his argument is destructive to the loose Monism of his own principal opponents. " My consciousness is a stream of consciousness which has a certain unique unity ; it is a multiplicity of distinguishable parts or features which, although they are perpetually changing, yet hang together as a continuous whole within which the changes go on. This then is the nature of consciousness as we know it. m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 91 Now it is perfectly obvious and universally admitted that my stream of consciousness is not self-supporting, is not self-sufl&cient, is not a closed, self-determining system ; it is admitted that each phase of the stream does not flow wholly out of the pre- ceding phase, and that its course cannot be explained without the assumption of influences coming upon it from without. What then are those influences ? The Psychical Monist must reply — They are other consciousnesses. How then about the process by which the other consciousnesses, the other streams of con- sciousness, influence my stream of consciousness ? Is this also consciousness ? (For, we are told, all process is conscious process.) If so, it also is a stream of consciousness, and it must influence my stream through the agency of yet another stream, and so on ad infinitum. Thus my consciousness itself, by reason of the fact that it hangs together as a stream of process relatively independent of other streams of process, implies the essence of what is meant by substantiaUty, namely, the continuing to have or to be a numerically distinct existence, in spite of partial change." {Body and Mind, pp. 162-163.) The fact of the unity of consciousness can certainly not be accounted for or explained on the simple theory of consciousness as a stream or streams, or as any sequence or even conglomeration of merely " associ- ated " states. The inner weakness of this form of Psychical Monism is confessed by one of its ablest repre- sentatives, Professor C. A. Strong, who turns up more than once in Mr. McDougall's pages with his distressful query, " What holds consciousness together ? " As it is manifestly impossible to get any unity out of a stream, or rather out of many streams, he is driven to the hypothesis of " psychical dispositions " as a substitute for a soul. But psychical dispositions must either also be part of the stream or streams ; in which case it is not easy to see how unity is to be got out of them ; or they must be " raised to the rank of extra mental realities, and a system of such realities neither ' simple ' nor 92 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m ' undivided,' yet quite sufficiently active, will form our substitute for the soul," so good a substitute that Mr. McDougall sees no difference between this theory and Animism. I am still following Mr. McDougall, and for the moment I must ignore, as he does, the older theories of Objective Idealism. Its adherents, so far from regarding consciousness as a flux, saw it held together in a firm net of " thought-relations," to which it owes its " objectivity." For them the unity of consciousness was as the very rock of their belief. Mr. McDougall, like his opponents, Professor Strong, Professor Paulsen, Professor Miinsterberg, and all the witnesses to Psychical Monism whom he summons up, look upon consciousness both as a stream and as some- thing essentially disjointed ; and they all cry aloud for something to " hold it together." He has no difficulty in breaking all their backs one after the other over the " unity of consciousness," and finally settling them with the problem of unconsciousness. It is obvious that a stream of consciousness, even with central whirl- pools in it of .psychical dispositions, cannot have periods or even moments of unconsciousness without ceasing to exist. There are other arguments, drawn from other qualities of consciousness ; but these two are sufficient for the destruction of the Psychical Monists. Fechner, the author of strict Psychophysical Parallelism, is twice broken, once as a Parallelist and once as a Psy- chical-Monist. It is hard to see why Fechner should be involved in the special ruin of the Psychical Monists, though he certainly held a somewhat unstable position mid- way. Fechner's case is peculiar. He starts with a vigorous Parallelism, and then, by what seems the masterly inconsistency of his enthusiasm, lands himself m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 93 in Psychical Monism with his theory of Pan-Psychism. All the same, he never abated one jot of his Parallelism in his serious Psycho-Physik. But his Pan-Psychism lands him peacefully in Animism, side by side with Mr. McDougall, so far as he gives the ghost of personal identity to his souls (27). But, after all, what does his inconsistency amount to ? He held that wherever we find matter we find mind in some degree, however low. Not the smallest grain of inorganic dust that has not its psyche. And he held that wherever we find mind we find matter. This position he defended to the last against all his opponents. So far Fechner must be judged a Parallel-liner. Inside his system he is almost fanatically consistent. But he had an imaginative genius that would have been dangerous to any system, and it carried him far beyond the limits of his own. But when we come to the strict Psychophysical Parallel-liners, back-breaking isn't quite so simple a matter. For they are the people who are punctiliously just in weighing the claims of both sides ; they refuse on any consideration to let the balance tip to one or the other. And as Mr. McDougall is, if anything, still more punctilious and still more just, it is not so easy for him to make out a case for Animism against them. They are less vulnerable because less adventurous. Fechner's follower, Wundt, who outdoes his master in simple Parallelism, is a formidable adversary, whose views require rather more detailed consideration. He lays down his parallel lines with laborious science and strenuousness, and he runs his system along them with sobriety and discretion. If it leaves the rails it is not because Wundt allows himself to be distracted by ecstatic visions of the cosmic soul. 94 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m Never, on Wundt's theory, can the two lines, the physical process and the psychic process, hope to meet. Between them there is equivalence and point to point correspondence, for every neural change a psychic change ; for every psychic change a neural change ; with a sequence so invariable that where we can detect the one we may infer the other ; but no connection, no cross-correspondence from line to line, no interdepend- ence, no interaction. In psychophysical organisms " body and soul are, for our immediate knowledge, one being, not different. . . . When from all natural phenomena, and therefore from all phenomena of physical life, we carefully abstract the psychic processes, it is obvious that from these objective processes, thus stripped of their subjective side, sub- jective properties could never be deduced, just as, vice versa, the deduction of physical life-processes from psychic experiences as such is impossible. Body and soul are a unity, but they are not identical : they are not the same, but they are properties that are found together in all hving beings." (Physiologische Psychologie, vol. iii. chap. xxii. p. 767 et seq.) They are not the same. How are we to conceive the relation between them — their unity ? We are to conceive it as a parallelism. And the Law of Parallelism runs thus : " Wherever and whenever we find ordered relations between psychical and physical phenomena, these are neither identical nor interchangeable {in einander transformirbar). For they are not comparable one to the other ; but they are related to each other in such a way that certain physical processes correspond regularly with certain psychical processes ; or, to use a jfigurative expression, they go ' parallel to one another.' This definition, which we prefer to keep now that it has been once for all intro- duced into psychophysiology is, however, only half correct. It expresses very aptly the fact that the groups of phenomena m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 95 here brought into correlation are not identical, but not that there is no ground of comparison between them." (Ibid.) * There is no bridge from the mechanical causality that rules on the physical line to the teleological causality that rules on the psychic Kne. " Take the case of an act of will, try to break up the links proper to the combined psychophysical series completely into their physical elements ; in such a process starting point and ending point will be connected up through all the intermediary Unks in the chain, and through all the conditions that accompany them ; but this connection can never be thought of otherwise than as a purely causal one. Whereas we cannot make the proper teleological connection between ending point and starting point of the (psychic) series until after the series is actually completed, according to the universal character of teleological connections." {Ibid. pp. 754-755.) That is to say, in tracing the steps of the physical process we go back and find the cause at the beginning and the effect at the end of the series ; while in the psychic series we go forwards and find the cause — the design or purpose of our act of will — at its end and not at its beginning. An act of will has always reference to the future, is grounded in the future, while the physical event is grounded in the past. Again, in physical causality, cause and effect are equivalent ; the cause passes over into the effect, so that there is nothing in the effect that was not already contained in the cause. In psychic causality the effect is by no means already contained in the cause, and may be out of all proportion to it. And, it may be added, like causes do not necessarily produce like effects. Only of subjective motive, as distinct from objective end or purpose, can it be said that it is already contained, not in the actual result of any given action, but in its general 96 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM direction or tendcDcy. The actual result may be something that goes far beyond anything contemplated in the purpose, something for which the motive is utterly inadequate. For instance, I want to inflict a slight physical injury on my neighbour for his good. Reformation is my motive, chastisement my end or purpose, death, by unrealized and undreamed-of violence, the actual result. Neither violence nor death were a part of my purpose ; they are in no way contained in, nor are they commensurate with my motive ; but chastisement may be said to be included in my general policy of reformation, I suppose it is something of this sort that Wundt means by motives being " already contained " in the " direction " of these results, as causes are in their effects. " In this sense," he says, " every psychic connection of the immediate contents of consciousness forms both a causal and a teleological series. And that, not merely in the general regressive sense which holds good of all natural causality, but also in that specially progressive sense by which the End itself becomes cause, and as such precedes its effect. To be sure, here too, the end which, as motive, precedes its effect, is not identical with it ; and thus far in this case also there remains a margin of causality which stretches beyond causahty itself." [Physiologische Psychologie, vol. iii, chap, xxii.) Teleological judgment is based on this discrepancy between the end proposed and the end accomplished. It is a nice question of " on the one hand comparing such and such results with the motives which inevitably tend towards them {welche die Richlung auf jene enthalten), and on the other hand of valuing motives according to the probable results." {Ibid.) It will be seen at once that Wundt does not by any m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 97 means belittle the Psychic role. He has made over to it the whole realm of teleology — a very handsome concession — and of moral values. We shall see how much more he has conceded when we come to his law of the " creative resultants." For the moment the chief points to notice about his parallel lines are, first, that there is no common term and no common value between them, no bridge of any sort between the dual systems of mechanical and teleological causality ; next, that every causal change is the last link in a series of changes having their starting-point in the vast physical universe outside the body ; whereas the psychic changes have, apparently, no world of equivalent vastness to which they may be referred. On the other hand, the psychic processes show what William James would have called a " thick- ness " of their own. They are not only sequences, but syntheses. They not only follow on, but stick together, and stick together in such a way that the whole has a different quality from its parts ; that is to say, it is something more and other than the sum of the several states which compose it, and is therefore a new thing. For this newness and unexpectedness and otherness that we meet with in every psychic synthesis, Wundt found an admirable expression in his principle of the " creative resultants." He calls them " resultants," to show that "it is from single and empirically provable elements, or groups of elements, that the synthesis is made, and in a strict accordance with law analogous to that synthesis by which the components of a mechanical movement give rise to their resultants." But he qualifies the process with the adjective " creative " to show that " the efiect is not, as in the case of a resultant movement, of the H 98 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM same kind and value as its components, but that it is a specifically new event, made ready but not read^j 7nade, by its elements {vorhereitetes aber nicht vorgebildetes), and that its characteristic value marks a newer and a higher stage than theirs." For instance : " A sound is more than the sum of the tones that compose it. AVhile these are melted into a unity, the ground-tone gains a colour of its owTi through the overtones which, because of their lesser intensity, have become powerless as independent elements ; these make it a very much richer sound than it could be as a simple tone. " Likewise every spatial perception is a product, or result, in which, again, certain elements have lost their independence, and impart to the result a completely new property — the spatial ord^r of sensations." Again : " In processes of wilUng the multiphcity of motives finally gives rise to more and more complex forms of wilHng, which again, as original psychic products, are differentiated from the single elements of motive which compose them." But, lest we should build too much on this creative principle, we are warned unmistakably that it refers " only to syntheses and relations of such psychic contents as hold together immediately, and never to such as are completely separated ; even when these belong to a single individual con- sciousness. In. short, it is a principle that applies only to par- ticular psychic events ; not a law that rules in spiritual evolution generally." {Physiologische Psychologic, vol. iii. chap, xxii.) And we can no more draw conclusions from it as to the future of existing spiritual values (or of spiritual beings) than we can argue as to the future of the physical world from the law of conservation of energy. Meanwhile, the back of materialism is broken. In psychic processes we have got another principle of ni ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 99 causality altogether. We have something so new, so different, that it cannot possibly be accounted for by any mechanical or material process. So far so good. But can strict Parallelism be kept up ? Surely Parallelism implies correspondence of the events on one line with events on the other. And on a system of strict correspondence we should expect to find that all events on one line were represented somewhere on the other, or at least that all ascertain- able sequences could be shown to correspond point for point ; even when physical groupings do not correspond mth psychic groupings, and vice versa. But it is difficult to see, on the one hand, how several million vibrations, whose psychic correlate is a sensation of colour, are represented in the psychic event, or, on the other hand, how any conceivable grouping of nerve and brain cells could represent or correspond with the perception of objects in the field of vision. Even if different qualities of sensations of the same class are represented by differences in the rate of vibra- tions, it is still difficult to see how differences between classes — the difference, for instance, between sight and hearing— are represented by any conceivable differences in the construction, or disposition, or chemical quality of molecules in the visual and auditory nerves. So that, from the first moment of rudimentary con- sciousness. Parallelism breaks down. And when the psychic plot broadens and deepens, and its " thickness " becomes apparent, the system definitely leaves the rails. If it cannot stand the strain of such a simple psychic process as elementary sensation, how is it going to stand the strain of any psychic processes less simple than those which are supposed to be accounted for on the "association" theory? (28) True, if memory and the association of ideas are no more than the psychic 100 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m response to repeated stimulus of the same associated nerve and brain cells, the faithful correlate of a purely physical association, fixed by repeated treading of the same nervous track, then physical habit and psychic habit will run perfectly parallel. The parallelist's task is even simpler than the associationist's, since he has not got to account for the psychic process causally at all. We shall see how it is this too great simplicity of his that wrecks him. Here the crucial question raised by Mr. McDougall turns on meaning. " The parallelist has to beUeve that purely mechanical deter- mination rmis parallel with logical process and issues in the same results. He has to beheve or at any rate assert, that every form of human activity and every product of human activity is capable of being mechanically explained. Consider then, a page of print, the letters and words of a logical argument are impressed upon the page by a purely mechanical process. But what has deter- mined their order ? js Their order is such that when an adequately educated person reads the hnes, he takes the meaning of the words or sentences, follows the reasoning and is led to, and forced to accept, the logical conclusion." As for the author, for him the meaning and the logical drift of his words and sentences was present in his consciousness before and during and after the process of writing ; his foreseen and foregoing purpose was to demonstrate his meaning ; " his choice of words and order was determined by this purpose, by the desire to achieve an end, a result, which existed only in his consciousness. Now the parallehst necessarily maintains that all this process ... is in principle capable of being fully explained as the outcome of the mechanical interplay of the author's brain-processes : that a complete description of the mechanics of these processes would be a complete explanation m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 101 of the ordering of the letters, words, and sentences." [Body and Mind, pp. 174-175.) I do not think that it is fair to the parallelist to fasten on him a belief that the mechanical process, if known, would account for the teleological process ; for that is precisely what the strict Parallelist denies. And Wundt would have been the first to insist on the purely teleo- logical character of the process described. Enough, if the Animist can show that there is a teleological process on the physical Une, that interaction gives a better account of what goes on on both lines, and that causation and teleology, so far from being mutually exclusive, involve each other. Mr. McDougall then asks : "Is there or is there not any complete brain correlate of that part of our con- sciousness which we call meaning ? " The same question is crucial for memory. Memory as mere habit -association is the great psychic stronghold of the parallehst ; and if it can be shown that meaning is a determinant of association and of memory, the stronghold will be very badly shaken. In considering how associations are actually formed, Mr. McDougall gives us a very clear and simple statement of the case. " Our consciousness comprises again and again complex con- junctions of sensations which show no appreciable tendency to become associated together. It is only when the attention is turned upon the objects that excite sensations, and when the sensations enter into the process of perception (serving as cues that bring some meaning to consciousness) that associations are formed. And even then, the forming of an effective neural association is by no means an immediate and invariable re- sult. . . ." He illustrates this point by his own experience in teaching his son, a clever and observant child of six. 102 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m The boy had no difficulty in learning the alphabet and recognizing the forms of the letters. But, when it came to naming each letter separately, many hundreds of repetitions were required to fix the mechanical associa- tion between the form of the letter and its name. In learning to name numbers from one to ten "an even larger number of repetitions of the naming were required to establish really effective associations. " This experience brought home to me very vividly the great difference between memory and mechanical association. For the boy, who required so many hundred repetitions for the estabhshment of these simple mechanical associations, would often surprise me by referring to scenes and events observed by him months or even years previously, sometimes describing them in a way that seemed to imply vivid and faithful repre- sentation. Yet the memory pictures of such scenes involved far more complex conjunctions of partial impressions than did the remembering the name of a printed letter or number. " The essential difference between the rememberings of these two kinds was that in the one case meaning was at a minimum, and remembering depended almost wholly upon mechanical or neural association of the nature of a habit ; whereas the complex scenes and events remembered (in some instances after a single perception only) were full of meaning." How crucial this factor of meaning is will be realized when we consider the established psychological fact that " an impression which is already associated with others acquires new associations with more difficulty than one which is free from previously formed associations, and that the difficulty is greater the greater the number of the previously formed associations." Hence, on the theory of mechanical association, " the richer the meaning the greater should be the difficulty of combining any complex of sense impressions and of reproducing them as one memory picture ; it is therefore impossible to account in this way for the fact that impressions which convey m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 103 much meaning are combined and remembered with so much less difficulty than those of Httle meaning." {Body and Mind, pp. 340-341.) Mr. McDougall might have added that mechanical associations have the longer ancestral history ; they have been practised longer ; so that we should expect their physical machinery to work with such an ease and readiness as to render them pre-potent in determining remembrance. What actually happens is clean contrary to this — ^the higher, and biologically more recent, power of appreciation of meaning rules the event. It must not be supposed that Mr. McDougall by any means underrates the other side of the question. " Neural associations or habits may so link groups of sensory elements of the brain as to lead to successive revival of the corresponding sensory complexes ... in so far as each sensory complex has evoked meaning in the past, it tends to revive it upon its reproduction and reinstate the idea in consciousness. This is the process of the evocation of an idea from the neural side. It plays only a subordinate part in the higher processes of remembering." For the idea is more than its sensory content ; it is a " compound of sensory content and meaning." And meaning, as we have seen, has escaped the net of neural association. Yet the pre-potency of meaning argues its. persistency. But — how or where do meanings persist ? " Clearly," Mr. McDougall says, " they do not persist as facts of consciousness. But the development of the mind, from infancy onwards, consists largely in the development of capacities for ideas and thoughts of richer, fuller, more abstract and more general meanings. If then meanings have no immediate physical correlates or counterparts in the brain, and if the meanings themselves do not persist, we must suppose that the persistent 104 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m conditions of meanings are psychic dispositions." {Body and Mind, p. 343.) If anybody has a lingering doubt as to the possibility of what is called the " psychic increment " — of psychical dispositions and of psychophysical interactions — let him ask himself what would happen if the automaton theory of association really held good. The question is crucial ; for, while all the higher mental processes are based on association, it is still possible to acknow- ledge the " creative " value (in Wundt's sense) of a logical synthesis, and to deny strenuously that the psyche has a hand in the associations themselves. Let us suppose, then, that it has no hand ; that it must always take what associations are given to it, without any means of selection and rejection other than the automatic stamping out of weaker and less frequent associations by stronger and more frequent ones ; and that these associations are formed strictly by neural habits. We are told that, when two or more impressions are received together, either often enough or with suffi- cient intensity, a neural track from one to the other is set up within the brain cell where both have met, a track which henceforth becomes a line of least resistance ; so that, either on the actual repetition of the one im- pression, or its revival in memory, the other — ^through the revived stimulation of the brain cell — spontaneously and inevitably leaps forth. Suppose that this is all there is in it ; suppose that we remember, never because we choose, but always because we must ; and that our memories are at the mercy of all sorts of random associa- tions, being nothing but the revived stimulation of the brain cells where neural paths having once met, meet for ever ; suppose that there are no psychic dispositions, no psychic interferences, no psychic preferences, and no selections and rejections of associations, then our m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 105 consciousness would be like nothing on earth but an immense fantastic telephone exchange ; an exchange where messages, indeed, received and registered and answered themselves, but all at once, and in over- whelming multitudes ; an exchange deafened and dis- organized ; bells ringing incessantly all through its working hours ; messages rushing in from all parts of the city and suburbs at once, crossed and recrossed by trunk calls from all parts of the outlying country ; casually crossing and recrossing, interrupting and utterly obliterating each other. On these lines, neither logical departments nor central control could possibly exist. Yet without some one central sorting and supervising system, a system which refused more calls than it received, mere automatic association would have no more method about it than that mad telephone exchange. What is the more Hkely, not to say more conceivable, theory : that the brain, which is itself the exchange, the distracted hall where the infinite number of wires meet and mingle, without aid selects and rejects, orders, gives meaning, supervises, and controls ? Or that the psyche uses the brain, and the memories which have become the habits of its body and its brain, as its machine, and its vehicle ; and that the secret of its remembering and forgetting is its own ? But if " psychical disposition " determines the higher forms of memory, what, then, determines " psy- chical disposition " ? As Mr. McDougall does not raise this question, we may take it that he considers " the soul itself " to be sufficient answer. But, as you cannot cut the individual soul clean off from its own history, from its long past existences, it is just possible that preacquired experience may have 106 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m determined its individual " disposition," in tlie absence of any permanent factor persisting in and partly deter- mining those experiences themselves. If there be such a permanent factor persisting through past experiences, and in part determining them, it is the Will ; and the Will itself will be in part determined by past experience ; so much enterprise in seeking new- experience, so much adaptation to each experience found. Go back to the earliest experiences of all ; say that the first bit of protoplasm is formed in fulfilment of some need, that the amoeba " improvises a stomach because it wants to," and that our protoplasmic forefather did the same thing for the same sufficient reason ; he may be supposed to have taken the next step, and the next step after that, also for the same reason, his want or will determining his development and slowly but surely shaping his memory, his associations, and his meanings (when he has any), till in the long run (his intelligence immensely helping) it has shaped the psychical dis- position he is born with. If, at the top of the scale to-day, Mr. McDougall's son's memory is determined by meam'ng, is not that because of his psychic predilection or choice of meanings ? Is it rash to suppose that some such cumulative effect of will comes under the head of that " psychic increment " of energy, which, as Mr. McDougall suggests, may in aU probability influence the behaviour of organisms ? (He is trying to show that the law of conservation of energy is not in itself fatal to the hypothesis of the psychic increment.) "... all living organisms show certain peculiarities of be- haviour that are not established by any inorganic aggregations of matter. The pecuUarities of behaviour of living organisms, especially the power of resisting the tendency to degradation of energy which seems to prevail throughout the inorganic realm, m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 107 are correlated with, that is to say, they constantly go together with, the presence of psychophysical processes in them, and this fact of correlation imphes causal relation between the two things. . . . The few experiments which go to show that the energy given out by an organism is equal in amount to the energy taken in, are far too few and too rough to rule out the possibility that psychical effort may involve increment of energy to the organism; for increments far too small to be detected might effect very important changes in the course of the organic pro- cesses." If this hypothesis remains unjustified we have the alternative possibility " that mind may exert guidance upon the brain-processes without altering the quantity of energy." In either case, the physical law of con- servation is not one that can be legitimately applied to energies presumably of a different order. It seems to me that both alternatives, that of the psychic influx (or increment) of energy and that of the guiding influence of mind, are a little vague ; besides being vulnerable to any experiment that may yet establish the law of conservation of energy in living organisms. Whereas we do find that every act of will is accompanied by the release of energy ; so much so that desire seeking fulfilment may be said to be psychic energy itself. Anyhow, whether as release or as influx, it is the one psychic factor that appears the fittest to play the decisive evolutionary role. It is the one that lies nearest to life itself, that has the deepest ground in our past and the highest reach into our future. We have seen how the " psychic increment " may work at the human level in the case of Mr. McDougall's son. Let us see now what part it plays at a level slightly lower than the human — in the case of Professor Thorn- dike's cat. 108 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m Mr. McDougall is considering the process of acquiring " new modes of bodily response to impressions " by- adaptation and movement. {Body and Mind, p. 318.) Professor Thorndike, testing animal intelligence by various experiments, hit upon the simple one of shutting up a hungry cat in a cage within sight of a saucer of milk placed outside. The door of his cage was closed with a latch, which it was just possible for the cat to open by a happy accident in his struggles to escape. " The cat, stimulated by the sight of food placed near the cage, makes a great variety of movements, clawing, scratching, and squeezing in all parts of the cage ; it runs through its vocabulary of movement without the least indication that it appreciates the presence of a door, or of a latch by moving which the door may be opened. Sooner or later, in the course of these random movements, the latch is moved by happy accident and the cat escapes to enjoy the food. Now it is found that in nearly all cases, if the cat is put back in the same cage on many successive occasions, it gradually learns to escape more and more quickly ; until eventually it goes straight to the latch and makes the necessary movement." [Ihid. p. 319.) Now on any theory which absolutely excludes the psychic factors of desire and choice, and denies that movement can be determined by anything but neural habit associations, the cat's readiness to acquire the habit of the right movement is inexplicable. Why just that particular movement of all the movements he has made and repeated, each repetition setting up a neural habit ? Why should the habit of the successful movement override the habits of the unsuccessful movements, which have had the advantage of the start, if desire and its fulfilment, if success or failure are not to count ? It is not necessary to keep a cat hungry and shut m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 109 him up in a cage within sight of food in order to test the power of psychic associations over neural ones. Everybody who has lived with animals, and loved them and gained their love, must have observed what I may call the pre-potency of their acquired affections over long-established habit associations. (I am not sure whether one may speak of the pre-potency of acquired characteristics ! But an illustration will make my meaning clear.) My own cat, like other cats, is obsessed by his motor habits. Perhaps his most persistent motor habit is his garden game of running away and hiding in the bushes when I try to catch him. Indoors, he is not happy unless he is sitting in my lap. There he may be easily caught, and will even offer himself to be carried like an infant in arms. Out of doors he will not come to any call ; he will not be caught or touched by any hand. My approach is the signal for his flight. All through this summer, and last spring and summer and autumn, all through the spring and summer and autumn before that, he kept up his garden game, with the same fixed gestures, the same lovely ritual of play ; a ritual so invariable as surely to have become auto- matic. This autumn I went away for seven weeks. When I came back he was not in the house. I could hardly suppose that if he was in the garden he would come to me, since he had formed no habit of coming when he was called. Still, I called him, and in an instant he appeared on the wall of the next garden but one. He stood there and stared at me till he had put the voice and the figure together. Then he came running fast, along the connecting wall into his own garden, and straight into my arms. The rush of affec- tion and of reminiscence had carried it over all the motor habits of the garden game, and over all his ancestral memories of pursuit and flight. 110 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m Now if Parallelism cannot well account for the behaviour of Professor Thorndike's cat, still less can it account for the behaviour of my cat. There are yet other psychic factors besides desire and its opposite, aversion, which are not represented on the physical side. There are pleasure and displeasure. And there is a further problem : Do these psychic factors, or does some neural process, determine the movements of organisms ? Grant that pleasant experiences are beneficial and unpleasant experiences hurtful. " If then " (I am still quoting Mr. McDougall) " pleasure and displeasure are themselves the determinants of movements of appetition and avoidance, we can understand how this general agreement between the beneficial and the pleasurable and between the hurtful and the disagreeable has been brought about by natural selection. ..." And if " we adopt the Parallehst's assumption that two neural processes, the physical correlates of pleasure and displeasure (which we may call x and y) are determinants of appetition and aversion, then the correlation throughout the animal world of X with the beneficial and of y with the hurtful, bodily affections follows . . . from the Darwinian principle. But that x should express itself in consciousness as pleasure and y as displeasure would remain an insoluble problem." Again : " And if it be asked — Are we then to believe that the feehngs themselves act directly upon cerebral processes ? the answer must be, I think, No ; they act only indirectly, namely, by ex- citing conation or psychical effort, for conation is, essentially, the putting forth of psychical power to modify the course of physical events," Now, the parallelist and the materialist with him might say : Why drag in psychical effort to account for m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 111 movements of appetition and aversion which you have allowed to be determined by x and y 1 On the theory, psychical effort can do no more than show itself as a movement of appetition and aversion which has been already accounted for. The Animist can only '"' down " him by showing that psychic effort does do more. It does so much by way of modifying physical events that its teleological action deflects the teleological line from the parallel, and sends it cutting across the causal line continually. The parallelist's diagram of the transaction should stand thus : Physical and Causal Line. Psychic and Teleological Line. Movement b accomplished. ^^ Neural process. a Movement desired b' as end. ^ I Sense-impression. a' These are positively all the factors that the strict parallelist is justified in taking into account, if his lines are to remain strictly parallel, and if point for point correspondence is to be perfect. The diagram is absurd ; but it is beautifully simple, as on any theory of rigid Parallelism it is bound to be. You will notice that interaction is inexorably barred. There is no bridge to or from the causal physical process on the one side to the psychic teleological process on the other. You will also notice that no teleological action has taken place. It need not take place, because neural process a has led directly to the accomplishment of movement h. And it cannot take place because, clearly, movement b is accomplished on the physical line, and there is no means of transferring it to the psychic line. So the parallelist must either give up his teleology, 112 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM or, agreeing that teleological action has taken place, lie must admit that it has contributed to an effect (the movement) accomplished on the physical line ; in which case he gives up -his Parallelism, and goes over to the theory of interaction. I do not want to complicate this problem unneces- sarily, but if we introduce the factor of time— and we cannot ignore it — some very odd consequences will follow. For we have not forgotten that, on the two lines of physical and teleological causation, what is last in the physical series as efiect appears first in the psychic series as cause. Physical Process. Instants of Time. Psychic Process. (Action) d-^ V d" Awareness of action d' c ^ - -^ c" Will to act c' 6 " h"~- ^ Desire for action h' a a" ~- (Action, a' as final cause, end or purpose.) I am not trying to circumvent Parallelism by arguing that an action accomplished is identical with an action designed ; and that, consequently, the same thing, besides existing both as the cause and the effect of itself, must exist (as cause) at the same instant of time when (as effect) it has not yet come into existence. For there is no reason why the same thing should not behave as cause and effect respectively at different instants of time ; and it is quite impossible to establish point for point correspondence of the series of instants in time with the series of physical and psychic events, so as to force the conclusion that the time of those different behaviours is the same. I suggest none of these ab- surdities. On the contrary, in spite of that diagram, I would insist that action physically accomplished, and m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 113 action as purpose or end, are two separate events — divided, it may be, by a long period of time and by many intervening processes — of which one event, invisible, incalculable, psychic, most truly determines the other, which is visible, calculable, and physical ; inasmuch as the inner event is the one factor without which the outer event would not have happened. And I would suggest that, this being so, it is not the antecedent neural process but the antecedent psychic process that is the prime causal factor. But — to return to the case of Professor Thorndike's cat — ^there were other psychic factors, not represented on that diagram, which cannot be ignored. What has happened in the case of Professor Thorn- dike's cat ? The cat has received his pleasant sense-impression of the milk outside his cage. He has hit on the lucky means of escape, and established a pleasant memory of the beneficial result. After a few experiments, which he makes himself, a connection (but what connection ?) is established between a', the sense-impression of the milk, and b, the movement which unlatches the door ; so that, in future, sense - impression a' is instantly followed by movement b. Now, besides these two terms, there stands on the psychic line a third term c', the cat's pleasure or satis- faction. (His pleasure and his pleasant memorj^ are really two terms ; or, if we count repetitions, they are as many as you like ; but for the purpose of the problem they may be taken as one.) This third term is of supreme importance in determining b. It, not b (the movement itself), is the real final cause, the motive, purpose, or end of b. For the pleasure or satisfaction of drinking rnilk is that for which the cat makes his experiments and his successful movement. lU A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM But though the psychic event c' will no doubt be represented on the physical line by some point of neural change c, on the parallelist hypothesis c' (again) must be a superfluous and impertinent interloper, since the sense-impression and the memory of a' , the sight of the saucer of milk, or rather its refresentative neural change a, is sufficient to bring about the movement b by nervous discharges along a path of least resistance, going direct, that is to say without psychic intervention, from a to b. (Direct, because the question is not of the neural reflexes naturally involved, but of psychophysical interaction.) So direct is it (in this sense) that, given strict corre- spondence, the process on the psychic line — each term accompanied, if you like, by its meaningless note of neural change — ought to stand a' b\ without any intermediary c'. The cat's pleasure (which, by the way, has grown by repetition from one more or less simple sensation to a perfect pile of memories and anticipations of pleasure), the Cat's Pleasure, so immensely important and personal to him, counts for nothing in the parallelist's programme ; though to the cat and to his master it must rank as the chief actor in the psychic drama. If it comes to that, is it, can it be, really the chief actor ? Or even the chief motive power ? Behind the cat's movement is his memory, and before it his anticipa- tion of pleasure ; so that, even if we count the sensation and the memory and the anticipation as one deter- minant, the psychic plot thickens before our eyes. And if we are really to do justice to the whole action, we must assume a fourth factor d', the Cat's Desire. Eliminate his desire, and his whole behaviour becomes meaningless. His pleasure is meaningless ; his move- ment is meaningless ; he might just as well keep quiet in his cage. True, he would not desire the milk if he had no pleasure in it. It is equally true, however, that m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 115 he would have no pleasure in it if he did not desire it. And the peculiarity of this factor of desire is this : that it does not enter the series as a single member of the series (a', b', c\ d'), but is present to each member of the series {a'd\ b'd', c'd'), and to the whole, in a way in which they are not present to each other. For instance, he desires his pleasure ; and he desires the movement which is his means to his pleasure ; but he has no pleasure in the movement itself. His desire saturates his sense-impression a' of the saucer of milk, and his pleasure c', and his memory and anticipation of pleasure, and it is surely the true causal determinant of his movement b. And if you say (the parallelist is bound to say it, since he is committed to the teleological view of the series a', b', c'), if you say and insist that his desire d' is determined by his pleasure c', which thus appears as the final cause of the movement 6, still, you cannot eliminate the factor of desire without doing violence to the whole series with which it is so intimately platted up. I think, therefore, you are driven to acknowledge it, not as the final cause — for pleasure fills up that role quite adequately — and not as the immediate working cause — for that is a complicated affair of nervous discharges and muscular tissues — but as the determinant of (or ruling causal factor in) the movement b. Then you have got as clear a case of that trespass which is interaction as the Animist could well desire. And the parallelist's dilemma stands thus : If he was justified in regarding the series, a b which stands for the neural lines of least resistance representing habit association and habit memory, if he is justified in regard- ing this series as sufficiently determining b, he is obliged to ignore the obviously existing psychic factors of pleasure and desire, determinants of series a' b'. But as, in any case, on his own showing, it must have 116 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM been sense-impression a' that started the whole business, some form of causation other than the teleological has surreptitiously crept in on the psychic line, contrary to the sacred law laid down by himself in the beginning. For, clearly, without the psychic intervention of the original sense-impression a\ the precise and particular fact we are considering, though possible, would not have been actually accomplished. So that, in the most elementary process of psycho- physical life, his rule which forbids interaction has been broken. If, on the other hand, he acknowledges — as he is bound to do — the existence of the psychic factors, pleasure and desire, he will find one of them, desire, breaking loose obstreperously from the teleological line and invading (again !) the causal side as determinant of the movement h. In this case he has, to add to his embarrassment, a whole psychic series within a' fe', in which c' and d! stand as the chief factors, a whole psychic series for which at would be hard to find point for point corre- spondence on the physical line. Parallelism therefore breaks down badly in three places : its law which demands correspondence breaks down ; and its law which forbids cross-correspondence breaks down ; and its law which distinguishes between causal and teleological lines breaks down ; and a better diagram of the real situation would stand thus : Physical line Psychic line ^=Z2 cr r^ Ill ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 117 You have there a vision of the entire collapse, of the most obvious crumpling and buckling and cross-cutting of the lines ; while the Animist has established a sort of ascending spiral as his image. (I must not father this image on Mr. McDougall ; but I think it is justified by the ensemble of the process.) And yet we have not got farther than the simple psychology of Professor Thorndike's cat. Imagine then what a diagram would look like that attempted to represent the higher psychic processes of man, the complex play of many motives, determining one of many actions seen to be possible and desirable ; the conflict between desire and will ; the element of choice — the will darting like a shuttle to and fro among all those infinite threads and weaving them to its own pattern. Add to this the emotions saturating the web with their own colours ; and consider that you have not yet allowed for the intellectual fabric, different and distinct from this play of action and emotion and desire, yet hardly distinguishable, so close is the psychic web, so intricate the pattern. When you come to the work of the adult human intelligence (we do not yet know enough about animal intelligence to say with any certainty what goes on there), to even such an apparently simple operation as the perception of an object in space, and of its relation to other objects in space, it is even more obvious that you are no longer dealing with a series alone, but with a synthesis. Add to this— what is inseparable from it — the perception of change, of the succession of events in time, and your synthesis will be a synthesis of successions and juxtapositions, or contemporaneous existences, in which events will be perceived as moving one after another and altogether, against a complex background 118 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM m of objects immobile in space. Add to this the mere perception of their innumerable relations, and to this the higher operations of the intellect, the innumerable concepts involved in the most elementary process of acquiring knowledge, and you get a series of syntheses and the synthesis of this series. Add the operations of judgment and of reasoning, inseparably bound up with this process ; then abstract these operations from the process and examine them ; you will find, not only that they follow a certain fixed order of their own (the laws of inductive and deductive logic), but that yet another operation has crept in — analysis, and that these syntheses, so laboriously built up in consciousness, are in consciousness dissolved and broken up, in order that new syntheses, new com- binations, associations, and arrangements may be formed. This is Wundt's principle of the creative resultants with a vengeance. As Mr. McDougall points out, with that one rash word " creative " Wundt gives the whole show of psycho- physical Parallelism away. And I do not think it is unfair to hold him to it. There is no wriggling out of the awkward position it has created for him. And if we are offered our choice between Parallelism and Inter- action I can see no grounds for hesitation. Parallehsm is a sort of psychological book-keeping by double entry, under such conditions that the values, on whose constancy the integrity of the result depends, change, not only between the dates of invoice and account, but with every separate item in the ledger. So that the parallelist's books never really balance. Whereas the Interactionist allows for every fluctuation in the values, while equally pledged to the austerity and sanctity of book-keeping. m ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 119 Now I tliink the fact of psychopliysical interaction is fairly demonstrated. But so far from giving us the metaphysical security we are seeking, it leaves that side of the problem as much as ever in the dark. Psychology suggests the ultimate questions it cannot answer. We cannot strike a balance of interactions and say whether physical or psychic action tips the scale. We do not know how far psychic action can modify the order of physical events. There are certain long-established, not to say invariable sequences, such as the course of the stars and the formation of water from the union of HgO, with which we are pretty sure it cannot inter- fere. You can persuade a plant or an animal to breed and grow the way you want it — within certain strictly defined and very important limits. But you cannot force a single particle of inorganic matter to behave contrary to its pre-established habit. Still there are certain physical alterations that you can effect. You can dam back the tides and divert the course of rivers. You can change the outward appearance of the habitable globe by merely displacing things on its surface. You can turn steam into a cylinder so as to drive an engine. You can so regulate a current of electricity or an ex- plosion of petrol as to make them do the same thing. So that, if a diagram could be drawn showing the physical results of the psychic processes of a few enter- prising individuals it might not equal our imaginary psychic diagram in complexity, but it would be a very imposing and intricate affair. Shut up a puppy by himself in your study when he is teething, or let loose a speculative builder over a square mile of virgin wood and field ; and observe the change their psychic processes will effect in the order and integrity of material objects. In twenty minutes the puppy has gnawed the backs off your books and 120 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM worried the hearthrug to shreds, stained the carpet by upsetting the ink over it, and, having eaten the best part of your manuscript, he is about to change its chemical composition when you find him at his work. In a year's time the builder has caused the virgin wood to disappear and has covered the fields with streets of houses which show in outward forms of conglomerated bricks and mortar the inner hideousness of his soul. True, the puppy and the builder have been obliged to use physical machinery to achieve these physical results, pitting one set of physical forces and one arrange- ment of molecules against another. Still, all this con- tinuous construction and destruction has involved continuous psychic effort ; so that all along the series there will be innumerable points where the physical processes are no longer traceable, and the psychic processes come into play. But when we try to estimate the proportion of psychic effort to physical result we find we are dealing with incommensurables (29). So many bricks laid, so many psychic processes involved in the laying of each. We can count the bricks, but we cannot count the psychic processes ; neither can we gauge the intensity of the psychic state at each moment of the process. And so far we have only been dealing with one side of the total operation, with extension, and the displace- ment and rearrangement of objects in space. When we come to ti^ne, all possible correspondence ceases. You can measure the time taken to lay each brick, and calculate from it the number of months it will take to complete the entire scheme of the Estate ; but you cannot measure the time of the psychic processes, for the simple reason that those processes are more than processes, they are syntheses. And with them we are brought back once more to the unity of consciousness. ai ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF PSYCHOLOGY 121 And we are once more driven to ask : 1. Is there any unity outside our consciousness that corresponds with this unity within it ? 2. If so, is that unity also a unity of consciousness ? Or rather : Is there anything in that unity from which we may infer that where it is there is consciousness ? 3. Is there anjrthing in both unities from which we may infer an ultimate unity ? Once more, the long round that we have fetched by way of biology and psychology has landed us in ultimate questions of metaphysics. lY SOME ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 123 IV SOME ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS It will be remembered that we adopted Mr. McDougall's classification of metaphysical systems provisionally, and with considerable reservations, in order that he might do his own deadly work among them unhindered. We have seen him do it. We have seen how far he has justified the hypothesis of a self or soul as the unique ground of the unity of consciousness. And we must admit that he has certainly delivered it from the worst assaults of the physiological psychologists. He has done this, apparently, by demonstrating the principle of psychophysical interaction. , But this is by no means the end of the matter. I think we may ask him at least four questions. 1. How, without recourse to some metaphysical principle, does he propose to maintain the unity of consciousness throughout the interactions ? 2. Plow would he explain the soul's action in the construction of time and space ? 3. What holds body and soul together ? 4. What holds the multiplicity of souls together ? Surely (1), unless body and soul are one or aspects of an underlying Reality which is one, each irruption of either into the other's territory must be a break, however slight, of their respective unities. And this, whether the law does or does not hold good eternally, 125 126 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv that the cause must pass over into its effect. Inter- action is interaction. Now, whatever the unity of matter may be, unity of consciousness is the unique arm of the Animist. Take it from him, and he is powerless. Mr. McDougall is aware of his danger, and he tries to reduce the soul's action to something less than cause and more than correspondence. But the danger is only masked and not removed. Once admit interaction, with its resulting changes, and not only is the powerful charm of Parallelism broken, but the Animist himself is committed to the whole causal relation. That relation is not like an unhappy love-affair with the " reciprocity all on one side." It is not the simple affair of body as cause, telescoping into soul, and soul, as cause, telescoping back into body ; but each con- tributes to the effect. This double relation of cause and effect alters the ensemble so profoundly that to talk any more of dualism is absurd. Even granted (2) that each interaction is simultaneous and not successive, the whole series of interactions con- stitutes a process, a series in time. If you presuppose a " real " time, you are promptly landed in all the dilemmas which M. Bergson, for one, has shown to be inherent in that idea (30). If the soul supplies, as it were, its own time, then you have a psychic action covering the whole psychophysical performance in one very extensive and necessary relation. And the same holds good of space. What holds the high interacting parties, body and soul, together ? (3) (This question follows from Question 1.) As long as they were parallel they could be considered as holding themselves together ; but, as we have seen, their unities are broken. Surely a system of interactions cries for r7 ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 127 a unity just as loudly as a system of states of con- sciousness ? As for the fourth and last question : What holds the multiplicity of souls together ? Since the souls interact on each other, their system of interactions calls for unity. I do not think that these questions can be set aside as frivolous. They are perfectly legitimate problems arising out of the case ; and Animism provides no solution of them. When it comes to unities, as on the Animist's own showing it must and does come, if the unity of conscious- ness only holds good within and of consciousness, then physical unity, if there he any, will hold good within, and of bodies or matter generally ; so that, in the last resort — and there must always be a last resort — each unity will form a " closed system " ; and the Animist must be numbered among the parallelists. I do not see how, without recourse to a metaphysical principle and a metaphysical unity, he is to escape from the position. It is clear that in that classification of systems which I have borrowed from Mr. McDougall we are dealing with two things : Psychophysics, which has no philosophic axe to grind, and Metaphysics. Neither Animism nor Psychophysical Parallelism professes to give us a Metaphysic or a Metapsychic ; but only certain psychophysical postulates. It should also be clear that, however much we may wish to separate them, we cannot, as a matter of fact, keep them apart if we are to go on with — I won't say finish — our thinking. And I think it should be transparently clear that neither empirical nor a priori metaphysics can take up any impregnable position outside Psychophysiology, 128 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv and will not advance very far, or at any rate very safely, as long as it ignores the psychophysical facts, however radiantly honest its attitude may be. But it may not have been equally clear that Psycho- physiology cannot keep itself unspotted by some Meta- physic or another ; that is to say, if it is to go on with its thinking. It can, and we have seen that it does, voluntarily arrest its thinking on its own borders and refuse to take the metaphysical plunge ; but with the first step over, and not even with the first step, but with the first look, with the affirmation that there is, and with the affirmation that there is not a region beyond its border, it is in. Only the non-committal attitude that acknowledges that there may be a region will save it from the plunge. But if the Psychophysiologist goes on thinking he is committed to a metaphysic. For there is a lurking metaphysic in his most empirical conclusions, and even in his non-committal attitude. Let us look back at the systems we considered. They may be reduced to three types, as far as body and soul are concerned. 1 . Monism : the systems of the One. 2. Parallelist Dualism : the systems of the Two (with or without assumption of an underlying One). 3. Animism : or the theory of the Mixed. To these, as we leave the ground of Psychophysics, we shall have to add Pluralism in its three forms of : 1. Pragmatism, 2. Humanism, and the 3. New Realism, which are all systems of the Many. Of these the New Realism is so new, so revolutionary, so dangerous to every form of Monism we have con- IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 129 sidered hitherto, that it calls for special treatment later on and in a place apart. I have not insulted the Animist by putting him among the Parallel -liners, where, I think, if he finished his thinking he would have to go ; because he may quite honestly and legitimately decline to finish it. But I have not followed Mr. McDougall, this time, in putting Objective Idealism (which is somewhat inadequately rendered by "Psychical Monism") among the Parallel- isms ; for I do not think this arrangement is fair to a philosophy which cuts the knot by maintaining, with a stoutness verging on apoplexy, that the world arises in consciousness, that it exists in and through and for consciousness, and that consciousness is the " Thing-in- Itself "; which thus begins its thinking with conscious- ness as the totality of experience, and finishes it there. If we consider each one of these systems in turn we shall find that there is not one of them, no, not even the most non-committal that has not its own dilemma. The dilemma of the out-and-out Materialist is that he must either admit that consciousness does not come altogether into his net, or he must break his own sacred law of the conservation of energy. In any case, if he says that psychic processes are an illusory by-product of physical processes, he fails to show why they should be conscious processes. The dilemma of the out-and-out Subjective Idealist, or Self-Aloner, is that he must either deny the existence of other consciousnesses, and of things he is not conscious ■ of and never could be ; or he must give up his funda- mental hypothesis of his own solitary existence. If he turns the materialist's position upside down and says that his ego produces the physical series as the illusory by-product of its own psychic series, he fails to show why it should be at the pains of projecting any physical K 130 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv aspect of its psychic states, why there should be an illusory appearance of a parallel at all. If he says that there is no parallelism and only one series, his own psychic states, he fails to account for the existence of any consciousness other than the one he started with — his own. Still less can he account for the order of physi- cal things in ante-psychic time. For if there is no universe outside his private consciousness, the universe that physical science shows us as existing previous to the appearance of his consciousness is a retrospective illusion, and the manifestations of his neighbour's con- sciousness are a past, present, and future illusion ; and his neighbour's consciousness itself, with the universe it carries about in it, is the illusory hypothesis of his thought. Worse still, as he is not conscious of his own neural processes, they also cannot be allowed to exist ; their existence for another consciousness, that of the scientific observer, is not existence in any consciousness ; it must therefore share the illusory quality of all that attaches to his neighbour and his neighbour's con- sciousness. Worst of all, his own ego, the self which should be at the bottom of the whole show, to produce and maintain the system of illusions, can have no existence either ; since it does not and cannot appear in its own con- sciousness. The formula for this theory must be : Consciousness is just consciousness, of nothing, for nobody ; and it is nobody's consciousness. So that the out-and-out Self-Aloner must either show reason why he should exist in this solitary and unsupported manner ; which he cannot do, as he has no grounds to establish his self on except himself ; or he must acknowledge the existence of a world — if it be a world of selves — outside himself, in which case he is no longer a Self-Aloner. IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 131 Mr. McDougall has very clearly shown the sad plight of the Parallelist. His attitude has no intervals of repose. The more strictly parallelist he is, the more he denies interaction, the more he has to keep jumping backwards and forwards from one of his lines to the other ; in which case he has to admit that there is a jumping-off-place and a landing-place somewhere, that is to say, a common terra firma for thinking and acting on both lines. His dilemma is like the Materialist's. He cannot keep his rules and his principle too. The dilemma of the Animist, as I have tried to show, is that without some " higher unity " to solder them, his unity of consciousness, and the unity of all physical things, finally form closed systems of penultimates running parallel ; so that in the long run (his long run) he is landed in a dilemma as serious as any he has exposed. Either he must make the totals of psychic and of physical interactions equal and opposite, an assumption which he has no grounds for ; in which case, by the law of causation, they will cease to be interactions, and will form one action and one phenome- non ; or, while insisting on partial interaction, he must acknowledge a greater unknown second quantity of actions and phenomena running parallel. In either case the unity of consciousness is broken. There are dilemmas and dilemmas. There are dilemmas inherent in the nature of a system. Such are the dilemmas of the Materialist and Idealist by-product theories. There are dilemmas which are latent in a system, of which the upholders of the systems are more or less aware. Such are the dilemmas of the strict Parallelist and the Animist. Wundt virtually abandoned his Parallelism in his principle of the creative resultants. 132 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv You feel that Mr. McDougall lias either a monistic or a pluralistic solution up his sleeve, if his conscience as a man of science would allow him to produce it. And there are dilemmas which are much more apparent to the critics of a system than to its supporters. Such are the dilemmas of the Imperfect Parallelist, or devotee of the Underlying Unknown, and of the Psychical Monist or Objective Idealist. I have left the dilemmas of these Monists to the last, because there are dilemmas and dilemmas ; and because, since it must needs be that dilemmas come, they seem rather less unbearable than any of the others. The dilemma of the upholders of the Underlying Unknown and Unknowable is that, in order to prove that it is there at all, they have to assume it to be knowable, and indeed known ; inasmuch as it is the ground of its own aspects and appearances. When you have said of your Unknowable that it is Underlying, or that it is Substance, or the only Eeality, or the Thing-in-Itself, you have already dragged it in the net of knowledge. When you have added that it is Infinite or Absolute, you have to all intents and purposes caught it and made it the object of your thinking. The one thing you absolutely don't know about it is whether it does or does not exist. You cannot predicate of it that reality which was the raison d'etre of your afiirming it at all. Either you must give up its reality, by virtue of which you declared it to be unknown and unknowable ; in which case your Monism has the bottom knocked out of it, and you are left with the dual aspects on your hands ; or, declaring it to be the only real, you give up its unknowableness, and, by defining it, have brought it in under that aspect and manifestation which is thought. IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 133 This feat, whicli his predecessors performed in- voluntarily, is the serious and deliberate accomplishment of the Objective Idealist. There is but one step from the Underlying Unknown Reality to Thought as the Thing-in-Itself. The Objective Idealist does not worry about dilem- mas. Consciousness can swallow them all. There is nothing that it cannot swallow. They are logical dilemmas, are they not ? Very well, then. Already they fall within consciousness. They are expressed in terms of consciousness and lend themselves most oblig- ingly to the expression. He does not worry about the world outside him. It is outside his body, not outside consciousness ; his body is part of it, and both it and his body are expressible in terms of consciousness. Why seek, or why assume other modes of expression ? If you remind him that, on his own showing. Nature is the " other " of Thought, he will say. What if it is ? Doesn't that prove that it falls within consciousness, since otherness is a " thought - relation " ? What is Nature but a network of relations, and what are re- lations but the work of thought ? The terms of the relation ? You don't suppose I've been so simple as not to allow for them ? What are your precious terms when all's said and done, and you've analysed all the thought out of them ? Sensations ; and if sensation is not consciousness I should like to know what is. Changes, you say, not of consciousness nor for con- sciousness ? Changes, let me tell you, that wind up in sensation, bang in consciousness. Changes, every one of them, in the outside world. World outside what ? Consciousness ? Not a bit of it. Outside and inside are terms — if it's terms you're talking about — of consciousness, or rather, they are thought-relations. Can you see " outside " ? Can you hear " outside " 134 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv or touch it ? Outside (and inside) exists only in and for thought. World in time and space ? I believe you ; and where, if you please, are time and space if not in con- sciousness ? And what are they if not terms — there you are again — of consciousness ? Changes of matter ? All we know of matter is expressible in terms of consciousness ; and what we don't know of matter is not material to my argument. Your argument ? Your argument doesn't matter so much, either ; but — since you insist — you're not claim- ing, are you, that matter is the Thing-in-Itself ? Con- sciousness is the Thing-in-Itself. You think matter as we do not know it may be ? But what sort of matter is that ? I thought you were an empiricist ; if you are, you've no business to jump like that from the known to the unknown ; and if you're not, you'd very much better come in with me. Direct his attention to the triumphant existence of the Parallel-liner's physical line (or what is left of it after the Animist has done with it), the neural and brain processes which never are in consciousness, and he will smile patiently at your fatuity while he tells you that, if they do not exist as sense perceptions for your consciousness, or his, they exist in and for both as knowledges ; and, even if they were not in his consciousness, or yours, they are in some consciousness as knowledges ; and that there is no reason why they should not exist as sense-perceptions for a consciousness so constituted as to perceive them sensibly. Talk to him of forces and of energies, and of the conservation of energy, of the imperceptible ultimate constituents of matter, of ether and electrons, and all the impalpable and imponderable postulates of physical science, and he will floor you with the same argument. Draw for him the picture of the aeons of past time. iv ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 135 of solar systems rolling iinperceived througli space, of lifeless seas, and of glacial ranges subsisting in their august and solitary unknownness before sense and thought were ever dreamed of, and he will repeat that the picture itself is not only drawn in lines of conscious- ness, but coloured deeply with its dyes ; and he will ask you where and when these spectatorless dramas could have been played, if not in space and time, which he maintains, not without a show of reason, to be thought-relations which need no duplicate ; and he will invite you in your turn to eliminate all possible forms of consciousness from the universe, and picture, if you can, how much would be left of it. Mr. McDougall cannot hope to disconcert him with that little joke about eating without an eater and without anything to eat, any more than you could shatter Kant with the old pragmatist wheeze of the thousand thalers ; both instances being drawn from a region below the level of the enquiry. He takes his stand on the firm ground that consciousness at any rate is " given " ; and if you are indiscreet enough to talk about eating, his obvious answer is that he alone among philosophers is not trying to eat his cake and have it too. He alone is unthreatened by either horn of a dilemma. And when angry with him, this time, you turn and ask him how he dare mention Kant, who was worth fifteen of him, he will refer you to Kant's Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysic, and swear that Kant was on his side all the time with his unity of apperception, only that he hadn't the courage to say so. He will add that Kant deliberately dished the Transcendental Realist (or Absolute Idealist) show in order to exalt Practical Reason at Pure Reason's expense, and prove himself the most moral man in Konigsberg. He will 136 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv suggest, not without plausibility, that if people would only read Kant's Prolegomena and his Critique of Judg- ment more, and the two Critiques of Reason a little less, they would see that there wasn't such a great difference between him and the Idealists after all. At this point you will perhaps remind him that Hegel's NaturpJiilosophie was not exactly a work its author could be proud of ; and that Naturphilosophie was ever the weak spot in the Idealist's armour ; but he will stand his ground, protesting that, if Hegel had not been so bent on keeping his chair at Berlin by bolstering up the doctrine of the Trinity, he would have been more in earnest with the " otherness " of Nature ; he would, that is to say, have seen that if Nature is to be the " other " of Thought, the more otherly she behaves the better, and that that is why Nature kicks against the Triple Dialectic. If you ask him what he will do, supposing, just supposing, it should be proved to-morrow that Nature did get in first, and that consciousness really was an illusory by-product, he might be staggered for a moment, but he would recover on the assurance that, even in this case, consciousness would come out on top ; seeing that, once the affair was known, the scientific explanation of it must necessarily be given in terms of consciousness. In fact, I don't think the prospect would really stagger him even for a moment. You cannot starve into surrender a system with such a prodigious " swallow," nor " down " an opponent with such an inexhaustible capacity for retort. Almost you could believe that Objective Idealism is the winning horse, and that you could do worse than back it. Almost, but not quite. The Objective Idealist's horse is a remarkably fine animal, and of an incomparable IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 137 speed. He can cover the greatest possible space in tlie smallest possible time, and you cannot " wind " bim. Tbat the Objective Idealist's wind is bis only merit is the opinion of most people who have tried to bold out under bis interminable recitative ; wbereas bis great and undeniable merit is bis almost infantile simplicity. But be is vulnerable in two places. Ask bim wbat be makes of unconscious tbinking, of sleep and of forgetting, which are small boles, but still palpable holes in the general web of consciousness, holes which can never be filled up by the device of calling them knowledges ; he ought to be able to say tbat no consciousness is lost for ever, but that things lost for us and forgotten are stored and remembered in the Absolute ; but unless he is an Absolute Idealist be cannot say it. Ask him what he makes of the great energies of instinct and of love, of will and purpose and action, of conscience and ethical values and aesthetic values, and he will tell you tbat he makes nothing of them except that they are states of consciousness like any other, and — if he is consistent — that one state of con- sciousness is as good, because it is as real as any other. He is either so absorbed in his vast vision of the world "arising in consciousness," so satisfied with his fairly easy reduction of everything in the universe to states of consciousness, or so intent on his series of unanswerable repartees, tbat be has never paused to consider what consciousness itself may be doing all the time, and bow its states are behaving among themselves. And his secret dilemma, which be will not acknow- ledge, is this : He has cut the Thing-in-Itself very cleverly out of the problem and packed all Reality into states of consciousness ; not my states, or your states, but all the states of all the consciousness there is ; so 138 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv that the sum of Reality will be simply the sum of the states. No state of consciousness, on his own showing, can be more real than any other state. But Totality, the sum of all states, must be more real than any one state or any number of states. So that his Reality is purely quantitative, and every lapse of consciousness, no matter whose or what — and these lapses are con- stantly occurring — will be a dead loss of reality to the Universe.. And unless he can show that this loss is made good somewhere and made good all the time, reality must suffer very seriously. In order to make good the loss, he must give up his assumption that all states of consciousness are equally real ; so that he may protect himself by the further assumption that what the Universe has lost in quantity it has gained in quality (which is impossible to prove). In this case he must either aban- don his theory of consciousness as sufficient reality in itself, or he must take refuge in an Absolute Conscious- ness. Say that, like a wise man, he takes sanctuary. Even then he is no better off. For he cannot contend that his Absolute is real qua Absolute. Consciousness being the only reality, his Absolute can be only real qua Consciousness. So that, strictly speaking, he had no right to summon it qua Absolute to his aid. But he has done it, and is now faced with the further dilemma. If Consciousness is only real qua Absolute, all those states of consciousness which, on his own showing, con- sisted chiefly, or entirely, of thought-relations are un- real. He cannot save himself by picking out the terms of the relation from the relation and declaring them real ; for it was just their capacity for entering into relations that entitled them to reality within his closed system. Nor can he purchase reality for them by merging them with his Absolute, except at the price of the Oneness to which he was pledged. For then he IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 139 has indeed found the true home of the irreducible term (shorn of its thought-relations), which must be held henceforth to exist within the Absolute with all the abso- lute reality of the Absolute ; yet, at one blow, he has deprived of reality his entire system of thought-relations. It is all up with the " diamond net," in which he had so skilfully ensnared the universe. He must now confess that appearance, not to say unreality in the form of relativity, enters largely into consciousness ; since Absolute Consciousness is the only Real. This appearance must either exist within Absolute Consciousness, infecting it with relativity ; besides setting up a schism inside it as against the " real " terms ; or it exists in states of consciousness outside it ; in which case Absolute Consciousness will be set up over against Relative Consciousness in a relation of absolute to relative ; when it is all up with the Absolute. Even the Self-Aloner is not in a more horrible position. He can swaUow the entire Universe, and the Absolute with it, in one sacramental mouthful, since at least he has given himself a " Self " to swallow with. Now, when we behold the collapse of one meta- physical system after another, and of one psycho- physical theory after another, and find the cause of the collapse in some inherent dilemma, three courses are open to us. We may abandon all systems and all theories hence- forth and for ever. This is the counsel of prudence and of caution. It is also the counsel of intellectual despair. Or we may try to build up another system and another theory out of all the old ruins on a new site. This is what has been done with metaphysical systems 140 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv from time immemorial, and done with perfect ease ; it merely involves shifting the material and rearranging the already generalized terms of the problem. But we cannot play in the same light-hearted fashion with psychophysical material, which has its own attachments and its own territory, and refuses obstinately to be shifted on to new ground. In any case, the chances are that our precious erection would have most of the bad points of its predecessors with a special and incurable shakiness of its own. Or we may go back to the old systems and the old theories, to see whether they had anything in common, and if so what, and try to find out the root of the dilemmas which were the cause of their collapse. We have got to face the fact that the psychophysical problem has complicated our problem very seriously. Supposing we find that all, without exception, have a common interest and a common end, and that their several dilemmas have a common root, we shall have gained, not perhaps enough to build with, but enough not to despair of building henceforth and for ever. Now it cannot be maintained that all metaphysical systems and theories seek unity, in the teeth — ^the really very sharp and ferocious teeth — of the New Realism which has gone out of its way to avoid it. The New Realism is out and out Pluralism. But certainly all the systems and all the theories we have considered yet have this thing in common — ^the quest for unity, some kind of unity, no matter what. The desired One may be matter, or it may be mind ; it may be the Ego ; it may be just Consciousness ; or it may be an unknown and unknowable tertium quid, Substance, Thing-in- Itself, the Absolute, the Unconscious, the Life-Force. It is implicit in the very dilemmas of the systems that have repudiated it. ^ IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 141 First, then, we have to see whether the dilemmas we have considered have a common root. , We have seen Vitalism fall from one dilemma into another, because of the ultimate reality it ascribed to matter, and the metaphysical importance it gave to action. It seeks unity, it seeks reality, but it cannot find it. And the root of its dilemma is that it looked for ultimate reality in a penultimate place. The dilemma of the thorough-paced materialist was that he could only save his materialism at the cost of the empirical law he based it on. Clearly he would not have fallen into that dilemma if he had not given to matter an ultimate reality, and conceived it as doing what, as a purely mechanical phenomenon, it was powerless to do ; besides giving to a purely physical law a metaphysical validity he should have been the last to claim for it. In other words, he looked for ultimate reality in the wrong place. The dilemma of the thorough-paced Subjective Idealist was that, in denying the existence of any reality outside himself, he cut away the ground from any possible proof of his own existence. Again the root of his dilemma was the quest of ultimate reality in the wrong place. The dilemma of the less consistent types of Parallel- liners was that, placing Reality in a mysterious third Something, expressly stated to be either Unconscious or not definable in terms of consciousness, they straight- way fell into either defining it plumply and plainly in terms of consciousness, or bringing it into such relation with consciousness as to compromise very seriously its neutrality. The root of their dilemma was that, while they distinguished clearly between appearance and reality, and recognized that body and soul, matter and mind. 142 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM iv brain processes and consciousness, are equally pheno- menal, they yet placed Reality in some Third Principle from which they had previously abstracted every sign and mark of the Real. They also were looking for Reality in the wrong place. The dilemma of the thorough -paced Parallel - liner was that, the harder he drove his system on two lines, the more it tended to leave them. And the root of the dilemma is again the same. In renouncing the quest of the Ultimate Reality he is obliged to ascribe to mere psychophysical processes the metapsychic and meta- physical functions they have not. If you cannot say that he, too, has looked for ultimate reality in the wrong place, since he was not looking for it at all, he has looked on at the usurpation of its place and power. Nor can it be said that Objective Idealism, or even that Absolute Idealism escapes ; in spite of its tremend- ous swallow. If the Vitalist makes too much of action, the Objective Idealist makes too little. His dilemma was that, having defined reality in such terms of con- sciousness as to eliminate all elements of consciousness other than thought-relations, he infected his Absolute with relativity, and was forced to deny to Thought the ultimate reality he had claimed for it in the beginning. The root of his dilemma is transparent. He, too, looked for ultimate reality in the wrong place, in con- sciousness held together by thought-relations and by nothing else. Animism is safe from dilemma only so long as it has not declared openly against metaphysical Monism. It would be unfair to press any argument hostile to Plural- ism against Animism as represented by Mr. McDougall, still more unfair to fasten on him an opinion he would disallow. His is clearly a case of suspended judgment. IV ULTIMATE QUESTIONS OF METAPHYSICS 143 So long as he forbears to take the final plunge into any metaphysical gulf I have no right to picture him as hovering on the brink. Leaving Animism, then, to its suspended judgment, we may say that, with this doubtful exception, all those systems and theories, psychophysical or metaphysical, had some one ultimate reality for their common end. And all, in mistaking one or other set of appear- ances for ultimate reality, or one part of reality for the Whole, have betrayed the common root of their dilemmas. All looked for Reality, looked for Unity, and looked for it in the wrong place. It would seem, then, that the universe is not built up from the Life-Force in action upon matter alone ; nor from Matter itself alone ; nor from the Individual Self alone ; nor from an Unknown and Unknowable alone ; nor from Body and Soul alone ; nor from Consciousness alone ; still less from Thought alone that lands you in the barren Absolute. But, if there were one term that would cover all these terms : Life-Force ; Matter ; Individual Self ; Substance ; Thing-in-Itself, the Unknown and Unknowable or possible Third ; Soul ; Consciousness ; Thought ; the Absolute ; one term which, besides covering all these, covers also that which has slipped away from them — Will and Love, that term, could we find it, would stand for the Reality we want. We want a term infinitely comprehensive, and perfectly elastic ; and a term that does some modest sacrifice to the Unknown. For the vice of those terms was that none was elastic, none was comprehensive ; but that some one excluded, inevitably, some other. If we could put that term in every place where we 144 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM w have used those others I do not think that the same dilemmas would arise. To the Unity and the Reality we are looking, for we can give no name but Spirit. This leaves a wide margin for the Unknown. PKAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 145 V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM The doctrine of the One has been worked so hard and so incessantly, and with such passionate variance among its adherents as to the nature of their " One," that the reaction against it was bound to set in, and the tendency of modern metaphysical thought is in favour of the Two or the Many. It was said that there are dilemmas latent in a system, of which the upholders of the system are more or less aware. But a system may have a dilemma lurking in it of which its upholder is not at all aware. Pragmatism and Humanism are such systems. At first sight they seem, like Psychophysical Parallelism, to be exceptions ; but they also are exceptions that pay an unconscious homage to the rule, an unconscious craving for the unity they spurn. The spurning, of course, was inevitable, by way ot a change. Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, ostensibly a Pluralist, subsides into a sort of ethical Dualism ; (31) while Mr. William James is all for a Pluralistic Universe. Even Mr. McDougall, who may be suspected of cherishing some sort of metaphysical principle up his sleeve (he has at least deprecated the imputation of metaphysical Dualism), even Mr. McDougall joins with the pragmatists 147 148 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v in robust derision of the monist, the slave of his " appetite for unity." They deny that the craving for unity is a universal craving, or even a legitimate hunger. They do not feel it ; no good pragmatist could feel it ; the vast majority of mankind are born utterly without it ; therefore it is clear that it is by no means a universal need. They do not go quite so far as to say that it doesn't exist, since certain absurd people do feel it ; but they let you see that they regard the sincerity of these people as more dubious than their absurdity. Besides this suggestion of insincerity, the unpopular monist is taunted with his supposed belief that his One is holier and " nobler " than the Many ; whereas what he does believe is that, as an ultimate metaphysical principle, it is more necessary. The driving wedge of the pragmatic humanist's attack on Monism is practically its argument ad hominem. " Humanism," Mr. Schiller says, " like Common Sense, of which it may claim to be the philosophic working-out, takes Man for granted as he stands, in the world of man's experience as it has come to seem to him." For, " even Pragmatism is not the final term of philosophic innova- tion : there is yet a greater and more sovereign principle now entering the lists, of which it can only claim to have been the forerunner and vicegerent." This is only an inspired way of saying that Pragmatism lands you in Humanism, as indeed it does. As for the principles the miserable monist deals in — " Pure Being, the Idea, the Absolute, the Universal I " — what are they " but pitiful abstractions from experience, mutilated shreds of human nature, whose real value for the understanding of life is easily outweighed by the living experience of an honest man ? " (32) There you are ; could anything be plainer ? If Man is not the Measure of all things, an honest man, V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 149 besides being the noblest work of God, is the measure of metaphysical truth — and no other sort of man is. If the monist does not like the turn affairs are taking, he has nobody but himself to thank for it. Now the honest man, the plain man, the man in the street, Vhomme sensuel moyen, to whom Pragmatism makes its plain common-sense appeal, does not reckon among his familiar interests any conspicuous appetite for unity. He can grasp a working hypothesis applied to everyday life ; he can see the point of the little joke about Pot-and-Pantheism ; but you may " work " with two or five hundred ultimate principles for all he cares. And in the last resort it is on his utter indiffer- ence to the event that the pragmatist is banking when he frames his neat arguments against unity as a meta- physical ultimate and a necessity of metaphysical thought. It may turn out that unity is no such necessity ; but surely the honest man's unawareness of it is neither here nor there ? Ten to one the honest man will be equally unaware of the unity of consciousness until some psychologist or metaphysician explains the point to him ; but when he sees it, ten to one if he doesn't tell his informant to go — where bad metaphysicians do go, he will let him know that he could have told him that, in fewer words and with less trouble. For in matters that he does understand the honest man is very far from lacking in a sense of unity. Where the pragmatist will seem to the plain man to score is in taking the existence of the Many for granted "as it stands." The Many undoubtedly are there, and their existence does not, on the first blush of it, suggest the existence of the One. And the assumed existence of the One does not, in itself, help you to under- stand the existence of the Many. 150 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v This statement sounds like common sense to the plain man. And as long as you are dealing with an abstract One, and an abstract Many (for the pluralist' s Many is every bit as abstract as the monist's One), it is a true enough statement. But the humanist and pragmatist do not deal in abstractions. They deal with the Many of honest human experience, the Many as they stand. And the monist might retort : " Does the Many, then, as it stands, explain its own existence ? Do not all attempts to wring its secret from it end in generalizations which are unions and unities, not suggested by the Many as they stand, yet irresistible ? Did not the high priest of Pragmatism declare that : ' The most important sort of union that obtains among things, pragmatically speaking, is their generic unity ' ? And that : ' With no two things alike in the world, we should be unable to reason from our past experiences to our future ones ' ? And that : ' Absolute generic unity would obtain if there were one summum genus under which all things without exception could be eventually subsumed ' ? (William James, Pragmatism, pp. 139-140.) And does not Mr. Schiller declare that Matter is a ' baseless abstraction ' {Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 69) ; that ' the development of Matter and Spirit proceeds along converging lines ; and that by the time the supersensible is reached, a single reality will be seen to embrace the manifestations of both ' ? " {Humanism, p. 298.) So that unity would seem to have even a pragmatic sanction. Under all the pragmatist's cheerful appeals to the honest man there lies, half suppressed, a still more serious argument. It turns on the combined unthink- ability and non-existence of the One without the Many. But as the Many is equally unthinkable and equally non-existent without the One, this argument cuts both PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 151 ways. Either side gains its advantage from the insidious substitution of the relative, predicative, quantitative, numerical " one " for the Absolute One of the monist. You might argue in this way that one pragmatist is unthinkable without many pragmatists, and one God (if there is a God) without many gods. The trouble is that, while we are sure of the pragmatists, we are not sure of the God. And this is precisely where the prag- matic pluralist' s argument lands him ; and it is where he wishes to land, and always meant to land. For by insisting on the patent relativity of the one and the many, he is still sure of an easy victory when he works it the other way round : Many pragmatists are un- thinkable without one pragmatist, and many gods without one god ; a proposition where the one prag- matist and the one god figure as the first units in a numerical series, which lands you again in palpable plurality. So that, by this surreptitious substitution of unit for unity, and of quantity for not- quantity, the pluralist gets plurality both ways, at either end of his proposition. But all that has happened is that, by his surreptitious substitution, he has insidiously transferred the tainted relativity of his predicates, one and many, to his sub- stantive God ; or, let us say, the One Reality. And when he goes on to argue that unity is unthinkable and non - existent without multiplicity, the two-edged nature of the argument reveals itself at once. Multi- pHcity is unthinkable and non-existent without unity. Neither side has the advantage ; but this time the pluralist doesn't get his multiplicity both ways. For unity, in the monist's sense of one all-embracing Reality, is certainly not the first number in a numerical series. It is now pretty evident that both sides are dealing, 152 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM not with the necessities of thought but with the barest abstractions. But when the monist contends that his One is not the divisible, multipHable, numerical " one " of mere quantity, but the Absolute One of self-contained and self-conditioned Being, the pragmatist turns on him and exposes the relative nature of his Absolute. If all things are one in the Absolute, then the Absolute, being all things, is not one but many. If the relative is not the Absolute, then the Absolute is not all things. Again, if the Absolute is not all things it is not the Absolute ; because it will then stand in relation both to the things it is not and to the things it is, and thus cease to be Absolute. It holds its thin prestige of Godhead or of cosmic unity at the cost of all god-like or cosmic attri- butes ; for the moment it begins, either to be anything or to do anything, it needs must " enter into relations." At every turn the Absolute of the monist must face that awful and incredible " self-diremption," which makes of it a sort of Judas Iscariot in the potter's field of Philosophy, a Judas without any bowels. The sad process of the Absolute is the suicide of the eternal through time. The Absolute, in short, is the most flagrant instance of an empty, impotent, adjectival abstraction — and a negative abstraction at that — ^posing as a cosmos or God. And Being is in no better case. What is Being, anyhow, but an abstraction of the copula "is," by which predicates are hooked on to their substantives ? It is hard indeed to see wherein either is holier, or nobler, or more convincing than any dual or any plural principle. The pragmatic pluralist can at least show that his plurality is concrete, that it is something, and that it IS given. V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 153 It must be owned that this form of the pragmatic pluraHst's attack sounds very formidable. All the same I think the monist's monotonous answer meets it. The driving point of the pluralist' s wedge is the assump- tion that the relativity which is at the bottom of all the dilemmas, and which holds good of the world of appearances, holds equally good of the world of Reality ; and that, while you may and indeed must have dilemmas in the sub-metaphysical world, they should be strictly excluded from your metaphysics. And the Absolutist's answer is : Quite so. The sub-metaphysical world is the very birthplace and the home of dilemmas, which is precisely the reason why I am driven to assume a better and a safer one. And to the pragmatist's sinister assurances that his metaphysical world is not safer, that it is not really half so safe, his reply is that the prag- matist wilfully ignores his point, and for purely pragmatic reasons. His point, which he reiterates with sickening persistency, is that what appears as a dilemma in the sub-metaphysical world is not a dilemma in the meta- physical one ; dOubt of appearances here is the very foundation of certainty there, and denial of unreality is its crown. But the good pragmatist will have none of this. I^ doesn't matter what you happen to be denying, denial is bad Pragmatism. "Du bist der Geist der stets verneint." He is desperately afraid of any hand being laid on the actualities he loves. Mr, Schiller protests against Mr. Bradley's " conclusion that everything which is ordinarily esteemed real, anything which any one can know or care about, is pervaded with unreality, is ' mere appearance ' in a greater or less degree of de- gradation." He finds that " this antithesis has become 154 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v to me a considerable nuisance, and also, it must be con- fessed, a bit of a bore." In the heat of Pragmatism he forgets that it was his Mephistopheles who tempted Faust to say to the fleeting moment, " Verweile doch, du bist so schon," and that the soul's perdition lies in confusing the passing loveliness with the Eternal and the First Fair. But, after all, what has Mr. Bradley done ? He has never, so far as I know, said a word about '' degradation," or denied that an appearance may be a very noble and beautiful and even useful thing. He has said nothing to destroy pragmatic " values." The pragmatist is annoyed with the antithesis, which seems to him to exalt Absolute Reality at the expense of appearances ; though he knows perfectly well that, since appearances are " there," since they have contrived somehow to get in first, they are not a bit the poorer for the metaphysical excesses of Mr. Bradley's Absolute. Yet the pragmatist pays homage to that principle in his heart when he ascribes absolute reality to the things he knows and cares about. And under all his Pragmatism lies the monstrous assumption that the honest man's knowing and caring are the measure of all the knowledge and all the passion in the universe. Of Mr. Bradley's Absolute he says, pragmatically and humanistically : " If It be not fair for me, what care I how fair It be ? " Now, in the first copy of Appearance and Reality that came into my hands, fifteen years ago, I found that the owner had written on the fly-leaf these words of Saint Augustine : " Thou hast made us for Thyself, and our hearts are restless till they rest in Thee." So that somebody seems to have cared about Mr. Bradley's Absolute. PKAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 155 I do not know anything about the state of Mr. Bradley's affections, or whether he has more or less " heart " than a pragmatist ; I am quite sure he has more imagination. He would probably find it no end of a nuisance and a bore if all the nice, useful things the pragmatist knows and cares about turned out to be " absolutely real." But he has reasons for his antithesis which are not pragmatic. Assume, as he does, that Man is not the measure of all things, but only of some things, and that even those things are not as they appear to him, and you will not worry about dilemmas. In a world of appearances a few dilemmas more or less will not very greatly matter. But assume, as the pragmatist does, that things are as they appear, and a dilemma becomes a very serious affair indeed. Assume an ultimate Dual- ism or Pluralism ; then, since this is the only world that Pragmatism allows us to know and care about, the only world it allows us to assume, there is no hope of a solution in the " highest synthesis " of another. The pluralistic pragmatist abandons the hope of any highest synthesis, and is happy ; because his genius, his Will-to-believe, inclines him towards Humanism. The absolutist claims that the perfection of his principle is its capacity to swallow all dilemmas. It is what it is there for. Observe that there is an implicit charge of arrogance in all that the pragmatist says about the absolutist. As if the absolutist had not made the Great Surrender, and as if it were he who had made human thought and human emotion, and human conduct and morality, " as they stand," binding on the transcendent and everlasting Keality ; as if he had not stripped himself bare for his adventure into the " untrodden country." It is an adventure on which he has staked his all. 156 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v This recklessness of his is precisely what the pragma- tist has against him. It is, you see, a question of " values." Either your relations with the Unseen are good business, or they are nothing. The pragmatist feels that the absolutist is not getting back his money's worth. He is buying in the dearest market and selling in the cheapest. What is worse, he is sending good money after bad. Instead of driving a profitable bargain with Reality, as any sensible man would, he is plunging. And Pragmatism abhors the plunger. The Absolute, in pragmatic language, " does not pay." How can a " pitiable abstraction," a " mutilated shred," even of " human " nature, be made to pay ? Now there are several ways in which the absolutist may meet this common -sense attitude. He may say that it is not a question of values, but of truth or false- hood, of sheer logical compulsion or the reverse, and that logic drives him to the assumption of the Absolute. He may say that, whether the pragmatist likes it or not, the conception of the Absolute is not a mutilated shred of human experience, but a necessity of thought. It is not to be accounted for by any description of the way in which the human psyche arrives at conception in the course of its evolution. It is not obtained by picking human experience to pieces. So far as it is " obtained " at all, it is obtained by testing all the " ultimate " principles of empiricism and finding ^hem wanting. And they are found wanting precisely because they are — not absolute. This, his opponent says triumphantly, is making human thought the measure with a vengeance. You see, you cannot get away from Humanism after all. It is nothing of the kind, the absolutist retorts. You are simply quibbling. My principle is expressly stated as transcending human thought, in so far as thought is V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 157 human, yours is not. It is presupposed in human experience, but — unless we are agreed to include the Beatific Vision as part of human experience — it is not found there. He may also say that the Absolute is under no obligation to pay him, and that he is not looking for payment. Or, if he takes the line that he has faith in the Absolute, and believes that it will pay him in the long run, I d^^n't see what the pragmatist is to do about it. He is pledged to the principle of the Will-to-believe, and the absolutist's Will-to-believe is as good as his. In any case, it is the pragmatist who begs the question when he says that the Absolute is an abstraction. So it is, from his point of view. When you have pinned your whole faith to the plump reality of a pluralistic universe, strictly conditioned, the Absolute must needs be the emptiest of abstractions. But even an uncompromising absolutist like Mr. Bradley would claim that his principle is the most concrete of all concrete things, since, on the theory, it has swallowed up the whole Pluralistic Universe of the pragmatist, and is ready to swallow as many more as fast as the pragmatist produces them. For his is not the frivolous contention that his Absolute has merely the largest swallow. As M. Bergson distinguishes between Pure Time and spurious, popular clock-time, he distinguishes between the true Absolute, which is the Self-conditioned, and the spurious, popular Absolute, the Unconditioned tout court, which he grants you is nothing better than a negation, and liable to be bowled over by the first robust " condition " that comes its way. He distinguishes between the true Infinite, which includes the finite, whose image is the circle, and the spurious Infinite, which is the finite all over again, the infinitely divisible, the process ad in- finitum, whose image is the line. There is no end to 158 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v the dilemmas of the Infinite if you insist on tainting it with the unrealities of space and time. If you taunt the absolutist with his everlasting negations, he can retort that the negation of a negation is not a negation, and that it is up to you to prove the reality of things, " as they stand," since you care so much about their status. There is one metaphysical situation, and only one, which would give rise to the dilemma which the pragma- tist urges against him. He will agree that if the situation were such that his absolute Reality were relative to another absolute Reality, the two absolutes would then be relative, and in their mutual relativity would kill each other. Which is his reason for contending that there are not two absolute Realities or many absolute Realities, but one Absolute Reality. But as for his Absolute " entering into relations," like an Honest Man entertaining a business proposition, he denies that it does anything of the kind. It could only enter into relations if it were one term of the relation only ; but it is both terms, and the relation ; for, on the theory, it is all that is. Its function, as Absolute, is to maintain itself and manifest itself through things in relation, and, as One, to maintain and manifest itself in multiplicity. If you appeal to the Law of Contradic- tion, and protest that two contradictory propositions cannot be upheld seriously by any sane mind, he can- point triumphantly to the fact that they can be, and are, united, both in conception and in actuality. What God hath joined, let no pragmatist put asunder. In short, the pragmatic pluralist finds multiplicity everywhere he goes and unity nowhere apart from it ; while the absolute monist has to go no farther than his own consciousness to find the unity which is always, so to speak, top dog. And there would not be a pin to V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 159 choose between them if the absolutist did not mean rather more than he actually commits himself to sapng, and if the pragmatist had not a sharper appetite for unity than he cares to own to. For the student of metaphysics there may be some- thing nobly serious in this desperate contention, con- ducted on one side with scorn and derision, and on the other with imperturbable aplomb. But, to the student of literature, born without any metaphysical prejudices, it looks as if each side were criticizing the other with the crudest literalism, a literalism which he would be ashamed to bring to the interpretation of a classic. To him it seems that, under the interminable webs of reasoning the absolutist wraps his meaning up in, his meaning is simplicity and clarity itself. He is trying to say that Spirit is absolute, a law unto itself from beginning to end of the world-process (if it has a be- ginning and an end). The whole performance, as he sees it, is neither one-sidedly psychic nor one-sidedly physical, but is one spiritual act. He may think that he arrives at this conclusion by a subtle dialectic, but he really jumps to it by that spiritual recognition we call analogy. Jumping from what goes on in his own self, he knows of no elan vital to compare with the elan vital of spiritual energy. For, raise either psychic energy or physical energy to their highest pitch of intensity, and you get Spirit ; you get something that, either way, is immaterial. Whether this is what the absolutist really means, to the student of literature, who has his business among the high intensities of art, this is what he ought to mean. And so far as both Humanism and Vitalism admit this, Humanism and Vitalism are good enough for him. And the absolutist is too densely literal if he cannot 160 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v see that the pragmatist's plural principles are every bit as spiritual as his one ; with, of course, his private reservation that, so far as they are spiritual, they are one. The rest is an absurd juggling with terms of arithmetic which, on either theory, do not apply. In short, the unprejudiced student oi literature cannot for the life of him see what the two are worrying about, and why they should not come to some arrange- ment. Pragmatism, if you fancy it, for the affairs of life, and Monism in its proper place. But we renounced this light-hearted attitude in the beginning when we decided for the rigour of the game. We are now committed to the metaphysical adventure, and must see it through. There is one more consideration which may bring a strange and unexpected food to the appetite for unity. The pragmatist has another and a stronger line of argument, the moral line. He says the blatant Pantheism of the monist lands him in moral catastrophe. If his One, his Absolute, his God, is all things. He is evil as well as good. The pragmatist cannot face the awful consequences of what is to him an immoral God. If God's All-mightiness is incompatible with His Goodness, then for God's sake give up the All-mightiness and let us, at any rate, have moral peace. Because man hates evil and shrinks from pain, there must he a Dual principle ; there must be Another, the scapegoat of a God not quite almighty, upon whom all the evil in the world may be fastened. Or there must be Others, a host of Evil Ones, abominable spirits that have existed in their abomination, if not from all eternity, then from inconceivable time. If you ask how and why abominations should spring up spontaneously in the imiverse, the pragmatic humanist PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 161 cannot enlighten you. He can only point to the exist- ence of evil in the world as it is and has been since man knew it or since it knew man. We can only ignore it, Mr. William James says, by " taking a moral holi- day." We can only meet it, Mr. Schiller says, by this assumption of the incompetent God. The Infinite and the Absolute are up against man's morality and his dis- like of suffering, and they must go. God is only infinite in his good intentions, which presumably pave the hell of the Evil One. God, though infinitely well- meaning, is powerless to prevent this Evil One or those abominable spirits. But better, thrice better, that he should be powerless than that he should be immoral ; for he is not so powerless that he cannot struggle. The pragmatist is happy in that he can point to an actual state of struggle in the cosmic order. Given a Good Principle, struggling with an Evil One, there is always a chance that he may overcome him in the end ; that evil may be swallowed up in good. Really, this is not an unfair statement of the prag- matic humanist's problem and his heroic position. But, lest I should be suspected of loading the dice in favour of my monist, I will let Mr. Schiller state it in his own words. (Mr. Schiller rejects Dualism, although it " seemed able to preserve the all-important distinction between good and evil, for which Monism left no room." Dual- ism is " virtually disposed of with rejection of the ultimate difference of Matter and Spirit.") " The real battle has to be fought out between the champions of the One and of the Many, between Monism and Pluralism. And, contrary to the opinions of most previous philosophers, we are inclined to hold that the Many is a far more important principle than the One, and that Pluralism, consistently inter- preted and properly explained, is the only possible answer to M 162 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM the ultimate question of ontology." {Riddles of the Sphinx, pp. 350, 351.) " The finiteness of God depends on the very attributes that make him really God, on His personahty, on His being, like all real beings, an individual existence. God is one among the Many, their supreme ruler and aim, and not the One underlying the Many, The latter theory makes the Many inexplicable and the One indifferent. God, therefore, must not be identified with Nature. For if by Nature we mean the All of things, then Nature is the possibihty of the interaction of the ultimate exist- ences, and of these God is one. And the existence of these ultimate existences explains also why God can be finite ; He is hmited by the co-existence of other individuals. And from His relations to these other existences, which we have called spirits (chap. ix. § 31) arise all the features of our world which were so insoluble a problem to Monism — its Becoming, its process, and its Evil." (Ibid. p. 361.) "... though Matter, being nothing in itself, cannot be the principle of Evil, and is not in itself evil, it is yet characteristic of an essentially imperfect order of things : it is, as it were, the outward indication and visible reflection of Evil. For Evil is, hke all things, ultimately psychical, and what is evil about Matter is the condition of the spirits which require the restraint of Matter ... if evil, i.e., inharmonious spirits were permitted the full realization of their conscious powers, they would be able to thwart and delay, if not to prevent the attainment of the divine purpose of the world process . . . the lower existences, i.e. the less harmonized, have their consciousness limited and repressed by material organization, in order that their power for evil may be practically neutrahzed, and that in the impotence of their stupidity they may have Httle influence on the course of events." {Ibid. chap. ix. § 31, p. 303.) Observe, in passing, that, though Matter is " char- acteristic of an essentially imperfect order of things," though it is " the outward indication and visible re- flection of Evil," it is the weapon in the hands of the ferociously good God (apparently the only weapon that he has). It is " the check upon consciousness " : a V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 163 sort of poison gas which the Good God sends into the enemy's lines, to smother and stupefy and reduce to impotence the Evil Ones. '• We start with a number of spiritual beings struggling against and opposing the Divine Power, which may overpower, but cannot destroy them. What is to be done ? To leave them in the full possession of their powers and intelligence would be to give them the power to do evil, to reduce the spiritual order to a chaotic play of wild antagonisms." (For, after all the fuss the humanist has kicked up about the existence of Evil, it is " practically neutralized ! ") To return to the Evil Ones : " To destroy them is impossible. But it is possible to do the next best thing, viz., to reduce their consciousness to the verge of non-existence. In such a state of torpor it would be possible to induce them to give an all but unconscious assent to the laws of the cosmos, and gradually to accustom them to the order which the divine wisdom had seen to be the best. . . ." (Ibid. p. 362.) That is the Humanist's solution : a moral God, one against many, armed with lumps of Matter. He cannot destroy his enemies (besides, it would be immoral to destroy them), but he can knock them senseless. So, you see, he hasn't done so badly after all. " For to impress on fools and beasts even a dim sense of the rationality of the scheme of things, is a task more difficult by far than to prevail over the dissent of superhuman intelHgences." I do not know why it should be more difficult, except that Mr. Schiller says it is, and he ought to know about his own God. Anyhow, these are the triumphs of the Good God. The rationality of the cosmos is proved by a knock-you-down argument which prevails with fools and beasts ! Well, well, the problem of Evil is a very hard one. 164 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v But this particular solution overlooks two rather glaring facts, the fact that stupidity causes most of the moral evil that we suffer from ; so that by deliberately causing stupidity the good God becomes a cause of evil. There is really no sense in which stupidity can be made out to be a good thing. The other fact is the behaviour of Matter, which is the cause of most of the physical pain we suffer. On Mr. Schiller's theory. Matter at any rate seems to be under the control of the Good God — why, then, if he is all that the humanist would like him to be, does he allow Matter to get so intolerably out of hand ? You would have thought, that (even if the Evil Ones can dispose of war material, and have all the best designs for armaments) He might have put down, for instance, earthquakes. An earthquake, after all, is not an ultimate spiritual, existence. But no, his efficiency is limited in that direction, too. Oddly enough, it is this well-meaning but incom- petent God of Humanism that has caught the fancy of Mr. H. G. Wells. Mr. Wells has given to the conception a poetry and a dignity which is not its own, but he has not succeeded in disguising either its inherent absurdity or the moral hysteria to which it owes its being. " Mr. Britling's " son has been killed in the Great War, and " Mr. Britling " — type of all Britishers and honest men— realizes, contrary to his usual way of thinking, that there is a God. But not a God who " lets these things happen." A God, amiable and inefficient, who can't, for the life of him, help them happening. " Letty," who has lost her " Teddy," insists that he mMst let them happen. " Or why do they happen ? " Mr. Wells, like Mr. Schiller, tells us why. " ' No,' said Mr. Britling ; ' it is the theologians who must answer that. They have been extravagant about God. They have had silly absolute ideas — that he is all-powerful. That PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 165 he's omni-everything. But the common sense of men knows better. Every real rehgious thought denies it. After all, the real God of the Christians is Christ, not God Almighty ; a poor mocked and wounded God nailed on a cross of matter. . . . Some day he will triumph. . . . But it is not fair to say that he causes all things now. It is not fair to make out a case against him. You have been misled. It is a theologian's folly. God is not absolute ; God is finite. ... A finite God who struggles in his great and comprehensive way as we struggle in our weak and silly way — Who is with us — that is the essence of all real religion. ... I agree with you so — Why ! if I thought there was an omnipotent God who looked down on battles and deaths and all the waste and horror of this war — able to prevent these things — doing them to amuse himself — I would spit in his empty face. . . .' " {Mr. Britling sees it Through, p. 397.) If Mr. Britling had left it "at that " we might have been sorry for him. But when the flood of hysteria subsides, he blunders up against the Open Secret. " ' God is within Nature and necessity. Necessity is a thing beyond God — beyond good and ill, beyond space and time, a mystery, everlastingly impenetrable. God is nearer than that. Necessity is the outermost thing, but God is the innermost thing. Closer is he than breathing and nearer than hands and feet. He is the Other Thing than this world. Greater than Nature or Necessity, for he is a spirit and they are blind, but not con- trolling them. . . . Not yet. . . . ' " {Ibid. loc. cit.) " Necessity is the outermost thing, but God is the innermost thing." When Mr. Wells comes to see that Necessity is an illusion, and that space and time, and our good and ill, are not absolute and ultimate realities, and that the " innermost thing " is the Real Thing, he will be at the end of his Research Magnificent. Mean- while, he has shown his wisdom in not attempting any picture of the actual procedure of the good and inefficient God in his duel with Evil. 166 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v You cannot very well state the humanist's position in any terms that will not make manifest the absolutist's advantage ; but I think Mr. Schiller's own statement shows it, if anything, better than mine. The monist's reply to this innocent Manicheism is that it is the pragmatic humanist and not he who is deifying Evil, since he has endowed it with ultimate reality. He will suggest that an Absolute that is both good and evil (since the pragmatist will have it so), is not evil, even for one fleeting moment of his infinite existence ; and that, for that matter, he is just as capable, in fact ten times more capable, of bringing good out of evil than a God, desperately moral, but of im- perfect power ; since the Absolute as immanent is the world-process, and as transcendent is also everything that may be left over and above it ; that, if there is to be a final victory, if the Evil Principle, or Evil Principles, are ultimately to be swallowed up in the Good, you have an ultimate unity ; that, with his struggles and his victories and his ultimates and finals, the humanist is giving a metaphysical reality to time that time cannot be made to bear ; and that, since there is to be a final swallowing, and a final unity, he might just as well have had it first as last. Here, I think, it must be admitted, the absolutist scores. The pragmatist has betrayed his secret appetite for unity. His evil must be swallowed up in good. If the pragmatist is not playing with words, if there is to be a real swallowing and a real assimilation, the two must be potentially one. It does not matter whether his resulting unity be a moral unity, or a metaphysical unity ; unity it is, and union and At-one-ment ; and really he might as well have had it first as last. The absolutist does not take a " moral holiday." He does not deny, and he does not ignore, the serious V PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 167 and bewildering difficulty of the problem of evil. It is a difiiculty from any point of view. But I cannot see that it bears with a more awful weight on the theory of an immanent and transcendent God, in whose reality evil, as such, has no meaning that we can recognize, than on these two alternative theories of a Dual Principle or of Plural Principles. Humanism either exalts Evil, in all the prestige of an independent metaphysical reality, or it poisons life at its source by fixing it in matter, which should be, of all things, innocent if life is to be kept holy. Or if it does not fix it there, it fixes it in the human will, which is even worse, besides not being altogether true. The one theory that it does crush, you would think, should be the old theory of the absconding deity, God the Creator, who is above all things. Blessed for ever ; who sits outside creation, with no part or lot in its conflict or its suffering. And yet it does not crush it utterly. Incompetent as he is, the humanist God, the God of the cosmic arena, has a certain trait in common with the God who sits above it. " Re- sistance," we are told, the resistance of matter, the resistance of the hard, recalcitrant Evil Ones, is " neces- sary " to the putting forth of his power, to the heroic spectacle of his prowess. Who designed this accordance of evil with the requirements of the gladiatorial God ? Not the Evil Ones, you may be very sure. Suspicion falls upon the gladiator. He has engineered the existence of Evil to gratify his taste for combat and for personal display. But the immanent Spirit of the absolutist truly bears his part, he truly labours and suffers, in so far as he is all Nature and all mankind. He has literally shirked nothing. Von Hartmann's one merit as a thinker was that he saw that God the Creator is the intolerable God. If he had had a little more metaphysical vision, and a 168 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v little less moral cowardice, he would not have called upon man to save God, to deliver the Absolute, by bringing the world-process as quickly as possible to an end. He would have called to him rather to save God by saving himself, by behaving as much like a spiritual being as possible. In no other way can he hasten the end of the world-process — the tendency of all spirits towards self-determination, after the likeness of the Absolute Spirit in whom they live and move and have their being. So that Pragmatism and Humanism, in spite of their closeness to life, and their admirable freedom from the bonds of system, have broken out into a dilemma almost as bad as any inherent in the systems. In the very act of whitewashing its deity so as to bring him up to the parochial standard of purity, Humanism has lapsed into the unity it repudiated. Horn one. Horn two, which is a moral point, is not quite so obvious ; but it will become so if the situation is examined. The Good God, being good, is opposed to the evil He did not cause but cannot help. He must, therefore, struggle against it that his goodness may be proved. If he refuses the heroic combat he is not a good God. If, having entered the arena, he does not come off conqueror he is not, he cannot be, so very good. If he conquers, the Evil One is not destroyed, but merged in Good ; and you have, not two principles, or many principles, but one principle. And this is moral Monism. The humanist, you see, is not quite so naif as the Semitic theologies that have produced him. Uncom- promising in the face of his moral dilemma, he boldly throws over God's Almightiness so that his All-goodness may be kept intact. On no account must he be identi- fied with the trivialities and absurdities and iniquities of existence. He should not, for instance, be held PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 169 responsible for the presence in our universe of " so many millions of fleas." Mr. Schiller seems to suggest that it is Mr. Bradley who should be responsible for the many millions. It does not occur to him that they might have been designed for the express purpose of demonstrating that man is not the sole end of the universe, and that humanist man is not the measure of all things, but that the humblest organism may have its point of view, and its right to a say in the matter of existence. Having relieved his principle of its worst embarrass- ments, the humanist has now got God almost, but not quite, as moral as himself. But he has not avoided All- in- Allness ; he has simply conceived it in the form of human morality. Human morality, evolved by pro- cesses of alternate conflict and readjustment from various instincts of desire and repugnance adapted to the social and physical conditions of the inhabitants of this planet, this precious morality of his is what he solemnly refers to transcendent Reality. And this, mind you, after jibbing at any identification of deity with the absurder details of our daily life. And mark the dilemma that arises from an honest man's attempt to whitewash God. After all, he can only save his moral whitewash at the expense of his Pluralism, and his Pluralism at the expense of his white- wash. And, even then, he has not saved his Good God entirely from the suspicion of complicity in Evil. The Good God challenges, provokes, demands resistance. He is no more All-good than he is All-powerful. There is another very serious objection that the absolutist might make. The pragmatist's helpless and unhappy God is not good at all, any more than he is all- powerful. For, on the pragmatist's theory, the good is the useful ; it is what pays. The good God, then, is 170 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v the useful God, the paying God ; and Evil is swallowed up in usefulness, in payment. So that Evil, also, is what pays in the long run. It would seem, after all, then, that unity, in some form or other, is a necessity of thought. If the appetite for it is frustrated in one place it will break out in another. It is implicit in the very dilemmas of the systems that have repudiated it. But, to be just to Pragmatism and Humanism, they have deserved well of philosophy in reminding it of things it is apt to forget ; little things, like Will and action and moral conduct, which Idealism really renders little or no account of. And I do not think either pragmatists or humanists claim to have established a metaphysic. Concerned as they are with the human will and with action, and with moral conduct, they aim at something which they believe devoutly to be nobler and better and more useful — they conceive themselves to be much more profitably engaged in laying the ethical foundations of the Universe. They do not worry about the foundations of Ethics ; they worry about the ethical behaviour of the Universe. Whatever the Universe does or does not conform to, it must conform to human and pragmatic ideas of morality. But the Universe is nothing if not ironic. And in the fate of Pragmatism and Humanism there is a peculiar and a perfect irony. They have been taken at their word ; and, as they have insisted on putting conduct first, and Ethics first, or Ethics, if anything, a little after conduct, and on ignoring everything in the Uiliverse that does not square with conduct, or account for conduct, or presuppose conduct, that is not related to conduct, or referable in some way to conduct, they are left, in consequence of their vast repudiations, without PRAGMATISM AND HUMANISM 171 any ethical ground for Ethics ; and therefore without any ethical ground for conduct at all. " Thought- relations " are irrelevant to conduct, therefore " thought- relations " must go. Relativity is fatal to ethical conduct, therefore relativity must go. The Infinite and the Absolute are indifferent to ethical conduct, therefore the Infinite and the Absolute must go. Monism will not account for ethical conduct. Monism is even in- compatible with ethical conduct, therefore Monism must most emphatically go. So that, though Pragmatic Humanism does not claim to have established a meta- physic, it does claim to have destroyed one, which is to be metaphysical with a vengeance. And it does not seem to have occurred to either Pragmatism or Humanism that a dead metaphysic could revenge itself in its turn. It did not and it could not occur to them that in this clean sweep of non- moralities. Morality itself must go. The pragmatist's eyes are fixed on conduct and the useful, the paying results of conduct ; and the humanist's eyes are fixed on the origins of conduct and the end of conduct, and neither have paused to ask themselves the one question that is vital and crucial for Ethics : Is there anything that is good in itself, apart from its results or its origin, or its end ? The logical outcome of Pragmatism is that the good is what pays ; the logical outcome of Humanism, with its evolutionary Ethics, is that the good is the pleasant or the desirable or the beneficial. With all their air of brand-new modernity, neither Pragmatism nor Humanism have added anything to the Utilitarianism of the middle nineteenth century, nor to the Hedonism of the year 400 B.C. Pragmatism wears a Quaker's hat, and Humanism has vine-leaves in its hair. Their quest is not for Ultimate Reality, but for steam-engines and motor cars and synthetic 172 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM v chemistry ; or for Tango, if that is pleasant, desirable, and beneficial. But it is only fair to add that their dilemmas are of the unconscious kind, and that they have made no specious promises. They say : I find this Dualism or this Pluralism, and I leave it at that. It does not make a tidy universe, but I can't help it. It's not my job to tidy up the Universe. And I prefer things left like that with their ends hanging all loose ; it is more picturesque, more like Nature and like real life. VI THE NEW REALISM 173 VI THE NEW REALISM We have seen that, after heroic struggles, neither Pragmatism nor Humanism succeeded in shaking itself wholly free of the abhorred unity. In their exclusive concern with conduct and morality both betray a strong subjective bias fatal to the pretensions of a philosophy that is out against subjectivism in all its forms. We have seen that their too great zeal for goodness and the ultimate triumph of goodness defeated its own end, and left them with a universe on their hands in which Goodness had neither metaphysical sanction nor logical ground, and, so far from being a reality, is not even that which to every pragmatist and humanist is a miserable makeshift for reality— an idea. I had got so far when it was pointed out to me that to deal faithfully with those philosophies is to slay the slain, and that my time would be very much better employed in considering the New Realism, which has nothing in common with them but its abhorrence of unity. It was also pointed out to me that the claims of the New Realism are so well founded that there is no likelihood or even possibility of Monism raising its head again, and that the mysterious Snark, " ultimate reality," has disappeared from the universe. I gathered 175 176 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi that, this time, there can be no more temporizing, no more fooling about with relativity ; no more fencing and dodging, and no more playing fast and loose with the law of contradiction ; no more sheltering of reality behind appearances ; no more conjuring with the unity of consciousness ; in short, that all the little games of Monism are played out. It is a case of either swallowing the New Realism, or being swallowed, with no possible doubt as to the actual issue. There is nothing for it but to approach the monster with as bold a front as is possible for a devout monist inwardly quivering with fear. It must be confessed that he is in some danger. For the New Realism is before all things a mathematical method ; and it cannot be said that every monist is as strong in mathematics as by the nature of his case he ought to be. Still, he will do himself no good by ignoring the gravity of his position. He has got to look the thing squarely in the face, or go for ever quivering with fear of what mathe- matics may do to him. Now he cannot look it squarely in the face until he has stripped himself of every prejudice that clings to him, until he has got rid of the traditions he has been born and bred in (for the monist is usually born, not made) ; until he has cleared his mind of Kant, whether he spells it with a small c or a big K. He must, I think, acknowledge that his real, live, and formidable enemies are, not the Dualism of " Messrs. Dewey and Schiller," nor yet the Pluralism of Mr. William James, but the Pluralism of Mr. Bertrand Russell, Mr. G. E. Moore, Mr. Alexander, and the new realists of the United States. At the same time, it would have argued a most un- reasonable negligence to have ignored the brilliant and powerful work of Mr. James and Mr. Schiller. By VI THE NEW REALISM 177 their very brilliance and their power, and the grace of their appeal to the thought and feeling of the plain man, they are likely to hold their own, if not after the New Realism has been forgotten, at any rate long before it has begun to be remembered by the plain man. The chances are that it is neither Pragmatism nor Humanism, but the New Realism that will succeed in establishing itself as the dominant philosophy of the twentieth century. Still, they prepared its way before it ; they anticipated it to some extent in their criticism of abstract intellectual Idealism, and in their insistence on those, irreducible elements of will, feeling, and action which abstract Idealism leaves out of its account. And the New Realism has not been grateful to the two pioneers. It comes triumphantly and relentlessly into its own, and you may say its first act of power is to give both of them the coup de grace where it finds them, loitering contentedly on the very road they had made smooth for it. Well, the plain man is not going to think the worse of Pragmatism for Mr. Bertrand Russell's attack on it, even if Pragmatism is not hereafter to be counted among serious philosophies, and if Humanism is in no better case. To what does the New Realism owe its deadly force ? Mainly, I think, if not entirely, to its method. Not to its newness, for it is not by any means so new as would appear from its claim to have revolutionized Philosophy, much as Copernicus revolutionized astro- nomy, by taking the sun as the centre of the solar system instead of the earth. Indeed, the New Realism has gone one better than Copernicus. It has decentral- ized Philosophy altogether. And it has done this by applying the method of N 178 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM Mr. Bertrand Russell's " atomistic logic " to the universe without and to the universe within ; that is to say, to the sum total of experience. The first result of this searching and implacable analysis is to demonstrate that the two are by no means conterminous. On the contrary, you are led, step by step, through a series of unwary admissions to the conclusion that there is no universe within ; but that the sum total of the within is, in a rigorous and un- debatable sense, part (and a very small part at that) of the universe without ; while of the universe without there is no sum total, but an infinite number of kinds or classes of existences and an infinite number of exist- ences within each class or kind. The extreme pluralistic conclusion follows wherever and whenever the analytic method is applied. There is no escaping it, because, in the last resort, it rests upon a limited set of incontro- vertible axioms of mathematical logic. There is no escaping the extreme realistic conclusion, because it also rests on an incontrovertible law of pure mathe- matics. All mathematics in their turn flow from a score of premisses of Symbolic or Formal Logic (33). This fact, that " all Mathematics is Symbolic Logic," Mr. Bertrand Russell declares to be " one of the greatest discoveries of the age " (34) ; and he shows that it is impossible to exaggerate its importance to Philosophy and its influence on the fate of Monism. " The Philosophy of Mathematics has been hitherto as contro- versial, obscure and unprogressive as the other branches of philosophy. Although it was generally agreed that mathematics is in some sense true, philosophers disputed as to what mathe- matical propositions really meant : although something was true no two people agreed as to what it was that was true, and if something was known, no one knew what it was that was known. So long, however, as this was doubtful it could hardly be said THE NEW REALISM 179 that any certain and exact knowledge was to be obtained in mathematics. We find, accordingly, that idealists have tended more and more to regard all mathematics as dealing with mere appearances, while empiricists have held everything mathe- matical to be approximation to some exact truth about which they had nothing to tell us." {Principia Mathetnatica, i. p. 4.) The strengtli of Idealism has hitherto lain in the poverty of Formal Logic, the impossibility of bringing the sacrosanct deductions of mathematics into line with deductive logic as it then existed. Philosophers, when they looked for the cause of this mysterious divorce and contradiction between two orders of truth supposed equally incontrovertible, so far from suspecting that the machinery of formal logic might be at fault, were apt to throw the entire blame on mathematics. Mathe- matics was accused of relying on axioms which were so many unproved and unprovable hypotheses. They might depend on an a friori intuition, or they might not ; in either case their boasted logical certainty was an illusion. What was much worse, so far as pure mathe- matics could be said to be certain, they had no valid application to the world of experience, the wofld of space and time. All Idealisms, constructive or destructive, are based on the ultimate inability of mathematics to defend its own position. And it is claimed that with the reform of Symbolic Logic, the perfecting of the formal machinery, the bottom is knocked out of Idealism. For it follows that if all mathematics is symbolic logic, if " all the entities that occur in mathematics can be defined in terms of those that occur in the above twenty premisses," we have no longer got two orders of truth, but one order of truth. Pure mathematical truth will not be purer than any other ; it will not constitute a different, a higher, holier, and more certain kind of 180 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi truth. Any un mathematical proposition that follows faithfully from the same laws of symbolic logic will be as certainly true, as high, and holy as mathematical truth. And lest the monist should take heart and see in the Great Discovery a confirmation of his theory that all logic, that is to say, all thought, all truth, and therefore all existence is one, it should be broken to him at once that he is doomed to disappointment. This unity of supreme logical law is not a unity in which he can hope to recognize his own. It is a purely formal and provisional unity. So far from being any good to him, it is the thin end of the wedge by which his universe is prised open, torn asunder, and scattered to the infinite. This logic is not his logic. Instead- of the twelve comfortable categories which he could wrap round his universe like twelve woolly blankets, with the one vast eider-down of the Absolute on top, it gives him a plurality of logical indefinables, as hard as marbles, which hurt him in all his tender places ; instead of the rhythmic and dynamic throb of the Triple Dialectic, with its rich, rolling song of unity in difference, it gives him vibrations as multitudinous, as discordant, and irrelevant as the noises in a Futurist symphony. The New Realism is before all things a method, and a mathematical method. For, if there is to be any philosophy — any discussion as to the nature of the known, of knowing and the knower — at all, you must begin somewhere ; some axioms, or at any rate one axiom, must be accepted as certain, if there is not to be an infinite going back upon all propositions whatever. And the only certain axioms are the axioms of pure mathematics ; that is to say, of Symbolic Logic. If we start anywhere, we must start with these. Starting with these, Pluralistic Realism stands or THE NEW REALISM 181 falls by mathematical logic. Its four vital theories are based on it : its theory of the mathematical infinite ; its theory of relations ; its theory of concepts or univer- sals ; its theory of immediate perception, or of our knowledge of the external world. It ought not to matter which of these we take first ; for from each Pluralistic Realism will follow. Each leads us safely to its source in some incontrovertible law of mathematical logic. But, as it happens, we cannot consider the realistic theory of perception apart from the theory of the Infinite and the theory of relations, on both of which it depends. Say, then, that we begin with immediate experience, the perception of an object in space. (It is, to say the least of it, extremely debatable whether the perception of an object in space is in any sense an immediate experience ; but I must leave this crucial point for consideration later on. I want to state the position of Pluralistic Realism, as far as I understand it, with the greatest possible clearness and cogency, and for present purposes we may very well assume that the perception of an object in space is an immediate experience. We must start somewhere ; and it is important for a proper understanding of the " new " position that we should start with an experience into which these three terms, " object," " space," and " perception," enter.) Whatever consciousness may be supposed to have done or not done originally with its sense data, there comes a point when those data are " referred " to an object perceived as in a space external to the perceiver. We know what Idealism makes of this, and with what plausibility. It makes of it something like this : — Let us grant that the only space in which objects are immediately known (otherwise perceived) is a " private space " (35), which the perceiver carries about 182 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi with him, and that the shapes, sizes, lights and shades, and positions of objects in this space are not absolute, but relative to the position of the perceiver. Let us grant that the natui^e of pure or mathematical space has laws of its own and a nature of its own such that it is not and cannot be known in immediate perception. On these two points Monists and Pluralists are, I believe, agreed. Now, as long as it could be supposed that pure mathematical space was as much infected by illusion and relativity as any " private " space of yours or mine, and that it was therefore a perfect hotbed of contradictions and dilemmas (what applied to space applying equally to time) ; then, though the truth of all the intermediate laws of physics rested on the truth of the assumption that their space and time are " real " and contain no contradiction. Idealism was still within its rights in denying absolute and independent reality to space and time. The more contradictions and dilemmas Idealism could find in relations, above all in the relations of space and time, the better it was pleased. For, since there is nothing known that is not known as standing in relation to something or other (except the Absolute), it could then charge the whole multiplicity of outer and inner experience with unreality and set up its Absolute, which is One, as the only Real. Physical science could not lift a finger to prevent this annihilation of its universe, as long as the pure mathematical laws, on which it rests, themselves involved the very worst contradictions and dilemmas. Its universe of space and time, matter and motion, was infected at its source. The most destructive of those dilemmas turned on the nature of the Infinite and its relation to the finite. It was argued that finite events such as motion or any other change simply could not happen because of the infinity they involved. And if they are perceived as THE NEW REALISM 183 happening, if they are, in fact, knoivn to happen, that fact goes to prove that all our perceiving and all our knowledge is of appearances and not of realities, and that the only real object of a real knowledge is the Absolute, the motionless and unchanging One. This relativity on which Monism battens is found not only in the changes and motions of things, but in things themselves. Their being is to be related. Take the simplest of static relations, the relation of the thing and its qualities. It seems obvious that, if there are qualities, they must be qualities of something. There must be something that holds them together. (At least so it seems to the Idealistic Monist.) The thing and its qualities will then stand to each other as the two terms of a relation. But it is evident (the Monist thinks) that the relation must depend upon what the thing is, and what qualities it has ; that is to say, upon the nature of its two terms. The relation itself will be related, and doubly related. We have, then, instead of the single chaste and simple relation that we started with, a relation of dependence holding between the relation itself and each of its two terms ; that is to say, the relation that we thought so innocent has itself given birth to two terms and a relation ; and that relation, being likewise dependent on the nature of its terms, will be likewise related ; and so on for ever and ever, the terms and the relations multiplying, like generations, in geometrical proportion. You will find all this maddening behaviour of relations described in Mr. Bradley's Appearance and Reality, pages nineteen to thirty-four. We started with a thing and its qualities and the relation between them, and we have got an infinite regression. But, by the very fact that it possesses quality and that the qualities are possessed by it, the 184 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi thing is finite, the qualities are finite, and the relation between them is finite. So that we have again the contradiction and dilemma of a finite set of terms and relations involving an infinite series of terms and rela- tions. A contradiction and dilemma which can only be avoided by taking both term and relation, the thing and its qualities and whatever it is that makes them its qualities, as appearances and not as realities. Apply the same argument to the supreme relations of subject and object, of the self and its consciousness, and the entire universe of the without and the within is revealed as an illusion and a contradiction. And once more our flight is to the Absolute as the only Reality. This conclusion is revolting to the intellectual con- science of men of science and to the common sense of the plain man, however much it may delight the Monist and the mystic to be thus driven into the bosom of his God. We have seen how Vitalism and Pragmatism have tried to escape it and wherein they have failed. It must, I think, be owned that the New Realism is more successful. Neither Vitalism nor Pragmatism had a logic and a method. Vitalism took its stand on immediate percep- tion and the facts of life. It observed them, as the biologist or the psychologist observes them ; it found that neither what it called Realism nor what it called Idealism provided or accounted for the most important data of perception and the most vital of the facts of life. But it had no logic whereby to test the apparent contra- dictions and dilemmas of immediate perception ; it attempted to solve them uncritically and by rule of thumb, trusting to the plain man's common sense to find no fault ^vith its pronouncement : The problem THE NEW REALISM 185 of Life is solved by living, as the problem of walk- ing solvitur ambulando. And although Mr. William James has dealt very faithfully indeed with Abstract Idealism, his method is, on the whole, so akin to M. Bergson's want of method that it consists mainly in an open appeal to the imagination and the common sense which Vitalism satisfies and Abstract Idealism does not. It is hard to resist Mr. James when he is quoting Fechner, almost as hard as it is to resist Fechner himself. Fechner appeals with fervour and without shame to the desire of God and the hope of immortality that still stirs the hearts of some of us outside the Universities of Cambridge and Harvard. But so long as there is left in this hospitable pluralistic universe a single stickler for the rigour of the game, one solitary professor whose heart remains impervious to the desire of God and the hope of immortality, the appeal of philosophies which have no Logic is urged in vain. For it should be remembered that this is not a question of who thinks closest to life, Mr. William James or Mr. Bertrand Russell, but of what guarantee we have that when we think our thinl<:ing is true. We cannot dash in and snatch at a highly complex ready- made reality like Life and test our thinkings by their correspondence with it, even if we knew what life is and what thought is (which we are very far from knowing). For life, anyhow, is a highly specialized and subordinate part of the whole context of experience, which includes many more things than immediate perception can lay its hands on ; and, as for thought, it may have no higher or more comprehensive place in the total hierarchy than life ; and philosophy cannot test thought by its correspondence with reality, when the reality of ex- perience is the question before us to be solved. We owe it to Mr. Bertrand Russell that Logic has 186 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi been restored to its proper place as the organ of philo- sophy. We also owe it to him that Synthetic Logic has been succeeded by Analytic Logic, if it is only for a time. The result is the most drastic criticism of pre- ceding philosophies that has been known since the Critique of Pure Reason smashed the systems that were before it. If the conclusions of Atomism hold good all along the line, it means the complete break-up, not only of Absolute Idealism, but of all the great syntheses that ever ruled in Philosophy — with some revolts and re- volutions — since Philosophy began. The synthetic systems were based, one and all, on criticism, more or less drastic, of the assumptions of immediate perception. Where the axioms of pure mathematics were held to be true they were also held to be inapplicable to the objects of immediate perception. Every attempt to reconcile the two orders of assump- tions led to contradictions and dilemmas. The truth of the mathematical axioms themselves was considered to be open to doubt. Though the most tremendous consequences flowed from them, there were no axioms more ultimate and more simple from which they them- selves flowed. The validity of every generalization and every deduction of physical science hung on them. They hung unsupported in a world of their own. Mathe- matics had thus a peculiar and mysterious existence. No valid conclusion about the actual physical world could be reached without them. Yet the objects they defined had no existence in the actual physical world. That position remains unaltered. " As a branch of pure mathematics Geometry is strictly de- ductive ; indifierent to the choice of its premisses and to the question whether there exist (in the strict sense) such entities as its premisses define." {Principia Maihematica, p. 372.) " Until the nineteenth century Geometry meant EucUdean THE NEW REALISM 187 Geometry, i.e. a certain system of propositions deduced from premisses which were supposed to describe the space in which we Uve." Then there were only two alternatives : " Either we must be certain of the truth of the premisses on their own account, or we must be able to show that no other set of premisses could give results consistent with experience." Kantian Idealism held out for the first alternative. Empiricism for the second. " But objections were raised to both. For the Kantian view it was necessary to maintain that all the axioms are self-evident, a view which honest people found it hard to extend to the axiom of parallels. The second alternative . . . could only be tested by a greater mathematical abihty than falls to the lot of most philosophers. Accordingly the test was wanting till Lobat- chewsky and Bolyai developed their non-Euclidean system. It was then proved with all the cogency of mathematical demonstra- tion that premisses other than Euchd's could give results empiric- ally indistinguishable, within the Umits of observation from those of the orthodox system. . . . Geometry has become (what it was formerly mistakenly called) a branch of pure mathe- matics, in which assertions are that such and such consequences follow from such and such premisses, not that entities such as the premisses describe really exist. That is to say, if Euclid's axioms be called A, and P be any proposition implied by A, then, in the Geometry which preceded Lobatschewsky, P itself would be asserted since A was asserted. But nowadays the geometer would only assert that A implies P, leaving A and P themselves doubtful. And he would have other sets of axioms A^, A2, . . . implying P^, Pg, respectively, and the imphcations would belong to Geometry, but not A, or P, or any of the other actual axioms and propositions. Thus Geometry no longer throws any direct light on the nature of actual space. . . . Dimensions, like order and continuity, are defined in purely abstract terms, without any reference to actual space." (Ihid. pp. 372-376.) Now the former state of mathematics suited the 188 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM idealistic monist admirably, for it provided all the contradictions and dilemmas that he wanted. And he may have still drawn consolation from the assurance that Geometry is farther than ever from throwing " any direct light on the nature of actual space." But he has now to learn that " indirectly, the increased analysis and knowledge of possibilities resulting from modern Geometry has thrown immense light upon our actual space." If Pluralistic Realism can show, in spite of the high irrelevance of its mathematics, that there are definitions and there are axioms that hold good of the universe of space and time, matter and motion ; if it can remove the contradictions and dilemmas which have been held to attach to the conceptions of space and time, matter and motion ; if it can show that the relations of finite and infinite contain no contradiction or dilemma, it can then go on to prove the continuity of space, the absolute reality of space and time, matter and motion, and of that curious collection of qualities we call an object in space. That is to say, it undertakes to show that the existence of the external world is independent of our consciousness and of any consciousness whatsoever. We shall see that those conclusions do not exhaust the possibilities of Pluralism. It claims to have estab- lished the external and independent reality of such things as concepts and " thought -relations " and the external and independent reality of sensations, which even philosophers hostile to Monism have for long enough surrendered to the inner world. ^ It makes out its case, first, by dealing with all mathe- matical laws and all mathematical reasoning as laws and reasoning of Symbolic Logic ; secondly, by giving the entities defined by pure mathematics — points, lines, and planes — an external reality peculiar and apart ; THE NEW REALISM 189 tliirdly, by cutting away the ground from under the monist's most cherished contradiction, the contradiction involved in the very idea of mathematical space. As long as you were compelled to think of pure space as a mysterious continuity made up of discrete elements either infinitely divisible, or indivisible and infinite in number, the idealist was within his rights in denying the reality of space and time, and of matter and motion and everything else that depends on space and time. The New Realism admits, I think, that he was within his rights. Things cannot move, that is to say, cannot change their positions, in an unreal space, nor real events happen in an unreal time, nor real things be tied together by unreal relations, nor real parts be contained in unreal wholes. So the first thing that Mr. Bertrand Russell shows is that the laws of pure mathematics are the laws of Symbolic Logic. They have no superior cogency, but they have all the cogency that Formal Logic can confer on them, and there arise no contradictions or dilemmas in them anywhere. This could not be shown as long as the axioms of mathematics can be held debatable ; and they can be held debatable as long as finite and infinite are affected by each other's behaviour ; and finite and infinite could be very seriously affected by each other's behaviour as long as pure mathematics dealt with quantity and magnitude. But pure mathematics no longer deals with quantities or magnitudes, but with pure numbers. Pure numbers are reduced to " classes " or terms, the simplest elements of purely logical formulae ; they can therefore be treated like any other terms in purely logical propositions. We have seen that the mutual compromising of finite by infinite and of infinite by finite is the root of the 190 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi contradiction by which Idealism stands. But their differ- ences have been adjusted for ever, we are told, since, some time in the 'eighties, George Cantor, the mathe- matician, made a certain interesting discovery as to the nature of the Infinite. He found, and proved, that to or from an infinite series any number, even an infinite number, can be added or taken away without either in- creasing or diminishing the series. That is to say, finite and infinite are not affected by each other's vagaries. They neither negate nor limit nor do they define each other. Mr. Bertrand Kussell contends that this discovery has made secure the whole ground of mathematical philosophy, and with it all the foundations of applied mathematics, and with them all the laws of physical science that depend on the laws of space ; and with these, again, the ground of the reality of the external world is made secure. For the reality of motion depends on the continuity of space, and the reality of change on the continuity of time. Before Cantor's discovery it could be argued that change and therefore motion, which is change of position, were relative and unreal ; that real motion could not take place, for the simple reason that there was no place for it to take, and that no real event could happen in time because there never was a quiet, steady instant for it to happen in. As long as space and time were held to be discontinuous, to consist in a finite or infinite number of separable points or instants, these dilemmas, so distressing to Realism, followed. For progress of bodies and succession of events will always be from one point to the next beyond it, and from one instant to the next beyond. Always between points the body said to be occupying space will be out of space, and between instants events said to be occurring in time will be out of time. M. Bergson does not cause THE NEW REALISM 191 these dilemmas to disappear by calling space the net that intellect spreads out under matter to catch it as it tumbles, and by using time to stuff the gaps in space. For there is nothing to stuff time's gaps with, except duree which is not time. There is no space and no time that can cover the awful, the unthinkable jump from next to next. Therefore, in Zeno's problem, Achilles never can overtake the tortoise ; because, however fast he runs, he can do no more than jump from next point to next point ; and the tortoise, however slow he is, can do no less. Neither of them can skip a point, so that Achilles can't settle it by jumping over either the tortoise or the ground that he has travelled. Swiftness and slowness are irrelevant to the problem. Time, which is all im- portant to it, suffers from the same discontinuity as space ; from instant to instant is on all fours with from point to point. Into this dreadful gulf between point and point, instant and instant, the modern mathematician shovels in — ^the Infinite. Continuity, for the modern mathematician, is not an affair of infinitesimals, but of infinitely divisibles. More than all, it is an affair of order in a series. From Cantor's discovery it follows that there never is a next point, a next instant, a next number ; there never is any nextness at all. The next point, the next instant, the next number, are finites. And as the Infinite is neither increased nor diminished, nor limited, nor in any way affected by any behaviour of the finites, it follows that, start at any finite point, or instant, you will, between it and the next point, the next instant, there will be an infinite number of points and instants, and between any two numbers an infinite number again, and so on to infinity, the gaps filling up before your eyes. 192 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi You will find the entire proof set forth in the chapters on Infinity and Continuity in the Principia Mathematica. ^leanwhile Mr. Russell simplifies the problem by an illustration. "... Let us imagine a tiny speck of light moving along a scale. What do we mean by saying that the motion is continuous ? . . . If we consider any two positions of the speck occupied at any two instants, there will be other intermediate positions occupied at intermediate instants. However near together we take the positions, the specks will not jump suddenly from the one to the other, but will pass through an infinite number of other positions on the way. Every distance, however small, is traversed by passing through all the infinite series of positions between the two ends of the distance." {Our Knowledge of the External World, pp. 133-134.) It is obvious that this feat would be impossible if time could not be treated in the same way. So there is no nextness anywhere. And if there is no nextness there is continuity. And if mathematical space and time are continuous, then all spaces and all times are continuous ; and if continuous then real. This conclusion, which is by no means self-evident, is the result of further logical constructions and corre- lations. What holds good of actual space will hold good of matter occupying space. What holds good of actual time will hold good of change and motion occupying time ; change and motion will be absolute and real, and unselfcontradictory in the sense that there is no state of change, and no state of motion. And since all material things are continuous, that is to say extended, extension, and with it the primary qualities of matter, will be absolute and real. There were, as we have seen, three outstanding objections to the older Realisms : the alleged hypo- thetical character of the aidoms of pure mathematics ; THE NEW REALISM 193 the supposed fact that sense-perceptions are illusory ; the supposed dependence of a relation on its terms. We have seen how the New Realism deals with the first. We shall see, later on, in another context, how it deals with the third. Its business, at the point where we are now, is with sense perception. AVhen it comes to sense -perception it betrays a certain consciousness of difficulty. The appearances of an object in space do certainly differ according to the point of view and the optic apparatus of the perceiver. Its size, shape, colour, and relation to other objects in space vary with the position and distances of the per- ceiver. If a humorous creator had given to the lens of the eye the extravagant convexity and concavity of the little mirrors placed at the doors of Pierce's restaur- ants, the world of creatures would appear as a world of grotesques. But suppose that the New Realism accepts as the standard lens the lens of the normal human eye, appearances presented to the normal human eye will not rank as appearances, but as real objects normally perceived, and all variations from the normal will be attributed to flaws in the mechanism of perception. (This question of the standard is crucial for the New Realism. It raises difficulties which I will not dwell upon at present.) Still, the variations, which we may call objective variations due to the perceiver' s objective changes of position, will remain. Also the fact that to one object of perception there will be a considerable, not to say an infinite number of perceivers, each bringing to the problem an individual angle or point of view, which itself will change with each change in his position. So that the New Realism has to assume at least three kinds 194 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi of space to begin with, and as many more kinds as may be necessary : Pure space, the space of the mathema- tician ; private space, the space which every individual perceiver carries about with him ; and pubHc space which is the same for everybody, and to which each separate private space has to be added and adjusted as a system of private cubicles is adjusted to a public dormitory. All these spaces, purged from the uncleanness of contradiction and relativity, are real and outside con- sciousness. Even private space is real and outside. It is, indeed, in its own mysterious way, not perhaps part of public space, as the cubicle is part of the dormitory, but one of the infinite, sliding, interpenetrating planes of the pluralistic Real. On this system private spaces may be imagined as being like so many transverse inter- secting beams subsisting in public space, cleaving their way through it and through each other (as rays of light pierce their unique and untroubled paths through so many sheets of thin glass), and constructing with public space a system of most indubitable outsideness. I must leave it to Mr. Bertrand Russell to describe the manner of their adjustment. " If two men are sitting in a room, two somewhat similar worlds are perceived by them ; if a third man enters and sits between them, a third world, intermediate between the two previous worlds, begins to be perceived. . . . The system con- sisting of all views of the universe, perceived and imperceived, I shall call the system of ' perspectives ' ; I shall confine the expression ' private worlds ' to such views of the universe as are actually perceived. Thus a ' private world ' is a perceived ' perspective' ; but there may be any number of unperceived perspectives. " Two men are sometimes found to perceive very similar per- spectives, so similar that they can use the same words to describe them. ... In case the similarity is very great, we say the points VI THE NEW REALISM 195 of view of the two perspectives are near together in space ; but this space in which they are near together is totally different from the space inside the two perspectives. It is a relation between the two perspectives, and is not in either of them ; no one can perceive it, and if it is to be known it can be only by inference. Between two perceived perspectives which are similar, we can imagine a whole series of other perspectives, some at least miperceived, and such that between any two, however similar, there are others still more similar. In this way the space which consists of relations between perspectives can be rendered continuous, and (if we choose) three-dimensional. . . . There are as many private spaces as there are perspectives ; there are therefore at least as many as there are percipients. . . . But there is only one perspective space, whose elements are single perspectives, each with its own private space. . . . " These private spaces will each count as one point, or at any rate as one element, in perspective space. They are ordered by means of their similarities. Suppose, for example, that we start from one which contains the appearance of a circular disc, such as would be called a penny, and suppose this appearance, in the perspective in question, is circular, not elUptic. We can then form a whole series of perspectives containing a graduated series of circular appearances of various sizes : for this purpose we have only to move (as we say) towards the penny or away from it. The perspectives in which the penny looks circular will be said to lie on a straight line in perspective space, and their order on this hne will be that of the sizes of the circular aspects. . . . " In order to explain the correlation of private spaces with perspective space, we have first to explain what is meant by ' the place (in perspective space) where a thing is. . . .' We can form another straight line of perspectives in which the penny is seen end on and looks like a straight hne of a certain thickness. These two hues will meet in a certain place in perspective, i.e. in a certain perspective, which may be defined as ' the place (in perspective space) where the penny is.' ". . . " Having now defined the perspective which is the place where a given thing is, we can understand what is meant by saying that the perspectives in which a thing looks large are nearer to 196 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi the thing than those in which it looks small : they are, in fact, nearer to the perspective which is the place where the thing is. " We can now also explain the correlation between a private space and parts of perspective space. If there is an aspect of a given thing in a certain private space, then we correlate the place where this aspect is in the private space wath the place where the thing is in perspective space." (Owr Knowledge of the External World, pp. 87-92.) We are meant to see at once that such a space bequeaths its own reality and peculiar outsideness to the things that occupy it. Given that the adjustment of private to public space is an outside affair, it is possible for New Realism to proclaim boldly the outsideness and publicity of sense-data. There is no sensation so elementary and so immediate that it cannot rank as perception of an outside real thing. Only from the private point of view of the perceiver can it be regarded as a private object enshrined in private space. Sensa- tions : red, hot, loud, rough, hard, heavy, are not my intern,al and private response to an external nerve stimulus, nor are they yours ; they are planted out in the object ; or rather, they subsist in the object by its and their own right. They are objects. It follows that for Realism, as for Idealism, there will be no difference between the so-called primary and secondary qualities. If position, extension, size, shape, weight and impenetrability are real, we have no reason for supposing that the secondary qualities of matter, colour and sound and taste and smell, are not real too. This point is too important to be passed over with a summary reference. Again it is a question of logical construction and correlation, and the inferences we make therefrom. Such sense-data, whatever else they may be, are to be classed among what Mr. Bertrand Russell calls " hard " THE NEW REALISM 197 facts. Tliey are given, not inferred ; they are irreducible to anything simpler than themselves. We infer that they have an objective or " independent " reality from the fact that they enter obediently into the context of objective or " independent " realities ; they can be correlated wdth them so as to form part of the same ' logical construction ; they show themselves as belonging, not only to the same universe, but to the same order of reality within the universe. For the thorough-paced realist and thorough-paced idealist alike the distinction between the illusions and realities of sense is irrelevant. They are distinguished only by their respective contexts. But it is a distinction which makes all the difference between Realism and thorough-paced Idealism. Thus Mr. Bertrand Russell in Our Knowledge of the External World : — " The first thing to realise is that there are no such things as ' illusions of sense.' Objects of sense, even when they occur in dreams, are the most indubitably real objects known to us. What, then, makes us call them unreal in dreams ? Merely the unusual nature of their connection with other objects of sense. I dream that I am in America, but I wake up and find myself in England without those intervening days on the Atlantic \Yhich, alas ! are inseparably connected with a ' real ' visit to America. Objects of sense are called ' real ' when they have the kind of connection with other objects of sense which ex- perience has led us to regard as normal ; when they fail in this, they are called illusions. But what is illusory is only the in- ferences to which they give rise ; in themselves, they are every bit as real as the objects of waking life." (Pp. 85-86.) Thus Mr. Edwin Holt, in The Place of Illusory Experience in a Realistic World, taking up the idealistic challenge : — " Not the illusory or hallucinatory image as such, it was rightly said by our opponent, but such an image when it asserts 198 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi itself to he, or when the realist asserts it to he a real object, is the crux for realism." {The New Bealism, p. 356.) " Now the secondary qualities present interrelations, both fixed and intelhgible, so that those persons who seriously study them begin to see that they form a system Uke the systems dis- covered in mathematics ; and this fact alone, as some one has said, already sets them ofi from the purely ' subjective,' in- dividual, and incalculable." {Ihid. p. 331.) Mr. Holt's argument is too closely and elaborately knit to bear quotation of any single passage. This is the gist of it : Take a whole class of so-called sense- illusions (errors of space), the diminution, duplication, and distortion of an object. A suitable apparatus can produce mechanically and objectively the perfect counterpart of these eiiects. There is a certain mechanical focussing of the eyes by which, when our eyes are shut, near things can be made to seem nearer and smaller. There is a certain mechanical focussing by which a machine for manufacturing shoe-lasts copies its model. " The machine at work has quite the air of seeing its model." So much so that the nearer the centre of the last is brought to the cutting edge of the machine, the smaller the model that the machine turns out. Again, " The stereoscopic camera habitually sees double," as human eyes will if their several perspectives are divided. A roughly cut lens distorts as badly as an astigmatic eye. And the realist argues thus : As in these cases there isn't any question of the self-subsistent reality either of the single, undiminished, undistorted object, or of its doubling, reduction, and distortion, so there should be no question in the case of the human apparatus which is equally mechanical. Both afiairs are of the same order. As for the so-called subjective hallucinations, for / THE NEW REALISM 199 instance, of dreams, they are precisely on the same footing as " objective " sensations. " The nervous system, even when unstimulated from without, is able to generate within itself nerve-currents of those frequencies whose density factor is the same as in ordinary peripheral stimula- tion." {Ihid. p. 352.) And Mr. Alexander is no less explicit. For him sense- data are on precisely the same footing as an " object of thought," and equally independent of the mind that thinks or senses. " For us, both the sensum and the so-called object of thought are equally objects, non-psychical ; they are equally objects meant, though they are not equally important. " Doubtless it is difficult enough, without natural and philo- sophical prepossessions, to treat the sensum as an object in- dependent of the mind, for which the mind with its sense organ, through its act of sensing, is the mere vehicle of reception. Partly this arises from our theoretical ignorance of what exactly in the object the sensum is as compared with the percept. To call the sensum blue, as I have done, using a Leibnizian metaphor, a fulguration of the quaUty blueness is admittedly but a metaphor. And I am not yet prepared to supply the defect in theory. The sensum is so fragmentary and elementary. But at least we can say that, whatever it may be, it is that which exists in the thing at the moment and place to which it is referred, and that it is equally and identically apprehensible by me and another person who should put himself into the same situation of place and time as I, and who is supposed for simplicity to be equally normal with me, and to be suffering from no special subjective condition different from mine which might differently affect his suscepti- bihty to the sensory object." {The Basis of Realism, pp. 16, 17.) Again : "I see the table in different perspective according to my position. But this does not prove the visual object psychical — a mere content, but only that the object looks different from different angles . . . the appearances are real characters of 200 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi the thing. And so when the stick is seen bent in water, its visual character is bent because of the refraction of the hght ; the illuminated outline is bent. But of course the touched stick is not bent. " These facts . . . point to the superior value of touch-ex- perience and the greater importance of primary qualities, as in the first place apprehended by touch, over the secondary ones , . . the primary qualities are in precisely the same position with regard to our minds as the secondary ones. Either both of them are mental or neither." {Ihid. pp. 17, 18.) The plain man ought to rejoice at this rehabihtation of the world he takes for granted ; the irreducible real world outside consciousness, resonant as a drum, hard as marble, bearing all the heraldry of its colours in its own right ; the world that Dr. Johnson believed in ; the world that Eeid and Wolf — ^the Wolf who sent Kant into a dogmatic slumber — took for granted without any aid from analytic logic. Consider what has happened. This world was badly shaken when Berkeley melted down the primary objec- tive qualities of matter into secondary subjective qualities, and declared their esse to be percipi, when Hume reduced causation to fortuitous sequences of sensation, and Mill defined the result as " a permanent possibility of sensation." And when Objective Idealism proved that consciousness is considerably more than a stream of sensations, when it raised up the world again out of the flux and stuck the broken bits of it together with " thought-relations," its indubitable " outside " reaUty was still " inside " universal consciousness. And it is this universality of consciousness that the New Realism has laid its hands on. So far Idealism and Realism can get along fairly comfortably together : they can, at any rate, both agree that all the qualities of matter are in the same boat : THE NEW REALISM 201 there is no difference on either theory between primary and secondary qualities. It is over the " thought- relations " that the decisive battle is to be fought. The New Realism abolishes the entire system of thought-relations which Idealism has built up. It repudiates the idealist's theory of " internal " relations, relations snugly yet inscrutably housed in their " terms." For Realism there are terms and there are relations. But, though relations are concepts, they are not " the work of thought." And in no case is a relation de- pendent on its terms, or grounded mysteriously in their secret inner nature. Every relation is an outside and self-subsistent reality, independent both of the relater and the related. There is, properly speaking, no relater. A relation is a thing devoid of secrecy or mystery, plain as a pike-staff or the nose on your face, and offering not the smallest foothold to Idealistic Monism. Useless to enquire how a relation and its terms come together. They are together, for shorter or longer periods ; that is enough : that is the beginning and the end of — ^the relation. And, as sense-data — the greenish-gold, the loud, the cold, the smooth, the heavy, the acrid-smelling, the bitter-tasting, all the secondary qualities that I sense, say, in a brass trombone — are outside and self-sub- sistent objects of sensation ; and as percepts, such as the brass trombone itself, localized, for me, in close and intimate relation to my sense organs as I play it, and in more or less distant relation to the concert hall I play it in, to the other instruments in the orchestra, and the other things in the hall, as the brass trombone, the per- cept, is the outside and self-subsistent object of percep- tion, so the concepts, brass trombone, greenish golden- ness, loudness, coldness, smoothness, heaviness, acridity 202 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi and bitterness, are outside and self-subsistent objects of conception. But they are no more " in " the object of sense-perception than they are " in " or " of " the perceiving consciousness. They would have given con- siderable trouble, and raised the most disconcerting dilemmas if they had been ; so they, too, are planted out ; not in space, not in time ; but in a world of their own ; the world of the changeless and eternal Ideas. If there be any world of the Absolute it is theirs and theirs alone. Here, after twenty-three centuries, Platonic Idealistic Realism has come again into its own. There must be no misunderstanding about the position of ideas, concepts, or " universals " in the New Realistic scheme. " No sentence can be made up without at least one word which denotes a universal. The nearest approach would be some such statement as ' I like this.' But even here the word ' Hke ' denotes a universal, for I may Hke other things and other people may like things. Thus all truths involve universals, and all knowledge of truths involves acquaintance with universals." The universal cannot be a so-called " abstract " idea ; an idea seated firmly in particulars and picked out of them by the mind. Take, for example, the idea of whiteness or the idea of the triangle that Bishop Berkeley argued about, the triangle which must be " neither oblique, nor rectangle, neither equilateral, equicrural, nor scalenon, but all and none of these at once," an unqualified triangle, a triangle tout pur. " A difl&culty emerges as soon as we ask ourselves how we know that a thing is white or a triangle. If we wish to avoid the universals whiteness and triangularity, we shall choose some particular patch of white or some particular triangle, and say that anything is white or a triangle if it has the right sort of VI THE NEW REALISM 203 resemblance to our chosen particular." (Bertrand Russell, The Problems of Philosophy, pp. 146, 150.) But this is only putting off the evil day when we have to recognize the presence of the universal. For " the resemblance required will have to be a universal. Since there are many white things, the resemblance must hold between many pairs of particular white things ; and this is the char- acteristic of a universal. It will be useless to say that there is a different resemblance for each pair, for we shall have to say that these resemblances resemble each other, and thus at last we shall be forced to admit resemblance as a universal. The relation of resemblance, then, must be a true universal. ..." " Consider such a proposition as Edinburgh is north of London. Here we have a relation between two places, and it seems plain that the relation subsists independently of our knowledge of it. . . . The part of the earth's surface where Edinburgh stands would be north of the part where London stands, even if there were no human being to know north or south, and even if there were no minds at all in the universe." {Ibid. pp. 151, 152.) This follows, as we have seen, from tlie realistic theory of perception, so that, before we go on to consider the doctrine of universals, we may assume it to be true that " nothing mental is presupposed in the fact that Edinburgh is north of London. But this fact involves the relation ' north of,' which is a universal, and it would be impossible for the whole fact to involve nothing mental, if the relation ' north of,' which is a constituent part of the fact, did involve anything mental." * (Idealists will again agree heartily with this view. It would, indeed, be impossible.) " Hence we must admit that the relation, hke the terms it relates, is not dependent upon thought, but belongs to the independent world which thought apprehends but does not create. ..." 204 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi *' If we ask, ' Where and when does this relation exist ? ' the answer must be ' Nowhere and no when.' There is no place or time where we can find the relation ' north of.' ... It is neither in space nor in time, neither material nor mental ; yet it is something. ..." " Thoughts and feelings, minds and physical objects exii^t. But universals do not exist in this sense ; we shall say that they subsist or have being, where being is opposed to ' existence ' as being timeless. The world of universals, therefore, may also be described as the world of being. " The world of being is unchangeable, rigid, exact, delightful to the mathematician, the logician, the builder of metaphysical systems, and all who love perfection more than life." {Ibid. pp. 153-156.) Thus Mr. Edward Spalding in his Defence of Analysis : " The concept is not the printed or spoken sign, the word. It would subsist, did the signs not exist. ... It is not the know- ledge or idea of the state of affairs." [The concept or group of concepts.] ..." It is not identical with the individual cases, whatever these be. Number is not any one number, man is not a man, etc. It is not necessarily even physical or mental, even when the individual cases are physical or mental existents." {The New Realism, p. 233.) Thus Mr. Cecil Delisle Burns in William of Ockliam on Universals : "... The facts of experience necessitate the supposition of (1) particulars differing numerically and not as collections of different quaUties, and (2) likenesses implying the existence of some sort of reality which is different from the reality of the particulars." ..." The likeness ' between ' particulars has to be explained by reference to a third thing which we may call a universal. Nor can the mere addition or blurring of particulars (thisnesses) produce a likeness (whatness). The universal, therefore, must be a kind of reality in relation to which the particulars are ' alike.' Thus it exists beside, and, if you like it, above or beyond the particulars." ..." We may say that THE NEW REALISM 205 universals are ' in mente,' but that they are and are independently of our knowledge of them there is no doubt. Therefore they exist in some other way than the way particulars exist ; hence we say that the likeness ' in ' things is not the universal hut indicates the universal." (Pp. 13-19.) The italics are mine. They emphasize the most important point of all. The reason for this planting out is not far to seek ; it follows from the law of analytic logic, which postulates the independence and the reality and the infinite number of its universals. For the validity of all reasoning, both inductive and deductive, depends on the presence, somewhere in the chain, of a universal proposition, either arrived at or assumed, either expressed or implied. In deduction, which proceeds from the universal to the particular, it is obvious that this is so. But it is no less imperative in all induction, which proceeds, at its logical peril, from the particular to the universal. Logical peril : for, consider, that by no possible conjuring can you obtain a universal proposition from the simple enumeration of particular cases. Not if you went on enumerating for ten thousand years, untold generations of observers taking up the tale. For the peculiar, indefinable, indestructible validity of a universal law is not born of tireless and vociferous repetition. But deduction must obtain its universal somewhere. You must therefore assume the existence of as many universals as there are possible propositions if there is to be any reasoning at all. It follows that, if reasoning is to hold good of the real world, universals must be as real, as independent of consciousness as any of the realities which analytic logic has shown to be firmly established in space and time. 206 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM Universals, then, are concepts ; but concepts are not " thought-relations " in the idealist's sense ; nor are they in any sense constructed or constituted by thought. They are entities ; objects of conception, independent of the conceiver, standing on their own feet in their own spaceless and timeless world, as objects of perception stand in space and time. There is a concept or universal, not only of every number and quantity, and every thing and every quality, but of every possible relation that obtains between all or any of them ; and of every proposition that can be made concerning all or any of them ; (36) so that the world of the universals is as infinite as the world of space or time. If you ask how, apart from their logical functions, they may be said to he, the answer is that they are as objects of conceptual contemplation. Now it is clear that on this theory the role of con- sciousness is reduced to the very narrowest margin, and that the Self will be nothing more than the spectator of existence. As Mr. Joseph Conrad says : " This is purely a spectacular universe." There is nothing in it which can be said to have arisen in consciousness. Thus, a magnificent spectacle has been provided, at the expense of consciousness, by the ruthless planting out on to a distant stage of everything once held securely within it. If we ask whether, within the Self's narrow border, there remains anything at all that is the work of con- sciousness, we are told : Yes, besides the primary and secondary qualities of matter there are certain tertiary qualities that cannot be planted out with them. Such are the aesthetic feelings and values, the moral feelings and values ; delight, charm, and their opposites, all that Mr. Alexander calls " the richness of mind," and all THE NEW REALISM 207 that is creative in the objects of creative art. These are purely subjective. They have no home anywhere but in the Self that feels them. It is interesting to see that Mr. Alexander includes among them beauty and goodness, which to Mr. G. E. Moore and Mr. Bertrand Russell are essentially objective realities, universals ; and that Mr. Ralph Perry recognizes what he calls " content patterns," as determined exclusively by the agency (selective and combining) of the subject of consciousness. Mr. Perry also admits that " higher complexes, such as history, society, life, or reflective thought, are dependent on consciousness " ; but whether he would get any backing here from his brother realists is open to doubt. The emotions and the passions, which might have loomed so large, are left out of the accounts I have referred to, probably as too glaringly subjective for special notice. Personally, I do not see how, on the theory, the Self can be justly credited with the work of its imagination. For imagination deals with universals, and has its home in the eternal. Therefore one would have supposed that creative Art was the least subjective of entities. Its works are planted out for ever in the spaceless and the timeless world. I do not know whether this conclusion would be held to follow strictly from the premisses of the New Realism. But I think it should follow. There is, however, I believe, considerable divergence of opinion on this point. I think it must be allowed that the New Realism has made out a strong case for itself, and that where Prag- matism and Humanism have failed it has succeeded. I do not think that the idealistic monist will gain 208 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi anything by refusing to concede to it the full measure of its success. I believe that, if he meets it courageously, so far from driving him out of the bosom of the Absolute, it will fold him more securely in. If he thrives on what Walt Whitman called " the terrible doubt of appear- ances," if there is nothing terrible to him in that doubt, it is because to him the terrible thing would be to be shut up for ever in this prison of space and time and matter, and to know nothing for ever but appearances, when it is reality for which he hungers and thirsts. To begin with, whatever Pluralistic Eealism does to him, it does not shut him up in any prison. On the contrary, to borrow Mr. Bertrand Russell's phrase, it " gives him wings." It proves to him that the bosom he desires, the barren bosom of the Absolute, is a prison indeed. The universe it opens to him has no walls, not even the walls of all-containing deity. It is only to be conceived, so far as it can be conceived at all, as an infinite number of infinitely intersecting planes of reality, each one of which is infinite. Each plane represents a different kind or order of reality, and maintains an infinite number of realities within or on it. Time and space and matter are not prisons ; for time and space and matter are infinite, and there is an infinite number of times and spaces and matters and motions. Time and space contain an infinite number of separate planes, as it were, of spatial and temporal and material realities ; of these there are an infinite number of objects of sensation, an infinite number of objects of perception, and an infinite number of their relations in time and space. There is also an infinite number of " universals," the objects of conception, out of time and out of space, corresponding with every class of object in time and space : and, again, an infinite number of relations out VI THE NEW REALISM 209 of time or space, and an infinite number of miiversals, or class-concepts corresponding with each relation. And as every single member of this injBnity of infinities is a real thing, an entity, the monist cannot justly complain of any lack of reality. But while the New Eealism gives him reality, more reality than he asked or dreamed of, reality in embarrass- ing, overwhelming quantities, it does not give or profess to give him the kind or quality of reality he wants. The New Realism, in its turn, complains of his bad taste in wanting any other reality and of his impudence in asking for it. But there is no reason why the monist should not admire this largely spectacular universe Realism has provided. What he has reason to complain of is its lack of unity. Then the pluralist tells him that unity, except in the peculiar and limited form of a Whole, is precisely what he cannot have. And since the Whole was, after all, what the monist performed nearly all his monistic tricks with, he may seek to bargain with his adversary and say : You may keep all your infinities, for all I care, if only you will give me back my Whole to do what I like with (for he thinks he may yet succeed in packing all those infinities inside it in some supreme synthesis). And then he will learn to his bewilderment that it is no longer his to do what he likes with. In fact, he will not recognize his Whole by the time analytic logic has done with it. To begin with, it raises all over again the apparently innocent but really formidable question which Monism has hitherto answered with an unhesitating affirmative : Is the relation between whole and part such that, given the concept of the whole, the concept of the part follows ? That is to say : Is it a relation of logical priority ? If it is, it ought to follow as strictly as the two proposi- 210 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi tions, " B is greater than A," and " A is less than B " follow from and imply each other. " Then we should be able to define the relation thus : A is said to be part of B when B is impUes A is, but A is does not imply B is." (Principia Mathematica.) Now at first sight this looks a very straightforward and satisfactory definition of the relation between whole and part. And it looks as if it might favour Monism by attaching the whole inseparably to the part, and the part inseparably to the whole in a " unity." But not a bit of it. Mr. Bertrand Russell rejects the defini- tion on the grounds that this relation of logical priority cannot be made to run on all fours with the relation of simple mutual implication between " B is greater than A " and " A is less than B " ; that it is not a simple but a highly complex proposition ; inasmuch as it implies other propositions asserting the being of A, and the being of B, and the being of the relation, each of which is simpler than itself ; and that it rests, not only on the proposition " B implies A," but on the further proposition, " A does not imply B." The invalidity of the definition by logical priority will be seen at once if we introduce an element of another kind and value. " For example, ' A is greater and better than B ' implies ' B is less than A " ; but the converse impUcation does not hold : yet the latter proposition is not part of the former." Again, from " A is red," it follows that A is coloured. " Yet the proposition ' A is red ' is no more complex than * A is coloured.' . . . Redness, in fact, appears to be a simple concept which, though it implies colour, does not contain colour as a constituent." VI THE NEW REALISM 211 And Mr. Russell argues that, " having failed to define wholes by logical priority, we shall not, I think, find it possible to define them." Now, I think, the monist would agree heartily that if the relation of whole and part is not to be defined by logical priority, it is not to be defined at all. He would not be at all so certain that the definition he thinks so satisfactory should be flung aside because analysis finds that it is less simple than it looked at first. He would, I think, protest against propositions, that is to say, judgments covering concrete complexes being ruled out because it can be shown that they will not hold good when reduced to the strictly abstract terms of formal logic. He defies the analyst to discover any flaw in the definition : A is said to be part of B when " B is " implies "A is," but "A is " does not imply " B is." And Mr. Russell admits that " this state of things is realized when A is part of B." It seems to him, then, sheer wantonness to infect this still comparatively simple relation by complicating it with irrelevant elements drawn from other sources ; and then to argue that, because " worse " is very far from being part of " better," and because colour, implied by red, is not a part of red, therefore logical implication must not be allowed to infect any definition of whole and part, when it has been admitted that it holds good when, that is to say, whenever and wherever A is part of B. But Mr. Russell is out to prove that this particular relation of whole and part is an indefinable and ultimate relation, a concept as irreducible as goodness or badness, redness or colour, and that there is no question of the whole holding its parts together in a unity, or of the parts as existing only in and for a unity. Correlation, for the logical atomism of the pluralistic realist, does not involve either " higher synthesis," or mutual dependence 212 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi of relations on terms, or of terms on each other. Con- cepts are hard, irreducible, mutually repellent entities, and relations are hard, irreducible, mutually repellent entities ; and when propositions are broken up they are broken. What analytic logic hath put asunder, let no man join. But this is not the end of the matter. Besides this indefinable and ultimate relation there are others. And we are now told that the nature of the relation will depend upon " the nature both of the whole and of the parts." For it would appear that, though a relation is not allowed, on pain of an infinite regress, to depend upon the nature of its terms when this dependence suits the monist, it may do so for the convenience of the pluralist, who in this case blinks the dilemma with tolerance and bonhomie. Thus three kinds of wholes may be distinguished : (1) Collections, or aggregates of single terms. (2) Collections, or aggregates of terms that are themselves aggregates. (3) Collections of propositions which relate or qualify. It is only when we reach the third and last kind of whole that we arrive at unity. As this whole always consists of propositions in which something is related to something, or something is quali- fied by something else, it must be regarded as radically and irreducibly different from any whole which is simply a collection or aggregate, whether of single terms or aggregates. And the relation of whole and part in any unity will be radically and irreducibly different from the relation of whole and part in any collection or aggre- gate. So much so that we may say that there are not three kinds of whole but two kinds : Collections (or aggregates) and unities. And the radical and irreducible difference between VI THE NEW EEALISM 213 these two kinds is this : that in a collection, whether of single terms or aggregates, " such a whole is completely specified when all its simple constitu- ents are specified : its parts have no direct connection inter se, but only the indirect connection involved in being parts of one and the same whole." Whereas wholes containing relations or predicates "are not specified when their parts are all known." {Ibid. p. 140.) For, take the simplest instance, " A differs from B," and let A and B be as simple as you please, you cannot reduce this whole to anything simpler, i.e. to fewer terms than " A," " B," and " difference." Simple as it seems, " A differs from B " is really a very complex synthetic statement. Under analysis it yields, as we have seen, "A, B, and difference " as a subordinate aggregate of three terms, and the whole involved in its implication, " B differs from A." " A," " B," and " difference " must be thought of as three single and irreducible terms before ever the business of joining up A to B in the relation of their difference can begin. The relation itself is a new thing that will not be found in the analysis, and is " not even specified by specifying its parts.'.' So that the only unity which Analytic Logic allows him, so far, is a unity that doesn't yield an inch of ground to the struggling monist. In fact, he is, if anything, worse off with it than he was with the whole as a " collec- tion " ; since the collection at least collected, and the whole could be specified by its terms when the terms were known. We have got to realize that always " the whole is a new single term, distinct from each of its parts and from all : it is one, not many, and is related to the parts, but has a being distinct from theirs." {Ibid., loc. cit.) 214 A DEFENCE OF IDEALISM vi And the pluralist argues that, since this is so, we can no longer talk about identity in difference, or about the whole being present in its parts, or about the parts existing in the whole. And as the monist surveys the ruins which Analytic Logic has made of his neatly ordered and closely articu- lated world, several things are bound to occur to him. I think he will say : All this may be true of finite things and of finite wholes. I have never denied the plurality of finites. But my Whole is Infinite. Let us see, then, what the pluralist' s account is of Infinite Wholes, and whether they are in any better case. " We must then admit infinite aggregates. It remains to ask a more difiicult question, namely : Are we to admit infinite unities ? . . . Are there any infinitely complex propositions ? ... A unity will be infinite when the aggregate of all its con- stituents is infinite ; but this scarcely constitutes the meaning of infinite unity. ... " An infinite imity will be an infinitely complex proposition : it must not be analysable in any way into a finite number of constituents. . . . Now, for my part, I see no possible way of deciding whether propositions of infinite complexity are possible or not, but this at least is clear that all the propositions known to us (or probably all that we can know) are of finite complexity. . . . Thus the question whether or not there are infinite unities must be left unanswered, the only thing we can say on this subject is that no such unities occur in any department of human knowledge, and therefore none such are relevant to the foundation of mathematics." {Principia Mathematica, pp. 145, 146.) There is no comfort for the monist here. The only sort of infinite whole that Pluralism will allow him is an infinite collection ; and an infinite collection, so far from being any good to him, carries on the business of plurality for ever and ever, world without end. II So far, it must, I think, be admitted that, where the logic of the new realist meets the logic of the monist, the encounter has been apparently to the disadvantage of the monist. Hitherto the monist has either neglected mathematics altogether, or he has seized on them greedily to nourish his appetite for dilemmas. Thus his position becomes vulnerable from the first moment when the mathematician cuts of! his nourishment at its source by solving the dilemmas. It remains to be seen whether his Idealistic Monism has sufficient vitality, or sufficient command of other resources to survive the blockade. His ultimate and complete overthrow must follow if he has no other resources than the slender synthetic methods he has employed hitherto ; if, that is to say, he stands or falls by the entire epistemology of the past. It must follow, in any case, wh