o CO o LIBRARY OF THE University of California. Class THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE A0ENT8 IN AMERICA THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64 & 66 Fifth Avenub, New York THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE BY CARVETH READ, M.A. PROFESSOR OK PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND LOGIC IN DNIVERSITY COLLEGE, LONDON LONDON ADAM AND CHARLES BLACK 1905 CONTENTS INTKODUCTION Chapter I. — Belief and Knowledge 1. The Scope of Philosophy 2. Belief, Knowledge, and Science 3. Hume on Belief. 4. Society and Belief 5. Initial difficulty of Philosophy 6. Natural Doubt, Belief, and Reason PAGE 3 6 8 12 13 15 Chapter II. — Reality and Truth 1. Reality Empirical, Physical, Transcendent, Subjective 2. The Truth of Perception 3. The Conceptual System and the Physical Method 4. The Truth of Subjective Reality 5. The Subjective Conceptual System 6. The Truth of the Conceptual System . 7. In Metaphysics, Percepts and Concepts imply Judgments 19 23 26 28 29 31 33 BOOK I.— CANONIC Chapter III.— The Test of Truth: Historical 1. The Greeks 2. Descartes 3. Locke .... 4. Cudworth and Spinoza, Intuition 5. Leibniz .... 6. Kant .... 7. Mill .... 8. Spencer .... 39 43 46 48 51 54 56 59 VI THEf METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Chapter IV. — The Test of Truth : Analytic SECT. PAGE 1. The value of (a) Sense -perception ; (b) of the distinction between Formal and Material ; (c) of Universality ; (d) of Innateness ; (e) of Clearness and Distinctness ; (/) of the Sufficient Reason . 64 2. Necessity and the Inconceivability of the Opposite . . .71 3. Necessity as determined by Defiuiteness of Conception and Relation . 73 4. Necessity and Consistency ...... 75 6. Though the characterisation of the Criterion be imperfect, it is not useless ........ 78 Chapter V. — Scepticism 1. The Modality of Judgments : Pyrrhonism 2. Carneades and Probability 3. Hume ..... 4. Characteristics of his * Scepticism ' 6. Motives of his sceptical disguise 6. Pragmatism .... 80 83 86 88 91 93 Chapter VI. — The Eelativity of Knowledge 1. Modes of Relativity classified and illustrated . . . .97 2. Incidence of the sceptical criticism of Knowledge . . .102 3. The means of correcting Relativity are immanent in Sense-perception 105 4. The limited range of Sense-perception is no objection to its validity . 108 5. Difficulties arising from the abstract character of Science . . 110 6. — from its departmental character ..... 113 7. — and from the nature of Explanation .... 115 BOOK II.— COSMOLOGY Chapter VII. — Substance in Experience 1. Analysis of Empirical Substance 2. Empirical Substance is prior to Self-consciousness 3. Substance and Quality .... 4. Primary and Secondary Qualities 5. How can the World be Known ? 6. ' Powers '..... 7. Permanence of Substance : Kant and Spencer upon the grounds of this Belief ....... 121 125 126 128 130 136 137 Chapter VIII. — Ontology of the World 1. Origin of the problem : Democritus and Plato 2. Materialism ..... 3. Hypothetical Realism : Locke, Malebranche, Kant 4. Subjective Idealism : Berkeley 144 148 150 153 CONTENTS ▼u 6. Mill's Psychological Theory 6. Absoluto Idealism : Groen 7. Monism : Spinoza, Schopenhauer, Spencer 8. Conclusion .... PAOE 156 160 165 170 Chapter IX. — Universal Forms of the Phenomenon 1. Time Space, Matter and Motion are co-implicated in the growth of Perception ...... 2. Time is empirically real ..... 3. Space is empirically real ..... 4. Time, Space and Motion are conceived as infinitely divisible ; but the divisibility of Matter is a jihysical j)roblem . 6. Motion and Time are conceived as of infinite duration 6. Whether Space and Matter are finite or infinite quantities is a physical problem ...... 7. The interest of Reason in these questions 173 176 179 182 185 187 188 BOOK III.— PSYCHOLOGY Chapter X. — The Subject in Experience 1. Souls .... 2. Consciousness in relation to Physics 3. Grades of Consciousness in Nature 4. Is the Subject Substance ? 5. Is Consciousness Energy ? 6. Consciousness is an activity of Transcendent Reality 7. Mind and Body .... 195 197 199 203 205 209 211 Chapter XL — The Ontology of the Subject 1. Plato and Aristotle on the Soul 2. Descartes and Materialism 3. Leibniz's Monads 8. A mind is the consLiousness of that transcendent Being whose pheno- menon is the mind's body ...... 217 218 221 4. Berkeley's "thinking, active Principle" ; Hume's "bundle" ; Spinoza 223 5. Mill's " Permanent Something" .... 6. Kant on the Unity of Apperception and the Paralogisms ; Lotze 7. Green's "Self-distinguishing Agent" .... 227 230 235 240 Chapter XIL— Natural History of the Subject 1. Experience and Heredity 2. Primitive mental functions 3. Teleology of mental development 4. Development of the Individual 5. l)e servitule humana 6. Growth of Intelligence . 7. Reason .... 242 245 247 251 253 255 256 VUl THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE BOOK IV.— THE CATEGORIES SECT. 1. 2. 3. 4. Chapter XIII — The Abstract Categories Part I. — Of Ilelation in General Relation is the ground of every Judgment Is Relation conceivable ?..... Is Relation objectively valid ? . Relations are discriminated by Understanding in Empirical Realitj' Simple Relations of Time and Quality .... PAGE 263 264 269 270 273 Part II. — Qualitative Relations 6. Secondary Relations of Time and Quality 7. Change and Becoming ; Potential and Actual . 8. Possible and Impossible ; Contingent and Necessary . 9. Thing and Nothing ...... 10. Specimen and Species ; Event and Law ; Particular and Universal 11. Matter and Form ; Phenomenon and Substance 275 276 278 280 283 286 Part III. — Quantitative Relations 12. Scientific prerogative of Equality 13. Relations of Space and Time 14. Number 15. Indirect Measurement of Quantity 290 292 297 301 Chapter XIV. — The Physical Categories 9. 10. Metaphysical treatment of Physics Atoms and Ether Rest, Change and Identity Motion ..... Force ..... Inertia, Mass, Elasticity, Incompressibility Actio in distans .... Mechanics, Chemistry, Organisation Causation as Conservation and Uniformity of Nature Causal Instances. Causation is a Category of the physical or tual System ...... concep 307 308 309 312 315 317 318 320 323 326 Chapter XV. — Categories of Subjective Activity 1. Activity, Interaction, Parallelism 2. Will and Free Will 3. Final Causes 4. Human Ends or Ideals . 5. Man and Society 332 337 340 349 352 INTBODUCTION CHAPTEK I BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE § 1. As to the nature aud scope of Philosophy, two opinions are current. Some regard it as no more than the organisation of the Sciences : that further content is unattainable has been shown, they say, by experience of repeated failure and by reflection upon the nature of the case. According to others, there are prescientific beliefs that still have a necessary place in human life ; and, even if no definite predications can be made outside the circle of the sciences, still the grounds of the sciences themselves must be examined, and their claims to be a comprehensive and sufficient explanation of the course of the world and of human experience must be vindicated. These opposing doctrines may conveniently be called the Positive and the Critical. To me it seems that, when reason- ably stated, they are not opposed, but that both are necessary and complementary one to another. Positive Philosophy, the attempt to imite the Sciences in one system, to expound their mutual relations and the harmony of their laws, is such a manifest demand of reason, that almost at the beginning of European speculation it was felt by Plato {Rep. B. VII.) ; at the beginning of modern thought, by Bacon ; since Comte the idea has become popular, and the first problem of the Positive Philosophy, the Classifica- tion of the Sciences, is now a common exercise. The great body of the Positive Philosophy (not merely Comtian) is constituted by those sciences which give an account of the genesis and history of the world, — Astronomy, Geology, 3 4 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE Biology, Psychology, Sociology : the Analytic Sciences, treating of the modes of energy or activity which the genetic Sciences imply, are, — Mechanics, Physics, Chemistry, Physiology, Eco- nomics, etc. : the Formal Sciences, Logic and Mathematics, investigate the conditions of proving the relations and laws of phenomena in general, so far as proof is possible from accepted premises. Critical Philosophy, which takes its name from Kant, and which I shall usually call Metaphysics, is the study of the validity and adequacy of knowledge and belief. Positive Philosophy, with its premises, is, therefore, part of the object of Metaphysics ; but only a part : for Metaphysics has two branches, the Metaphysics of Natm'e and Science, and the Metaphysics of Ideals. The Ideals are expressed in Polity, Eeligion, Art, and Virtue ; but these human Ideals and their metaphysical significance are beyond the scope of this volume. The Metaphysics of Nature, as Nature is presented to us in science and experience, is my subject ; but since the regions of science are certainly greater than I can explore, I shall deal only with their most general principles, where they come nearest to philosophical interest, are least technical, and have now become an element of general culture ; and it is a rule from which I never depart, not to attempt to solve a priori any problem, that can only be effectually treated by inductive methods. The criticism of knowledge and beliefs, then ; and, of course, some extensions and interpretations of them, in order to give roundness and coherence to the whole ; in fact, an essay toward the Prima Fhilosophia. He who makes the Sciences of Nature or Ideals of Himianity the object of criticism, and investigates their validity and value, is not therefore sceptical about them. In some ages it is a fashionable distinction of the Minute Philosopher to doubt of the Ideals ; at present, perhaps, to doubt of the Sciences ; but it would be very insincere of me to claim merit upon either score. It is, indeed, foolish not to recognise that Natural Science, so recent a growth, must be immature, or not to admit that much even of what is considered to have been established may be infected with BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 5 error. It is also obvious that popular morals are little better than barbarous, and philosophic morals often narrow, timid and compromising ; that jjopular religion is wavering, confused and superstitious, and that philosophical religion usually con- sists in offering one's personal persuasions as an apology for catholic dogma. But these things cannot hide the equally obvious truth that our daily life depends in every detail upon science, and for its stability and amelioration upon morals and religion. There is indeed one conception characteristic of our age and sprung from its profoundest reflections, whicli may yet paralyse us with self-suspicion and fear. So long has been the process of the world, so long the period of human existence, 60 recent is the growth of science and moral enlightenment ; so long is to be the future of mankind, so vast perhaps the expansion of civilisation and intelligence : what hope that we can yet have achieved or perfected anything ? Must not all our culture appear shallow and vain in the comprehension of the world to come ? May not our own descendants be the " superior beings " to " show a Newton as we show an ape " ? But to let ourselves be inhibited by such forebodings is the surest way to prevent their realisation. The city founded on science which Plato and Bacon beheld in prophetic vision, can only be built by the continuous labour of human generations ; of which ours is one. As the past is not abolished but re- embodied in ourselves, so shall it fare with us hereafter. And indeed better : for we are hardly rid of the illusion of astonishment or even laughter at the errors of ancient or even recent predecessors ; but Time, with equal travail the mother of truth and error, will at last give birth to comprehensive criticism. Still it is true and significant that philosophy, not yet 3000 years old, is a new thing in the world, and that 3000 years hence it will still be new: whether we consider the immense period of preparation for thought duriug the growth of organic consciousness ; or the immense prospective period of reflection that remains, and will remain, for the human or Buper-human mind. Modesty, therefore, becomes us well, but 6 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE not despair. If many of our beliefs are erroneous ; if little surprise is felt when what has passed for knowledge turns out to involve some mistake or oversight ; if the sciences stand in need of perpetual revision and readjustment ; yet comparison and criticism, rejection and confirmation, analysis and integra- tion go hopefully forward ; and in each age it is the part of Metaphysics to carry out the process methodically with reference to those doctrines and conceptions that at the time are assumed to be fundamental. Scientific discoveries, social changes and the indefinable growth of the public mind, have again and again thrown the older criticisms and systematisa- tions out of use, like last year's crab-shells. To readjust the world's beliefs the philosopher was needed ; he was a social organ for that purpose ; without him the public mind must have remained either cramped or formless : and whatever mental blemishes he may have had, such as fancifulness, paralogy, megalomania, — all most incident to that sort of man, who is as much an imagination as an understanding, he brought the plasticity that is necessary to readjustment. And the task which giants of old accomplished single-handed must now be discharged by the regiment, each of us doing his share. § 2. As to the use of the terms Belief, Knowledge, Science, not much refinement is required, and I mean to avoid needless technicality. Every one thinks of science as the most definite, systematic, and best -ascertained kind of knowledge. The meaning of belief is less settled. It sometimes stands for the region of opinion or doctrine about which we are not quite confident ; so that we recognise degrees of belief, or of subjec- tive assent ; whereas we should hesitate to say that we had knowledge or science of anything concerning which we felt doubtful, or saw any reasonable grounds for doubting. Some- times, again, a fact or doctrine is called a belief when no logical reason can be given for it, though it may be held with the utmost force of conviction ; whereas knowledge and science are supposed to be grounded upon evidence that can be explicitly stated and methodically adduced. But then, since the grounds of science are said to be axioms and facts of BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 7 sense-perception, for neither of whicli logical reasons can be given, the claim is laid that knowledge and science are them- selves based upcm belief, and are therefore even less certain than this from which they are derived. Or, again, if it be said that sense-perceptions and the intuition of axioms are direct cognitions, and that this is more akin to science than to belief, as the terms are commonly used ; it may be replied that, at any rate, the greater part of any man's science depends upon memory, or upon the testimony of others, and that this is certainly called belief. Besides, there is no impropriety in saying that a man ' believes ' the fifth proposition of Euclid, though he may just have demonstrated it ; and even the wildest beliefs of savages are based upon some sort of evidence and elaborated by some sort of reasoning. For my part, I shall use Belief as the most comprehensive term, including Knowledge, which again includes Science. For although a science may have some appearance of being an independent structure, it is better to regard it as an outgrowth of beliefs, having the original nature in every part, without which it would have no hold upon us or serious interest. Belief is the subjective acceptance of Eeality : whatever we believe in is regarded as real, or as grounded in, or correspond- ing with, reality : and whatever we take to be real is thereby an object of belief, and determines our conduct accordingly. Our discussions will be concerned hereafter with the validity of Belief, Knowledge, or Science ; that is, only so far as it is regarded as implying Eeality. Metaphysics is not like formal Logic, which may deal with ' X is Y,' no matter what X and Y stand for ; and it cannot, like formal Logic, deal with judg- ments or propositions without reference to the attitude or process of believing or knowing them. To give a full account of belief as merely subjective, and of all the processes of percep- tion and inference, belongs, indeed, especially to Psychology, and the most comprehensive account of belief is given by James Sully in The Human Mind (chap, xii.) ; but Metaphysics, as best it can, makes use of all the sciences. "We must there- fore consider these things so far as they throw light upon metaphysical inquiries : though our object is Belief for the 8 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE sake of Reality, Reality cannot be isolated from the subjective processes through which it arises for each of us and stands there for us all. § 3. Psychologists seem not to have been able to carry their investigation of the nature of belief much beyond the point that was reached by Hume {Treatise, P. II., Sects, v. to x.; Inquiry, Sect, v., P. 2). They have drawn more attention to the importance of our emotions and activities in establishing belief, but he did not overlook these factors. Now Hume found that belief differs from ' conception ' or ' fiction,' not in its content, but only in the manner of conception, or (more precisely) in a certain " feeling or sentiment " it has in the mind : a feeling that cannot be defined any more than cold or anger, that is, than any state of mind that Locke would have called a " simple idea " ; because, of course, such states cannot be analysed : they must be severally experienced. This result gives him some embarrassment : " For my part I must own that I find a considerable difficulty in the case ; and that even when I think I understand the matter thoroughly, I am at a loss for terms to express my meaning. . . . And this different feeling I endeavour to explain by calling it a superior force, or vivacity, or solidity, or firmness, or steadiness. . . . And in Philosophy we can go no further than assert, that it is some- thing felt by the mind, which distinguishes the ideas of the judgment from the fictions of the imagination. It gives them more force and influence ; it makes them appear of greater importance, it fixes them in the mind ; and renders them the governing principles of all our actions." Hume's embarrassment has generally been shared by his readers : partly, perhaps, because ' feeling ' is the name of so many experiences that are fugitive and insignificant ; chiefly because it is paradoxical to refer the Reality of the universe ultimately to my feeling or sentiment. But the paradox results from identifying the metaphysical with the psycho- logical point of view, the position of self-consciousness, which involves metaphysical ' solipsism.' The difficulty of accepting Hume's doctrine disappears if Reality be based upon what we (dl feel with such ' force,' ' firmness,' ' steadiness ' : for what BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 9 more can we say ? Modern Scepticism has descended from Descartes not because he insisted upon proving all things, but because he found nothing to hold fast by except self- consciousness ; for the Hegelian interpretation of this position, as implying universality, was far from Descartes's mind. The existence of other people than ourselves may indeed be sup- ported by arguments ; we may say that (a) they are like ourselves externally, therefore internally ; (b) they proceed from similar generative causes, therefore are similar effects ; (c) they answer when we consult them, and thus verify the hypothesis of their being conscious. Thus a justification may be obtained for recognising their assent or dissent ; but such arguments cannot be said to carry conviction, since they add nothing to the conviction we already have ; and to urge them seems a disparagement of the instinctive belief that existed in full force before they were thought of. But whatever difficulty Hume may profess to find in the conclusion that belief is a kind of feeling, he is, of course, pleased with the literary effect of his paradox ; and he goes on to inquire into the causes of belief. He observes first that belief always attends the memory and the senses. This is universally admitted ; Kant identifies Eeality with sensuous data. Among the senses some are more convincing than others ; the prerogative of sight is witnessed by the proverb, " Seeing is believing," and the still greater efficacy of active touch, by the test of St. Thomas. That is especially real which we act upon and which limits our activity by acting or reacting upon us. But Hume's next remark takes us deeper ; an impression of the senses communicates its vivacity and force to all ideas related to it. Hence memory is distinguished from imagina- tion by its greater vivacity and also by the fixity in the order of its ideas, derived from the order of the original impressions. Further, the vigour and vivacity of mental processes, and therefore of belief, is favoured by attention, by the associative principles of resemblance and contiguity, and, more especially, by causation and by repetition or custom. Even an idea of which we have forgotten the correspondent impression may 10 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE itself become the ground of belief and inference ; because whatever firmness or vivacity it has it must be able to bestow on whatever is related to it. " Of these impressions or ideas of the memory we form a kind of system, comprehending whatever we remember to have been present, either to our internal perception or senses ; and every particular of that system, joined to the present impressions, we are pleased to call a reality. But the mind stops not here. For finding that with this system of perceptions, there is another connected by custom, or if you will, by the relation of cause and effect, it proceeds to the consideration of their ideas ; and as it feels that it is in a manner necessarily determined to view these particular ideas, and that the custom or relation, by which it is determined, admits not of the least change, it forms them into a new system, which it likewise dignifies with the title of realities. The first of these systems is the object of the memory and the senses, the second of the judgment. 'Tis this latter principle which peoples the world, and brings us acquainted with such existences as, by their removal in time and place, lie beyond the reach of the senses and memory." Hence, although the passions and the excitement of poetry and oratory, by increasing the force and vivacity of ideas, influence our beliefs, yet " by reflection and general rules, the understanding corrects the appearances of the senses," and determines the judgment, " even contrary to present observa- tion and experience." Thus in reviewing the causes of Belief, Hume, starting from sensation as its origin, has effected a transition to science as still more coercive. His explanation of this is that the system of general rules rests upon customary experience, and that the mass of this overcomes the strength of any particular impression that seems to oppose it. He has not completely guarded his position : a general rule cannot, of course, over- come a single impression per se ; if I see ' red,' I see ' red ' : but a rule may determine the significance of an impression ; if I take it for blood, the rule may assure me it is claret, or even that it has a subjective origin with no external corre- spondence. One might also complain that only by a strained BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 11 interpretation can our belief in systematic science be said to be based upon the custom of experience : so much analysis intervenes. Yet it is essentially true that, first, the reduction of general laws under others still more general, and these again under others, as in the systematisation of science, confirms one by another through identification of the relations involved, in a manner analogous to the confirmation by repetition of particular passages of experience, such as the striking of a flint and the outburst of fire ; for every physical law, as a relation of cause and effect, is a repetition of every other : and that, secondly, as a sensation or idea " transports the mind to such ideas as are related to it," and " likewise communicates to them a share of its force and vivacity," all the elements of experience embodied in a general rule must strengthen and enliven one another, and so must all the rules related together in any system. It is easy, therefore, to understand that in such a system the greatest intensity and stability of belief is found ; especially in those who have not merely learnt to rehearse its formulae but in whom it has been renewed by experience and labour; for a hearsay system depends upon who, or how many, are heard to say it, and may not prevail over other prejudices. Exception may be taken to another expression of Hume's : he says that " we form " the system of memory, and that the mind " forms " the system of understanding ; but this seems to me true only in the sense that an acorn forms an oak. It is manifest that the system of memory grows, and that in most men a very small part of it is designedly formed ; and the same is true of the system of understanding. Hume's expression too strongly suggests an artificiality in our systems of belief. On the other hand, he observes in the Inquiry that beKef " depends not on the will, nor can be commanded at pleasure " ; that is, belief depends not on an immediate act of will. The Philosopher of " Common Sense " {Intellectual Powers, vi. 4) agrees with him : " It is not in our power to judge as we will. The judgment is carried along necessarily by the evidence, real or seeming, which appears to us at the time." Plainly, belief upon evidence, far from being 12 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE volitional, is a kind of acquiescence. But here, again, some qualification is needed ; for if, as Hume says, attention and the passions help to determine belief, it follows that, without design, the cumulative effect of volition may be very great ; and, accordingly, it is a common remark that people believe as they list ; and Pasteur had reason to say that " the greatest disorder of the mind is to allow the will to direct belief." The passions determine belief by communicating a " greater force, vivacity, solidity," to ideas ; that the sthenic emotions have such influence is easily understood ; but so have the asthenic, by the infusion of fear which (as Mosso shows) is pathologic and exerts a fascination — whence the power of superstitions. And voluntary action itself strengthens belief without any direct ' will to believe ' ; for having an end in view, and being busy with means toward it, we are concerned with relations of causation, which (as Hume might say) afford an easy transition of thought ; and, moreover, the reaction of our efforts irradiates from the kinaesthesis the whole region of correlated ideas. § 4. There remains an important cause of Belief of which Hume says remarkably little : the influence of social life in the various forms of education, tradition, authority, common sense, confirming alike our sciences and our superstitions. It seems to have been characteristic of the Sophists to dwell upon this topic, insisting that what was taken for truth or justice existed only by institution or convention, not by nature ; whereas Plato and his followers have maintained that in nature or the reason of nature, the truth of everything is grounded : Aristotle, for example, argues that both absolute justice and slavery are by nature. For me this dispute turns upon an exaggerated distinction between nature and society ; since institutions and conventions are as natural as trees in the forest ; where, also, poisonous weeds are found. But social influence introduces new causes of belief; for Society has interests besides those of which its members are aware ; and from social relations grow many distinctively human senti- ments, such as loyalty, honour, justice; since it is necessary that men should co-operate : and these feelings determine our way of thinking. The great organ of social influence is BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 13 language, whose terms derive their meaning from experience ; and propositions, bringing these terms together in thought, as experience brings facts or events together, produce, where there is no overwhelming conflict, some degree of belief. For what else is the use of language ? But see the consequences. As soon as we can talk, the right of private judgment is en- croached upon by irresistible power, and every artifice is adopted to bury the nascent understanding under a load of prejudice. What might not happen could there ever be an intellectus sibi permissusl Socrates, perhaps, by fighting his way back, got nearest to it ; and no such force to make others think has ever appeared in the world. But family, school, church, and State instruct the boy and the man what to think and what to do. Inheriting a nature fit for such a life, his instincts of imitation, honour, sympathy, reverence, and the rest, all co-operate in delivering him over to the great tutor or arch-sophist (however you regard it), Society, till both in thought and manners — Custom lies upon him with a weight Heavy as frost and deep almost as life. The habit of believing assertions, become almost instinctive, gives opportunity to liars and other imaginative persons. Falsehood and romance, imperfectly differentiated, flourish amongst children and savages ; and this is quite natural, for deceit is common in organic Nature. Hence, if we may assume (on the principle of natural selection) that in a successful tribe or nation most of the prevalent beliefs are, or have been, useful, still we cannot infer without special inquiry that any particular belief is true. § 5. Philosophy, then, coming late in human life, meets at the outset with a great difficulty : how to begin the dis- crimination of truth and error, what to accept, what to reject ? Hume's remark about Eeligion at the beginning of his Natural History is true of every belief : there are two questions to be considered — " its foundation in reason," and " its origin in human nature." The mass of beliefs, ingrained in child- hood and youth, abides with us ; preceding the exercise, it is 14 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE necessarily amongst the foundations of reason. Sometimes the philosopher has affected to disregard this situation, to base all his structure of thoughts or words upon one first principle, or even to proceed without assuming anything at all. Whereas, in fact, even the greatest philosophers rely on the history of culture and the attainments of their own age, and in the elaboration of their doctrines at last depart at but few points from common sense ; are sometimes anxious to show that it is the other philosophers who are at issue with " the plain man " ; or if they venture to maintain here and there a monstrous paradox or two, they compound for it, and excuse their treason to King Mob, by deducing thence through unexpected links of inference all the most popular conclusions. Who does not see that the pretended conclusions are the real premises ? The Sceptics abolish all knowledge, and then restore it under the name of probability. On the other hand, though some- thing must be assumed, we cannot begin by accepting the whole accumulated traditions of our race. But, fortunately, wherever Philosophy becomes possible distinctions have already been recognised, by those who can be interested in Philosophy, between various groups of beliefs as more or less trustworthy. Not only belief but criticism is antecedent to Philosophy. Why not take frank advantage of this, and assume provision- ally all that is accepted by well-informed and sensible people ; in fact, as much as a candid reader is likely to grant ? Akin to the illusory purism of deductive method, evading the traditionary foundations of knowledge, is the egotism of some Philosophers as against their predecessors and rivals, their claim to originality. Each man, indeed, feels bound to treat all the problems that have formerly been dealt with, and he recognises a closer relationship to some of the dead than to others, and sometimes approves of an attitude of mind or even adopts a formula ; but, on the whole, he undertakes to create anew the intellectual world by the intervention of his own word ; if others had the right point of view, they failed to see the landscape in its true perspective ; if they had a glimpse of a sound principle, they had no steady vision of it and could nob draw the necessary inferences. As for those with whom BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 15 the philosopher feels little sympathy but rather antipathy, his criticisms of them are often so unintelligent that he may be suspected of having taken little pains really to understand what they were trying to say. In short, hitherto, by his account of it, mankind had sat in the cave, gazing at shadows, and he first had managed to turn round, to climb up to the sunlight, and to behold the world of things in their truth and substance. In consequence of such egomania, a philosopher's view, though often ingenious or even sublime, is manifestly one-sided and partial ; it is just his view ; we learn from his works only what the infinite world seemed like as reflected in his little head. Eclecticism, meanwhile, has been a term of reproach ; it means the unreasoned adoption from others of incoherent principles by mere subjective preference. And it must be acknowledged that those who have been especially called Eclectics have been second-rate thinkers ; a good deal of self- confidence is natural to the great man. But the possibilities of really independent performance are greatly exaggerated. The limits of individuality are narrow ; no one man is equal to any great task. In such a personal matter as epic and dramatic poetry, the greatest geniuses never invent their own fables, but are content to give a new form to that upon which the human mind has long brooded. Similarly in science and mechanical invention, each discoverer builds upon the labours of others. And so, in fact, it must be in Philosophy ; the systems that make such a figure in history age after age, are patchworks ; the critical historian has no difficulty in tracing the materials to former owners, and in many cases he might trace them to folk-lore. Is it not better to acknowledge all this ; to recognise that in experience, tradition, speculation, the foundations of Philosophy have already been laid ; that other foundations can no man lay ; that the work belongs to the ages, not merely to us, and that as it was well begun long before we put hand to it, so after we have done our best and gone away it must be carried on by countless generations ? § 6. The causes of Belief manifestly give rise to both truth and error. In simple, barbarous tribes the discrepancies of popular tenets are slightly felt. With the growth of experience 16 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE and the keeping of records, with the change of social interests and establishment of orderly and definite conditions of life, the contradictions of fact with fancy and of fancies with one another are gradually forced upon the attention of the more reflective minds. Hence, as we said, before the rise of Philo- sophy some beliefs have become less trusted than others. Belief admits of all degrees of intensity, from the subjective feel- ing of " necessity," through degrees of probability, to doubt and suspension of judgment ; and, again, through degrees of improbability, to disbelief. Subjective probability and improba- bility differ from belief and disbelief, not merely in the intensity of their feeling ; as states of mind they are more complex and a later attainment ; and suspension of judgment is the most complex and the latest attainment of all. Bain's ' primitive credulity ' rules the savage life. Considerable growth in the organisation of thought is requisite before those comparisons are made by which it is explicitly recognised that one belief excludes another ; which, therefore, must be rejected and disbelieved ; and prior to such growth, beliefs persist in spite of many and glaring contradictions of fact. A sense of improbability depends upon a more refined appreciation of con- flict amongst the causes of belief and therefore amongst ex- pectations. Suspension of judgment implies that incompatible beliefs are felt to be equally balanced in a mind susceptible to their influence at the same time, that is, within the psycho- logical present ; therefore, in a highly co-ordinated mind. For an imperfectly co-ordinated mind, it is well known, may be possessed at different times with incompatible beliefs, and never compare them at one and the same time ; may be quite unaware of their incompatibility, and perhaps incapable of comparing them. We may all of us be more or less in this condition, and the ideal Philosopher, entirely free from confusion and latent self-contradiction, may not be born for some thousands of years to come. The causes of Belief are always, in the first place, regarded as reasons for believing ; whatever, at any stage of culture, determines the judgment, may be adduced as evidence. " I was told so " ; " It is a story honourable to my tribe " ; "I BELIEF AND KNOWLEDGE 17 saw it in a dream " : in certain conditions of society these are reasons. But when Hobbes observes, that the last of them is equivalent to " I dreamt that I saw it," every one smiles, and recognises that the value of evidence changes with the mind of man, and that to assign the cause of one's own belief is not to give a catholic reason for assenting to it. But what security can our own age have, or any age, that its ' reasons ' will not excite the smiles of posterity ? Will it not be always true that, in giving reasons for a belief, mankind must point at last to some of its causes ? Is it possible in the case of any belief, to draw clearly Hume's distinction between " its foundation in reason " and " its origin in human nature " ? Argumentative discussions and scientific investigations having drawn attention to the methods of arranging and formulating evidence, or of reasoning, which are especially embodied in Logic and Mathematics ; the effectiveness of this organon within certain limits, and the exultation of command- ing it, have led men to identify it with Eeason itself, and to invest it with all the glory of the differentia of the paragon of animals. It has been supposed to carry conviction by means altogether different from those that excite vulgar credulity ; and in comparison with it every other kind of evidence has been disparaged, and experience itself regarded as irrational and inconclusive. Inasmuch as these systems of reason, Logic and Mathematics, must have some basis, this, we are told, is intuitive reason, which gives the axioms or necessary grounds ; so that the formal systems are reason throughout ; intuitive and discursive reason are ground and superstructure. If any account of intuitive reason be asked for, it is a priori, ' innate,' ' heaven-implanted ' : all which phrases amount to a refusal to give any explanation at all. And in this faith many a thin enthusiast will still live and die. The theory of evolution, however, to any one who accepts it, is, I suppose, incompatible with any but an experiential origin of intuitions, as instinc- tive modes of cognition developed in the human mind and generalised by language. An intuitive axiom is a general judgment concerning ultimate unconditional truth : its gener- ality distinguishes it from a perception of fact, and its uncon- 2 18 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE ditionality from discursive reason, which depends on premises. It was in attempting, under some misapprehension of the facts, to explain the intuition of causation that Hume attributed it to "custom"; and for this he is always charged with scepticism concerning reason ; whereas he was only giving the best account he could of the growth of reason as to this concept : " Custom " is intuitive reason in the making. Intuition, then, is at once a resultant and an element of experience, and as such it is a cause of belief. But, further, not only is the basis of Logic and Mathematics to be derived from experience, but unless their forms are filled with the content of experience, they are absolutely useless not only in practice but in the discovery of truth, and can never make us believe anything. All reason, therefore, rests upon, and is merely a mode of formulating, material that is not technically rational, namely, experience. It must be acknowledged that such a way of considering beliefs, as wholly determined by experience, suggests a mechanical interpretation of thought, as if Truth were the survival of a conflict in the mind, as the equilibration of any system depends on the cancellation of disturbing forces. More- over, so far as experiences can be expressed in propositions they may be exhibited as reasons, but in extensive regions of experience this may be impossible ; for much of our experience is subconscious, and our subconscious life powerfully influences judgment and belief, but cannot be read into the forms of Logic. If then, in fact, such experience determines beliefs that are inexpugnable and a necessary complement to those in which formal reason plays its greatest part, our judgment seems to be given over to a power beyond our control and beyond the reach of analysis. But the consideration of Belief in relation to reason and experience, draws us from the subjective to the objective side of knowledge. An attempt to discriminate the characters of truth and error; to collect and examine the grounds upon which philosophers have endeavoured to justify their convictions or their scruples ; and to inquire whether, or how far. Belief is, or may become, co-extensive with Reason, will occupy the following pages. CHAPTER II REALITY AND TRUTH § 1. Opposite me, at a distance of about 500 yards, a hill rises steeply to a height of about 1000 feet. At its foot lies a narrow meadow surrounded by dark green woods of oak, chestnut and fir. Above the wood runs a brighter border of ferns, then heather, and at the top grey crags. In the blue overarching sky a few white or grey clouds drift slowly along. From the valley at the foot of the hill is heard the rushing of a mountain stream, hidden by trees, and from this side of it a meadow and lawn slope up to my window. Cattle browse across the meadows ; swallows skim by in the air, and a light wind rustles through the woodland. This is Empirical Eeality, matter of fact, the scene of the activity and interest of life, the beauty of the world, which can never be " explained away," and for which no theory can ever be substituted. Why not be content with this, instead of making a theory about it ? Still, this being a working hour, terms of the Schools begin to jangle in my ears and gurgle in my throat. I observe grimly that the scene before me is matter in space, a continuum of points of resistance and intervals of free move- ment ; that I am necessarily impressed with its permanence as a whole, in spite of changes among its parts ; and with its independence of myself, in the sense that others will see it when I go away, and that if I come back next year it will seem much the same. I see that all objects in the landscape have characteristic properties ; that only oak, and fir, and fern, and heath, and rock look just like that : that only 19 20 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE swallows and one or two other birds with similar wings have just that casting, sweeping flight ; that only mountain streams make just that everlasting noise. And as to all this no serious doubt is possible, and if any one suggests a doubt there is no use in arguing about it. A belief so primitive as generally to be inarticulate, no other can compare with it in " force, solidity, firmness, or steadiness." This Empirical Eeality is equivalent to human sense- perception. It involves much more than sensation, more than the sense -perception of an animal such as the cow yonder; nay, to one man sense -perception has far more significance than to another. As mind develops all its functions develop, and sense - perception comes to include more and more the elements which, considered abstractly, are ascribed to thought. In fact no clear separation of mental functions is possible, but only a distinction of view for special purposes. Thought is immanent in perception and perception is implied in all thought. We may say that most characteristic of thought are the scientific processes of classification and explanation ; and these are plainly involved in the present perception : for I classify in saying that I see oaks, chestnuts and fir trees ; and I explain in saying that I hear the noise of a river that cannot be seen. However, by thought these processes are carried much further than by perception. Thought, dealing with concrete things, has chiefly three investigations, what things are, how they came to be so, and what they do ; or their nature, their causes, and their effects. Not content with seeing that certain trees are oak, chestnut and fir, according to popular recogni- tion, we desire to know exactly the structure of each of them and how they differ from one another. We find that the oak and chestnut are much more alike than either of them is to the fir. We also learn that these trees and all other plants consist of cells, and that this is also true of cows and swallows and all other animals ; that the cells again consist of chemical molecules, and that this intimate structure is common to them with the rocks at the top of the hill. This, then, it may be said, is what things are. REALITY AND TRUTH 21 As to liow things came to be such as we now perceive them, the conclusions are at present less definite; but a botanist or zoologist would give some account, or suggestions toward an account, of how oaks or cows arose ; and a geologist would explain that the rocks at the top of the hill (which I believe to be weathered slate) were long ago deposited as fine mud at the bottom of the ocean ; then covered with other deposits, and during disturbances of the earth's crust subjected to enormous lateral pressure at a great depth and probably at high temperature ; whence resulted their character- istic cleavage and the tilting and fracture of their stratification. Beyond the deposition of the mud lies a region of surmise concerning still earlier rocks, and farther back still the supposed cooling of the planet, after its origin in the con- densation of a cloud of molecules. What things do depends upon what they are. Now they are regarded as special arrangements of molecules; so that what they do depends upon the nature and grouping of these molecules according as they constitute inorganic or organic bodies, plants or animals, oaks or cows. Amongst their activities, it is explained, are those that enable us to see them, hear, smell, taste them, feel them to be warm or cold ; for these elements of experience are scientifically regarded as merely our sensations, not belonging to the Reality as such. The oscillations of the molecules of a body, for example, by setting in motion the ether, stimulate the nerves of our eyes or skin, and thereby the sense of light or warmth arises. Since, then, as every inquiry brings us to a world of molecules and ether, and of their movements, it is very common to speak of these as real in an eminent degree, to the disparage- ment of the manifold of Empirical Reality, as if this were comparatively unreal. An obvious impropriety: to avoid which I shall call the world, as conceived by scientific thought. Physical Reality. Some metaphysicians reduce Reality to much narrower bounds. They argue that the only absolute existence in the world we perceive is a Substance or substratum, of which Physical and Empirical Realities are merely the manifestation 22 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE in our consciousness. The properties of the Physical World, resistance, extension, and motion, they call primary qualities of this substance ; and the further properties of the Empirical World, colour, sound, etc., they call secondary qualities. There are various ways of formulating this doctrine ; but they all agree in degrading the world of perception and scientific analysis to the position of a phenomenon, having only a conditional reality and lying, in fact, as Plato says, some- where between reality and nothingness. We may call the substance which all appearances or phenomena are said to depend on, or inhere in, but which is never directly known, Transcendent Reality, or Being. As to the nature of this substance, however, whilst the commoner practice is (or has been) to call it Matter, others maintain that it is essentially Thought. The activity of the Divine Mind, they say, or the self-existent Ideas of things (for here again there are various opinions) must be regarded as the ultimate ground of phenomenal existence. And the ultimate ground, thus conceived, it may be convenient to call Noumenal Eeality. Reality is, however, not exhausted by the object of percep- tion and its supposed conditions. Looking out upon the landscape, I am aware of my own delight and interest in it, an expanding curiosity, activity, and exhilaration ; listening to the rush of the river, I cannot help wishing that the trees on this side of the valley were a little thinner, that I might also see the shimmer of the waters ; if whilst watching the swallows it occurs to me that they are catching many insects, there may cross my mind some disturbing considerations of the raven of nature, mitigated by further considerations of the annoyance that would be caused by too many insects ; and so on. Now these feelings, wishes, inferences also belong to Empirical Reality ; it is the reality of what Locke calls * Reflection,' and may be termed ' subjective ' to distinguish it from the objective Reality of Perception. There is nothing in the subjective region corresponding with Physical Reality. Something approaching the character of a primary quality of mind may be found in the nisus of EEALITY AND TRUTH 23 attention ; but this cannot be regarded both as a condition of other modes of cousciousneHS and at the same time inde- pendent of them, as molecules are in relation to visual and auditory sensations. A Transcendent Reality of Reflection is generally recognised under the names of Mental Substance, Ego, Self or Spirit ; or, considering it as informing and animating the body, and (by most) as capable of subsisting independently, it is called the Soul. Concerning the nature of this mental substance, how- ever, and its relations to the thoughts and feelings which are its properties, modes, or activities, there is, as in the corre- sponding case of material substance, much difference of opinion ; and, according to Materialism, the substance of mind is the body. Finally, the Self, or Soul, or particular human (or animal) consciousness is sometimes treated as an emanation or process or phase of the Universal or Divine Consciousness ; and, according to this doctrine, the worlds of perception and reflection have the same fundamental Noumenal Reality. § 2. The notions of Reality and Truth are sometimes identified, as when it is said that the truth of the world is the Good : meaning that Good is the ultimate Reality. But it seems better to say that Reality is that of which Truth is a more or less adequate representation ; or that Truth is the correspondence of cognition with Reality. It may be com- plained that this is to give a secondary place and an inferior dignity to truth ; and further that, thus understood, truth cannot be ascribed at all to the Divine Consciousness, which is Reality itself. Such difiiculties, arising from traditionary associations of words, are amongst the reasons why Metaphysics must be written. It seems to me that human consciousness likewise is Reality itself. Whether the Universal Conscious- ness can be called ' true,' matters little : I despair of doing honour to the Absolute by any accumulation of predicates. But if the word truth implies the possibility of error, it cannot be an attribute of the Divine Mind ; and it seems an advantage of the above definition that it regards truth as only appertain- ing to particular consciousness, and restrains the vagaries of 24 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE speculation by the consideration that what we seek is to avd pdnTTivov a\rj6e<;. Truth, then, must be considered under each of the recognised modes of cognition and representation, Percept, Image,. Concept, Judgment ; and in relation to the various modes of conceiving Eeality. The Percept, indeed, may seem identical with Empirical Reality ; and so it may be as far as it goes ; but it is never adequate, as we may see by looking closer at an oak tree, by tearing off the bark, making sections of the wood, examining it under a microscope. The percept, again, may contain representations that accurate inspection will not verify ; that is, it may be illusory. Besides, not every one looking at yonder hill can discriminate all the shades of its manifold coloration ; some are blind, or colour-blind in various degrees ; there are limits of discrimination to the most delicate sense : nor, listen- ing to the concert of nature, can every one hear the various tones of stream, thrush, grasshopper ; nor when night falls, the cry of bats in altissimo, the hooting of owls and still the rushing of the stream ; some are deaf, some hear various noises but no music. There are, therefore, three ways in which perception may come short of the truth of Empirical Reality : it may be abnormal, or illusory, or inadequate. The content of any percept is direct Empirical Reality for the perceiving Subject ; but so far as it does not agree with the perception of other Subjects in the same circumstances, it is abnormal or illusory. So far as merely inadequate, it is symbolic or representative of a whole ; and it is true so far as it signifies further possible percepts discoverable, immediately or conceptually, by exploration. Perception may be especially inadequate in respect of the relations and reciprocal influence of things. Where a thing is, seems to perception a needless question, but it is very difficult to answer; how far things are distant from one another may be perceived more or less accurately, but only within narrow limits. That a certain tree flourishes in one situation and not in another ; that one tree shadows barren ground, whilst another allows the growth of grass or under- REALITY AND TRUTH 25 wood : so much we may, perhaps, be said to perceive, but not the processes that have these results. We cannot perceive how vegetable life depends upon soil and sunshine ; how animal life depends upon vegetable, and vegetable upon animal ; tlie processes and conditions of dependence are secret and obscure. We perceive the voice of the river and the light of the sun, but not the means by which they reach us. Thus, when we try to trace the connections of things and events, the inadequacy of direct perception drives us from Empirical to Physical Reality. Now the elements of Physical Reality, atoms and ether, cannot be directly perceived at all, cannot be sensibly dis- tinguished from space, being too refined to offer any sensible resistance to our movements. Atoms massed together, indeed, become directly perceptible by manipulation ; but this is a very coarse means of perception, since millions of atoms may be added to, or subtracted from, a given mass without our being at all aware of it. The size and qualities of atoms, the nature of the ether and the movements of these things are altogether conceptual. Conceptual truth, which will presently be considered, is entirely representative ; it is not only symbolic of something else, but it is also no part of that which it symbolises ; for the name or definition of oxygen is no part of the gas, as the colour of a rose is part of its Empirical Reality. As to the truth of percepts in relation to Transcendent Reality, Substance was supposed by Locke to resemble Empirical Reality (ideas of sensation) in its primary qualities, but no further. Spencer tries to show that, whilst there is no direct resemblance, there must be a correspondence of relations between the world as perceived and the Unknowable Force ; others have even denied that a transcendent Substance exists at all. Noumenal Reality presents similar difficulties : Plato treats the truth of the phenomena (percepts) sometimes as a participation in, sometimes as an imitation of. Ideas ; and he shows that great perplexity arises in either course. In fact, we are here confronted with a great traditionary question of Metaphysics. (See Chapter VIIL) 26 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE § 3. Less metaphysical interest attaches to the truth of images : I mean the phantasms or traces that perceptions leave in the mind and which fill our study of memory or imagination. On the whole, it must be considered to follow the truth of perception itself ; that is, images may be normal or abnormal, or illusory, adequate or inadequate ; and, in the latter case, either as to objects and events, or to their order and relations. The older psychologists greatly exaggerated the extent to which, in ordinary minds, images are copies of their original percepts. A few people have very vivid and complete mental pictures, most people much less perfect, some hardly any that can be said to resemble objects or occurrences : similarly with phantasms of hearing and of active touch ; of other sense -perceptions still less. In general, as percep- tion is inadequate, it is symbolic; and imagery is far more so, as we see in the swift and synoptic career of memory; but this is a matter of Psychology rather than of Meta- physics. Mental imagery is a great source of illusions and primitive superstitions ; but with the development of reason imagery and the vague ideas it supports are superseded by concepts, and become important chiefly as subsidiary to the conceptual system. If you mention an oak to any Englishman who has ever lived in the country, it may call up some image of a tree grow- ing in a wood or in a meadow ; it will at least suggest certain characteristics of such a tree in verbal schemes if you ask him to describe it ; as that it bears leaves of a certain shape and colour, branches almost horizontal with sharp lateral twists, has acorns for fruit, sometimes carries oak-apples, makes a hard durable wood of a certain structure. This is his idea of an oak. A botanist makes this idea more definite and detailed, explains that oak-apples are not a natural product, assigns a particular oak to its genus and species, showing how it differs from other allied kinds. This is the concept of an oak. The botanist may go on to explain how the oak grows, feeding upon the soil and air ; how its leaves inhale carbon dioxide and exhale oxygen, for the nature of which gases he refers you to the chemist, and the chemist is ready with EEALITY AND TRUTH 27 definitions or concepts of them and their laws. Thus, again, the conceptual system is created to make good the short- comings of perception and imagination, Physical Reality to complete Empirical Reality. The creation of this conceptual system is carried out by a combination of observation, hypothesis, deduction and induction, for which I refer to books on Logic and Methodology. The physical method proceeds from percepts to concepts concerning their nature and con- nection, and comes back to percepts again : the return to percepts being the verification of the conceptual construction. At every stage the conceptual process must conform to the analogy of perception, and is checked by perceptual conditions. By conforming to the analogy of perception, I mean that the things conceived must be endowed only with such qualities and movements as bear some resemblance to the qualities and movements of things perceived, though they may not resemble the very percepts of which they are conceptions : the vibrations of molecules are not like the perceived fact of heat, but they are like vibrations that are things perceived. That the process is checked by perceptual conditions means that if (for example) it is conceived that plants exhale oxygen, it must be shown to perception that the gas exhaled has the properties and reactions of oxygen ; and the properties of pure oxygen are inferred from the reactions of a gas obtained under conditions such as to satisfy our perception that nothing else can be present. It follows from this that the conceptual process, in spite of its highly symbolic character, is an imaginable one, at least to those whose imagination is tolerably powerful ; and this has two consequences. First, imagination may prepare the way for conceptual theory; since by its means even atoms and ether may be seen, as by an indefinitely powerful magnify- ing-glass. Secondly, the fact that the conceptual process can be pictured, or intuitively represented, whether by visual or tactile schemata, brings it into the same plane with the perceptual process; so that Empirical and Physical Reality form one continuum, and thereby that satisfaction is obtained 28 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE for the sake of which the mind creates Physical Reality. Without intuition, no understanding. There remain, however, two discrepancies between these modes of Reality. The first is that, whilst the Empirical is mainly static, the Physical is a world of incessant movement. The scene before me presents indeed some objects moving at various rates — the dashing swallows, the rushing stream, the browsing cattle ; but the meadows and mountains give an irresistible impression of permanence, and even the sunshine seems a steady illumination. The conceptions of Physical Reality represent the whole as a scene of incessant change. The motions of animals are attributed to molecular motions going on inside them, most of which are active when the animal lies at rest ; the hills are whirling with me through space in a frantically complex figure, and all their rocks vibrating with thermal and other latent forces : any apparent rest is relative to my position or my perceptive powers. The sunshine that gives such steady illumination dances past with incredible activity, and its apparent steadiness is mere sensa- tion. That introduces the second discrepancy : Physical and Empirical Reality are only conceived as a continuum in respect of the primary qualities of matter, as if these were not sensation : the secondary qualities are regarded as connected with the primary only in Empirical Reality. § 4. So far we have only considered the Truth of objective consciousness, but in the subjective region we may draw parallel distinctions. Corresponding with the perception of things, there is introspection of mental states and processes, whether wholly subjective (like toothache), or (like yellow) objective in their first significance but now considered merely in themselves or in subjective relations. Introspection may be abnormal or pathological in various ways ; but we are here concerned with its adequacy or inadequacy, because this is the condition of its truth in relation to subjective Reality. The content of every introspection is, like the content of every percept, symbolic and, in that sense, representative of a whole comprising far more than the immediate and distinct consciousness of it. Generally, closer attention to any psychic KEALITY AND TKUTH 29 content is enough to bring to light elements that at first were undiscriminated. To realise this, any one who is not familiar with such matters has only to read the description of Anger or Fear in a psychological text-book ; though indeed novelists and poets often say the same things in their own way. These writers draw our attention to much that the distracted mind neglects ; but there is a great deal in a fit of anger that will never be set down in books. Perhaps the symbolic character of consciousness may be most easily seen in this, that every emotion develops through a series of stages, but we know what is the matter with us as soon as one begins : the initial stage is a sign of all that is to follow. Direct analysis by mere attention shows us much, but indirect analysis brings out much more, as every one must have realised on first reading Berkeley's Th eory of Vision : the first great triumph in Psychology of indirect analysis. This proves to us that we must have certain sensations which it costs some effort to become aware of. Clearly, therefore, introspection, like perception, is inadequate and representative or symbolic ; and it is true, as distinct from real, so far as it signifies further possible content of introspection discoverable, immediately or conceptually, by exploration. § 5. Discoverable immediately or conceptually I say ; for here too we may distinguish the Empirical Reality of intro- spection from something analogous to Physical Eeality, namely, a conceptual system designed to connect and complete the inadequate and fragmentary contents of introspection. The possibility of such a system has been indicated by such con- ceptions as Leibniz's petites perceptions, Spencer's atomic feelings, and Fechner's subliminal consciousness. All these expressions point to depths of mental life that underlie, in indefinite remoteness and obscurity, all that can be brought within the region of self-consciousness : a mental life the laws of whose growth must contain the explanation (if there be any) of the work and play of our superficial thoughts and feelings. Such hypotheses are often scouted by those who think that physiological conditions give a sufficient explana- tion of the mind, and by those who teach that the limits of 30 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE introspection are the limits of analysis. But the former group are palpably mistaken, and the latter soon surrender to them. To take the final results of introspection as the limits of psychological analysis is as unreasonable as to confine Physics to the data of sense. Some would even make the perception of space an ultimate datum, though space is the subject of all Geometry, and has therefore an infinitely diversi- fied content. But it seems to me that even the sensations of blue or yellow, however apparently structureless, as they are correlative with the functions of an ancient and complex organ, must cany in their constitution the records of that organ's growth. To fix upon any data as ultimate is to repeat the error of those " limitary cherubs " who, in the name of innate ideas or a priori forms, have affected to settle for us all the questions of nature and genesis ; it is to infringe the interest of Reason in everlasting labour. This conceptual system of Psychology, as it bears many analogies to Physical Reality, must be investigated by the Physical Method, proceeding from introspective data, through concepts, to introspective verification. But there are certain differences between the subjective and objective conceptual systems: (1) The subjective is not, like the objective system, the scene of incessant motion ; for it is not in space, which is a condition of motion : but it is the scene of incessant change of quality, of intensity, and of feeling-tone. (2) The distinc- tion of primary and secondary qualities has no place in subjective Reality, nor in sensations considered as subjective experience ; for the whole of consciousness is real in the same sense and in the same degree. (3) Low-grade or sub-liminal consciousness in the psychological conceptual system is more difficult to imagine than the play of atoms and ether in Chemistry and Physics ; for, by hypothesis, low-grade con- sciousness cannot be imitated by our imagination, which is always high-grade. One would like to be a dog, or a butterfly, or a spinal ganglion for a time ; for the failure of imagination to follow the lower life discourages the understanding and makes it too readily acquiesce in merely physiological explana- tions. An introspective magnifier would be useful ; but, if REALITY AND TRUTH 31 relatively as powerful as those used in Physiology, it would still (like them in their own function) fall far short of revealing the latens schematisinus and the latens processus of sensation. Biological and physical analogies must help, or some other way may yet be found. § 6. As to the truth of concepts, it may be considered, first, as a question of their consistency with one another ; but this is sufficiently treated of in Formal Logic under the heads of Division and the Predicables. Secondly, there is the relation of concepts to Empirical Reality ; and this, again, is treated of in Inductive Logic under the heads of Classification and Nomenclature. But, thirdly, there is the relation of concepts to Physical Reality ; and this at first may seem to need no special discussion, for, it may be asked, what is Physical Reality except concepts ? But it is much more ; for the concept is a function of cognition, and beyond it lie the things to be known by it. The concepts of Physical Reality are symbolic of something ; and their truth consists in signifying things and processes in such a way that inferences drawn from them can be verified in Empirical Reality : where waves from the depths of Nature come to the surface and break in the light of day. We verify perceptually as far as possible, but the weakness of our senses leaves a conceptual region which is believed to correspond to something impercept- ible ; just as perception itself does, except that perception is identical with Reality in that character which is a sign of the rest. That further region is conceived as if it might be perceived ; and is, therefore, conceived on the analogy of perception, so that it may also be imagined. For if the conceptual system is reduced to merely arbitrary symbols, such as mathematical equations, these may be verifiable and very useful ; but to formulate is not to explain, for it does not present to us the continuity of the World ; nor, therefore, does it subserve that final use of science and philosophy, the raising of Nature into Self-consciousness. The difference between the question of the truth of concepts in relation to Physical Reality on the one hand, and on the other hand in relation to Transcendent Reality, is that 32 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Transcendent Eeality is conceived of as having its being otherwise than as possible perception. But if, by hypothesis, it is imperceptible, how can it be conceivable ? Undoubtedly, " Substance " and " Idea " present themselves to us as concepts ; but can we assign them any distinct content or connotation and any reference or denotation beyond themselves ? This, like the corresponding question with regard to percepts, is a traditionary problem of Metaphysics, and we must hereafter try to solve it. Philosophers often assure us the solution is unattainable, that the transcendent is unknowable ; but it presently appears that this is only an exordium to stimulate curiosity whilst they go on to tell us all about it. They seem anxious to restrain the vagaries of other minds ; unbridled speculation is such a waste of time, they say : like Locke, who nevertheless cannot restrain his own speculations concerning cherubim. But Locke, like Sir Thomas Browne, may have seen reason " to fear the prophecy of Elias," and that the time of this world was running to its dregs. We have better hopes, or at least we have longer views. Why should the human race, now assured of its youth, be in as great a hurry as when anticipating its decrepitude ? Is it certain that philosophers can waste their time ? Would they, if otherwise employed, be very useful ? But meanwhile they do no harm : a statesman usually does more mischief by a single Act of Parliament than the whole line of philosophers have accom- plished since Thales. But we cannot hope to approach Transcendent Eeality entirely by the Physical Method, proceeding from percepts through analogous concepts to empirical verification. To maintain that this is the only valid method for all investiga- tions that deserve the name of science, no matter how largely the conceptual element may predominate in them : this I take to be the true position of Empirical Philosophy ; and the Physical Method must be followed as far as it will lead us. The opposite method is to begin with concepts, to endeavour to establish their relations to one another, and to regard the success of this procedure, that is, the systematisation of concepts, as the sole requisite verification. Such a method REALITY AND TRUTH 33 needs no organon but Formal Logic. Plato's plan of Dialectic makes the nearest approach to it, and Hegel has made the most elaborate attempt to carry it out. We are often assured that Hegel did not disregard the facts ; and that is true : to disregard the facts is impossible, for without them there could be no sense in concepts. But he had no clear view of the place of facts in the method of investigation and proof, nor of the uses of facts in relation to different orders of concepts. Hence, so far as it is based upon facts, his Rationalism is only an unintelligent Empiricism. We must begin with experience, since otherwise there is no problem ; and return to experience, since otherwise no solution is made good ; and proceed on the analogy of experience, since otherwise there is a failure of that continuity and resemblance in which explanation consists. The use of quitting the cave is to find the essential nature and connection of the shadows, and to return, and to interpret them. But the chief concepts of the transcendent world, " Substance " and " Idea," have not the definiteness of content which the Physical Method presupposes. No inference has ever been drawn from them that could be verified by particular experience in perception or introspection. And the truth is, I think, that they are not concepts of science or knowledge, but of that background of Belief out of which knowledge has been differentiated as science has been out of knowledge. If such concepts are to be justified, it must be as appertaining to the necessary background of our picture of the World ; and it should appear possible by fair inferences (though imperfect because unverifiable) — to trace in that obscurity a few faint outlines of resemblance to things that stand in the foreground and are more distinctly known. § 7. Reflecting on the above discussion, we find that to question the truth of perception or of conception implies that they are modes of Judgment. To distinguish these three processes may be necessary in Psychology or in Logic, but metaphysically the third is involved in the two former. Whether the phenomenon that suggests to me an oak or a chestnut will prove on inspection to have the further properties of such a tree ; whether yonder rock is slate or granite, yonder 34 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE bird a swallow or a martin ; or whether any o'f them are even solid bodies : these and innumerable other points in the region of present perception may be doubtful ; and in deciding in one way or another, I judge. Similarly with the concept : it is not only that, as Hamilton observes, " every concept is a fasciculus of judgments," implying as many judgments as it comprises attributes and relations between the attributes ; so that if the concept A has the attributes b, c, d, we may be said to judge, logically, that b, c, d, coexist, and that each of them determines A ; but, further, if the concept is used cogni- tively, which is its only interest for Metaphysics, we judge that b, c, d, belong to the reality that A represents, and coinhere in that reality. Hence a doctrine of Categories or highest Concepts is properly a doctrine of Judgments, and is concerned with their truth or relation to reality. Kant shows that it is the reference to objects that distinguishes the meta- physical from the merely logical forms of the understanding. The Truth of Judgments, then, is the ultimate question as to truth of every kind. A judgment comprises a sign and something signified : it is a representation or symbolic consciousness of the relations of connection or resemblance in which certain elements of reality stand to one another. There is no impropriety in saying that to judge is to conceive the relation of such or such terms ; but it is always something more, namely, to believe in that relation ; for in no other way can it constitute experience or science. The elements related may belong to the same order, Empirical, Physical, Transcendent ; or these orders may be cross -related in a judgment: that oil of vitriol (for instance) is H.,SO^, is an empirico-physical judgment. But let us avoid as much as possible the humours of technicality. Locke held that any body perceived resembled in its primary qualities the corresponding unknown substance ; but he could not have called this an empirico-transcendent judgment. Metaphysics, however, does not inquire into the truth of all possible judgments : it is enough to deal (1) with those for which no forms of proof are given by Logic or Mathematics, namely, judgments taken for granted by those Sciences them- REALITY AND TRUTH 36 selves ; (2) the first principles uf the Natural Sciences, so far as they have been ascertained ; and (3) certain judgments that have merely been preserved by i)hilosophic{d tradition ; for this tradition must be continuous. Metaphysics, then, is the criticism of those judgments, whether scientific or traditionary, whicli cannot be proved from otlier judgments, and therefore, strictly speaking, cannot be proved at all : judgments of which no methodical proof is possible, because method supposes some more general principle (which must be a judgment) on which to proceed. Yet, without method, how can there even be criticism ? It becomes necessary to try to advance " considera- tions determining the mind " (in Mill's phrase), in order to induce reasonable people to grant some principle upon which a method may be founded. Hence the fundamental problem of Philosophy is the possibility •)f a criterion or test of truth. BOOK I.-CANONIC CHAPTER III THE TEST OF TRUTH. 1. HISTORICAL § 1. Both in the preparatory and in the great age of Greek Philosophy, Reason was confident in her own powers. Daring and constructive thinkers seem to have been of Spinoza's mind that the truth reveals both itself and error : sane sicut lux seipsam et tenebras manifestat, sic Veritas norma sui, et falsi est. Plato, indeed, mentions the principle of Contradiction as a ground of discrimination {Rep. 436 b), and infallibility (477 e) and distinctness (478 c) as characteristics of science iu contrast with opinion ; but although these remarks remind us of many anxious attempts in subsequent ages to define the nature of truth, for Plato they are rather descriptive than canonical, and show more security than caution. As in the course of investigation difficulties accumulated, he acknow- ledged that truth had not yet been attained, left the Good undetermined, as to the origin and nature of the world was content with probability ; Aristotle, too, whilst carefully investigating the conditions of formal truth, or consistency, admitted Chance amongst the principles of things, and irre- ducible accidentia amongst the consequences. Yet they both assumed that truth was attainable, and that when attained it would manifest itself as a systematic explanation of a world of Reason ; that such a world of Reason exists, and therefore is by Reason knowable. It was only in the age of speculative disappointment and of political and social depression that the force of negative criticism drove men to seek a criterion or test of truth : sedulous to lay sure foundations for the new structure of practical life ; indisputable principles, if not of 39 40 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE Nature, at least of human conduct. It was in behalf of rational action that the Epicureans and Stoics tried to solve the initial question of Philosophy. There were, in fact, two questions: (1) What is Reality? and (2) How do I know that my judgment corresponds with Reality ? According to Epicurus, a materialist of the School of Democritus, the criterion of truth concerning Nature is sense- perception, which must be distinct {ivapyi]';) and ultimate, i.e. incapable of being shaken or confirmed by reasoning {a\oyoa■ -> Motion The germinal experience is our own movement ; though it cannot be known as such till all its latent contents have been differentiated. None of these cognitions can have grown up without the others ; and although they are not equally prominent in all objective cognition, and probably are very unequally devel- oped in different species of animals and even vary amongst men, yet to attend to, or treat of, any one of them apart from the rest can never be a complete but only a quasi-abstraction. I am assuming that the analysis of external perception given by Bain, Spencer and most English psychologists, is essentially sound ; though a good many psychologists, such as Kiilpe, reject it as too speculative. For whilst I admit that the effect of the argument, as urged by Spencer or Sully, does not amount to conviction, yet reflection always increases my sense of its probability ; and the failure of direct con- viction seems to me sufficiently explained by the immeasur- able antiquity of the organic preparation for these perceptions. It is unreasonable to expect that the growth of countless ages can be adequately unravelled and reconstituted in a few pages of reasoning that are read in half an hour. Now if it is true that the cognitions of Time, Space, Matter and Motion all have their root in the same experiences, namely, in the kinsesthesis, or sensations of muscular contrac- tion resisted and unresisted (with the correlative relaxations), and in the adjustment of limbs and eyes, and their sliding TIME, SPACE, MATTER AND MOTION 175 from one adjustment to another (with the accompanying tactile and retinal sensibility) ; if this is true, the finished percepts, or concepts, of Time, Space, Matter and Motion can never be distinguished, compared and contrasted, without the danger of isolating in words and half-thoughts the things that are inseparable in Nature and experience. They are four factors of th3 Siime experience ; discriminated factors of the same empirical Eeality. Hence, moreover, such being the mutual implication of Time, Space, Motion and Matter, any concepts of them that are incompatible with this fact are bad concepts ; or else any dialectic that seems to exhibit the concepts as incompatible with the facts or with one another, is mere eristic. It is indeed the natural sophistry of the analytic understanding to assume that distinct concepts stand for possibly separate existences ; to treat the results of analysis as independent factors of creation. Then, what more reason- able than to treat Time or Space, or both, as existing in their own right, and to introduce Matter and Motion to them as if from outside ? But any question as to their relations raised in this way, must be stated in such a form as to pester the answer. There is not the smallest reason to suppose that any one of the four. Time, Space, Matter, Motion, ever existed separately or was experienced separately, and it is a delusion to suppose that any one of them can be separately explained. Kant says that Time and Space cannot be represented as non-existent, but can be represented as empty. The former clause is, I think, true ; for though in some conditions even human consciousness may be so narrow and dark that neither Space nor even Time defines its content, this is not the deliberate suppression of Space and Time that Kant declares to be impossible. But as to our ability to represent Space and Time as empty, he is mistaken ; for, even granting it possible to exclude the representation of all other bodies or images (which is not true), still our own body from which all Spaces radiate, and our present consciousness from which Time flows, are quite inexpugnable. I have here used ' representation ' as equivalent to Kant's Vorstellung ; but for the ensuing discussion we shall need 176 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE terms to distinguish three modes or grades of cognition : (1) Perception — particular, concrete cognition; organised in experience and aroused by the stimulus of immediate sensation. (2) Imagination, derived from perception and having its con- crete character, and sharing many of its limitations, but not dependent on present sensation, nor restricted to the scale of perception, nor to the order of perception in experience. (3) Conception, dependent on perceptions or imaginations for its contents ; yet not upon any in particular, but on the comparison and analysis of many, and therefore not concrete but abstract. A concept may be sustained by an image taken in a repre- sentative character, or by a word, or other symbol : the representative character being preserved by definition. By operating with symbols the power of conception extends far beyond the limits of perception and imagination ; and therefore, for the sake of sanity, it must proceed from perception, follow the analogies of perception, and return to it for verification. We have seen that perception is in general the ground of Empirical Reality ; that conception is the means of completing and explaining Empirical by Physical Reality ; that to be imagin- able or intuitable in a representation is a condition imposed on any concept in order that Empirical and Physical Reality may form one continuum ; but that to be perceivable or imperceivable, imaginable or unimaginable, conceivable or inconceivable, is no proof of Reality or Unreality in any particular case apart from systematic confirmation. § 2. Time, Space, Matter and Motion are all empirically real. Kant, however, when he says that Time and Space are empirically real, is inconsistent ; for he also says that they are pure (non-sensuous) intuitions, and that sensation is the test of Reality. That pure forms may be empirically real, it is not enough that they should be excited to activity by sensation ; and in fact it is as inconceivable that pure forms of intuition should be aroused by sensation, as that pure forms of judgment should connect sensations : if knowledge is to be one it must all grow together from one root. The reality of Time is immediately known in the " psycho- logical Now " : every experience has a certain duration, some TIME, SPACE, MATTEK AND MOTION 177 seconds ; but tlie ' how much ' i.s variable and cannot be generally determined : every experience also involves a change or changes ; and Duration and Change are the elements of Time. No experience is simple ; it is a process whose phases blend and overlap, and this is the condition of the inteirration and comparison of experience. Human experience is at every reach of it an immeasurably complex process ; the more you investigate it, the more you discover ; for the brain acts as a whole. If, neglecting this basis of fact, we treat Time con- ceptually as a line divisible, the present moment becomes infinitely small, is inappreciable in experience as duration or change. The past has gone ; the future is not yet ; the present is iucognisable : therefore the World is a nonentity. Such puzzles distress the youth of speculation, and reward the speculations of youth. But in the moment of true experience the whole of reality is grounded : the past is recorded as Effect and the future germinates in its Causes ; and, therefore, to a sufficient intellect it carries the World siih sjjecie eternitatis. The reality of Time is known in the Now ; but the com- prehensive consciousness of Time is the vastest abstraction (if justly called abstract) of the human mind. As the form and enfoldment of all possible experience, it is another name for the Universe in its everlasting movement. For as there is but one Universe and one process. Time as a whole cannot be considered apart from its actual contents. Hence the true character of Time is disguised by the methodological device of treating it as of one dimension, representable by a straight line. This can only represent the lapse of Time by an image of dui-ation (no matter what it is that endures). But Time beyond the Now has no duration ; and even there it is consciousness rather than Time that endures ; for it reposes on the universal process. This process, again, is co-extensive with moving bodies in Space of three dimensions. Time, therefore, comprehends the height and the breadth and the depth of the galaxy, and something more, the life and mind of all that world. It may also be a convenient fiction to treat Time as made up of moments ; but in experience all moments are fused in 12 178 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE the continuity of movement. Moments are occurrences in the course of time and are marked upon a background of obscurer changes. Nothing can be less like our consciousness of Time than a series of moments. It is indeed probable that the accents of attention (sensations of adjustment) help in defining for us the process of Time by giving a subjective measure : the fixation of attention takes about three-fourths of a second, and this is the period of which our subjective estimate is most exact. But the point of attention is neither the whole of consciousness nor the sole determinant of its growth : it is a selection within consciousness, and all that lies about or beyond to the most obscure marginal sentience (and, no doubt, still farther) has its influence and its registration. Hence Time, as the form and content of all experience of movement and change, is the whole mass of consciousness ; but since in the Now, or in any given lapse of time, the contents of experience continually vary (for even the accent of attention is of unequal intensity and is sometimes suspended), a concept of Time has been developed having no particular content, but as a " quasi-blank form " of any possible content. And this, I suppose, is Kant's pure form of intuition. The perception of any particular time beyond the Now is vague, because it is one-sided ; I mean that its sensation- element lies in the Now from which we measure, whilst at the other end of the period there is only a memory, expectation, or representation. The perception of a space, or body in space (which comes to the same thing), is supported by sensation in the Self measured from, in the object of regard, and in others on every side of the line of vision : it has, therefore, a high sensation-vivacity. But the most distinct personal memory is supported by sensation only in the present ; the fact remembered has only an idea's vivacity, which faintly illumines neighbouring objects, but leaves dark the intervening hours or years. The vagueness and subjectivity of times perceived or remembered makes them hard to measure and arrange. So to measure them we turn to things external and take the motion of some body as a constant ; then construct a calendar and TIME, SPACE, MATTER AND MOTION 179 insert iu it our own history, and are apt to think we remember the order of events when in fact we read them there. Without a calendar, the best way of arranging our past life is by reference to our movements and where we have lived, for this is the best clue to causation. Altliough Time may be primarily subjective, the human idea of it is developed by means of objective experience and by need ; yet it now far transcends any need we have for it. In animals who have little need of memory and foresight, the development of the perception of Time is backward in comparison with Space, Matter and Motion. And this seems also to be true of children ; still even in them the sense of Time is so far developed before the rise of self-reflection, that it is known as that in which we live and not as our invention. And though less clear and distinct than Space, Time is more comprehensive ; for Space is only the form of phenomena, but Time of all consciousness ; and therefore it is more real than Space, because consciousness is Reality. Nothing, therefore, is more preposterous than the notion of a 7iunc stans : which, in fact, is the mistaking of Space for Eternity. Such is the penalty of manipulating concepts in contempt of experience. But the comprehension of Time by man, transcending all utility, belongs to the World's self-knowledge ; and, I suppose, the dimness of our comprehension is the still unlifted veil of that knowledge. § 3. The reality of Space in experience is given primarily in sensations of movement, which in the development of perception come to be signified to us by every touch, by every limb-adjustment, by every eye-adjustment, and hence by every coloured expanse ; nay, further, by every focussing of the eyes upon a point that yields no retinal sensation, and by every experience of not touching, for this (though less attended to) is as real an experience as touching is. But it may be said, if Space is real, what sort of reality is it ? It is not Substance. No : but we must not assume that we have already named every Category that is needed for thinking Reality ; any more than that all the Categories we name have a correspondence in Reality. Space is not Substance ; for the fundamental attribute of empirical Substance is resistance, 180 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE and this is the opposite of Space. And yet it has an attribute, of which it may be said to be the subject ; for as the defining attribute of Matter is resistance to movement, so that of Space is non-resistance, known by freedom of movement ; and this is quite as positive as impeded movement. I say non- resistance is the attribute of Space, for it is not the same thing as Space. Space is a construction, or rather a mental organic growth, to which other experiences, tactile and visual, con- tribute ; and the product is not the same as any of its elements or even all of them together. It is something known on occasion of them, most vividly by movement. As this growth is complete before the rise of self-conscious- ness, it is empirically objective, and, like Time and the material World, something into which the self-conscious individual is born. Hence the natural man laughs when he hears of Kant's doctrine that Time and Space are (transcendentally) subjective forms of intuition. But in my opinion Kant did not really mean that they were forms of merely individual intuition, but of the universal Knower in Nature ; though the misunderstanding is Kant's own fault, not only by bad statement, but by not clearly conceiving what he meant : influenced perhaps by the Cartesian innate ideas. It may be asked whether, then, Kant was wrong in arguing that, since every sensation has degree, empty Space, a vacuum, cannot be proved from experience {Anticipationen der Wahrneh' mung) ; because the kinsesthesis has degree, and this is the essential condition of the perception of Space. But we must consider that empirical Space is not empty, but tilled with ether (according to current hypothesis) ; which, however, offers no sensible resistance. An ether-vacuum cannot be obtained ; and if it could be we might discover that movement of a body as a whole is impossible in such a vacuum, because any body entering it would instantly turn into ether, and therefore, as a body, could move no farther. The kinsesthesis or sense of our own movement, therefore, is conditional upon Space not being empty. I know not what a physicist would think of this speculation. There is no perception of pure Space, but only of spaces TIME, SPACE, MATTER AND MOTION 181 variously bounded by (or measured I'roni) bodies at diflerent distances and directions in a variously -coloured patchwork, or in an active-tactile exploration. The dill'erences of colours, adjustments and movements being abstracted from our percep- tions, there remains what is common to them, the concept of pure Space, which Kant mistook for a pure intuition. Kant was unfortunate in every way : first, in denying tlie conceptual character of pure Space ; secondly, in supposing pure Space to be the object of Geometry, which treats of determinations of Space ; and thirdly, in supposing that Geometry treats of intuitive Space, whereas in intuitive Space no determination satisfies the conditions of pure Geometry. Clearly Geometry in treating of points, lines, surfaces, etc., and their relations, deals with abstractions from experience of the determinations of Space, conceived as existing in a Space similarly abstracted from experience. Space as perceived has three dimensions, and is so conceived by Euclid and his followers ; but that it may be conceived as having four, or more, is a liberal paradox. Granting Space in four dimensions to be conceivable (that is, definable), whether it be real or not in any other sense Heaven knows : we shall never know in this life ; because the matter in such Space can never influence our experience. Just as surface is not a physical but only a geometrical property of Matter in three dimensions, and therefore our Matter can never disturb the inhabitants of a superficies ; so three dimensions constitute no physical property of Matter in four dimensions, and such Matter can never intrude upon us ; because in our Space it would be destroyed by its own definition, annihilated by its own essence ! Whether all Space is really curved, so that it is impossible to draw a straight line in it, seems to be a physical question. Does the assumption of curvature fiicilitate the solution of any physical problem ? Does the assumption of straight lines ever give rise to appreciable error within the limits of calculation and of verifying by measurement ? We cannot determine this by reference direct to Empirical Eeality ; for within such limits the measurable segments of innumerable curves might 182 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE not differ from straight lines. As to the further speculation that Space may not only be essentially curved, but even change its curvature with the process of Time, and that this may be the truth of Motion ; abstractly considered, this is conceivable, because Motion is a traversing of Space in Time, and it is a mere translation of this to consider Space itself as changing in Time. But tui'ning to the experience of many bodies traversing adjacent spaces at different velocities, to conceive of this as a wriggling of Space itself is painful to a sympathetic mind. And, to avoid hypocrisy, I must confess that to me these speculations have an air of belonging to the play rather than to the work of Reason. Still, play may be serious enough, and Nature shows that it is the best preparation for work, and this is the best excuse for many shelves of Philosophy ; and, to be sure, there is time enough to be all in earnest, and there is posterity to fall back upon. § 4. Time and Space then are real, and in Chap. VII. we showed in what sense Matter is real in experience ; and since Motion is nothing else than Matter traversing Space in Time, this too is real. We next take up the problems of infinite divisibility. Our immediate perception of the Now, the Time-process, is, of course, not infinitely divisible ; in other words, in the psychological Now there is a minimum sensibile (for sound _!._ sec.) ; so that if the Now lasts 6 seconds, it comprises 3000 minima. But conceptually Time is infinitely divisible; because, taking any unit in experience, we may apply the symbolic system of numeration and divide ad libitum, or save ourselves this trouble by an algebraic sign. And the use of this device as far as may ever be requisite is justified by the appalling calculations of physical science concerning the movements of atoms and ether. Moreover, since such move- ments affect our organisms they must our minds, and we may reasonably regard the minimum sensibile of the Now as having been, in our own and ancestral experience, subliminally divided according to the minutest differences of Nature : an infinite division is not required. Whoever supposes that the mind cannot be affected by less than the Empirical minimum TIME, SPACE, MATTEIt AND MOTION 183 sensihile, should consider the organ of Hearing, how it counts and multiplies and does sums in proportion, as if it had an over-mind of its own. But even tlie minutest sensible ditt'erences are not to be treated as moments constituting Time, for they are events in Time, and are fused together in Time by the continuity of Motion and Experience. The dis- continuity of Time is inconceivable, not beaiuse there must be an interval of Time between any two moments, but because each moment would then be an origination and cessation of existence. There would be no Time and no Understandins:. In perceptual Space there is a minimum sensihile (for the retina "005 mm.). But conceptually, of course, any unit measure of Space may be divided ad infinitum ; and the smallest part, considered as Space, contains the conditions of all Geometry. And, as in the case of Time, the use of this device as far as requisite is justified by the calculations of physical science ; and it is futher justified by the discovery of space -relations which are incommensurable except by reference to an infinitely small unit. Nor would it be reasonable to regard the immediate perception of our minds as a standard of Nature, seeing that all our perceptions are immeasurably compounded in correspondence with our bodily organisation. Nor, of course, does Space consist of distinguishable minima or points, whether in the visual expanse or in eye- and-limb adjustments, for all such points are fused by the continuity of movements. The discontinuity of Space is inconceivable, not because there must be an interval of Space between any two points, but because we should find an immeasurable and impenetrable barrier between them. The movements of primary importance in the cognition of Space are, doubtless, those of our own (and ancestral) limbs ; which, extended to all practicable distances and turned in all possible directions, have carved out that geometrical character of Space in which the human mind seems to be exploring its own infinite resources. But in experience the exploration of Space is relative to bodies that occupy and determine it : for it happens through the movements of our own body or limbs. 184 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE sometimes leading to contact with other bodies, sometimes swinging free. Space, therefore, is not known as relation without terms ; for bodies in Space are terms in the experience of space- relations ; and even when the arm swings free, the relation perceived is not without its appropriate term, for there is special sensation in the finger-tips when they do not, as truly as when they do, touch a body. And further experience shows that the tingling absence of contact is a sign of possible further movement, which again must be imagined to end either in contact or not. Similarly the focussing of the eyes on an unoccupied point has its own sensitive registration. But, again, since the same movements and adjustments have under different conditions different results, it becomes possible to conceive of Space apart from any particular perceptions, and to study the relations of distance and direction from any points assumed. For, by the way, distance and direction are the fundamental relations of Space, or of points in Space ; not relations in the abstract, of which to be sure there could not be parts ; but distance and direction are defined by lines and angles, and of these there may be parts. Body is known as occupying Space by its offering resistance to pushing and grasping. When a moving limb explores a greater or less extension, and all the way its tactile organs obtain continuous stimulation, a muscular contraction that intensifies the tactile sensation at any point has a certain quality of strain in contrast with the sliding ease of those muscular contractions that lessen, or put an end to, the tactile sensation. Body being extended, then, it is conceived to be, like Space, infinitely divisible ; that is to say, geometrically considered, it is infinitely divisible. But whether it is so in fact, considered physically, is entirely a question for physical science. It is in vain to say with Descartes, who identified Body with Space, that whatever is extended must consist of parts ; for whether every Body has physical parts is the very question at issue. To say that whatever the force of its coherence, a greater force is conceivable, which may, therefore, break it up, is to commit two fallacies. For, first, to speak of TIME, SPACE, MATTER ANJ) MOTION 185 its coherence is to assume that it has parts that cohere, the geometrical conception is slid into the physical question. And, secondly, the assumption is made that if we can conceive a force capable of breaking up a given whole, such a force in fact exists ; and there can be no worse prejudice. There may, therefore, be physical atoms : the existence or non-existence of atoms is to be determined by scientific method in the con- ceptual interpretation of experience. Even if it should be shown that a chemical atom consists of ether, it would not follow that it consists of parts, unless it were shown that ether itself consists of parts ; and if this should be shown, the question would return as to the ether- atom (the physical as distinguished from the chemical), whether that consists of parts. Similar reasoning holds good of the electrons, of which chemical atoms are now supposed to consist ; whether electrons be ultimate and indivisible, or, again, condensed ether. That if the chemical atom consists of ether or electrons, its distinctive character is conditional and may be temporary, has hardly any metaphysical significance. Since Motion is a traversing of Space in Time, it is conceived to be infinitely divisible ; that is to say, there is no limit to the smallness of the Space that may be considered as traversed, nor to the smallness of the Time that elapses in the traversing of a given Space. Such conceptions are easy symbolical extensions of Empirical Reality, and are justified by the verification of physical calculations. § 5. It remains to consider whether Time, Space, Matter and Motion are finite or infinite in duration or extent. This question is often argued upon the ground of what we can imagine or conceive. But imagination depends upon empirical perception, and as the untutored mind often perceives Matter or Motion originating or ceasing, there is no difficulty in imagining it. Nor, it seems to me, is there any difficulty in forming an isolated concept of the beginning or ending of things. But how does all this affect the question of fact ? When for empirical we substitute experimental perception, the beginning and cessation of Matter and Motion is no longer perceived, and to scientific investigators (I understand) it 186 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE ceases to be imaginable ; and the conception of it is in con- tradiction with the principles of scientific explanation. If the principles of the persistence of Matter and Energy be admitted, and extended throughout the stellar system, on the ground that some at least of the chemical elements exist, and the laws of mechanics and physics prevail, in remote stars ; and if it be acknowledged that explanation consists in the discovery of resemblance, especially in causes, and that equality of ca,use and effect in all changes is the most complete explana- tion ; it follows that the everlasting existence of the World and its everlasting movement are necessary concepts. It is merely the logical obverse of this doctrine that in the phenomenal World a First Cause is inconceivable ; and that any suspension or interruption of the order of equivalent changes is inconceivable. It is true that, for the same reason, the explanation of the present World can never be complete, because the regress of causes can never be followed to infinity, and no unconditional beginning can be found in the infinite series. It is also true that within the period during which the World is known to have existed the series of events is still very imperfectly articulated in thought ; many things — of which perhaps the origin of life is the most interesting — are not understood. And some minds are so constituted that whenever they are unable to explain an event by natural antecedents, according to the usual principles of explanation, they feel no difficulty in referring it to an extra-mundane cause. Sometimes it is even said that science itself points to such a cause ; but that is impossible. Whatever the shortcomings of scientific inquirers, the ideal of science can never require any explanation for anything, except equivalent antecedent phenomena according to a law. Not appreciating this limitation, those who appeal to extra-mundane causes do not take enough pains to make clear the principles of their reasoning. Unless they state in precise terms (1) the marks by which we may know that an event not yet explained is essentially insusceptible of scientific explanation, and (2) in what sense any extra-mundane power can be a cause, or can be the ground of explanation according to any analogy of TIME, SPACE, MATTER AND MOTION 187 experience, although their authority may weigh with those of us who muft rely upon authority of some kind, they will hardly convince the more rellective part of their fellow- creatures. An exact treatise on the Logic of Extra-mundane Inference and Explanation is still a desideratum. If an infinite regress of the World's movements is required by the principles of explanation, so of course is an infinite Time. It happens that a finite Time cannot be imagined, because it is never perceived : since in experience every movement follows, and is followed by, others. But, on the other hand, an infinite Time cannot be imagined : like perception, imagination can only proceed to a given point and beyond it. The imagination of Time is indefinite : to follow the regress of movement to infinity requires an infinite Time in which to accomplish it. But infinite Time may be adequately conceived as exceeding any assignable limit. For this is all that is required by the principle of explanation, that to whatever point the history of the World may be traced back, it remains to investigate the cause of the state of things then existing. § 6. In Space it is our constant experience that wherever we go, there lies Space beyond us ; hence we cannot imagine limits to Space. On the other hand, we cannot imagine it infinite, for want of time to complete the exploration. Space may be conceived as infinite or exceeding any assignable limits, and Motion will then be conceived as having the same range. And although it is often denied that Space can be conceived as finite, I do not see any difficulty, if we do not confound conception with imagination. The conception of a limited Space implies a limited range of Motion. The concept of infinite Space is not, like infinite Time, required by the principle of explanation. That Matter exists in Space is proved to us by oiur grasping, circumambvdation and circumnavigation of things, and by Astronomy. It follows that if Space is limited so is Matter ; and if Matter is infinite in quantity. Space must be infinite to contain it ; but if Space is infinite. Matter may still be limited. The prevalence of a belief in the boundlessness of 188 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE the material World (except amongst the Epicureaiis) seems to be modern. But, recently, the evidence has l)ee^ interpreted as indicating that Matter is a limited quantity, and attempts have even been made to weigh the Universe. Whether the World is finite or not has some metaphysical interest. For supposing the atomic World to be finite and the ether infinite, it must, according to the principle of the degradation of Energy, run down in a finite time ; and therefore, contrary to the principle of explanation, must have had a beginning, in the sense that no known laws of phenomena will explain how it began to work. But if the ether is finite as well as the atomic World, there may be a limit to the dissipation of Energy, and after that has been reached the Universe may recover itself, and pulsate through infinite series of evolutions and dissolutions. If the material World is infinite, it can never run down. If Space is finite, so is the ether ; but if Space is boundless, the ether may still be a limited whole in the midst of it — unless subject to some law of expansion and interminable diffusion which I have not seen mentioned amongst its versatile properties. The whole problem is essentially physical, and to attempt a metaphysical solution of it a priori would, in my opinion, be ridiculous. Still, it is a problem upon whose solution the principle of explanation is staked, and Metaphysics is indirectly concerned in it. Should the progress of physical inquiry make it appear that Space is limited, it would at the same time accustom the imagination to follow it ; for proceeding from experience, and following the analogies of experience, the inquiry would itself give experience of a limit without a beyond. § 7. The nature of Time, Space, Matter and Motion, as at present understood, presents no necessary limit to the elabora- tion of Positive Philosophy. The foregoing discussions treat of the problems which Kant, in his criticism of Rational Cosmology, sets out in the form of Antinomies of Pure Reason. Reason, he says, in endeavouring to explain the World, falls into a dialectic within itself, because it assumes that the conditioned phenomena of experience indicate an Unconditioned Cause or ground; and its dialectic leads to contradictory TIME, SPACE, MATTER AND MOTION 189 conclusious because, as no such Unconditioned is given in experience, but only as an Idea, there is no intuitive basis of all the logoniacliy. The Antinomies may be abbreviated thus : — I. The World has a beginning in Time and limits in Space. II. Everything is either simple or composed of simple parts. III. Causality through freedom, as well as by natural law, is necessary to explain phenomena. IV. A necessary Being exists as part or cause of the World. The World is infinite in Time and Space. There is not in the World any- simple substance. Everything happens according to natural law. There is no such necessary Being. Now, any one who reads through these propositions can see that no Unconditioned Cause is assumed except by the first, third and fourth theses, and that these three have the same meaning. The antitheses are notliing but dogmatically expressed prin- ciples of empirical Methodology ; namely, that no limit to analysis is to be assumed, and that all investigation presup- poses uniformity. Therefore, the whole imposing criticism of Rational Cosmology — the origin of the problem, the strife of Reason, the critical solution — is groundless. It is not Philosophy but literary invention. De Quincey observes that Kant's writings belong not to the literature of knowledge but to the literature of power. Kant saw that " human reason is naturally architectonic," and he essayed to gratify this instinct by a prodigious exertion of constructive genius akin to the faculty of Titanic artists. He explains nothing, but he is deeply affecting. Both the architectonic instinct and the impulse to gratify it, no doubt, prognosticate the future develop- ment of knowledge. Kant next discusses the interest of Reason in the Antinomies : if we must take sides, which set of propositions should we desire to see victorious ? First, there is a practical interest in favour of the theses ; because, that the World has a beginning and depends upon a necessary Being, and that the 190 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE course of the World is determined not only by natural law but also by free causality — these are the grounds of religion and morals. Secondly, there is a certain speculative interest on the side of the theses ; for if there was a beginning of the World, and if every compound consists of simple parts, we may hope to carry our investigation of Nature to an end and complete our scientific system. And, thirdly, there is a popular interest on the same side ; for the vulgar mind would gladly see speculation finished and done with. Besides, in the dogmatism of Reason (so Kant calls the theses) the vulgar find themselves on a level with the learned ; have indeed this advantage, that the philosopher feels some qualms, but the vulgar none at all, in accepting the incomprehensible. Hence, he says, the antitheses of Empiricism, demanding exact thought and endless labour, will never prevail outside the Schools or find favour with the crowd. For the speculative interest of Empiricism lies in this very fact, that it knows no limits to the exploration of Nature ; whose laws it may trace with certainty, dealing with the facts themselves in perception, or with conceptions that can be verified by distinct percepts. Such an attitude of mind is incompatible with the expectation of finding a beginning of the World or any breach in its order. But, therefore, it is contrary to the practical interests of morality and religion : " If there is no Urwesen distinct from the World ; if the World is without a beginning and there- fore without a Creator ; if the Will is not free and if the Soul is, like Matter, divisible and perishable ; moral ideals and principles lose all their validity, and fall along with the transcendental Ideas which were their theoretical buttresses." It is impossible to find in literature a more desperate sentence than this, or a more false. It is false that morality or religion depends upon the dogma of creation. It is false that morality or religion depends upon the dogma that the will is exempt from natural law. That there is any opposi- tion between empirical science and morality is false. Happily too : for is it not plain that science is what every one now trusts, and believes in, more than in anything else ? And what can be more pernicious to human life than to put TIME, SPACE, MATTER AND MOTION 191 morality in conflict with men's convictions ? Yet in sympathy with Kant's most imluippy delusion, persistent attempts arc made to di.sparage the sciences ; not merely by necessary criti- cism, but in the spirit of scepticism for the sake of faith : a fatal error! For faith is always born of faith, and scepticism has no offspring but scepticism. BOOK III.-PSYCHOLOGY 13 CHAPTER X THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE § 1. Having arrived at the early maturity, or prematurity, of Reason, Man finds himself amidst a world of which he is indisputably the head. The earth is covered with his works, his cities and possessions, his empires. That other things about him are conscious and even intelligent, serves only to emphasise his superiority. Glancing down over the ranks of living things and seeking for the widest and most decisive difference between himself and them, he defines himself the " rational animal." Long ago he recognised the other animals as his kindred ; then he doubted and even denied their claim to relationship ; now he acknowledges it again, but is loath to draw any inferences from it, except to excuse his own vices, or to find fresh grounds for self-satisfaction. But he has long been accustomed to believe in another sort of kindred : even other men who have left their palpable bodies and become impalpable and invisible, except sometimes at night when the conditions are least favourable to distinct vision. These others, the doubles, shades or ghosts of men, once had a world of their own much like ours, and their life there was something entirely natural and matter of course. As they had not wholly lost their interest in our world, nor forgotten their former affections, antipathies and fixed ideas, the neighbourhood of their viewless world, which might at any moment invade our own, became a disturbing but also a restraining power over men's actions. As human society developed and division of labour, rank and government were established, a parallel development happened in the kingdom of the dead ; and in 1Q5 196 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE the great religions those kingdoms attained a power and exaltation far above all fleshly rule ; supernatural and divine, overwhelming imagination with wonder and awe. Man's relationship to this unseen world became an absorb- ing interest ; and since rank was there distinguished by intelligence as well as by power, the dignity of his rational nature was enhanced ; whilst his animal nature was degraded, until the body, as seat of the animal nature, became the prison of the soul, or a wild beast, or a corrupting corpse to which the soul was un wholesomely fettered. The reward of the religious life was honour there and the expansion of reason ; of the irreligious the reward was degradation to a brutal life and the obscuring of reason, or else to a shameful life in the dungeons of demoniacal wrath amongst the " dejected and downtrodden vassals of perdition." As the unseen world was more lasting, more powerful, more vital and comprehensive than this one, so it was more real ; and therefore the shade or soul that should dwell there was more real than the body. Hence when onto- logical discussion arose it was easily decided that, since the most real things are called substances, the soul must certainly be a substance. In modern cities men are safe, busy and prosaic. Gradually there grow up systems of thought and habits of thinking that readily assimilate positive interpretations and exclude the mythological. The interference of things unseen is no longer traceable ; and, unsupported by either experience or utility, the too elaborate structures of celestial and diabolical tradition disintegrate and fall by their own weight. At first slowly, then rapidly, the ancient beliefs lose form and content : their imaginations become unimaginable ; the supernatural, unnatural ; the wonderful, merely perplexing. In the history of Philosophy the change came late, but very suddenly. At the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries, Locke and Leibniz still speak of angels as familiarly as we do of pterodactyls, and then they are no more heard of. But man is still defined as a " rational animal," and the soul, under the name of the conscious Subject, is still generally assumed to be a substance. THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 197 § 2. Approaching the study of life and mind from the side of Physics, we find Consciousness, the essential character of the Subject, a sort of mystery ; it is like nothing that has hitherto been met with, and therefore wants the ground of explanation. As Huxley says, the rise of consciousness after the stimulation of a sensory nerve is as mysterious as the appearance of the Djin when Aladdin rubbed his lamp. Not only on the strictly mechanical, but on any physical theory — even admitting mechanics, chemistry and vitality, to be ulti- mate and irresolval)le processes — consciousness seems a useless ' extra ' ; and a thinker may pose himself with doubts whether he has any right to think before he has explained how thinking is useful or possible. As Subject, he is told that he is an epi- phenomenon, a secondary, accidental and rather inconvenient result, a sort of by-blow or parergon of the play of molecules constituting the real phenomenon, his body, especially his brain, most particularly the grey matter of his cortex. To protest that he is indeed there, places him in the ridiculous position of poor Partridge after the Examiner had announced his funeral. Nevertheless, since to trust the conceptual system of Physics apart from Empirical Eeality, is to cut off the bough on which you sit, it is necessary to return to the security of primitive fact ; and there the Subject recovers his rights. Whilst the reality of the Object is in my opinion not seriously disputable, still, even if it is, at any rate the reality of the Subject is not disputable at all : it is conceded even by mechanical engineers. Consciousness being real, why from the side of Physics should it seem inexplicable ? Because it is not regarded as a mode of energy in correlation with those modes that Physics investigates ; and if this is true, a living body may be con- ceived to go through all its changes and discharge all its functions without the aid of consciousness. Consciousness, therefore, appears as something detached, otiose, and useless. As detached, it has no value in the equations of change through which matter and energy pass in the evolution and dissolution of animal bodies. To take account of it spoils the equations ; for with life, or at some stage of life, consciousness 198 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE is manifest, and yet there is no traceable antecedent ; so that the principle of continuity, in the form ex nihilo nihil, seems to be violated. Again, as useless, consciousness is equally inexplicable by the biological theory of Natural Selection, according to which every organ and function of an animal is, or has been, useful to it (allowing for possible " correlated growths "). Here also, then, no antecedent can be traced. So it seems to follow either that consciousness is really a mode of energy, or that the principle of Causation and Continuity is not true. There are, however, three other suppositions : (1) that consciousness is created when it first appears in animal life; (2) that it is due to a soul which at some stage of evolution is united with the animal body; (3) that conscious- ness is universal in Nature, inorganic as well as organic, and that its special manifestation in organic life is a correlated growth of the organisation. Of these suppositions (1) and (2) involve many considera- tions that lie outside the scope of the present volume. Here, however, we may say that the concept of absolute creation ex nihilo can never be an explanation of anything, because it is not like any known process ; so that if it should appear that Religion requires such a concept, nevertheless, it cannot find a place within any philosophical system. Some points i/ connected with the notion of a soul — namely, substance and personality — we shall presently discuss. Meanwhile it may be observed that supposition (3), that consciousness is universal in Nature, allows us to understand that all equations of change in the redistributions of matter and transformations of energy may be treated without error in terms of those things that are measurable ; whilst at the same time the equations are satisfied by corresponding values of consciousness on each eide of them ; though these cannot be precisely measured and are only known to us as accompanying certain changes in our own organisms : and further to understand that, if in the activities of our organisms consciousness cannot be shown to be specially useful, that is (as we have said before) because it is universally necessary. It may be asked — Why universal in Nature ? Why not THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 199 rather as accompanying the activities of those elements that enter into organic life — H, O, C, N, S, P, etc. ? For by no means all tlie elements are concerned : man is not in this sense a microcosm. Phosphorus especially, it may be said, has been thought the essential condition : but the evidence of its special relation to consciousness has (I believe) been over- stated. And as to H, O, C, N, it does not follow that, because they have the character that best fits them for organisation on this planet, they are therefore the sole conditions of con- sciousness, or even of organisation. And if all elements have a common ground (ether or protyle) it is more reasonable to look to the activities of that as the concomitant of conscious- ness than to any special groupings of it ; and if consciousness exists there, it may be supposed to exist in the activities of all the elements that have arisen from that common ground. It would, however, be more correct to say that consciousness accompanies the activities of that of which the elements, ether, protyle, are phenomena ; for all phenomena have their Eeality by existing in consciousness. § 3. Now it is certain that consciousness exists in many degrees of fidness and intensity, several of which are known to us. First, there is discursive thought with the infinite variety of ideal and emotional life which we consider to be distinctively human : and this we may call self-consciousness or apperception. Secondly, there is the narrower region of perception, activity and feeling which we share with (at least) the higher animals : it is a state of mind which incursions of the higher powers perturb and hinder, the state in which a man plays billiards or a dog noses about for rabbits. Both these degrees of mental activity in their greatest efficiency are characterised by the attitude of attention, in which conscious- ness is focussed. But, thirdly, in contrast with such ' focal,' there is ' marginal ' consciousness (to use Lloyd Morgan's pregnant terms), the much greater volume of sensation and feeling which is present in consciousness without being attended to, sometimes seems struggling to attract attention and sometimes succeeds, and is always ready to become more lively and prominent whenever attention relaxes or wanders. 200 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Then, fourthly, there is (as it seems to me) a far vaster region which rarely comes into distinct consciousness at all — petites perceptions — which may sometimes be discovered experiment- ally or by trained introspection, is sometimes made known in abnormal or diseased conditions, is sometimes only hypothetic- ally discoverable (such as the elements of sensation integrated or fused in the perception of space, in an emotion, in the coenfiesthesis) : and this I propose to call sentience. So far we have modes of consciousness and sub-conscious- ness that are all in some sort known to us as entering into or profoundly affecting our lives, and of which the more obscure are believed to be shared in some degree by lowlier organised animals even down to the simplest forms. I do not mean that these grades of consciousness are mutually exclusive or exactly defined. On the contrary, the higher grades depend on the lower and consist chiefly in the co-ordination of them ; and within each grade, again, finer distinctions might be made. In sentience, especially, it is impossible to say how many degrees there are of faintness and indistinctness. Perhaps Binet, in his Psychology of Micro-Organisms, has exaggerated the variety and definiteness of their consciousness ; and similarly Wundt, when he says in his Outlines (§ 14) that " the movements of the lowest animals are all evidently simple volitional acts." Lloyd Morgan, in his Animal Behaviour, is judiciously sceptical : whether a certain process in Paramecium is accompanied by sentience, he says, we do not know. " That it is controlled and guided by any consciousness in the cell is most improbable" (p. 13). The "profiting by individual experience is the criterion of the effective presence of conscious guidance and control " (p. 31). But this means " the influence of certain nerve-centres which have for their concomitant what we have termed effective consciousness " (p. 51). So that in no case is there a question of anything but concomitance of consciousness : its degree varying with organisation. Whoever grants consciousness to the new-hatched chick but denies it to the new-laid egg, can only excuse his rejection of continuity by some device for conjuring a ghost into the chicken. But, again, the simplest forms of life are indistinguishably THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 201 animal or vegetal; and if the least organised plant life is indistinguishable from animal life that is admitted to be conscious, it is arbitrary to deny consciousness of such plant life ; and, if so, it is still more arbitrary to deny it of more higlily organised plants. This may offer some excuse for those poets who, like Shelley and Wordsworth, have believed in the sentiency of tlowers and trees. But evidence of it, or at least strongly suggestive matter, may be found in the phenomena of irritability, contractility and purposive movement exhibited by plants. These ideas have been entertained by many botanists and biologists since Darwin published his investiga- tions into plant-movement. Plants possess what may be most naturally called sense-organs in relation to gravitation, contact, light and perhaps other stimuli; these organs seem to have developed like those of animals from the epithelium; and their stimulation excites reflexes, which, according to Francis Darwin {Nature, Nov. 1901), are of the same type as action in animals by association, and therefore allied to habit and memory. Having got so far beyond the range of human sympathy as the level of plant-life, the principle of Continuity carries us further and points to some actuality even in inorganic Nature corresponding with animal consciousness, however vague and undifferentiated. Of course, we cannot imagine what it is like. The feeling of movement, energy, striving, which we commonly read into the operations of Nature, is with us a specialised sensation having its own organs, peripheral, afferent, central. There is a natural hesitation to ascribe consciousness not only to things that have no nervous system (for this is not traceable lower than the Medusse) but even to those that have not the special form of matter from which nerve-fibres and ganglia develop, such as we suppose to exist in simple animals and plants. But perhaps ere long it may be shown that the differences between the organic and inorganic are much less than we are now accustomed to assume. J. C. Bose, in his Response in the Living and the Non-Living, after showing that under electrical stimuli plants exhibit fatigue, etc., and are affected like animals 202 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE by ansesthetics and poisons, goes on to prove the same pro- perties of tin and platinum wire. These also become fatigued ; there is a threshold of response ; subliminal stimuli become effective by repetition ; response increases with the intensity of stimulus up to a certain point at which another limit is reached ; response is affected by temperature, and the median range is most favourable to it ; some substances act as stimulants upon tin and platinum, others like anaesthetics, others as poisons (destroying all response) ; a small dose may increase the response, and a large dose of the same agent abolish it. The resemblance of these results to some of those obtained in Physiological Psychology is obvious. Inorganic matter is much simpler than organic, and so is its molecular activity; the simpler an organism, the simpler its consciousness; hence no doubt inorganic consciousness is the simplest of all. If it be true that one organic cell may comprise 300,000,000,000,000 atoms; and if it is difficult to imagine what the consciousness of a cell can be like, compared with our own ; the consciousness of an atom must seem to us to be pretty near the vanishing point. But so is the magnitude of physical atoms and of some ether waves at the vanishing point. By the standard of customary ideas, all physical speculations seem monstrous and maniacal. I make the very reasonable request that the same possibility of infinite refine- ment should be recognised in consciousness, as already has been acknowledged in the case of " gross, dead, brute matter," as it used to be called. Whoever refuses this, ought to say whether he denies the principle of Continuity, or knows of some magic by which a ghost is conjured into every organic cell. It is true that the characteristic of our own consciousness is relationality : petites perceptions are only knowable when occasionally they come into relation v^ith the larger masses of our experience, and the most convincing ground for believing that our minds correspond with our nervous systems is the manifest fitness of these systems for carrying out the relational processes of our minds. But if from the analysis of our own minds we infer that consciousness can only exist through the continuous relation of its elements, it is impossible to explain THE SUBJECT IN EXrERIENCE 203 the beginning of consciousness in organic life; or in any indi- vidual, unless it be said that such consciousness is transmitted by germs in virtue of their predisposition to develop a nervous system ; or on awaking from sleep, except by maintaining that we are apperceptive all night without being aware of it. But how many people would rather maintain a contradiction than follow an argument ! If the ether be that from whose activities all things arise, its psychoses have an inexpressible simplicity, purity and calm — invidious to contemplate : having the best claims of any- thing to the whole list of predicates that have always been ascribed to the Absolute — one and the same, universal, un- changing, self-active, everlasting and supra-substantial. We cannot indeed, at the present stage of our argument, regard this absolute consciousness as a Subject ; for subject implies object, whilst consciousness (as such) does not. Consciousness is not necessarily a knowledge of something else ; that contrast arises with the increasing volume and differentiation of organic minds ; though even we, in spite of our highly specialised growth, sometimes pass through experiences during which the distinction of subject and object is nearly, or entirely, lost. But even the denial of subjectivity to the absolute conscious- ness need not be resented ; it is a condition of limitation, opposition and of all pain : and, therefore, it is no compliment to the Universal Ether to insist upon calling it " Subject " after the model of ourselves. § 4. According to this hypothesis of the universality of consciousness in Nature, it everywhere accompanies the move- ments or activities of that which is manifested to sense-percep- tion and which, conceptually, is figured to exist as atoms and ether, but which itself is necessarily transcendent. On the other hand, each human Subject at least is still regarded as a Substance. Every one knows that Descartes defined the Self to be a thinking Substance, and how many later philosophers have discussed that position of his. I shall have to return to it in the next chapter on the Ontology of the Subject ; but here it is necessary to consider whether the Subject is Substance, or how far it may be considered so, on 204 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE empirical grounds, just as we have already done in the seventh chapter concerning objects or bodies; and we may conveniently begin with Locke's opinion. In his Essay of H. U. (Book II. chap, xxiii.), having shown that we have no distinct idea of the substance of bodies, but only a supposition of one knows not what support of such qualities as are capable of producing simple ideas in us — an obscure and relative idea, — he goes on to maintain (§ 15) with much humour that, "by putting together the ideas of thinking, perceiving, liberty and power of moving themselves and other things, we have as clear a perception and notion of immaterial substances, as we have of material. For our idea of substance is equally obscure, or none at all, in both." The primary ideas of body, he says, are the cohesion of solid, and consequently separable, parts, and a power of communicating motion by impulse ; figure is only a consequence of finite extension : the ideas peculiar to spirit are thinking and will, or a power of putting body into motion by thought ; existence, duration, mobility are common to both (§§ 17-18). "We have by daily experience clear evidence of motion produced both by impulse and by thought. . . . Pure spirit, God, is only active ; pure matter is only passive ; those beings (such as men) that are both active and passive, we may judge to partake of both " (§ 28). Here then we may seem to be taking our stand upon experience ; though in fact the ground is mined by scholastic prejudices. Substances are known by their attributes ; that could be assumed : matter especially might be taken for granted. As to spirit, Locke knows there will be greater difficulty in bringing home its substantiality to the ordinary reader ; but, he urges, the argument is as good for this as for that. Here too there are certain attributes or "peculiar ideas," namely, thought and will, or the power of moving bodies by thought : these attributes are distinct from those of matter, and imply a distinct substance — so far as we can form any idea of substance ; why is not the argument convincing ? Partly, no doubt, because most men are so continuously engrossed in manipulating material bodies and think so seldom of their own minds, that they are not accustomed to apply to the latter any THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 205 category : partly, by mere force of association between the word substance and bodies. But even to the psychologist or meta- physician retiection discovers many diflicul ties in maintaining the substantiality of the Self. Subjective consciousness is so different from the objective qualities of bodies, solidity, movement, etc., that it does not directly suggest a substance in the same sense as they do : it wants vividness, steadiness, independence, permanence, continuity and measure in its changes. Its most constant character, the nisus or kinujsthesis, had until recently gone unnoticed or unnamed. Few philosophers have adopted such a doctrine as Hamilton's of "unconscious mental modifica- tions," according to which all past thoughts still exist in the substance of the soul, as bodies are supposed to when out of sight ; and no one, I believe, except Leibniz (of whom in Chap. XL), has suggested that future thoughts already exist like undiscovered bodies. But all this seems necessary in order to put the substance of mind on the same footing as the substance of matter. It is very natural to regard consciousness as an activity of the organic body ; and in fact that is what happens when consciousness is attributed to the soul or ghost; for this is a shadow, double, or imitation of the body and is intensely imagined as an objective thing. Being less palpable and visible than the body, it is now conceived by meta- physicians as of a wholly different nature. But, surely, con- sciousness would never have been supposed to imply a distinct substance from the body, had not the belief in ghosts arisen from other causes, and been universally popular before the beginning of philosophical reflection. Besides, if substance is an obscure relative idea of I know not what even when referred to bodies ; how much more obscure it becomes if we attempt to refer it to bodies and also to such a different thing as consciousness. § 5. Whether Subject is Substance, then, must depend upon that other attribute which Locke ascribes to it, the power of moving bodies. But this attribute is common to bodies and created spirits ; and if Locke regarded bodies as having received their original impulse from God, he certainly regarded all the powers of created spirits as derived from the 2a6 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE same source ; and there is no difference between a body's moving another by impulse, and a spirit doing the same by thought, except that the latter process is more obscure because we can trace no equivalence. If, then, the attribute of motivity be the same in bodies and spirits, it points to the same substance as common to both. However, in Locke's view, God has endowed spirits with self-activity and has denied this to matter; he held that spirits and bodies are entirely different ; so, as it is of little use to argue with him now, I will turn to more recent ways of thinking. If thought itself moves bodies, it must be either as a mode of energy correlated with others, or not. In the former case it belongs to the system of material things, just as they do. But as this may seem to imply a charge of " materialism " against such a way of thinking, I beg leave to say that the term " materialism " is here used descriptively, not contume- liously. A system of Materialism is, in my esteem, as respect- able as a system of Spiritualism, if it is as well reasoned ; and if better reasoned, it is more respectable. Why not, seeing that our knowledge of bodies shows them to be far more wonderful than anything we have been told of spirits ? But now in the alternative case, that thought moves bodies, not as a mode of energy, but in some way peculiar to itself; what shall we say of it ? I say that whatever is peculiar can neither explain anything nor be explained, and has no place in philosophy. If indeed consciousness could be separated from organised bodies and experimented with in isolation, empirical laws might conceivably be discovered concerning its relation to moving bodies ; but such laws would merely make a list by themselves, not only irrelevant to, but in conflict with, the laws of energy. Let us then inquire what evidence there is that thought moves bodies. It is now generally held that our consciousness of activity, or sense of effort, is excited by muscular, tendinous, articular stimuli in moving, straining, etc., just as colour or sound is due to the stimulus of the optic or aural nerve ; that is to say, it points to the influence of body on mind rather THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 207 thuu of mind on body. Thus what was formerly the most popular iU'gument in favour of the moving power of thought, or will-force, has quite lost its significance. Spencer, however, thinks that states of consciousness are " factors " in our nervous and physical activities, and for this opinion he gives three reasons: (1) the facts of habit "prove that states of consciousness which were at first accompaniments of sensory impressions and resulting motions, gradually cease to be concomitants " ; they suggest that consciousness " exists in any line of communication in course of establishment and disappears when the communication becomes perfect." But I do not see that this proves anything more than that distinct consciousness accompanies the activities of the more plastic and less organised matter of the cortex, and sinks to some lower degree of consciousness or subconsciousness when organi- sation has so far advanced that the current passes more rapidly or by a shorter circuit. We must not exaggerate the uncon- sciousness of habit : true habit, formed within the individual's experience with little or no inherited predisposition, is not only a conscious process, but is always liable to disturbances and interruptions in which the fuller original consciousness revives. Spencer's examples of reading and knitting fully illustrate this. (2) "Sundry facts appear to imply that con- sciousness is needful as an initiative in cases where there are no external stimuli to set up the co-ordinated nervous changes : the nervous structures, though capable of doing everything required if set going, are not set going unless there arises an idea. Now this implies that an idea, or co-ordinated set of feelings, has the power of working changes in the nervous centres and setting up motions : tlie state of consciousness is a factor." But whilst it is true that in many cases the nervous structures are not set going unless there arises an idea ; can we suppose that the idea arises without any corresponding nervous change ? There may be no external stimuli, or none traceable ; but this does not exclude central excitation. And although the antecedents, whether physical or mental, are by no means always known, and accordingly psychologists discuss "free" or "spontaneous" ideas; yet 208 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE they do not suppose such ideas to be absolutely free or spon- taneous ; but regard them as having, of course, some physio- logical concomitant, and therefore propose hypotheses, such as local congestion, or omitted links. (3) There are "passive emotions," such as grief, which, though directly dependent on nervous changes, do not initiate actions ; so that the feeling seems to be produced by the molecular activity and to absorb it, since otherwise it must have further effects {First Princ. 71 b). But surely there are other ways, besides external actions, by which the molecular activity accompanying grief may be relieved. The vaso-motor discharge gives a sufficient accoimt of it, and, by affecting the blood-supply to the voluntary tracts, partly (at least) explains the passivity which characterises this emotion. In § 71c, Spencer declares the relation of consciousness to nervous action to be on any hypothesis inconceivable ; he mentions particularly the supposition that " consciousness in- heres in the all-pervading ether," which may be capable under special conditions in certain parts of the nervous system, of being affected by nervous changes so as to result in feeling, and reciprocally of affecting the nervous changes. But then, he says, " we must assume that the potentiality of feeling is universal," though realised only in special conditions ; and such an explanation is merely verbal, since we know not what the ether is. How mind and matter affect one another is a mystery, but not a profounder one " than the transformation of the physical forces into one another. All ultimate problems are insoluble." To these positions, however, it is again impossible to assent. The transformation of physical forces is not a mystery in the same sense as the relation of mind and body is : for it has been experimentally ascertained in detail, and generalised in such a way as to satisfy the requirements of explanation. But consciousness, besides the not being definitely measurable, and therefore not equatable with physical forces, is further of such a different character from them that an equation is inconceivable : and where the conditions of scientific explanation are wanting there is some sense in pro- claiming a mystery. That any physical force and consciousness THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 200 are so different that an equation, or any exchange between them, is inconceivable, is in my judgment intuitively plain or self-evident ; but this argument can have no weight with those who see otherwise. § 6. The very suggestion that possibly the ether may be that in which " consciousness inheres," shows that consciousness cannot be put upon the same footing with physical forces ; for no one, I presume, would speak of light as " inhering " in the ether. Physical light is the ether itself in a certain state of vibration, but consciousness is nothing like vibration. The truth is that neither the ether, nor the cerebral cortex, nor any other phenomenon, can be the seat, or basis, or vehicle of consciousness, even because all phenomena exist in consciousness and cannot be related to it as they are to one another. For exactly the same reason consciousness is not a substance or a force ; all empirical substances and forces are phenomena. To a free consideration consciousness does not even suggest any substance : the dogma of its substantiality is a mixture of savage superstition and scholastic gibberish. As for its alleged simplicity, nothing is more contrary to every man's experience. Its boasted unity is a mystical derivative from the Greek's amazement at Arithmetic : organic totality is the character of an individual Subject. It ought not to be surprising that consciousness, or any Subject, should not need to be a substance, seeing that itself is Reality : with phenomena it is otherwise, and therefore they need to be referred to a substance. But how is this : was it not agreed that the world of sense-perception, i.e. phenomena, constituted Empirical Reality, the ground and beginning of all inquiry and of all confidence ? That is a very natural question ; and I reply, first, that Empirical Reality is a mode of conscious- ness, and in that sense has the reality of consciousness ; secondly, that Empirical Reality is, as to confidence, more real than the Transcendent Being, which (in Chap. VIII.) seemed to be required by reflection upon experience ; and thirdly, that it is only with reference to Transcendent Being that Empirical Reality has the character of a phenomenon. The phenomenon is constructed by the Subject, but is not subjective : reflection 14 210 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE finds a difficulty in this, and tries to overcome it by considering the phenomenon as representing something not subjective, from which relation it has its objective character. It is another way of expressing this relation to speak of the phenomenon as consisting of the attributes of a substance. There is no contradiction between simple experience and reflection. Happily, this is impossible ; because the un- sophisticated man has not our concepts, and we have not his simplicity. If we try to put ourselves in his place, and say — Now that tree is indisputably real ; yet, on reflection, it is a phenomenon — this can only seem a contradiction from not reflecting enough. To suppose that to be " representative " is to want reality, confuses the philosophic with the popular or political uses of this word. More reasonably it might be contended that since the phenomenon has the reality of consciousness and is also representative of the Ding an sich, it has the power of both, and hence is more real than either of them ; as, in fact, to simple experience it is. Representative- ness is merely a way of considering phenomena in relation to a Being which is half thought by an indicative or orectic category for the sake of filling up a sort of blind-spot in experience. But if the Subject is not substance how is it related to Transcendent Being ? Is it a phenomenon or an attribute of that mysterious thing ? It is not a phenomenon, because it is a condition of all phenomena ; and it is quite useless to call it an attribute. We have seen (Chap. VII.) that even in experience the category of Substance and Attribute can have significance given to it only if we treat a part of any group of attributes as substance in relation to some other of the group : we cannot, therefore, by this analogy, transfer it beyond experience. Further, Substance and Attribute in- evitably suggest " prior and posterior in Nature," " higher and lower," degrees of dignity in the list of the ten Categories, the metaphysician's table of precedence ; and it is intolerable that Self-consciousness should be logically inferior to an hypothesis. Besides, to quote again Spinoza's definition, an attribute is that which the intellect regards as of the essence of substance ; THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 211 jind this is tlie necessiiry and linal definition : for what else can an attribute be ? But, then, strictly speaking, intellect knows only its own contents, and therefore the essence of substance is exhausted by modes of consciousness. To call consciousness the attribute of Being, then, would lead to a contradiction with the conclusion already drawn that conscious- ness is not the whole of Being. Of course, no words can meet this dithculty ; but, perhaps, to think of consciousness as an activity of Transcendent Being may be least misleading ; and for the particular Subject, if any one must have a ' Thing ' that thinks, he may take that Being of which the body is phenomenon, and may (if he likes) call it the Soul. It would be convenient, and I might do so myself, but for the latent rhetoric of technical terms, that often gains adhesion without unanimity and assent without understanding. § 7. I have been drawn by the trend of ideas into that region beyond experience which belongs to our next chapter ; but before closing this one there remains for discussion the " relation of body and mind " as conceived by empirical Physiology and Psychology. A belief in some connection of body and mind is instinctive : Greek psychological speculation is full of it; and with the development of modern Physiology it has become increasingly definite. It is now almost impossible to try to theorise about the mind without appealing to what is supposed to be the bodily correspondence. It is true that no physical theory can ever be an explanation of mental activity; for the category of Causation fails us, and even Eesemblance cannot be traced between mental and physical processes but only between the relations of such processes : I mean, there is no resemblance between the excitement of the retina and a colour, nor yet between the activity of the eye muscles and the kinaesthesis, but the retina and the muscles co-operate, and so do colour and the kinsesthesis, in the act of perception. Yet a physiological theory of the processes corresponding with the mental life, though so remotely explanatory, is strongly desired. The reasons for desiring it, I take to be these : — (1) Mental states cannot be developed by introspection, 212 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE and traced in their connections and retraced, with enough fulness, certainty and constancy to produce the conviction that we are observing a thorough continuity of events according to laws. I shall not sneer at the laws of association, which in their day constituted the best Psychology extant ; but is it not a great relief to have discovered " association-fibres " ? Moreover, one's own consciousness is full of fag-ends. As James Ward says, sensation cannot be explained by antecedent psychoses : it is always beginning. It seems to me, further, that most trains of thought never definitely end ; but presently we find ourselves thinking of something else. The fluctuation of attention is notorious : the occasion of it may be external distraction as often as internal, or mere fatigue : but what is the meaning of consciousness being fatigued ? (2) Mental states give little opportunity for measurement : except as to their time-relations, duration and interval, they have no definite quantity. And in mental processes of any complexity so much is subconscious that measurement is out of the question. If, for example, we could measm-e the more intense or conspicuous of our motives to any action, the indefinite remainder would far outweigh them. This vagueness and uncertainty of our subjectivity may be ascribed, partly, to the withdrawal of attention from it by the predominant interest of action in the external world : hitherto few people have seen much use in introspection. Partly, it is due to the symbolic character of apperception : this is necessary to the co-ordination of consciousness, but it submerges all that which G-. F. Stout calls the " meaning " of images and signs — incomparably the greater portion of the consciousness involved ; so that more and more of it lapses into subconsciousness. (3) The first object of Psychology is to explain the nature of the mind so far as it is common to us all : we therefore turn to that upon which we can agree, physical fact. Each man is a physical fact to all others : for you, your volition precedes your action ; but for me, your action is a conversion of potential. Introspective Psychology can never explain a completed volition. In the region of physical fact we find measurement, continuity, law : we find it as instructive con- THE SUBJECT IN EXrERIENCE 213 cerniiig idiosyncrasies as concerning our common nature : we learn from it facts most important to the mental life which introspection could never have discovered ; for example, the function of the semi -circular canals. (4) Througli Physiology, Psychology is connected with Biology, obtains the aid of biological retrospect, biological laws and the comparative method. This alliance has been the re- birth of the science. (5) It is througli our physical nature that society exists, since our bodies are the sole means of communication ; and consequently on our despised bodies depend religion, art, polity and morals : upon all which subjects Physiology and Biology are very instructive. In short, self-observation or introspection does not afford sufficient grounds for the construction of mental science ; and it seems to me that this belongs to the nature of the mind as immediate Reality ; that which admits of prolonged and exact study by experiment and demonstration is the phenomenon. Hence the attraction of physiological method. Psychologists who, being also physiologists, attempt to construct mental science by introspection alone, cannot eliminate the influence of their physiological knowledge. An investigation the most comprehensive possible into the physiological phenomena is necessary ; and along with it a generalisation of the conditions, so far as ascertainable, of the rise, activity and lapse of the correlative consciousness. In pursuing these inquiries it is now usual to assume a " parallelism " between physical and mental processes ; for criticisms of that doctrine James Ward's Naturalism and Agnosticism (Part III.) may be consulted. In my judgment, if the doctrine of parallelism is understood metaphysically, it makes the mistake of treating consciousness as a phenomenon on the same footing as nervous changes. For scientific purposes, indeed, any hypothesis that is helpful is justifiable ; and in psychological discussions, it would be pedantic to object to the practice of describing processes of consciousness as phenomena of mind. But the border between Psychology and Metaphysics is not always easy to determine. Of course, it is not expected that an exact 214 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE purallel should be discoverable between nervous or cerebral changes on the one hand, and on the other those degrees of consciousness that are open to introspection : the sinking into subconsciousness of innumerable processes is a condition of the unembarrassed supremacy of apperception, whether in control- ling conduct or enlarging knowledge. We have inferred the universality of consciousness, and free-living cells are generally held to be conscious ; so that as the human body is an organisation of cells and atoms, it is natural to regard the human mind as an organisation of consciousness. This consideration may remind the reader of certain doctrines of " mind-stuff" ; but those doctrines, though well meant, have (such of them as I have seen) the same fault as the popular doctrine of parallelism ; namely, that they put phenomena and Reality upon the same footing. Still, if I am asked how my hypothesis is to be defended against the assaults of William James in chap. vi. of his Principles of Psychology, I reply (1) that he takes for granted that a combination of mental processes must be causative and mechanical, and that I have shown these Categories to be inapplicable; and (2) that his assertion that an unity cannot be formed of atoms except as it affects something else, is merely a denial in the case at issue that this unity is a consciousness. It is true he hints here that there is much to be said for regarding the soul as that which is conscious ; but as, in chap. X., he very candidly explains that the conception of the soul is in his opinion quite useless, and that the present section of the stream of consciousness may be regarded as carrying the whole of it— and that for itself, not for some one else — I do not see how he differs from his opponents ; especially the Associationists : whom he misunderstands. But, again, if there is an organisation of consciousness into a more comprehensive unity, it does not follow that the elements were originally discrete. No cells, since the origin of life, are discrete (at least in the same line of descent) ; they are discrete in space, but continuous in time, which we have shown to have the greater reality. As to the molecules of which cells are composed, whether they are really discrete THE SUBJECT IN EXPERIENCE 215 or in some way continuous through the ether, we do not know. So far, theu, as we may infer from these phenomena to the conscious Eeality, we have no ground for denying that all Consciousness may be one continuum, though under special conditions it rises at many points into special fulness. If the question be put — How the rise of special minds is possible ? the reply must serve, that the corresponding growth of the body offers the best analogy for interpreting the growth of the mind. What is ultimate is unique : there can be no true analogue to the development of mind; but organisation is the nearest we have. Because organisms alone of things have their single interests in the series of birth, youth, maturity, decay and death, they alone have a continuous, unified teleological consciousness, and probably they alone know pleasure and pain. Organic life is a constant struggle, or co-operation, of the organism with other things that are contrasted with itself; and the increasing consciousness of this is self-consciousness. To make an extraordinary wonder of self-consciousness has no ground but the love of wonder. Self is the continuity of the consciousness and interest of that of which the body is the phenomenon. The more widely the interests of the organism extend to events in space and time, the more comprehensive consciousness becomes, and the higher self- consciousness rises : yet Schopenhauer rightly held that this progress tends to the obliteration of individuality, through recognition of the unity of the World whose self-consciousness the individual is: for as a whole it cannot be self-conscious for want of contrast. If it be urged that, nevertheless, consciousness seems to be of no more use to the world than to a single animal, since all physical changes might go on just as well without it, such a speculation ranges beyond my power of flight. A world without consciousness would be a very different world from the present one ; and what might be possible in it, is not for me to say. That an animal, considered from the outside, may be construed to lead its life independently of consciousness, and, therefore, seems to have no need of it ; whilst we, being animals ourselves, have no doubt that, inside, it is somehow 216 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE conscious according to its organisation : this is good ground for inferring that consciousness is the inside of all Nature, from which plants and animals and men arise. But when we turn to Nature herself, to speculate as to what may be useful to her is grotesque. Shall we hear it suggested that the present world is conscious in virtue of Natural Selection, all other unconscious worlds having been annihilated in an antecosmic struggle for existence, and that thereby tlie utility of consciousness is proved ? Use is for them that lack ; for you and me because we are limited and poor : for us, who want and desire, utility seems a great matter. But these things have no place in the world of Nature, serene above hope or fear, and tranquil in inexhaustible sufficiency. CHAPTER XI THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT § 1. According to the earliest beliefs concerning ghosts, they were a kind of bodies, though of a more subtle material than ordinary bodies. This was also the view of the early Greek philosophers, even of Anaxagoras, and of the Stoics and Epicureans for centuries later. Nay, though such a notion would now by most people be verbally disavowed, all popular stories and all the practices of Sludge imply that it still prevails. It is generally held by scholars that the clear conception of immaterialism was first reached by Plato. In various Dialogues he describes the soul as most real, living, self-active, unitary, by nature divine, without beginning or end. On the other hand, his separation of the soul's faculties is not easily reconcilable with its alleged unity, and the doctrines of metempsychosis, degradation and purification, of animal souls and plant souls and specific souls (that is the Ideas) are all derived from traditionary mythology ; and the parables by which he tries to explain himself are so thick with suggestions of material things, that if we discard the imagery it is impossible to say what remains. Still it is undoubtedly from Plato chiefly that all these predicates concerning the Soul — unity, simplicity, substantiality, immortality — descended to the Rational Psychology of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that suffered so severely under the criticism of Kant. According to Aristotle, soul is the form or entelechy of an organic body : the nutritive soul of plants exists in subordina- tion to the sensitive soul in animals, and both to the rational soul in man. Memory and imagination belong to the sensitive 217 218 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE soul and are shared with man by the higher animals ; and even in man reason itself has two functions, a passive and an active, and its passive fimction is dependent on the i^avrda- jxara of memory and imagination, consisting in what may be called picture-thinking, whilst the higher processes of abstrac- tion and unification belong to active reason. The sensitive soul is transmitted by generation, grows with the individual and dies ; but active reason, though born with a man, is not generated but comes from without, and at death remains akin, and returns, to the Keason of all things, thought of thought — equivalent to form of form, — or absolute abstraction of actual Being. Hence in Aristotle's view the soul is immaterial in the sense that form is distinguished from matter in his system. The individual soul is neither simple nor immortal, and is self-active only in the sense that every living thing is self- moving : it implies the existence of a body (its matter) and each soul implies a particular body whose form it is ; so that metempsychosis is impossible. On the whole, Aristotle's doctrine is much further removed than Plato's from the ghost-theory and all popular notions ancient or modern. It is the most attenuated version of Animism : Spinoza's stands nearest to it, amongst philosophic doctrines. Immaterialism in the modern sense is much more explicitly stated by Plotinus, developing the teaching of Plato ; but for details I shall be content to refer to T. Whittaker's Neo- Platonists (chap. v. § 1, on the Psychology of Plotinus). It is, of course, Christian Theology that has moulded the great body of existing belief about the soul: at least verbally, and sub- ject to the influence of local traditions and to the limitations of the popular mind when trying to apprehend metaphysical concepts. Its doctrine of the immateriality of the soul is explicit, in spite of the theory of a celestial body and many imaginative forms employed in exposition ; the effect of which upon the unmetaphysical disciple is to beget in most cases a very materialistic way of thinking. § 2. In the modern schools of philosophy discussions of the soul or ego date from the definitions of Descartes. Matter he defined by the single attribute of Extension, and Mind by THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 219 the single attribute of Thought. Since thinking was the only f^round for believinarticular it is inconceivable that a thought or a passion can be conjoined to anything divisible and extended ; it cannot be to the right or left, inside or outside, imless at one point wliich is indivisible ; and if it were coextensive with an extended thing, we must suppose the possibility of a passion being a yard long, a foot broad and an inch thick : but, again, it is equally inconceivable that an extended perception, such as a table, can incorporate with a simple and indivisible Subject ; for this cannot lie to the right or left of that, nor be entire in every part of it though itself unextended, without leading to absurdities and justifying the supposed union of our indivisible perceptions with an extended substance. It is, I suppose, admitted that this argument of Hume's disposes of the vague notion of inherence as explaining per- ception : Berkeley had already repudiated it, and substituted a spiritual power or activity sui generis. But Hume next discusses the cause of our perceptions, and he argues that whether or not they are caused by the motions of matter is purely a question of experience and evidence ; since (as he has shown) we are never sensible of any connection betwixt causes and effects, and a priori anything may produce any- thing. And it is in vain, he says, to appeal to the action or power of ourselves or of the Deity, since it has already been shown that " we have no idea of a being endowed with any power, much less with infinite power." Hume then (§ 6) makes a more direct attack on Berkeley : he argues that we have no idea of Self in " its perfect identity and simplicity," for if we had there must be in self-conscious- 16 226 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE ness some impression " invariably the same through the whole course of our lives," whereas " there is no impression constant and invariable." We are always conscious in introspection of " some particular perception or other." Setting aside some metaphysicians, the rest of mankind are (each of them) nothing but a " bundle or collection of particular perceptions which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, and are in a perpetual flux and movement." Whilst, then, the strict conception of identity or sameness is of an object that remains invariable and uninterrupted through a supposed variation of time, the identity of a self or person is analogous to that we attribute to a plant or an animal. In the successive exist- ence of a mind or thinking person, the " fictitious " identity we ascribe to it is due, first, to the resemblances amongst successive states in which memory consists, and, secondly, to causation which links together its different perceptions in a system. The soul, therefore, may best be compared to a " commonwealth in which the several members are united by the reciprocal ties of government and subordination, and give rise to other persons, who propagate the same republic in the incessant changes of its parts." As to the soul's simplicity, " an object, whose different coexistent parts are bound together by a close relation, operates upon the imagination after much the same manner as one perfectly simple and indivisible." We therefore " feign a principle of union as the support of this simplicity and the centre of all the different parts and qualities of the object." In spite of the instructiveness of this section, the use of such expressions as " fictitious " for what is entirely natural, " feign " for a process instinctive and undesigning, " bundle " for what he acknowledges to have organic unity, and the analogy of a commonwealth adopted in preference to the closer organic structure of an animal — all suggest an endeavour to minimise the integrity of personal life as against the over- strained statements of Berkeley and the dogmatic philosophers. Still, the essential conclusion, that the mind does not immedi- ately know itself as a Substance, was supported by Kant, and has never since been shaken. THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 227 Spinoza's philosophy bears a greater rosemblauce to Hume'« than h;is generally been recognised. The scepticism of the one and mysticism of the other are so opposed in tone as to disguise the fact that both issue in u strict phenomenalism according to laws of Nature. In their views of the Subject this is very plain : for according to Spinoza the mind is the idea of the body (Part II., 13); and as the body consists of innumerable small parts of extension, so does the mind of corresponding ideas (Part II., 1 5); and, finally, the union among ideas of the mind corresponds with the organisation of the body. For "in so far as a body is better fitted to do or suffer many things, in that degree is its mind more fit to perceive many things at the same time; and the more the actions of a body depend solely on itself, and the less other bodies concur with it in action, the more capable is its mind of distinct understanding" (Part II., 13, Schol. ; cf. IV. 38), and therefore of blessedness and self-control (Part V., 39). At least, I do not see how we can translate a ' fitness to do or suffer many things ' and ' depending in action upon itself,' except by the word ' organisation.' § 5. Mill, turning like Hume from the analysis of material to that of mental Substance, inquires in his Examination of Hamilton (chap, xii.) whether the conception of the mind as a permanent existence is an original datum of consciousness. He observes that " our notion of Mind, as well as of Matter, is the notion of a permanent something, contrasted with the perpetual flux of the sensations and other feelings or mental states which we refer to it"; and that this permanence, supposing that there were nothing else to be considered, might (like Matter) be explained as "a Permanent Possi- bility of states," sensations, etc. : in sleep, e.g., my capability of feeling is not destroyed, but only conditionally suspended. But there is something else to be considered, namely. Memory : which has the peculiarity of involving " a belief in more than its own present existence. A sensation involves only this : but a remembrance of sensation involves the suggestion and belief that a sensation of which it is a copy or representation actually existed in the past " ; and not only that it existed 228 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE but that I myself, and no other, formerly had the sensation remembered. Thus I am not only a series of feelings or possibility of them, but am aware of myself as such ; and it is a paradox that a series of feelings should be " aware of itself as a series." In the Appendix, Mill adds a good deal to this. " The organic tie," he says, " which connects the present consciousness with the past one of which it reminds me, is as near as I think we can get to a positive conception of Self." He will not decide whether " we are distinctly conscious of it in the act of remembrance," or, " according to the opinion of Kant, are not conscious of a Self at all but are compelled to assume it as a necessary condition of memory." But further, whilst the Mind is only known to itself pheno- menally, as a series, " we are forced to apprehend every part of the series as linked with the other parts by something in common which is not the feelings themselves, any more than the succession of the feelings is the feelings themselves ; and as that which is the same in the first as in the second, in the second as in the third, * * "^ must be the same in the first as in the fiftieth, this common element is a permanent element." We have here a significant transition of expression from " the notion of a permanent something," which " we figure as remaining the same while the particular feelings, through which it reveals its existence, change" (p. 235, 3rd ed.) — to a common and permanent element in the feelings, which is not the feelings themselves (p. 257), nor any definite mode of consciousness, but which belongs to experience and is not merely the ' notion ' of something. Now there is a relatively stable element in the flux of consciousness, namely, the coenaisthesis or somatic feeling; it is not indeed permanent, but may remain much the same for hours in the background oi consciousness whilst the distinct foreground rapidly changes ; and this, as Eibot says, is a decisive factor of the empirical per- sonality; but Mill does not seem to have meant the coeniesthesis. And he can hardly have meant that every mental state has the character of memory ; for though the fact of memory (or " retentiveness ") is involved in every state, that is a very different thing from its having consciously the specific quality THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 229 of being remembered. Nor does he seem to have meant that the judgment " I think " accompanies every act of consciousness. Mill's notion of a permanent self in introspection, though approacliing Berkeley's belief, falls far short of it in confidence and definiteness. As to the Permanent Possibility of feeling that is figured to remain during the lapse of consciousness in sleep, since (in chap, xv.) he is inclined to admit Hamilton's " unconscious modifications in the only sense in which I can attach any very distinct meaning to them, namely, unconscious modifications of the nerves " — why should not the nervous system have served him equally well as the Permanent Possi- bility of feeling, or indeed, of memory ? Finally, as to the paradox of Memory, the difficulty of conceiving a series of conscious states conscious of itself as a series : if we really mean a series of " feelings," it is not only paradoxical but impossible : for ' feeling ' is the lowest term of consciousness and can never amount to memory. But memory is not " peculiar in involving a belief in more than its own present existence." Mill knew, and has explained, that every cognition has this character, being significative or representative — reason of the universal, even sense-perception of some object ; and a series, or stream, or organic activity of consciousness, conscious of its own former existence, is one in which occur ideas having the significative character which we call memory and believe to represent past reality. In this there is no peculiar paradox. It is impossible to appreciate the reality of consciousness whilst treating its processes as phenomena. In Mill's Essay on Theism (Part III.) he goes somewhat further : " Feeling and thought are much more real than anything else, they are the only things which we directly know to be real." And as to the mind's substantiality, he says : " Substance is but a general name for the perdurability of attributes : wherever there is a series of thoughts connected together by memories, that constitutes a thinking substance." But, surely, such a series constitutes not a substance but a continuous activity. In his work on Hamilton, he says that our notion of Mind is " a permanent something, contrasted with the perpetual flux 230 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE of mental states " ; which is not really perpetual because of sleep. No one would call that a substance which, as Mill supposed, might be suspended for several hours every day. What has become of the " permanent possibility " ? In his Theism, then. Mill has emphasised the reality of the Subject, but he has committed an impropriety and a contradiction in calling it a thinking substance. § 6. Had Mill appreciated Kant's philosophy he could hardly have written his chapters on the Self without some discussion of the famous doctrines of the Unity of Appercep- tion and the Paralogisms of piu-e Eeason, Without taking up disproportionate space it is impossible here to examine all the passages in which Kant labours to explain these matters ; but I must attempt a summary of his teaching. The unity of Apperception, that is, of explicit conscious- ness, first becomes prominent in the Deduction of the Categories (§ 16). "The / think" he says, "must be able to accompany all my representations ; for else something would be represented in me that could not at all be thought, which is as much as to say the representation would either be impossible or for me at least nothing at all," All the manifold of intuition, therefore, is necessarily related to the I think in any Subject ; and this is an act of spontaneity not of sense (which is only receptive). It is called pure consciousness to distinguish it from the empirical ; and original consciousness because it is that self-consciousness which, inasmuch as it gives rise to the representation / think accompanying all representations and in all consciousness one and the same, cannot be derived from anything further. It is also called the transcendental unity of self-consciousness to indicate the possibility of cognition a priori. It is the highest principle of all synthesis in both intuition and understanding; the ground of the categories, of the unity of objects, of the necessity and universality of experience or Nature : at least it is so for the human mind, though perhaps not for a mind whose representations should merely as such be actual — an intuitive Understanding (§ 17). Therefore, this objective unity of consciousness must be dis- tinguished from the subjective unity of the internal sense. THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJPXT 231 which is empirical and contingent and varies in different men (§ 18), and consists of phenomena in time, which are thought under the categories (§ 24) ; that is, the unity of the empirical Subject is that of a something thought as one ; but the pure unity of consciousness is the condition of all thinking, by the category of unity or any other. Herein I am conscious of myself, not as I appear to myself, noch wie ich an mir selbst bin, but only that I am : it is a thought not an intuition ; so that the consciousness of self is far from being a knowledge of self (§ 25). Now, to overlook this fact was the error of Eational Psychology (as in Descartes and Leibniz), which took the pure consciousness / think for an object, and proceeded to prove that it is (1) a Substance; (2) simple; (3) identical at all times ; (4) in relation to possible objects in space, a soul. The proofs err, first, by assuming that the Self which is always a subject, never a predicate to thought, is therefore a Sub- stance ! Secondly, by inferring that the Ego, which is of course a single subject, is therefore a simple Substance. Similarly with the third case, identity. Fourthly, I distinguish Self as a thinking being from things in space ; but it does not follow that the consciousness of myself is possible without things outside of me through which representations are given to me, or that I can exist merely as a thinking being, not as man. Such are the Paralogisms. Although I cannot regard as historically true Kant's derivation of Eational Psychology from the mistake of treating the / think as a given object, since Rational Psychology is manifestly a scholastic recension of the ghost-theory ; still, seeing the general truth of Kant's position that only the phenomenon (in his sense) is given, and that Self at any rate is posited as subject only, one cannot help wondering at Lotze's attempt to establish the independence of the soul as a simple substance merely on the evidence of the unity of Apperception. He explains indeed {Metaphysics, § 243) that this is in accordance with his own definition of a substance as " every- thing which possesses the power of producing and experiencing effects, in so far as it possesses the power " ; and presently he 232 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE adds : " The fact of the unity of consciousness is eo ipso at once the fact of the existence of a substance : we do not need by a process of reasoning to conclude from the former to the latter as the condition of its existence " (I quote the translation). But this is hardly reconcilable with other passages. In § 241 he says : " Any comparison of two ideas, which ends by our finding their contents like or unlike, presupposes the absolute indivisible unity of that which compares them : it must be one and the same thing which first forms the idea of a, then that of h, and which at the same time is conscious of the nature and extent of the difference between them." "What is this but arguing (I will not call it reasoning) from the unity of consciousness to a substance, a " thing " that " forms an idea " ? It is the style of mythology. The unity of consciousness can have a " power of producing and experiencing effects " only if it is one of the phenomena related. But this it certainly is not. Common modes of speech would excuse a man's writing of the Soul as a Thing having a unity of consciousness in its activities ; but there can be no excuse for describing the unity itself as a thing producing and experiencing effects, which are nothing but the consciousness of which it is the unity. Hence, Lotze has in fact inferred Substance from Subject. But we have seen that a relation between substance and phenomena or between soul and activity (if it can be thought at all) is not the relation between cause and effect : and still less is this the relation between the unity of consciousness and the phenomena of consciousness. The unity of consciousness neither acts nor suffers. As to Kant's doctrine of Apperception, it is only intelligible in connection with the deepest thoughts of his philosophy, which are left in a sort of secret script to be deciphered as best we can. Every one knows how the Ding an sich plays hide-and-seek with us throughout the K. d. r. V. ; but in the ethical and religious writings it becomes as manifest as words can make it. There we learn that the reality of our life and fate is homo noumenon ; and we may easily suppose that there is a multitude of noumena, one for each of us, besides those of other rationals. But on reflection it must appear that this is THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 233 iuconceivable ; for noumena out of Time and Space cannot be many ; there cannot be a numerical individuation, but at most a ciualitative difference, and this only a moral one — holy and uot-lioly. That individual men, not only in this life but ad infinitum, are sensuously determinate is implied in the argument for immortality : homo phenomenon does not become a noumenon by death in this world, since it is the persistence of sensuous opposition to Keason that guarantees his own per- sistence. The noumenon, then, is one with two aspects — the Absolute Rejison, and homo noumenon who is fallen. The fall (we learn in the Religion i. d. G. d. hi. Vernunft) is a mystery, its origin unaccountable, and of course not to be thought of as occurring in time; but, seeing that evil is due to the influence of Sense upon Reason, we may suppose that homo noumenon is nothing else than the aspect of Reason in a sensuous world — whose self-diremption in Time and Space, or the ' taking of flesh,' is, as such, a ' fall ' from Absolute Reason. Hence we may understand the objectivity of Reason in experience or Nature ; which in the K. d. r. V. is such a monstrous doctrine, if we understand it as the constitution of Nature by the individual human mind. The individual, as rational, shares in the knowledge of Reason which is the law of Natiu-e, but in his limitations only knows the outlines of the world- scheme, and must find out the details as best he can. Now, pure transcendental original Apperception is the common consciousness of Nature, in which all objective knowledge resides ; of which Time, Space and the Categories are the most general functions, but every detail of fact and relation is equally and as necessarily a function. Accordingly, it is widely distinct from the mere subjective empirical unity of Apperception. As the condition of the representation of objects in Space, it is the condition of the existence of any homo phenomenon ; and, through Time and the Categories, it is the condition of the synthesis of his subjective experience and of the thought of its unity, even to himself. But the Categories are conditions of his thoughts as Laws of Nature ; they are not his private organs of thinking ; he must be 234 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE content to do his private thinking with the Schemata of Imagination. Hence transcendental Apperception itself is One in a qualified sense — not under the Category of Unity, not numerically then ; and, therefore, if spoken of as Self-conscious- ness, this is also in a qualified sense ; for ' self ' implies others on the same footing, and what is above unity is above plurality, and else it could not be pure. In short, we may best interpret it as the Kantian Logos. But as for the subjective unity of apperception, or empirical self-consciousness, yours or mine, it is merely a limited particular fact, and to make great ado about it is very unphilosophical. For it is far from being the whole even of oneself; since beyond it lies the vast region of sub-consciousness (much more than ^^ of oneself), and the period of infancy, and all the forgotten experience that once was conscious, and a considerable part even of consciousness as it flies. Kant fully recognises this in his Anthropologie (Book I. § 5); and even Lotze says {Metaphysics, § 241) that he does not " repeat the frequent but exaggerated assertion, that in every single act of feeling or thinking there is an express conscious- ness which regards the sensation or idea simply as a state of self; on the contrary, every one is familiar with that absorption in the content of a sensuous perception which often makes us entirely forget our personality in view of it." This is as true of attentive thought as of perception. Lotze adds : " But then the very fact that we can become aware that this was the case, presupposes that we can retrieve what we omitted at first, viz., the recognition that the perception was in us, as our state." How much can we retrieve ? Often next to nothing of all that has passed. I must not be supposed to contend that the above interpretation of Kant is borne out by every passage in which he treats of Apperception. Far from it: at the very outset the proposition, " I think accompanies every act of conscious- ness," suggests the individual unity, and is both false and misleading. He did not from the first distinguish clearly in his own mind the universal and individual unities ; else he must have seen that the latter necessarily includes the sub- THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 235 jective unity of the internal sense. But, viewing his philosophy as a whole, I have given the only sensible meaning of tranH- cendentul Apperception ; for the notion that this am be a function of the individual is so intolerably foolish that any other is comparatively sane. § 7. The esoteric Kantian doctrine of homo phenomenon, then, is akin to the ancient theory of emanation in the Vedanta and Neo-Platonism. Lotze expresses it (§ 246) : " Nor again is it out of nothing that the soul is made or created by the absolute; but, to satisfy the imagination, we may say it is from itself, from its own real nature that the absolute projects the soul, and so adds to its one activity, the course of nature, that other which, in the ruling plan of the absolute, is its natural completion." Even in the history of English Philosophy similar doctrines have been held at various times by Oudworth and others ; of whom the most recently interesting is the late T. H. Green. Green says {Prolegomena, § 67) that our consciousness " can only be explained by supposing that in the growth of our experience, in the process of our learning to know the world, an animal organism, which has its history in time, gradually becomes the vehicle of an eternally complete consciousness." Apparently, the marks by which, according to Green, our consciousness may be identified with the Divine are five: (1) it is not itself in time, as may be proved by the very fact of its perceiving events in time ; (2) in every act of consciousness it distinguishes itself from the content of its activity ; (3) it is a unifying principle to the contents of consciousness by relating them together; (4) it is therefore an agent, and (5) a free agent. All these marks, except the fifth (for which see § 77), are given in the following passage {Prolegomena, § 32): "Thus in order that successive feelings may be related in objects of experience, even objects related in the way of suc- cession, there must be in consciousness an agent which distinguishes itself from the feelings, uniting them in their severalty, making them equally present in their succession." Many similar passages might be quoted : this is the essence 236 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE of Green's Metaphysics, and every position is gained by a paralogism. For (1) human consciousness is entirely determined in time : not only are relations of succession cognised as such and by an actual succession of their terms in thought, but this is even true of relations of co-existence ; and if there is any mysterious question here it is, not how succession can be presented as such, but how co-existences can be recognised at all. Green seems to have mistaken the " psychological now " for the nunc stans. (2) That in every act of consciousness the agent (soul or ego) distinguishes itself from the content of its activity is (a) untrue, because in fact self-consciousness does not accom- pany every act of human consciousness, (h) There is probably here a confusion between the total empirical content of the ego at any time, which contrasts with any fresh feeling or cognition (if distinct), and the abstract Subject, which (as such) is never known at all. For (c) to suppose that the abstract Subject can be distinguished from any particular content, is to make it one term of a relation of difference, and therefore an object needing another Subject for its presenta- tion (Third Man). The same objection applies to the descrip- tion of the Unity of Apperception as the " correlate of all experience " ; for a ' correlate ' is a term related. (3) Self-consciousness is not the unifying principle even in knowledge ; for all knowledge begins with perception, and the integration of psychic elements in perception which gives it its significative character, is infinitely more ancient and profound than any individual human consciousness. Hence the unsatisfactory character of the psychological analysis of perception : hence the fact that the unity of perception is felt as depending on the object. At present the unity of perception can best be understood as a growth. Similarly, the integrations of instinct, habit, and even memory are growths, as truly as the physical tissues are. Memories, indeed, both in acquisition (as a rule) and in revival, are clearer and more analysable than the more ancient functions of the soul, but their connection or unity is not determined THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 237 by self-consciousness, but (rather) determines it. The inven- tions and discoveries of imagination and discursive thought, though they appear in consciousness, do not come by the routes of consciousness : the lines that signal and summon them run through the dark. What a shallow thing our explicit consciousness is we have not yet enough considered. (4) To assume that the unity of consciousness is the activity of an agent, is precisely the paralogism of treating the Subject as Substance. " What is the use (poor Kant might ask) of writing, or refuting, or proving anything ^ — Were it not better done as other use, To sport with Amaryllis in the shade ? " But (5) that human consciousness should be a free agent is in conflict with the principles of Green's philosophy. Having inferred from human consciousness a divine Conscious- ness as sustaining the world, he finds that it must be timeless, uniting all existence in eternal knowledge, and in this aspect he calls it a " free cause." But he does not mean that it is a cause in any ordinary sense of the word by which some " separate particularity " is implied in cause and effect : for " the agent [divine Consciousness] must act absolutely from itself in the action through which that world is — not, as does everything within the world, under determination by some- thing else. The world has no character but that given it by this action ; the agent no character but that which it gives itself in this action" (§ 76). Now, how such a relation is possible we are to understand by comparing our own activity in knowledge ; which is " an action as absolutely from itself, as little to be accounted for by the phenomena which through it become an intelligent experience, or by anything alien to itself, as is that which we have found to be implied in the existence of the universal order " (§ 77). But this explanation raises appalling difficulties. How is it possible that in know- ing I should be a " free cause " of knowledge, seeing that the object known is always a fact of the eternal Mind ? Whilst awake I necessarily know something, and must know it as it is. I cannot choose how I shall know a thing, and the thing 238 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE takes no character from my knowledge of it, nor is my character merely equivalent to my knowledge of the thing. In knowledge, then, man is not a ' free cause,' and does not help us to bring the divine Consciousness under that odd category. In experience causa libera is without example or analogy : it neither explains anything, nor can it be explained. It is especially odd that any one should apply the adjective " free " to the Divine ' Agent ' as above described. According to Leibniz, God was not free to choose any world but the best possible (namely, this one) ; and Green cannot have meant that the Divine Agent was free to cognise another world ; for he explicitly asserts that " it has no character but that which it gives itself in this action " (knowledge of the world). This world therefore is not merely the best but the only possible one. And the Divine Unity of Apperception, as Green con- ceives it, cannot be an ' agent ' at all. For agency implies activity, implies changes brought about; and this is impos- sible in the world known to such a Being, a world without beginning, or end, or process, or development, or decay. Still, such a world, a nunc stans, being granted, it may seem a fair inference that it can only be represented in Time by an invariable order ; and this agrees with Green's remark that "all results are necessary results" (§ 109). But then all human knowledge and actions are necessary. We may conclude that there is no way of comprehending man as resembling the Divine Consciousness in being a free agent, unifying the object of knowledge from which it dis- tinguishes itself as a timeless principle ; and that therefore Green was right in saying that " the indivisible reality of our consciousness [at once divine and human] cannot be compre- hended in a single conception. In seeking to understand its reality we have to look at it from two different points of view ; and the different conceptions that we form of it, as looked at from these different points, do not admit of being united " (§ 68). This seems quite just; but things that '^cannot be united in a single concept " have no resemblance, and can never help to explain one another. Such is the truth : and, having THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJP:CT 239 perceived it, is it uot ustouishiug that this most earnest, sincere and benevolent man sliould try to make an impossible concep- tion the basis of human maunei's and of family and social life { Has the house of our life no foundation but tliis impalpable sand ? Unless a scheme of notions is in fact merely verbal, if it cannot be clearly rendered in concatenated concepts, there is no support for it but some sort of incoherent imagery. Theories of emanation are not merely verbal, and they cannot be clearly concatenated ; but such words as ' emanation,' ' the absolute projects the soul,' etc., not only had orignally a physical mean- ing (in which, as in so many mythologies, ' generation ' predominated), but they still retain it ; and physical sugges- tions, half suppressed by habits of technical thought, are still that which gives them all the sense they have. In short, Emanation is essentially a materialistic theory, in spite of every effort to refine away its sensuous dross. If I am asked whether the outological suggestions of this volume are purely verbal, or clearly concatenated, or vaguely imagined ; my answer is that, so far as conceptual, the imperfect character of the concepts employed has been explicitly shown, and that nothing will be built upon them without fair warning ; and that, where these concepts fail, there is a dim impulse of imagination to supplement the quasi-intelligible, which of course likewise fails, and, as far as it goes, is materialistic. But here, indeed. Materialism and Mysticism meet ; for Mysticism is always an attempt to walk by imagination where perception has left no vestiges. This cannot be helped in any Ontology. The nature of human thought and language makes it impossible — once we quit the ground of immediate consciousness, — to imagine the non-material or to define it except by blank negations of materiality. And the remedy for this defect of thought is to find a way of looking at the "World so as to see that ' Material-Spiritual ' is a crude, strained and indefensible opposition. It is not a case in which any theory can be proved by the physical method and incorporated with the sciences, but one in which we have to consider, in view of the sciences and the whole of experience, what scheme of notions will best 240 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE serve us to fill up that background of experience which all admit to be obscure. Such is the purpose of these specu- lations. § 8. We iiave seen, then, that the ego or consciousness is not, and cannot be explained by, any Substance, material or spiritual. Hume and Kant (in his speculative Philosophy) recognise what are called the phenomena of the Soul ; and, if interpreted dogmatically, they might be supposed to be Nihilists, denying any Substance ; but if fairly treated as sceptic and critic, they are Agnostics, demonstrating the grounds of our ontological nescience. The sequel of Kant's Philosophy shows that this Agnosticism was unsatisfactory to himself; and it is so to me, as well as to many others who acknowledge the force of the sceptical and critical arguments. Therefore, I am recommending as the most coherent and natural way of thinking, on the whole, this hypothesis that the World is essentially a conscious thing ; that in consciousness we have immediate knowledge of Keality, but not of the whole of Being ; that the rest of Being is made known to us by phenomena ; that it is everywhere conscious, but in various degrees, and that the higher degrees are known to us by the phenomena of organisation. In support of this view I argued in Chap. X. from the phenomena, and it has been necessary to show why other hypotheses are less satisfactory. It remains to consider, in this chapter, how it compares with other hypotheses in the account it gives of Perception and Volition. Neither Materialism nor Spiritualism can give any account of perception or volition. To Materialism all consciousness is a miracle, and therefore so is perception : to Spiritualism no perception is possible, because there is nothing to perceive. Dualism, maintaining the reality both of a material and of a spiritual Substance, has, from Descartes to Hamilton, tried in vain to circumvent the truism that between Substances divided by definition there is no community. Our own way of representing these things, on the hypothesis that there is an intimate parallelism between consciousness and the rest of Being which is manifested in phenomena, such that conscious- ness may be considered as an activity of Being, may be put THE ONTOLOGY OF THE SUBJECT 241 in this way : Sensation arises when a disturbance in the transcendent Being of the brain is set up by changes in the Being of other phenomena ; and perception is the integration of sensations that takes place under certain conditions in which one sensation becomes a sign of the others. An idea consists of perceptions and their associations centrally excited ; that is, accompanying disturbances propagated from other parts of the Being of the brain. Volition, or the acting upon the idea of an action, implies a specific disturbance in the Being of the brain corresponding with the idea of the action, and a propagation of this disturbance by the Being of nerves and muscles into the outer world. This story contains so many queer phrases that it asks some courage to write it ; and, in fact, it would not have been written if I had thought that it expressed merely notions of my own. But, however crude the expression (and I have deliberately refrained from refining it), I believe it is the way in which many, perhaps most people now think, who have given any attention to Psychology and also to the recent progress of the physical and biological sciences. For they hold (1) that consciousness has no mass or energy ; (2) that it cannot be explained by any other mode of existence; (3) that phenomena do manifest mass and energy ; and (4) that phenomena (as such) are not the reality of Being. My account of perception and volition follows from these four propositions. But how little I can venture to infer concerning Being that is not Consciousness, has been shown in Chap. VIII. § 8 ; namely, Succession, Change, Co-existence, Order. And amidst the contempt into which Ontology has now fallen it is lonely, wearisome and depressing to write about it. Once more let us return to the common daylight, to the fresh green fields of primitive credulity, to the great conjuring entertainment where seeing is believing. IS CHAPTER XII NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT § 1. ' Phenomena of consciousness ' is a convenient phrase in treating Psychology as a Natural Science, which is my purpose in the present chapter : for we must trace in outline the development of the rational life, without which there could be no Metaphysics. ' Phenomena of consciousness ' is also a very natural phrase, for it is only by late reflection, and not without difficulty, that the conviction can be reached that in fact consciousness is not a phenomenon, but the direct and sole revelation of the ultimate Being of the universe. Consciousness seems a fragmentary thing, not only by the intermissions of sleep and other lapses, but because each man has some first recollection, and it is always of something that happened a very little while ago ; and a few relics of events from then till now are all that he directly knows of conscious- ness : like the bridge that Mirza saw stretching out across an unfathomable sea, many of whose arches were broken, whilst its further end was hidden in mist. We learn from others that we lived before we can remember ; but they know us only by our bodies, as we know them ; and it is only by expression, gesture, behaviour that we can infer anything of them or of the animals, upon which to poise still more hazardous conjectures concerning the rest of Nature. By such a dim and flickering lamp is the vast world warmed and illumined. We have, therefore, no choice but to recognise human society and animal life and the sciences of these, as conditions of psychological inquiry : not that the psychologist fails to 242 NATUKAL IIISTOKY OF THK SUBJECT 243 make u full returu for what he takes, but that his f»\vn experieuce is isolated, incoherent and meaningless apart from the environing and antecedent activities of other men and other animals. To understand the growth of any single human mind, we must begin with the inherited organisation and disposition to development presented by its body, and with the social circumstances into which it is bom. And the psychologist's first problem is to determine, if possible, how much of a man's mental development is traceable to education and experience, and how much to the intrinsic maturing of the germ-plasm of his psycho-physical being. This problem will not soon be solved ; but I shall not disguise my own inclination to lay great stress upon the organic development, which is a growth of the body as a sign of the soul. Works of Psychology give elaborate accounts of how we learn to perceive objects and to will movements. I admire these writings, their penetrating insight and subtle analysis, and eagerly acknowledge how much I owe them. Yet they seem to me to describe what may be supposed to have happened in the infancy of our minds rather than what really happened. In my view we cannot properly be said to learn any of those things. We come to perceive objects by organic growth, before discriminating the sensations that are the ground of the qualities that constitute objects ; and by the same means we acquire many voluntary actions before we are able to attend to motor ideas. Our interpretations are apt to be as anthropomorphically misleading in studying the mind of a child as in studying the minds of other animals. To perceive an object, to perceive it at a distance and to acquire control of the movements necessary to reach it, are all involved in the generic development of the neuro-muscular apparatus. Since that development is greatly furthered by a child's activities, which imply a varied consciousness, we easily regard such acquisitions as " outgrowths of the same experi- ences," as they would be were a child's mind like our own ; but this is impossible. When the time comes for learning by experience, we already live in an orderly world, and are in possession of the general scheme of our faculties. 244 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Our early growth is accompanied and influenced by experience, but is rapid out of all proportion to experience, and may be attributed to that inherent activity by which every seed develops according to its kind. Before birth far greater progress is made than during the whole of an individual's subsequent life ; and this self-development continues for many years, is conspicuous again at puberty, and gradually slackens and ceases at ages varying in different races and in different men of the same race. Then come middle age and old age, considered to be especially the time of experience ; but the essential characters of these periods express, no less than those of infancy, the individuality of each organism. Why do children of the same family, families of the same folk, various races of liomo sapiens, grow up even under similar conditions with widely different abilities, aptitudes, characters ? The whole range of capacity from idiocy to genius has little to do with experience. The period of infancy in man is much longer than in other animals of equal bulk at maturity, and in some races of men, and in some men of the same race, longer than in others. As this is manifestly inconvenient, it may be asked why the period of gestation should not have been lengthened instead. Mechanical difficulties connected with the size of the head at birth may be alleged ; but gestation is said to be already three months longer with man than with the gorilla. Longer gestation might have been inconvenient to savages (our recent ancestors) still nomadic ; but it would have been safer for the offspring. Long infancy is favourable to the development of family life, and of active sympathy and affection, which are advantageous to a co-operative animal. All these are considerations ; yet I think some- thing must still be allowed for the necessity of thoroughly interfusing from the first the animal growths of perception and instinct with the growths that are stimulated by free activities in the beginning of experience, and with the gradual differentiation of the great plastic reserve in the cortex which corresponds with the specifically human powers of imagination and reason ; though even these later NATUKAL IIISTOKY OF THE SU3UECT 245 growths are controlled iu their main features by inherited predispositions to organisation. The human child, according to Romanes, at about the sixteenth month, reaches the gorilla's level of intelligence. The poor gorilla ! Perhaps Romanes has a little antedated the success of our rivalry ; for we know nothing about the gorilla's intelligence under natural conditions. However, thenceforward the proportion iu which human development depends upon experience, as compared with the internal forces of organisation, increases. But to maturity and even to the close of life (as we see in the oncoming of insanity) it seems that the general type of intellect and character, as distinguished from the details of knowledge, accomplishment and behaviour, is a realisation of hereditary conditions. § 2. In the biological evolution of mind we first see the relation of its cognitive and active qualities in the sequence of stimulus and contraction ; when a nervous system begins to appear this relation is concentrated in the reflex arc ; and when the energy of reaction grows greater and greater in proportion to the energy of a stimulus, a release of intra-organic potential is implied to which the psychic parallel is feeling and emotion. Mr. Spencer has admirably traced and illustrated the develop- ment of the correspondence between the living mind and the conditions of its existence ; he has shown how the corre- spondence extends in space and time, and increases in speciality, generality and complexity (Psychology, Part III.). Tiiroughout, the character of the mental organism and all its powers and activities are conditioned by Natural Selection ; whereby it becomes, through obedience, the interpreter of the law and reason of the world. " The essential feature of living matter," says A. D. Waller, " ia its instability." Every organic body is metabolic : it can only maintain its existence if a moving equilibrium be established between waste and repair, that is, as long as the anabolic balances the catabolic process. Every change in it, therefore, has a reference to some further change : tliis is its teleological character ; and it is sanctioned by Natural Selection, which favours those forms that live best, and best conduct the 246 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE activities that preserve life. Self-preservation, said the Stoics, is the first effort of Nature. It is only by internal forces that inorganic compounds are preserved ; but self-preservation, by the very process of change, is characteristic of the organic — by " the adaptation of internal to external relations." Hence everything, so far as it is conscious, always strives to live, to obtain food, to find its mate, to escape enemies or defeat them. All activity is destructive and must be repaired ; the individual dies at last and must be replaced : hence the appetites of hunger, thirst and sex. In the satisfaction of these appetites lies the primary interest and attention of animals : success is pleasure and " corroboration of vital motion " ; failure is pain and enfeeblement. In attention, all the organism is focussed, and all its powers are brought to bear on whatever is interesting. This attitude is certainly favoured by Natural Selection ; and the same may be said for the primary functions of cognition, assimilation and discrimination. Assimilation is, in the first place, the ground of action ; because, a known situation having been reinstated, an action formerly successful may be repeated, an action formerly unsuccessful inhibited ; and the pleasure of former success reinforces repetition, and the pain of former failure inhibits it. By discrimination, assimilation is defined and guarded. At their first appearance in micro-organisms these functions have a quasi-chemical aspect ; there the living thing blends with inorganic Nature ; whilst, in the progress of animal and human life, we find them to have contained the germs of reason and science. Since, when we know what a thing is and where we are, we know also what to do, assimila- tion is pleasurable ; and from this humble source is derived the impassioned joy of explanation. When images begin to enter into the mental life, the difference between them and perceptions is a condition of sanity, and to this difference is proportioned the energy of their motor reactions. Images subserve foresight and adap- tation to things remote ; and their guiding power depends on the processes of Association ; which are determined by Natural Selection. For association and suggestion according NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT 247 to contiguity, correspond with the connections that muke one thing a mark of another in time and place ; and the con- tirraation of association by repetition ensures a tendency to think of things in some proportion to the frequency of their recurrence. True, these tendencies may be very misleading, and must often be destructive ; but animal life is generally confined to a narrow routine in which approximate adaptation is enough for the species. Interest and attention confirm associations, because, in the routine life, that is interesting which is preservative. The unhappiness of human life is due to the failure of routine, and the persistence of primitive interests in conditions that require analytic reason and circumspect control, whilst these powers are still undeveloped. § 3. Whilst the adaptation of the organism to deal directly with things remote in space has reached a high degree of perfection in many animals, particularly in some birds of prey, its aoaptation to deal with events remote in time is characteristic of man. Teleology, as we have seen, is inherent in all organic life, as a series or system of co-ordinated self- and - species preservative changes : this begins with the appetites ; is carried further by many instincts having a remoter reference, in which there is a consciousness of the action and a s-.rong feeling for it, but no distinct consciousness, or even none at all, of the end : in human life it is increas- ingly taken up into an explicit consciousness of ends and means, though bhis process is far from complete ; I mean that human nature is still largely instinctive and full of ideas and impulses whose purpose it does not understand. To deal successfully with events remote in time, there must be a certain spontaneous orderliness of thought or expectation, of which animals exhibit the beginnings ; but, further, a power cf discovering the order of Nature, laws of the relations of events, and of calculating their results with some degree of precisioL or probability — in a word, reason. Of this I shall speak presently ; but here I draw attention to a third condition of the attainment of remote results, namely, the growth of corresponding feelings. Plato had regarded certain passions as the natural allies of reason, and even the later 248 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE Stoics found a place in their death's-head dogma for rational emotions. Aristotle saw that " thought moves nothing " ; though his expressions are not always consistent with this truth ; for he talks of desire being opposed to reason, instead of to the desire to act reasonably. But Spinoza was the first to see clearly that " a passion can only be controlled by another and stronger passion," and that the orderliness of our life requires the development of emotions fit for human nature ; though the, influence of Aristotle led him to put a too exclu- sive stress upon the philosophic nisus. We see, then, the inadequacy of defining man merely as ' rational ' : since reason must be unavailing without the growth of correspond- ing feelings, these must equally be differentiae of human nature. Perhaps it is not quite true that thought, or its physical process, moves nothing ; it has some energy, but not enough to move twelve stone ; for that there must be a release of potential, and therefore (where organisation is imperfect) a wave of feeling. But purposive actions arise in special situations, such as aggression and escape, and thence acquire a speciality of feeling. I take it that every special emotion is an integration of the algedonic experiences of actions of the same kind as those that they now reinforce and sustain. Under the influence of less specialised feeling, efforts to escape or hide generated the emotion of fear ; habits of hoarding were the precondition of prudence ; the practice of equal sharing gave rise to the sense of justice ; aud the worship preceded the love of God. With the development of animal life adaptation to a greater and greater variety of circumstances becomes necessary ; in man most, and especially in civilised man. Every situation, as determined by purposes and the relations of persons and things, has its own feeling ; and therefore our feelings are shaded and blended in endless variety, so ihat Malebranche may have been justified in saying that perhaps no two men ever felt the same passion. Still, certain situations frequently recur which approximate to an average tfpe, and there are emotions corresponding with such situations having a suf- NATUKAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT 249 ficiently specific character to be readily recognised, though they cannot be precisely classified. The emotions exist either to intensify expression, like Joy and Grief, or to reinforce action. Tlie latter are either Impulsive, like Fear, Anger, Affection, which are common to the higher animals, — the interpretation of their apparent manifestation in the lowest animals is conjectural, - — or liegulative in many degrees of co-ordination : the inferior degrees being shared by some animals, whilst the superior are proper to man, or even to some civilised men. The regulation of action implies inhibition ; and this may be due to the asthenic influence of an emotion tinged with fear, or dread, like Prudence ; or to the fact that if one action is effectually reinforced all incompatible actions must be suppressed, as Justice suppresses Arrogance. The regulative feelings, like the impulsive, are at first instinctive ; that is, they direct conduct to an end without a distinct prevision of that end, and with most men such is still their condition. Quasi-rational, they help to secure the ends of reason during the immaturity of reason ; they are provident without circumspection, and but for them, reason- ing, even to the last, would be ineffectual. Various emotions may be considered as specially subserv- ing the interests of the Individual, the Family, the Tribe ; but in a normal civilised man all emotions are socialised, or modified in the interests of the tribe or society. Some emotions are concrete, like Love. Others are abstract, like Pride — the integration of all satisfactions in success of whatever kind, but especially in competition ; or like Fairness — the integration of all satisfactions in pro- portionate dealing. The differential circumstances in either case cancel, and the common body of feeling remains with a corresponding reflex or expression, the stiffening of the spinal column or the opening out of the hands. The social emotions are (1) Ego-altruistic, representing what we believe to be the feelings of others toward us, such as Vanity, Shame, Honour ; or (2) Altruistic, sympathetic affections toward others, such as Pity, Generosity, Benevolence 250 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE (cf. Spencer's Psychology, Part VIII.) ; or (3) what I can only call Panic emotions, meaning that they depend for their development upon a sympathetic rajpport of the tribe, such as Loyalty, Religion, Duty. If it be said that these last in their highest form, so far from having a panic quality, brace the solitary protestant and most shine against the face of tyranny and clamour, we must remember that this happens in few men, that it is not solitary where God is, and that every mental structure in its highest organisation attains a relative independence. I need not show how all these feelings, though instinctive, regulate and rationalise our life ; and this is not the place to show how all emotions, whilst they remain instinctive, involve more or less illusion, guiding the conduct of the individual to ends of Nature other than those which he proposes to himself. Play imitates all the actions of life and, therefore, all its feelings. Hence every emotion is experienced in two ways : first, in earnest as a motive or reinforcement, and then in recreation. From the play -instinct the Fine Arts are an outgrowth with a panic inspiration, especially in the rhythmic Arts ; and under this influence the emotions suffer a further transfiguration ; grief turns to pathos, terror to sublimity, laughter to comedy. In this form their motive force is nearly lost ; indeed, the possibility of its suspension is the limit of Art : whence the rule not to intrude poetry into oratory ; which urges to do something, except the encomiastic. Still, indirectly, the Fine Arts are regulative, especially by enhancing loyalty, religion and personal ideals. They unite mankind ; sympathy reconciles us most in suffering, but Art in rapture. The effort to reason and to know, the more necessary as the interests of life grow more enduring, has its own in- stinctive passion — Curiosity. Plato and Aristotle traced the beginning of Philosophy to Wonder ; but Wonder presides chiefly over the mythopoeic stage of explanation : from which indeed Plato half emerges, like The tawny lion, pawing to get free His hinder parts. NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT 251 Wonder wants the permanence that is requisite to sustain long and arduous research. Curiosity, derived from remote animal progenitors, and at first directly subserving the simpler needs of life, only finds its true field when the complexity of human society demands the discovery of general truths applicable to various circumstances, and at the same time makes it possible to carry out the division of labour between thought and action. To ensure the service of men at tasks the least directly and plainly useful, like those of Art and Science, Nature infuses master-passions into those whom she calls ; who labour often unrewarded and careless of reward, accounting themselves blest in their toil ; though to the bystander they seem a sort of victims. Becoming aware of this, they justify themselves by proving that science cheapens bread, cotton and pig-iron ; but this is a concession to the illusions of the world ; for amongst all the passions of man- kind Philosophy alone is without illusion. Science truly is a condition of civilisation ; but civilisation is for the sake of Science. § 4. Every man is born to develop a peculiar organic structure of impulse and emotion, more of this and less of that, through the whole range of feeKngs. Such a struc- ture varies inexhaustibly from man to man, as faces and finger-prints do, and constitutes his character (the dominant tendencies of his reaction) ; so far as this can be distinguished, on the one hand, from behaviour, which is determined partly by experience ; and, on the other hand, from temperament, which depends upon the ccensesthesis. In intra -uterine consciousness, wherein the feeling of nutrition and growth is contrasted with the sense of move- ment and resistance — or ccensesthesis with kinsesthesis — begins the differentiation of Subject and Object. The kinaesthesis accompanies all the special sensations, and becomes the connective tissue of the objective mind or Nature. It is that which every other sensation signifies ; and because of the weight and resistance of my body, always pressing on the earth, the significance of perception is always reinforced by present experience : that star, that cloud, that 252 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE church is like this — this earth beneath my feet. My body itself is such a thing ; such things favour or hurt the body and affect the coenaesthesis. Hence the conviction of Physical Reality, and the necessity of the conceptual system of the physical sciences. The coeuaesthesis is the original and the most permanent factor of subjective consciousness, the background of all changes of thought and feeling; so that some psychologists regard it as the essence of the personal life. But to me it seems rather to be the essence of subjectivity, and generic in character ; too little individualised to constitute a person ; who springs from it like a tree from the soil, or (say) like a leaf from the tree. The utmost subjectivity brings us nearest of all that we know to eternal and universal Being ; but a man inhabits Time and Society. Expectation, memory, endur- ing interests, concatenated endeavours, achievements and plans mark out the cycle of his life, his individuality. The living organism, moreover, cannot be understood merely as the Subject ; it is the union of Subject and Object ; for the kinaesthesis is as constant an experience as the coensesthesis ; and hence spring our surmises concerning the truth of the World. But neither can man be understood merely as an individual, for his interests are fused with other men's ; sympathy signifies, as Schopenhauer shows, the kindred of mankind, and even of organic nature ; and so do religious beliefs. Biological theory explains this by the continuity of all life in Time, which (aa we say) is more real than Space, the divider ; and doubtless the coensesthesis is continuous, derived from germ to germ. Hence a man's personality is inseparable from the family and its possessions and traditions ; and hitherto it has been inseparable from the Tribe or State. There, on the one hand, grows up a consciousness of the relation of self to others, according to rules implying responsibility and defining the individual ; on the other hand, suggestion, imitation, education, emulation and specialised industry and rank, modify hie individuality, and disguise his character by codes of behaviour. And further, since society is the greater part of every man's NATUKAL HISTORY OF THP: SUBJECT 253 environment, it operates selectively, eliminating those who fail to ' behave,' and thus determining the possible types of character itself. Different social conditions, town or country ; different constitutions, despotic or free, operate differently in the selection of character ; and of all considerations bearing upon the comparison of social or political affairs, this is the most important to mankind. Mill thought that Democracy tended to favour uniformity and mediocrity of character, because he dreaded uniformity and mediocrity ; Plato thought that Democracy produced the utmost variety and extravagance of character, because he hated Democracy and variety ; and it is certainly odd that the worse motive should have prompted the better inference. § 5. Nothing so clearly proves the secondary and dependent character of the individual as a study of his appetites, desires, emotions ; for they all refer to things or persons beyond him, in relation to which he endeavours, so far as he is aware of them, to adjust his actions, in order to save, or to better, him- self, his family, his tribe. His actions depend upon what he is aware of and what he is capable of desiring ; neither of which can be arbitrarily altered. Nay, his desires further determine what he shall be aware of ; confine his eyes within the deep-trodden lane of customary life ; or if he ever looks over the hedge, determine what shall interest him in the world around, and therefore what he shall see there. Hence in the quality and limits of our desires lies the true poverty of human nature : it springs from a poor root. A few generations ago we were little better than savages ; a few generations farther back, and what then ? If the state in which we live is civilisation, it has come too soon ; we have not had time to prepare for it. The reign of man has been established before he is fit to govern. Power has been acquired over Nature ; but for most men there is no further use for it than to provide a frivolous variety of satisfactions for the same cravings of the same soul that 5000 years ago was happier upon a kitchen-midden. So unready are we that every country swarms with 254 THE METAPHYSICS OE NATUKE thieves, harlots, faith -healers, gamblers, idlers, miracle-mongers, quacks, politicians, and all sorts of parasites and impostors. And for the rest of men, or not much less than half, who can give a sincere reason why they should live in such toil and darkness ? For some indeed there is ease and comfort, — a noble result of Nature's travailing and groaning ; for a few there is even wealth and ostentation. There is social gaiety, possible by the grace of oblivion. Philanthropy, more truly honourable than hopeful, and Art and Science remain, Nothing is more depressing than the poetry of magic and devil-conjuring: there we see the hero armed with super- natural power, and helpless because he remains himself. Hence Shakespeare treats such power ironically : Prospero makes an exalted marriage for his daughter, and recovers the duchy which, when formerly possessed, was never valued. Superstitious prejudice, exasperated by the Eenascence, produced the legend of Faustus ; and Marlowe's genius cannot disguise its fatuity. According to Goethe, Faust escapes the devil and satisfies his own soul by reclaiming waste land and founding an industrial colony. We find with some disappointment that the devil cannot help us to anything that cannot be done without him. The same thing happens when epic poets, from Homer to Milton, treat of the gods. The gods, it seems, have the same narrow interests as we have ; or, indeed, narrower ; for to idealise is to impoverish. So there is no escape from our lot ; even imagination is as helpless as the devil. Popular pictures of Heaven would be extravagantly comic, if one did not reflect how desirable must seem eternal rest to the weary, clean linen to the dirty, and a decent participation in glory to the down-trodden and despised. I do not suggest that human nature is always the same ; far from it : but progress is slow, the average man of a race advances little in 3000 years; the head of the procession drags after it an appalling tail, and sometimes there is retrogression. There has been during the last 100 years. For it is an obvious truth that whenever any species has unusual facility in getting a living, it degenerates ; since many poor specimens then survive who, imder normal difficulties, NATUKAL HISTOKY OF THE SUliJECT 255 must have perished. This is the condition under which the population of North-west Europe and America, by the aid of machinery and expanding industries, has so rapidly increased. It cannot continue indefinitely, but will probably end in a period of remorseless selection and misery. Modern industry has done nothing for human happiness ; but it was necessary to the inventing and perfecting of scientific apparatus. § 6. As our character determines our actions so it deter- mines our thoughts ; for thought is a kind of action. Char- acter, that is, determines our thinking, so far as we are able to think; but the ability to think depends upon the plan or structure of that which thinks, or upon its original disposition to produce such a plan. As we are now speaking of phenomena, this means that the ability to think is objectively represented by the plan and structure of the brain. I suppose that every brain has a certain innate disposition, generic, specific, in- dividual, to develop certain connections of its tracts or sub- organs ; and, in the case of the higher animals and man, an aptitude for falling from time to time into new combinations, which constitute a further development of its structure (if confirmed) and exhibit the same specific or individual traits. Plasticity of structure corresponds with originality of thought. At first, all cognition and thought merely subserves the organism, as a lamp before the footsteps of desire. Then with the adaptation of man and society to more and more remote conditions, thought discovers the objects of our true desire ; that which is good for us on the whole, co-ordinates best our conduct, is consented to by the preponderant weight of our character ; which implies the inhibition of " chance desires " that tend to frustrate the attainment of that good. Mean- while, in these labours thought becomes self-impassioned and obtains strength to lead its own life ; and we learn that he who would discover truth must have in view no interest but truth. Adaptive intelligence begins not from reflex action, nor from instinct, but from expectation, which is a simple out- growth of perception : differing from it in this, that some interesting factor of an experience-complex is deferred. Ex- pectation is not a projection of conscious memory, but of 256 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE experience ; for the predominant course of the stream of con- sciousness is forward ; the primitive movement of attention is watchfully forward ; at the lower levels of life no power is possessed that is not useful, and memory (as distinct from re- tentiveness) only becomes useful when there is sufficient fulness and plasticity of mind to compare and discriminate, and so to adapt conduct to new cases by the light of the old. It may be, indeed, that primitive expectation is not even illuminated by an idea of that which is expected ; for it seems enough that there should be an attitude of preparation, and a subactivity of certain nervous tracts facilitating the per- ception of certain objects, and inhibiting all actions excited by irrelevant objects. Certainly expectation is exhibited by animals much lower in the scale of organisation than the level at which evidence can be found of dreaming, hallucina- tion, or home-sickness : the three criteria of the capacity for free ideas according to Komanes, — the last of which is questionable (^Mental Evolution in Animals, chap. x.). From this lowly stage of adaptive intelligence, the rise of memory and free generic ideas, or recepts, leads to " reasoning from particulars to particulars " ; that is, to a judging of the present in the light of parallel cases recalled. Not that such reasoning supersedes the early expectant judgment ; for this still serves us well, even after the last stage of reasoning has become possible by means of principles, generalised or abstracted from aggregates of remembered or recorded experience, and methodically verified. § 7. Generalisations concerning the relations of things and events are possible only by means of language ; and, therefore, if generalised thought is a human differentia, society, in which alone the growth of language is possible, is older than man. This truth, that man never by contract or other- wise formed society, but that society is older than he, and that from the first he has grown up and been moulded in all his traits in relation to society, is of the utmost importance to Moral Philosophy ; but what we are here concerned to note is that the language that has developed in social life is the necessary organ of Reason. I NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT 257 That we should reason chiefly by means of language seems a superficial and probably deceptive arrangement, and in fact so it is ; but the possibility and even necessity of it appears when we consider that the advantage of economising time and energy has imposed a symbolic character on all mental opera- tions. The reasoning by means of signs is not an unintelli- gible change in the process of mental growth ; we find the same thing in perception, where (normally) visual sensations are the signs of complex objects and motions ; and in memory and imagination, not only as derived chiefly from vision in most of us, but also by the use of fragments of images to signify extensive tracts of potential representation, or of words to supersede even the fragments of images. This is the condition of that " quickness " commonly ascribed to thought ; for if in such processes of representation we could not be content without reviewing the whole phantasmagoria of our associations, thought would by no means be quick. And the same device facilitates volition : for the most part it is only in acquiring control of an unused muscle, or of a new muscle- grouping, that ideas of actions are explicit in consciousness ; but otherwise they are taken for granted, — complicated with the idea of the end to be attained, as the weight of an object is complicated with its visual presentation, — whence the tran- sition is easy to secondary automacy. In all these cases the effectiveness of abbreviation depends upon the strength of integration or association between the signs and the facts signified. Without this condition, reason- ing, whether with ourselves or with others, could not, as it often does, take the form of a verbal continuum, comparable with the visual continuum that, as we look round, presents to us the realm of Nature. Accordingly, the fitness of language to lead our thoughts is ensured by its three-fold roots in the mind and a corresponding intricacy and pervadingness of asso- ciation : namely, as received by the ear, as articulated, and as seen by the eye — not only when written but in lip-movement and in the accompanying gestures and expression. And being in all these ways, but especially in articulation, an active experi- ence, it is an apt organ of attention and of universal control. 17 258 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Still, whilst language is an indispensable organ of human reason, it implies the existence of a reason of which it is the organ, that is, the organisation of the mind as a whole, which has come into existence for the use and for the sake of reasoning, because the world itself is orderly and predictable. Spencer has given the most elaborate account of the growth of this organisation : see his Principles of Psychology, especially Part III., ou Mind as a Correspondence, and Part V., on the Evolution of the Nervous System ; also Part II. chap, ii., on the Composition of Mind, and Part VIII. chap, iii., on the Development of Conceptions. The chief defects of his theory are its extreme abstractness, as if the process of development depended not at all upon the endeavour of the individual mind to know ; and its giving no part to language itself in aiding the evolution of Eeason. The essential features of rational organisation are, on the one hand, the perceiving, imagining, thinking as totalities those things, events, ideas that have a physical or logical cohesion ; and, on the other hand, the discriminating and identifying as such the properties and relations of those totalities. Both these processes, grouping and abstraction, whatever crude beginnings of them may exist in the animal world by the " logic of recepts," depend in the degree in which they are performed by ourselves upon the words and construc- tions of language. The groupings range from such simple percepts as " stone " or " flying bird " to such complex ideas as " History of Home," " Astronomy," " Self," " World " ; the abstractions range from such recepts or generic impressions as " sweet," or " edible " to such categories as " gravitation," " number," " equality " ; and it cannot be supposed that the later terms of these series could possibly be fixed and manipu- lated without language. In considering the rational organisation of experience by grouping and abstraction, or synthesis and analysis, it is usual to confine the term reasoning to the analytic process ; but, in fact, the two processes are inseparable. High abstrac- tions imply vast aggregates of experience to be compared, and the aggregates themselves, though largely formed by associa- NATURAL HISTORY OF THE SUBJECT 259 tion, are extended by iuferences, and limited by discriminative judgments. According to Wundt, to reason is to analyse a total idea that has been formed by " apperceptive synthesis " (selective attention) ; but this is too narrow a view. We do, indeed, analyse an aggregate idea, as we do a percept. We analyse (say) an orange, by attending to its visual properties, prepared to grasp whatever other properties suggest themselves. Similarly, we may attend to the sign of an aggregate idea (usually a verbal sign), — say, Cartesianism, — and note the contents that suggest themselves, — initial doubt, certitude of self-consciousness, innate ideas, mutual exclusiveness of thought and extension, etc. ; and further, the relations between those ideas that constitute the total, and which, like the whole, are known to us by their verbal signs. But the more original functions of reasoning are the breaking up of aggregate ideas erroneously formed, and the building up of others upon juster conceptions of community ; for example, to judge that the idea of Monarchy as including Constitutionalism and Autocracy is superficial and misleading, and that the true connection of Constitutional Monarchy is with Republics : or, again, the identification of aggregates commonly assumed to be opposed ; for example, to judge that human life, animal life, and plant life agree in this, that Malthus' law of population is equally true of them all. It could be shown, I think, that our advances in reasoning, including the great scientific discoveries, conform to these types. When aggregates are named they are apt to acquire not only unity but isolation ; more especially when their names signify opposition, the aggregates they stand for have a mutual repulsion. Words spread a sort of skin over their meanings : such ideas as buying and selling, rational and brutal, mind and matter, become so strongly delimited, that until the barriers are broken through by some exceptional nisus of thought, there is an end of understanding. The faculty that carries forward this disruptive and recombining process is the primitive function of discrimination and assimilation, raised to various powers under the name of abstract thought. William James happily describes the 260 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE procedure as " dissociation by varying concomitants." I believe the credit of first explaining the matter is due to Hume in his Treatise, Book I. Part I. § 7, 0/^ Abstraction, especially the last two paragraphs on the " distinction of reason." When any quality or relation is repeated amidst complex experiences that otherwise vary, it attains a quasi- independence ; and the same is true when a quality varies amidst complexes otherwise constant. In either case, attention is attracted and assimiliation is accomplished; and thence- forth the identification of the quality or relation is facilitated should it occur in further experience. Its fixation is assured by a name or proposition. The primitive function of assimilation is therefore also the ground of the explanation of Nature ; for this consists in the progressive identification of the properties and relations of things and events under all the disguises of variety, and the co-ordination of them in a system of concepts and laws, the most general or abstract of which are called Categories and Axioms. We have now considered self-conscious reason as arising in individuals in the course of nature by natural laws. If this is the explanation of the individual, it is also the guarantee of the reality of the World. In no other way is that explanation and guarantee possible ; no otherwise can the knower be related to the known ; and only so far as there is law can there be any system or any truth. The development of reason carries with it the criteria of truth : it becomes clear and definite, excludes contradiction, presupposes uniformity, and tends to establish universal consent. Whether, or in what sense, the World itself is to be thought rational, we are not yet ready to discuss. To declare that that which reason interprets must be rational, may be rash and even impious. Discursive reason is tentative and fallible ; in Nature there are no paralogisms nor " provisional hypotheses." But if it be hazardous to speak of the World as Universal Reason, at least we are sure that it is the ground, the measure, the law, the judge, and in every way the superior of human reason. BOOK IV.-THE CATEGORIES I CHAPTER XIII ABSTRACT CATEGORIES I. Relation in General § 1. In Formal Logic a Judgment is analysed into two Terms (subject and predicate) and a Eelation between them (marked by the copula) ; and it is usual to speak of subject and predicate as concepts, but not to call the relation between them a concept. Yet it expresses the same judgment to say ' A is like B,' or ' A and B are alike ' ; ' A is the cause of B,' or * A and B are cause and effect.' Thus the relation of the terms is turned into a predicate, and so becomes manifestly a concept. It is true, though not immediately relevant, that, as Hamilton says, every concept, though in the place of the subject or predicate term, itself involves relations, and is a " fasciculus of Judgments." Now the Metaphysic of Logic is a reflective evaluation of conceptual knowledge ; but of course it examines not all concepts, — an infinite task, — but those that are variously called the highest, or most abstract, or universal, or fundamental ; and such are the concepts that are most conspicuously relations because commonly in the place of the copula in judgments : wherefore Kant called them " judging concepts " ; and, following him, it has become fashionable to call them Categories. The recognition of Eelation as the nexus of all judgment and knowledge is a late result of analysis ; it was, I believe, original with Locke, and is one of his chief services to Philosophy. Plato had reckoned some relations amongst the Ideas which he regarded as constitutive conditions of experi- 263 264 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE ence; Aristotle had given Kelation the fourth place in the list of Categories. But the vague logical copula was for ages allowed to disguise with superficial facility both the true unity and the variety of thought ; so that, although Locke's doctrine was illustrated and reinforced by Hume, Kant, misled by his admiration of the Scholastic Logic, treated Relation as only one genus of the Categories ; although Eelation is as essential, if not as conspicuous in the Categories of Quality and Quantity as in Substance and Attribute, Cause and Effect. Moreover, whilst indicating a special connection between the three categories of each genus, he declared them to be all equally original and independent. Hegel, following Fichte, added to the number of the Categories and pretended to deduce them one from another in a series, beginning with Being and ending with the Idea (or Thought of the Universe), by a necessary process of dialectic. But no enterprise was ever more irrational. The argument is sometimes fallacious, depends often upon bare assertions and arbitrary definitions. Relation first emerges under the rubric of Appearance, and is naively investigated in special cases after having been assumed again and again : being in fact the nerve of every dialectical process, since this takes place (by the way) in the mind of some thinker, not amongst Categories in vacuo. But recent Psychology and Metaphysics agree in restoring Relation to its true place as the essential character of apperceptive con- sciousness, the universal of cognition and thought of thought. § 2. The Categories, or most general forms in which men judge, are, then, the object of our present inquiry ; and, first. Relation itself, whether it is clear or (in other words) possible ; and, if so, whether it is valid : for both points are disputed. In the Theory of Logic (chap, ii.) I observed that " A relation cannot be defined, for we know of nothing more elementary. The only way of bringing it to light is by contrasting it with its co-ordinate abstraction, the term. Every relation lies between, or connects, or ties two terms, and no more. All terms are connected and tied by relations. * * * The world consists of related terms or terminated ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 265 relations. This seems to be the eud of all analysis, whether of the Object or Subject." In this somewhat figurative way I sought to express the necessary form of all judgment ; and I still hold that every sound Logic or Metaphysics of Logic must make this its starting-point. Accordingly, it was a great satisfaction to tind that in Appearance and Reality (chap, iii.) F. H. Bradley takes a similar view of the indissoluble co-implication of these elements of thought. He says in § 1 : " Qualities are nothing without relations. * * * We have seen that in fact the two are never found apart. We have seen that the separation by abstraction is no proof of real separateness. And now we have to urge, in short, that any separateness implies separation, and so relation, and is there- fore, when made absolute, a self-discrepancy." Nothing can be truer or better stated ; nevertheless, he j&nds the conception full of intricate puzzles. In § 2 he writes : "We have found that qualities without relation have no intelligible meaning. Unfortunately, taken together with them they are equally unintelligible. They cannot, in the first place, be wholly resolved into relations. Hence the qualities must be, and must also be related. But there is hence a diversity which falls inside each quality. It has a double character, as both supporting and as being made by the relation." To recognise these two aspects of the quality is, of course, to relate them ; and then each aspect may be treated in the same way ; and the process is endless. But why should the process begin ? For a quality to " be " and to " be related " are not two facts : to treat them as different is a breach of the conditions already laid down, that " qualities are nothing without relations." To treat the being of a quality as distinct from its relatedness, is to make abstract separateness absolute, and leads (as foretold) to self- discrepancy. Whose fault is that ? In § 3 we read : " We may briefly reach the same dilemma from the side of relations. They are nothing intelligible either with or without their qualities. In the first place, a relation without terms seems mere verbiage, and terms appear, therefore, to be something beyond their relation." A relation 266 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE without terms is " a false abstraction, and a thing which loudly contradicts itself." " But how the relation can stand to the qualities is, on the other hand, unintelligible. If it is nothing to the qualities, then they are not related to it at all ; and, if so, as we saw, they have ceased to be qualities, and their relation is a nonentity. But if it is something to them, then clearly we now shall require a new connecting relation. For the relation hardly can be the mere adjective of one or both of its terms ; or at least as such it seems indefensible. And, being something itself, if it does not itself bear a relation to the terms, in what intelligible way will it succeed in being anything to them ? " This process also is endless. The dilemma assumes that a relation must be either " nothing " or " something " to the qualities ; and then comes proof that it can be neither : therefore, the notion is unin- telligible. But the whole process depends upon our forgetting the original position that terms and relations imply one another. When it is said, " If it [the relation] is nothing [or something] to the qualities," are we to understand by " it " the relation considered in abstraction from the qualities, or the relation in actuality along with the qualities ? In the latter sense (the only legitimate one) the supposition is — 'if the relation of qualities is to be nothing to the qualities as related, they are not related at all ; if something, we requu'e a new connecting relation.' But these horns are only made of paper : for the relation of qualities and the qualities as related are the same thing ; so that the supposition of one being nothing to the other, or of tlieir needing fiurther relation, is merely supererogatory. If, on the other hand, we are to understand by " it " the relation considered in abstraction from the qualities, this is precisely what has been condemned (quite justly) as a " false abstraction." Yet now it is described as being " something itself," and " bearing a relation to the terms," apart from which, we have just been told, it cannot be conceived at all. The fact is that the author, after having declared terms and relations, taken severally, to be false abstractions, is still a ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 267 victim of the natural illusiou that separate words imply separate things, and that therefore terms and relations must be such things. His whole argument is a misapplication of the ' Third Man ' : which always consists in showing that a certain position involves the " finding new relations without end." But the position against which this objection is valid is always a denial in some form that ' relation of terms ' is ultimate : such a position as Plato's Idea, or Green's Self- consciousness, or Spencer's Absolute. The ' Third Man ' shows that relation of terms is ultimate ; and the third chapter of Appearance and Eeality shows the same thing: but this is a very different matter from the showing that 'relation of terms' is unintelligible, which was the point to be proved. Some light may be thrown upon this matter if, instead of illustrating related terms by A-B, we take a particular case, such as greenness and transparency , terms related as coinhering in emerald. Suppose it to be said that we may take either term and compare it with the relation, say, greenness with coinherence ; and that as the relation of difference then emerges, we may again take this and compare it with either term ; and so on. But there are some oversights in this dialectic. For, first, in comparing coinherence with greenness we are not comparing a relation with a term ; coinherence has become a term in the act of comparison. To overlook this is to assume that relations are self-existent things or species ; whereas they are functions of thought, so that a relation of terms in one process may be the term of a relation in another. But, secondly, the relation of difference emerging from the above comparison, is not a new fact ; for it was involved in the original thought of greenness as a quality related to another by coinherence. This rests upon the classification of the elements of thought according to their functions into terms and relations ; and this is justifiable because " separation by abstraction is no proof of real separateness." The abstract consideration of terms and relations is only possible by means of language. We have here the extreme case of the ' distinction of reason.' Starting from the position that Relation of Terms is ultimate for thought, there is no 268 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE difficulty in seeing how either terms or relations may acquire a quasi-independence. We need only reflect that, though there are no terms unrelated, yet each term may stand in many different relations to other terms. Hence it is inde- pendent of any particular relation or relationship ; and this is the nearest we can get to its heing as distinct from its heing related. Similarly, any general relation is independent of any particular terms. As red is unlike yellow and also unlike green, and yellow is unlike green and also unlike blue ; and as the tone C is unlike D, and D unlike E, and so on through all orders of phenomena; it becomes possible, by means of words, to think of Unlikeness apart from any given contrast, although without supposing some terms the word is meaningless, or (as F. H. Bradley admirably expresses it) it is a " false abstraction." He says, " The conclusion to which I am brought is that a relational way of thought — any one that moves by the machinery of terms and relations — must give appearance and not truth." And with this position, if it means that relational thought can yield only relative not absolute truth, I have no quarrel ; for it is a familiar doctrine of the good old-fashioned Empirical Philosophy. And I agree heartily when he adds : " Our intellect " (that is, the Absolutist's intellect) " has been condemned to confusion and bankruptcy " ; for, in fact, it never yet honoured a single draught. The Absolute, I believe, is a whole without internal contradiction ; and knowledge of the Universe as a whole will not be obtained in this or the next generation, even if thought do not involve an infinite regress. Whether our knowledge involves an internal contradiction, is indeed a serious question ; but an infinite regress is not an internal contradiction. And, odd as it may seem, relation is the one thing that c^u never be self-contradictory ; for the Principle of Contradiction runs : It is impossible for anything to be and not be in the same relation. The principle, therefore, applies to terms as related, and assumes the validity of relation ; and this is the same thing as to say, what is obvious and trite, that the validity of relation cannot be denied, except by a judgment that takes it for granted. ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 269 § 3. If the concept of Relation is clear and valid in the sense of being free from internal contradiction, it still remains to inquire into its objective validity : do the relations established in apperception correspond with Reality ? We saw in Chap. VI. (§1) that Spencer disputes this. In the passage there quoted he says, that our sense of the diflierence of two colours corresponds with notliing in the outward fact ; for it is merely a change of our consciousness, whilst the colours remain unchanged. From the context, however, it appears that by " two colours " Spencer means two " objective agencies unknown and unknowable " (Frinc. of Psych. § 93). It is of no use to ask how any one can know that unknow- able agencies are two, are mutually independent and are unchanged. It is a desperate question. But confining ourselves to a consideration of the correspondence between Judgment and Empirical Reality, I venture to say that, when two colours — say red and blue — side by side are seen by us to be different, to find whether or not there is any conscious- ness of them and of their difference other than that of organic Subjects, is a problem, if not a very prosperous one, and not an occasion for dogma. Further, to speak of the relation of such colours, " as we think it, being nothing else than a change of our state," is to give a very inadequate account of the matter. Such may have been the germ of relational cognition in primitive organic consciousness, but for us at present the consciousness of red and blue is an essential part of the consciousness of their difference. Sense-qualities, from the multiplicity of their relations in an experience coinciding with the differentiation of the organism, have become independent of any particular relations. They cannot be resolved into relations ; the older doctrine of Psychological Relativity, according to which even every sensation varied with its context, was much overstated : it confused the sensation with the relations in which it is known. But the progress of organic consciousness is toward fuller and more definite knowledge : manifestly, red and blue and the other sense-qualities exist in Empirical Reality, and our perception of their differences is based upon that fact. In 270 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE other words, things are objectively different, whether there is an objective non-organic consciousness of their difference, or whether non-organic consciousness is non-relative. The validity of Relations, as corresponding with facts of Empirical Reality, is confirmed by tracing the correspondence back into the Conceptual System, That the grounds of our relative judgments are facts and not merely cognitions, is implied in all scientific inquiries, and confirmed by every verification of any hypothesis or calculation according to the Physical Method. That the Demiurgus, as Plato puts it, mingled the Same and the Other with the essence of the World, is not a mere hypostatisation of intelligence or of the principles of explanation ; it is the condition of intelligence and of the World's Self-knowledge. § 4. Terms that may be related are all things whatsoever : bodies and their qualities, sensations and all subjective modes, positions in time and space and all relations themselves. Relations related have, of course, their own terms, express or implied, which may be other relations with further terms. It is not to be understood that all pairs of terms may be related in all ways : a body cannot be definitely like a pleasure ; a position in time cannot be sequent to a position in space : but any terms that are not related in other ways are still different in a common consciousness : and this common ground of all comparison in consciousness is signified by the differ- entiation of all sense-organs from a common origin in the cells of the epithelium, and by the co-ordination of all organs of the cortex. Hume was unfortunate in describing Difference as " rather a negation of relation than anything real and positive " ; for certainly it is as real and positive as Likeness ; and, although less fruitful in positive results, it is, as Henry Sidg- wick shows {Philosophy , its Scope and Belations, Lect. I. § 3), equally important to Philosophy. Spencer's view that Dif- ference is primordial in consciousness, and that Likeness is at first of a comparatively negative character, as the cancella- tion of a Difference {Psychology, Part VI. chap, xxiv.), is in- teresting ; but Metaphysics is chiefly concerned with mature ABSTKACT CATEGOEIES 271 and explicit judgmeuts in apperceptive consciousness. There Likeness and Diflerence are upon the same footing : both clear, each having its distinctive feeling, neither resolvable into the mere absence of the otlier. Apperceptive consciousness and tlie analysis of judgment and reality into terms and relations seems to be possible only by means of some sort of language or appropriate signs. It is indeed an important truth that relationality is implicit in perception and in all modes of organic consciousness ; but it is questionable whether the highest sub-human mammalia are capable of explicitly recognising it; picture -thinking (or 'reception') seems to limit their powers (see Lloyd Morgan's Comparative Psychology, chap. xiv.). Even in the simpler forms of language the apparatus of comparative thought is extremely imperfect, and is eked out by gesticulation ; and the growth of language is marked by nothing more emphatically than by increasing power of expressing relation : whether by more precisely determining the relative places of words, by inflections, by specialised words (prepositions, conjunctions, etc.), or by the differentiation of names for relations themselves (equality, coexistence, etc.), a process continually carried further in scientific terminology. As for the names of relations, they are derived from con- crete terms and point to perceptual comparison as the original ground of thought. Likeness is from A.S. lie, the body ; alike (A.S. ordic) indicates agreement tested by superposition. So, ' it likes me ' means, it suits or fits me. Equal is ' as one ' ; same, similar, resembling, simultaneous, all primarily meant ' together,' hence matched ; whilst different meant ' put asunder.' Comparison, in short, as the word itself suggests, begins with an actual distribution or arrangement of objects ; and, as we now see in a Museum, this is still necessary to exact knowledge. Yet, contrary to every one's experience, it has been supposed that relational words subserve the expression of pure thought: so that bad Metaphysics, rather than Mythology, deserves to be called a " disease of language." The fiict is that the Categories take their rise in human perception, — which is not a separate thing from human 272 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE understanding, and therefore may itself be classificatory and apperceptive, — in the direct attentive consciousness (at once analytic and synthetic) of Empirical Reality. This is the strength of Kant's position, that the Categories constitute Nature, for there they must be sought and justified. But Kant treats them as primarily forms of pure understanding ; and so can never bring them home to the experience of the individual, except by the vicarious Imagination. To attempt to systematise the Categories by abstract reason has the worst character of Scholasticism. It assumes the possibility of a purely deductive method, but there is no such thing as abstract deduction ; every logical process arises out of unfathomable depths of experience. In this sense Empiricism is re-established. The term ' Empiricism,' indeed, is now sometimes used as if it stood for a doctrine of the complete passivity of the Subject in experience. But this makes it meaningless ; for such was not the position of Locke or Mill, and cannot be the position of any physiologist. If ' Empiricism ' is thus employed by those who are essentially Empiricists but wish to avoid classification, I sympathise with any one who dislikes being labelled. The name of a School is usually a nickname for each of its members. But I do not sympathise with the avoidance of a nickname by any one who does not repudiate it also for his allies. Let every man take what name he pleases without prejudice to others ; or let him, if he likes, like a savage, conceal his true name to avoid cursing and incantation. To look for the Categories in Empirical Reality saves us from the absurdity of presuming that the system of them (that is, of the World) already exists finished and round for human reason. We must often ask not merely how the Categories are thought but how they ought to be ; since many scientific controversies are concerned with definitions — as of ' force,' 'cause,' 'species,' — and such controversies can never be ended except in full view of the perceptual World ; which to explain is the test of the conceptual system. The appeal to experience also saves us from the whim of attempting a linear deduction or any formal scheme of the ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 273 Categories. Not only in psychological history but also iu logical dependence, the Categories branch out in all directions, like a family tree, from common roots. No doubt it would be a relief to arrange them in a square, like the elements ; or iu a circle, like the serpent, tail in mouth. Dichotomy seems to save tlie labour of learning anything ; triads lend a colour of romance to pure reason. But the expectation of greater symmetry than exists in Nature, is justly classed by Bacon amongst the Idols of the Tribe. § 5. If the category of Relation is clear, it cannot be by force of definition ; for, of course, the ultimate form of all cognition cannot be itself defined. And the same is true of Likeness and Difference, and even of their specific modes in simple judgments of Time, Quality and Quantity. They are abstract intuitions, analytic growths (according to the universal process of abstraction) from the experience in which they are implicit, and where they are now perceived by their own assimilative power. According to speculative Psychology, the beginning of organic consciousness is a change of consciousness ; and this implies (a) a Succession of states, which in the course of mental development becomes known as a Difference and Succession in Time ; and (b) a difference of states, which becomes known as a Difference of Quality or of Quantity. In adult consciousness every experience either involves a change, and therefore Succession and Difference ; or, if Difference be instantaneously apprehended, it is by an organ which has been developed and trained to interpret simultaneous experience as equivalent to that which originally could only be learnt in succession. And differences are still most clearly apprehended when experienced in immediate succession. In such experience therefore, whether the Difference or the Succession is attended to, depends upon the direction of our interest. Whether the difference is of Quality or Quantity, is an ultimate contrast of experience : Quality has not here the sense of ' reference to a Substance,' but is a certain aspect of terms that may vary in certain ways, in contrast with another aspect of these terms (or others) that vary in the 18 274 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE characteristic way of Quantity, that is, more or less. There is no defining power in these sentences : all the expressions imply one another. Relations of Time are : — (1) Succession, or Difference of Time. (2) Contiguity, or immediate Succession. (3) Interval, where succession is not immediate and we are interested in the terminal changes. (4) Duration, where we are interested in the experience that fills the interval. (5) Simultaneity, or Likeness in Time ; a relation applic- able only to events, not implying place or more than instantaneous duration, (6) Co-existence, or Likeness in Time, predicated of bodies, qualities, or positions in space, and compatible with unequal duration of the terms. (7) Coinhereuce, a relation especially of the qualities of a body, generally implying coexistence, but not necessarily. Relations of Quality are indicated by several names whose precise reference has never been determined. Even Likeness is ambiguous ; but I cannot enter here upon a long psycho- logical discussion. Whoever would examine the matter should turn to E. B. Titchener's Instructor's Manual of Ex'p. Psych. § 14, and the references there given. (1) Likeness and Difference are the most general ex- pressions of qualitative comparison. (2) Sameness is the relation of terms that in respect of Quality are indistinguishable ; whether (a) the successive moments of a continuous simple experience (a red light), or (h) experiences separate in time or place (two red lights) ; or (c) groups of the same qualities related in the same ways. ' Identity ' is sometimes used in all these senses, but should (I think) be reserved for the persistence of concrete things. (3) Similarity is compatible with some Difference, and seems to imply a less Difference than some other. ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 275 If any Quality is perceived to undergo a slow change, it presents at tirst a slight Difference, but still a Similarity, until at last a state is reached which presents a decided Difference, We have no appropriate names for the distinguishable places in such a series ; it presents degrees of Similarity and DifiFerence until we reach a (4) Contrast, or a striking Difference upon a common ground of Similarity. (5) Resemblance seems to mean a relation of concrete things, the same or similar in some qualities, differing in others, when our interest in the Likeness preponderates. If this seems to be the road to pedantry, I shall probably atone for venturing upon it by not observing such distinctions myself ; but fallacies arise from neglecting them ; thought cannot be clear if language is indiscriminate. Quality of sensation (say, heat) remaining the same, its Quantity may change, grow more or less intensive or extensive : this is Degree or Amount. Quantity of sensation remaining equal, its Quality may change (say, from blue to green). As to Time : Simultaneity, Interval, Duration, and Coexistent Positions in Space imply also relations of Quantity, that is. Equality, or More and Less. The qualitative Likeness of Relations is called Analogy. II. Qualitative Relations § 6. The Categories take their rise in human perception, from which they are partially released by language. In the ex- perience of Reality things and their qualities coexist, or succeed one another and change, and are of this or that kind ; that is to say, are alike or unlike {a) in Time, (&) in Quality. Hence follow two series of Concepts that have an astonishing pro- minence in the history of Philosophy. From the unanalysed experience of relative permanence and change issues the series : — 276 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Changeable Unchangeable Becoming Enduring Potential Actual Possible Impossible Contingent Necessary From the experience that things are of various kinds, and kinds of kinds, in Nature issues the series : — Thing Nothing Specimen Species — Genus Event Law Particular Universal Matter Form Phenomenon Substance Having thus arranged such words, simple inspection may convince us, that to treat them as of independent import is a delusion. We must briefly review them. § 7. As for Change, it has always been regarded as the enemy of knowledge and felicity. But so common a concept lies open to misconstruction from its indiscriminate usage. That something changes, and that there is a change in some- thing, may easily be taken as equivalent expressions ; but they are very different. That there is a change in something frequently implies that the ' something' still retains on the whole its identity : that something changes implies no such thing, but rather denies it. Hence ' that something changes * is the more appropriate expression for describing the experience {Kara irdOos:) in which one quality disappears and is succeeded by another : whilst 'that there is a change in something* rather suggests a process in some concrete whole, one or more of whose qualities may change although, in some relevant way, it may still bear the same name ; like Timon, who is still the son of Echecratides though he was happy once and now is grey. Neither of these meanings is self-contradictory. However abstract the concept of Change, it is steeped in sentiment. If to any one who should complain that all things change, I were to reply, ' And a good job, too ! ' — he would count me a ruftian. Yet what is it that is good enough to last for ever ? Perhaps if Space is limited, the Infinite can ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 277 only be expressed in Time. But in unhappy ages men see their native country decadent, as happened to Plato. The decline of our own powers begins at last for all of us, and in our memories pleasurable images fill most of the old rooms. Then there is the pernicious and fatal desire of rest and ease. Again, there is bereavement ; there are premonitions of death ; there are affections, and labours unfulfilled, and the instinct to persist in being, and egotism resenting to make room for others. Few are content with the permanence of the Universe, and understanding, and acquiescence, and the intellectual love of God. Indeed, does not Change frustrate understanding along with our other hopes ? It has been thought so ; and the Unchangeable has been proclaimed the only true object of knowledge and the Reality of things — the Idea, the nunc stans : whilst the apparent succession of events has been said to warrant only opinion and even to be an illusion of our perceptive constitution, or the parallax of our own inconstancy. The Reality some one has compared to a row of pillars, which seem to us to move because we are condemned to be always passing by them. This hypothesis will presently recur ; but if it were true, the progress of investigation ought to have led to a static instead of a more and more dynamic view of Nature, by which we seek in laws of change the explanation of what seems even the least changeable. And it has already been shown that Transcendent Reality is in Time, and that nothing else can be conceived to be manifested in Empirical Reality. Even the creation and sustentation of the world by divine Power must be considered as an activity implying change ; and one may learn from the theology of Cudworth that it is not in this attribute that the Divine Being is unchangeable, but in Thought. Now Thought unchangeable may be manifest in unchangeable Laws ; for it is not the object but the form of knowledge that is unchangeable suh specie eternitatis ; it matters not whether in the thought of God or man. Becoming is a less abstract concept than Change, for it more strongly implies termini a quo and ad quern, with the 278 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE suggestion that such termini are at least relatively enduring ; although the Enduring can only be relative, since change is, in truth, all prevailing amongst the modes of Existence, and all beginnings and endings are selections of interest and distinctions of thought. At this height of abstraction birth and death are the same thing. As the object of knowledge is changeable, but the form of knowledge is unchangeable ; so Becoming is a character of experience and Keality, not of laws or concepts themselves. If we add to or substract from a concept it does not become another ; we merely make a fresh one, the old remaining. Each concept is an identity ; and this is the logical meaning of the Principle of Identity. Still a concept, though un- changeable, cannot be called enduring ; for Time is irrelevant : it is therefore eternal. When we consider any process of Becoming, C to D, C is called the Potentiality of D, and D the Actuality of : not that either has a greater reality than the other ; for all things that exist are actual ; and C is admitted to be the Actuality of a foregoing B, and so on. The distinction, therefore is essentially relative ; and the relativity is imperfect. Not to abuse it, we must observe that B (say the seed of a tree, or a cloud about to fall in rain) is not by itself the Potentiality of C, but only under favourable conditions. The truth is that the interest has gone out of these old Categories of Heracleitus and Aristotle : they are vague anticipations of Causation and of the processes known to natural science. Motion, conversion of energy, chemistry, organic metabolism ; it is these things that give definite meaning to Change, Becoming, Potential and Actual ; and for a logician to discuss under vague and antiquated terms the truth of Nature in general, without knowing anything in particular, is too comic an enterprise to be carried on much longer. § 8. Much the same may be said of the Possible and Impossible, Contingent and Necessary. In fact logicians have given up the attempt to treat by their own old methods the Modality of Judgments, and have substituted outlines of the ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 279 Theory of Probabilities. Logically, Possible is anything that 18 conceivable, and any combination of attributes is conceiv- able tliat is not self-contrudictory. But this only means that it is possible to think of it, not that any corresponding individual is possible in reality or even in imagination. Each attribute of a concept is derived from perception, and there- fore must comply with the forms of perceptual consciousness, that is, it must be capable of entering into relations of Like- ness, Difference, Succession and Coexistence with the rest of experience ; but it does not follow that the combination of attributes in a concept occurs or can occur in Nature : for example, centaur, ghost, planetary influence, phlogiston. Every new concept or hypothesis is a regrouping of elements of knowledge that have severally a perceptual ground : its truth depends upon whether the concept corresponds as a whole with real, if hitherto unrecognised, groupings in Empirical Reality. Referred to Empirical Reality, the Possible is that which agrees with the laws of Nature, and of which the causes and conditions exist or are to exist ; but, in this sense, whatever is possible is also Necessary. The Impossible is, logically, the self-contradictory; and this is the meaning of the Principle of Contradiction : physic- ally, it is whatever does not agree with the laws of Nature, or of which the causes and conditions have no existence. Obviously, the Impossible-to-be is the same as the Necessary- not-to-be. Except in the formal interpretation of Conditional Propo- sitions, Contingency has no specially logical significance. Physically considered, whatever is possible but not yet extant, is contingent upon the occurrence of its causes. But unless its causes exist at some time it cannot be contingent ; whilst whenever they do exist it is necessary. The character of Necessity has been discussed in Chap. IV. § 4. Thus the Categories of Possibility, Impossibility, Con- tingency, Necessity, have only subjective value : things seem Possible or Contingent when we do not know enough about them to see that they are Impossible or Necessary. And, 280 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE further, the Changeable, the Becoming, the Potential and the Actual, are all Necessary as to their existence, and as to the time, place and manner of existence they are Unchangeable. From this position, the notion of a nunc stans looks not unattractive, for the concrete system of the World in which every part is necessary becomes here more prominent than the abstract Time in which everything is contingent. We must remember that Time is the form of Consciousness, and that Consciousness is the only known Reality. Still, objective existence is not merely present existence, the tense of predication : to forget this makes people afraid to die ; afraid, that is, of losing hold of the pyschological Now. But, as Spinoza says, there is necessarily in God an idea of each human body under the form of Eternity. Whatever belongs to past or future has existence or Reality, neither more nor less than the present. None but the most immediate Solipsist can dispute this. Whoever admits that there is any present existence beyond perception, must on the same grounds admit that past and future exist or are real, namely, by universal integration and continuity. § 9. The usefulness of the word Thing depends upon its vagueness : to define would only spoil it. Still, we may say that the notion of a Thing implies that it can be recognised, and that it is somehow different from all others. Any given Thing is said to exist, and the predication of this fact is called an Existential Proposition or Judgment, as if it involved nothing further. But everything exists in some determinate part of Space and Time, which is conditioned by, and exclusive of, every other part. On the removal of any given Thing something else holds its place : this experience is the ground of the Principle of Excluded Middle. We cannot say in general what that something will be ; but there is no such experience as nonentity, the common uncritical acceptation of ' Nothing ' : it is a self-contradictory concept, a supposititious offspring of the negative particle. Tliere is always something or other (fir) 6v = erepov). This reflection, far from being frivolous, is ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 281 80 important that it accompanies every exact investigation. When in the ordinary careless life one says ' on opening the cupboard there was nothing tliere ' (that is, nothing of the kind required), such an expression represents a double experience : (1) in the absence of the thing required, something else is peitjeived — this is a Difference ; (2) there is a failure of expected Likeness : the seeker had a mental phantasm of the thing wanted (or, at least, a symbol of it and a preparedness to recognise it), and the perceptual satisfaction of this expectation is denied him. The latter experience, as the more interesting, absorbs the whole attention, and is generalised in the term Nothing, or non-satisfaction of any expectation whatever ; but of expectations based upon definite experience there is no such universal failure. Tlie philosophers have taken up the problem of Nothing, and it suits some of them perfectly ; but the best essay upon it is Henry Fielding's. Kant distinguishes four kinds of Nothing, according to Quantity, Quality, Relation and Modality {K. d. r. V. — end of Transcendental Analytic) : (1) There may be a conception of an object that cannot be found in experience, such as noumena, or a supposed new force in Nature. But here we have a confusion of ideas, for though the conception of nouraena, as such, involves no contradiction, the conception of them as given in experience does : in experience, therefore, they are logically impossible, and not on the same foot as a supposed new force that involves no contradiction, although it may be physically impossible. Such a supposed but indiscoverable force is a case of disappointed expectation, and one always finds something else. (2) The conception of the absence of an object, such as cold, or shadow. But these examples are definite experiences, by no means Nothing ; and, apart from examples, the conception of an object that is absent is a disappointed expectation. (3) The form of intuition without content — pure space, or pure time. But there are no such forms of intuition apart from 282 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE experience. The perception of space or time involves a kiniesthesis, and so does the representation of them. (4) The object of a self-contradictory concept, such as a figure bounded by two straight lines. But the " object of a self-contradictory concept " is itself a self-contradictory concept : where there is self-contradiction no concept has been formed : and self-contradiction can only be called Nothing in so far as the frustrated endeavour to frame a concept resembles disappointed expectation in seeking an object. There are not, then, four Nothings, but one Nothing ; and that is generalised from one side only of our experience of the absence of things expected, namely, from the merely subjective side, to the neglect of the objective and real side of that experience, that something else is there. Hence the meta- physical conception of Nothing is the Indefinite Other. Now the Indefinite Other is always matter of experience, but the noumenon never is : therefore, the noumenon is not the Indefinite Other ; that is, transcendent Eeality, or Being, is not Nothing. If the noumenon has often disappointed the expectations of those who sought it, that was because they had not noticed that whatever is discoverable must be within consciousness, whilst the transcendent Real always lies beyond. Their expectation of finding such Reality was not based upon any foregoing experience of it ; for, on the other hand, it is never Something. In short, we cannot do better than agree with the Bhagavad-gita, that Brahm is neither Sat nor Asat. All concrete things compared together have resistance and extension in common. Add Space, and compare, and only the common attribute of extension remains. Add plea- sure, or relations of Succession, and again compare, and there is no common quality or connotation, no one distinguishable mode of consciousness left, but only comparison itself ; that is, relation of Difference. On account of the supposed empti- ness of the abstract of All Things, it has been identified with the uncritical Nothing, or Nonentity, but, in fact it is Consciousness itself or absolute Reality. And it is not the Indefinite Other, but the discrimination of Otherness. Dividing ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 283 All Things, the Summmn Genus, by dichotomy, with auy assignable fundamentum, we have Something or Other. Nothing, therefore, is not on a foot with the Sumvium Genus, but is a counter-class, infinite term, or remainder, relative to a given Species, or Something. It may be said, If Nothing is the Other, how can it be true that ' Nothing can come of Nothing ' ? For does not each thing come of another ? I suppose, in the ancient maxim, the Nothing that is for ever barren, means Nonentity, a mere grammatical negation. But it is still true if we understand Nothing as the Indefinite Other, for no one thing has an indefinite antecedent. The material World does not arise from the Other in objective existence, namely, Space. Objective Existence, the Phenomenon, does not spring from the Other in experience, namely, the subjective processes now contrasted with it ; and to experience as a whole there is no Other in experience. Concerning Nothing, then, and its true inwardness, may so much suffice. § 10. That Things are alike in some ways and unlike in others is the fact of Species in Nature, and the likeness and unlikeness of Species is the fact of Genera ; that is to say. Species have no other existence in Nature than in the resem- blances of Things. A Thing, considered as exhibiting the qualities of any specific resemblance, is called a Specimen, A statement of the specific resemblance is a Definition of the Name of any Species or of its connotation, and therefore a Limitation of its denotation, that is, of the things that can be considered Specimens. The thought of a Species, usually by its name and, more precisely, according to the Definition, is a Concept. The Concept of a Species being unchangeable, it may seem a matter of course that it should be perdurably represented by specimens in Nature. A brief experience seems to confirm this assumption, and then there may easily arise the notion of Classificatory Sciences in which all things are to be arranged according to Genera and Species. Ancient Idealism, too, was beset by the prejudice that since the Concept or Science is unchangeable, it must have, either in or above Nature, an 284 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE unchangeable object. More comprehensive experience shows, however, that not only everything but every kind of thing has a determinate existence in time : and that, therefore, any given Species may cease to be represented by specimens in that present time during which men can think and have concepts. A Species, then, does not exist perdurably, and yet it has a permanent existence within certain limits of time, and this is the grain of truth to be found in the older doctrines. But if a Species comes at a certain time into existence, and again comes to an end, to sum up its characteristics in a Definition is not an adequate Science of it ; we must also know the conditions of its coming to birth and death, and therefore of its having such and such characteristics. Hence a scientific classification is only a preparation for Science. The words genera and species are apt to suggest plants and animals, but we are here dealing with merely logical categories. Whenever anything is definable by its likeness to other things, there is a species. The coming or going of any such thing, or any modification of it, is an Event, and the statement of the conditions under which it comes or goes is a Law. As a specimen is to a Definition, so is an event to a Law, and Laws have no other existence in Nature than in the resemblances of events. Hence, again, though a Law, as conceived, is unchangeable or eternal, yet it may be represented by events in Nature only during some definite period of time. Therefore, Definitions and Laws do not determine the existence of anything, but only describe it : inasmuch as they remain in thought unchanged, whether any facts agreeing with them exist or not in present time. As there are species and genera and still wider classes, according to the more or less resemblance of specimens, so Laws are of less or greater generality according to the greater or less resemblance of events. The greater the generality, the longer the period of time during which a Kind or Law is realised in Nature. The more complex Kinds have the less duration. Not only animals and plants, but all inorganic integrations, even the chemical atoms, may be supposed to have a beginning and a dissolution. The ancient belief in a ABSTKACT CATEGORIES 285 Great Year of the World, during which all things and all kinds of things, even the gods or (in modern prose) the Laws of Nature, are born and reabsorbed, has been renewed by the doctrine of Evolution. All things rush down into the maw of Siva ; that is to say, they are resolved into Protyle. And if the existence and character of all bodies is conditional and transitory, so is the realisation of all Laws that are dependent upon the collocations presented by such bodies. It is, therefore, rash to draw up a list of Categories of Absolute Eeason as necessarily determining the nature of the Universe. There may be some temptation to put down (1) the conditions of Knowledge, Likeness, and Difference; (2) the relations of Time, Space, and Number, which are independent of any particular concrete existence ; (3) Protyle and the Laws of whatever dynamic conditions prevail in Protyle. These last Categories have not yet been definitely embodied in our new mythology, though the process may have been begun by our Hesiod, Ernst Haeckel, in his Riddle of the Universe (cf. chaps, xii.-xiii.). If there should not be sufficient ff rounds for an inductive treatment of such things, the pos- sibility would remain not only that the scheme of the World is never repeated, but even that such Laws as those of gravita- tion or of constant proportions are only realised in the present Great Year. Generalising the correlatives. Specimen and Species, Event and Law, we find the contrast of Particular and Universal. A particular Thing or Event is this or that, exists here and now, or there and then : determinate time and place are its indicative characters. It is further constituted by qualities and relations to everything else, and these qualities and relations, so far as they are the ground of resemblances, are Universals. Such even is its time, for at the same time there are many things in different places, and such also is its place, for in the same place there are many things at different times; it is only by time and place together that a Particular is determined, since this character is different for each. But this character colours all its other qualities and relations, making them all grounds of difference as well as of resemblance : 286 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE for example, the whiteness of two shillings may be the same, but is not identical. We cannot conceive how it should be so, but we perceive it plainly enough : it belongs to the Empirical Reality of things. Since the qualities and relations of every Particular are infinite, it cannot be logically defined; since its localisation is relative to points of measurement, which again are relative to others ad infinitum (such is our present knowledge or ignorance) it cannot be mathematically defined ; and since every quality and relation of it carries a difference as well as a resemblance, it cannot be fully understood according to laws. Hence there can be no science of Particulars as such, but only so far as their essence can be expressed by the universality of their qualities and relations ; for differences apart from resemblances do not constitute knowledge nor Nature. Such reflections have sometimes led metaphysicians to disparage the Particular as unreal, because it has not the character of an Universal, which is definite and unchangeable: forgetting that neither has the Universal the characters of the Particular, which is original, infinite and inexpugnable. Other metaphysicians, remembering these things, are for disparaging Universals as mere abstractions ; forgetting that human perception involves Universals, and that every valid Universal is an apprehension of experience. Every abstract principle is as truly a statement of matter-of-fact as the most detailed description of a battle or a beetle. Perhaps an education chiefly literary lays a man open to opposite errors: familiarity with abstractions may lead one to exaggerate their independent value; want of familiarity with the exact pro- cesses by which abstractions are elicited from experience may lead one, in a different mood, to treat them as empty formulae, that possibly, or even probably, are at war with the facts. § 11. Any Particular may be considered {a) as of such a Kind, by a selection of certain resemblances which it bears to certain others ; or (2) so far as it resembles things of many or all Kinds. In the former case, the Kind to which it is assigned is called its Form ; in the latter case, that by which it belongs to no one class rather than to another, is called its ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 287 Matter. Taking Form and Matter as correlatives, what is Matter in relation to one thing (pig-iron to knife-blades) may- be Form in relation to another (pig-iron to iron), as in the logical subalternation of genus and species. Taking Matter as opposed to Form and an utter privation of every character, we have the Indeterminate. Taking the doctrine of Form and Matter in connection with some vague notion of the development of Nature, we may identify the Indeterminate with Protyle, out of which all Forms ultimately emerge ; but in the more definite modern hypothesis of development Protyle is not exactly the Indeterminate, however hard to determine. Every Form is an universal, and Matter is also an universal, whether something less determinate in relation to a given Form, or in relation to all Forms quite indeterminate. Matter is regarded as distributed in space, as divisible and as " informed " in multitudinous ways to constitute Particulars. But the Indeterminate cannot be distributed, nor divided, nor informed, and no combination of universals. Form and Matter, can produce a Particular ; for, as we have seen, the Particular cannot be generated by conception, it belongs to Empirical Reality and can only be perceived. Form and Matter are ways of considering Particulars, they are abstractions not elements. Materialism considers the Forms of Nature as chanfrino' the Matter as persistent, because Materialism, like Empiricism, starts from perception, in which alone the change of Forms is manifest. It resorts to the notion of Matter as the common ground of Forms, but goes astray from the path of experience by forgetting that Matter is not something independent of perception. Matter, in fact, is a methodological Category : it is for the physical sciences to decide how it may best be defined, as a means of understanding phenomena. Idealism considers the Forms as eternal, and Matter as something relatively unreal, incessantly changing as it passes through the Forms ; because Idealism starts from thought and the forms of thought are universal and unchanging. But since Forms are manifestly transient in experience, they have to be regarded as, in their true nature, transcendent Realities ; 288 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE either per se, which is Absolute Idealism (Plato in the BepuUic) ; or in the Divine Mind, which is transcendent Subjective Idealism (Cudworth). But neither of these doctrines casts the faintest light upon the problems of human knowledge and empirical existence. For, however such Ideas exist, we cannot directly know them, having no power of transcendent intuition but only powers of analysis and induction, according to the measure of our feeble race. If they stood before us we could only know them by comparison; in our tables of instances they must be entered with the rest ; for the weakness of knowledge, whatever it is, lies in us not in the facts : and, therefore, an Idea of truth unrealised would still appear to mock us. And as to Existence, Ideas cannot be the causes of phenomena, because they lie out of the order of causation, and their unchangeableness is repugnant to causation. Even the creative activity assumed by transcendent Subjectivism, belongs not to the Ideas but to the divine Power ; and if we carry the category of causation into the noumenal world even the divine Will becomes subject to it. Of course. Ideas of Laws have no more energy than Ideas of Species. And they can no more be the essence than the causes of phenomena, for how can the essence of things exist in separation from them ? Or if the doctrine be adopted that Forms are not transcendent (a mere reduplication of existence) but immanent in phenomena, each universal identical in all its manifestations, there is the difficulty that in different times and places there cannot exist an Universal numerically one, but only the same according to the definition such as analysis may give ; and to dispute this is to deny the reality of Time and Space, and then the Forms become again transcendent. But we have seen that experience is real. Finally, since Forms cannot explain the failures and shortcomings of Nature, or the accidents of things, these are attributed either to Matter, and then that shapeless shadow is endowed with quality and energy ; or else to Necessity or to Ahriman, and this leads to Fatalism, Manicheism, and Devil- worship. Nevertheless, one Idea is indispensable to speculative philosophy, namely, transcendent Substance or Being. And it ABSTRACT CATEGORIt^J 289 hfis, I am sorry to say, all the characteristics of a genuine Idea : we cannot adequately know it, it is never found in experience, and is of no definite use in explaining either knowledge or existence ; neither practical life nor special science feels the need of it. Even in the philosopher's vision it is a blind spot only discovered when he searches for it, yet it is irresistibly suggested by all lines of metaphysical reflection. Most of these objections to Idealism were urged by Plato himself in the Parmenidcs, at the height of his impassioned curiosity, before relapsing into his later dogmatism. But how is it possible to wish him to have abandoned it, or to have thouglit otherwise than he did, if we have any sense of sublimity in the retrospect of Philosophy, or of necessity in the development of thought ? His conception of Reality as static could only be overcome by calling in a personal agency. The nature of concepts and his admiration for Arithmetic and Greometry were opposed to any coherent theory of change ; for Number and Space seem the most everlasting of all things conceivable, and may well be undisturbed by the systole and diastole of the Great Year. Aristotle's notions of the process of phenomena were embarrassed by his doctrine of Causes. The Stoics and Epicureans had better views of Causation, and some specialists, like Hipparchus and Archimedes, made memorable investigations ; but the vitality of classic civilisa- tion declined before inductive method became fruitful. The modern sciences resumed the conceptions of the Stoics and Epicureans with two great advantages : improved powers of mathematical analysis, and greater energy of the inductive disposition. The activity of this disposition in antiquity unfortunately coincided with the decline of Greek national life, in modern times most fortunately with the early maturing of the European nations ; for there is a sympathy between the achievements of men, and their enterprises wax and wane together. Every Particular Thing is a Phenomenon and, as such, by correlativity implies Substance. Consciousness is also usually held to need a Substance ; but if, as we say, consciousness is 19 290 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE immediate Reality, to consider it as dependent on Substance is contradictory. Substance, then, is an objective category correlative with Phenomenon. But we have seen that, on analysing the Phenomenon, nothing can be tbmid but a group of qualities, themselves phenomena, cohering in one place, per- durable and moving as a totality. In view of this fact there are three ways of treating the category of Substance: (1) to reject it as illusory. But whoever does this should be careful how he speaks of phenomena, for his words may seem coherent by force of the implied concept of Substance, although his repudiation of that concept has rendered his argument logically empty. (2) To recognise Substance as a transcendent category, inadequate, one-sided and orectic, signifying or indicating that Reality which is not immediately expressed in consciousness, but mediately by phenomena. In this use the term Substance might well, perhaps, be replaced by Being. (3) To regard Substance as a category necessary to the understanding of phenomena, whether it be (as Kant says) a priori, or the result of reflection upon experience, but merely methodological. It is then hardly distinguishable from Matter ; it is the formal way of considering Matter, and its precise definition must be left to the physical sciences ; though we may be confident that the Primary Qualities will be the core of the definition, because these constitute the measurable aspect of Nature and the ground of the conceptual system. III. Quantitative Relations § 12. As to Relations of Quantity, or Ratios, exact like- ness is Equality ; difference is Greater or Less, according to the order of terms in the act of comparison. A ratio of ratios is called Proportion. Inasmuch as, in certain cases, exact like- ness of Quantity is unattainable, things may be called equal when there is less tlian any assignable difference between them, or when one may be substituted for the other without affecting the result. The judgment of Equality has, for scientific purposes, the following advantages : ( 1 ) It is more definite than qualitative ABSTRACT CATEGOPJES 291 Likeness, because of the two-fold contrariety — neither Greater nor I^ss ; whereas Likeness of quality has only the contra- dictory, Unlikeness. To give " neither Greater nor Less " as a definition of Equality would be, in strict logic, a tautology of relative terms : but though this is formally true, it is not true for intuition, which is kept straight (as it were) by warn- ings on either hand. Hence Likeness admits of degrees, but Equality does not. Simultaneity, it is true, has also the double contrariety of Before and After ; but whenever there is a question not merely of instantaneous judgment but of methodical determination, Simultaneity must be deduced from measurements. The clear appreciation of Before, Simultaneous, After, introduces the conception of a Series or order in Time, the positions in which are relative to a given point from which they are measured, and from which their distances are Less, Equal or Greater. Finally, the judgments Greater or Less when made definite (how much) require a common measure and, therefore, judgments of Equality. (2) The relation of Equality is simply convertible without change of expression or risk of error : if A = B, B = A. This is also true of Likeness : if A is like B, B is like A, But with ' A > B .*. B < A,' the expression changes; and with *A is simultaneous with B, therefore B is simultaneous with A,' tliough the expression is the same, there is risk of error unless we know that both events are either instantaneous or altogether isochronous ; and this requires another judgment of Equality. (3) The Relation of Equality may be repeated in judgment any number of times without loss or change of significance. Hence it is the chief means of mediate comparison, and gives such immense range to the Mathematics. Qualitative Likeness, being vaguer and admitting degrees, cannot be so transferred without loss of confidence. (4) The Relation of Equality admits of the most precise application to things and events by the arts of measurement : whereby the use of Mathematics in the Physical Sciences becomes possible. For these reasons, and because (as we have seen) Likeness is the ground of Explanation, Equality, as the most exact 292 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE Likeness, is the supreme category of Understanding. There- fore, we seek to reduce Causation to equations, and to find the explanation of Nature in those Primary Qualities that are measurable and to which Causation is referred. In subjective experience the modes of Quantity are Degree, Duration and Amount (volume or extensity). But in the same objective circumstances different Subjects appreciate differently these modes of experience ; and there is no direct means of comparing their judgments ; nor even those of the same Sub- ject at different times with any certainty or exactness. We therefore agree to recognise some grounds of comparison as if they were the same for all Subjects, and for each Subject at all times ; and we naturally adopt as such grounds the forms of experience whose development precedes the consciousness of subjectivity, namely, the space -relations of bodies and the movements of bodies in space. Although the agreement of subjective estimates with objective measures is relative and approximate in each case, yet the accumulation of experience in which differences are neutralised, has produced the disposi- tion to accept such physical standards as thermometers and balances. For example, that weights are equal when, being equidistant from a common fulcrum, they hang evenly, is a theorem accepted by every one as soon as proposed, because our own bodies, being approximately symmetrical, are pairs of scales. Standards and apparatus having been fixed upon and elaborated, we are able to follow and estimate the forces of Nature far beyond the lower and higher limits at which they can excite recognisable sensations or sensation -differences in ourselves ; and our instinctive confidence in such methods is confirmed by the agreement of the results of calculation and verification. § 13. Space -relations between bodies are Distances and Directions measured by Lines and Angles. Lines and Angles are given in perception ; but not mathematical lines, nor therefore true angles formed by the meeting of lines that do not coincide. Sigwart, indeed, says that the straight line is the line of sight in depth, the line in which we originally projected objects from ourselves {Logic, § 67). But even in Berkeley's time it was admitted that the line of sight iu ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 1293 depth, being end-wise to the eye, cannot be seen at all ; and, if it were seen, it need not be straight, since that depends upon the medium. Or if the true line of sight is not exactly end -wise to the eye, because it starts from between the eyes, no other line is more diificult to see than this one. As for the original projection of objects, it happened a long time ago, some millions of years before the birth of Man ; which I can hardly remember. An adequate experiential basis of abstract science is, however, found in the lines approximately straight that are seen in other directions by retinal sensation interpreted by movement. Whether space-relations can be known by retinal stimulus alone is disputed ; but, surely, no peripherally initiated sensation without muscular reaction exists; and if it did exist, it would be isolated and could give no aid to judgment. The movements of the eye and hand yield a perception of straightness ; and of the whole body, not in the line of sight, but in the line from our feet to an object. It is not ease of movement or economy of effort that determines the matter ; for, from the structure of our organs, many motions in a curve cost least effort : it is the importance of straight move- ments to the activities of life, as in chasing and striking, that has produced an instinctive judgment of straightness, and a quick sense of all deviations from apparent straightness, as in dodging round a tree. And, surely, it is far from true that, in Nature, lines straight enough to give rise to a generic idea of straight- ness, are rare. Innumerable pines and palms present them, every stalk of grass or bamboo from knot to knot, the sea and sky-line ; and the edges of split rock must have been familiar to the troglodyte. Moreover, ages ago men learned to make things straight — spears and arrows — of necessity, because they fly best. Approximately straight lines being perceived, the forma- tion of the concept by abstraction is simple : to doubt this is greatly to imderrate the power of abstraction. Similarly, curves and angles are known by the sweep of the arm and by pointing here and there ; besides what may be witnessed in the flight of birds and missiles, in the stoop of trees, the set of boughs to their trunk, of leaves to their stalk. The right 294 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE angle is that at which most trees, and men themselves, stand to the ground : it has the emphasis of equilibrium. It may- be suspected that points were originally fangs and thorns. Generic ideas of all these things were formed by unsophisticated man, and named, and used in dealing with his world. To Science remained the exact definition of the concepts ; the discovery of methods for measuring angles by the division of the circle, and for determining position by relation to points assumed ; and processes of ratiocination by which properties of figures not directly apprehensible are disclosed and demonstrated. Kant's error has already been referred to (Chap. IX. § 3), namely, that Geometry is a science of the immediate intuition of Space ; which leads him to contend that Space is pure form of perception and not a concept. Space is certainly a percept, but we never perceive pure space : our perception of space is full of details, which differ from moment to moment ; so that for us, intent upon what is essential, the differences cancelling, a concept also forms itself; and without this there could be no science. Geometry was at first a collection of devices for measuring bodies and the relations between bodies ; but in acquiring its scientific character it began to deal not with particular space-relations but with the concepts of them. Now such concepts are eternal and unchangeable, and therefore all that is demonstrated concerning them is universal and necessary. Geometry, then, is Abstract Science in the sense that it is abstracted from the facts ; and, therefore, it is true of the facts and verifiable, so far as percepts approximate to their concepts. Abstract Geometry, as the truth of experience, presupposes the Uniformity of Space : its concepts, abstracted from a narrow and coarse perceptual knowledge of the World, are assumed to hold good of the remotest regions and of the most minute and obscure recesses : their verifiability, then, can hardly ever be placed beyond cavil ; though the incessant accumulation of wide and complex deductions, involving geometrical principles, gradually overcomes the doubts of all, except a few ingenious and suspicious minds. On the one ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 295 hand, it may be said that Geometry is to be trusted as the truth of experience, unless facts are found in contradiction with it : meaning by facts such experiences as are accepted by trained investigators, not silly ghost -stories such as, in the modern recrudescence of superstition, we sometimes hear alleged as only explicable on the hypothesis of a " fourth dimension." At present no irreconcilable facts are known. But, on the other hand, it may be urged that Geometry can never be regarded as true and adequate as long as any region of Empirical Reality remains unexplored ; and, remembering that Space is a phenomenon constructed in experience, this distrust of our conceptual Space must mean, that there may be some conditions of Being of which Space is the phenomenon, which are not represented in our perceptual construction, but might in certain regions or conditions disturb our experience. The Uniformity of Space implies that a straight line does not alter its length or lose its straightness, to whatever part of the universe it may be transferred ; that, supposing it presented in some physically unchangeable body, it could be used as a measure of all spaces. If any one disputes this, there is no reply. Sigwart says he cannot conceive that, if objects shrank when moved, we should not discover it by our memory-images (upon which he thinks comparison depends) ; that is, it is more conceivable that bodies in common Space should change in magnitude than that the shallow traces of our personal experience should vary ! He does not seem to be jesting ; but this sort of argument comes of yielding to the prevalent whim that any bare suggestion of nonsense imposes an obligation to refute it. The simplest perception of Time comprises a Duration in which Future, Present and Past are all present : although this seems a paradox, because we are in the habit of substituting the conceptual instantaneous Present for our present experience. The contents of such experience incessantly change ; and, abstracting from the variable contents, we conceive of a Duration that may be represented by a straight line ; though nothing can be less like a line than our actual experience of Time. Then, to this line all the determinations of one 2 96 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE dimension of Space become applicable. Any point within it being taken, the opposite directions from this point repre- sent Future and Past, which may be measured by any unit ; and then durations may be compared. Equidistant events in the same direction are conceived as simultaneous ; if not equidistant, the interval of their succession may be computed, and so on. To these abstractions, there correspond in experience the perception and imagination of an indefinite duration of the World-process, with its past, present and future diversified, though uninterrupted, by countless events of all degrees of interest, and more exactly marked by rhythms subjective and objective. These rhythms are periodic movements, which may be traced or conjectured throughout Nature, from vast revolu- tions of remote celestial bodies to the undulations of ether that are conceived as necessary to explain our perceptions of the physical forces. From amongst such rhythms one must be selected as the standard of duration ; whether the rotation or the revolution of the Earth be taken, or some physical standard from the region of molecular or etherial vibrations shall be deemed more constant. The verification of the standard (that is, the determining of its constancy) depends on a comparison of observations or experiments with computations. Observation and experiment involve reliance on subjective testimony, and, as this is variable, problems arise in the elimination of error. The best method for the elimination of error is that which gives the most consistent results ; that is to say, we refer again to objective measurements, and regard the greatest agreement amongst these as the test of our standard of Time, when freed as much as possible from the influence of subjective rhythms and the idiosyncracies of self- consciousness. We take for granted an uniformity of the objective world into which we were born and which had laid down the conditions of our conscious lives before we were conscious of ourselves. So from the first it cannot be sup- posed that the adoption of a standard (say, the day or month) was made upon a subjective estimate of Time elapsing, — a series of ideas, equal sums of which the standard was felt ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 297 to comprise and, therefore, to measure : it must have been instinctive. Time, then, is measured by the Motion of a Body, that is assumed and computed to occupy a constant duration in tra- versing a certain Space ; and some unit of Time being taken, whether the standard or some multiple or division of it, all other Motions are measurable by that imit. Thus velocity is determined by the Space traversed in an unit of Time. Berkeley tried to prove the impossibility of framing an abstract idea of Motion without a moving Body ; and using ' idea,' as he did, to mean ' image,' it is impossible ; for no such thing can be perceived, nor therefore imagined. But there is no difficulty in conceiving it ; for abstracting from all differences (qualitative and quantitative) of moving bodies, there remains a point moving in a line. And this concept is convenient in computing the motions of masses by their centres of gravity, and of atoms : being nearer to a representation of the truth of atoms than any concrete image can be. § 14. Measurement of Continuous Quantities, such as Space, Time, Motion, supposes the recognition of a Unit, and of laws of the addition, subtraction, etc., of units ; that is, of Number. But it cannot be imagined that the laws of Number were originally discovered by the analysis of Continuous Quantity. Pure intuition comprises no data for any sort of science, and Time and Space, being continuous even in percep- tion, though diversified in their contents, and being purified in conception from all diversity, do not, as such modes of Quantity, offer the data for perceiving Plurality and learning to count it. And in fact the history of this great acquisition of culture is pretty well known. The Plurality of mere diversity is given in every act of perception. The Indefinite Plurality of things of a kind is also given, and is recognisable by the higher animals. Deer in a herd, eggs in the nest, children in the family, warriors in the tribe, articles of barter, are felt as ' more or less ' before they are known as ' so many ' ; and to analyse the Plurality of things of a kind is the problem of learning that art of counting of which all arithmetical pro- cesses are only abbreviations. The instinctive solution of the 298 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE problem seems to have consisted in the taking of one standard group, the best known, — that is, the fingers of the hand, each of which generally has its distinctive name, and then comparing all other groups of things with this standard as a common measure of plurality. To compare five warriors, with the thumb, forefinger, middle finger, stiff finger, and little finger is the primitive equation. If there are more to be reckoned, the other hand, or even the toes may be appealed to. This detailed comparison unit by unit is often used in primitive barter (say, one stick of tobacco for one glass bead); the children and even the adults of modern Europe may still be seen counting on their fingers ; and our semi-civilised world has settled down by force of habit to the decimal system in spite of its imperfections. Still, comparison in detail with a standard group is not true counting ; it is only a perceptual equation. True counting requires : (a) abstraction, from all the differences of individuals, except their distinctness as objects in a series ; (6) the recog- nition that all arrangements of the series are indifferent ; (c) the consequent freeing of the names of numbers from all con- nection with particular objects or arrangements. Numbers can then be analysed and defined and their relations compared as abstract science ; and they can be applied conventionally or arbitrarily to any objects, groups of objects or ideas, qualities or relations, or to hypothetical divisions of continuous quantities — Space, Time, Motion; always subject to the condition that the predications made or conclusions drawn in terms of number do not assert or imply anything as to the qualitative character of the things counted, nor anything as to their quantitative character except the numerical. Whether the things counted are qualitatively alike, or whether the continuous quantity has been evenly divided (say, into inches), is a distinct consideration : the likeness or equality of things counted implies not merely a numerical unit but a Unit- measure. In counting we attend to the things counted ; and the abstract character of Numbers has led to the hypothesis that it is the common facts of all counting — acts of Attention — that ABSTRACT CATE(a)IUES 299 are the basis of Number. But to attend to acts of Attention is the most difficult exercise of introspection, and nobody dreamt of it when Arithmetic was formulated. Nevertheless, in counting it is always assumed that the things counted belong to some group, or come under some general denomination or siip-positio, though they may differ widely in both (juality and quantity : a traveller may count the ' items ' of his luggage, or the contents of any parcel ; a farmer may count a flock of sheep, or the number of pounds that one sheep weighs ; a chemist may count the elements, or the qualities it is convenient to recognise in defining a given element. Thus the suj)positio may be indicated by the nature of the case, or by general convention, or may be quite arbitrary. However determined, the swppositio is a Totality or Whole, of which the items counted are numerical parts ; and any Total may be treated as a Unit under a less comprehensive sup- yositio. Thus all the things we usually deal with as concrete units are chemical and physical Totals. Nothing can be more obvious than these considerations, yet on the neglect of them depend most of the puerile fancies that have been entertained concerning the One and the Many : fancies excusable enough in the beginnings of speculation, but which we see persisting age after age in the writings of men who invoke the name of Plato, And wonder with a foolish face of praise. That there should be one Idea or concept and many particulars, is due to this, that when a man counts ideas he does not count particulars, and that when he counts particulars he does not count ideas : the suppositio is different. We might as well express amazement that one strap should bind up many sticks. That particulars should agree in some qualities (determining the concept) and differ in others (locality, for example), has nothing to do with Arithmetic, but is a physical result: conditions of production being more or less similar, so are the products ; but as the conditions are not exactly the same, neither are the products. That one Substance should have many Qualities can raise 300 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE no surprise in any one who considers, that empirical Sub- stances are metaphysical totalities and are counted under a different suppositio from their qualities, which are metaphysical parts. As for Substance transcendent, my advice is — not to try to apply the ready reckoner in that region ; but, at least, there is no contradiction in Spinoza's conception of one Substance with infinite Attributes. We must, however, distinguish this arithmetical consideration from the pseudo- physical question how the One, if a prius, can become a Many. This involves one of two fallacies : (1) either the notion of Becoming or Generation, thus used for procession from the Absolute, is a mere ghost of physical causation, meaningless and inapprehensible — a " transcendent use of the category "; or (2) it is assumed that the One must be simple, confounding the suppositio ; for the One may be a meta- physical totality of Attributes, or a physical totality of (say) Atoms, or a numerical totality of anything. Unity has nothing to do with simplicity ; the unity of Apperception, for example, is in the highest degree complex. But, again, the procession of the Many from the One, or self-diremption of the Absolute, cannot be shown to be logically necessary on the ground that One implies Many as correlative ; for the One, as Idea, is not correlative with the Many as Phenomena. And hence too, the vulgar objection to the doctrine of the Trinity, that there cannot be One Substance and three Persons, is absurd and laughable. Not that I can approve of the pseudo-Athanasius's use of the number "three"; it is a transcendent application of Arithmetic. But this reminds us that the word ' One ' is often used negatively, or mystically ; for when we say that God is One, we are not about to count gods ; we merely repudiate Poly- theism. The One of Plotinus was not a digit. Where there can be no second, ' One,' numerically used, is a meaningless predicate. That the Universe is one, is tautology ; that the Absolute is one, is verbiage. But should we call them ' One,' it would not follow that God, or tlie Universe, or the Absolute is simple ; and they are very rash who maintain that whatever consists of parts must perish : a shallow, empirical prejudice ! ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 301 Oiir own investigations indicate that, beginning with the actual World in Self-consciousness, this implies Universal Consciousness and Being ; but whether these shall be reckoned One, or Two, or Three or Four, let them decide who think more highly of Arithmetic than I do. § 15. Tiie indirect measurement of Quantity (as Comte defined the Mathematics) depends upon the Axioms of Mediate Relation, which are reducible to two: (1) magnitudes equal to the same third are equal ; and (2) if equal magnitudes be added to equals, the sums are equal. Equality implies that the magnitudes compared shall be of the same order (Degree, or Duration, or Extension), since else they cannot be compared. There is a resemblance between the mathematical Axioms and the Dictum de omni et nullo, but much disparity in the fruitfulness of these forms. For if logical comparison deals with Classes, these are definitely related only within the rings of Porphyry's tree, and elsewhere overlap one another with endless irregularity ; and if with Causes, indefinitely conceived as subject to plurality or vicariousness, no causal series can be formally reversed. But in Porphyry's tree, though we ascend it securely enough, the progress is always brief, and we cannot descend again except by limitation at every stage ; and as soon as we leave its shelter and attempt to explore the neighbouring wood, on the strength of the like- ness of Class A to B, B to C, C to D, from A to D becomes a perilous leap, because the likeness may differ in each relation. Or, again, if in general A is a cause of B, B of C, C of D, it cannot be inferred that in any particular case D is the effect of A, because at each step backwards there may have been other causes. On the other hand, comparisons of Equality admit of endless concatenation, reversal and substitution. Hence the advantage of treating causal series as presenting equations in the transformation of matter and energy. The power of the Equation sometimes tempts meta- physicians to imagine that they are wielding it when, in fact, they have no more than the relation of Genus and Species at command. Thus Schopenhauer establishes to his own satis- faction the following series : The Will to live is an effort at 302 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE individualisation ; individuality is limitation ; limitation is exclusion ; exclusion is opposition ; opposition is strife ; strife is pain ; pain is evil, therefore the Will to live is (morally) evil. But only some opposition is strife, some strife pain, some pain (moral) evil ; and even earlier in the series, though limitation, exclusion, opposition may be abstractly correlative, moral associations creep subtly in. Similarly deceptive series are not uncommon in dialectic. Whilst ostensibly employing abstract comparison, the meaning of terms is at every step enriched, and it is not acknowledged, as it should be, that the source of enrichment is experiential. No richer category was ever derived from a poorer one: experience is the common ground of them all. In perception an equation may be determined more exactly than any other comparison ; but as direct comparison is limited by our powers of perception, so is the direct veri- fication of the Axioms. The Axioms are, in the first place, instinctive judgments, assumed and acted upon by men long before they are formulated : not only in man but throughout the animal kingdom, each creature's body is necessarily a measure to it of all other things. That the comparisons of active experience should be exact is not essential to the practical use of the Axioms. It is enough that the nearer other things are to being equal in length to a foot or a cubit, the more nearly they are equal to one another : the short- comings cancel, and the universal instinctive assumption emerges. That if A is greater than B, and B than C, much more is A greater than C, is a still commoner experience, but less interesting, as its generalisation is now less fruitful. It is necessary, however, to the further formation of progressive quantitative series; and, therefore, cannot be derived from such series. When under definite ideas of method the Axioms are formulated, the relation of Equality is conceptualised, and it is thereby required that every comparison shall be not merely in perception but unconditionally exact ; and in this sense the Axioms can never be directly verified. But their truth is known not merely by intuition but by the consensus of all ABSTRACT CATEGOKIES 303 deductions from them, and they are applicable to particular experience in proportion as the relations determined in ex- perience approximate to conceptual equality. Quantitative reasoning then consists in the mediate com- parison of Times, Spaces, Motions, Series, Groups, as conceived and defined. When such quantities are measured in terms of some unit they are expressed by Numbers. Number is usually opposed, as discrete — to Time, Space and Motion, as continuous. But how Number itself should be discrete I cannot understand ; the predicate is only applicable to things counted. In counting items in a group (say, sheep in a flock) the things numbered are discrete ; in counting inches in a rule, the things numbered are only discriminated. So far from being opposed to a continuum. Number is essential to the conception of it. A continuum is conceived as that which can never be exhausted by division ; but this implies the con- ception of a division infinitely continuable. That in fact the process stops, has nothing to do with the conception of it. Wherever it stops the result will be expressed by a finite number ; but to say that if one divides for ever, an infinite number will never be reached, is a rather bad bull. The definitions of numbers are obtained by addition of units up to 10 (that is, by counting), then by adding 10 to 10 or part of 10 ; and arithmetical processes consist in establishing equations between different ways of constituting a Number according to the Definitions. The analytic process founded upon the definitions has sometimes been mistaken, as (apparently) by Hume (who may have followed Leibniz, Monadologie, §§ 33-35), for the whole method of Mathematics ; and, if there were nothing more, these sciences would consist wholly of verbal or identical propositions. But, as Kant saw, there is a synthesis, though he was not happy in the examples he gave of it. In fact there are two synthetic processes in Arithmetic: (1) the counting, upon which definitions of the numbers are based; and (2) the intuition of Axioms that justify the concatenation of equations. Similarly, geometrical reasoning consists in establishing equations between difiierent ways of constituting the same facts of distance and direction, 304 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE according to the Definitions and in reliance on the Axioms. As for the geometrical figure, given or constructed in percep- tion or imagination, it is necessary to the analysis and helps to confirm our sense of the conclusion ; but the demonstra- tion is conceptual and, therefore, universal and necessary. Algebraic reasoning carries out the comparison of quantities by substituting symbols for the quantities themselves or their relations ; and abbreviates the process of ratiocination by sub- stituting signs of operations to be performed for the detailed performance of them. Negative quantities, expressed by the minus sign, may be interpreted in the same way as Logical Negation. We saw in § 9 that Nothing always means some Other ; and so does negative quantity in Mathematics ; but whilst in Logic the Other is quite indefinite, here it is always the Other of a given quantity. Thus in measuring distance (say, a mile) we start from some point in some one direction ; and the negative of this, or minus quantity, is an equal distance measured from the same point in the opposite direction. Similarly with degrees : representing them upon a scale, any point in the scale may be taken at convenience as zero ; and all degrees above it being called positive, all below it are negative ; and if y stand for any positive degree, the corresponding negative is — y. Zero, of course, is not nothing, but a certain point in a scale. Absolute zero of temperature is another state of matter than that in which the molecular motion of physical temperature exists. It is a standing paradox that in manipulating algebraic symbols, the multiplication of minus quantities into one another should give a positive result : minus a multiplied by minus 6 is db. But the apparent difficulty depends upon our regarding the two minus expressions as independent of one another : in fact, they are like clauses in a sentence, one of which qualifies the other. That a degrees below zero taken negatively (the reverse of below) h times, should be ab above zero, is a truth corresponding with Obversion in Logic and with the rules of English Grammar. As for " irrational expressions " such as fj — a, they are ABSTRACT CATEGORIES 306 methodological devices whose justification is far from being agreed upon amongst experts ; so that it is useless for a layman to discuss them. Taken as they occur in a process of calculation, they seem to me to stand for operations to be per- formed subject to the context. Puzzles arise from assuming that every expression must be good in any context ; but mathe- matical symbols depend for their meaning upon what is being reasoned about. De Morgan's explanation of ^ — 1 {Elements of Trigonometry , chap, iv.) is the most intelligible I have ever seen. There is more promise of metaphysical interest in in- commensurable quantities, but no fulfilment. According to Sigwart, incommensurable magnitudes in space are " the most striking proof against all empirical theories of Space ; no actual measurement could convince us that it is impossible to express the side of a square and its diagonal by numbers of the same unit" (§ 67). I am not aware, however, that any empirical theory of Space requires actual measurements. It would be more plausible to urge that no rational theory of Space is compatible with the discovery of incommensurables. It is a discovery of fact made by discursive reasoning ; but Reason is formed and guided by experience. The empirical growth of Space-perception dates from the antiquity of organic life ; but to urge that incommensurables are therefore due to the imperfect manifestation of Being in the Phenomenon, would need an extraordinary power of keeping one's countenance. The approximate solution of such problems depends upon the conception of infinitesimal quantities and a Limit. If any factor of conceptual Reality cannot be exactly measured so as to compare it with another, some third factor may be found which can be so measured, and which differs from the first by a very small quantity ; and we may suppose this difference to be indefinitely reduced, until the third factor may be sub- stituted for the first without assignable error. This is the familiar conceptual process of fixing upon that which is common to things and neglecting their differences. The difference between a straight line of less than any assignable length and its arc, whether in length or direction, is negligible, and a 20 306 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE Limit is that stage of an operation at which differences become negligible. Berkeley might have overcome his antipathy to fluxions by carrying out the doctrine ofTJie Principles of Human Knowledge, that general reasoning depends upon the use of ideas, words, or other signs, in their representative character, and he would then have avoided the irony of irony misplaced. It may be doubted whether he fully grasped the significance of his own reasoning in the Principles ; for in the Analyst his argument turns entirely upon the confusing of conception with imagination. On the ground of experience, comparison and abstraction, a suflQcient account may be given of the Abstract Categories ; and on no other hypothesis is it intelligible that their application should be fruitful in the Physical Sciences. CHAPTER XIV THE PHYSICAL CATEGORIES § 1. Physics, in the widest and most natural sense of the term, includes the whole theory of concrete existence, usually distributed under the head of Mechanics, Physics (in the narrower sense). Chemistry and Biology. The metaphysical treatment of this universal science of Nature differs in many ways from that of the special sciences. It deals only with the most general notions of the subject. It may regard certain concepts as still worthy of commemoration, though the special sciences have discredited them. It endeavours to construe in each case the whole fact of experience; whereas the special sciences, limited by methodological considerations, may neglect or even disparage whatever aspects of the fact cannot be quantitatively valued and prepared for mathematical com- putation ; and these aspects include the subjective character of every fact. The metaphysician (in his proper function) seeks in the special sciences their objective construction of Concepts and Laws ; or, if the construction is still incomplete, he must wait until it is completed : for this construction is concerned with what is not ourselves ; it is essentially an inductive and tentative process, and to attempt it by any other method is a self-stultification. Still, whilst it is true on the whole that Science, by the very fact of its progress, is its own criticism, the metaphysician or any other bystander may require that concepts and laws used in the interpretation of Nature shall conform to the principles of explanation and consistency ; for even the most exact knowledge ought to be intelligible : and he must consider whether concepts are possible, or have veri- 307 308 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE similitude in view of their history and alliances. If such matters are neglected, there seems to be a justification of the opinion that the sciences do not seek truth but are content with " working hypothesis " ; an opinion which (I believe) every sincere investigator repudiates. § 2. That the progress of Science is its own criticism was never better illustrated than it is at the present hour, when so many beliefs are being modified or abandoned. The bystander knows not where to find footing for the soles of unblest feet. A short time ago he might have taken it as agreed upon that the factors of concrete existence were Ether and Atoms. Now the Atoms, on the one hand, are supposed to be ' knots,' ' kinks,' or vortices in the Ether, produced by some process of ' pyknosis ' ; the Ether, on the other hand, is said to be conceived too inconsistently to explain anything, and it is even hinted that by the new conceptions of Atoms the Ether may become superfluous. The theory of the atomic structure of bodies seems to have been based upon their sensible comminutability. Kocks, rubble, sand, powder : the series suggests an indefinite divisi- bility, only checked by the reflection that division can never be destruction, and that the smallest parts must have some extension and mass to account for such properties in the whole. Hence the antiquity of the doctrine introduced into Philosophy by Democritus. And the most recent speculations on the decomposition of chemical atoms into electrons, similarly appeal to the experience that under certain con- ditions pieces can be broken off from atoms, and that some of the heaviest atoms, if not all, break down, or radiate, by their own instability. Ether, according to Aristotle, was the matter of the celestial regions, having the properties of permanence and circular motion, in contrast with the elements of terrestrial things that are perishable and move in straight lines. Never- theless the notion was taken by him from folk-lore, in which the ether, or upper air, was figured as something more refined than that which we breathe. When the ether was adopted into modern Physics it was endowed from time to time with such properties as it seemed to require, as a vehicle for modes THE PHYSICAL CATEGORIES 309 of energy, and as a medium correcting the discontinuity of the atomic structure of things. These notions, then, of Atoms and Ether are entirely empirical : they do not involve the deepest principle of the understanding. The Atomic Theory appeals to familiar analogies in the formation of bodies, from an animal organism to Silurian rocks ; whereas the continuity of the Ether is without any physical analogy in familiar experience. But even the Atomic Theory is on a different footing from the doctrines of Conservation and of Continuity in Time. Conservation and Continuity in Time cannot be disputed without abandoning all possibility of explanation ; but the notions of Atoms and Ether may be modified at discretion, until by a series of trials the scientific mind shall have reached at last the most comprehensive analysis of con- crete existence. § 3. In empirical Eeality all things in Time and Space move and change, and sometimes seem to come to rest and to remain unchanged. Movement, Change, Rest are plainly given to our cursory perception : do they retain their reality when we attempt a systematic interpretation of experience ? Rest, although even Spinoza writes (perhaps unguardedly, Eth. ii. 13) as if it were a phenomenon co-ordinate with Motion, quickly disappears in the light of investigation. Whilst a body may often be said to rest in relation to certain other objects, it is easily shown that every body must be in incessant movement both as a whole and (if composite) in the configuration of its parts : the direction, velocity and com- plexity of its movements baffling imagination. Change was said by Aristotle to comprise (1) the origina- tion and destruction of particular things, (2) growth and decrease, (3) alteration of quality, (4) locomotion ; and he showed that the last is a condition of all the others, but maintained that it does not wholly account for alteration of quality. The fact is that origination and destruction, growth and decrease of particular things, are processes common to empirical and conceptual Reality ; and in the latter region, in which things exist only in their primary qualities, motion is the ground of all changes : but alteration of quality in 310 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUEE empirical Eeality includes those changes of secondary qualities that depend on subjective reaction of the special senses ; and this cannot be explained by motion, being the subjective Eeality of that of which motion is itself the phenomenon and, therefore, an ultimate experience. Qualitative Change is more real than Motion, as Time is more leal than Space. Kant said that the consciousness of Change requires the contrast of something permanent in consciousness : but it is enough that something more enduring be there. The existential correlative of Kant's argument is that Change implies some identical thing that changes ; and this seems to involve a contradiction, for Identity and Change are incom- patible predicates ; but the knot is at once loosened by observing that Identity is predicated of different things in different senses. If in space there be any simple and ultimate phenomenon, its Identity excludes every sort of Change except locomotion, which is not incompatible with Identity ; and, strictly speaking, nothing else can be called self-identical. In all generated things Identity is regarded as compatible with some amount of Change, because there are limits to the appreciation of Change, and in many classes of things con- tinuous Identity implies a series of changes. A State or a living Body is called the same, though undergoing such metamorphoses as overtake a caterpillar or a constitution ; without which the existence of the thing is not fulfilled according to its nature. Hume observed that Identity depends upon Causation {Treatise, Book I. Part III. § 2), and this is true of all things changeable, as we may see in several ways. Popularly, a thing is no longer called the same so far as its effects become different : a darned stocking may be the same in the economy of ownership, but not in the market. Again, as to the re- cognition of Identity : whereas Plurality depends upon the determination of particular Things in time and place ; so that different Things may at different times be in the same place, and the same Tiling may at different times be in different places, but not in different places at the same time ; it follows that to trace the Identity of anything, we must THE PHYSICAL CATEGORIES 311 know what causes are capable of moving it and of substituting something else that is perceptually indistinguishable from it. Hence we may observe that, since Identity depends uy)on Causation, Causation cannot be explained by Identity : Causal Instances (even were they qualitatively and quantitatively the same) are numerically different. And since Thinghood involves Identity, we see that Causation, the latest concept to be clarified, is necessary to the understanding of Thinghood ; which, seeming primitive and simple, is in some ways arbitrary and ambiguous and illusory. But to see this still more clearly, let us consider that, as Locke says, Identity implies that a Thing has only one beginning (Assays of H. U. ii. 27, ^ 1); and this is obviously true of all generated Totalities. Now its beginning is a change or process of Causation, and its whole existence depends upon the equilibrium thence resulting. That this equilibrium should in certain cases be relatively permanent, because in fact forces capable of overthrowing it are rare or no longer active, may be admitted possible ; and in that case, in the absence of adequate causes, there will be a relatively persistent Identity. Nevertheless, so far as it is true that whatever begins perishes, every such thing is a temporary result of processes of change ; and, even granting that anything that begins can be permanent, yet all its qualities are traceable to the persistence of internal strains and movements implied in its constitution ; nor can it be doubted that these are modified by changes in its external relations. Amongst sensible phenomena, then, an unchangeable thing has no existence ; and, therefore, the question, ' how a Thing can change,' is misleading. A Thing is a process of change ; even its tem- porary persistence is due to the uniformity of changes, that is, to Causation — master-concept of the concrete world. And, therefore, the law of Contradiction, that A is not not-A, must, in its physical application, be understood of processes : there cannot be two moving bodies in the same relations of place and time. The concepts of Change and Identity, then, are not impossible or contradictory, although they must be cautiously 312 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATUKE used in the interpretation of immediate experience. The possibility of forming the concept of Identity depends, first, upon the phenomena of relative Eest and relative persistence of Quality ; secondly, upon the unchangeable nature of concepts themselves. But whether Unchangeableness is a predicate necessary to the ultimate interpretation of experience, remains a question for physical science : is it necessary in any way, qualitative or quantitative (other than Conservation), to the formation of an universal Science of Nature ? If so, it is in that relation verifiable ; and, because it is verifiable, its use is truly immanent and not transcendent ; it applies to phenomena and not directly to Being. § 4. Heracleitus' profound intuition of the universality of Change in the sensible world is still a paradox, but less alarming perhaps to the public than Zeno's arguments against the conceivability of Motion. The public approves of Diogenes' answer, which was — to walk away : though it has been urged that this was a most disgraceful blunder, since the arguments were directed not against the fact but the concept of Motion. According to J. Burnet, however {Early Greek Fhilosophy, chap, viii.), Zeno's attack was made not so much upon the general con- cept of Motion as upon the Pythagorean doctrine of Space. The Pythagoreans seem to have held that Space is made up of points ; and, if so, they must have admitted that any given Space, being infinitely divisible, contains an infinite number of points. It follows in four ways, according to Zeno, that Motion is impossible. For, first, no such Space can be traversed in a finite time. This, however, could present no difficulty to the Pythagoreans unless they denied that Time, likewise, is infinitely divisible. Now Zeno's third argument was that a flying arrow is really always at rest, since at each moment of time it is at some particular point of space. Burnet approves of Aristotle's observation that this " depends upon the assumption that Time is made up of ' Nows,' that is, of indivisible instants " ; adding that " this, no doubt, was the Pythagorean view." So that if the Pythagoreans were really so simple as to assert infinite divisibility of Space, and deny it of Time, they cut themselves off from what might seem an THE PHYSICAL CATEGORIES 313 easy answer to the first argument. Apart from this blunder attributed to the Pythagoreans, it may be supposed that Zeno's argument starts from the assumption that Motion in an infinitesimal moment is not Motion but Rest ; that is to say, that it merely begs the question. In any case, it is im- possible to conceive of Motion unless Space and Time are conceived as continua ; and that they are continua is the ground of Aristotle's solution of these puzzles. Motion is a traversing of Space in Time ; it cannot be completely analysed into Space and Time ; something further — an ultimate ex- perience — is of the essence of it : and this is some excuse for Diogenes' retort. The right reply to the doctrine that Space is made up of points, is that ' divisible ' and ' discrete ' are very diSerent notions ; if Space, Time and Motion were not divisible they could not be measurable : but if Space consisted of discrete points, the impossibility of Motion would follow from this, that between any two points there is no room to move. The Eleatic's fourth argument was, that if two bodies move with equal velocity past one another in opposite directions, they will do it in half the time that either of them takes in passing a fixed body — that is, each of them has in the same time different velocities. Grote thought this observation designed to show that velocity is not absolute but relative ; and, in that case, it is a sound argument. However, Burnet approves of an explanation offered by Tannery : that it " was directed against a possible answer to the preceding one, namely, that in each indivisible instant the arrow is passing from one point to the next. If so, answered Zeno, motion must always have an equal velocity, for all instants, being infinitely small, are equal." But that all infinitely small instants are equal, is not necessarily true ; and if it were, to assume that all motions in equal instants must traverse equal spaces, is flatly to beg the question whether different velocities are possible. It is just because velocities do in fact differ, however small the time supposed, that it is necessary to fix upon some actual motion of a body (say, a revolution of the Earth) as a standard of comparison. 314 THE METAPHYSICS OF NATURE But it is the second sophism (in the usual enumeration) that has excited most amazement and scalp -scratching — the famous race between Achilles and the tortoise. Should the hero give the reptile a start, he can never overtake it : for (granting, for argument's sake, that they can move at all) by the time Achilles reaches the tortoise's starting-point, it will have got beyond it a certain distance ; whilst Achilles is covering that space, the tortoise will have moved on again : and so forth ad infinitum. This description of the event, how- ever, takes no account of the diminishing times of the several distances. For suppose that, as Grote puts it in his Plato (chap, ii.), whilst Achilles advances 100 yards (say in one minute) the tortoise advances 1 yards ; then whilst Achilles covers these 1 yards (in x^th of a minute) the tortoise covers 1 yard more, and Achilles walking that yard (in x^tj*^ °^ ^ minute) is still xV^^ ^^ ^ yard behind the tortoise. Therefore Achilles will never overtake the tortoise in the times supposed, as I have supplied them (or t-f- j-\j^-f xo(y, etc.). But this implies that the race is not to last very long ; for if it only lasts one and one-fifth minute, Achilles will be nearly 9 yards ahead (cf. Mill, On Hamilton, chap. xxiv.). So much in dis- charge of the duty, imposed upon every writer on Metaphysics, to offer some reflections upon the father of Dialectic : it was not left to him to make men puzzle-headed ; but he first had a happy knack of displaying our natural endowment. Motion is so far from being inconceivable that only by a conceptual treatment can we get any clear view of it. It cannot be necessary here to show that all motions are relative both in direction and velocity ; nor to answer the question how Motion can originate from Eest or subside into Eest, seeing that there is no such thing as Eest. Motion, then, being an universal condition of all bodies, there can be no cause of it in general, but only of its changes or transformations, that is, of Acceleration or Eetardation, or of Direction, or in the form of Energy. The specific forms of Energy and their characters are a modern discovery, owing little to early philosophers, and still less to primitive folk-lore : for from these sources came the notions of Animism, occult THE PHYSICAL CATEGORIES 316 principles, fluids, which were rather a hindrance than an aid to positive investigation ; except that the subjective notion of Force, vaguely generalising all manifestations of energy, mechanic