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1 1 •:.* >
ON THE
REALISATION OF THE POSSIBLE.
Eleusis servat quod ostendat reviscntibus. Initiatos nos
crcdimus : in vcstibulo karemus.
Seneca.
ON THE
REALISATION OF THE POSSIBLE,
SPIRIT OF ARISTOTLE.
F. W. BAIN, M.A.,
Quondam Fellow of All Souls' College, Oxford.
rh Se Svvdfj.fi tls tVTfAe'xeiai/ jSaSi'fe*.
JAMES PARKER AND CO.
6 SOUTHAMPTON-STREET, STRAND, LONDON
AND 27 BROAD-STREET, OXFORD.
1899.
Printed by James Parker and Co.,
Crown Yard, Oxford.
S3
3ifc
TO
THE WARDEN AND FELLOWS
OF
ALL SOULS' COLLEGE, OXFORD,
THIS SOLUTION OF AN OLD PROBLEM
IS DEDICATED
WITH RESPECT AND ESTEEM.
" MHTIN ("fiSe, Bed' <ro<f)iav rts lipio-r ereXeao-ev ; " —
tJx® r ' avT '- K eiruiv r/o-der uTroTrrape'voiv,
anf/a r dpeifiopevrf TraXivopo~os ave'inev ernKXr/v
e< Aioj lepevrjv, oipai, eivatvvpiav.
rjpas yap xaAe7rco? xP^ V0S epire'ipovs e8l8a£ev,
pe'ia 8" API2T0TEAH2 auros anavr epadev.
7fpa>ros eTTiarrpi-qs I8eav enoirjae reXeiav
vXr/s 8vrnT€idovs Tpa^v deXrjpa 8dpa>v,
8t]poTiKT]v t dvopoov ardcriv dp6u>o~as 8iaXeKT(ov,
. dpxrjv T auroKpdrcop evdpovlo~as re vopov
Xpvaovv Trdai vopua-jxa, Xdyovs KareKO\f/ev aKpiftels'
(vuv 8e o-o(f)i£6pevoi, xp^P e ^ opeovvpiais.)
Tlpcorayopas re KaXfos dvdpa>Trca trdvra perpelo~dai
aero' rouro yap rju avro to uerpov avt]p,
irao~av 6pi(,6pevos yeveo-iv NOOS, auros opiaros
H nPfiTH AYNATI2N ENTEAEXEIA AOrON.
S> 2(/uy£ dv8poXereip', a'lviyp.d erov \o~6i reXeurr/v
'Lo~xoV l8ov Tov ayav euaroxov OiSiVoSa /
dp\r)6ev 8 rjv dur\ Aoyov TSlvdos ftao-iXevayv'
vvv re Aoyos (ppov8os, Aoypa t dveipoyeves
nvevpariKois (jivaa Xriprpxao-LV, epya r dpa^vris
vrjTTVTias pvias SatSaXecus dnara.
■%a>pio~pov y^i>xrjs ana rrooparos rjXldtov yap,
dKp6o~o(f)ov 8' aropov 8eo-p6v eyu>ye kuXcc'
aepvd T 'AXr/Beias ye U\droov ene8ei^e 7rpoVa>7ra
avro 6' Apio~TOTeXr]s ijyayev ' Ov ro8e rt.
pe\p^ 8e roii8e irdXat. fxerea>pLadel.aa Nolens
Kai.ope.vrj nrepvyas 6do~o~ov eirvnre Karoo.
u> rots rjuadoeaaav 68onrXaveovo~iv ept]pi)v
\ijrh\r) klcov rgXetyavovs o-o(filas !
Vlll
& kot' dneipoPdOovs aKaTatrraTov oibpa BaXdrrqs
(paidipov ovpavias oppa KaracrTdcreios !
XafjiTrpuv o(tov <rTi\fieis Kara irdvTa KciTavyd^ets re —
dpxcis, Kocrpov, opovs, yfjv, pereapa, (pva-iv,
(wa, 7ro\(is, tyvxrjv, 7ToirjTas, prjTOpas, rjdrj —
rj (po(3os ei, Seivfj Trapcpavocov 8vvdpei
ws ov&' eaTrepos ovt tip ea>os a , e/c?7/3oAos, aidav,
Saipoviov Kadapds (pdcrpa 8i<aiocrvvt]s !
Biiipcov bfj tis lip' rj(j6a ; (pvaiv yap cnap(poTepl£et.s
rdv pdpov, dvdpanra' rov voov, ddavdra.
» Elk. Nic. v. I.
b De Part. Anim. iv. 5, and Plato, Sy?np. 202 E.
PRE FACE.
AS nothing in this world can be understood except when
considered in relation to the whole of which it forms
a part, and as, owing to the over-specialisation and ex-
cessive differentiation of modern intellectual labour, there
is a complete divorce between science, history, and Aris-
totle, the man of science totally ignoring Aristotle a , the
historian too busy to attend to either, and the Aristotelean
degenerating into a commentator, the result is, that the real
significance of that revolutionary ferment in the mind of
Europe, occasioned principally by the Origin of Species,
is not perceived. The deification of Darwin was, in fact,
though the world did not know it, its apology to Aristotle,
its 7ra\iva>5la, the recantation of its abuse and rejection of
its old Master, dating from the Reformation.
It is true that modern Science supplements, corrects,
and enriches the philosophy of Aristotle, in detail : but
conversely, that philosophy can do for modern Science
something of which it stands in sore need ; something
which modern philosophers have attempted to do for it
in vain. As a man might have in his possession the
various parts of a steam-engine, or the bones of a mam-
moth, and yet be unaware of his wealth, from not knowing
how to put the pieces together; so the Sciences do not
recognise the meaning of their own discoveries, because
* Always excepting the universal Humboldt, who said of Aris-
totle, that he must remain, for thousands of years to come, the
Master of the Wise. (Kosmos, ii. 525, Bohn.) The spirit of Aris-
totle was half reborn in Humboldt.
b
PRE FA CE.
they ignore that organic whole, that method, scheme, or
plan, of which they are all but so many particular illus-
trations. The faggot is not bound. Now, the Old Or-
ganon is just the string that runs through and makes a
necklace of the several beads : it is the lost unity of their
disjecta membra, that which the world loved long since and
has lost awhile. Men of Science will one day awake to
honour duly their greatest man : they will awake, to dis-
cover, not without a blush, that those old 'essences' and
1 entehchies ' at which they have been scoffing for cen-
turies —
And they hae sworn a solemn oath
John Barleycorn was dead —
that old obsolete philosophy which, under the strong
delusion of their own ignorance, they mistook, like Thor,
for a miserable grey-haired old woman, and strove in
vain to overturn, was only the Universe in disguise.
CONTENTS.
PAGE
Introduction ..... i
I. Historical : on Modern Idealism, or the En-
deavour to account for the Continuous Real
by the Discrete Ideal; to reduce and refer
the Infinite Possibility of the Universe to a
single case of Abstracted Actuality: the
origin, development, self-contradiction, and
intrinsic futility of that Endeavour . 13
II. Analytical: on the Origin (dp\n)> Unity
(rfkos), and Evolution (ytveais), of the Physical
Sciences.
a. Origin : the Nature (ova-la) of Sight . . 69
§ 1. The Critical Blunder of the Idealist . 71
§ 2. The Raison d'etre, or Duty, of Sight . 100
§ 3. The Analytical Definition of Sight . 120
£. Unity : the Logic of Nature (ova-la, cpvaa, rtkos) 163
§ 1. Molecule, or the Nature of Physics . 165
§ 2. Syllogism, „ „ Logic . 172
§3. System „ ,, Astronomy . 178
§ 4. Rock „ „ Geology . 185
§5. Cell „ \ _. , /potentiality 191
„ > Biology Y
§ 6. Soul „ \ bJ { actuality 201
§ 7. Wealth „ „ Economics . 206
§ 8. Institution „ „ Politics . 210
§ 9. Authority „ „ Law . .221
xii CONTENTS.
§ 10. Character, or the Nature of Ethics . 227
§ n. Insight „ „ Intellect . 232
§ 12. Reality „ „ Metaphysics . 236
y. Teleology : the Law of Evolution . . 245
Appendices —
a. On the relation of Aristotle to Plato .
b. The Impossibility of ' Natural Selection
c. On the Hindoo ' Syllogism ' .
d. Aristotle as a Geologist
e. Force ....
257
262
264
267
274
Note. — With regard to the title of this essay, it goes without saying
that possible (— the Scholastic fosse) is not adequate as a rendering
of Aristotle's Greek. Potential and dynamical, terms employed
nowadays in special scientific senses, are unsatisfactory. In the
absence, therefore, of any exact equivalent, I have preferred possible
as a general expression, replacing it in particular cases by other
words.
ERRATUM.
P. 40, note t, last linz, for electrophorus read electroscope.
INTRODUCTION.
ALL down history, but especially in the last two
centuries, the intellectual and consequently the
practical efforts of the world have been rendered
vain and nugatory by a fatal weakness of which it
is unconscious, which makes the philosopJiical basis
of its thinking radically erroneous a priori.
This weakness is, the innate and incorrigible pro-
pensity in the human mind to abstraction. In every
sphere of thought, in history and politics, in philo-
sophy and religion, in science and economics, men
poison and vitiate all their thought beforehand,
without suspicion, by abstracting things from those
correlative, often latent and imperceptible con-
ditions, which alone make them possible, and there-
fore real. For every real thing is a realised possi-
bility ; possibility is the root and source, and the
core of reality, but this they ignore, and so their
thought never reaches realities, for which they sub-
stitute invariably entities, unrealities, mere rational
impossible figments of the self-deluding mind. In
this substitution of entities for realities, by a failure
to recognise their possibility, lies the very soul and
creative cause of error ; it is this which has ruined
B
INTRODUCTION.
the thought of Modern Europe and brought about
most of its practical evils.
The heart of the delusion is this, that the world
cannot draw the line between its imagination and
its judgment. It is deluded and fooled by its own
faculty of idealising and abstracting : taking things
out of and away from their context, mistaking a
part for the whole, neglecting essential determinant
factors, conceiving a state of things other, and
better, not only than what is actual, but even possi-
ble. Hence the Utopiology which futilises its en-
deavours. It cannot understand that the limits of
the possible are fixed and determined with adaman-
tine necessity by the inalterable nature of tilings, that
nature which, notwithstanding all its physical science,
it ignores, and which it is precisely the essence of
Modern Philosophy to deny. Therefore it is, that it
gives its vote by preference to the man who advo-
cates magnificent, high-sounding, ultra - philan-
thropical impossibilities, only because he does not
possess insight into the nature of things as they
are. It is his very want of wisdom that wins him
weight in the world, which considers him noble,
sublime, and so on. And though the world's own
nature gives him the lie, yet it does not see this,
for it does not know itself, and utterly refuses to
recognise its own face in the glass. It worships
INTRODUCTION
accordingly the wrong men, paying no attention
to its real ' prime ministers,' and deifying, as pro-
found moral and economical philosophers, literary
dreamers, foolish Utopians, or preaching charlatans,
whose thought moves in worlds other than this our
real one, and who eternally deceive themselves and
the world, and lead it, while it gapes at the stars, into
sloughs and ditches : since the effort to realise more
than is possible invariably ends in actually realising
less a .
To speculate is human : to define, divine. Any
human being can speculate : but not one man in
a million knows what thinking means. For ' specu-
lative thought/ as it is called, with which we are
deluged nowadays, is to real thinking what wishing
is to willing. The one is vulgar, easy, attractive,
feeble, feminine b , and fatal : the other rare, un-
popular, male, difficult, and beyond all price. They
differ, notwithstanding their superficial resemblance,
infinitely and immeasurably ; as weakness and
strength, dreaming and doing, Plato and Aristotle,
* This is why some periods in history are unjustly blackened
on the authority of poets, dreamers, religious and political enthu-
siasts, who criticise reality from the point of view of unrealisable
ideals.
b The mark 01 degeneracy in literature and philosophy is the
appearance of women in it. Women are incapable of thought ; it
requires the semen virile.
B 2
4 INTRODUCTION.
Hindoo and Englishman, Ahriman and Ormusd.
Utopiology, sublime speculative roaming in the
realms of the abstract, imaginary and infinite,
soaring on what Michelet calls Vaileinfini du desir et
du rive, has not only its charm but its positive
value in human life c : there is even a point of view
from which it might be regarded as the choicest
flower (but not the fruit) of existence : yet its
danger consists just in its beauty, and the difficulty
lies always, not in idealising the real, but in realis-
i?ig the ideal. This is what is so infinitely hard, for
it involves definition, determination, patience, con-
centration, labour, courage, self-control, grasp,
analysis — thereby to acquire real insight into the
limits of the possible and the nature of things as
they are.
Emancipation, political or intellectual, from old
chains of slavery, proclaimed so noisily by the
philosophers and politicians of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries, is a great idea, certainly :
but then, the realisation ? For nihilism is liberty
in the intellectual no more than it is in the political
sphere ; though it is equally easy in either. To
be a ' radical,' a ' root and branch ' man, a sceptic,
c Could you e.g. convert the Hindoos to a kind of sober, rational
Deism, you would make them no wiser, no better, and very much
sadder men : they only live in their mythological dreams.
INTRODUCTION.
to deny everything wholesale, is easy enough. The
difficulty is to begin again, to believe on good grounds,
to understand the raison ditre, the necessity and
nature of things: to base life on logic. If the
boasted emancipation which is the note of modern
philosophical and political history meant only the
denial and ignorant rejection or abuse oj necessary
mental and political laws and conditions by conceited
superficiality that did not understand and would not
recognise anything but the obvious, it was only an-
other form of slavery, grosser than the old. And
this is in fact exactly what it did mean, as I shall
endeavour to show. The emancipators were them-
selves, little as they dreamed it, slaves, and conse-
quently the enslavers of the dupes who should follow
their blind leading, to a radical misconception of
the nature of things. They were absolutely ignorant
of the nature of those very two things which they
professed to understand and expound — the Mind
and the State. And what the world most needs
at this moment is the recognition and restoration
of the very thing they strove to pull down : the
philosophy of Aristotle.
When Renan described a certain peculiar con-
ception of Aristotle's philosophy as a ' newtonisme
metaphysigue 6 ,' he let fall an expression whose
d Aver rocs, p. 1 1 6.
INTRODUCTION.
depth and admirable felicity he was infinitely far
from intending or even suspecting. Renan was an
advanced sentimental cosmopolitan Liberal, and
did not appreciate Aristotle, whose philosophy
possessed in his eyes only an historic interest ; but
it is curious to see how in this instance he speaks
truth point blank, though unawares. Metaphysical
Newtonism is the very word : that is Aristotle. For
just as Newton rectified and methodised the con-
ceptions of the world especially with regard to
celestial mechanics, by discovering and introducing
the correct central idea ; so, as I propose to show,
has the central conception of Aristotle's philosophy e
power to rectify our conceptions in many directions
where they require it, by methodising all. The
modern Physical Sciences are the verification of
Aristotle's philosophy, which gives them just that
which they have not got, the scheme and unity of
Science. They are all but particular illustrations
of his universal : the philosophy of Aristotle is the
One in their Many.
Aye ! and it is something more : it is the very
soul and spirit of life. And if the English people
only knew him better, they would make Aristotle
their patron-saint. Aristotle is the great constitu-
tional philosopher and natural historian who has
• Not that to which Renan refers, but another.
INTRODUCTION.
as it were critically anticipated the English type :
the spirit of his philosophy is incarnate on their
practical activity. For what is the Englishman's
summunt bonum ? It is, I will venture to answer
for him, the exercise of power, i.e. the realisation
of the possible. This is the secret of English life,
of its ethics, its politics, its athletics. This is that
^vyr\<i ivepyeia tear dperrjv which is only the ethical
aspect of the universal law of organic motion, to
examine which is the object of this essay. You
may epitomise the spirit of Aristotle and the soul
of the Englishman in one and the same word —
doing, action, energy. It is not either Bacon or
Hobbes, Locke or Hume, Berkeley or Mill f : still
less is it Kant and his school of dreaming ideologists :
it is Aristotle who has divined the soul, expressed
the ideal, and methodised the life of the English
nation. He is the true English philosopher: he is
more English than Greek : and yet they have
thrown away this royal eagle for wallowing hogs
or blinking night-owls.
But, no doubt, the idea that we ought to return to
Aristotle, and seek the reconstruction of shattered
principles in the Old Organon, might seem retro-
f The two philosophers who really did understand England were
Bolingbroke and Disraeli : but England does not return the com-
pliment : she knows nothing of her greatest men.
8 INTRODUCTION.
grade, academic, the delusion of a dreaming school-
man, especially to the 'practical' man, the terrible
Liberal ignoramus whose criterion of truth is the
numerical majority of the ignorant, or, still worse,
half-educated, and whose disastrous efforts to realise
the impossible during this century g have brought
the world to a pass apparently without a passage.
Therefore, I wish to draw the particular attention
of the reader to the striking resemblance between
our present position and that of the Greek world
in the time of Aristotle : i.e. between our problems
and those which he had to solve.
Now, as then, there is a school (speculative, not
experimental, Physical Science, corresponding to
Democritus and others of old) whose aim is the
purely mechanical h explanation of the world by
means of Atoms, EtJiers, Vortices, &c. Now, as
then, this school is opposed by another (German
* This is the explanation of the chaotic state of France. She laid
down impossible principles at the Revolution : but she refuses to
recognise this : hence every successive government in France is
obliged to pretend and proclaim principles which it knows to be
absurd : and each in turn is convicted of hypocrisy and failure. And
so it will be, till they abandon the principles.
h Mr. Stallo's masterly criticism of this mechanical philosophy
(Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics) is, as he knows, largely
a modern restatement of arguments brought by Aristotle himself
against the mechanical theorists of his own day (see especially De
Ctclo and De Gen. et Corrupt passim).
INTRODUCTION.
Transcendental Philosophy and its offshoots, cor-
responding to Plato and others in ancient times)
in which rationalistic figments, the idea, the concrete
notion, universal reason, objective thought, conscious-
ness, the ego, &c, play the same explanatory part
as the atoms and ethers of the mechanical philoso-
phers. Now, as then, there is a school (that of the
Liberals and Political Economists, corresponding
to Socrates and one side of the Sophists) whose
banner is cosmopolitanism, philanthropy, individual
freedom, universal brotherhood, &c, but whose
necessary outcome, based as it is on pure ignorance
of the nature of things, is diabolical competition,
envy, hatred, and malice, Socialism, Nihilism,
Anarchy, and other desperate remedies involving
national death. Now, as then, there is an ' educated '
public opinion lost in a chaos of conflicting theories,
wavering helplessly like a flock of sheep between
old and new, at the mercy of every charlatan, and
a practical conclusion of the Sophistical type, that
anything is good which will sell. Now, as then,
the cause of the chaos is the same, the break up of
old dogmas ' and the absence of any recognised
1 And every one must be struck with the curious resemblance
between Medieval Christendom and the Pope, and the Greekdom
and Oracle of Herodotus : between the international rivalries and
diplomacy of Modern Europe, and the squabbles of the Greek States
io INTRODUCTION.
and authoritative intellectual standard or canon of
Reason, any such logical training school and Court
of Appeal as the Scholastic Philosophy in the
Middle Ages. Then, the cause of this absence was
that there was no such thing, Aristotle not having
yet appeared : now, it is that his logical canon has
been ousted and supplanted by systematised ab-
surdity.
And is, forsooth ! Europe to find salvation in the
Reason of Aristotle ? Not at all. That is precisely
the theme of this essay. Aristotle can no more save
Modern Europe than he could save Ancient Greece.
Reason never yet saved any nation. And why ?
Simply because it is only reason, and as such impo-
tent, it does not contain power. There is a strange
distrust of human reason in every human institu-
tion, says Bolingbroke : and the ethical impotence
of reason is just the answer of Aristotle himself to
Plato's rationalism. It is not by reason, but by
institutions, and the habits and authority embodied
in them, that nations are saved, if at all. But now,
the denial or ignorance of this truth, the emphasis oj
1 pure 1 reason to the neglect of the organic, potential
factor, is exactly the tiling which constitutes the essence
in Thucydides. The part of Philip profiting by dissension has yet
to be played.
INTRODUCTION. n
of modern philosophy. This is just that rationalism
which is the core alike of Descartes and Kant,
Adam Smith or J. S. Mill, &c, in which lies the
root of the evils now impending over the world.
For though nations can only be saved by institu-
tions, they can be ruined by ideas.
And it may be that the evil has now gone too far,
and arrived at that stage when it can no longer
be cured or eradicated. It may be that Europe can
wash out her philosophic errors, or expiate them,
only by means of a bath of ' blood and iron,' which
will either regenerate or annihilate, mend or end
her. For if you lay down principles, you must take
the consequences : and the possible will march on
to its realisation, whether we know it, and whether
we like it, or not.
I. HISTORICAL.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
\pevSrj AajUj8droi/<ri koI a.av\\6yi(TToi flffiv' &K\' eybs At6ttov
SoQfvros t5/VA« ijv/xfiaivfi.
AXIOMS.
aOvvarov ^| aTu/AWf flval rt avvexfS.
t))v ariyn-qv 8rt oi>x oT6v re /3apos (x e,v > (pavtpbv.
eK twv vo'qraiv ovStv yiverai fj.4ytdos.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR
T3EFORE Copernicus, Kepler, and Newton had
-*-^ made their immortal astronomical discovery,
systems of the heavens were but so many ingenious
yet mistaken attempts to account for the celestial
motions on a false initial hypothesis. It is the same
with modern philosophical systems or theories ot
Knowing and Being. The parallel is exact. For
every philosophy that begins by dogmatically mis-
interpreting the deliverance of the senses, denying,
e.g., that Sight shows us things as they really are
in themselves, i.e. apart from the mind which
perceives them, is necessarily, nolens volens, obliged
as a consequence to frame some fictitious hypothesis
in order to account for the knowledge and existence
of things in some round-about way. This is the
psychological root and original cause of Idealism :
a disease of reason springing from an erroneous
interpretation of the deliverance of the senses.
But fully to account for the philosophy of Idealism,
psychological analysis alone will not suffice : it
■ Although this historical section comes naturally first, yet the
reader will appreciate it much better if he reads it after Parts
II. and III.
16 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
must be combined with historical investigation.
For the diseases of the mind, like those of the
body, are catching, and contact, contagion, or
continuity will often explain their presence in
places where they would never have originated
spontaneously. Many an Idealist has never be-
stowed a thought upon the senses : in his case
Idealism is not original, but second-hand, derived,
inherited : he caught it from some book, person,
or school of thought.
For if men hand on to one another, like runners,
the burning torch of science, they hand on also,
with far more persevering tenacity, the false lights
of bad theories and erroneous principles. We love
to exalt and extol reason, the peculiar glory and
prerogative of man, while we are apt to forget the
defects of its qualities. Pure reason, like pure
water, is delicious : but then reason, like water,
is never found pure in nature b . And incalculable
as are the benefits arising from reason, which alone
renders possible the continuity of human achieve-
ment, it is the same reason which also makes
possible the continuity of error, the terrible per-
petuation of sophistry, from which the animal,
b This is not a merely fanciful analogy : the nature of reason, and
that of water, is identical : see Part II. /3, §§ i and 2.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. ly
not being rational, is free. Continuity is a two-
edged weapon, a double-dealer: it blows, like
the Satyr in the fable, both hot and cold from
the same mouth : its blessing has a curse attached
to it. And so it is, that men follow one another
in false systems, spell -bound and hypnotised
by terminology, each with his whole attention
magnetically concentrated on his predecessor, his
faculties subordinated to a sort of artificial tethered
reason, whose bounds are fixed by the elasticity
of the founder's dogmas. He leads the way : ol
Se Kara ttjv <J)Q)vt]v eirovrai KeKrjXrjfiivoi, like a row
of geese on a common : and humanity advances
like a living man tied to a corpse.
And thus, though the capacity of reason, the
special difference of man, lifts him immeasurably
above all other animals in one way, it subjects
him in another to certain very great disadvantages,
which they, precisely by reason of their inferiority,
escape. On the other hand, the senses, which he
shares with the animals, who in this respect often
infinitely surpass him, are far more essential than
reason to life as such. The animal can get along
very well without reason, but not at all without
senses. Now, man is himself an animal, and it is
not as men, but as animals, that we have senses.
However superior in dignity and rank, reason is
C
i8 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
nevertheless posterior in order, and, as it were,
only the upper story of the edifice : a faculty super-
added to, and possibly absent from, animal life :
a capacity, however essential to man, not essen-
tial to the animal, as such.
It is, therefore, the bounden duty of every
philosopher who erects theoretical structures of
reason, to begin by thoroughly scrutinising and
determining first the nature of the senses. But
when we turn to the systems of modern phi-
losophers, we are astounded to find, that, with the
rarest exceptions, they do nothing of the sort.
Nor can anything be more miserably poor and
inadequate than the conception of the senses enter-
tained by the leading Cartesians : anything more
meagre and summary, more discreditable, more
ridiculous, than the criticism (bestowed upon them
by the most eminent critical philosophers. The
idea of accurately defining the nature of the senses
never so much as occurs to any one of them.
Yet without definition, where is scientific solidity,
and what is criticism ? Really, when we examine
the writings of philosophers, we might be tempted
to define a critic as one who delights in drawing
very obvious conclusions from principles which he
has accepted without examination from one who
himself took them on trust from a third person,
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 19
and so on ad infinitum. Any kind of sand or
rubbish is apparently good enough to form the
foundation of an elaborate and imposing edifice
of Pure Reason. In fact, as will be seen further
on, the preliminary criticism of the critical philo-
sophers is not merely weak and inadequate : it is
scandalous ; it is incredible ; it is heartrending.
Observe, that notwithstanding all the doubt which
scepticism may throw over the testimony of the
senses, the man of science must of necessity, and
always does in fact assume, that his senses intro-
duce him, somehow or other, to things as they are
in themselves, ex analogia universi .• for, if they do
not, all explanation is impossible, and the whole
edifice of science is a mere mass of conjectural
hypothesis, with no more intrinsic probability than
the raving of a maniac or a drunkard's dream.
Speculation on the nature of things in a sphere
placed ex hypotJiesi beyond all capacity of arriving
at^, it is, obviously, utterly vain and futile. All
scientific explanation, therefore, postulates, as its
necessary condition, that the senses do not trans-
figure, but mirror, realities : since it is all merely
the reduction of the unknown to terms of the
known : and accordingly all finally comes back
upon the senses. And therefore, scientific men who
are not metaphysicians shrink with instinctive
C 2
20 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
repulsion from all sceptical considerations. They
assume without ceremony that the senses introduce
us to things in themselves, and are for the most
part content to leave the matter there ; pointing,
not without reason, when asked for the proof of
their assumption, to the ' pudding,' the practical pro-
ducts of scientific activity. And this is quite as it
should be. But now, the scientific assumption is the
philosopher's problem. It is for the latter to analyse
and critically justify this necessary working hypo-
thesis of science : otherwise, the scientific tree will
have a flaw at its root. And yet not only have
the philosophers never succeeded in performing this
task, but they have on the contrary definitely and
we might almost say unanimously pronounced it
impossible. Entangled in a web of sceptical so-
phistry, spun by themselves out of bad abstractions,
they have fallen a prey to their own neglect of
initial critical analysis, and abandoned reason to
the claws of the sceptic, whose charges of im-
potence against the senses, whose denial of the
possibility of attaining to any knowledge of things
as they really are per se, are declared to be well
founded and irrefutable, and made the point of
departure of all philosophy. And thus philosophy
is founded c on the theoretical impotence of science ;
c e.g. ' Scepticism proves, on the hypothesis of the distinction
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 21
a thing equally fatal to science and philosophy,
directly productive of intellectual chaos and anarchy.
Moreover, what is worse than all, many of the
leading men of science, failing to realise the sui-
cidal absurdity of their action, have been beguiled
by philosophy into stultifying all their activity by
accepting the initial scepticism ; wherein, as will be
shown further on, they have been very ill advised,
and have only succeeded in demonstrating that
a very good man of science may be a very bad
dialectician. And thus the indispensable conditional
assumption of science, its cardinal postulate, is
degraded to the level of a mere vulgar belief
or instinct unsusceptible of critical establishment :
reason is convicted of impotence, and the magni-
ficent ensemble of modern Physical Science all hangs
dubiously from the hair of an initial ' perhaps ' ; to
which, for practical reasons, we give the benefit of
the doubt, without being able to clear it of sus-
picion ; much as your Scottish jury would dismiss
' between subject and object, that knowledge is impossible'
'it is because the finite contradicts itself that we are thrown back
'upon the infinite' (Caird's Hegel, pp. 51, 57.) A sceptic's prooj
is a curious thing : something must be wrong either with his scepti-
cism or his proof: and as we shall see, it is not the finite* but the
philosophers, who contradict themselves, and saddle the nature of
things with their own impotence.
22 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
a culprit under a verdict of Not Proven, and an
everlasting stain on his character.
Modern Philosophy is, in fact, determined through-
out by its original want of critical analysis in respect
of the senses. It is, to describe it generally, a high
platform of error, an elaborately developed attempt,
or series of successive attempts, to account for know-
ledge and existence per impossible, on sceptical
principles that cannot do it : hence its abstruse,
far-fetched, round-about and sometimes well-nigh
unintelligible complexity. The generic term for
this philosophy, reposing on the theoretical im-
potence of the senses, is Idealism ; but under that
name are comprised many very different schemes,
many of which would be far more appropriately
designated Phenomenalism. The essence and core
of them all is the initial dogma, hypothesis, as-
sumption, or article of faith, that the senses trans-
figure : that all that we can ever reach by their
means is the transfigured effect of an unknown
cause : that consequently, with iron necessity, know-
ledge is only phenomenal of an unknown reality,
and the whole Universe phenomenal, i.e. dependent
on mind, or unknown : its presence and existence
conditioned, somehow or other, by the prior and
indispensable presence and existence of 'conscious-
ness.' Every form of Idealism, and nearly every
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 23
system of Modern Philosophy, is a variation on
this theme. It lay potentially in the scepticism of
Descartes ; broke the shell and emerged from the
egg with Malebranche and Berkeley ; and has since
been very variously developed by Hume, Kant,
Comte, and their numerous disciples and commen-
tators: it can, therefore, be only as variously defined,
according to the special features and clothing which
it assumes in each case ; as, for example : the
phenomenalisation, or rationalisation, of realities,
the conversion of entia realia into entia rationis ;
the abstraction of ' the ego ' from its constituent
relations, its illegitimate erection into an uncon-
ditioned and self-subsisting essence d , prior to or
independent of those relations : the explanation of
the Universe by the figmentary assumption of some
queer permanent or universal ' consciousness ' or
'ego': the reduction of the Universe to a mani-
festation of ' mind ' : the thesis, that the under-
standing makes Nature : the endeavour to construct
the physical Universe in the alembic of ' mind '
out of a c chaotic manifold ' of sense ; the attempt
to deduce the world from ' sensations,' and the denial
of all not so deducible : and so on. This Idealism,
d Observe that when the word essence is used in this way, it
has no meaning. There is no abstract being.
24 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
or Phenomenalism, or Sensationalism, or Ration-
alism, call it by whatever name you will, essentially
identical under all its forms, is nothing whatever
but the misbegotten attempt of abstract logical
reasoning to turn evolution upside down, and make
the original low conditional on the posterior high :
it is a colossal, strictly preposterous blunder, reposing
on ignorance of the law of continuity ; the endeavour
to refer the whole Universe of potentiality to one
little abstracted case of actuality : it is an inversion
of the ova (a and the e'f ov, the omega and alpha of
evolution, seeking to place the differentiated result
at the bottom of the scale of creation, the final
development at the unevolved beginning of things.
The essence of Idealism is, in fact, the astounding
varepov irporepov of endeavouring to account for the
posse of things by their esse, instead of vice versa,
divorcing actuality from potentiality, the act from
the capacity, hypostatising it, and seeking to make
this discrete abstraction account for the continuity
and possibility of the Universe : an error springing
from ignorance of natural economy, or evolution, or
the spirit of the Aristotelian philosophy — for all these
are but different names for the same thing — inaugu-
rated by the conceited and ignorant self-sufficiency
of the founders of Modern Philosophy in the seven-
teenth and eighteenth centuries.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 25
Little did those unfortunate men, who have so
long been falsely extolled as profound thinkers,
dream of what they were doing, when, condemning
with summary and indiscriminate iconoclasm the
whole of Scholasticism 6 in the lump, they turned
their backs upon its biological kernel, the evolu-
tionary analysis and scientific method of Aristotle.
They were foredooming philosophy to centuries of
sophistry and ultimate failure. Like men, who from
ignorance of mathematics should ' begin again ' by
rejecting Newton's Principle/,, so they, wholly igno-
rant of biology and natural economy, ' began again '
by rejecting Aristotle's Principia — that is, his cen-
tral conception of evolutionary continuity, his realisa-
tion of the possible ; for in depth of insight into
organic nature no man ever equalled Aristotle.
Descartes, the notorious doubter, whose preliminary
doubt was merely the dust thrown in the eyes of
the world to blind it to the most astonishing system
of hypothetical figmentary dogmatism ever hatched
in the brain of man : Descartes, who so ridiculously
called in the veracity of the Deity to help his halt-
e The credit of re-awakening the human mind from its barbaric
mediaeval slumber belongs to the Schoolmen, that is, indirectly, to
Aristotle himself : it is falsely ascribed to the Jacobs who stepped
in when the work was done, supplanted and abused its real authors :
whose shoes they were not worthy even so much as to polish.
26 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
ing philosophy over a preliminary stile f {dignus
vindice nodus), apparently forgot that however little
the Deity might be inclined to deceive a man, he
might deceive himself : and certainly, no man ever
did so more effectually than Descartes. The mind,
idiotically throwing away all its knowledge, and
centred by Descartes in its pan-ignoring self, is
lost in the bottomless void of ' consciousness,' and
cut off from all hold of reality : the logical corollary
is the state of internal self-concentrated abstraction,
the divine beatitude of the Hindoo yogi or monk
of Mount Athos. But in the western world of
energy and action, this would not do : notwithstand-
ing Schopenhauer. Somehow or other, reality had
to be squared with the principle. Accordingly, from
this point begins the evolution of the Absurd, which
rises by a climax till it culminates in Hegel s . The
long series of Cartesian philosophers is simply the
continuous evolution of diseased thought : a study
in intellectual pathology. And one feature of this
disease, parenthetically, is too remarkable to be
' The true proof of the veracity of my senses is not the veracity
of the Deity but my own existence. See below, Part II. o, § 2.
s The kernel of value in Hcgelianism is simply Aristotle, stood
on his head, and disguised in the abuse of language and the Abstracti-
fication of the Concrete, pushed to absurdity, and dialectically evolved
according to Spinoza's omnis ddcrminalio est negalio, which is a
mere truism.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 27
passed over. Just as Descartes found himself com-
pelled to supplement the impotence of his original
starting-point by calling the Deity to his aid, so
we find that all his continuators waver between the
horns of a dilemma : the positive denial of a Deity
altogether, or the refuge in the Deity, as a sort of
dialectical necessary hypothesis h to account for that
permanence and continuity of the world which their
principle annihilates. Idealism swings backwards
and forwards, oscillates like a pendulum between
the extremes of Nihilism and Pantheism. It was
fatal : it was so determined from the origin : there
is no escape. One or the other : Hume, Schopen-
hauer, or Hegel : choose.
The philosophical world which congratulated itself
on substituting Descartes for Aristotle, a fine new
lamp for an old one, never suspected that it was
rejecting the graded and evolutionary conception
of Nature as a continuous ladder of being, the
logic of analytical definition, the law of organic
differentiation, in a word, biological insight, to en-
throne in its place abstract, rationalistic, quasi-
h German transcendental philosophy is only the hypostasis of the
Cartesian personal sum into an impersonal Est, with a big E. This
kind of ' Universal Consciousness ' is to the metaphysicians exactly
what the Ether is to the mechanical mathematical physicists : an
explanatory sine qud nmi : a figment minus which they cannot
get on.
28 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
mathematical speculation on a basis of blank ignor-
ance ; for in the age of Descartes, and for long
afterwards, the intellect of Europe was a tabula rasa
as far as the organic world is concerned \ And so
it embraced a method, whose essence lay just in
the elimination of the element of reality, the poten-
tiality and continuity of Nature, and which aimed,
more mathematico, at reducing the Universe to a
mechanical play of abstract entities, a mere juggle
with ' extension ' and motion. It was not Aristotle,
it was his enemies, who would turn Nature into a
play of logic.
The source and root of the error was the natural
bent of Descartes' mind, which was through and
through mathematical : hence his fatal tendency to
abstract and entify realities 1 ". What the mathema-
tician leaves out is, everything, except the quantita-
tive shell of things : he leaves out continuity, the
woof and web of reality, which no numeration of
infinitesimals will ever subsequently reach. You
1 Leibnitz alone dimly discerned the value of what was being thrown
away, and he has gained immense credit for his inkling of that
which, a thousand years before him, Aristotle exhaustively under-
stood.
k to yap <pvaiKa x ui P l ^ ov(riv > VTtov ovra x^P'CTa tuiv ixadrnxartKciv
(Phys. ii. 2), a criticism which hits Descartes and Ricardo as well
as Plato.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 29
cannot abstract reality; its essence is exactly what
cannot be grasped by abstraction : but abstraction
is the essence and method of mathematics, and it
was also the beginning and end of the method of
Descartes, whose great idea was, to reduce the world
to a mathematical problem l ; and who would admit
nothing which he could not clearly and distinctly
conceive. This criterion of truth is perhaps the most
striking illustration in history of the incapacity in-
herent in the mathematical mind to comprehend
what thinking means. Could he, forsooth ! dis-
tinctly conceive the origin of the fowl from the egg,
or the butterfly from the caterpillar ? What he
loses is only the universal potentiality of Nature,
its dynamical energy : for you cannot conceive, you
can only perceive, a real thing.
And so, he determined philosophy a priori to
impotence. With this abstract regard, the philo-
sophical current flowing from Descartes turned away,
and lost the soul of action, losing thereby the very
1 See Kuno Fischer's Descartes and his School, especially pp. 93
and 322 {Eng. Trans.). ' mathematics becomes the criterion by which
' he tests every cognition .... so ripens already the problem to which
' he gave his entire life, the fundamental reform of the sciences by
' means of a new method based on the analogy of mathematics ....
' the problem is, to apply the methods of mathematics to the know-
' ledge of the universe ; to treat mathematics, not as the theory
' of quantities, but as the theory of science as universal mathematics, '
30 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
possibility and principle of explanation and defi-
nition of organic realities. For everything organic
is defined by its work, its action, its duty, and its
capacity to perform that work and duty, in its due
place in the scale and nexus of creation. Such a
thing has its raison d'etre only in mediis rebus, out
of which it has no meaning ; nor can it be under-
stood and defined and accounted for, save by con-
templating it there. This is why mathematics
cannot express even the simplest organism. For
the essence of mathematics is abstraction : but you
lose, by abstraction, just what constitutes the es-
sence and explanation of every natural object, since
that lies, not in the thing itself, but in other things
which surround it and make it, by their demands
upon it, what it is : that is to say, in continuity
and correlation. Every natural object is for the
sake of another : is what it is and becomes what
it is by the necessity of conforming to this other ;
and so, this 'other', this 'for the sake of [rivos
eveica ;) is just the principle of explanation, the
thing needed to account for all organic realities.
Take any such thing out of the chain of being,
consider it in abstracto, and you render it unintel-
ligible : you cut yourself off ipso facto from all possi-
bility of understanding it. Just as the cliff is defined
and accounted for by wind and water, waves and
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 31
weather, so is it universally" 1 . Definition is the
repetition in tJiougJit of the historical causes which
made the thing in fact. In the abstract, for ex-
ample, all plains are alike. In reality, they all differ,
in their soils, in their climates, in their geographical
position, in their elevation above sea-level, in their
geological process of formation. It is not abstrac-
tion, but geology, that accounts for the plains. Still
more with organic life. The salmon's tail, the owl's
eye, the eagle's wing, can only be defined and ac-
counted for by referring them to the water, the
night, and the air. Abstracted, every natural object
is an x\ and so, the Cartesian philosophy makes the
whole Universe an x. The conception of continuity,
correlation, concrete and exact particular position
in time, place, and relation is the indispensable con-
dition of scientific explanation n . You must not
abstract and calculate : you must look and see and
think. Your sight is more important even than
your reason, because it shows you everything, there
and then, in mediis rebus.
But all this is totally ignored by Descartes and
his school, whose thought is dominated by mathe-
matics as the type of scientific explanation and
■ This is the analytical definition of Aristotle.
a Hence Aristotle's everlasting qualifications — his wov, -(ire, ncHs,
irpbs ti, and so on.
32 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
definition, and the consequent fatal and futile effort
to explain continuous realities by discrete abstrac-
tions °. They lose the point : for mathematics does
not contain it. Its circles and squares are never
hungry or thirsty ; they never want to eat or drink,
or escape from enemies or propagate their species :
they have no WANTS and require accordingly no
ORGANS, whose raison d'etre is to serve their needs p ,
and preserve their lives, and whose explanation
accordingly lies of necessity in their final cause, their
purpose, their end, their duty, their work.
For 7] <j)V(rts TeXo<? icrriv and ovBev fidrijv 17 tyvais
TToiei. Nature's creatures are not mere aimless,
shapeless lumps : no creature of Nature, nor any
essential part of such a creature but has its end,
its use, its raison d'etre. This is that universal law
of Nature, that utilitarian, economic, or teleological
principle, which, under the name of final causes,
modern philosophy at its origin ignorantly laughed
to scorn and threw aside. But va? ridentibus ! Like
men in a dream, they were but inflicting fatal wounds
Exhibited in the superlative degree by Spinoza, who endeavoured,
more Cartesiano, to deal with virtue after a method suitable only
to triangles and parallelograms. His method is exactly that part
of him which is utterly worthless.
It is need which differentiates living from dead matter, and
it appears at the very bottom of the scale : protoplasm exhibits
' greed for oxygen.' (Campbell's Elementary Biology, p. 4.)
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 33
on themselves, while they fancied they were slaying
others. The scoffers at Aristotle's teleology and
' entelechies ' were, little as they knew it, scoffing
at Nature herself, and she had her revenge. Their
own philosophy paid the penalty. By this super-
cilious rejection of the organic law of Nature which
had been discovered, systematically analysed, and
definitely won for the world, out of the void and
formless infinite, by the genius of Aristotle, all pro-
found and solid philosophy was rendered impossible :
any such philosophy as might in fact arise was
doomed in the germ. Having cast aside that wis-
dom which it did not understand, philosophy was
left to its own devices in the darkness, and lost
its way, every now and then pursuing with eager-
ness some momentary ignis f atoms into a bog.
And this is why, in their various treatises on
Human Nature, or special parts of it, philosophers
of the Cartesian school always stultify altogether
that nature of which they profess to treat, being
as they are completely ignorant of Nature, organic
Nature, in general, the whole, of which our human
nature is but a special case. Above all do they
stultify that part with which our particular concern
is in these pages, as being, for the purpose of
science, the most important of all — the nature of
Sight ; by neglecting its conditions, ignoring its
D
34 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
duty, eviscerating it of its meaning, denying its
power, and reducing it to a futile interior absur-
dity, all but identical with its contrary impo-
tence, blindness.
Sight is an organic function, and the picture
presented to us by our eyes is not there for
nothing : it has a vitally important use. But in
the philosophy of Cartesians, this is completely
ignored. With Berkeley, Hume, Kant and their
successors, all the pictures of Sight are futile,
fxaraia : all these ideas, impressions, plienomena
sensations, &c, are idle, useless, purposeless «J, purely
aesthetic : they merely appear, these phantasms,
as it were for the sole sake of appearing, at the
stroke of some enchanter's wand, his mysterious^/ :
they hang suspended, so to say, in the air without
rhyme or reason, arise causelessly out of the dark :
presto, there on a sudden they are before us, we
know not why : they have no raison d'etre, serve
no end : they are phenomena and nothing more,
shadows on the screen of non-entity and the un-
known. And then come the obvious corollaries.
Out of such phenomenal plienomena, turn and twist
them how you may, you can never get anything
<» Because they are abstracted from the sphere of their operation
see below, Part II., a, § 2.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 35
but themselves : perfectly true : ergo, denial or
transmogrification of all that cannot be deduced
from them : — the philosophy of Hume r , the most
logical of the Cartesians. But this is a reductio ad
absurdum, and makes the world feel uneasy : con-
sequently, the phenomenal premisses being unques-
tioned, next in order come the various wire-drawn
round-about, and unintelligible endeavours to get
back, by some internal juggling with abstractions,
what the premisses make impossible and utterly
destroy : to show how this real continuous world
which we perceive and know is there, only ' for
consciousness,' only through the agency of some
hypothetical, permanent 'ego,' 'subject,' some strange
universal figment which is ' eternal, self-determined,
and thinks s ': — the philosophy of post-Kantians in
England and Germany, of transcendentalisms and
'absolutes.' And as the natural consequence of such
stuff as this, comes last of all the present stage, in
r Hume's philosophy is nothing but the consistent denial of con-
tinuity. Kant endeavours to answer him, by accentuating the per-
manent ego: but his world of phenomena remains as unreal as Hume's,
and his permanent ego is a bit of illogically introduced realism, as
will be shown below. Permanence and continuity depend on some-
thing Kant's philosophy does not contain — potentiality. Cartesian
philosophy which starts from the actual ego, a thing discontinuous
and interrupted, cannot reach potentiality of which it knows nothing.
See Part II., a, % 3. * Green.
D 2
36 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
which all philosophy whatever is banned by the
world as all nonsense, gibberish, moonshine, cob-
webs, ' metaphysics.' Poor metaphysics ! how many
crimes are committed in thy name ! The whole
process is logical and necessary, and the conclusion
is, that reason leads infallibly to absurdity ; the
practical result is intellectual ruin and chaos, and
among other things, the degeneration of all litera-
ture, which has no backbone of thought, and is
rapidly going down hill.
Never did any man hit the point more admirably
than old Hobbes of Malmesbury, when he compared
strayed reasoners to ' birds, that entering by the
'chimney, and finding themselves enclosed in a
'chamber, flutter at the false light of a glass window,
' for want of wit to consider which way they came in.'
Modern philosophers are exactly such foolish fools.
Entering by the chimney, the abstract starting-point
of Descartes, they all find themselves in a close
prison of their own making, and so flutter con-
tinually at the false windows, the various systems
by which they vainly strive to escape from the
necessary logical consequences of their original
error. Do what they may, they are logically lost
beyond redemption. Each may echo the lament of
Samson, / am become the dungeon of myself. The
sceptic holds them in a grip from which they can
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 37
escape only by abandoning reason for mysticism
and imaginary figments. Hence all these desperate
efforts, since Hume, to galvanise a corpse, quicken
a caput mortmim, get from dead premisses a living
conclusion, emerge from the gaol in which Descartes
has confined them. In vain : the sceptic triumphs :
' your phenomena, discrete and individual, do not
' contain realities : you have not got reality, causa-
' tion, the continuous and necessary nexus, in your
' premisses, and I tell you, you can never get it out
' of them.' Nor can they. Their only resource is
to resort to the explanation of the known by the
unknown, imaginary, fictitious ; of the actual and
perceptible by the hypothetical and gratuitous: their
philosophy becomes accordingly a \6yos dXoyos, a
thing upside down : the endeavour to account for
realities by non-entities, a process whose intrinsic
absurdity has to be disguised by dark and obscure
terminology, metaphor, coupled with a kind of
impatience of logic, and the exaltation of sentiment,
feeling, faith, mysticism, as the highest qualities of
mind — the self-conviction of intellectual impotence.
Hence the utter ruin of philosophical style, the
virtue of which is logical exactitude and crystal
clearness, but which has now become a kind of
horrible philosophical Chinese, which violates the
first canon of speech, — that, of two men communi-
38 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
eating, both shall understand the meaning of the
words.
All this has come about, with iron inevitable
necessity, owing to the original neglect of ana-
lysing the exact nature of the senses, and the
misinterpretation of those doors of knowledge,
which was involved in the radical error of Des-
cartes, the start with abstractions.
Of all our senses, Sight is the most valuable,
being the chief source of all original and immediate
knowledge. Out of it as out of a root grows almost
all philosophy and almost all art : all contemplation,
action, and production issue from and depend upon
it : scientific explanation all runs back to it, as the
objective sense and ultimate ground beyond which
we cannot go : the final reference is always to
Sight. Moreover, it is in itself the choicest gift of
God : a permanent and inexhaustible well of the
purest of all human pleasures, from which at all
moments we may draw deep draughts of inward
peace and ever various beauty ; for we never tire
of it, and it never runs dry, but, like the purse of
Fortunatus, has always some new gold piece at
the bottom of it. And did not custom stale us to
its perpetual miracle, Sight would seem to us what
indeed it is, the first wonder of the world : but like
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 39
the music of the spheres, it moves us not, because
it is always with us, and those only realise its
value who have lost it. Then, when it is gone,
they understand that life deprived of Sight is like
the earth without the sun. Milton knew
' But chief of all,
O loss of Sight, of thee I most complain.'
And we may say without much exaggeration
of Sight, what Aristotle says of motion, that to be
ignorant of its nature is to ignore the nature of
the Universe.
For consider. How were the old four satellites
of Jupiter originally discovered ? By deduction, like
the planet Neptune ? No. By induction, like the Law
of Gravitation ? No. How then ? By simple inspec-
tion, intuition. Sight. The telescope was pointed
at Jupiter, and they were seen. They existed for
ages, unknown to the world, owing to the immense
distance that divides us from Jupiter: but the inven-
tion of the telescope ' ccelorum pcrrupit claustra ' —
that is, annihilated the distance — and there they
were.
And as with the telescope, so, in the opposite
direction, with the microscope. Ordinary human
vision lies in the middle between the two. The
telescope and microscope, with all their admirable
adaptations to special ends, have raised our faculty
4 o THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
of Sight to a power previously inconceivable, and
revealed to us two new worlds — that is, two enlarge-
ments of the old world — the world of the infinitely-
great, and the world of the infinitely small. But
they have done something more. They show us,
if we think about it, how our power of vision is
the condition, the root, the source, the possibility,
and in a sense, the limit of science 1 . Deduct the
telescope and microscope, and two worlds vanish
from our ken : the two opposite ends : deduct
Sight, the intermediate, and all goes. If in a world
of men who see, the blind can artificially make
shift, by education, assistance, and communication,
without their eyes to live and partly know, we
must not allow this to deceive us as to the truth.
Such blind men are possible, only because others
see. There are, it is true, other doors of knowledge
than the eyes, and there may be, and is, in fact'
animal life without sight. But speaking from the
human point of view, both life and science are
conditional on sight u , and impossible without it.
Take it away, and both must disappear.
1 Scientific instruments are but means of translating imperceptible
powers of nature into terms especially of sight: e.g. the barometer
makes visible the weight of the atmosphere, the thermometer, the
degree of heat, the electrophorus, the presence of electricity, &c.
u So, Night is the condition of our knowledge of the Universe.
Were day perpetual, we should know nothing of the stars.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 41
And yet, though everybody knows perfectly well,
in a way, i.e. in its exercise, what it is, to see ;
nobody can tell. There is not a single philosopher,
ancient or modern, who has ever understood, critic-
ally, what Sight is, the nature of Sight ; exactly
what it is, to see. They all mutilate, misinterpret,
and misrepresent the fact. There is in the problem
of Sight a very peculiar, subtle, and insidious snare,
a trap into which all unwarily fall. Now an error
about Sight is fatal, as modern philosophy shows.
For this is the beginning of philosophy, its neces-
sary point of departure dXiA punctum saliens : in this
imperceptible point lies the whole development of
thought : for a principle, as Aristotle says, is a
dwarf in size with the power of a giant. The true
nature of Sight, what Sight IS, has escaped every-
one : for it reposes essentially upon that intimate
communion between soul and body, which all doc-
tors understand, but which almost all philosophers
disastrously ignore.
I say, that on the critical determination of this
problem, all hangs. Determine rightly the nature
of Sight, and out of it, as out of a rich and fertile
soil, philosophy will rise like a luxurious and spread-
ing vegetation : but the original error of the Car-
tesian school is like a stony and unprofitable sand,
a very waste and desert, the arid home of stunted
42 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
bush and scanty cactus, salt lakes and delusive
mirage.
In vain do all these philosophers dogmatically
lay down, accept, or assume, each in a dialect of his
own {ideas, impressions, sensations, phenomena, &c),
that we do not see external objects : that the reality
remains ever hidden behind the mind's own states,
feelings, sensations, and what not ; that only what
things seem to be, and not what they really are
in themselves, is attainable. Here, for example, are
the Sun, Moon, and Stars. All down the ages, from
time immemorial, men have worshipped and adored
and counted their time by these heavenly bodies,
the nearest of which is more than two hundred
thousand miles off. Now, we cannot either touch,
hear, taste, or smell these bodies. Then, if we do
not see them, how did we ever become aware of
them, how get at them, how know that they are
there ? ' Oh ! ' says a philosopher, ' gently, my dear
' Sir : distinguo : we infer them from sensations V
' Infer them from sensations, do we ? and pray, how
' do you know that ? ' ' Why, physiology tells us,
' that the brain, eye, nerves ' ' Brain ? eye ?
' nerves ? and how do you know that you have such
x We do nothing of the kind : Sight is not inference, nor, as I
shall show further on, has reason anything whatever to do with it :
but of this on a future page.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 43
' things ? ' ' Why, of course, all men have them.'
' But how do you know ? ' ' Well, we see them, when
'we dissect ' 'Ah! ah. \ {see them — the devil
' you do ! So you can see brains and nerves, and
' therefore, you cannot see the moon. But permit
' me to inform you, that you cannot employ the
' capacity of Sight in its own disproof. If I can-
' not see the moon, your physiology is all moonshine!
All idealism, since Berkeley, is founded on a
denial of the power of Sight, based on a misinter-
pretation of its nature, and a vicious argument in
a circle. The detailed examination of this will
occupy our attention further on, but here we may
anticipate so far as to notice the method of pro-
cedure, which is this. First, the philosophers see,
as we all do, long before we become philosophers,
and continually afterwards, external objects, and
so get knowledge of them. Then, when they come
to philosophise, they reflect, that the things are
distant, and so cannot be, and are, in fact, not seen.
To account for this difficulty, they resort y to what,
as I shall show further on, is only a misinterpreta-
tion of the fact ; what we see is within, and the
external object is only inferred and not seen. The
next step is obvious : cut bono this external object ?
y Thus Idealism appears historically after Materialism, of which it is
only the other side: Berkeley follows Ilobbes.and Protagoras Democritus.
44 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
It is accordingly discarded, as at once superfluous,
problematical, and unknown : and thus they con-
clude, in the most satisfactory manner, that the
objects seen are within, ergo, there is, or may be,
nothing without the mind : and you have scepticism
and idealism at once. Though all this while it is
precisely their actual knowledge of these objects
without or external to the mind which started all
the chain of reasoning ending in their denial. Thus
they all end by denying, each in his own way, the
very thing which they started to explain, and on
this foundation arise all the various systems of
philosophy. But we may fling back upon them all
the charge which they would fasten upon us —
' Thou hast no speculation in those eyes
Which thou dost glare with. '
Postponing, now, to a future page the critical
examination of the Idealists' premiss, let us con-
sider some aspects of their systematic thought.
Nothing in all history is more astonishing than
the incoherence and internal self-contradiction of
those critical systems which have been universally
extolled as triumphs of dialectical ingenuity, unless
it be the passive and acquiescent approval with
which these systems, compounded of mutually ex-
clusive positions, have been stamped by the world.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 45
Hume and Kant are adored as dialectical giants,
the very Otus and Ephialtes of metaphysical saga-
city, holding Reason, as it were, bound in iron
chains, with their feet on his throat.
I say, that the reputations of those philosophers
for critical power crumble to pieces at the very first
touch of analysis.
I. Two things are inseparably associated with the
name of Hume, Scepticism and Empiricism. Hume
the sceptic is equally Hume the empiricist : he is
as it were the very incarnation of both spirits ; and
the combination of the two in one man is challenged
by nobody. Yet the two things are absolutely in-
compatible and mutually destructive ; and their
union in Hume proves to demonstration that neither
he himself, nor his disciples, understand what sys-
tematic thinking means.
' It is beyond a doubt,' says Kant, in the very
first line of his Critique, ' that all our knowledge be-
' gins with experience ' ; and in this respect the world
is entirely at one with him. ' The general pro-
' position that all our knowledge of the objective
' world is derived from experience appears to be
' undeniable, and is doubtless assented to explicitly,
' or in some mode of implication, by every sane
' person at the present day z .'
z Stallo's Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics.
46 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
Very good : now, suppose that I deny that pro-
position. Why, then, says Mr. Stallo, you must
be insane. Let us see.
I find my head more or less full of knowledge,
and I ask myself, where does it all come from.
Experience ? Not in the least. Nine-tenths of my
own or anybody else's knowledge comes not via
experience, but by the medium of books, communi-
cation, language Pooh ! that is still experience :
if not your own, then somebody else's
Ah ! ah ! somebody else's. Now we are getting
to the point. So, then, it is not true, but false,
to say that all knowledge comes from experience,
UNLESS you take in other people as well as yourself:
unless, that is to say, you are speaking, not of the
individual, but of man, the race, the species, men
collectively. The statement, universally recognised
as true, is so only of continuous man, not of the
abstract individual. In other words, the sceptic who
asserts the doctrine is committing logical suicide :
he is cutting his own throat : in the mouth of Hume
the sceptic, the statement is absurd, seeing that his
own, your own, my own, knowledge does not come,
and cannot be accounted for, from his own, your
own, my own experience*. Shut up, ex hypothesi,
* i.e. All our knowledge comes from experience : yes : all my
knowledge — no.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 47
in himself, limited to his own ideas and impressions ,
his knowledge is inexplicable : the greater part of
it must remain for ever simply x, an irreducible surd,
of which no account can possibly be given : its
presence in the mind an insoluble mystery. For
the moment he resorts, in order to explain it, to
language, communication, he is abandoning his posi-
tion, going outside himself; but this is just what
logically he can never do. Language is a sealed
book to scepticism, and one of the rocks on which
it splits : for it is the essential condition of any
degree of knowledge, and its explanation : a thing
wholly irreconcilable with any subjective philo-
sophy : for what is speech but the externality of
reason, its vehicle, the continuity of man with man
in space and time, the intellectual money of society ;
(speech being to thought exactly what money is
to demand : its material body ;) a capacity that has
absolutely no meaning at all for the isolated Car-
tesian ego, or Hume's ' bundle of impressions.' And
in fact, we might go much further : for even the
inner man and his nature are determined by speech ;
as e.g. the faculty of the orator or poet. So little
is humanity explicable on sceptical principles : so
much does the interior moral man depend on that
continuity, of .which Hume's scepticism is the
denial.
48 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
I say, then, that without language, i.e. continuity,
that is, for the abstract individual, it is altogether
false, and even ridiculous, to derive knowledge from
experience. The position is utterly incompatible
with scepticism, and destroys it. That Hume should
be admired and accepted as the representative
champion of both is merely one of the innumerable
proofs of the deplorable imbecility of the world.
It need not surprise us to find language and its
corollaries totally ignored in Cartesian philosophy,
such as that of Hume. He could not have denied
it, without stultifying himself—for what is his
book ? — nor again could he possibly have deduced
it from impressions and ideas ; so that had it oc-
curred to him, he must simply have acknowledged
that his philosophical principles were unable to cope
with it, and torn up his Treatise on Human Nature.
That would have been a pity — Othello's occupation
gone ! Yet we are bidden to bow down to the philo-
sophical profundity of the man, the two principal
aspects of whose philosophy are logically incom-
patible, and who had never so much as considered
language in relation to his principles : language,
which is but the outside of reason, the body of which
reason is the soul. No body, no soul : no language,
no thought. The simple truth is that Hume had,
and could have, no insight whatever into the nature
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 49
of reason b , because it is an organic thing, a social
capacity ; and requires for its comprehension and
explanation biology, and that continuity of Nature
of which Hume's philosophy is the rationalistic,
superficial denial. The individual, the ego, or iso-
lated abstract bundle of discrete impressions, could
have no reason, for he, or rather it, would have no
need of communication, which is reason's original
root c .
II. And this brings us to another less obvious
but no less profound, error in the analysis of Hume.
The peculiar and superlative merit of his philosophy,
as, since Kant, we have been told usque ad nauseam,
the thing that constitutes his greatest achievement
and evinces the subtle penetration of his metaphysical
glance, is his criticism of causality. I assert, on the
contrary, that it proves exactly the opposite : his
lamentable want of equipment, positive or critical,
for the adequate performance of the task which
he set himself to do.
The colossal blunder which he made here arose
naturally and almost necessarily out of his philo-
sophic method. Hume was not a genuine philo-
b See Part II., ft § 2.
c It could not even have a memory, for memory depends, not on
the discrete, actual ego, but on the continuous, potential ego ignored
by Hume. See Part II., a, § 3.
E
50 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
sopher, by which I mean, one who being puzzled
by realities seeks to account for them d , and so arrives
at principles by the regressive analysis of realities :
he was a book "philosopher, i.e., he took his philo-
sophical premisses from another (Berkeley) and de-
duced corollaries from them, leaving out, ignoring,
or denying everything which they did not contain.
The consequence is, that he has left out, without
the least suspicion, exactly half of the whole in the
case before us — causality. He did not fix his eye
on the facts of Nature, analyse and classify their
causes (as Aristotle did), but he arrived at his
conception of causality deductively from his phi-
losophical premisses. The mind has impressions :
now, between any two of these there is no neces-
sary connection discoverable : there is Hume's
philosophy, and his idea of causality, in a nut-
shell e . Nor can anything be simpler or more easy
to see than his point. Mere sequence, not necessity :
the imperceptibility of the power that effects the
result. Let that be as it may : we will not quarrel
d All children, e.g., possess genuine philosophic curiosity.
e It is nowadays insinuated that Hume was not serious but ironical.
Nothing could be further from the truth : he was entirely in earnest ;
and the way in which he labours, through two huge volumes, to
orce the whole world into the strait-waistcoat of a bedlam theory
that does not contain it will always make his book one of the wonders
of the world.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 51
with it at present : where he makes his egregious
blunder is in supposing that this is all: that this
efficient causality exhausts the species of cause and
necessity.
I almost despair of bringing home to the reader
the full atrocity of this extraordinary oversight.
All. Why, Hume recognises and considers only
one side of causality, of the other he has never
so much as dreamed. It never enters his head that
there are two totally different kinds of real (not
merely formal and subjective) necessity and causa-
lity. He understands one only : the other he ab-
solutely ignores. And yet this other side is just
the key to the whole world ot organic Nature : it is
that great universal necessity which Aristotle calls
the avdy/cr) tov Sia ri, the necessity which everything
is under of conforming to circumstances, the final,
formal, and adaptive, as opposed to the efficient
causality alone recognised by Hume.
Here, for example, is a gold watch. Now, it is
not the gold which determines the nature of the
watch, but the necessity of keeping time. This is
that organic final necessity which makes the watch
what it is. Break the watch up, reduce it to gold
only, and this necessity is gone : only the material
necessity of the elements, as such, remains f .
f This is treated in detail in Part II., 0.
E 2
52 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
This is only a type of the universal law of Nature.
This organic necessity is the key to the economy
of Nature ; it is the web and woof in which every
organic being is set, and by which it is moulded
and defined. This is the cause which is needed to
determine and account for every organic being in
the world : yet it is ignored, absolutely and utterly,
by Hume's criticism of causality : because biology is
a sealed book to him : he knows nothing whatever
of organic nature g . Yet he never suspects this de-
ficiency, which is essential in any one who endeavours
to account for human nature. He resembles a man
handling astronomy without any knowledge of mathe-
matics. We cannot see that fire must burn : very
well : now, how is it with the other necessity which
he ignores ? Is it not iron, and is it not obvious ?
Can the whale live in the Sahara, or the camel in
the Polar Sea ? Can the butterfly swim, or the eel
fly ? Can a steam engine run with square wheels ?
Is not the form of a boot or a glove, a saw or
a saddle determined necessarily by their work ?
Must not the crow and the gull see and fly, if
they are to live ? Can sheep live under water ?
But why multiply instances ? This fatal organic
necessity, arising not from the properties of matter
as such, but from conditions and exigencies that
• it obtains in other spheres also, but is less easy to see in them.
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 53
make demands upon the form ; this necessity, which
must be obeyed on pain of death and disappearance,
is invisible to Hume and his commentators : and
yet it contains the secret of the Universe. In other
words, Hume's treatment — it is in no sense an
analysis — of causality is only a fragment of the
whole, a segment of the entire circle. He treats 01
Human Nature in perfect ignorance of that species
of causation of which it is a special case. Human
Nature is not material, it is organic. An owl or a
man obey a very different necessity from that which
rules over a mere lump of matter. Kill the animal :
deprive it of its life and reduce it to its elements,
and the necessity which tyrannised over it while
it was alive is gone : it must no longer fly or run,
eat, drink, or see, &c, that end has gone : and with
it goes organic necessity. Hume's boasted analysis
of causality is the reasoning of a blind man about
colours : it is a futile attempt to account for bio-
logical problems without any insight into the sphere
of the problem : the vain endeavour of a part to pass
for a whole of which it is utterly unconscious : it
resembles, to revert to a former illustration, the
effort to account for the watch by reference only to
its gold — a theory whose absurdity it would be im-
possible to surpass. Had Aristotle been presented
in the shades with a copy of Hume's Treatise on
54 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
Human Nature, he would have thrown it aside,
with the criticism, that the author was an acute
reasoner who knew absolutely nothing of Nature,
and was wholly unconscious of the extent of his
own deficiencies.
III. Kant ranks in public estimation as fully the
equal, if not even the superior, of Hume : the critic
tar excellence.
Very good. Now, does it ever occur to Kant,
all the way through the Critique of Pure Reason,
or elsewhere ; does it ever occur to the author of
that truly remarkable dictum — ' the matter of phe-
nomena is given us a posteriori: the form must
1 lie ready for them a priori in the mind ' — does it,
I say, ever occur to him that man does not only
contemplate phenomena, but creates them ? What is
a temple, a statue, a steam engine ? Now, the artist
certainly does not create the matter : we have even,
were it necessary, Kant's own authority for it. What
then remains for him to create ? The form ? Oh no !
according to Kant that cannot be ; for the form
of phenomena is given to them by our mind in
the act of contemplation : it lies ready for them
in the mind. Then what remains for the artist
to create ? Nothing : for form and matter exhaust
the phenomenon.
And this is the critical quality of the Critical
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 55
Philosophy ! that epoch-making system which was
avowedly founded by its illustrious author on the
assumption that 'objects must conform to our faculty
' of representation.' Imagine a rhinoceros conforming
to our faculty of representation ! Objects do conform
to something : but it is not our faculty of repre-
sentation : it is the organic necessity of circum-
stances. But of this Kant knew nothing : though
it was ' writ large ' in the writings of Aristotle.
IV. Yet once more. If there is any one thing
plainer than another, it is, the moral consequence
of the Cartesian principle. If the individual self,
my ' egOy is the sole reality, and all else mere
phantom of me, then virtue is absurdity and obli-
gation disappears: for continuity is gone, and the
Self, having no fellows, becomes, as it were, itself
the Deity, outside all control, alone in a world
which is only a reflection, or expression, or mani-
festation of itself. Pan-egoism. Le Monde, cest
Moi h . It follows, with inevitable necessity, that
selfishness, pure, ferocious, bestial selfishness, reigns
supreme. In the frightful solitude created by the
Cartesian principle, I am the sole and only reality,
and to myself the only law. With what would you
seek to bind Me ? what meaning has the word Duty
'' This is Fichte, a maniac who is perfectly logical, and corresponds
to the Hindoo philosophy of the Upanishads and the Vedanla system.
56 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
to Me ? I laugh the very notion to utter scorn. But
now, even supposing the necessity clear to him,
which is hardly ever the case, no Cartesian would
for all that dare to lay such a moral consequence
down, for if he did, he would be instantly doomed
by the revolted moral judgment of the world. And
accordingly, we see all the Cartesians labouring in
the most grotesque manner to link an Ethic on to
their principle : to get, by hook or crook, out of
their principle a morality which it not only does not
contain, but annihilates. Nothing in the history of
the ludicrous can parallel the spectacle presented
to us by the desperate efforts of Spinoza, Hume,
Kant, Schopenhauer', and others of the school to
put forth some moral system that will square with
their premisses. Spinoza's attempt to dovetail an
ethic mathematically on to a system which sinks the
individual in the universal sea of Being — called God
for euphemism — was absurd enough. But the palm
was reserved, here also, for Kant, in whose famous
Categorical imperative the Sublime and the Ridi-
culous meet. It is a realised asymptote, the last
desperate stronghold (or weakhold) of a false philo-
sophy driven into a hole, not daring or willing to
Schopenhauer is the most consistent : his moral system being, in
fact, the thesis that there is none : ' what we arc, we are ; virtue,
' a fig ! 'tis in ourselves that we are thus or thus.'
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 57
admit the obvious moral consequences of its own
fundamental principles: the grotesquely ridiculous
figment of a man whose heart was better than his
head, and who shrank, either from timidity or
politics, from boldly carrying his principles out to
their bitter end. But give me the man who has
the courage of his principles : he is worth his weight
in gold. No logical coward ever made a great phi-
losopher : though it is true that many have been
regarded by the world as great philosophers who
were in truth very far from being anything of the
kind. ,
And exactly in harmony with this, though arrived
at by a somewhat different road, is the specious
accent laid nowadays on the principle of ' con-
science,' in semi-philosophical religious thought :
conscience, which in Dryden's fine language is ' the
' royalty and prerogative of every " private " man :
1 he is absolute within his own breast, and account-
able to no earthly power for that which passes only
' between God and him ' : — as opposed to the old
system of external social control, exemplified in
almost all ages and countries : e.g. in the Hindoo
system of Caste, the old self-governing communities
of Europe, groups and guilds, and so on. This
internal principle of conscience sounds indeed mag-
nificent : on no text is it possible to preach finer
58 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
sermons. But show me a society morally directed
and controlled only by this grand interior principle
of conscience, and I will show you a gang of knaves
and hypocrites. Conscience, which has so fine a
ring in the ear of pious bookworms who do not
understand human nature as it is, but are always
contemplating ideal human nature and pure reason —
this conscience, regarded as a working moral prin-
ciple, is utterly futile and impotent : it is the sancti-
monious mask of any rogue, the specious cowl of
any villainy that shuns the light because its deeds
are evil ; and the virtue contained in conscience is
really derived from outside ; for virtue, like lan-
guage, is an organic, not an individual attribute.
Embrace Cartesian principles, let go continuity and
the organic nexus as the basis of human nature, and
your ' individual ' may have indeed a conscience,
but only after the fashion of Tartuffe or Titus Oates.
Conscience, in the good sense of the word, the con-
science of the really good man, the mens conscia
recti, is a result, not a principle : it is the inward
spiritual sign and indication of an outward social
virtue that is there ; but it is not itself the principle
of virtue. Any Macchiavellian soul who has not
got it will laugh to scorn the vain efforts of Car-
tesian philosophers to establish morality for him on
such a delusion. Conscience may be the finest
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 59
flower of virtue, but it is not its root. That root
is, continuity, organic obligation, i.e., Duty, which
is merely the moral aspect of that final cause totally
neglected by Cartesian philosophers. The Duty of
any organic being is determined by its relations
to others : it is a special case of the ov eveica. When
a man dies for another : when he sacrifices his own
Wic for the sake of some one else, he is, little as he
may dream of it, illustrating and verifying the
analysis of Aristotle : he is practically refuting the
philosophy of Descartes.
The truth is, that the only logical attitude for one
who begins, like Descartes, by making the abstract
discrete hypostatised self the sole or primary reality
is the ironical one. A didactic sceptic is an ab-
surdity. Hence all these inevitable self-contradic-
tions in the works of philosophers who endeavour
to dogmatise on sceptical principles. A genuine,
thorough-going sceptic, who laughs at all science,
(he would have plenty to laugh at now,) never argues,
but expresses himself in jest and mockery, scoffs
and gibes, is at least not inconsistent ; you cannot
touch him : he has a literary position, and even
commands our sympathy to a certain extent : it
is a point of view. But a didactic sceptic, a sceptic
who seriously reasons and writes books to prove this
60 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
or that ! — it is a monstrosity, a self-contradiction
incarnate. Unfortunately, to get the reputation of
a ' great sceptic ' you must write books, otherwise no
one will ever hear of you : consequently, a great
sceptic is apparently of necessity an illogical thinker.
The only really great sceptics are those of whom, by
reason of their logical attitude ot complete silence,
the world has never even heard. It knows, then,
nothing of its greatest men !
What these Cartesian philosophers all do is, in
reality, very simple. They have embraced a prin-
ciple, an original philosophical starting-point, which
logically reduces the world to zero or ego (with a
large or small E), and which would reduce them,
were they critically consistent, to silence ; for there
is no room for language in their philosophy. But
this would not do : the world's philosophers cannot
be silent men : moreover, they do not see it, for
there is not a single Cartesian who understands the
logical consequences of his own principle. There-
fore, though they parade their principle in the fore-
ground of their dialectical endeavours, they really
convey, by an illicit subterfuge, all that matter into
their philosophical systems which has really no right
to be there : i.e. they proclaim the Idealistic prin-
ciple, while secretly profiting by all that vast field
of continuity and potentiality which it eliminates
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 61
and cannot account for. There is accordingly very
often much by the way in their systems of frag-
mentary insight, though it is quite irreconcilable
with their original principle. Their pretext and
banner is Idealism : but their thought forsakes their
principle, when it comes to action, for the real
nature of things is stronger than the sophistry of
self-deluding rationalism k . Where they all fail is
in critical consistency ; systematic organisation and
coherence of thought : agreement of part with part.
They have neither the grasp nor the courage to
carry their principle out to its logical conclusion.
They ought, in strictness, to do one of two things :
either absolutely deny all that their principle will
not admit, as Hume partly did, — all, virtue, neces-
sity, language, society — everything whatever that
depends on continuity and potentiality : or con-
versely, deny the principle itself. They do neither.
They assert the principle, and combine it forcibly
with consequences that do not follow from it, and
are incompatible with it. They assert the principle,
because they have never yet been able to see how or
k It is commonly asserted nowadays that Idealism is as valid an
hypothesis as any other, because it can explain in its own way all
that any other theory can. But unfortunately, the one thing no
Idealism can explain is just the essence of the Universe— potential 'ity.
Idealism = esse minus *oss(.
62 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
where it is erroneous : they combine it with incon-
sistent inconsequent consequences, because it is just
these which are the matters of concern and import-
ance to the world : all the vital interests of humanity
being precisely the things which their principle logic-
ally sweeps away. Hence the grotesque want of
critical consistency in their systems : hence the ab-
surd and fantastic, wearisome and idiotic attempts
to explain the continuous real by the discrete ideal,
the universal background of things by one of its own
particular manifestations : the substance by its re-
flection : the organic woof and web of existence by
mathematical atomistic points, or worse still, by
hypothetical figments and imaginary nonentities
hence in short, the whole generation of the Idealistic
school from Descartes down. Idealism was doomed
from its birth to this self-contradiction, the arbitrary
and forcible conjunction of mutually exclusive op-
posites. It professes to derive all from the self,
while it is really obliged to derive it from other
things : it professes an hypothetical theory which
in practice it entirely disregards : its pages are full
of discussions ot things of which, ex hypothesi, it
could never know anything at all, which could not
even exist at all, on its principles : and the very
language it makes use of is its running refutation.
There is, indeed, a sense in which Idealism, not
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 63
being founded on reason, cannot be overthrown by
it : seeing that ' what came not in by reason cannot
'by reason be expelled.' To many people, Idealism
means, not what it is, not that essentially nihilistic
or egoistic phenomenalism which logical Cartesian-
ism must be, but a vague sentimental magnificent
something compounded of aspirations and imagina-
tions, mysteriously related to e.g. Wordsworth's Ode
to Immortality, Tennyson's In Memoriam, Plato's
Phcedo, and so on. Idealism is conceived to be a
kind of sublime, ethereal, profound and lofty mode
of thought ; its exponent, a soaring genius, a finer
soul, raised far above your gross and grovelling,
commonplace and superficial realist l . It requires
courage as well as criticism to be a realist, since
you run the risk of being branded with superficiality
just for that reason. The truth is, in reality, the
other way : Idealism being a superficial absurdity
which ignores the potentiality of the Universe, and
tries to make our shallow little human scoop the
measure of that Infinite* Ocean of Possible Being into
which, here and there, it dips. But the world is
governed by the sound of words, and better loves to
Realism is the true mean between the two equally false poles
of Materialism and Idealism. It combines the virtues of both with
the fallacies of neither.
64 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
go up in balloons than to go down in diving-bells ;
and so it comes about that, deluded by their own
faculty of language, people cling desperately to a
philosophy that logically annihilates everything
which they hold sacred. Sancta simplicitas ! they
resemble nothing so much as drowning men hugging
to their bosoms — the anchor ! And then, just as
natural objects look more beautiful when reflected
in water than they do in themselves, so an imagina-
tive charm, a literary spell, hangs about the notion
of Idealism — there is a kind of magical aroma in the
very word — which exercises on minds of a certain
calibre a far more potent attraction than logic ot
the sharpest ever can. Xvirei to aKpifies : there
seems to be something a little mean and illiberal in
applying nicety of criticism to gorgeous or graceful
speculations : the noli turbare circulos meos is not
without its influence ; and there will always be
people who prefer to err with Plato, Berkeley, Schop-
enhauer, and other masters of literary grace and
beauty ; for however much men may talk about
reason and truth, they prefer the Sophist, the man
who discourses beautifully about the truth, to the man
who nakedly and unmeretriciously exhibits it. There
can be no finer instance of this than Plato himself,
whose everlasting polemic against the Sophists com-
pletely blinds people to the fact that he was himself —
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 65
this is the real Socratic irony — a thousand times
more of a Sophist than any of those whom he carica-
tures and confutes in his pretty dialogues by the
most childish pretences at reasoning. With the
appeal to reason always on his lips, he settles every
question by his own dogmatic requirements, and his
philosophy owes its own attractions entirely to those
very allurements of sense which it is always con-
demning ; its logical content taken apart from its
setting would seem as miserable as a Persian cat
shorn of its hair. This is why of all philosophies
that of Plato m can least be abstracted from his
works. You must go to Plato himself for it, since
every account of it leaves out the one thing valuable
about it : its vehicle, the style, the atmosphere, the
by-play.
However apparently different, Platonism and Car-
tesianism are really and at bottom the same thing :
the core of both is total ignorance, neglect, or denial
of potentiality and the endeavour to subordinate the
concrete to the abstract, realities to their reflection
in the mirror of consciousness. It is not without
reason that Plato's admirers regard him as the
founder and anticipator of all modern philosophy.
He is so, in fact. Cartesianism is simply the return,
m AfSpi rvcpKtjS Ktxl yor)Ti ra iv ovpav$ hiyyovulvcp, 3s ovSe ra iv
tji yfj KaBopifv itivvaro.
F
66 THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR.
based on biological ignorance, to that abstract
philosophy of Plato, which Aristotle annihilated
by his discovery of the evolutionary process of
Nature, the continuous march from possible to
actual : a discovery rediscovered, verified and solidi-
fied by modern science, and one which is as valid
and complete a refutation of the modern Cartesian,
as it was of the ancient Platonic, Idealism.
But when any philosophy has once acquired
status, prescription, authority : when sophistry has
become a classic : when it is taught in colleges
and bound in vellum : when its commentators have
become a fraternity, its elucidation, a trade : when
critical reputations have been staked on its truth,
and professorial expositions of its principles stand
or fall with it : it dies hard. To convict it of error
is, as it were, to take down great ' critical ' philo-
sophers from their pinnacles, or make them, in
Bolingbroke's malicious phrase, ' like little statues
• on great pedestals, only seem the smaller by their
' very elevation.' The world dislikes nothing so much
as to see its idols broken, and have to confess that
its gods were after all not porcelain, but common
clay. Rather than admit this, it will obstinately
refuse to see. And therefore, though it should
ultimately, as it certainly will, awake, and cease
to decorate with musk roses the fair large cars of
THE GENEALOGY OF ERROR. 67
its Cartesian Bottom, meanwhile the thin ghost of
Idealism will continue to haunt the dens of philo-
sophers and lurk in the shadow of libraries, long
after it is logically defunct.
The future of philosophy, like the past, belongs
to Aristotle ; the unique, the immortal Master of
the Wise. He, he alone lives and endures for ever :
all the rest are fleeting shades. I wandered in his
deserted school, and raked in the ashes of his extinct
altar, till a spark of his divine genius suddenly glim-
mered and glowed in the darkness : I fostered and
fed it with fuel till it flamed into fire and showed
me the way : lit me like a torch to the discovery
of a definition, which, though not Aristotle's, is
Aristotelian : which I venture to say that Aristotle
himself would now have given, could Aristotle rise
from the dead. I have but raised his spirit, and
written down the oracle on scattered leaves.
F 2
II. ANALYTICAL.
a. ORIGIN : THE NATURE OF
SIGHT.
ipifffihs, yvwptff/jLbt ovaias.
AXIOMS,
Trjs yap apxys &\\ri yvuxris k<x\ ovk diroBd^it-
7j yap atidrjcts iiri(TTr)^.7}S t)(*i dvvaij.iv.
a. ORIGIN: THE NATURE OF
SIGHT.
§ I. The Critical Blunder oj the Idealist.
QTRANGE, and even incredible as it may seem
to the reader, it is nevertheless true, and I shall
now proceed to convince him by ocular demon-
stration, that Idealism is critically impossible, being
confronted at its outset by a dilemma, either horn
of which destroys it. The whole edifice of modern
philosophical Idealism is founded on a critical
blunder.
And this is the puncium saliens of all the sub-
sequent paradox and difficulty : therefore I exhort
the reader to give it his most serious and profound
attention. The source of all those sceptical per-
plexities which have ruined philosophy and brought
discredit upon human reason lies in this initial atom,
so small as to be almost imperceptible, yet so tre-
mendous in its potential results that the conse-
quences of failing to detect it are fatal. Minute
as it is, the mighty genius of evil lurks within it,
and if we carelessly overlook it and let it pass,
we are, like the princess in the fairy tale, lost irre-
trievably.
72 ORIGIN:
Philosophers of every school, realist, idealist,
dogmatic or sceptical, however much they may
differ in all other respects, do nevertheless agree
in one point. They all unanimously admit that
the testimony of consciousness, naive, unanalysed,
uncriticised, is in favour of vulgar realism. That
we seem to see the very external objects themselves,
immediately, as they are, at a distance, is the opinion
alike of the vulgar and of every philosopher, call
him Hume or Hamilton, Kant or Huxley, Berkeley
or Reid.
All philosophy, therefore, begins with, and is
founded upon, the critical analysis of this vulgar
opinion ; which every philosophy must accept, un-
less and until it can be shown to be erroneous.
Idealism is founded on the rejection of this vulgar
opinion.
Now, whether this vulgar opinion be right or
wrong — a point to which I shall return on a future
page — it has escaped the notice of all the philo-
sophers that in either case Idealism is out of the
question. For it is impossible to refute this vulgar
opinion, except on realistic assumptions. You cannot
refute vulgar realism by any process of reasoning
consistent with Idealism. And therefore it is, that
Idealism, as a critical philosophy, is impossible : for
no Idealist can ever refute the vulgar view without
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 73
at the same time destroying the foundation of his
own philosophy. In every attempt which has ever
been made to refute it, the Idealist assumes the very
thing- which he is disproving, the denial of which
constitutes the essence of his own theory. Every
Idealist commits, and must of necessity commit,
logical suicide on the threshold of his speculations.
Though it is assumed by all that the initial position
of their school has been long ago established, the
truth is, on the contrary, that it never has been, nor
ever can be, established at all. You can enter the
philosophy of Idealism only by committing an out-
rageous critical fallacy at the door. A chasm yawns
between the Idealist and his own philosophy, which
is not surmountable save by an illegitimate and
illogical jump. The Idealist plumes himself on
the impregnable nature of his position : but what
he does not perceive is that he never can get into
it himself. It can be garrisoned only by ghosts,
disembodied spirits, i.e. logically dead men.
I shall now call up in order the representative
champions and master spirits of Idealism, and make
them convict themselves out of their own mouths.
Take, then, to begin with, the strong man of
scepticism, the renowned and redoubtable Hume,
who, grant him but his premisses, will inevitably
reduce you the whole world to a mere fiction of
74 ORIGIN:
the imagination, filling up the gaps in its impressions
by a continuous hypothetical nescio quid.
'Men,' says this eminent philosopher, 'always
'suppose the very images themselves presented
' to the senses to be the external object?, and
' never entertain any suspicion that the one are
nothing but representations of the other.' [There
are, then, others P] 'This very table which we see
' white and which we feel hard is believed to exist
'independent of our perception, and to be some-
' thing external to the mind which perceives it.
' But this universal and primary opinion of all
' men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy,
' which teaches ' [now mark} ' that nothing can ever
• be present to the mind but an image or perception,
' and the senses are only the inlets through which
'these are conveyed a , without being able to produce
'any immediate intercourse between the mind and
'the object.' [There is, tJien, an object, other than
and external to the mind?} 'The table which we
'see seems to diminish as we recede further from
' it, but the real table wliicli exists independent of
a Note the words here. Hume pictures to himself the images
travelling along from objects through the senses, conceived as tunnels
or channels, to the mind situated somewhere over against the objects
— realism I And what does he mean by ' can be present,^ and ''with-
out being able? ' What meaning has possibility for his philosophy,
which postulates only discrete impressions ?
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 75
us suffers no alteration : it was, therefore, but its b
1 image which was present to the mind. These/
concludes the sceptical philosopher, with obvious
satisfaction, ' are the obvious dictates of reason.'
And is it really possible for such criticism as this
to pass muster, and command general approval,
from Hume's own day down to our own ? Obvious
dictates of reason ! by all means, if you like ; but
they are instantly fatal to Hume the sceptical Idealist.
What ! then after all, there is a real table existing
independent of us, at a distance ? And pray, how
in the world do you come to know that ? You tell me
that the apparent table diminishes, but the real table
does not, therefore, &c, this is actually the reasoning
on which you found your Idealism, your denial of
the possibility of knowing any such independently
existing real objects. That is, you employ actual
knowledge of such objects to prove that none can
be known : you base your proof that such knowledge
is impossible, upon that very knowledge. Then,
whence came that knowledge of yours ? How can
you refute the possibility of knowledge by means
of just such actual knowledge ? how refute the
vulgar realism by employing a knowledge which
you declare to be impossible? Will you be good
b Its image, forsooth ! What is it, and what is an image? How
can there be an image of an unknown net/ting ?
7 6 ORIGIN:
enough to explain how you can contrast the ap-
parent with the real object and prove them distinct
and different, if there are no real objects and
if, as your philosophy maintains, they cannot be
known c ?
This is the criticism of a great sceptic ! On this
dialectical pleasantry, this grotesque and almost
incredible blunder, is founded the .whole critical
philosophy of Hume : founded, that is to say, on
a dilemma, either horn of which annihilates it.
Either the vulgar opinion, this universal and primary
opinion of all men, recognised by Hume, is right
or wrong. If it is right, his whole philosophy is
elaborate nonsense. If wrong, then he must prove
that it is so, without assuming what he is disproving
in his proof. It may be wrong : we are perfectly
ready and willing to admit it, but let him produce
the evidence. Refute, by all means, the vulgar
view, and then proceed with the alternative which
you establish on its rejection. But it is really rather
too much to refute realism by its own aid, and then
coolly go on to substitute in its place an Idealism
which you have yourself annihilated by the very
reasoning you employ to demolish the vulgar
opinion.
This is the foundation of those remarkable
c Cf. Treatise on Human Nature, i. iv. §§ 2, 5.
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 77
sceptical conclusions and speculations which are
presently to awaken Kant from the dogmatic
slumber in which, till old age, he lies, contentedly
lapped in all the puerilities of spiritualistic pneu-
matological metaphysics. But before dealing with
Kant, let us consider Hume's ' forerunner,' the
source of his sceptical inspiration, Berkeley. Berke-
ley deserves attentive consideration, because his
speculative paradoxes about the senses make him,
after Descartes, the second founder of modern
Idealism d .
Berkeley is a very curious ' phenomenon : '
a most noteworthy instance of the disastrous ab-
surdity that arises from speculative ingenuity not
weighted by the ballast of exact definition. His
attractive personality, his graceful literary quality,
and the ' pulpit strain ' in his eloquence, cover,
as with a thick cloak, the multitude of his logical
sins. But we must not allow these argumenta ad
hominem to throw us off the scent : logic is logic,
and sophistry, sophistry, be the reasoner saint or
devil. Berkeley's logic is of the feminine type :
charming in its absurdity. An eternal self-con-
tradiction in his argument, of which more anon :
d Observe, that with his Theory of Vision, right or wrong, we
have in this section no quarrel or concern : it is only his Idealism,
based on that theory, yet wholly incompatible with it, that is now
in point.
78 ORIGIN:
a grotesque hallucination about distance as ' a line
1 projected endwise to the fund of the eye : ' (as
if we had only one eye ! as if it were not clear as
noonday that this conception of distance itself im-
plies just that very externality or 'outness' which he
labours to explain away !) inextricable confusion
arising from the perversion of common words to
new-fangled private meanings of his own ; (the
assassination of thought, for public or common
significance is the essence of speech ;) an irritating
and incomprehensible incapacity or refusal to under-
stand what is a general idea e : (arising principally
from his own perverse signification of the term idea :
no human being ever having supposed the existence
of a general idea, in his sense of the word ;) and
a theological arriere-pensee by which, in spite of
the constant appeals to reason, the course of the
argument is always secretly determined : — there
is Berkeley. Yet of all his characteristics the most
significant is this, that though he insists continually
that it is not he, but the other philosophers, that
are the paradoxical rascals, he keeps on repeating
the same arguments, over and over again, with
a kind of unwearied, unsatisfied enthusiasm ; i.e.
* Yet Hume takes this miserable vial entendu for a great new
discovery. The confusion between intellectual conception (v6r)na)
and imaginative pictOl cntation (<f>aVraoyta) poisons modern
philosophy.
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 79
he felt the absurdity of his own paradoxes, and
was in fact labouring to persuade himself as much
as other people. ' What means this iteration,
' woman ? ' This, that he is arguing against the
grain : inspired, not by the interests of truth, but
the supposed interests of his creed. What is want-
ing in Berkeley, as it is wanting in his school
generally, is the organic element, apprehension
of the continuity of Nature : he abstracts soul
from body, the actual from its vehicle, labouring
to show that esse — percipi. And how then as to
■bosse ? He ignores it : it is for him as a book with
seven seals.
Nothing in history surpasses the strange ab-
surdity of this perfectly serious endeavour to de-
monstrate that the essence of the world consists
in its aspect, its mirrored reflection in conscious-
ness. And any one who examines Berkeley's life
and writings together can see at a glance that
the good bishop was a visionary, a kind of theo-
logico-mathematical enthusiast: full of quaint fancies
and delicate suggestions, but wholly destitute of
the two things above all necessary to make a great
thinker, the sense of reality and the capacity of
systematic organisation of thought. His thought
takes its tone not from biology, (the sphere of
the senses,) but from mathematics, recently en-
8o ORIGIN:
nobled by Newton's achievements : nor can any-
thing more conclusively demonstrate his extra-
ordinary lack of consecutive and co-ordinating grasp
than his astonishing blindness to the logical con-
sequences of his own principles. What could be
more ironical than the fervour of his crusade
against his bugbears, the Atheists and Free-
thinkers, the partisans of Matter? Did it never
occur to him that he was rooting up along with
the tares of his enemies' opinions the wheat of
his own ? that all mysteries reached not by sense
but abstraction stand on the same footing? and
that in hewing away at general ideas, he was
cutting down a branch on which he was seated
himself? Could anything be plainer? What kind
of dialectical depth can we allow in the man who
could not see so obvious a consequence ? Need
it astonish us, then, to find that the philosophy
of his old age {Siris) actually preaches exactly
that primordial universal matter which it was the
whole aim and object of the philosophy of his
youth to destroy ? Is the old man or the young
one to be our guide ? for they will meet no better
than the blessing of Judah and Issachar.
The simple truth is, that Berkeley did not know
what it was to think a philosophy out. His merit
lies in isolated fragments of insight, scattered here
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT.
and there in his writings like occasional gems in
a heap of paradoxical rubbish, and couched generally
in the form of queries: discrete, not continuous.
Nor, as his life shows, did he really know anything,
when he started his philosophy, but a little mathe-
matics f . Experience taught him wisdom : he
dropped quietly out of his paradoxes, and more
into harmony with the common sense of the world,
as age came on : the force of reality with all its
myriad potentialities gradually weaned him, as
it did Plato g , from the dialectical hallucinations
that had beguiled his youth. And yet in that youth,
actuated by the zealous enthusiasm that inspired
many other actions of his life, he did not shrink
from setting up his puny little unfledged philosophy,
crude, raw, impotent, empty-headed little weakling
as it was, against the profound, all-embracing,
organically founded and systematically thought-out
and world-tested evolutionary analysis of Aristotle
and his giant logical followers, the Schoolmen.
It was the well-meant rivalry of a farthing candle
with the great Sun at noon. There is indeed
something painfully ludicrous in the spectacle of
f It is the same with Hume, whose philosophy, the product of a
young man, exhibits, naturally enough, acute deduction of accepted
premisses to logical conclusions, not analytical regress from realities
to principles that will explain them.
* See Appendix.
G
82 ORIGIN:
a man posing as a philosopher, and writing volume
after volume, full of language and reasoning, whose
particular bugbear is general ideas. He should,
to be consistent, have expounded his philosophy
by a series of pictures and diagrams.
Berkeley's Idealistic dialectic, his argument for
Idealism h throughout, is nothing whatever but the
kaleidoscopic repetition of one and the same weari-
some fallacy, which runs through every page of his
writings : the assumption of the very thing which
he is labouring to disprove, Idealism established
on realistic assumptions, the disproof of any know-
ledge of an esse which is not pcrcipi, by its actual
employment. For example : —
' Phil. Have you not acknowledged that no real
'property of any object can be changed without
'some change in the thing itself?
' Hyl. I have.
' Phil. But as we approach to or recede from
' an object, the visible extension varies, being at one
' distance ten or a hundred times greater than at
'another. Doth it not therefore follow from hence
' likewise that it is not really inherent in the
' object ?
h ' According to my system,' he says, ' all things are entia rationis,
and he culls the distinction between entia rationis and entia realia
'a foolish distinction of the Schoolmen.' He takes his own ration-
alistic folly for wisdom, in entire good faith.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 83
' Hyl. I own I am at a loss what to think.
1 Phil. Your judgment will soon be determined,
'if you will venture to think as freely concerning
'this quality as you have concerning the rest. Was
'it not admitted as a good argument 1 that neither
' heat nor cold was in the water, because it seemed
' warm to one hand and cold to another.
' Hyl. It was.'
Or again :
' Phil. It seems then that light doth no more than
' shake the optic nerve ?
' Hyl. Nothing else.
' Phil. And that consequent to each particular
' motion of the nerves, the mind is affected with
' a sensation, which is some particular colour ?
' Hyl. Right.
1 Phil. And those sensations have no existence
' without the mind ?
1 Hyl. They have not.'
Such is the uniform and unvarying quality of
Berkeley's thought : always and everywhere we
find the very thing which he is disproving as-
sumed as a fact and made the basis of the ar-
gument : via., Knowledge of an object, an esse,
1 It was indeed. Here we see the necessity of Aristotle, to dis-
tinguish between the actual and potential heat.
G 2
84 ORIGIN:
beneath and without the percipi (water, light, optic
nerve, motion, &c). The very reasoning employed
to establish his thesis utterly destroys it : he cuts
his own throat in every line. The premisses as-
sume what the conclusion denies k : certainly a mode
of reasoning unknown to Aristotle and the poor old
Schoolmen, whose distinctions Berkeley so much
despises. But the obliging lay-figures in his dia-
logues, ever ready with their easy admissions,
never detect the fallacy: how should they, poor
creatures ? they are only the interlocutor himself,
under another name. By means of such dummy
dialectic as that of Plato or Berkeley, there is
no difficulty in proving or disproving anything.
The thing is a sham, a parade : show minus sub-
stance ; esse minus posse : imposing upon those
only who take — God bless them ! — dialogue for
dialectic, verses for poetry, a grinning row of
false teeth for Nature's genuine grinders l . Plato
forgot, when he invented this method, thinking to
fix Socrates on paper, that it lost ipso facto the
k A particularly striking instance of this common Idealistic method
is this : how can an Idealist talk, as they all do, of an inverted image
on the retina? How can the image be inverted, situated in an
opposite way, to the real object, if there be no such object?
1 As the doctor in Waverley ' was a believer in all poetry which
* was composed by his friends and written out in fair straight lines
' with a capital at the beginning of each.'
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 85
virtue and soul of the living question and answer,
retaining only its dry bones, the galvanic activity
of waxworks.
This glaring self-contradiction forms the substance
and core of all Berkeley's reasoning. Yet it did
not prevent J. S. Mill from pronouncing Berkeley
the greatest of all the metaphysicians, for all his
Logic did not enable Mill to see a fallacy that
stared him in the face. Mill will go bail for
Berkeley, but quis custodiat ipsicm ? Let Mill
answer for himself.
Consciousness tells us, says Mill, that we see
the real object : whereas we know that we see
only a variously coloured surface m . Indeed ! and
how come we to know that f Let Mill answer that
question, if he can, without committing logical
suicide. He will refer you to the time-honoured
old Chesselden case. But, on Mill's principles,
what has that case to do with me ? I am not
the patient in that case. I am myself. You tell
me that I see what I do not see : I ask for proof :
and you refer me to something outside, something
not myself, as a type of me : something diseased
into the bargain. And you call this proof. Proof !
Why, is it not just J. S. Mill who denies type,
essence, and believes only in particulars' ? Who
■ See § 3 on this point.
86 ORIGIN:
declares that syllogistic argument from type to
particulars n is a fallacy ? Yet here is this very
Mill appealing from somebody else's experience
to my own : arguing that I really see what I do
not see, because somebody else, who was diseased,
saw what I do not see. And pray, what is the
evidence on which he knows of the existence of
that somebody else? Surely not that he sees other
people? What then ?
And this is to replace the old Organon of Aris-
totle ! This marvellous logical genius, who has anni-
hilated the syllogism, and analyses thought, if he
is not mistaken, ' under better auspices ' than
Aristotle : this nineteenth century prodigy, who
tells us that the real fact of the matter, in Vision,
is something not only not corroborated by con-
sciousness, but even contradicted by it, is, if you
please, the very same man whose cardinal philo-
sophical principle is this : — that we can never know
anything primarily about anything, except what
experience and consciousness tell us !
To ' logic ' of this kind the world erects statues :
monuments of something other than it intends.
Where shall we turn for 'criticism?' where, but
to the Critical Philosophy?
The epoch making genius of Konigsberg, when
B See, on this point, Fait II. B, § 2.
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 87
at length awakened from his dogmatic slumber,
took a line of his own. Far from rejecting vulgar
realism, he admits it, under the new name of
Empirical Realism, as the primary fact : but he
immediately proceeds to qualify and retract the
admission by denying exactly that which forms
the essence of the vulgar belief — that it has any
validity apart from intuition. Space, Time, and
Causality have, on the contrary, nothing to do with
things in themselves, i.e. apart from the perceiving
mind. These are absolutely incognisable. Then
the question instantly presents itself: And how in
the world comes Kant to know anything about them ?
How is it that this critical philosopher commences
by dogmatising about the incognisable ? and con-
tradicts himself flatly at the beginning ? You tell
me that Space, Time, and Causality do not belong
to things in themselves : and yet you assert that
these things cause our sensations, and you speak
of them in the plural. What ! there are, then, many
of these things in themselves ? But how is this ?
for number, you say, applies only to phenomena.
And then, Space, the possibility of figure and form,
a purely mental contribution ? What ! the form of
a saddle, a saw, a boot, the crab's claw, the bat's
wing, the horse's hoof, the salmon's tail, of our own
ear, eye, brain or lungs, which it is impossible to
88 ORIGIN:
perceive, all given by our mind in the act of per-
ception ! Why, we must invent a Deity, a permanent
act of intuition, to explain the continuous existence
of the world when it is not being contemplated by
any human or animal eye : Its sole function shall
be to keep on contemplating : if It were to stop for
a moment, everything would go out ' bang, like
a candle', like Alice, if the Red King stopped
dreaming .
Well does Aristotle say, that the mind when
moving in absurdities becomes itself absurd. Kant's
Critical Philosophy has reached the apex. Its
grotesque absurdity escapes detection, owing to
the fact that he never clearly understood his own
meaning, and juggles everlastingly with the word
p/ienomena, which he employs to denote both ex-
ternal realities and subjective perceptions: (the two
being in his philosophy falsely identified :) e.g. he
says, on the opening page of his Critique : ' it is the
' matter of all phenomena which is given us a pos-
* teriori ; the form must lie ready for them a priori
'in the mind 1 '.' Now, as long as we remain in ab-
" If God did not exist, said Voltaire, it would be necessary to
create Him. Words prophetic of German philosophy, in which the
Deity becomes a sort of explanatory dialectical necessity dragged
in ex machitid to prop Idealism.
* Of notional classification or recognition alone is this true : e.c.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 89
stracto, thinking vaguely of phenomena as purely
mental affections, the full significance of this as-
tounding dictum does not come out : but take a
concrete example, a particular phenomenon, and then
see. Is the matter of a statue by Pheidias given
us a posteriori, and its form by our mind ? Is the
matter of a corkscrew, a hippopotamus, or a bishop,
given us a posteriori, and its form by our mind ?
You cannot save Kant by denying that these things
are the phenomena, because it is just the essence of
his philosophy that they are : vulgar realism being
empirically valid. Did Kant really suppose that
the mind in actu percipiendi^ there and then con-
verted an amorphous ' chunk ' of the Ding-an-Sich
'given' to it who knows how, into shape? turn one
chunk into a cartridge, another into a rifle, and a
third into a Brahmin sepoy ? and are there three
chunks for the three phenome?ta, one apiece ? or
does the mind divide for itself the continuous Ding,
chopping off such pieces as may serve its turn ?
Really, one might sometimes laugh, when one con-
this thint; which I see is a candle : but this was always known to
everybody.
*> Cp. J. H. Stirling, Text Book tc Kant: ' that house, this tree,
1 this table, this pen, external as they are, are not wholly so, but
' have forms projected into them from within my own self even
' in the very act of my perceiving them.'
9 o ORIGIN:
siders the imbecility of the world, for a quarter of
an hour. Why, did it never occur to this wonderful
critical philosopher, as we enquired in the Intro-
duction, to reflect that phenomena are not only
perceived but created by man ? What is a hatchet
or a shoe? what are machinery, sculpture, archi-
tecture ? Forms created by man. And is the whole
differentiation of Nature created by our mind in
the instant of perception ? Do not attempt to crawl
off at a tangent by importing into the question
hypothetical figments, universal ego, or any other
such devices to bolster up one error by making
another: I hamstring such quibbles with Occam's
Razor : entia non sunt multiplicanda prceter necessi-
tatem.
The very absurdity of this protects it, because
people are unwilling to suppose that any theory
of which they have made an idol could possibly
be such nonsense. But there is no escape : the
absurdity is a rigorous, logical, inevitable corollary
of Kant's fundamental dogmas. If, as he maintains,
phenomena* are empirically just what they seem to
r • In the Transcendental /Esthetic, we proved that everything in-
' tuited in space and time, all objects of a possible experience are
' nothing but phenomena, that is, representations : and that these,
1 as presented to us, as extended bodies, have no self-subsistent ex-
istence apart from human thought.' (Critique, ed. Meiklejohn,
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 91
be, then and there : if yet space be a purely mental
contribution of no validity minus the mind, and con-
sequently its form accrues to the chaotic matter
only in the moment of perception : then it follows
with iron necessity that the whole differentiation
of objects in respect of their form is bestowed upon
them by the mind : and you can escape only by
a concatenation of figments, the hypothetical sup-
position of some permanent act of perception, call
it by any name you please.
The simple fact is, as any one who closely examines
the Critique of Pure Reason can see, that, busily
occupied in elaborating his internal rational super-
structure, Kant never clearly understood his own
meaning as to the most important point of all, the
phenomenoft, its significance, and its relation to the
'thing in itself.' His thought in this respect is
simply a muddle, as he shows whenever he attempts
to explain himself. He wavers indefinitely between
vulgar realism and sceptical idealism, the inevitable
consequence of making space at once empirically
valid and a subjective phantasm: his outside is inside,
and he moves in a haze of confusion, because, having
once identified the phenomenon with the real ex-
p. 307.) Kant's notion of proof "is truly remarkable : there is nothing
in the Transcendental Esthetic bearing the remotest resemblance to
an argument.
92 ORIGIN:
ternal object, he is obliged to keep on contradicting
himself, by using the term object now for the phe-
nomenon, now for the thing in itself. These things
in themselves are really nothing but external objects,
which Kant's theory makes incognisable, but which
are, in fact, known not only to the world in general,
but to himself. Hence his actual knowledge of
them is constantly contradicting his theory that
they are incognisable ; and accordingly every page
of his book is a tissue of this self-contradiction :
the actual display of knowledge respecting a sphere,
knowledge of which he declares to be impossible.
His theory is simply a combination of two errors :
its psychological genesis is this. First, he accepts
vulgar realism: then he gratuitously denies it. Hence
he first identifies the phenomenon with the external
object : and then dogmatically severs them, thus
reducing the external object to & je ne sais qnoi by
deriving all its qualities from the perceiving mind.
It thus becomes a nonentity — in theory: in fact,
it continues to exist, in spite of Kant, just as if the
Transcendental ^Esthetic* had never been written.
If,' says Kant, ' things could be contemplated otherwise than
' as they are, and as the pure Understanding would cognise them,
' then they would all seem quite different : ergo, Space and Time
'are mere forms of intuition.' This is what he calls proof! And
what is this miserable figment, a pure Understanding? If three
times six were thirteen, then, &c, &c.
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 93
And yet it is just this foolish Transcendental
Esthetic which Schopenhauer, a most fervent disciple,
singles out as the only part of Kant's whole philo-
sophy which is sound : but then its extraordinary
merit and profundity console Schopenhauer for all
Kant's other shortcomings. The disciple, adopting
the doctrine of his master as to Space and Time,
has argued elaborately for it in a special treatise.
Here is a specimen of his reasoning :
' Sensation is and remains a process within the
'organism, and is limited as such to the region
'within the skin: it cannot, therefore, contain any
' thing that lies beyond that region, or in other
'words, anything outside us.' (Four-fold Root, &c.)
Here, forsooth ! is criticism ! What ! there is, then,
after all, an outside, a beyond, which sensation cannot
contain ? And pray, how do you know that ? Do you
not see that you are assuming the independent
existence of Space in order to refute it ? We cannot
perceive what is outside, because it is outside : there-
fore, we perceive what is inside: therefore, there is
no outside. Q.E.D.
Elsewhere, Schopenhauer breaks forth poetically,
a propos of vision — he was a great writer — as
follows : ' Sight needs no contact, nor even prox-
'imity: its field is unbounded and extends to
' the stars.' Perfectly true. But reconcile this
94 ORIGIN:
opinion, if you can, to the Transcendental Aesthetic.
Why this laudation of Sight? If Space be a purely
mental subjective contribution, why admire Sight
more than Touch? or why feel more admiration
for the Sight of the fixed stars than the Sight of
your own nose? What is the ground of distinction
between Sight and Touch? This, that Touch informs
us about bodies hi contact with our organism, and
Sight, about bodies at a distance. Let any one
square Schopenhauer's rhetoric with his criticism,
who can.
Enough of the critical philosophers : take, now,
some typical specimens of the scientific physiological
sensationalism of our own day : and to begin with,
listen to the late Professor Huxley, who has stamped
the doctrines of Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume,
with his eminent physiological approval.
' What the senses testify is neither more nor less
1 than the fact of their own affection l . As to the
' cause of that affection, they really say nothing : '
or again: 'the impact of the ethereal vibrations
' upon the sensory expansion, or essential part of
1 the visual apparatus, is sufficient to give rise to
1 all those feelings which we term sensations of light
1 It is not the senses, but the organs of sense, that are affected :
see below, § 3, for the criticism of this lamentable confusion between
senses and their organs.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 95
' and colour, and to that feeling of outness which
'accompanies all our visual sensations 11 .
Now, how is it that Professor Huxley comes to
be exhibiting here knowledge of those very causes
of sensations which he declares to be unknown? Who
does not see that his denial reposes upon the very
possibility which he denies? These ethereal vibrations,
this sensory expansion, this visual apparatus, not only
are these causes well known to him, but he actually
knows that they are sufficient to give rise to that
feeling of outness, &c. x Why, his knowledge is
perfectly amazing. And where, then, did it come
from ? Surely, Professor Huxley could not descend
to the humble, self-contradictory admission that it
came by observation and experiment, i.e. Sight ?
for he tells us that it could not so come, since the
senses tell us nothing of the causes of their affections.
Did he get it, then, by Divine Revelation, or did
he dream it ? To say that he got it in the laboratory
or the dissecting-room is to cut his own throat.
He uses the knowledge that came in through his
eyes to disprove its own possibility, which shows us
that more things than physiology are required to
make a philosopher. Huxley's actual science is
u Elementary Physiology 1 , pp. 240, 223. Similarly in his Essays
on Descartes, Berkeley, and Hume.
x Feeling of outness ! ' Is this the mighty ocean ? is this all ? '
96 ORIGIN :
the disproof of his own philosophy : and yet the
world took the philosophy on the authority of
the science ! Truly, there is here food for joyous
laughter.
Take a still more modern instance : — Professor
Theodor Ziehen, who says, in his Introduction
to Physiological Psychology, 'our science stands
' in the closest relation with the founder of the
' Critical Philosophy, Kant. Locke, Berkeley,
1 Hume, had prepared the way for the great truth y
' which Kant finally expressed, that primarily we
' have only the psychical series, the series of ap-
' pearances or phenomena, as he called them.
' The hypothetical " cause " of the phenomena or
' the psychical series is I. merely inferred, 2. a factor
' of which we know absolutely nothing.'
Very good : merely inferred and absolutely u-n
known. We turn, then, to any other page of his
book, and we read, e.g. on p. ior, as follows:
' the adequate physical stimulus of the eye is
' furnished by the vibrations of the ether ' . . . .
' not all velocities of ethereal vibration impart
' a sensation of light to the eye '....' the
' number of vibrations per second may be too
' large or too small to produce such a sensation '
. . . . ' in general, only more than 400 billions and
l This great truth is either a truism, or a fallacy.
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT 97
' less than 900 billions per second are capable of
1 exciting visual sensations.'
So Professor Ziehen was quite right, when he
said that his ' science ' was closely related to
Kant's philosophy. It is indeed of the same criti-
cal quality. From this, or almost any page of
his book, it turns out, that so far from the causes
of sensation being absolutely unknown to Professor
Ziehen, he possesses, on the contrary, a knowledge
of them which is absolutely appalling: he can
count with accuracy in billions in this absolutely
unknown sphere. What an astounding achieve-
ment ! But I want to know, how comes he to know
about the unknown ? Doubtless Professor Ziehen
would be justly annoyed if any one were to tell
him that his knowledge was all moonshine — a de-
lusion and a dream. But if it is really knowledge,
how can it be knowledge of the unknown ? Of two
things, one. Either he does not know what he
says he knows, and it is all nonsense about the bil-
lions, or the causes of phenomena are not un-
known. Which is it that is wrong—optics and
the undulatory theory of light, or Kant ? It may
be both : it must be one or the other. The only
question is, which ?
These citations, which might be increased in-
H
98 ORIGIN:
definitely, will suffice to show the reader clearly
the nature of the point here enforced : he can add
to them himself to any extent that he pleases by
rummaging the literature of philosophy.
The truth is simply this, that Idealism is neces-
sarily founded on a self-contradiction. It is obliged
to assume, in its own establishment, the very thing,
of whose possibility it is the denial : knowledge
of that which lies behind the phenomenon, of the
reality independent of its sensations, ideas, im-
pressions, &c. You cannot possibly refute vulgar
realism, except by realistic arguments. The pre-
liminary refutation of vulgar realism is a task
beyond the power of Idealism. I challenge any
reader to discover, in all the literature of philo-
sophy, or, if he can, to manufacture for himself,
a disproof of vulgar realism which does not as-
sume either that, or realism of a modified kind.
How can anything be more obvious ? How can you
first derive externality from Sight, and then employ
it to prove that Sight contains none ? How base the
disproof of the possibility of a certain kind of know-
ledge upon the actually possessed knowledge it-
self? The thing is manifestly ridiculous. And yet,
from Berkeley down, every Idealist without ex-
ception commits without suspicion this astonishing
fallacy, and bases his philosophy upon the very
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 99
thing which it maintains to be impossible. But
I ask, again and again : If Sight contains no exter-
nality, whence then comes all that external knowledge
by means of which they prove to us that i J is im-
possible ?
They all admit implicitly what they explicitly
deny, viz. : that somehow or other, as all their
proofs and arguments imply, we do get at the
causes of phenomena, ' behind ' them. The ques-
tion therefore for us is, How?
To that question we accordingly turn. Note,
meanwhile, the conclusion as to Idealism. There
is only one kind of Idealism possible : Idealism
by faith, the credo quia absurdum : the Idealism
which adopts its first principle without critical ex-
amination. Critical Idealism is impossible. No
Idealist can open his mouth to refute the vulgar
realism which is primarily in possession of the
field, and valid till it is refuted, without annihil-
ating himself. Refute it, by all means, if you
can. But if you cannot, you must accept it : and
if you can, you must cut your coat accordingly :
your disproof disproves also Idealism.
This much therefore is certain : that the much
despised vulgar person, however it may subse-
quently turn out with him, may at least laugh to
all eternity at the futile efforts of the Idealist to
H 2
ioo ORIGIN:
capture his position. He may indeed capture the
position, but only to arrive in it dead himself, like
the old Rajpoot chieftain before Chittore. Alive,
he carnot take it. Idealism, like those unfortunate
souls of "horn Plato tells us somewhere, is destined
to yearn for ever for critical existence, yet fated
not to be. Idealism is a philosophy only de facto,
and not de jure . : t is the illogical realisation of the
impossible z .
§ 2. The Raison d'etre, or D7ity, of Sight.
The founders of modern Idealism, whose evil that
they did lives after them, were the victims of their
own point of departure, abstraction. The senses
are unintelligible, they have absolutely no meaning,
except when considered in a light never dreamed
1 There are four possible theories, and only four, as to visual
phenomena. They may be —
1 . The very external realities themselves.
2. Copies, images, more or less closely resembling those realities.
3. Signs, or symptoms, indicative of realities, but totally unlike
them : phenomena of an unknown x.
4. Signs, symptoms, ideas, impressions, sensations, or what you
will, indicative of nothing but themselves.
Of these four, the two last are the view of Idealism : the first
of the vulgar : the second contains the truth, but it requires ex-
planation. Properly understood, it coincides with the vulgar view.
See below, § 3. Note, also, that on either of the last two theories,
science is impossible.
v
THE NATURE OF SIGHT 101
of by Descartes or Berkeley, Hume or Kant, Reid
or Hamilton. All these philosophers, when dealing
with the senses, fumble in the dark void of ab-
straction with a mere spoonful of isolated water,
knowing absolutely nothing of the vast ocean of
organic existence and natural economy, the whole,
of which our senses are but special cases. The
immeasurable superiority of Aristotle to every other
philosopher, ancient or modern, a superiority which
he retains even in these days of evolution, arises
principally from the fact that he always has his
eye upon organic existence as a whole, and his
thought moves accordingly in the true sphere of
the problem. He never converts realities into non-
entities by abstracting them from that nexus of
relations in which alone they can be what they are.
The philosopher, who, meditating upon the nature
of Sight, comes to the conclusion that the vulgar
are mistaken, and adopts views analogous to those
which we analysed in the last section, is settling
in a very summary manner a question that does
not affect men only, but involves the whole world
of living creatures, which stands or falls theoretically
by his answer. Is there now a single Cartesian
philosopher who recognises Sight to be that which
it is, a capacity not human, but animal ? Do you
find a glimpse of this conception in Berkeley, Hume,
102 ORIGIN:
Kant, or their commentators ? But, says the reader,
how should we expect to find it ? it is only since
Darwin that we have learned to view these things
in their true light ; but they lived before evolution.
And how, then, about Aristotle, whom they despised
and rejected ? This point of view is the very soul
of him : it runs through every line of his works ;
it is printed large on every page of him : and yet,
for the Cartesians, he wrote in vain. None, says
the proverb, are so blind as those who will not see.
Aristotle was to be condemned, because he was
Aristotle, and so the modern philosophers went
on their way rejoicing in the new light of their
dense ignorance of Nature and her methods. Ob-
serve, for example, how, two thousand years after
Aristotle, the fact of a chicken seeing as soon as
it is out of its shell disconcerts J. S. Mill a , and
how lamely he endeavours to reckon with it. Why
this awkward uneasiness ? Why, because it had
never occurred to Mill before to consider his philo-
sophical premisses in their true light, the universal,
organic, animal point of view. This chicken, seeing
accurately and well, in so unexpected and annoying
a manner, is quite a novel idea to Mill, who though
he knows nothing about chickens or any other
animal, looks down from the height of his wisdom
* See his Dissertations.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT 103
upon poor old Aristotle. Mill has read his Berkeley
and his Hume, but he has never observed the facts
of Life : he is a mere book philosopher, a continua-
tor, a commentator : the source of his principles
is not Nature and original analytical thought, but
his library, and his awful father. Life as it is in
living beings, animals : Nature, her methods and
means of attaining her ends, are foreign, strange,
and surprising to him. Who could have supposed
that this wretched chicken would see in this dis-
gusting manner ? Well indeed might it set him
thinking. This miserable little fluffy atom, this
absurd little egg-shaped insignificance, annihilates
the philosophy of J. S. Mill, and upsets Berkeley's
Theory of Vision ; proving, beyond all possibility of
denial, that Sight does not always require experience
and the association of visual and tactual sensations.
Then, if not always, does it ever ? Do we ourselves
see like the chicken ? What is Sight ?
Discussions of Sight by Cartesian philosophers
resemble a treatise on comparative anatomy written
by a man who had never seen any skeleton but his
own. As if it were possible adequately to handle
any general characteristic of animal life, sex, gen-
eration, development, sense, by confining yourself
to a single specimen ! When Darwin discusses
sexual selection, does he confine himself to man?
104 ORIGIN:
Aristotle could have taught these philosophers
better than Darwin, had they not been so wise in
their own conceit, that it is as animals, and not as
men, that we have Sight b . The sense of Sight
is, in animals that have it, one of the sine quibus
non : it is a means to an end, an instrument of life,
like the capacity of flying, running, swimming,
burrowing, &c, to each capacity being assigned
its appropriate and necessary organ, as fins, wings,
legs, eyes, &c. Consequently, before proceeding
to lay down the nature of Sight, the first question
of any one must be, what part does Sight play in
the animal economy : thence, a fortiori, in our own ?
The general precedes the special: the animal foun-
dation comes before the human edifice reared upon
it. If you want to understand Sight, you must
go to the sphere of its operation, the scene of its
action, and watch it at work. Then, and not till
then, after having accumulated your observations,
you can speculate on its nature z . You can no more
b ovk \i &v6pa>iroL tcr/xtv, 1\V fj foia, inrdp-)((i.
c It is really extraordinary to see how completely the Cartesians
reverse the truth as to themselves and Aristotle. Hume or Mill,
e.g. , preach experience, and condemn a priori metaphysical methods.
Yet it was they themselves, not Aristotle, who were erecting schemes
of human nature on a basis of ignorance as to Nature in general.
Aristotle's method is the analysis of accumulated facts: theirs is
abstract deduction from a rationalistic dogma.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 105
understand the nature of Sight apart from the sphere
of its operation, than you can understand the tail
of the salmon or the mouth of the whale, away from
the water of the river or the sea. For it is the work,
the ditty, of all these organs and capacities that
made, explains, and accounts for them : and that
work can be performed only in mediis rebus. How
can the philosopher who ignores this utilitarian, or
evolutionary, or altruistic principle of explanation,
who does not know that everything organic is for
the sake of some other thing, make head or tail of
the senses ? For Sight is as strictly an instrument
as any other organic capacity. Can you explain
the differences of sight, the vision of the eagle, the
swan, the owl, without reference to their peculiar
habits ? and if not the differences of the capacity,
how then the capacity itself? For the general
capacity is only contained in the sum total of the
particular species of visual power. Contemplate the
economy of Nature : consider her hosts of animals,
creeping, flying, burrowing, diving, dashing about
in all directions in escape or pursuit, by means of
their organs and capacities, depending at every
moment amid a legion of enemies and hostile in-
fluences on their powers and faculties and senses
for their lives : and then turn to the dogmas of
Cartesian philosophers about the senses : you will
106 ORIGIN:
see that they all ignore the essence of the matter.
They are attempting to deal with organic means
without reference to their ends : they do not even
know that they are means : they turn the utility
of the senses to the futility of the senses, by isolat-
ing them and abstracting them from their work. Ig-
noring this work, which alone gives them significance,
they rob the senses of their point and stultify them
altogether.
For they invariably argue as if the mind's interest
in its ideas, sensations, impressions, phenomena, &c,
were a purely aesthetic interest, OewpCas eve/ca : they
represent 'the ego ' as the disinterested and in-
different spectator of these idle phenomena: as it
the torpid and curious contemplation of phenomena
were the primary and original function of the mind.
Whereas, on the contrary, the truth is that such
contemplation, scientific, aesthetic, or metaphysical,
is a luxury, an amusement, a pastime ; possible
among the countless hosts of creatures only to man,
and even of men, only to those in comparatively
easy circumstances : to a mere handful, as it were,
of beings. It is universally ignored by Cartesian
philosophers that the senses of the animal are the
means and possibility of its life and its action
a hostile world : or in other words that its ideas,
impressions, phenomena, &c, are its WEAPONS in
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 107
the incessant struggle for existence : their permanent,
primary and underlying function, the preservation
of that self to which they belong". reXos yap ov yvutcns
a\\a Trpdgcs : the phenomena that appear in Sight
are not, as they become in Art or Philosophy, an
end in themselves, but only a means to that end,
which is life itself. The mind is no mere magic-
lantern to amuse or delude us with shadows
[phenomena): it is rather a lamp, the light of Nature,
to discover objects in the surrounding darkness and
enable us to cope with them. And yet this is just
what Cartesians deny. They eviscerate the senses
of their externality, and deny that they either can
or do give us any information of the real nature of
the external object e . But the proof that they do
is the fact of existence. Imitating a formula of Kant,
we may say, ' they do, for they must, otherwise life
' were impossible,' and Idealism is the theoretic im-
possibility and stultification of organic Nature.
d This is the principle on which Aristotle accounts for the parts
or organs of animals : the end of all is the preservation of the animal
(ffw^nu tV cpiiaiv) in various ways, by fighting or fleeing, &c.
• ' No sensation can give me any information but how I am
'affected, I myself: of any information as regards the object I am
'entirely void.' Stirling's Text Book to Kant. As to which, see
below, § 3 : and observe how Stirling, just like Kant, as we saw,
is obliged to speak of the ' thing in itself as the object, i.e. to imply
knowledge of the theoretically unknown x.
108 ORIGIN:
Oh ! but Hume admitted it, the acute reader will
exclaim : he admitted that action refutes scepticism,
though reason cannot : as an agent he was perfectly-
satisfied. But this objection mistakes the point :
which Hume never saw. His point is quite different.
What he says is this : that the necessities of action
compel us to disregard the sceptical conclusions of
reason, which are still irrefutable. What I say,
on the contrary, is that the fact of organic exist-
ence f proves its possibility, and this possibility
demonstrates that the senses give us the real nature
of things, show us really what they are : — that is,
disprove his premisses, for he denied the fact.
He is candid enough to allow that life and action
will not square with his philosophical conclusions:
but he never either saw or suspected that, properly
considered and analysed, they annihilate his pre-
misses. That his premisses were erroneous it never
entered his head to imagine : his faith in them is
perfect and implicit : he never entertains a mo-
mentary scruple concerning thems, notwithstanding
If it be objected, that the sceptic can, from his standpoint, know
nothing of organic existence, I retort by challenging him to disprove
vulgar realism from his standpoint : which, as I have shown in the
last section, he can never do. Dogmatic and didactic scepticism,
as I have shown throughout this essay, is a tissue of self-contradiction.
* e.g. he says of Berkeley that his writings are the best sceptical
education possible, because his arguments produce no conviction,
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 109
the fact that, as we have already seen, they are
based on self-contradiction.
To return.
Every organic body, said Aristotle, ages ago,
lives by its wits, and must therefore, if it is to
preserve its life, perceive things not only when it
is in contact with them, but also from a distance 11 .
What is it, now, that enables vultures to flock
to a dead camel, owls to catch mice in the dark,
and in general, each animal to pursue and capture
its prey or elude and escape from its enemies ?
Wings, legs, beak, claws, &c. ? Certainly, but these
are all only secondary : there is a prior weapon
which makes all these possible by conveying intelli-
gence : in a word, Sight, which initiates all, by
instantaneously discovering the wliere and the what
of the object to avoid or pursue betimes: i.e. at a
distance'.
But in opposition to this, what says Idealism ?
This, that Sight is, in fact, not what it seems to
be : that ' the ego ' perceives, not others, but only
yet admit of no answer. Not only do they admit of an answer
(see § 3), but their argument in a vicious circle (§ i) is so palpable
that it does Hume small credit to have failed to see it.
h ct -yhp jucAAct aw^eadai oil p6vov 8e? a.irrofj.ei'of alodavtoQai dAAd
Kal &iro6tv.
Hearing and scent do the same of course, in special cases very
powerfully : but we confine ourselves here to Sight.
no ORIGIN:
itself: that the distant object itself cannot be, and
is, in fact, not seen : that ' of any information with
'regard to the object I am entirely void : ' that the
real nature of external objects is not given by Sight :
that ' the ego ' is shut up in itself, knows and can
know nothing but purely subjective phenomena,
&c, &c.
Why, life is possible, only if all this is absurd :
only if the very external objects are and can be
perceived, as they actually are, at a distance : aye,
and a very great distance too.
I repeat : Life, the whole organic creation, is
POSSIBLE, only if the creatures, ourselves included,
do actually perceive external objects as they really
are in themselves at a distance : otherwise, IMPOS-
SIBLE. The premisses of Idealism contradict the
possibility of organic existence : ergo, conversely,
the fact of organic existence annihilates the pre-
misses of Idealism : for ab actu ad posse valet con-
seeutio. The real nature of external objects must
be perceived at a distance : for if not, no creature
could live for a day k .
When Berkeley laboured, in the supposed interests
of theology (he was really injuring his cause) sophis-
tically to dissociate what God and evolution have
joined, Sight and Touch, and dogmatically denied
k iraat p.iv ro?s l'x ovai ourripias tvtKa iindpx (i V fyu-
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 1 1 1
that the object we see is the very same object we
touch (see his Theory of Vision, §§ 49, 136, &c),
he was only proving, little as he suspected it, his
own blank ignorance of that natural economy, dis-
covered by Aristotle, of which the first law is, that
every creature, and every organ of such a creature,
exists for the sake of its peculiar work. Now, what
is the work or duty of Sight? It is simply, the
revelation of distant objects betimes to the organism
possessing it, to enable it, among other things, to
avoid THAT, which it would injure it to touch.
Were there, as Berkeley labours to show, no identity :
were the object we see in fact other than the object
we touch, then life would be impossible. But it is
not only not impossible: it is actual: ergo, Berkeley's
thesis is absurd : an ingenious but unsound paradox,
reposing, as we shall see in the next section, on
a want of sufficiently close analysis and an abuse
of language. His own existence, could he have
but seen it, disproved his theory. For how had he
preserved it himself, how had his countless gener-
ations of ancestors handed it on to him, like runners,
from individual to individual, but by learning at
every moment from Sight at a distance how to avoid
that very self-same object which it would have in-
jured them to touch. Berkeley does not understand
what Sight is: he confounds a bit of Sight, an
U2 ORIGIN:
element, with the whole, its potentiality with its
actuality 1 .
Idealism reposes on the dogmatic stultification
of the senses. Perception, on the Idealistic hypo-
thesis, has absolutely no meaning at all : it is non-
sense. Perception in its very notion implies that its
possessor lives not by and in himself but in others:
lives by continually adjusting himself to those others.
He has perception precisely in order to do this, by
perceiving, not himself, but those others, as they really
are : for if he perceived them otherwise than as they
are, he might just as well not perceive them at all,
and would in fact speedily cease to do so. Idealism
stultifies perception : explains it by futilising it :
by laying down that perception of others is really
only perception of self, and that what those others
really are in themselves is beyond knowledge. Much
use this sort of perception would be to the hawk
or the eagle, the tiger or the shark ! Is it not plain
that all these philosophers ignore the dependence
of life on the senses, the USE of all these phenomena,
impressions, ideas, sensations ? Are these mere otiose
1 Astronomy, in particular, would be impossible, it Berkeley were
right : see Airy's Popular Astronomy, p. 65, for a type of almost
all experimental reasoning in that science. Do two men on opposite
sides of the earth observing a star, see one and the same, or two
different stars?
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 113
meaningless phantasms, indicative of nothing but
themselves ? Or are they not rather information by
telegram to the creature to warn it to action ? What
is a beast of prey? are not all animals, ourselves
included, beasts of prey? and how then do they
prey ? Certainly not by perceiving only themselves.
When we consider the wild beasts and their ways,
the fowls of the air, the fishes of the sea, the myriads
of insects, all living from hand to mouth by perceiv-
ing things (each the other) as they really are at
a distance, there is something unspeakably grotesque
about this philosophical paradox : this solemn trifling
of rationalistic speculation which has neglected the
analysis and exact determination of the nature of
sense. Objects are distant, and therefore cannot
be themselves seen: therefore, what is seen is inside;
the mind is limited to itself. Eh! wiseacres! and
how then does the salmon rise to a fly, how do the
eagles gather together where the carcase is ? Are
you so sure that objects cannot be themselves seen
at a distance ? Have you disproved that yet ? Will
you decide a priori upon what is or is not possible,
without looking to see ? But you say, vulgar realism
is absurd. Is it? How do you know? Because the
things are at a distance, and therefore cannot be seen
there — riest ce pas ? And pray, how do you know
that they are at a distance, if you cannot see them
I
1 14 ORIGIN:
there ? Can you, or can you not, see the Moon ?
That is the question.
The curious delusion that causes all this paradox
and absurdity has not only tangled the Idealists in
its nooses : but it has snared even their antagonists,
who always concede to theui their point, even in the
very act of endeavouring to refute them. This is
just why they have none of them ever succeeded.
Take, for example, some statements on this point
made by the author of Physical Realism, the latest
attack on the position of Idealism m .
1 Berkeley certainly proved that we do not see
<an object at a distance,' 'we do not see external
' objects at a distance from the eye. The propa-
1 gation of undulations to the retina and the con-
1 sequent nervous motion prove that we do not see
' external objects at all' (p. 239); 'we see no solidity'
(p. 228) ; 'there is no vision of the third dimension'
(p. 229) ; ' we see an extended coloured plain '
(p. 232). ' Berkeley proved that we do not see the
m My obligations of all kinds to Professor Case are such that
I differ with him only with reluctance and against the grain. But
it was from himself I learned the Saiov irportn^v tV aX-tidfiav.
Physical Realism consists of i. an argument from what is known
to how we know it, its data: we do know, ergo, we can, somehow,
reach a physical universe : and 2. an attempt to supply a solution
of this somehow. It is this second point which seems to me to be
unsuccessful : with the first I entirely coincide.
THE NA TV RE OF SIGHT. 1 1 5
1 real situation of objects, and in especial that we
■ do not see which is up and which is down, but
'an inverted image' (p. 234); 'we see no remote
' distance, no real magnitude, and no real situation
' of external objects; no solidity, no resistance, no
' protrusion, no outness of the world in external
' space ; this is what Berkeley proved ' (p. 240) ;
'no external object is sensible' (p. 24); 'we speak
' of perceiving the fire though we only infer it '
(p. 25) ; 'the external thing is inferred by reason'
(p. 82) ; ' we have no empirical intuition except of
'ourselves' (p. 54); 'sense never apprehends a non-
' ego distinct from the ego, that is, the man himself
(P- 82).
To all this 1 reply by a question : does Professor
Case really hold that all Nature is invisible ? What
is the distinction between visible and invisible Nature?
Is it not that we see one and infer the other ? We
see one side of the moon, and infer the other : but
according to Professor Case, both are inferred. Do
we, or do we not, see ships, butterflies, snipe, news-
papers, legs of mutton, cricket balls ?
I give a direct negative to every statement about
Sight quoted above. I assert that we see everything
which Professor Case says that we do not see. Or in
other words, the error of Professor Case, if I may
venture to say so of one whose learning and abilities
I 2
n6 ORIGIN:
I know to be far above my own, is precisely the same
error as that of all the Idealists : he does not under-
stand what Sight IS : he confounds its elementary
constituents with its whole, wrongly identifies the ego
with its organism, and is therefore necessarily obliged
to assert that we see what we do not see, and that
we do not see what we do see. Sight is not in-
ference ; nor has reason anything whatever to do
with it ; we do not see a coloured plain, nor an
inverted image ; nor did Berkeley prove any of
those things specified by Professor Case. All those
statements repose on and spring from that error
which is exactly the cause that generates and per-
petuates Idealism ; the confusion between the nature,
the complete whole, of Sight, and its constituent
elements and conditions. Why does the world think
and say that it sees e.g. trees and flowers, if it does
not ? What is the essence and meaning of seeing ?
That is the question to which we now turn.
Meanwhile, we may sum up the argument in this
section as follows.
The aphorism in which Descartes wrapped up
Idealism for his successors to unfold and develope
was : Cogito ergo sum : je pense ; done, je suis ?
[Note, that this cogito ergo sum is valid, only
if we strictly define and limit the sum, thus : Cogito
ergo sum, qud cogitans. But how then as to me, not
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 117
qua cogitating, but qud everything else, qud living,
dying, loving, hating, eating, drinking, begetting,
talking? Descartes' position is in fact utterly futile.
You can argue existence from cogitation, only in
that sense of the word existence which is limited
to cogitation, the merest superficies of existence.
Descartes' aphorism places the essence of existence
in thought, which is pure nonsense : he ignores and
leaves out the whole of man's other potentialities,
all his organic nature en bloc, with the solitary excep-
tion of actual thought. This is simply ridiculous :
it cuts off the esse from the posse, and makes it
absolutely unintelligible. The rational faculty of
man is that which is peculiar to him: but his organic
animal nature is far more universal and profound :
'one touch of nature makes the whole world kin ;'
and his senses are even more essential than his
reason to his life. Descartes destroys the kinship,
the continuity. To place the core of human nature
in its rational activity is to miss life altogether, as
the development of Cartesianism proves. And in
fact, Descartes shows plainly, by the use he made
of his aphorism — he uses it to infer his existence
as a man, whereas it only justifies him in inferring
his rational existence — how sorely he stood in need
of a dose of those categories of that old Aristotle
whom he despised. What do you mean, my dear
n8 ORIGIN:
Descartes, by sum ? for iroKkayjas Xeyerat to 6v.
The truth is that he and his followers supplement
the narrow content of a bad principle by illicit
conveyance : they make up for the deficiencies of
their original starting-point by illegitimately intro-
ducing those organic elements which it does not
contain. They smuggle in the potentiality and
continuity of the real world and real men and
women up the back stairs. This is why, in Car-
tesian treatises on human nature, the human nature
is conspicuous chiefly by its absence : such elements
as are in fact actually present being dragged in
forcibly over the wall, not by the door of their
principle. They are treatises, not upon human
nature, but upon abstract individual rationality — an
ens rationis with no blood in its pallid spectral
body.]
The aphorism, then, which we may oppose to
that of Descartes, as containing the fruitful germ
of all continuous and organic Nature is : Sum ergo
percipio : i.e. existence of Self implies perception
of others and is impossible without it : the senses are
prior to thought, and more universal, more common,
more vital.
So again, the question which Kant, whose philo-
sophy is a mere restatement of Descartes, a fuller
explication of his implications, propounded to meta-
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 119
physicians, was this : How are synthetic judg-
ments a priori possible?
[A question, observe, to which his own answer
is no answer at all. Even if we grant that Time
and Space are mere forms of intuition, still that
does not give the possibility of any judgments at
all, as Kant thought. So far, you have nothing but
blank forms ; no spatial or temporal determinations ;
no subjects or predicates ; nothing to judge about;
no elements of a judgment. These can come to
us only a posteriori, and then it is that we obtain
our generalities by abstraction from concrete par-
ticular material cases : thus, one (egg), two (dogs)»
three (men), straight (stick), curved (bow), round
(moon), and so on ; i.e. mathematics : which do
not, as is constantly asserted, deal with pure space
and time, but with determinations of space and
time, wholly abstracted from concrete particulars and
all necessarily a posteriori*. That such extremely
poor stuff as Kant's ' analysis ' of this matter could
ever pass muster is simply unintelligible to me.
There are no synthetic judgments a priori, for the
very simple reason that there are no judgments,
n I refer the reader, for some admirable discussions on this subject,
to Professor Case's Physical Realism, Stallo's Concepts and Theories
of Modem Physics, and Harper's Metaphysics of the School. But
it is all in Aristotle.
120 ORIGIN:
nor any possibility of any judgments a priori at all.
Like all the other Cartesians, Kant pretends to derive
from the subject what he really obtained long ago,
before he became a philosopher, from the object:
he bestows on his hypothetical subject, or ' ego' the
benefit of all that experience which the real one,
i.e. he himself, has acquired : producing, like a
juggler eggs, synthetic a priori judgments from
a bag that does not contain any.]
The question which in Kant's fashion we may
propound to Idealists is this: How is life possible?
i.e. how is it possible for any animal to live, unless
it can adjust itself to external objects by perceiving
their real nature, and at a distance ?
§ 3. The Analytical Definition of Sight.
to fitv bvvdfia, to Se evreXf^eia ov.
The error committed by all the philosophers
without exception with regard to Sight is this,
that they do not distinguish between the poten-
tiality and actuality of Sight, but sometimes ab-
stract the latter from the former, sometimes con-
found them together and identify the esse of Sight
with what is only a part of its posse. To explain
this clearly and fully is the object of this section,
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 121
which brief as it is has cost me many years of
intense meditation : and I hope that the reader will
chew and digest it line by line : it will be worth
his while. The extreme subtlety and delicacy of
this beautiful problem are not more remarkable
than its simplicity, when once it is mastered. But
mangle it with the coarse and indiscriminate sledge-
hammer of carelessness, and you destroy philo-
sophy.
Whoever begins with abstractions must end with
them. You cannot get, logically, more out of the
sack than you originally put into it : and if the
external world or the real nature of things is not
in your premisses, you will never get it out of them.
It has accordingly always been easy for Idealists to
show, and so far with justice, that logic is on their
side — assuming the premisses with which everybody
starts. If what ' the ego ' perceives is always only
itself, by whatever term you call it, then the ne-
cessary logical corollary is and can be nothing but
Idealism.
But now, we have seen that Idealism involves
self-contradiction and absurdity. Where then lies
the solution ? I answer, in the exact analytical de-
finition of the nature of Sight : which owing to the
want of this exact analysis has always been muti-
122 ORIGIN:
lated, dogmatically eviscerated of half its contents.
For the picture presented to us by Sight is no
abstraction. It is, on the contrary, the point of
continuity at which mind and matter, logic and
physics, touch : it combines and partakes of both :
its nature is double, it is a whole, compounded of
two halves, which has been confounded with, and
degraded to, now one, now the other of its halves.
This is one of those cases wherein the half is not
more than the whole but infinitely less.
Owing to their failure to detect the double nature
of Sight the philosophers have fallen into confusion.
This confusion consists in a latent a priori fallacy,
to which, in order to mark it distinctly, I give the
somewhat alarming title of the Obj edification of the
Subject: the confusion in various ways of the ego
with its own organism. It is this which drives the
philosophers inevitably, and as it were against
their will, into the hopeless quagmire of Idealism,
Scepticism, eternal perplexity and self-contradiction:
yet they can never free the question from its
paradox, because the misconception is latent, lying
unobserved beneath and anterior to all thought upon
the problem, involving them a priori in misunder-
standing and foredooming them to failure. It is not
a Critique of Pure Reason, it is a Critique of Impure
Reason that is wanted, showing how false notions or
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 123
prejudices, latent and unobserved, form a priori
categories in which all new ideas are received. It
did not seem, for example, to Kant, that he himself
was, in fact, under the influence of just such a dis-
torting a priori prejudice which poisoned and futil-
ised his whole philosophy a priori.
I, the conscious personality, the l ego,' the subject
which perceives and knows, is neither something
existing within the organism, in any pineal gland, to
which the senses are inlets, nor is it something over
and above, additional to, and numerically other than,
the organism — the old barbarian conception of the
soul as a sort of tenant or lodger in the body : the
notion of Animism, of ' Pneumatology,' of the savage,
and of Plato : — nor, yet again, is it the organism,
identical with it, one and the same thing. It is
the actuality of the organic powers — €We\e\;eia rod
Bvvdfiei ovros. To illustrate by a metaphor, which
is, however, only partially adequate , the ego stands
to its organism as its focus stands to a concave
mirror : it is its outcome, essentially bound up with
and dependent on it, exists through its agency and
apparatus : yet it is not another extra thing located
within it, nor is it the same thing. What the or-
Because in the case of soul and body the relation is reciprocal :
whereas with the focus and the mirror the first is wholly determined
by the second.
124 ORIGIN:
ganic powers can, that the ego is and does : it is
actually what they are potentially : it is the inward
illumination and realisation of organic possibilities.
But now, in considering the senses, the philo-
sophers all without exception unconsciously ab-
stract, hypostatise, as it were materialise the ego.
They all argue and think and talk of the perceiving
ego, the percipient subject, as if it were, not the
actuality and expression of the organic powers, but
a sort of separate and distinct materialistico-spiritual
substantial thing, co-existing with and in the or-
ganism, with a shape and a place, an extent and
content, an outside and inside of its own : they
objectify the subject, bestow upon the nature of an
object, either by completely separating it from, or
by identifying it with, its organism. All their lan-
guage and thought is pervaded by, inwoven with,
and poisoned by the misconception. The ' ego ' has
'impressions' — a metaphor from wax and a seal:
ideas, phenomena, &c, are ' in ' and ' o n ' it : it
lives 'in' the body, and the senses are 'inlets' or
'avenues ' or 'channels' to it : it is 'within ' and ob-
jects are 'without:' the forms of objects, as in Kant's
philosophy, 'lie ready for tJiem in the mind' — it is
then a kind of box, surface, or receptacle ? Take
any exponent of Idealism, from Berkeley down ;
examine carefully his argument : you will see, better
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 125
than any explanation or quotation can show you,
how this a priori delusion determines the thought :
and the first cause of the insoluble perplexity will
discover itself: the scales fall from your eyes, and
the question rights itself like a ship, when the cable
that chains and submerges it parts with a snap.
For it at once becomes plain how this initial
underlying conception of the ego as a sort of re-
ceptacle or surface in or on which impressions or
representations from objects impinge naturally forces
them to the conclusion that the ego is conscious
only of its own modifications p, its own self or sub-
stance — hence the perplexity. The philosophical
dead-lock is generated by the initial a priori mis-
conception of the ego as a sort of extended thing
or substantial entity : the confusion of the ego with
its organism, of the senses with the material organs
of sense. These philosophers all make an antithesis
between the distant object and the ego: but there
is no such thing : the antithesis is between the object
and the organism. The ego is not a thing like an
object : it is an act : it has no parts and no mag-
nitude : its essence and being are its action, i.e.
knowing or perceiving. Images and impressions do
not ' strike the senses,' as, from Hume down, philo-
f Modern physiological sensationalism puts it in another way :
for which see below.
126 ORIGIN:
sophers all with irritating and obstinate absurdity,
repeat : there is no impinging or striking upon the
senses or the ego at all, but upon the organs of
sense : the sense is the conscious result, the actu-
ality and realisation of the possible operation of an
organ so affected. In all the reasoning of the philo-
sophers on this head, physiological and critical con-
fusion reign. It is never the ego and the senses,
but always the organism and the organs of sense,
which are affected by external objects. The philo-
sophers all transfer to the ego the nature and
qualities of its organism : hence all the trouble.
What right, for example, has Hume, or any similar
philosopher, to talk of objects or images from
objects ' striking upon the senses ? ' That is realism
and physiology and confusion : it implies just that
external knowledge of the causes of ' impressions ' ab
extra which he denies. From the pufely sceptical
point of view no such conception or phraseology
is either possible or permissible.
So far from perceiving always and only itself,
what 'the ego' perceives is, on the contrary, always
and necessarily something not itself. For the ego is
always perceivcr, never perceived, because not even
perceptible : it is the seer, not the seen : it knows
itself not perceptibly, but only by reflection,
thought turned back and bent inwards ; nay, it
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 127
exists only in the first person, as the term ' ego '
implies : from the outside there is only an or-
ganism, the material possibility and vehicle of
'the ego ' : you cannot perceive it, either your own
or any one else's ; it is never a perceptible object,
and has no qualities of perceptible objects ; each
of us is confined to his own, which he knows only
indirectly in its exercise. • And in swoons, ' we' dis-
appear, like ghosts : the act ceases : nay even in
sleep, which returns at regular intervals, the ego
ceases, not absolutely, but temporarily. ' We ' are
then, not actually, but only potentially : the dream
being the dim mysterious suggestion of the poten-
tiality of an ego which for the moment is not ac-
tual, not in full being, but which emerges, when the
spell that bound it in sleep (we know not how) is
broken, and arises, like the electric spark, once
more out of its gloom, and again becomes a reality.
And so, even if Sight were, what it is not, but
what many suppose it to be : even if, that is to say,
what we saw were, not the real object, but only our
organism, it would still be altogether false to say
that the ego perceives only itself : its own organism
being just as much external to the ego as is the
furthest of the fixed stars.
But what then do we actually see ? What is the
nature and essence of Si^ht ?
128 ORIGIN:
We find that, apparently, we see the external
object at a distance : whereas physiology seems to
contradict this, placing ' what we see ' in our head.
For example, if, when we were contemplating any
object, say, a ship at sea, sudden pressure were ex-
erted on our brain, the whole picture would in-
stantly disappear : we should lose consciousness.
How, then, account for the apparently flagrant
contradiction between the verdict of the vulgar and
the verdict of science, the organic means in our
brain and eye, and the seen object apparently away
at a distance ?
The paradox and perplexity here arise from not
understanding what Sight is: from our latent and
inveterate confusion in thought of the organism and
the ego : of the potentiality of Sight with its ac-
tuality : the false identification of the final and
complete conscious result with its sub-conscious
organic condition.
The Intuitive Realism of Reid and his followers
was a mere uncritical, unanalytical deus ex machind,
the refuge of anti-scepticism to dogmatic absurdity :
and yet in a way its advocates were wiser in their
foolishness than the ' critical ' philosophers were in
their wisdom. For the explanations and accounts
of Sight given by philosophers from Berkeley down
are all mere caricatures : attempts based upon in-
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 129
sufficient insight to degrade, by bad analysis, the
complete function to its undeveloped raw conditions :
to confound and mix up the nature and essence of
Sight with its elements : to identify evolved power
with unevolvcd impotence : to argue us out of our
acquired capacities and deny them, for want of
ability to understand. When Berkeley, Hume,
Huxley, and the rest identify Sight with ' sensa-
tions or ideas of light and colour,' they show only
that they completely fail to grasp the nature of
Sight. Sensations of light and colour are no more
Sight than a lump of gold is a watch.
Sight is an evolutionary acquired organic power
or capacity (efts). The eye rises by gradations, from
incapacity to capacity, from the dubious pigment
spot of the ' Naked-eyed ' Medusa, to the telescopic
organ of the eagle or the vulture. Now, these organs
of vision, the eyes of animals, however much they
may differ in their several ranges, powers, and special
adaptations, agree nevertheless in this essential par-
ticular: they are all of them mirrors, reflectors q .
The eye, the organ of vision, is acted upon and
affected by rays of light, apprehended from 'within,'
i.e. consciously, as colour. But though the conscious
apprehension of colour, as such, is a mere sensation,
q There are in the eyes ot some animals remarkable and anomalous
structures whose use is not known.
i 3 o ORIGIN:
i.e. the transfigured effect of a wholly different cause:
nevertheless the sensitive apprehension of colour is
not Sight at all r .
The preliminary condition of Sight is the imaging,
mirroring, organic photography of objects by the
agency of light on the receiving surface of the eye,
the retina. What appears there is not colour, but
colours in forms, or coloured forms. A single such
coloured form never appears alone : it appears as
one among many others, often almost infinitely
numerous, of different sizes, colours, forms, imping-
ing from different angles and distances : all being
taken in which are for the time being commanded
by the field of the eye. Thus the retinal photograph
is still insufficient : it is only a chaos : something
further is necessary before there is Sight : its con-
structive architectural arrangement.
Now, this capacity, this power of constructing an
ordered whole out of colour sensations, is Sight.
It is a power acquired, ingrained, and perfected
by the practice and inherited accumulations of the
whole sum of geological periods ab initio rernm, rising
by gradations from original impotence (aTeprjais) till
it culminates in eagle vision. The primitive organism
with a pigment spot or rudimentary incipient ' eye,'
r See, for example, the misleading argument in Huxley's Hume,
about the Hash of light on a low protoplasmic organism.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 131
or organ of vision, dimly and subjectively conscious
of light and colour sensations, as such, could not
see : could, that is to say, be said to ' see ' only
in the sense in which a fowl obscurely conscious
of the number of its eggs may be called a mathe-
matician, a Newton or La Place : yet of such an
oyster-like organism alone would the assertion of
those philosophers hold, who degrade the powerful
capacity of Sight to sensations of light and colour.
Sight is infinitely more.
I define Sight as : the realisation or actual exercise
(eVTe\e^€/a) of an organic power : the power oj auto-
viatic instantaneous and involuntary (reflex) con-
struction of the spatial determinations s (figure, size,
position, motion, rest, number) of any dista?it object
out of its images projected upon the retinal surfaces:
or briefly and elliptically, the instantaneous spatial
obj edification of colours.
It is the external object, and not the sub-conscious
organic image, which is seen. I exhort the reader
to follow this carefully : simple as the point is,
nevertheless the philosophers all go down like nine-
s Observe that Sight operates only within definite limits ; what
is too near or too far t too large or too small, is either not at
all or only imperfectly seen : e.g. we only see the stars imperfectly,
as points of light at an inestimable distance.
K 2
132 ORIGIN:
pins before the deceptive snare in this problem : and
once down, never rise again.
Sight is not the sensational apprehension of the
colours, but the creative construction of spatial
determinations out of them. Colour sensations are
no more Sight than wood is a table l .
In spite of the universal assertion of philosophers
that what we see is colours — a deceptive statement
which seems so obvious that we all originally accept
it — I assert, on the contrary, that we do not see
colours, that colours are not what we see : and a
little reflection will convince the reader that, not-
withstanding the consensus of authorities on this
head, they are wrong. Of course colour is the
vehicle, the sine qua 11011, of Sight, but for all that
what we actually see is not colours. When, for
example, we are contemplating any scene, so far
from seeing the colours, it is only by the very
strongest possible effort of concentrated will and
attention that we can conquer our true Sight, and
bring ourselves artificially to the point of seeing
only the various colours, if indeed it is possible to
do it at all. What we really do see is, not the
colours, but forms, figures, spatial determinations
and relations ; it is these that we see, and colour
1 ' Light or colour is all that Sight can see.' Stirling, Text Book
l« h'ant, p. 38.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 133
is only the means through which we do it : a means
to which, unless we specially for other reasons direct
our attention to it, we pay, for the utilitarian purpose
of Sight, no attention at all. Sight is not the ap-
prehension of the colours, but the intuitive architec-
tural construction of an ordered spatial edifice out
of them. And this is so true, that if you tell the
' vulgar person ' that what he sees is only colours,
he will either deny it and laugh at you, or accept
it with doubt, hesitation, testing experiment and
uncertainty as an altogether novel idea : and he is
quite right, he does not see colours : what he sees
is objects ; for to see is, to pass instantaneously and
involuntarily through the colours to their spatial
signification. Further, every artist knows well, and
every one learning to paint will find, that until he
really studies the subject he is totally unaware of
how his Sight is arrived at : he gets at it instantly,
and yet is quite unconscious of the colours and
shades that gave him his Sight, his constructive
intuitive knowledge. Look at a statue : you see it
instantly : now, try to reproduce on a flat surface or
diagram the colours that enabled you to see it : you
cannot : because you have not a notion what were
the elements, the colours, that gave you your Sight :
your instantaneous cognition of its figure and form.
Everybody can see : not one in a million knows
134 ORIGIN:
anything about the elementary conditions of his
Sight, i.e. the colours that make it possible. More-
over, a colour-blind person, except in respect of
identifying colours, as such, will and does see just
as well as anybody else, and indeed, such a person
may pass the greater part of his life, and yet this
incapacity of his may never have been discovered,
just becaue it is not colours apprehended as such
that constitute the essence of Sight. For we see,
not colours, but through colours : what we see is
that which the colours accidentally bring with them,
i.e. space relations. As artists, we may specially at-
tend to colours, but yet colour sensations are not the
essence of the matter in Sight. Colours are internal
subjective sensations, but Sight is not: not internal
subjectivity, but external, i.e. spatial, objectivity.
To one born blind, who had just recovered, not,
observe, his Sight, but a certain possibility of Sight
by a surgical operation, the field of vision, the
expanse of the retina, would appear like a chaotic
palette of colours. Objects there mirrored would
seem, if we may trust the time honoured Chesselden
case, ' as if they all touched the eye like a shutter,'
a variously coloured fiat surface. From this such
'critics' as J. S. Mill conclude, that what we our-
selves see is just such a surface. And now, what
does the case prove ? Exactly the opposite — that we do
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 135
not see such a surface. That patient 'saw' and similar
patients 'see' such a surface, precisely because they
cannot see. Is that plain or not? They do not re-
semble, they differ from us. They have not Sight
but only a part of it, its elements : their Sight is
not whole: their capacity is maimed, diseased, im-
perfect: it is not so much a capacity as an in-
capacity : the power of instant automatic spatial
construction is not theirs.
The truth of any definition shows itself especially
in its power of conciliating opposing views. The
apparently paradoxical datum of consciousness, when
carefully considered in the light of the definition
of Sight, is explained and understood : it turns
out to stand in no real contradiction with the
demands of physiology. The seeming contradiction
and the puzzle arise from confusion of thought,
and vanish as soon as we clearly and exactly
comprehend what Sight actually is, what it is
that we do when we see. Consciousness tells us
that we see the very external objects, while Ideal-
ism denies this, having learned from physiology
that the affections of the organs of sense and the
nervous system, i.e. something Jiere and not there —
are the internal (organic) conditions of Sight. But
now, the mere organic affections, the nervous
mechanism, the physiological machinery, all this
136 ORIGIN:
is not Sight, but only the possibility of Sight : the
organism is not the ego, nor are the organic con-
ditions of Sight themselves Sight. Sight is the
conscious spatial cognition actually realised from
those sub-conscious conditions. When I say, ' Yon-
' der I see a horse,' this does not mean ' here my
organism is thus or thus affected,' but ' there in
' space is a horse which I know from here : ' i.e.
the assertion means only that I locate and spatially
define a horse at a distance : and this is just what
we found it was, to see (to tl -qv elvai tw opav).
We do not only seem to see the object itself at
a distance, but we actually do so, for though our
organism {the posse of vision) is here, the organism
is not the ego ; the ego, like the focus of the mirror,
is where it acts. That conscious picture of the
horse which we unconsciously build out of organic
hints is not in our organism, though it is of it,
it is constructively referred to a distance or ' thrown
outside,' and this is just the peculiar power and
capacity of Sight, which is so hard to understand
just because there is nothing like it in the Universe.
All things sui generis are difficult to comprehend.
The organic hints are inside — this is physiology,
the posse : the conscious picture is not — this is
Sight, the esse". Consider, now, the antagonism
" The reader who will carefully examine the curious phenomena
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 137
between the view of the vulgar and the physiolo-
gical claim : the actuality and potentiality of Sight.
The vulgar view says : there is only one thing,
the 'object which I see:' physiology says, 'No,
there are two : the external object and its image
in your head.' Now, both these views are correct.
The conscious perceptum is the result of a relation
between two terms, but then physiology deals with
the relation beneath consciousness. The antithesis is
beneath and prior to consciousness, between the
organs of sense and the object {not between ego
and object), and when these two opposites are
suitably disposed — organs here — object there — then
comes the result, the conscious act arising out of
the relation or antithesis ' I see the object,' i.e. in
consciousness there is only one thing, whereas beneath
it there are two. Sight, as we said at the outset
of this section, is the point of continuity, at which
mind and matter touch : it welds together two
sides and makes one of them. The vulgar person
is perfectly right in saying ' I see the object,' and
the physiologist equally right in saying, that there
are two poles of the operation : the paradox comes
presented by convex and concave mirrors and magnifying glasses,
which throw their images into the most extraordinary places, will
be enable*! to see the point of the mystery. The eye is not a flat
surface.
138 ORIGIN:
in, when we forget that the physiology is beneath
consciousness, and confound the organism and the
ego, potentiality with actuality of vision ; and sever,
as Berkeley and his friends do, the esse of vision from
its posse ; making the conscious result hang, as it
were, alone in the air, abstracting it from the sub-
conscious relation that produced it. Berkeley's
Idealism (on which all subsequent variations are
founded) is the divorce of the ego from its organism,
a stick with but one end. The vulgar in result
agree with Berkeley, but then they do not pretend
to account for their belief, whereas he does : and
so turns a truth, which is true only as a result,
into a fatal and mischievous sophism and error
by divorcing the soul from its body. I see the
object, says the vulgar person : yes, says Berkeley,
so you do; only it is merely an idea. This is
the conversion of truth into error. Criticism does
what Berkeley could not do : it explains and justi-
fies the vulgar view while harmonising it with
physiology by distinguishing ego from organism,
actuality from possibility of Sight. The vulgar
view (of which Reid was the uncritical champion)
is merely the statement of the conscious result :
Berkeley's paradox is the dogmatic conversion of
the vulgar view into an absurdity by abstraction :
physiology is the material analysis of the organic
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 139
means : the true definition of Sight conciliates
physiology with the naive superficiality of the
vulgar, and annihilates the one-sided paradox of
a self-contradictory Idealism.
I repeat ; the confusion results from failing to
distinguish the actuality of Sight, the conscious
' idea,' from its physiological conditions, which are
latent and only subsequently discoverable, only
known by scientific analogical inferences from
others to self. It is perfectly true that interior,
i.e. organic, affections are the sub-condition of
Sight : it is no less true that I see the external
object itself, for this 'I see ' is not the mere state-
ment of the sub-conscious organic affection, but
the expression of the resulting conscious cognition
of the spatial determinations of the object itself.
To deny that we see the object itself is simply
to misunderstand the meaning of the word see,
which consists in the instant cognition of the
figure and whereabouts of a distant object or objects
from the unconscious, unknown, and invisible images
projected upon the retina of the eyes.
I say, invisible images. It is most curious to
observe how invincible even to philosophers is the
delusion that exists on this head. I see, for ex-
ample, a ship. Now, it is true that the ship itself
is not in my head. What is there is, two miniature
140 ORIGIN:
images of the ship, one on each retina. Yet it is
quite a mistake to suppose that I see these images.
That assumes other two eyes behind each eye,
looking at it. I do not see my own eye or retina :
no man ever did or could : I see with my eyes :
i.e. spatially construct the ship ; define, locate it,
in relative size, shape, situation, &c, by the stereo-
scopic combination of the two images into one
solid whole, the final result alone being conscious.
Just as the reflections are in the mirror, yet the
mirror does not reflect its own reflections, but
distant objects : so the images are in my head,
yet what I see is the distant object : for this ' I
see ' is not the statement of the means, but the
expression of the conscious result.
When, for example, Berkeley or one of his friends
tells me that I do not see the distant object, I
ask, what does he mean? Of what object is he
speaking x ? Not his ' visible idea,' for that is just
what he says I do see, but the object — which I
do not see — the moon, for example ? Eh ! Why,
is it not as clear as noonday that Berkeley is only
x Dirk Ilatteraick denies all recollection of the murder, and they
measure his boots. The devil ! he exclaims, how could there be
a footmark on the ground, when there was a frost as hard as the
heart of a Memel log? Ah ! says the lawyer drily, that was the day
you do not recollect. Just so, Bcaumarchais caught Mme. de
(loezman over the immortal ' quinze /out's.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 141
saying that to see is not to see, that we do not
see exactly what we do sec. Do I not see the
Moon ? then how in the world do I get at it ?
how know that it is there ? and is the moon at
a distance, or is it not ? The truth is, Berkeley's
position reposes on a mere misunderstanding. Truly
a little physiological learning is a dangerous thing.
With absolutely no physiology or physics, no know-
ledge of eye, brain, nerves, retinal image, undula-
tions, &c, it would never seem to any one to assert
that what we see is internal, within, we should all
be vulgar realists. But when we learn about optic
nerve, retina, &c, then the mischief begins. Then
we are in a position to confound the ego and Sight
with the organs that make them possible, and assert
that the ego is conscious only of its own self, that
what we see is within, and so forth y . All this is
only an example of that half-knowledge which is
worse than the most vulgar ignorance : knowledge
just enough to go wrong, not sufficient insight or
criticism to go right. Men reduce, accordingly
the power of Sight to impotence, and perception
y As Kant, for example, does. It is not the ego but its organism
which conditions the spatial perception of objects, the form of the
eye. Kant bestows upon the ego, which is an act, the spatial quali-
fications that belong to its organism : he gives it the possibility,
permanence, and form which arise from its organism. His Idealism
is only a bungling caricature of the realism which he denies.
142 ORIGIN:
of others to perception of self, owing to a want of
ability to analyse and distinguish things that are
distinct : to yap Siopl^etv ovk icrrl rwv iroWwv, says
the Master: and in their handling of the problem
of the senses modern philosophers belong entirely
to the mob.
But your ' visible idea ' alters and changes per-
petually, rejoins the Berkleian : how then can you
be said to see the object itself? (Because, forsooth !
that does not change ? and how do you know that,
my dear Sir?) This apparently formidable objection
reposes on the same misunderstanding of what it
is to see. He would, it is to be presumed, hardly
say that the mirror does not reflect objects because
their reflections alter continually in it as it moves.
Yet his assertion is no less absurd. It is precisely
because the mirror does reflect objects that its re-
flections alter and must alter continually : just so,
it is precisely because we do see the objects that
the ' visible idea ' alters perpetually : and this, now,
is a beautiful illustration of the truth of our defini-
tion of Sight. If we contemplate, e.g., a stool from
different points of view, it is true that its perspective,
its images projected on the retina, change continu-
ally : and yet it is always the stool itself that we
see, just because Sight does not mean the dull
wooden reception or apprehension of a plane image,
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 143
but spatial reconstruction or localisation out of the
two images. Berkeley is here only displaying his
exasperating faculty of abusing language. He never
took the trouble to criticise his instrument, speech
— before starting to philosophise in matters that
require above all extreme nicety and exact accuracy
of meaning. He never understood what it was to
see because he never understood what it was to de-
fine. According to him you could truly be said
to see an object only if, at whatever distance or
point of view you stood, it remained always identical
and invariable in your view. Now, the only thing
that really does this is a hallucination, a thing really
internal, i.e. the proof that we see the external
object is among other things exactly those changes
which Berkeley imagines to disprove it. He is
only playing on the word see. What he demands
is that Sight shall be Identity : i.e. he will not allow
that the mirror reflects the objects unless the objects
themselves are actually in the mirror, which would
make all reflection impossible. Exactly so with
Sight. It is the object we see, but he confounds
and mixes up the organic posse of Sight with its
conscious esse, and denies accordingly what is the
truth. The stereoscope will enable any one to under-
stand : Sight being, not the reception of either or both
retinal images, but the total solid picture resulting.
144 ORIGIN:
But, the reader may object, all this may be
expressed in other terms ; the physiology of our
own day has corroborated Berkeley, by stating his
thesis anew — cerebral motion, nervous energy, stimu-
lation, and so forth. On the contrary, what has
happened is, that some physiologists of our day,
more skilled in physiology than in criticism, have
been beguiled by the baneful influence of Idealistic
philosophy into the endeavour to establish a sort
of physiologico-sensational Idealism that contains
self-contradiction in its heart, and crumbles to
pieces at the very first touch of analysis.
The fatal error of much of the higher scientific
speculation of our day is due to a want of training
in scientific method, and it lies in ignoring the fact
that though you may reduce by analysis a thing to its
elements, the elements are not, as such, the thing z .
Two entirely different things may consist of pre-
cisely the same elements. A butterfly pounded in
a mortar and reduced to its elements is no longer
a butterfly. Now, this is exactly the mistake that
is made in the false identification of all the senses
as sensations.
Heat, for example, the feeling, the conscious
apprehension of motion, is a sensation, the trans-
figured effect of a wholly different cause : just so
1 See Part II. (1, passim.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 145
in a different way are sound and colour. Hence
it is, that the sense of Sight is classed with the
feeling of heat, as being both sensations of the
same kind, because Sight is falsely regarded as
sensations of light and colour. But as we have
already seen, it is nothing of the sort. Though
colour is a sensation, colour sensations are not
Sight at all : and the nature of the sense of
Sight is altogether different from the nature of
the sensation of heat or colour. Colour sensations,
as such, are to Sight exactly what ink is to the
words composed of it. Just as ink conveys the
words, so does colour bring with it the spatial
forms of objects : and just as it is not the vehicle,
ink, as such, which makes the word what it is, so
it is not colour at all, but the space element that
comes with it, that make Sight possible. Thus,
though the sensation of colour is the conscious
feeling of a cause of a wholly different kind,
Sight, which is made possible by the space brought
with the colour, accidentally associated with the
colour, is, on the contrary, the cognition of an
element whose cause and effect are the same in
kind.
No amount of colour sensation, as such, will ever
produce even the very lowest form of Sight. Sight
begins not with colour sensations, but with space
L
146 ORIGIN:
apprehension, the noticing, that is to say, and taking
stock of, those spatial elements and forms which
accompany colours, for colours must bring forms
to the retina. The reduction of Sight to colour
sensations is based on a wholesale misunderstand-
ing : it is exactly analogous to the mistake of re-
ducing a printed page to the ink-blot made by
over-turning the bottle. From ink alone you will
never get words : and from colour alone, Sight will
never come. The original starting-point of the
evolution of Sight, its e'£ ov, is not colour, but
form, space : and just so, Sight itself, when we
have got it, is, not the apprehension of colour,
but the instantaneous cognition of space.
This false identification of Sight with colour
sensations, and consequently a confusion of ob-
jective knowledge with subjective feeling, is the
fatal error of physiological sensationalists who lump
together all the senses indiscriminately as sensations :
meaning by that term transfigured effects of un-
known causes. But when we come to examine
their books these unknown causes turn out to be
perfectly well-known motion : for their analysis, as
we said, is palpably self-contradictory. If the senses
transfigure : if all the senses are sensations, and all
sensation transfigures, how is it possible to discover
that heat, colour, sound, ab intra are motion, ab
THE NA TURE OF SIGHT. 147
extra ? The actual science of these philosophers
disproves their analysis of its origin. We are as-
tounded by their profound knowledge of those
causes which they declare ex cathedra to be un-
knowable. The truth is, that they derive objective
knowledge from Sight, and employ that very
knowledge to disprove its own possibility. They
do get at objective knowledge, but they do not
know how they do it. The solution lies in the
accurate analysis of the nature of Sight.
And by the way it is important to notice another
point closely connected with this, in which physi-
ology has gone beyond her last. Sight is often
stated to take place ' in ' the brain, because, when
the optic nerve is severed, there is no longer any
Sight. But now, this does not prove that we see
in the brain. It proves only, that an eye minus
a brain is as powerless as a brain minus an eye a :
that the whole apparatus must work together in
order to see. The eye will mirror, will perform
its part, even though the optic nerve should be
cut, ,but in that case ' I ' shall not see, because
you have deprived ' me ' of my eye : the telegraphy
does not work, the wire is broken. To say that
it is the brain which sees, that Sight takes place
n The reader will not fall into the error of supposing that a human
brain and the whole of it are required : see below.
L 2
148 ORIGIN:
• in ' the brain, is a misconception : it makes the
eye otiose and stultifies its structure. Brain and eye
see, all together : that is the truth : but to emphasise
the brain at the expense of the eye is worse than
to ignore it. We hear with our ears, touch with
our fingers, smell with our nose, and see with our
eyes : Sight is not thought, but sense b : and Aris-
totle says well that Sight is the soul of the eye :
the eye, which by reflecting the forms of the objects
surrounding it makes possible their spatial cognition
at a distance.
Sight is, not the transfigured effect of a cause
incognisable to us, but the organic, inwardly con-
scious and illuminated photography of Nature.
Observe, that if physiology denies this, we may
deny physiology, for it is only committing suicide.
Physiology can claim no authority, if sense cannot
reach the real nature of things, for it is all built
upon that assumption. Whence comes the know-
ledge of the physiologist as to his own brain ?
If all sensation transfigures, all Science is non-
sense, including physiology. But science is not
nonsense : it is only the dialectic of some of its
ambitious professors who would be philosophers
that is bad. All the science in the world will not
make up for the absence of dialectic.
'' See below.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT 149
And the absurdity of the original dogma becomes
glaring in the fashionable constructive physiologico-
sensational psychology, which, like all other feeble
ill-defined speculation nowadays, is baptized with the
name of a 'science.' (Can you make bread, if you do
not know what bread is? Can you make a science,
if you do not know what is science ?) The attempts
of its exponents, however, as e.g. those of the cele-
brated Wundt, to construct our actual experiences
from sensational atomistic points c : to derive, for
example, all our cognition of space from move-
ments — ' space-construction by ocular movements ' —
break down altogether the moment we touch
them ; as indeed even Wundt is obliged to admit :
a momentary electric flash, during which there is
no time for any movement at all, will reveal
a perfect picture : and the experiment on a large
scale is familiar to every one who has been out
in a thunderstorm at night : a sudden flash of
lightning will reveal the whole country and every
feature in it with glaring distinctness for miles
around. This demonstrates irrefutably that ocular
c It is here that the ridiculous modern speculations about space
ot more than three dimensions come in : they are all based upon the
farcical notion that our space has a form, is an actuality, instead
of being what it is, the infinite possibility of form. This sort of
mathematical foolishness is regarded as the most profound wisdom :
it is simply the result of a want of training.
150 ORIGIN:
movements' 1 are totally unnecessary for the ordinary
perception of objects : although they very well may
be for the exact and delicate estimate of comparative
and approximately identical lengths or sizes. This
however is a different thing, and one practically
altogether useless : what does the exact apprecia-
tion of almost indifferent differences matter to the
animal for its life ? It sees all essentials instan-
taneously, and ocular movements are altogether
unnecessary for the purposes of Sight. Wundt,
however, consoles himself by saying that anyhow
they were, once e . But though this should be the
case, what has that got to do with it, now ? What
we are and can, that we are and can : never mind
what we were and could not. In spite of 'science'
of this kind, the eye of the eagle will continue
to differ in power from the pigment spot of a miser-
able Medusa. Nothing, however, seems to satisfy
your sensational philosopher but the reduction and
degradation of power to impotence : then he thinks
he has explained everything. To explain away
and end by denying the very thing you started
to explain, or at least mutilate and mangle it, is
d ' The duration of the retinal stimulus must be exceedingly short,
'as the electric flash lasts only o - oooooo68 second.' Landois and
Slirling, Hitman Physiology, p. 773.
c Human and Animal Psychology, p. 165, &c.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 151
the golden rule of modern philosophical ' specu-
lation V
All these efforts to reduce what is to what was,
to degrade the whole organic capacity to the in-
capacity of its elements, and prove that the space
and its contents which we see at a glance are all
made up out of movements and inference, are pal-
pably ridiculous. In their endeavour to drag our
senses into the Procrustes bed of their sensationalist
dogma, these philosophers most unaccountably over-
look the most obvious facts. Can anything be
plainer or more undeniable than this, that the
capacity of vision depends, to begin with, on the
structure of the visual organ, the eye ? For if not,
why should it have a form at all ? Qui bono the
elaborate and highly specialised structures of the
organs of sense, of the eyes of animals, so admira-
bly adapted for seeing by night or day, in air or
water, at long or short ranges ? The retina is a
camera: why? In attempting to construct the con-
tinuous perception out of a sensational series of
hypothetical points, these philosophers argue as if
our two eyes were in reality nothing but the punc-
tual extremity of a nerves. As if the finished and
f I wonder whether the physiological sensationalists have ever
watched a hawk striking. There you see what Sight can do.
s Kant's ' chaotic manifold ' of sense : a piece of absurdity. The
152 ORIGIN:
complicated machinery of the eye, its elaborate
speculum, were all to no purpose ! as if Nature had
made it in vain ! as if the eye contributed nothing
to the power of Sight ! Of course it does : the eye
receives its whole field at one and the same moment,
no part being prior or posterior to the other. And
though we cannot attend to so vast an extent, but
only to one thing at a time, it is nevertheless there.
What can be more ridiculous, more forced and
preposterous, than all these attempts to identify
the vision of to-day with the ante-diluvian, pre-
geological, problematical 'vision' of conjectural
animals with incipient tentative guesswork eyes.
Sight is a power acquired not by the practice of
one individual life, but that of whole geological
epochs : and the eye of to-day need be at no such
shifts to reach its object as the eye at the origin
of things, which was not an eye at all, or the specu-
lative theoretical 'eye' of the sensationalists, which
is apparently not an eye but a point. If Sight were
only what these pettifogging theorists seek to make
it out, laborious effort, piecemeal construction, dis-
jointed mosaic, rational inferential patchwork out
of successive sensational ' manies,' then evolution
and development would have been in vain. All
senses do not give us chaos but order. Kant understood nothing of
the senses, and the want was fatal to his whole philosophy.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 153
this sort of philosophy is the mistaken endeavour,
based on a want of training in the philosophy ot
definition, to degrade by analysis the highly de-
veloped powerful capacity as it is to the highly
problematical incapacity that it was or may have
been, for we know what we actually now see much
better than any one knows what, ages ago, we may
possibly have seen : it is, in the matchless phrase-
ology of Aristotle, to confound and identify the
ovala, the evTeXe^eta, with the original e£ ov or
aTep7)ai<; ; it is to ignore evolution and degrade the
highest rung of the ladder of being to the lowest.
And now, we come to a point which has been
running alongside the argument all the time, and
which no doubt has repeatedly occurred to the
reader. I cannot understand how any one can go
so far astray as to maintain that Sight is Inference
and performed by Reason ; an opinion which, not-
withstanding its manifest and open absurdity, is
nowadays commonly received. Sight, Inference!
It is infinitely far from being so : it is a wholly
distinct and different capacity. It is true that we
may, for explanatory purposes, compare Sight to
a conclusion from premisses which are latent and
only physiologically discoverable : but this is only
an analogy, against which we should be always on
our guard : the resemblance is merely superficial
154 ORIGIN:
and the difference profound and essential. It is
also true that we find, in man, seeing and reasoning
united : this is what supports the error. But that
they are distinct and different is irrefutably demon-
strated by a single glance at the animal world.
The automatic intuitive flash or ' leap in the dark '
of Sight to its constructive ' conclusion,' its finished
spatial stereoscopy h , is to Inference, what Nature
is to Reason, what the whole geological series of
animal life in space and time is to a single indi-
vidual human life. Sight is profound, organic, in-
tuitive, involuntary, universal, unerring, the vitally
necessary means of existence throughout the animal
world : Inference is shallow, rational, discursive,
conscious, fallacious, exclusively human (for animals
possess only faint germs of it), and exhibited in
but few specimens even of men in any degree of
excellence. Inference is aristocratic : but Sight
is common, vulgar, democratic, nay, bestial. In-
ference is reasoning, and performed by reason :
Sight, not : Inference is logical, essentially bound
up with speech and society : Sight, not : it arises
from the inner depths of the individual animal
nature : only social animals can have reason, but
the lonely solitary animal has, and must have, Sight.
Reason we have, as men : Sight, as animals : the
'' For Sight is pictorial : Inference noetic.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 155
one is a superficies, the other, an abyss. The
man least capable of Inference, the woman, child,
barbarian, or animal barely or not at all capable
of reasoning, may see far better than a Hum-
boldt 1 or an Aristotle. It would indeed be a
bad business for the world if Sight were Inference,
if its Sight depended on its Reason. But this
is so far from being the case that Reason may
not only be absent, in animals that have not got
it, but even utterly destroyed in those that have
it, and yet Sight may remain : a maniac or idiot
will see as well as a sane man, and many animals
infinitely better. How can Sight be Inference,
or in any way whatever connected with Reason,
when it exists in the highest perfection, keen and
powerful and telescopic, where Reason is dull, weak,
or even absent altogether ?
The truth is that to call Sight Inference is to
abuse language, and argues a complete failure to
understand its nature, originating in the biological
deficiencies of the founders of modern philosophy.
Sight is a wholly distinct and different power, be-
longing to the animal as such, with which Reason
has nothing to do. It is beneath and independent
of Reason : we see as we digest : it is an animal
and non-rational function : a faculty and weapon
' See his Kosmos, vol. iii. p. 70.
156 ORIGIN:
analogous to claws, teeth, wings, beaks, talons, and
similar indispensable instruments of self-preservation.
We do not infer the objects we see : we see them :
it is not discursive inference, but constructive pic-
torial presentation : we open our eyes and there
they are : the thing is instantaneous, involuntary,
automatic, and inevitable: it is a pictorial 'con-
clusion ' without premisses, which are unknown, and
only discoverable by subsequent anatomy, and ana-
logical inference from others to self. So far from
deriving Sight inferentially from physiological ' pre-
misses,' the truth is the opposite : we know that
there are such ' premisses ' only by a roundabout
process of reasoning. That physiological knowledge
which is employed to prove that Sight is ' inference
from sensations' is itself derived from Sight assumed
to be, what in fact it is, valid and objective : it is
secondary to the original authority of Sight. But
as we have seen, these ' premisses,' these physio-
logical conditions, arc only the sub-conscious po-
tentiality of Sight. We do not see our own internal
organs, we see with them ; what we see is, as has
been shown, the external object ; to see being to
reconstruct spatially the external object from hints
furnished by the two eyes. But the process is un-
conscious ; when we open our eyes external objects,
as it were, crowd in upon us ; and the proof that
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 157
they are there is the fact that we are here, for other-
wise we should not be here to see. Sight is a faculty
whose exercise is the proof of its own veracity ; for
to see wrong is for the animal certain and almost
instant death. It is not the veracity of the Deity
which is the proof of the veracity of the senses :
it is, the very existence of the percipient animal.
For existence is impossible, except on the hypothesis
that the senses exhibit the nature of things.
And therefore it is, that the vulgar argument, the
appeal to the eye, is not absurd, not philosophically
ridiculous : it is perfectly sound and unanswerable :
although it is only a concrete argument and does
not explain itself. The absurdity lies on the con-
trary with the paradoxical philosophers, whose scep-
tical arguments, and subsequent dialectical edifices
to reconvert scepticism into reality, are all really
based on the very authority which they deny, the
authority of the eye. The vulgar are perfectly
right : objective knowledge, knowledge of the true
independent nature and constitution of things, of
an esse which is not percipi, is given, though they
know not how, directly by the eye, the mirror of
Nature which reflects its object tanquam in speculum;
and the truth is, curiously enough, the exact reverse
of the way in which the Kantian philosophy puts it.
It is precisely the form of the object which is ob-
158 ORIGIN:
jective, valid independently of perception, and only-
trie sensational element, the colour as such, which
is the contribution of the conscious self. Kant's ab-
surd Aesthetic is the truth turned upside down. And
yet the world has been vainly endeavouring for a
century to think itself by brute force into this non-
sensical dogmatism, trying as hard as it can to stand
intellectually on its head, and then wondering with
ludicrous amazement at the impotence of reason.
But grant one absurdity and the rest follow. Divorce,
as Plato and modern philosophers do, soul from
body, esse from posse, and you doom yourself to
absurdity as the sparks fly upwards.
The founders of Idealism in the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries had a wholly erroneous con-
ception of the value of the vulgar opinion. They
viewed the vulgar superciliously from the heights
of their own rationalism uninspired by any insight
into natural economy and organic possibilities. But
there is nothing more foolish than abstract ration-
alism. As Aristotle, the wise, the profound, the pro-
phetic Aristotle, knew ands aid, the vulgar opinion,
when it really is vulgar, i.e. common to all, and not
factitious, is more than all the wisdom of the learned ;
for it is <f>vaifcbv : it has in it what the individual
opinion, however well grounded, never has : it has
in it the depths and vital necessities of organic
THE NATURE OF SIGHT. 159
Nature, the profundities of the needs and creative
demands of life. Sight, touch, hearing, language,
aTopyr), the sentiment of kinship — the wisdom
and authority of these is not rational, but real,
organic. Oculus populi, ocuhis Dei. Dr. John-
son's repartee, when he rapped his stick upon the
ground, has afforded food for many an Idealistic
gibe : and doubtless, considered as dialectic, it was
poor : but was it poorer than the dialectic of the
Idealists themselves, whose soul is self-contradiction?
It contains the answer it does not unfold — viz.,
that the sophistry of rationalism carries less weight
than the instinctive evidence of sense. And we have
seen that the critical analysis of the senses is the
answer to an Idealism that begins by denying them,
on evidence derived from themselves.
And so, the authority of the eye, though disease
may now and again pervert and falsify it, and pre-
judice warp it, is yet the first and highest of all
authorities, and the solid foundation of all scientific
knowledge of the Universe. The very illusions,
hallucinations, to which we are subject in states of
disease or semi-disease, the curious spectral phe-
nomena (these are really pkenometia) which mock
and mimic the genuine objective deliverances of
Sight, and furnish superficial dialecticians with
sceptical arguments against the testimony of the
160 ORIGIN:
senses, are, in reality, only an inverse proof of the
truth of healthy Sight k . For they mean, when pro-
foundly considered, that the organic mechanism of
vision has during aeons of practice and experience
become so accurately trained to its work, so deli-
cately responsive to the touch on the trigger, the
stimulus from outside, that now and then in a
moment of aberration due to disease or fatigue,
when the machine is out of order, it anticipates
orders and works without its appropriate cause.
But now, observe, that this is no refutation, but on
the contrary, a confirmation of its normal deliver-
ance. For it could not do this, exceptionally, were
?iot its normal action so exact. The nature of its
occasional error, ox faux pas, exhibits the truth and
unerring accuracy and entirely trustworthy fidelity
of its general testimony : and, as Aristotle often
insists, we must base our conclusions about human
nature not on diseased, aberrant specimens, but
those which are healthy and sound. The diseased
eye is not an eye, nor, in spite of reasoners like
J. S. Mill, is a patient in an ophthalmic hospital
the type of healthy men.
The strong, simple, and profound proof of the
k Moreover, the sceptic cuts his own throat by admitting that they
are illusions : for to know that you must be able to compare the
appearance with the reality ; but this is just what he denies to
be possible.
THE NATURE OF SIGHT 161
independent reality and existence of the external
world is, notwithstanding all the pseudo-dialectic
of critical incapables, just this, that we see it. The
instinct of the vulgar coincides with and is con-
firmed by the most severe and exhaustive meta-
physical analysis : the necessary postulate of science,
that the senses introduce us to the nature of things
as they are in themselves, turns out to be solid
and philosophically correct : and the only result
definitely achieved by the philosophers who have
laboured with such inadequate equipment to throw
doubt on the senses of the world, is, that they have
discredited its reason. They have brought philo-
sophy herself into disrepute and bad odour by the
absurd conclusions which they declare to be the
necessary result of self-examination, and opened
the door to every description of feeble mysticism,
which presents itself bravely, as being not more
absurd than reason herself 1 . But the incapacity
which they would fasten upon reason belongs in
reality only to that portion of it which has fallen
to their share : they would saddle humanity in
general with their own particular imperfections.
Humanity, however, is not so foolish in its instincts
1 ' Un manoeuvre qui a toujours seduit les esprits plus ardents que
'sages, de fonder la religion sur le scepticisme.' Kenan, Averroes,
P- 97-
M
i
162 ORIGIN, &c.
as it is in its reason and its prejudices, and wisdom
will often be found to lie with the vulgar rather
than a corrupt school of hereditary error, floating
about balloonwise in the rarified atmosphere of
abstraction, the chain that bound it to terra firma
long since broken and cast away.
To emerge from the labyrinth of Idealistic para-
logism into which Descartes and his followers have
beguiled her : to shake off the long debauch of
sophistry, the deep draughts of stupefying jargon
and outrageous abuse of language, continued till
the very nerve of male and vigorous thought is
paralysed and drugged into impotence, modern
philosophy will have to drink the waters of Lethe
and again become a child : burn all her books,
and emerge like a phcenix from the ashes of her
philosophical library : go back and sit at the feet
of Aristotle, and learn from him that subtlety is
worse than useless, if it is not based upon insight
into the sphere of the problem and exact analytical
definition.
/3. UNITY: THE LOGIC OF
NATURE.
ris oiv 6 (pvcrticbs ; irdrepov b irepl 7T)V v\i]i>, vbv be \6yov
ayvowv ; 7) 6 irepl rbv \6yov (x6vov ; ^ fiaXKov 6 e'£ a/uupo'iv ;
M 2
AXIOMS.
to yap atrtop rov fjpai irciffiv 7; ovala ku\ 6 \6~yos ttjs oixrtas.
■i] <p{>ais atria iraai ra^eus.
j3. UNITY: THE LOGIC OF
NATURE.
§ I. MOLECULE, or Physics.
r PHE ultimate unit and radical of modern Physics
is the molecule. The physical world, to its eye,
is an immense accumulation of molecules.
The material objects that surround us, and in
their totality constitute the physical world, solids,
liquids, gases, animals, vegetables, minerals, rocks,
trees, rivers, beasts, birds, fishes, &c, are all com-
posed of stuff, material, itself compound. Analysis
decomposes these compounds into elements. And
the sum of its investigations is this : that the various
substances of which all things are composed are
nothing but masses or aggregates of minute homo-
geneous particles or molecules: each of a definite
and peculiar constitution. These molecules consist
of and can be resolved into definite proportional
quantities of ultimate {i.e. not hitherto further
decomposable) elements. Water, for example, de-
composes into oxygen and hydrogen. The (phy-
sical) molecule consists of (chemical) elements*,
oxygen and hydrogen.
* I say elements, not atoms, because the molecule is quite indc-
1 66 UNITY:
All composite substances, then, consisting of
molecules, or combinations of ultimate elements, in
different proportions, ratios, and arrangements (?),
any such substance can be expressed in terms of
its molecule : defined by its molecule. The mole-
cule is the root, the radical, the epitomised ex-
pression of the nature of the substance. Water,
e.g., is composed of oxygen and hydrogen, in the
proportion, by volume, of one to two, by weight,
of eight to one. Every molecule of water, then,
will exhibit this proportionate amalgamation : in
other words, water is H 2 0. And this is typical:
what holds of water holding, mutatis mutandis, of
all other substances: e.g. alcohol is C 2 H c O ; sul-
phuric acid, H 2 S0 4 ; common salt Na CI; and
so on. Thus though every special substance is
sui generis, has, that is to say, its own peculiar
definition, its own molecule : yet the molecule in
general, the essential nature of any substance may
be defined as
' the smallest mass into which a substance is
' capable of being divided without changing its
' chemical nature : ' or ' the smallest particle of
pendent of any theory as to the nature of the elements. What
is certain about the elements is the ratio or proportion required in
a compound. The atomic theory, in my opinion, makes the mistake
of trying to actualise the potential, as also does the kinetic theory
of gases.
THE L OGIC OF NA TURE. 167
'a substance in which its qualities inhere ''.' (Note,
parenthetically, that this is exactly the Aristotelean
form of expression, rj e'Aa^to-T?; <rdp%, </>\6£, or what-
ever it may be.)
There is, however, something more. Observe,
that the elements, as such, though present in the
correct proportion, do not constitute the mole-
cule composed of them. The molecule of any
particular substance is its elements only in that
peculiar combination ; i.e. it is not the elements
that constitute the molecule, but the special syn-
thesis of the elements. It is the peculiar disposition
of each special synthesis that makes each molecule
what it is, and gives to each substance its peculiar
qualities and attributes. The same elements may
make different molecules or substances : e.g.
1 the pleasant odour of apples, and the disgusting
'smell of rancid butter come from substances con-
' sisting of the same elements united in the same
' proportion what, then, can be the cause of
1 this difference ? .... for the past ten years a great
' part of the intellectual power of the chemists of
b Cooke, to Chemistry, pp. 84, 86 : cf. Wurtz, Atomic Theory,
p. 326. ' Why is mercury indivisible? I do not understand: I do
' not pretend to do so : only I admit that physical and chemical
' forces cannot divide it any further, because otherwise it would
' cease to be mercury. '
1 68 UNITY:
' the world has been applied to this problem . . .
1 and the answer they have obtained is, that the
' difference of qualities depends on molecular struc-
' ture, and the same atoms arranged in different order
1 may form molecules of different substances having
' wholly different qualities c .'
Thus does the stone which the builders rejected
become the head stone in the scientific corner.
Here we find modern Science going unawares back
to Aristotle: unconsciously repeating his very words;
unintentionally verifying his logic of science, his
analysis of the essential nature of things. For what
is this molecule but the physical aspect of Aristotle's
essence ? to yap clitlov tov elvai iracnv ?) ovala, kclI
6 Xoyo<? t?7<? ovo-la?. The essence of Aristotle looks
at us from every piece of salt or sugar, coal or
diamond, every drop of oil or water, every under-
trodden clod or stone, lump of clay or chalk ; and
the chemists of modern times are metaphysicians
sans le savoir, Peripatetics against their will. This
1 lowest possible realisation ' is nothing whatever
but the unconscious translation of Aristotle's Greek.
This is that very eWeAi^eta r) irpoaTri tov hvva[xet
ovtos which the world has been rejecting for cen-
turies. This synthesis of matter and form, with
c New Chc?nistry, p. 294.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 169
the stress laid upon the form, is taking the very
words from Aristotle's mouth. It is the essence
of anything that makes it what it is, and definition
is the declaration of that essence. In vain, then,
did modern philosophy reject Aristotle : it was
doomed to come back to him, whether it liked it
or not ; he lay inevitably across the onward path
of modern Science, and while men thought they
were receding further and further away from him,
they were in reality drawing nearer and nearer to
him. Is there not something ironical in the spec-
tacle of modern Science running into the very jaws
of the philosophy which it is always abusing, and
pronouncing to be obsolete and ' metaphysical ? '
' Physics, beware of Metaphysics ! ' Water, beware
of H 2 0. What if Metaphysics should turn out to
be the very core and heart of physics ? The essence
of physics is in fact, metaphysics, and every physical
molecule is metaphysic in concreto.
Now this molecule, this ovcria, this essence, this
nature, this synthesis of elements into a compound,
a crvvdkov or whole, which thereby becomes ipso facto
something new and entirely different from those
elements, just as zuater differs wholly from its con-
stituent gases, is, as we shall now see, the root and
core of science, the secret of reality in every grade
of the ladder of being d .
d Further considerations with respect to this particular § will be
\yo UNITY:
Note: As regards the ultimate constitution of
matter, Aristotle is in advance of modern chemists,
notwithstanding the fact that they have gone beyond
him in detail.
Everything, he says, is either an element, or com-
posed of elements : irav iariv 77 oToiyelov rj etc cttol-
^eiW. And he defines an element, with precision
and accuracy, as, that into which other bodies are
resolved, existing in them eitJier potentially or actually
{for which, is not clear) bat which itself is not re-
solvable into anything further, different in kind".
Now, according to Aristotle, the mistake made by
those modern chemists and physicists who, specu-
lating on the ultimate constitution of matter, offer
us atoms or vortex-rings, is that of attempting to
reduce the actual, not to the potential, but to the
actual : a mistake analogous, as he says himself,
to that of attempting to break up a sword into little
swords, or a saw into little saws. 'The attempt to
' bestow an intrinsic figure on the elements is absurd,'
he says : ' an element cannot have one f .' Elemen-
tary matter must be formless and amorphous : ready
to take any form according to circumstances, but
itself possessing none : e.g. water will accommodate
found in Harper's Metaphysics of the School, vol. ii. ; the coincidence
of which with this § is all the more remarkable because it is inde-
pendent : my own § having been written before I had seen it.
■ Dc Ccclo, III. 3. f lb., III. 8.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 171
itself to a vessel of any shape, and fill it ; it is itself
amorphous. And though Aristotle was wrong as
to what the elements were, in particular ; for we
know now that air and water, earth and fire are
not elementary, but compound : yet what he says
holds, apart from the particular error : he knows
what an element, as such, must be. The difference
between physical mixture and chemical combination^,
is exactly this : that in the former the elements
exist actually, whereas in the latter, they do not :
they are lost : oxygen and hydrogen exist in water,
not actually, but potentially : they can be educed
and become actual only by the destruction of the
water : i.e., of that special form, which in water they
possessed. Therefore Aristotle says, that the ele-
ments come out of one another — \elirerat e'£ uX\rj\wv
•yiyveadat : by which he means, that what is actually
one substance may be potentially another. And in
fact, I venture to say that no one but Aristotle
« Admirably defined by Aristotle in the tenth chapter of his De
Generatione et Corruption*. When barley and wheat are mixed
together, you have only mixture, juxtaposition (auvdeais), but when
gas becomes water, you have mingling, chemical combination (fi(^is),
the point of which is that the elements disappear, as such, but
remain potentially — cai^eTat yap ri Svi/a/xis axniiv. And this com-
bination Aristotle defines admirably as rS>v uliitwv aWowQivrwv eWins
— ' the unification of mingled elements that have changed their
1 nature, as elements ! '
172 UNITY:
ever thoroughly understood the philosophy of chem-
istry : because this too also depends on the great
distinction between potential and actual, which
modern Science, with all its wonderful discoveries,
ignores, though it is staring at her out of them all.
§ 2. Syllogism, or Logic.
Modern Philosophy began by rejecting, amongst
other things, Aristotle's analysis of thought, Syllo-
gism. And though the rejection of this part of
his philosophy has never been so universally accepted
as that of other departments, yet gathering force
and consistency, like a snowball, as it has run down
the hill of Cartesian development along certain lines,
it has reached its fullest and most comprehensive,
most mature and elaborate statement in the Logic
of John Stuart Mill. The denial of Syllogism is, in
fact, at once the necessary corollary of sensational
principles and their apagogical refutation : for, as
we shall presently see, you can deny Syllogism no
more than you can deny modern Physics. The man
who, like Mill, denies Syllogism shows thereby
only this, that he has not a glimpse of insight into
the nature of things.
A word, to begin with, on Bacon's rejection of
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 173
Syllogism, so well known, and so completely mis-
understood. Here is his own charge : —
" Syllogismus ex propositionibus constat, proposi-
' tiones ex verbis, verba autem notionum tesserae et
1 signa sunt. Itaque si notiones ipsae mentis (quae
' verborum quasi anima sunt, et totius hujusmodi
' structurae et fabricae basis) male ac temere a rebus
' abstractae, et vagae, nee satis definite ac circum-
' scriptae, denique multis modis vitiosae fuerint, omnia
' ruunt. Rejicimus igitur Syllogismum.'
Now, it is obvious, that this is not an argument
against Syllogism, as such, at all. It is only an
argument against bad Syllogism. On such grounds
as these we might with equal justice reject Bacon's
own method, or indeed any other method whatever,
as the Syllogism. Bad reasoning, says Bacon, is
bad reasoning : certainly : so is bad observation, bad
observation, and bad experiment, bad experiment.
And will you reject observation and experiment,
because they may be, and very often are, bad ?
But further, it is palpable that this rejection of
Syllogism is really a rejection of language alto-
gether. Nil probat qui nimium probat. Bacon's
quarrel is not with the Syllogism, but its ele-
ments, the words. And thus it stands in close
relation with Berkeley's quarrel with general ideas,
Descartes' isolation of the self, and other such
174 UNITY:
manifestations of individualism ; all but various
denials of the continuity of Nature. Yet in Bacon
such an attitude is altogether inconsistent and ab-
surd. How could, of all men in the world, Bacon,
whose great idea was co-operation and continuity in
Science, fail to perceive that in this rejection of
language he is rejecting the very possibility of
both ? Whatever defects there may be in language,
words, the constituent elements of Syllogism, we
cannot for all that get along without them.
We see, then, that Bacon's apparent rejection
of Syllogism is, properly understood, only a demand
for exact definition of words and terms and notions :
than which nothing could be more desirable. It is
not Syllogism, as such, but its abuse, that Bacon
denies.
But what he did not do, was done by others,
and the rejection of Syllogism, as such, mature
and considered, is seen fully developed in J. S. Mill,
whose Logic is the developed statement of what is
indicated more or less clearly in earlier philoso-
phers from whom he drew inspiration : the Lockes,
Berkcleys, Humes. It is in reality an inverse dis-
proof of his philosophical principles, and reposes
on his ignorance of essence, a problem which, as
Ueberweg says h , he entirely failed to solve.
u Logic, p. 152.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 175
The Syllogism was pronounced by Mill to be
a pctitio principii (though his own writings are, as
the writings of all reasoners must be, composed
throughout of Syllogisms ; for a man may deny
the Syllogism in theory : in practice he must obey
it, whether he will or no) because he wrongly re-
garded the major premiss as merely the numerical
sum-total of the particular individual cases ; where-
as, on the contrary, the major is not numerical but
typical. It is not 'all men are mortal' but, 'every
man is mortal,' every man, qua man ; it contains
the type, the essence. Deny this, as Mill does',
and of course there is no Syllogism : but then
Aristotle knew this as well as Mill, and said so,
ages ago. ' No universals, no syllogisms.' This is
true, but it is not new : it belongs not to Mill
but to Aristotle himself: whereas what is new
and what does belong to Mill is what is at once
erroneous and absurd.
1. In asserting that the conclusion gives, not some-
thing different from, but something already con-
tained in the major, Mill, to begin with, overlooks
the fact, obvious and elementary as it might seem,
that the conclusion results from, and is possible only
Yet though he denies this, in theory, he appeals to it, in fact :
as, for instance, I have shown on p. 85 of this book. No man
ever contradicted himself more flatly throughout than J. S. Mill.
176 UNITY:
through, the combination of the two premisses. The
question-begging example in the first figure, by
which he endeavours to support his position, might
deceive, and has doubtless often deceived, a tyro :
but how it could possibly deceive a professional
logician, writing a huge treatise to advocate a revo-
lutionary subversion of the consent of ages, is beyond
my understanding. A single example in the second
or third figure would have made the truth plain
even to J. S. Mill : e.g. some Mussulmans are good
men : no Musulmans are Hindoos : ergo, some good
men are not Hindoos, i.e. there may be virtue
outside the pale of Hinduism. It would have puzzled
Mill to say, which premiss contained the conclusion
here. And is it credible that an elaborate condem-
nation of Syllogism should be gravely put forward
by a man to whom, after presumably years of
meditation, it should still be unknown that the
conclusion depends not on one premiss only but
on the combination of the two ?
2. But this is not all. Little did the unfortunate
' logician ' suspect that in thus pronouncing on the
Syllogism he was running his head against a wall
buttressed by the Universe: that he was deliberately
writing himself clown ignorant of the very thing which
he professed to understand and expound, the inner
nature of all Science. The irony of this is almost
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 177
overpowering. In denying the Syllogism, what Mill
is really denying, though he does not know it, is
the molecule, the plan of Creation, the law which
runs through every form and grade of being, and
binds all the Sciences together as a string binds
beads.
For what was, as we saw, the molecule, the physical
essence ? It was, something new , something different
from the elements, necessarily resulting from their
being what and as they were. Well now, that is
exactly Aristotle's definition of Syllogism — avWoyia-
/xos earn Xoyos, ev a> redevTcov tivwv erepov tl twv
Keifxevcov e£ dvdyfcrjs (TVfj,/3alvet tm ravra elvac.
Syllogism is to thought exactly what its molecule
is to a physical substance: Syllogism is the molecule
of thought. Thought consists of Syllogisms just
as a substance consists of molecules. . The premisses
are the chemical elements ; the conclusion is the
necessarily resulting new and entirely different sub-
stance : the mind is the alembic or crucible in which
the chemico-intellectual process takes place. The
conclusion differs from the premisses, and yet de-
pends on them, exactly as water differs from and
depends on oxygen and hydrogen, being contained
in neither.
We see, therefore, that Aristotle's wonderful ana-
lysis harmonises with and is confirmed by the axioms
N
178 UNITY:
of modern Chemistry, as well as by those of the
other Sciences, as we shall find. For the Syllogism
to be erroneous would contradict Nature : it is im-
possible that it should be so : it is only the logical
aspect of essence. In the sphere of material bodies,
the essence appears as the molecule : in the sphere
of thought, it appears as the Syllogism. The two
things are at bottom identical ; one and the same
thing in different clothes. But a Mill looks at the
Syllogism, Aristotle's wonderful and profound dis-
covery, with the sightless glare of complacent fatuity,
and wisely pronounces it an error !
Note. ' By chemical action we signify that which
occurs when two or more substances so act upon one
another as to produce a third substance differing alto-
gether from the original ones in properties.' Roscoe's
Elem. Chew. This, as the reader will observe, is almost
identical with Aristotle's definition of Syllogism.
§ 3. System, or Astronomy.
The uranological scheme of Aristotle was wholly
erroneous. But what is especially worthy of notice
is that he went further astray in this field than others
of the Greeks, precisely because he was a better reasoner
than them all. All his errors flow logically from
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 179
a fundamental position in harmony with observation k
and experience, which was for all that an error. Yet
no man would have hailed the Copernican-Newtonian
astronomy with more delight than himself, because
in fact the Newtonian astronomy fits into his philo-
sophy, his continuous ladder of Science, much better
than his own did, which, as many little touches in
the De Ccelo show, was unsatisfactory in his own
eyes.
In the view of Aristotle, which remained the view
of all the world till Newton, celestial motion was
different in kind from motion on the earth. To show
that, on the contrary, the two were the same was
precisely the point in which Newton revolutionised
astronomical conceptions. By thus identifying all
motion, he brought the heavens down to earth, or
raised earth to the heavens 1 . He thus for the first
time classed astronomy among the physical Sciences.
With Aristotle, astronomy was, as it were, hyper-
physical. Its peculiarity broke the continuity of his
k rbv 5' ovpavbv bpu/pev kvkXui irepi(pfp6fx€i/ov (De Ccelo, I. 5). From
this principle it follows necessarily, as he shows, that the heaven
cannot be infinite, that it must be composed of different stuff from
our matter, &c, &c.
1 Note, that Aristotle condemns the Pythagoreans for their opinion,
that the earth was itself a celestial body (wherein they were more
right than he was), because their opinion, he says, does not correspond
with phenomena. (De Ccelo, II. 13.)
N 2
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series of particular sciences ; it contained celestial
elements foreign to all earthly things — circular mo-
tion, eternal sameness, &c. — and it thus appears
among the other Sciences like a mysterious Deity
among common mortals. This is why nothing can
be a greater mistake than to estimate the scientific
value of Aristotle by his astronomical speculations,
as is commonly done by those who do not know
him. As Leibniz 1 " says somewhere, excellently well,
Aristotle ought to be forgiven for making the earth
the centre of the Universe : the mistake lay not
so much in him as in his age. Appearances in
astronomy are the direct reverse of the fact, and
in an age when as yet nothing worth mentioning
had been done in mathematics, mechanics n or geo-
graphical exploration, what but appearances were
available ? The more scientific caution a philosopher
might have, the more likely he was in that age to
go astray in astronomy. It had no ground to stand
m The germ of the Calculus, the idea of continuous infini-
tesimals, is clearly expressed by Aristotle (esp. in Physics, iii. 6),
where he shows, that just as a given quantity may be potentially
divided ad infinitum, so, conversely, every definite quantity contains
within it a potentially infinite number of quantities whose sum never
reaches it. Query, was Leibniz indebted to Aristotle?
" The discovery which made the fortune of Archimedes almost
belongs to Aristotle — ' in air, a piece of wood weighing a talent is
' heavier than a piece of lead weighing a hundred drachms : but
in water it is lighter.'' {De Caio, IV. 4.)
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 181
on, and no instruments to work with : hence those
notions of circular motion and mystical divinity
which form the basis of Aristotle's theory of the
heavens.
And yet it is astonishing to see, how with all his
limitations, Aristotle's appalling sagacity places him,
even here, in the same class of ideas as the truth.
His endeavour, though it does not succeed, is to
get an explanation of celestial phenomena on the
principles of gravity and levity, i.e., motion to or
from the centre. Newton himself had not a clearer
perception of the astronomical importance of weight
than Aristotle : and Newton's first and third laws
of motion are stated °, in the very words of Newton,
in Aristotle's Physics (iii. 5 and iv. 8), ' no one can
' say why, in vacuo, anything moved should ever stop
' anywhere ; for why here rather than there ? — so
' that it will either remain at rest, or move on, for
' ever, unless some superior force should interfere.'
But he does not see how this applies. This was
'The great misapprehension which possessed the minds of nearly
' all men till the time of Galileo was that the continuous action of
' some force was necessary to keep a moving body in motion ....
' it is hard to say who was the first clearly to see and announce
' that this notion was entirely incorrect, and that a body once set
'in motion and acted on by no force would move forwards for ever. . .
'we can hardly be far wrong in saying that Newton was the first
'who clearly laid down this law in connection with the correlated
' laws that cluster round it.' Newcomb's Popular Astronomy, p. 75.
1 82 UNITY:
reserved for Newton, who founded the true as-
tronomy upon it p.
The Newtonian astronomy has destroyed and
replaced the astronomy of Aristotle ; but it has
not destroyed his philosophy : on the contrary, it
strengthens and exemplifies it. It strengthens
it : for it makes astronomy a physical Science like
all the other Sciences, and so avoids that breach
of continuity which was caused by the anomalous
mystical character of old astronomical speculations ;
it exemplifies it, for it furnishes another and most
beautiful illustration of the essence of Aristotle, in
the clothing of the night and stars.
For what is it that holds in astronomy the place
that we have seen the molecule and the Syllogism
to hold in Physics and Logic ? What is the astro-
nomical essence, the molecule, so to say, of the
Universe and the celestial spaces ? It is, System :
as, e.g., the Solar System, the System of Jupiter,
of Saturn, &c. For the Universe does not consist
in its matter ; nor do the countless bodies scattered
in space constitute, as such, the sphere and Science
>' The predecessor of Newton is not Aristotle, hut Empedocles,
whom Aristotle quotes to disagree with him {Dc Calo, IT. i), ' wc
' must not suppose that the heavenly hodies remain as they are
' because the speed of their revolution is so great as to conquer their
'natural tendency to fall, as Empedocles says.' This is exactly
Newton's idea. Query, did Newton get a hint from Empedocles ?
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 183
of Astronomy. The stars, suns, planets, comets, are
not the Universe : the Universe is, the regular and
harmonious system and co-adjustment of those stars
and suns q and planets: their balanced and delicate
correlation, so admirably expressed by the old Greek
word /coo-yuo?, which denotes not only the order but
its beauty. It is not the elements, the masses, that
constitute the Universe : it is that something different
from the elements, which results necessarily from
their being what they are. This is the soul of
Astronomy : of which mathematics is only the in-
strument. And Astronomy is scientific, only in so
far as it can detect and establish System. It has
done this admirably, and we might almost say,
completely, for our Solar System. But the enor-
mous distance of the suns which we call stars
relatively to our faculties places them beyond our
scientific grasp ; and there is, properly speaking,
little Scientific Knowledge, but only observation
and cataloguing of the stars : in spite of the spec-
troscope, the most audacious instrument ever devised
by the aspiring spirit of man. The goal of Astro-
nomy is perhaps unattainable: it aims at discovering
i ' The result of the observations hitherto made proves that the
' firmament is studded not only with red and yellow suns (as was
' known long ago to the ancients), but also with blue and green suns. '
(Arago, in Humboldt's Kosmos, iii. 283.) Can any idea be more
magnificent than this?
1 84 UNITY:
the system of the Universe ; but how shall we tackle
this portentous problem, when we can hardly succeed
in estimating doubtfully the distance of a few of the
nearest stars ?
Now when we reflect how the life of all organised
beings, including our own, with all its infinitely
various moral and political development, is deter-
mined by and dependent on heat and cold, a very
slight variation in which one way or the other would
annihilate all : how these again depend on the regu-
larity of the seasons, the mingled influences of Sun
and Moon, and are possible only through the ex-
tremely delicate balance and order of our System,
we shall recognise what this astronomical essence,
this celestial realisation of the possible, means. Chaos
might come again ; every individual element, every
particular sun or planet might be still materially
there : but the essence of the Universe, the world
and all its beauty, all the myriad corollaries of order,
the very possibility of art or science would be gone.
So true is it that harmony is the soul and condition
of all : and this is not poetry, but science ; or rather,
one of the points at which they touch each other.
But the astronomical essence is harder to perceive
than that of Physics, because it is so large and
universal, escaping observation much in the same
way as the names in a map which are spread out
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 185
over large spaces are harder to find than the names
of little towns. Just so, even the savage knows that
his life depends on food and water, but he never
suspects that it is also dependent on gravity, on the
continuous spinning of our globe round the Sun and
upon its own axis, and so forth. And not only the
Savage, but the highly civilised man, is equally blind
to the truth. Has he not been laughing for cen-
turies at the absurdity of Aristotle's dictum to yap
aiTiov rov elvat iracnv rj ovaia koX 6 X.670? tj}<? ovcrlas.
Perhaps instead of laughing, he would have done
better to try and understand it.
§ 4. ' Rock,' or Geology.
The lovers of Geology may be excused for pre-
ferring their fascinating Science to all others. For
though every Science has its own peculiar and
absorbing interest, and none can claim to be before
or after another in dignity and honour, nevertheless
Geology has in it this remarkable peculiarity : it
is what Bacon would have called a ' bordering '
instance. Border countries are particularly rich
in instruction ; now, Geology stands on the border
between the inorganic and organic worlds, the
Sciences that deal with dead and those that deal
1 86 UNITY:
with living matter, and it partakes of both. Geology-
contains in it the obscure germs of higher things :
in rivers and mountains, plains and valleys, seas
and shores, lakes and deserts, we dimly recognise
the first faint indications of a personality and char-
acter which are coming ; i.e. which rise into definite
and clearer grades in plants and animals, and attain
their highest expression in the souls of men.
The singularity of Geology lies in this, that its
essence is, as it were, temporary and unstable, fleet-
ing : it is a sort of historical accident.
What is the central conception of Geology ? It
investigates the Crust of the Earth, and its com-
ponent elements and substances : its granites and
basalts, marbles and quartzes, its coal, clay, sand,
chalk, and what not : in a word, all materials that
go to make up the Crust of the Earth. But ob-
serve, now, that Geology does not investigate these
materials as such. That is the business of Chem-
istry or Mineralogy. The object of Geology is to
investigate and account for all these materials, not
as such, but as existing in peculiar local and tem-
poral positions, situations, forms. Primarily their
form, and only subsidiarily their matter is the object
of Geology. In the language of Aristotle's Cate-
gories we might say that the function of Geology
is to account for the Kecadcu of materials. Geology,
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 187
in other words, is the Science which aims at ac-
counting for the formation of rocks ; a ' rock ' being
geologically, any natural aggregate (layer, stratum,
deposit, upheaval, &c), of any material which con-
tributes to form the Crust of the Earth ; including
therefore, not only solids, but liquids, and even
gases. The word ' bank ' would convey to an un-
initiated ear what is meant geologically by a ' rock,'
which contains no reference to the quality of
material, but only to its form, having long ago lost
its popular connotation of hardness ; since it was
soon discovered that it is impossible to draw any
line, owing to the gradual continuity and ' shading
off' of substances that are hard into those that
are not so.
If, then, Geology should ever succeed in fully
accounting for every ' rock,' in explaining how every
particular constituent portion of the Earth's Crust
has come to be what and as it is, it will have done
its work, and arrived at its goal. And so, Geology
is essentially a historical Science ; it deals with
continuous change. This, and the fact that it in-
cludes palaeontology, the archaeology of the Earth's
life, gives it a peculiar analogy to economics and
politics ; and the most fruitful conception of history
proper is that which sees its type in Geology, with
its successive epochs, layers, and strata, its up-
1 88 UNITY:
heavals and catastrophes r (occasional corollaries
of slow continuous changes), political and social
institutions being to the historian just what ' rocks '
are to the geologist.
And so, here too we see that the law obtains.
Geology, too, has its essence, though it is, as we
saw, one of a peculiar kind. As, to the logician,
all thought is an aggregate of Syllogisms, to the
physicist, all substances are aggregates of molecules,
to the astronomer, the Universe is an aggregate
of systems, so to the geologist, the Crust of the
Earth is an aggregate of ' rocks.' Here, as always,
it is not the material elements as such, but that
something different, their peculiar disposition or com-
position, which is the essence of the matter. The
geologist is not a chemist nor a mineralogist, though
both these come to his assistance ; he is something
r Compare the Reformation or French Revolution with such facts
as these, 'in 1783, at Skaptar Jokul, in Iceland, a great fissure
' opened ; two streams of lava issuing from this rent were in bulk
'equal to the mass of Mont Blanc! A century later, in 1883, the
' most violent explosive eruption on record occurred at Krakatoa,
' in the Sunda Straits. There was no outflow of lava, but pumice
' and dust were thrown to the heiglfl of sixteen miles into the air,
'the pulsations of the atmosphere travelled two and a half times
' round the globe, violent waves were produced in the ocean, which
' were registered on the tide gauges all over the world, and ejected
' materials were scattered over a circle with a radius of 1,000 miles !'
{Student's Lyell, p. 467. Judd.)
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 189
more : one who can account for the shape of hills,
the dip of strata, the position and age of fossils,
the trend of valleys, the structure of volcanoes, the
height of lands and depths of seas, &c. : in a word,
he is the biographer of the ' rocks,' and can tell
how each came to be what it is. To a Humboldt
or a Lyell, the whole Earth is full of friends : each
peak or canon, each dune or desert, appeals with
an interest almost personal : he follows the fortunes
of a ' rock ' with the sympathy of a reader reading
a novel ; nay, he can tell you, like Hamlet's grave-
digger, how long each skull has lain in the ground,
as if it were that of Yorick himself. For the whole
earth is after all but a cemetery, a burial-ground :
iraaa <yrj Ta^o?. It is marvellous to think how many
centuries have passed, while all the time men took
the earth for granted, and saw not what was
staring them in the face, as we can see, now that
Geology has lifted the curtain from our eyes, and
invested with scientific interest the very mud and
stones on which we tread. What poetry that was
ever written appeals to us weighted with such
sublimity as the bare unvarnished tale of Geology,
the record of the rocks ? We seem to listen, as
we read it, to the slow and measured beat of the
pendulum of Time: the infinite patience of Creation
is almost appalling : age after age, series after scries,
190 UNITY:
generation after generation, comes into being and
passes away ; mighty rivers flow on for aeons un-
perceived by human eyes, and disappear : great seas
beat on shores that now exist no longer, and moun-
tains crumble and waste away, grain by grain, into
flat and level plains : huge forests grow silently,
flourish, fade, decay, and die, leaving their trans-
muted substance to drive the engines of a future
age ; and the weird creatures of early periods slowly
and mysteriously change into descendants that do
not resemble their parents. Would any man ap-
preciate the continuity of Nature, let him meditate
on Geology : there, if anywhere, he shall find a
sermon in the stones to set him thinking. Let him
lie on a cliff that hangs sheer over the sea, some
hundreds of feet below, and listen to the break-
ing of the waves, the sough of the wind, the scream
of the gulls : even at that very moment creation
is going on before his eyes : Nature is showing him
her hand, so naively and openly that for thousands
of years he could not see it : the organic method
of creation, the continuous change, the universal
Kivrjai^, the ordered march from possible to actual,
destroying with one hand and creating with the
other, is visibly proceeding from day to day and
hour to hour : and a text-book of Geology is an
abstract of its course.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 191
Aristotle knew nothing about Geology s . And yet
of all the Sciences Geology is the one which most
admirably confirms and exhibits his metaphysical
law. The geological process is an everlasting series
of variations on one theme, which is Aristotle's
definition of Motion or Change. 1) rou Swcitov §
SvvaTov ivTeke^eta is the motto of Geology. The
brain of man could rise no higher : that definition
marks the summit of human intellectual power :
for it not only seizes and expresses the evolutionary
process of the Universe, but carries with it the stamp
of the eagle genius which was capable of so seizing
and expressing it.
§ 5. Cell, or Biology (potentiality.)
Of all the discoveries of modern Science, there
is none more wonderful than that of the Cell. The
revelations of embryology, or the study of develop-
ment, pregnant in themselves with profound sig-
nificance, are from. our present point of view doubly
interesting and important, for they vindicate the
insight of Aristotle in the most curiously exact
manner, and prove conclusively that the abuse of
Aristotle by the philosophers of modern times was
the abuse of knowledge by ignorance.
* But see Appendix.
192 UNITY:
The cell stands to the organic world in the same
relation as the molecule to the physical world : the
cell is the organic molecule, the organic unit and
radical, the stuff out of which all is constructed.
Embryology tells us that every living organism
comes from a cell, a fertilised ovum ; was, that is
to say, originally a cell, which by a mysterious
power, implanted and initiated by fertilisation, grad-
ually evolves under appropriate conditions into a
fully developed animal or plant.
Though every branch of modern Science illustrates
Aristotle's philosophy, even where it destroys his
particular views, nowhere do we find such a re-
markable corroboration of his analysis, as here. In
this he is right aven in the detail, as those who
misunderstand and abuse him in other respects, are
obliged to admit. The theory of Epigenesis, with
which the name of Harvey is inseparably associated,
was first propounded by Aristotle in his Dc Genera-
tione Animalium: biological differentiation, an idea
which made the fortune of Von Baer, belongs to
Aristotle ; the constant segmentation of the originally
undifferentiated cell, in which the process of de-
velopment consists, is described by himself — wov
yap to fj,ev irpwTov dSiopiarov, elra 8ia/cpiv6fjL6vov
ylvercu 7roWa.
There is a very great difference between a modern
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 193
text-book of embryology and Aristotle's imperfect
efforts, in point of fulness of detail and elaboration.
None the less, such a text-book runs on the lines
laid down by Aristotle, and does but fill up the
sketch, outlined by the hand of the old master.
The man who studies such a modern text-book is
also studying unintentionally a particular branch
of the philosophy of Aristotle.
Now, there is one very important error frequently
committed by modern scientific exponents of this
process of development that was never committed
by Aristotle. It is constantly asserted, and the
most far - reaching philosophical conclusions are
founded on the assertion, that all protoplasm is
identical. Protoplasm is spoken of generally, as if
it were everywhere the same, the common life-
material of all organic beings. The protoplasm
of plant and animal, of different plants and different
animals, is, we are told, microscopically indistin-
guishable. It may be so : the resemblance may
even go further : the chemical constituents may be
the same. Yet not only does that not warrant us
in pronouncing on the identity of all protoplasm,
but on the contrary, it is demonstrably certain that
the reverse is the truth. Two portions of proto-
plasm may look the same, may even consist of the
same chemical constituents, but they are for all
o
194 UNITY:
that potentially different, and development proves it.
No cell ever becomes anything other than one de-
finite thing. Consider, e.g. among vegetables, the
bamboo, the bulrush, the carrot, the onion, the
orange, the cucumber : among animals, the camel,
the elephant, the eagle, the porcupine, the mole,
the owl, the swan : suppose, to make the case as
strong as possible, that the chemical elements of
the several cells of these essentially different beings
were the same or nearly so in all : yet is it not plain
that every cell must be intensely sui generis, and
that the more the elements are the same, the more
is it necessary that the cause of the difference must
lie in the composition, the synthesis ; that something
different from the elements which as we have seen
is everywhere the essence of all being ? With this
agrees the extraordinarily complex nature of the
organic cell as compared with the physical mole-
cule, a complexity which defies the efforts of ana-
lysis, for it is unstable, and therefore examination
disturbs it ; alters, even in the endeavour to de-
tect it.
Here, as everywhere, the truth clearly exhibits
itself. Just as water is a thing totally different
from its elements, so is each cell a thing wholly
other than its component materials. Between cells,
as between molecules, there obtains the most in-
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 195
tense difference ; a difference that lies, not in the
elements, but the structure. To every cell its own
potentiality that determines the result : to yap atriou
Toy elvau ttcmtiv rj ova-la Kol 6 \6yos rfj9 ovalas.
The essence of every living creature lies potentially
in its cell, and appears fully developed in the grown
animal : growth being the process of the change,
the realisation of the possible as such.
Note. It is precisely in connection with the cell
as the potentiality of the fully developed animal
that the. impotence and superficiality of Darwin's
theory of Natural Selection becomes so glaring.
I have proved in my Body and Soul that that
theory is not only erroneous, but impossible : that it
is at once a truism and an absurdity, the absurdity
being quietly swallowed for the sake of the truism.
But in connection with our present subject I invite
the reader to consider the following argument.
The problem of evolution is not only physical
but metaphysical : that is to say, the solution must
take account not only of the historical genesis and
chronological origin of organic forms, but also of
their definite nature and constitution, when they
have originated : not only the passage, change, and
transmutation of one form into another, but also
O 2
196 UNITY:
the fixity of the form so obtained. Now the theory
of Natural Selection utterly ignores this fixity and
what it implies. It solves the origin of any form
by happy accident, casual variation. Very good.
But the continued production of similar forms is
not an accident. Why does a rhinoceros go on
producing a rhinoceros ? Obviously, because the
cell, the fertilised ovum, is obliged by the necessity
of its nature to become a rhinoceros and nothing
else. Now, no accident will account for this neces-
sity, this formal cause. Any one who will reflect
upon this will inevitably come to the conclusion
that the transmutation of any form into another
is somehow or other determined by and bound up
with changes in the generative system and process :
that is, in the formal cause, the cell, the potentiality
of the complete and perfect animal. It is not a
trifling miserable accidental variation in the fully
developed animal, of no account whatever in the
nature of the animal, but some radical and profound
chemico-organic change in the cell which alone can
explain final and definite alteration of the animal's
form ; an alteration which is therefore constant, and
goes on without change, with the regularity of clock-
work : for fixity is no more to be disregarded than
change of form. According to Darwin's way of
looking at the matter, this fixity would be a mere
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 197
accident 4 , like the shape of water in a cup, ready-
to change without demur or hesitation at the call
of circumstances. But what he ignores is the. formal
cause, the potentiality of form. To explain the origin
of species you must explain that : it is certainly
not explained by accidental variation. No amount
of accidental variation will add up into necessary
potentiality of a definite form : will in other words,
make up, explain, or account for, a cell. That, once
having arisen, a superior form will defeat an inferior
one, is a thing that stands to reason : it is a mere
truism: but the difficulty is, to understand, how u
that superior form came about. Darwin's theory
never touches the point : he assumes, just what con-
stitutes the difficulty ; the arising of favourable
variations. But how do these arise ? The Origin
of Species is an ignoratio elenchi.
Imperfect as it is, the geological record proves
conclusively v that the historical series of life on
the globe exhibits a constant progress upwards in
organisation from lower to higher : otherwise ex-
pressed, cells have constantly been becoming richer
1 Just as rocks are geological accidents, so according to Darwin's
views are organic forms. It is a view derived from geology.
" This is where his fallacy lies. If the variations were very slight,
they would not be favourable : to be so, they would have to be
very large and sudden. See Appendix.
T Lyell's Geology (Judd), p. 446.
ipS UNITY:
in potentiality, growing in power and variety. Now
to imagine that this continuous acquisition of ad-
ditional potentiality, of further formative power, can
be accounted for by the impossible selection, or
survival, or preservation of a minute, haphazard,
almost imperceptible variation in the fully developed
animal, argues a want of understanding of the point
where the difficulty is. The difficulty does not lie in
seeing, that the advantageous form will defeat its com-
petitors, — but in seeing how that advantage comes
about. Darwin's theory only explains what is ob-
vious : what is difficult it does not explain ; it as-
sumes it. It postulates the advantage : this is simply
to beg the question. The insignificant variation
in the full grown animal, the accidents of matter,
could never exercise the slightest influence. On
the other hand, it is certain that the very strangest
and abrupt departures from type, new organic points
of structure, are sometimes produced suddenly, by
the mysterious agency of generation. Two parrots
have been known, for example, abruptly to pro-
duce a third adorned with a brilliant scarlet hood
possessed by neither of its parents. This, and
similar instances, show that the solution of the
problem lies, not in the casual variation of the full
grown animal, but in the changes produced by some
mysterious agency in the form of the cell, the poten-
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 199
tiality of the animal x . The developed animal lies
a priori, potentially, in its cell, which must therefore
be rigorously determined by organic necessity : it
is this that contains the mystery. In other words,
the change of fully developed forms lies in some
difference of composition in the cells, exactly as,
analogously, the difference of molecules lies in some
chemical difference of the composition of their
elements.
That cells do become transmuted is certain : but
equally certain is it that Darwin's theory is not the
explanation of how it is done. That theory is alto-
gether superficial ; it does not touch the point. It
is a mistaken endeavour to account for inner organic
potential necessity by trifling exterior accident.
The cause of the transmutation of cells certainly
lies in generation, of which we know absolutely no-
thing : the mixture and as it were chemical compo-
sition of the cell. Aristotle has some profound
apcrcus on this point. ' We ought to observe,' he
1 ' When we remember such cases as the formation of the more
' complex cells, and certain monstrosities, which cannot be accounted
'for by reversion, cohesion, &c, and sudden strongly-marked de-
' viations of structure, such as the appearance of a moss-rose on
' a common rose, we ?nust admit that the organisation of the indi-
1 vicinal is capable through its own laws of growth, under certain
' conditions, of undergoing great modifications, independently of the
'■gradual accumulation of slight inherited modifications.' Origin oj
Species, p. 151 (5th Ed.). This destroys his theory.
200 UNITY:
says y, 'that a change in a very small principle will
'bring" about concomitantly change in many things
' that depend on that principle. This is plainly to
' be noted in the case of eunuchs. For though only
1 the organs of generation have been destroyed, yet
' the whole form changes to such an extent as to
'seem almost womanish: plainly indicating that
' that part or power which determines the sex of
' the animal is of the very first importance in its
'economy 2 .' This is a very pregnant consideration
in connection with the origin and transmutation of
forms, and it is here that the core of the problem
lies.
Darwin was a very great naturalist, and his
powers of observation were of the first order, but
he was a very poor thinker, and the only part of the
Origin of Species which is original is altogether
futile. The transmutation of species is a necessary
deduction from geology : it was ' in the air ' when
he wrote, and we should have had the idea now,
even had he never existed. But the endeavour to
account for that transmutation by ' Natural Selec-
tion ' is only one of the innumerable instances of
the sort of palpable absurdity that can pass for
philosophy, when the appeal is to the vulgar. A
y De Generatione Animalium, i. 2.
* Cp. also lb. iv. I, and v. 7.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 201
man nowadays may be totally destitute of training
in analytical thinking, definition, and method : he
may not even know what ' science ' is : yet if he
collects beetles or cuts up frogs he is a ' man of
science,' and qualified accordingly to pronounce on
the profoundest questions, betraying at every step
that the sutor is ultra crepidam. For no amount
of knowledge of particular scientific detail will
make a man a master of science. It is not the
accumulation of facts, it is the interpretation of
facts, in which lies science ; nor as a rule are ' men
of science ' even aware that thought has laws. And
this deplorable state of things must continue, until
Physics learns, not to beware of Metaphysics, but
to understand, and revere her.
§ 6. SOUL, or Biology (actuality.)
The cell is the potentiality of the living being :
its actuality is the soul, on which so many strange
delusions have existed since the beginning, founded
on the error of divorcing and abstracting the esse
from the posse. Here also Aristotle alone was equal
to the problem.
Observe a dead crab, impaled on a pin or other-
wise preserved in a collection : there you have the
body. Watch the same crab, scuttling about side-
202 UNITY:
ways over rocks and sea-weed, half in and half out
of water, when the tide is coming hurtling and
heaving in : there you have the soul, the essence
of life. It is not the body of the crab, but the soul
of him, the energetic activity of his peculiar frame,
in its due situation and circumstances, that con-
stitutes his being and fills us with such inexhaustible
delight to see. This is that ^v^fjs ivepyeia kut'
apeTTjv wherein consists the happiness, the end and
goal of all organic existence. The infinite varieties
of plants and animals are all only incarnations of
soul of various kinds, and therefore Aristotle says
well, that the business of the natural philosopher
is with the soul rather than the body : tov cpvaiKov
irepl ^rv^ip av elrj \ijeiv ical elBivai, not the dead
quiescent structure, but its living energy.
Anatomy and physiology deal only with the body,
the means to the end : they tell us nothing about
the nature of that whose parts and structure they
investigate. ' Man is only entitled to that rank in
' a morphological system which, in future ages, when
' nothing is left of our race but a sufficient number
' of fossil bones, a thinking being would assign to
' him in a scientific arrangement of the animal
'kingdom. According to the principles of com-
' parative anatomy and by scientific requirements
' he would then be separated from the apes of
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 203
■ the present geological era only as an order or
1 sub-order a .'
Now, though this may be true, it proves only
this, how little anatomy penetrates into the nature
of man. The skeleton does not contain the soul.
Contemplate the skeletons of man and the gorilla ;
who could dream, from such inspection, of the
infinite difference between the natures of the two ?
Who could tell by examining the skeleton of the
elephant, that this enormous unwieldy bony structure
can walk through dense jungle so silently as to
come upon deer by surprise ? Who could imagine
by examining the skeletons of the cuckoo or cow-
bunting that these birds have the habit of laying
their eggs in the nests of other birds? Who could
foresee, from an examination of the anatomical
structure of the sand-wasp, its habit of laying its
egg in a tunnel of mud filled with dead spiders
for the future nutriment of its grub ? And so
universally. No amount of anatomy will give you
a particle of insight into the nature of bird or
beast or fish b . To understand this you must go
to their haunts and watch them. Only there will
you get that Realisation of the Possible, that actual
* Oscar Peschel's Races of Man, p. 6.
b Except of a purely general description, as carnivora from their
teeth, &c. : yet this is not always certain, for there are animals whose
habits contradict their structure.
204 UNITY:
energy which is the soul of each, and which it is
the object of natural history and biography to seize
and depict. And with man it is clearly the same
The dissecting table is democratic and levelling.
Lay open on it Loyola, Napoleon, Shakspeare,
Aristotle, or a peasant from the plough, it will
not show you the difference. You must view them
at work, alive, to understand the peculiar nature
of each. Do the stupid crowds who flock to
Zoological Gardens in great cities understand the
strange and melancholy beasts at which they stare
with lack lustre eyes, offering them all indiffer-
ently buns? How should they? The carcases of
the wild animals are there to see, but not their
souls, their selves: they left those in the jungles
and the forests and the deserts which were their
homes, and lost them in captivity. This is why
in all such places there is something gloomy and
oppressive : a Thiergarten or a ' Zoo ' is, in fact,
a morgue, a place of death and corpses, a dungeon
of the dead-alive. Lifted out of the economy of
Nature, in which they filled a place and had their
being, these singular structures lose their raisou
d'etre, lose their grace and appositeness, and be-
come absurd : mere misshapen lumps of matter
without any visible appropriate end, like a lid
without its box, a corkscrew where no bottles are,
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 205
or a Hindoo Pundit at Timbuctoo. For the soul
of everything lies not in itself, but in other things
and its relation to them : each thing is for the
sake of those others. Sever the continuity, and
you slay the soul, leaving only something that
seems to live but does not. It wants only that
infinitesimal thing, that something different which
constitutes the essence of reality in every grade
of the ladder of being; that imperceptible touch
of Nature which alone of all philosophers Aristotle
could seize and understand, because he only was
not the victim of abstraction.
The soul of every living creature lies indeed in
others ; experience will furnish every man a bitter
proof of the truth as he grows old. For then the
old circle of friends with which he started and in
which he had his place gradually disappears, and
with it disappears also the best part of himself:
for the element in which he was at home is gone,
and he may now say sadly with Ovid : Barbarus
hie ego sum quia non intelligor ulli.
Thus old men are already dead, when Death
finally arrives to take them away : and they get
up from the table and follow him gladly out of
the room, for their life has long been a void,
a mere mockery, containing nothing of that which
made it what it was.
206 UNITY:
§ 7. Wealth, or Economics.
The unit, or molecule, of Economics is a single
one of those instruments of life which collectively
we call Wealth.
Now, it is to be carefully observed that there are
two distinct and different points of view from which
we may approach the subject of Wealth : and it
makes not a little but all the difference in the world
which we adopt. The remarkable fact is that almost
all economists confound the two and waver between
them : they avowedly adopt the one, and yet give
a definition which is harmonious only with the other.
The only really logical economist, who has clearly
and wholly adhered to one point of view, is Mr. H. D.
Macleod, and what he gains by this on one side
he loses on the other : for his point of view is the
wrong one : he is not a political but a mathematical
economist.
Wealth may be considered either as created or as
exchanged: either as a product to be used, or as a com-
modity to be sold: and Economics become accord-
ingly the scientific analysis either of the process of
creation, or the mechanism of exchange. To confine
your attention to this second view is to mistake the
means for the end : for the true end of all wealth as,
e.g., a shoe, is not to be sold, but to be used. For the
THE LOGIC OF NA TURE. 207
commercial man, the means is the end ; but for the
statesman, not so.
I. If, therefore, we adopt the first, which is the
true and philosophical point of view, admirably in-
dicated by the title of Adam Smith's work, — An
Enquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations* — we obtain the true definition of Wealth,
which I have elsewhere called the Quadruple Princi-
ple of Wealth-Creation. The Wealth of any nation
is a vast accumulation of units, each one of which
is to the whole aggregate exactly what a molecule
of water is to a mass of it : each, that is to say, is
a synthesis or compound of essentially four consti-
tuent causes, viz. : Material, Labour, Form, and De-
mand d : the four Aristotelean causes. (Aristotle
never applied them to Economics, but he may be
regarded as the potential author of the true defini-
tion, here as in the case of Sight.) According to
this definition, two things are especially to be ob-
served. First, that the highest form of Wealth would
be a great work of art : a statue, a picture, a drama,
c There is not a line, from end to end of Smith's book, on the
nature of wealth : its causes were, as he partly sees himself, wholly
other than the theory which he advocates ; and that theory, it
realised, would destroy all the nations in the world : it is anti-
nalional.
We might express it thus: as water is- II.jO, so Wealth is
MLFD.
2o8 UNITY:
a temple, an oratorio ; and the highest activity of
the nation, the full development and expression of
the creative faculty. Secondly, that the power is
more than the act, the posse of Wealth than its esse,
and that we ought to think rather of the permanence
of the causes of Wealth, than the actual Wealth
itself. And this was not done by the economists.
II. But the enormous development of commerce,
coupled with want of insight into the nature of
Wealth, has led to the general adoption by eco-
nomists of the commercial or business point of view,
resulting in this definition of Wealth, that it is any-
thing whatever that will exchange. The essence of
Wealth is thus placed, not in its true end, but in
its exchange value. And according to this defini-
tion, the highest form of Wealth would be Money,
and the goal and aim of human endeavour, national
or individual, to make it.
This is the chrematistic view, which has a partial
truth, but becomes an error in so far as this part
claims to be all, which makes money the riXos, the
essence and final cause of all productive effort ;
which turns all the sciences and arts into means
to that end, and makes venality the test of worth.
Nemesis will overtake the nation which adopts this
view. For just as the true end of man is the ^vxns
ipipyeia kclt apeTrjv, so is the true end of creation
THE LOGIC OF NA TURE. 209
or production the object created : for Wealth must
subserve the end. And indeed, the world, though
in its business relations it would agree with the
shortsighted shopkeeper definition, yet in its heart
of hearts agrees with the other. For it looks upon
its great works of art, rightly, as its best and truest
Wealth, and recognises, obscurely, that business is not
the end, but only a means to the end. Nor does
it class the business man, the man who makes most
money, on a level with the artist or philosopher or
statesman: it may envy, but it does not admire him:
no one erects statues to business men or money-
makers. And this shows, though it is not under-
stood, that the essence of Wealth is not exchange-
value. That is the highest form of Wealth which
embodies the soul of all Wealth and combines each
necessary element at its highest power: which gives
us the choicest material, the hardest labour, the best
intellect, and satisfies, expresses, or answers to the
highest need of man.
Which is the real Wealth: the Parthenon, or its
weight in gold ? there is the choice of Hercules. On
the answer to that question depends, theoretically,
the economic system : practically, the national char-
acter and achievement, and its reputation in his-
tory. As a rule the solution will be that of the
poet,
P
210 UNITY:
' video meliora, proboque,
Deteriora sequor,'
a quotation which is painfully, humiliatingly true :
for it has caught the spirit of humanity ; whose
better part aims at higher things, but which is too
weak to attain them.
§ 8. Institution, or Politics.
Every State is a system of institutions : insti-
tution is the essence of the State. What its mole-
cule is to a physical substance, its cell to an
organism, that its institutions are to a State.
And the same relation obtains here, as there :
it is not the elements but the composition that
determines the result. The men make the State,
but still more does the State make the men ; it
' turns out ' its men. Hence the indescribable
difference between good and bad institutions.
It is the essence of Liberalism to ignore this truth :
hence the political convulsions of this century, hence
the everlasting endeavours to realise the impossible
by legislative juggling ; to identify the essential
differences existing between the members of the
State.
The mathematical tone of Science inspires, and
lies at the root of, this error. When the State is
THE L OGIC OF NA TURE. 2 1 1
conceived, correctly, as a community, this concep-
tion is not a mathematic but an organic conception.
Community does not mean, as political theorists
assume, union of equals and similars, but of un-
equals atid dissimilars, oh <yctp ^iverai ttoXis it; 6/aoiW.
A State is an organic unity, composed of lesser
organic groups which are different in kind. The
conception which lies at the root of Liberalism is
what we may call the Atomic Theory of society :
a State of homogeneous units ; a mere numerus
of identical atoms: a community of individuals.
No such ' State ' ever did, ever will, or ever could
exist, except for a moment. The French at the
close of last century made, under the influence of
this theory e , a clean sweep of their institutions, and
set up a mathematical ' State ' of units, which
immediately became the only thing it could be-
come — a barrack ; and vanished, as things settled
down again, leaving France a prey to convulsion,
owing to the destruction of her institutions.
The accepted statement, that the progress of
society is from status to contract, harmonises with
this Atomic Theory. But this statement is only
true legally : if understood socially it is false and
absurd. It is altogether a delusion to suppose that
■ Admirably shown in the best of all histories of the Revolution,
that of Taiae.
P 2
212 UNITY:
you can get rid of status in any State. You may
abolish it, in a particular technical sense ; you may
change its form ; but it will always be there. And
the reason is that you cannot have any State
without institutions, and institutions involve status
of a kind.
The men of a State are not individuals but
persons : the two radical elementary conceptions
of the State are, in the language of Roman Law,
persona and res, persons and things, i.e. property,
for res does not mean a thing in the metaphysical
sense, it means a thing in relation to persons. Law
has nothing to do with a thing in the abstract.
Take, e.g., England. Among English institutions,
we observe a Monarch, a Peerage, a House of Com-
mons, a Church, a Bar, Universities, Public Schools,
an Army, consisting of different Regiments, a Navy,
&c. Now, the Queen, a Duke, a Member of Parlia-
ment, a Bishop, a Q.C., the Head of a College, an
Oxford or Eton man, a Colonel R.A., a Captain
R.N., &c, are none of them individuals. They
are persons. They are made what they are by
their positions. Their lives and actions are deter-
mined at all moments by the myriad influences of
the corps to which they belong. For example, the
spirit of Public Schools and the University has the
most profound influence on the Government of
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 213
India: abolish them, and India would be governed
far otherwise than it is. Or again, the past of any
Regiment hovers over its living members and in-
spires them when in action. And so it is universally.
That is to say, that the nature and activity of
Englishmen is determined, made what it is, by
their institutions. This is the true self-government,
of which the Liberal or Atomistic theory, which
thinks of nothing but the numerical representation
of individuals, is the bastard caricature.
I say, then, that here, as in all the other spheres
of Science, it is not the elements, but that something
different from the elements, which arises from their
being what and as they are ; that is, the institutions,
which are the essence of the matter in the political
area. It is not the men that make the State, but
the State that makes the men.
Obviously, volumes might be written on this
theme. But as the present object is only to connect
politics with the Aristotelean conception of nature
in general, I shall content myself with two illus-
trations of the way in which a misconception of
the truth may bring about fatal results, with the
best intentions in the world.
The false effort after unification, equalisation,
identification of opposites and dissimilars, which
arises from and reposes on the Atomic or mathe-
214 UNITY:
matical conception of the State, appears especially
nowadays in two directions : the attempt to realise
equality of properties and the attempt to realise
equality of persons.
I. Viewing with moral disapproval the actual
system, according to which property is very un-
equally divided, and owned to a large extent by
' idle rich ' men, the economists and political philo-
sophers of this century have industriously laboured
to show, and the Socialists and other Utopians now
repeat after them, that the foundation and principle
of property is industry : that this alone is its legiti-
misation : that only that is properly your own which
you have made yourself: that the true law of the
State is that he who does not work shall not eat,
and that he only should have and enjoy who has
made.
I assert, on the contrary, that such a principle
is inconsistent with the existence of the State, and
that its realisation would be the death of every
State and the annihilation of every existing system
of property. I say that the principle of property
is, and must necessarily be, that he who does not
work shall have and enjoy.
To exist, the State must have a continuous exist-
ence, from parents to children onwards. Now, the
principle of political continuity is inheritance. With-
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 215
out inheritance, no State is possible. But with
inheritance, it is impossible that property should
be founded on industry. For you cannot prevent
property from passing into the hands of those who
had nothing to do with the making of it. And
now, in addition to the main stream of inherit-
ance, consider also the minor but still immense
affluents of marriage, gift, bequest, gambling, swind-
ling, theft. Are you going to stop them ? Can
you prevent property from passing by their means ?
You might as well attempt to dam Niagara. These
things are the foundation and explanation of every
system of property in the world. It makes not
the slightest difference how property was originally
acquired, whether by force, fraud, or industry. Be
that how you please, a few generations later it will
be in the hands of an heir of some kind ; i.e. of
some one who had no hand in the making of it.
Without the State, no property, for no security.
Without inheritance, again, no State. With in-
heritance, property is and must be, sooner or later,
owned by those who did not make it. This is the
law of property which no human force can alter.
And this is one of the many tests by which we
may judge of the degree of insight possessed by
any economist into the nature of the State. J. S.
Mill, for example, asserts that bequest is involved
216 UNITY:
in the nature of property, and inheritance not ; that
you can have property without inheritance. I say
that it is just the other way : that you can have
property without bequest, but that you cannot have
it without inheritance. And history would confirm
this : but why appeal to history when reason is so
clear ? How is it possible for property to exist
without some principle of inheritance ? Who is to
possess that which was owned by one who dies
without a will? Are we to scramble for it? Mill's
conception of property, like his conception of almost
every other thing, is not the mirror of property
as it is, but the visionary notion of property as
it is not and cannot be : here as everywhere, his
thought is not analytic of the real, but abstract and
fictitious. He does not penetrate into the necessity
of the actual system of property and understand
its raison d'etre, why it is as it is, but he frames
an idea of what he supposes property ought to be,
and condemns existing systems because they do not
agree with it. The attempt to bring property into
harmony with the conception of society as a com-
munity of equal workers is simply futile. To be
unequal, and to be in possession of those who do
not work, is the necessity involved in the principle
of property, and however you may start, time will
realise this possibility, whether you will or no.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 217
II. Turn, now, to the second idea, the effort after
equality of persons, which arises from the radically-
false conception of the State as a community of
homogeneous units agreeing in their ' common
human nature.' The method of realising this state
of things lies in advocating the abolition of all
such institutions as recognise, embody, and per-
petuate differences of degree or kind in the mem-
bers of a society. This is described as Liberty,
and its partisan is a Liberal, i.e. one whose aims
are ' noble,' and whose insight into possibility is nil.
Liberty is the one thing Liberals might have been
supposed to understand. It was, as it were, their
political stock-in-trade — their private farm. There
is no one thing which they understand less. This
is why every society that falls into the hands of
Liberals is doomed : it ruins itself in pursuit of
a false ideal. True Liberty ; the fact, not the
phrase ; the actual, not the ideal ; the reality, not
the dream ; is not a natural and inalienable right,
it is a constitutional privilege ; not a universal,
but a peculiar thing ; positive, not negative ; not
inherent in, but added to, humanity; not opposed
to authority, but presupposing it ; not contrary
to institutions, but dependent on them : not natural
but acquired ; not common but enclosed ground ;
a Upov i7To\Udpov, the result of the holy communion
2i8 UNITY:
of the State f . No philanthropy can ever bestow
liberty on the human race, or turn what is essen-
tially a privilege into a cosmopolitan attribute.
The attempt to do so, the realisation of ' human
liberty,' however beautiful its emblematic head may
appear on the coins of a momentary Republic, can
only result in its opposite, the slavery of man. For
if you give to the weak that freedom, that emancipa-
tion which can belong only to the strong", you
cast them unprotected on the world, and they will
sink, by the law of moral gravitation, to their
natural place.
Is it not plain ? can anything be plainer ? Take
illustrations. What two things have been more
zealously denounced by middle-class Liberalism
than the two old institutions of Slavery and Con-
cubinage? The Slave and the Concubine are re-
garded with pious horror as hideous features of a
barbaric and immoral age. Well, we have got rid
f 'You may inflict on me death, banishment, or dishonour,' says
Socrates to his judges, 'and some might think these things evils,
• but I do not.' That is, he despises the institutions of the city to
which he owed everything. Rightly did they put him to death.
s Liberals call out that Greece is being deprived (1897) of the
control of her own affairs, ' inalienable rights of every independent
nation.' But the fact is that Greece is utterly unfit to be inde-
pendent, and would not remain so for six months, if left to herself.
The independence of Greece is the diplomatic fad of Western
Europe : it must pay for its toy accordingly.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 219
of the words ; how is it with the things ? We have
substituted liberty for institutions; and we have got,
accordingly, instead of the Slave, the Proletariate,
and instead of the Concubine, the Prostitute. The
very institution of Slavery secured to the weak, the
slave, more true liberty than the 'free' man enjoys
under the regime of competition, i.e. Liberty ; for
his very freedom is his slavery : it throws him de-
fenceless into the hands of fortune, accident, and the
myriad fluctuations of circumstances. Under the
old system, both Slave and Concubine had a recog-
nised and not dishonourable position in society :
now, under other names, they are outside society,
while forming part of it, and constitute two of its
most formidable dangers and crying reproaches.
Institutions that recognise human nature, or ' Li-
berty ' and ' Morality ' that do not : choose, Star-
vation and Prostitution, or Slavery and Concubinage.
The emancipation of women is a very pretty idea ;
very pleasant for the aristocratic few : it means
things horrible even to think of for the democratic
many. Women are altogether unfit to be emanci-
pated : the necessity for their subordinate (not, ob-
serve, inferior) position is physiological, organic.
The theory, and a little coquetting with the practice,
look beautiful in time of peace and quiet : see how
it will work when times are troubled, and the fight-
220 UNITY:
ing begins. Place women on a footing of perfect
equality with men : let them hold property, and
establish complete freedom of divorce h ; you will
injure them far more than you benefit them, as time
will show: for among other things, marriage becomes
an absurdity. It binds, ties ; it is slavery : your free
man and woman will have none of it. What is the
corollary ?
Liberals think, by reason of their profound ignor-
ance of the nature of things, to make homogeneous
the essentially unhomogeneous members of the State,
to identify parts that are complementary, polar op-
posites, and confound distinctions rooted in the
nature of things. They might just as well try to
make a horse walk with his mouth and eat with
his hoof. But they persevere ; they are actuated
by the best intentions, the noblest aims : they will
divide all, wealth, enjoyment, work, duties, functions,
equally and indiscriminately among all, men, women,
nay, even children (who work now as they never
worked before, and the joy has gone out of their life) ;
property, education, liberty, shall be the same for
all; the Universities shall be the hothouses, in which
h ' A specious theory is confuted by this free and perfect experi-
' ment, which demonstrates that the liberty of divorce does not
'contribute to happiness and virtue.' Gibbon's Decline and Fall,
e. 44.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 221
young men and maidens shall be educated together,
and why not the Public Schools ? II faut avant tout
que les fannies soient homines; apres, qui vivra verra.
The time cannot be far distant when we shall love
like cattle, and think like chimpanzees : when all
our men are knaves or slaves, and all our women
prostitutes. For all these things are only various
forms of Chaos : whose essence, so to say, lies in the
confusion of distinctions and the absence of defini-
tion.
§ 9. Authoritv, or Law.
As a layman in Law, I will venture to doubt
whether any one thing has been productive of more
mischief in this century than the inability to dis-
tinguish between Morality and Law ; to discern,
in what lies the essence of Law.
The essence of Law is authority. A law may be
moral as it may be immoral, conformable to notions
of equity or opposed to them ; but it is neither the
morality nor the immorality of the law which makes
it a law. What makes every law, Law, is that some-
thing different from its content which must always
accompany it, if it is to be a law ; i.e. the authority
which it carries with it.
222 UNITY:
Now, this authority may have more sources than
one. It may be derived from superior force, the
direct and positive command of a superior who has
the power to reward or punish the obedience or
disobedience of the law. Or it may be derived
from belief, custom, religion, superstition. The
narrow rationalism ' of Austin, following Hobbes,
could see no source of authority but the State :
but this view would exclude half the Law in
history from the category of Law.
Any law may be defined as, a general rule of
conduct, to do or forbear, imposed by a real or
imaginary superior power, which will, or which it
is believed will, inflict a punishment on the breaker
of the rule. Observe, that if you leave out the
imaginary element in this definition, you will arrive
at the absurd result that the laws even of a State
are sometimes not laws : because it may very well
happen, and often has happened, that the supreme
authority in a State has in fact not the power to
enforce its laws or punish their breach : yet the
belief that it has such power might continue to
preserve the State and the laws long before its
real impotence was discovered. And this is so
true that in fact even in ' positive ' laws the imagi-
1 Austin does not understand that the potentiality of Law is deeper
than its actuality.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 223
nary power is far more important than the real,
and a brand new set of such laws would not be
so efficacious as when time had accustomed people
to them, i.e. begotten the authority of custom for
them ; so much does authority, and therefore law,
rest upon custom as its basis. What people believe
to be is in one way more important and stronger
than what actually is. And even the dissolution
of the State would produce less chaos than the
cessation of old beliefs, for the loss of authority
in the first case would be less than its loss in the
second : as is amply demonstrated by such periods
in history as the English Rebellion or the French
Revolution.
A mere precept of morality, as such, is not a law
and has no authority. It becomes a law, when,
and exactly in so far as, it acquires authority:
either by being laid down by a superior power,
actual and able to punish its breach, or by be-
coming recognised in the common practice and
belief of men as binding, from reason of custom,
superstition, or religion. To commit murder is
everywhere to violate morality, in nearly every
country to break law, but it was not so among
the Thugs in India ; it was just the other way ;
to commit murder was the law among the Thugs :
a law supported by an authority greater than all
224 UNITY:
the authority behind the laws of England : the
authority of absolute and implicit belief in the com-
mand of an imaginary superior k , obeyed with an
obedience punctual and unquestioning. Here you
certainly had law ; equally certainly you had not
morality. And the truth is that there are as many
species of the genus Law as there are different
sources of authority. The Laws of the Church were
equal Laws with the Laws of the State ; canon and
civil Law was equally Law, before the Reforma-
tion. Hobbes' view of Law, like his abuse of
Aristotle, was dictated largely by bias and sinister
intention : he hated the Church.
And the truth that the essence of Law is
authority, is admirably brought out and exem-
plified in what is known as International Law.
In abstracto, International Law is not Law at all,
for it lacks that which is just the essence of Law —
authority. But it becomes truly Law exactly in so
far as it becomes associated with and is supported
by authority. The various States of ancient Greece
in the times of which Herodotus writes, had an
International Law in their common religious beliefs
and tics of kinship 1 . In the time of Thucydides
k See the extraordinary record in Sleeman's Ramaseeana, a book
that is unique in human history.
See especially Herodotus, Book viii. c. 144. The same sort
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 225
we see this disappearing, not because the morality-
was any the less theoretically binding than before,
but because the authority enforcing it — the belief
— was decaying. Under the Roman Empire the
various independent States of the ancient world
were all subjected to the Imperial system, and
International Law merged or disappeared, as it
were, into the Law of one colossal State : just as,
economically, the world had then a free trade m .
In later times the double system of Emperor and
Pope, the conception of a two-headed Christendom,
preserved a sort of International Law, which the
Church, rather than the State, represented and em-
bodied. But the Reformation destroyed it. Instead
of a common Christendom arose the modern system
of independent rival States.
And one of the first things revealed after the
Reformation had been in progress for some time
was the crying need of some International Law.
In truth it was the logical corollary of the Re-
formation. There are very few books in history
which have laid their finger on the point, recognised
of thing probably existed among the Hindoo Rajas of the Gangetic
Age.
m It is greatly to be regretted that Gibbon's immortal classic,
owing to his inexplicable over-valuation of Tacitus, represents the
Empire in colours often darker than the truth. The Empire was
«tp m^.ny ways, not the slavery, but the freedom of the world.
Q
226 UNITY:
the inner need and necessity of their age, so ac-
curately as the great work of Grotius. He pointed
emphatically to a great want — an International
Authority. And since his time there has gradually
grown up a body of rules regulating national
conduct, recognised by the various nations as
forming a system of Law, and operating by di-
plomacy and treaties. To say that this is occa-
sionally set at nought by this or that Power in
periods of chaos is only to say, what is obvious,
that the system is delicate and comparatively un-
stable, yet it is Law for all that, in so far as it
is recognised as authoritative, and renders admirable
services to Europe. It is beautiful to see how the
maniacs who made the French Revolution, in their
crusade to establish International Morality, only
succeeded in destroying pro tempore International
Law. The same thing in principle is done by those
Liberals at present who ridicule and make light of
the European Concert. That Concert is a histori-
cally developed organisation which has become
a kind of institution : and though, as an eminent
statesman recently and humorously observed,
among its many virtues speed is not one, it is
nevertheless the nearest approach to the substi-
tution of diplomacy and arbitration for war that
Europe has yet seen.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 227
As the Infinite is the potentiality of the finite*
so is International Morality the possibility of Inter-
national Law: being realised and becoming actual
in such measure as it can be embodied, however
imperfectly, in institutions that command obedience
and authority ; authority, the soul and essence of
Law, which disappears, when authority is withdrawn,
ipso facto, as night comes of itself when daylight
dies.
§ 10. Character, or Ethics.
THERE exists, in the whole compass of literature,
one scientific treatise, and one only, on this subject;
and it is the Ethics of Aristotle. The greatness of
that book can be properly appreciated only by one
who has ransacked history to find anything simile
aut secundum — in vain. Of preachers, of moralists,
the name is legion. But one man only could analyse
and define virtue, mistaking no halves for the whole,
and laying his finger, with unerring accuracy, on the
point where virtue touches happiness, ' turning to
scorn, with lips divine, the falsehood of extremes,'
and steering clear alike of the mystical abuses of
God or beast by seizing the moral nature of man.
Ethical Science begins and ends with Aristotle.
Virtue is grounded on the nature of man, and its
Q2
228 UNITY:
fundamental postulate is that life is good : for life
is itself the end. Deny this, with the pessimist, the
ascetic, or the hyperphysical idealist who frames his
ethic not in accordance with the nature of man, and
all is lost : virtue as well as life becomes absurd, and
the logical corollary is Nirvana, suicide, the denial
of life, mystical extravagance and abomination of
all kinds : for where the heights are, there also is
the abyss. Life is itself a good : rather, the good,
the end. Thus also, the acts, the means that con-
duce to the end. Observe, now, that the nature of
man, on which virtue is grounded, is not that ab-
stract humanity of which so much is heard nowa-
days (which leads into isolation, quietism, mona-
chism, self-absorption, withdrawal from the world,
laziness, and the death of the nation), but real
humanity, real men ; not men in the abstract but
men in the concrete, living and working in the
social nexus. Of these men, each one is a unit,
a manifestation of character, of virtuous or vicious
disposition or habit (££*?). The commentary on Aris-
totle's Ethics is universal history ; every biography
is an instance in point.
Those actions arc good which tend to the welfare
of the whole of which the individual character or
single man forms a part. This whole is not human-
ity, but his community, state, or nation, out of which
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 229
no welfare is attainable. But now, good conduct
alone does not constitute virtue, nor indicate char-
acter. A bad man may act virtuously ; bad men
do indeed continuously and throughout life act more
or less in accordance with virtue for ends of their
own. This is the hypocrisy of society. The miser
gives alms : the avaricious man subscribes: the cruel
man shows mercy ; the coward performs a cour-
ageous action; the lascivious man abstains parcalcul,
&c. All this does not constitute virtue. For that
depends not on the outside but the inside ; not the
act, but the spirit or intention of the doer. This is
the essence of virtue, the essence of character. It
is conduct indeed, but not conduct, as such; it is
conduct plus that something different which accom-
panies it, which here, as always, is the soul of the
matter and makes virtue what it is. Not only what
is done, but how it is done.
No greater blow was ever inflicted upon Ethics
than by the Provincial Letters of Pascal. Sir Henry
Maine has said n , that since the publication of those
'celebrated papers,' ethical speculation has ceased
to be conducted on the lines of the casuists. He
does not say, for he did not see, that this meant the
ruin of all sound ethics, which in losing Aristotle lost
its tradition, its truth and its method. Pascal's
n Ancient Law.
230 UNITY:
Provincial Letters are the greatest libel that has ever
been written : a literary masterpiece of the first order,
written by a man of genius to serve, not the truth,
but a party. As D'Alembert says, nobody can
have known better than Pascal, when, to serve the
Jansenists, he composed those wonderful specimens
of dramatic irony, that what he attributed to the
Jesuits alone was common to the casuists of all the
orders ; and that he was misrepresenting theoretic
and speculative subtlety common to all, and holding
it up as if it were systematically contrived by the
Order of Jesus to corrupt the world in the interests
of their society. He imputed to a theoretic prac-
tice a sinister intention, and charged it on one out
of a number. Was this commendable procedure
on his part? Is it for the uneducated vulgar to judge
about such questions as these ? Pascal proved too
much : if he was right, the Jesuits were not men but
devils. No order of men could ever have formed
such a design as he imputed to them.
Notwithstanding the disastrous result of con-
founding the use with the abuse, out of which
Pascal made his point, the truth which he cari-
catured is the truth par excellence in Ethics. It is
not the act, but the spirit of the act, which makes
it good. And no man can perform the act in the
proper spirit, unless he be the right sort of man ;
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 231
unless, that is, his character be definitely of the
right kind. Now, character does not depend upon
knowledge : it is formed by education. Hence the
close connection of virtue with education : the true
end of all education being, not to impart know-
ledge, but to form character. Hence the invalu-
able worth of good educational institutions. The
link between ethics and politics is supplied by the
analytical philosophy of Aristotle, who in this as
in other cases combines profundity with common
sense and the practice of the world, sublimity with
sanity, health, invigoration : the mens sana in cor-
pore sano. There is a place in his Ethics not only
for the hero, the magnanimous man, but also for
the honest, straightforward, open English schoolboy.
The tone of Aristotle's Ethics is the same as that
of the plays of Shakspeare or the novels of Scott,
the two greatest dramatic authors, not only because
of their power, but because of their tone. Litera-
ture, now, is not a tonic but a poison : for it has
lost Aristotle and its thought is diseased : it is
based not on virtue but on vice, and its charac-
teristic is aKpaaia, a/coXaala, the absence of self-
control, moral impotence, and eroticism.
232 UNITY:
§ ii. Insight , or Intellect.
INSIGHT is of all things the rarest and most
valuable. It is totally different from either learning
or reason ; the most learned man or the most power-
ful reasoner may possess no insight at all; and yet
without insight both learning and reason are often
worse than useless.
And what then, exactly, is insight ? This can
best be understood by taking an instance, wherein
we may see insight typified, from the royal game,
the king of games, the game of Chess.
The elements of Chess are the chequered board
and various pieces, of different powers and capaci-
ties, each with its peculiar move. But what, now,
is Chess ? Rousseau, if I remember rightly, says
somewhere, that he studied Chess in books upon
the game for months, and was then beaten easily
by a tyro the first time he endeavoured really to
play. ' The books ' tell you, for example, that in
such and such an opening, such and such a move
is good. But the truth is that no move is, by itself,
good. It is of no use to know theoretically the
opening ' good ' moves, if you cannot proceed. The
analytical treatise carries any particular opening out
Aristotle has two terms with this meaning, <pp6vricns and vovs ;
the former relating to the practical, the latter to the theoretical
sphere.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 233
for some fifteen or twenty moves, and then dis-
misses the game with the statement, ' Black wins.'
But let White be Morphy, and Black, Rousseau,
and Black will not win.
Quorsum hczc tarn putida ? This, that the art
of Chess is not to be learned from books, and does
not lie in theoretically good moves or learning.
It lies in combination ; i.e. he can best play Chess
who understands the powers of the pieces in com-
bination p, and given any particular situation, can
discern the point of it in regard to strength or
weakness, and consequently, the next thing to be
done. The same situation — all the pieces and the
whole board — lie open before the bad as before
the good player ; but one can see and the other
not. The advance of some unregarded Pawn, the
sacrifice of some important Piece, something not
apparent, something altogether futile, or even fatal,
except to the player who has real understanding
of the whole nexus and correlation of the situation :
this is Chess, this is Skill.
Now, this imaginative power of penetrating a
p So the technical expression, ' winning the exchange involves
a fallacy. The Rook is not necessarily more valuable than Knight
or Bishop : nay even a Pawn may be more valuable than a Queen :
everything depends upon the circumstances. Every chess player
will remember the celebrated game in which Zukertort beat Black -
burne by offering his Queen for nothing.
254 UNITY:
whole and discerning the point, is insight, a word
which paints admirably exactly what is involved
in the thing. Transfer all this from Chess to Life,
to Politics, to War, to Philosophy, and you have the
explanation of a thing which in this age beyond
all others the world wholly misunderstands, videlicet,
that to know is not to understand. A man may be
an exhaustive specialist in his own department, and
yet misunderstand it altogether ; he may spend his
whole life in research, and have before his eyes the
complete details of the situation — historic, economic,
scientific, military, political ; and yet may altogether
mistake and mismanage his material, because he
has not insight. It is not the accumulation of facts,
it is their interpretation, on which all depends ; and
this world is so curiously arranged that it is pre-
cisely the man who has to decide who is least likely
to possess insight. Why is modern history, with
all its superabundance of detail, in so many ways
the exact reverse of the truth ? because not one
in a hundred historians has any insight. Why is
' Political Economy ' a mass of rubbish ? because its
founders had no insight. Why is modern philosophy
throughout sophistical ? because its exponents have
no insight. When Napoleon came to Toulon, the
siege was over ; why ? insight. When Clive marched
to Arcot, Trichinopoli fell : insight. When Julius
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 235
Caesar crossed the Rubicon, he had managed to put
the Senate diplomatically in the wrong : insight.
Why was there a Mutiny in India in 1857 ? absence
of insight.
Ita vita est hominnm quasi si ludas tesseris. That,
which is manifested in the ' mimic battle ' in the
games of a Morphy or a Labourdonnais ; which
breathes in every page of Aristotle or Bolingbroke,
De Retz or Disraeli, and is never found in a Mill
or Macaulay, a Ricardo or Descartes ; which guides
and inspires a Themistocles, or Bismarck, Jane
Austen or Dostoyeffsky, is insight : the power of
grasping the whole as a whole, and consequently
discerning the related influence of every part ; the
power of intuitively apprehending and appreciating
the importance of what is apparently trivial, the
real triviality of what is apparently of colossal
dimensions ; the power of seeing through the mask
and the pretext, influencing the event by little
strokes and insignificant master- touches : — this
power is nothing whatever but the essence of
Aristotle in a subtle and intangible form, re-
flected in the mirror of mind. The chess-board
is before us all ; but it is not a knowledge of the
elements that makes the player : it is the intellectual
apprehension of that something different from the
elements which is in them, but invisible to all eyes
236 UNITY:
save those that can see : something that cannot
be proved % and cannot be communicated, for
reason cannot reach it ; that is there, for one or
two, and entirely absent, for all the others ; who con-
sequently deny it, and prove, satisfactorily to them-
selves and others, that it does not exist and is not
there.
§ 12. Reality, or Metaphysics.
icTTiv eiriGTrifxri rt9, says Aristotle, ?} Oecopel to
ov fj ov : there is a science which investigates not,
as physics does, the genesis of things, how they
come to be, but their essence, what are they, when
they are : i.e., which asks, what is the meaning of
the verb, to be, and in what consists the fact of
being. Things r that are, differ infinitely, but they
all agree in this respect, that they are. What is this
common property ? What is the being of a thing ?
What is it, to be real ? What constitutes reality ?
Metaphysics may well complain, like Liberty,
that many crimes are committed in her name.
q vovs av tit] tuiv apx^>" .... &M77 yvu<ris ko) ovk diro^u^is.
1 Except Matter, Space, and Time, which are not things, but
the universal possibilities of things, never actually anything. Space
is the possibility of figure and co-existence ; Time, the possibility
of change and succession ; Matter, the possibility of force. The
definition of force, which puzzles modern scientific men who will
not consult Aristotle is, the actuality of material power.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 237
Under the influence of the Cartesian philosophy,
of which we may truly say, nihil quod tetigit non
fccdavit, it has come to this, that Metaphysics, whose
object is as real and whose necessity is as indis-
pensable as Physics to the world, Metaphysics,
which deals with the most real of realities, is
identified with and degraded to thin, visionary,
abstract speculation about supra-sensuous hyper-
physical realms, attenuated problematical theorising
about the incognisable, essentially associated with
a disbelief in the testimony of the senses. And
as a consequence, Science, which needs a sound
Metaphysic as a fish needs water, and cannot exist
without it, has turned its back on ' Metaphysics '
and employs the epithet metaphysical as an awful
brand wherewith to damn anything not agreeable
to it, while all the time it is wallowing in a ' meta-
physic ' of its own that sets all logic at defiance,
and would have made the old Schoolmen blush.
In modern scientific speculation, Mathematics has
replaced Metaphysics, calculation has usurped the
place of thought ; the inevitable consequence being
the confusion of abstractions with realities, the en-
deavour to explain concrete realities by hypothetic
mathematic figments, e.g. ' mass,' ' atoms] 'forces]
regarded as mere points or ' centres ' of agency
without material vehicle, and so on : in a word,
238 UNITY:
the explanation of the continuous by the discrete,
which is absurd, and the same error precisely
as the ' metaphysics ' which Science so much de-
spises. Modern speculative Science and modern
speculative Philosophy are different variations on
the same theme — the endeavour to account for the
concrete reality by the abstract ens rationis. The
spirit of Descartes informs them both.
Metaphysics is not the degraded futile thing to
which modern Philosophy has reduced it, and which
it appears in the eyes of modern Science. Its
sphere and province is to point out that One in
the Many, which we have seen to be the core of
every special Science ; to track the identity through
all its special transformations and metamorphoses ;
and thus to show Science, as it were, her own face
in the glass, and reveal to her what she is, which
is just what at present she does not know. We
might call Metaphysics with perfect truth, the self-
knowledge of Science, the recognition by Science
of her own inner nature, that is, the intellectual
recognition of Nature of which Science is herself
the mirror. The specialist in any particular Science,
who does not know the metaphysical unity of all
Science, does not even properly understand his own :
for juncta juvant s .
• Cp. Jevons, Principles of Science, p. 599.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 239
By the constant (chemical) analysis of things into
their constituent elements, or by the constant (logical)
reference of any particular thing to a higher genus
of which it is a special case, most philosophies, such
as, e.g., those of Plato, Spinoza, Descartes, the
Eleatics, Schopenhauer, the Atomists, modern Phy-
sical Science, the old Hindoos, &c, come to place
reality either in ultimate elements, or ultimate
abstract genera, both of which are however not
more but less real than the things which they
seek to explain. Hence we find these schools
offering us as the true reality, Atoms, universal
imponderable Ethers, Ideas, Matters, Wills, Selves,
Brahms, Ones, and so on. All such philosophies
are philosophies of Identity : they place reality,
that is to say, in underlying fundamental Unity,
to which we penetrate by neglecting what is
different.
But now, it is obvious that this method, however
valuable as contributing to complete knowledge,
leads us nevertheless not towards, but further and
further away from reality, seeing that even assuming
this or that fundamental identity, the difficulty and
the problem does not lie in the identity, but in the
differences of things. How did the identity ever
become difference ? We must travel back again from
identity to difference. In other words, all these
240 UNITY:
philosophies miss the point, viz., that a thing IS,
not only its elements, but something more, that is,
its peculiar composition ; not only its generic notion,
but something more, that is, its peculiar differences
(springing from time, place, and relation, the con-
ditions of reality which all these philosophies leave
out by abstraction). The essence of reality does not
lie in the underlying unconditioned identity of things,
whatever that may be, but in something in each
particular thing peculiar to itself; the essence of
anything is no secret, hidden, mysterious, incognis-
able x, lying ' behind ' its phenomenal manifestation
(a materialistic or idealistic notion, the diametrical
antipodes of the truth) ; but on the contrary it is
naively and openly written in large characters on
everything. So far from being unknown and un-
knowable, it is on the contrary precisely the essence'
of anything which we can perfectly and exhaustively
know. It is not atoms, ethers, &c, that give its
reality to my watch, my horse, my dog, my wife, or
my child, my coat or hat. What, when you come to
talk of reality, is a res u ?
1 Nine out of ten modern philosophers confound the essence of
a thing with its material substratum, owing to the unfortunate word
substance. Matter, as Aristotle said, ages ago, is dyvuinbs ica6'
ai)TT)t>.
u Aristotle's philosophy is the only one in the world which is
not contradicted by language : the reason is that languages, in the
THE LOGIC OF NA TURE. 241
Aristotle solves the problem. He does not, like
modern Science and some philosophical schools,
overlook and neglect the synthesis by attending
exclusively to its material constituent elements; nor
again does he, like Plato and others, overlook and
make light of differences by attending exclusively
to ideal, i.e. generic agreement : but on the contrary
he holds realities to be, and reality to consist in
the actual, differentiated, conglomerated, definitely
thus or thus constituted structures. The essence of
reality, for him, is not identity but difference : his
real is the roSe ti, the ' this ' thing : not the ultimate
elements yielded by chemical analysis — els 6 ava-
Xverat, eax aT0V » nor > a g am ; the ultimate residuum of
ascending logical abstraction, under which the thing
is classed, but the incarnate ovata, the molecule, so
to say, in flesh and blood, which contains within it
both the elements and the logical kind or class or
notion, but which is also more than either, because
inclusive of both, and just in this tinion lies the reality :
i.e., it differs from both precisely in the fact that
it is real and they are not, being each of them only
factors in the real. And the much misunderstood
business of definition is to reproduce and state both
process of formation, recognise, what he does, that the essence of
reality is not identity, but difference.
R
242 UNITY:
sides of the compound ; neither by itself being
adequate to the reality.
The Platonic Realities, the Realities of modern
Science, the Spinozan, the Schopenhauerian Reality,
the Buddhist, Comtian, or Kantian Reality, the
Hindoo Brahma and all similar ultimates, are all
of them not the real realities, but elements and ab-
stractions from the true realities, arrived at by hy-
postatising, dissolving, dissecting, refining, discarding
and neglecting differences from those realities, ab-
stracting from the conditions of reality, time, place,
and relation. What all these philosophies overlook
is that their various reals, their unities, exist only
in the particular realities * : that those alone exist
per se, all the other things in them. The real reality,
the ens realissimum, is the particular differentiated
thing, the cvvoKov e£ vXrjs ical elBovs in its peculiar
and necessary time, place, and relations.
Is not this just our real world, the world not of
philosophical abstraction, but of perception, of seas
and sunsets, trees and flowers, men and women,
riches and poverty, cities and villages, kings and
popes and members of parliament ; the real world
x There cannot be a more admirable illustration of this than
Sanskrit roots: which have only an ideal existence, i.e. exist only
n the words ' derived ' from them. The philological consideration ot
the Sanskrit language is one of the most beautiful verifications of
Aristotle's philosophy.
THE LOGIC OF NATURE. 243
of history and natural history, politics, literature, and
life ? Here, then, we emerge, like Dante from the
Inferno, to find the profoundest of all metaphysical
analyses, the analysis of Aristotle, in exact harmony
with the popular instinct, the uncritical judgment
of the vulgar. But this is very old ? aye, so it is,
as old as the hills ; yet old as it is, the world cannot
learn it, will not have it, obstinately and incorrigibly
persists in substituting for the realities its own ab-
stract fancies, theories, and notions ; nay, nowadays
its practical error is canonised and elevated into a
philosophic dogma. We are gravely told by ' philo-
sophers ' to-day, that all is thought, that the real is
the rational, that the notion constitutes reality ;
logical thought usurps the place of perceptible
reality, and the world congratulates itself on its
insight when by means of verbal juggling and criti-
cal imbecility it rivets its congenial error — the con-
fusion of abstractions with realities — to itself with
clamps of iron, seeing profound wisdom in the stupid
confusion of being with thought, ignoring the dy-
namical potentialities of Nature, taking shadow for
substance, mistaking for the real its subsequent
logical reflection in consciousness, and endeavouring
to generate the Universe out of empty discrete ab-
stractions by dialectical quibbling and metaphorical
abuse of language, ex 8e rdv votjtwv ouSev jiperat
R 2
244 UNITY, &c.
fMeyedos. Thought does not contain the living
potentiality and continuity of Nature ?.
Idealisms pass : but the philosophy of Aristotle,
the philosophy of analysis and definition, of evolu-
tionary continuity and biological realism, endures :
it is confirmed and verified by all modern experi-
mental Science, that is, by Nature herself, whose
creatures conform to her laws because the penalty
of disobedience is death and annihilation, and are
thus all but so many living arguments, incarnations
of metaphysic, metaphysic embodied in matter, real-
ity in concreto. Nature rediscovers in the reason
of Aristotle, her chef cTxuvre, that creative method
of which all her creatures are but specimens and
exemplifications, and logic turns out to be but the
mirror of fact. The works of Nature and the
thoughts of Aristotle are akin : the characteristic
of both is a certain unanalysable, indefinable, un-
attainable union of the simple and the profound.
r Aristotle says profoundly that the mathematical point has no
weight: this is an aphorism which contains in germ the whole of
philosophy.
y. TELEOLOGY : THE LAW OF
EVOLUTION.
i) (pvais i) Keyoptvr) ais yevtcris 656s ecrrtv us <pvaiv.
AXIOMS.
7) (pvcris reKos iffrlv' oTov yap eaaffTOV ecrri ttjs ytveotws
T(\e(r9(iar]s ravr-qv (pa/xtv ri)v (pvai.v ziuai etcaarov.
■S) rod Swd/xei ovtos iyreXexeia, 77 toiovtov, KiVTjfris icrri ....
XaKiTTT] fihy ISelv, iv^i\ofJ.ivr) 5e ilvai.
y, TELEOLOGY: THE LAW OF
EVOLUTION.
INVOLUTION, in the proper sense of the word,
is the discovery and the soul of Aristotle.
At the same time, he is no Darwinian. The pre-
cursors of Darwin are, not Aristotle, but Anaxi-
mandros, and still more Empedocles.
The meaning of Evolution is a point on which
much confusion and misconception prevails. It is
of the very first importance to understand clearly
the distinctions appropriate to the subject.
The term ' evolution,' employed nowadays by
anybody with indiscriminate and unintelligent reck-
lessness, has several altogether distinct and different
meanings.
I. It is employed to designate the theory, common
to Lamarck, Darwin, and all modern evolutionists,
of the transmutation of species, the passage and
gradual change in time of one specific form into
another. This view is derived from and essentially
dependent on modern Geology : the changes of
1 rocks,' and the discovery of unknown and ancient
organic remains, having inevitably suggested the
continuous modification of species. In this sense
248 TELEOLOGY .
of the word, evolution is entirely unknown to
Aristotle. Observe, however, that this evolution
stands in a very sympathetic relation to his own
philosophy. It supplements and enlarges his own
biological scheme.
II. Evolution again is employed, most improperly,
to designate the theory, peculiarly Darwinian, of
Natural Selection, which is a special theory as to
how the evolution in the first sense came about.
According to this theory, species have arisen by
the survival of the fittest in the struggle for
existence, the selection of favourable variations
arising fortuitously'" 1 , and their addition, seriatim,
till they constitute a new positive form.
Acquaintance with this theory presupposes ac-
quaintance with the first, for the one is an endeavour
to explain the how of the other. As Aristotle knew
nothing of the first, so neither was he acquainted
with this one. But a sort of faint germ or fore-
shadow of this view is to be seen in a theory of Em -
pedocles quoted and rejected by Aristotle. Darwin's
attention was drawn to it by a friend, and he notices
it in the Preface to the Origin of Species, but the
translation which was supplied to him is not good ;
he seems to suppose that Aristotle favoured the
* I have proved in another work that this theory is not only not
true but intrinsically absurd and impossible. See Appendix.
THE LAW OF EVOLUTION. 249
idea, but the reverse is the case. Aristotle
says h :
' There is this difficulty : why explain the for-
' mation of organised beings on a teleological prin-
ciple ? why not otherwise? e.g. as rain falls, not
1 to ripen the corn, but by necessity, and when this
' happens, the corn also happens to ripen, and
1 similarly, as, when rain rots the corn in the floor,
' it did not fall with that object, but the thing
1 was an accident ; so, why should not the parts
'of an organic being be explained in the same
' way ? why should not the teeth grow (as the rain
' fell) of necessity, the front teeth sharp, suited for
' biting, and the back teeth flat, suited for grinding,
' the food : not intended for those functions, but
' happening to suit them ? and so with all other
' parts that seem designed for an end — all those
'parts which chanced to come about exactly as
' they would have done if they had been designed
• for an end being preserved, having spontaneously
b Physics, ii. 8.
c Note, that the almost universal misconception prevailing as to
Aristotle's teleology arises from the fact that we mean by ' Nature '
the universe — rb nav — whereas his ' nature ' means the constitutive
law of any organic being. When he says Nature acts teleologically,
he does not mean what we should mean, if we said the same thing
he is only stating a fact, viz., that in the formation of organic beings,
the end determines the whole process. Explain it how you please,
the fact is there.
2^o TELEOLOGY :
1 happened to fit their circumstances ; all those, on
' the contrary, that did not so come about, perishing
' and still continuing to perish, like the early monsters
( of Empedocles.'
He states this theory, and proceeds to reject it,
because, he says, were it so ; were the parts of
animals and plants formed merely by chance, we
should see them arising now in one way, now in
another : whereas, as it is, they always come about
in the same way : i.e. not chance, but a definite
and determined law presides over their formation.
And this is undeniable. Observe, that he is thinking
only of each individual form, and not of any geo-
logical succession of forms. The rabbit does not
get his ears, nor the swan his web foot, by chance,
but by the inner necessity of his own nature (<}>vais)
which determines his whole form a priori in the
cerm. This is what Aristotle means here, and he
o
is quite right. The genesis of the animal is no
accident. The further question raised by modern
geology, as to the transmutation of species by con.
tinuous change, is not in his mind : it is quite an-
other point of view which never occurred to him,
as far as we can judge by his works.
III. Finally, evolution is used to denote the
theory, associated in modern times principally with
Von Baer and Herbert Spencer, of biological differ-
THE LA IV OF E VOL UTLON. 25 1
cntiation, of development, of organic change, the
gradual growth and unfolding of the simple and
potential into the complex and actual. This is the
true and proper meaning of the term evolution, and
this is the sense in which Aristotle is not only the
discoverer of evolution but its greatest master : the
first and the greatest of all evolutionists, the most
universal and the most profound. And to explain
exactly what he meant by his teleology and his
yeveais, I shall take an example — language.
The essence of language is the expression, i.e. the
communication of thought. Now, if we imagine
a people in its infancy just beginning (we know not
how d ) to use language, to lisp and stammer as it
were, it is easy to see that the lowest possible form,
the germ of language (6 eXd^iaros \6yo?, ivTeXe^eia
7) wpcoTT]), would be the expression of a single thought,
the rudimentary sentence or proposition. Words
are only the elements of speech, and speech lies not
in the elements, as such, but in the significant syn-
thesis of the elements. Therefore it is impossible
that language should have commenced with isolated
words : the beginning of speech must necessarily be
the sentence e . (Not of course a sentence, definite,
d In Aristotelean language — it is the efficient cause of the origin
of language that we do not know.
c It is much to be regretted that Professor Sayce, who claims
2^2 TELEOLOGY:
logical and clear, such as we find in the works of
an Aristotle, but one confused, hazy, muddy, indis-
tinct, yet still a sentence.) From this rudimentary
sentence, up to the complete formation of a rich,
subtle, and flexible language, the adequate organ
of the perfect expression of thought, the language
of an Aristotle or a Panini, there is of course an
immense distance. Now, this process of formation
is the yivecris of language, or, in modern terminology,
its evolution.
And it is obvious that there are two limits to this
evolutionary process or yeveaLs : one accidental, the
peculiar mental endowment of the people in question
— for this or that savage nation will never originate
such a language as e.g. Greek or Sanskrit or Russian
— the other (even given the highest possible mental
qualities), necessary and essential, beyond which
further progress is impossible ; that is, the relations,
actual or possible, of reality. For thought is the
mirror of fact, and therefore language cannot pro-
gress beyond the point at which it is able fully and
adequately to express everything expressible. It
is clear that no language has ever attained this ideal,
that most languages fall infinitely short of it, and
this discovery as his own, can never mention Aristotle without a
sneer : seeing that the discovery is not his, but Aristotle's. (The
writer of the dialogue Sophistes in Plato was indebted to Aristotle.)
THE LAW OF E VOL UT10N. 2 5 3
that different languages exhibit different powers,
stages, degrees, grades of this capacity of expression.
But suppose that any language should have suc-
ceeded in reaching this perfect power : then this
would be its term, its goal, its end (opus, reXos,
ayadov), the final terminus of the evolution of lan-
guage. The yeveais is the progress to the T€\os f .
And the progress, the motion, itself, as such, is a
special case of the realisation of the possible.
The only difference between Aristotle and modern
evolution, in the third and proper sense of the word,
is that he accentuates its logical, rather than its
historical aspect. His is the logical and metaphy-
sical discovery of the law : modern science enriches
and illustrates it in all directions by giving it his-
torical meanings of which he never knew. We may
call Aristotle the spirit of evolution, its potentiality :
modern scientific discovery is the actual realisation
and effecting of that spirit.
And it is obvious that what holds of the evolution
of language holds equally, mutatis mutandis, of
everything else, laws, religions, states, systems, in-
struments, machines, organic structures of any kind.
Their development is, as it were, preordained : lies
' The point of departure, considered with reference to the coming
re'Aos not yet existing, is what Aristotle calls cnip-qais, i.e. negation
privation, absence of the end.
254 TELEOLOGY, &c.
fatally within the principle or starting-point {dpxh)
originally laid down. And in this consists the secret
of prediction. He only can predict who understands
principles, for then he can see in the germ the com-
ing end. This power belongs only to one man in
a million, and therefore any such man is destined
to be a voice crying in the wilderness in his own
day ; his wisdom not being appreciated till time
has rendered obvious to all, by its explicit realisation,
that possibility which he understood beforehand.
Of this two of the finest examples in history are
Lord Bolingbroke and Lord Beaconsfield : both of
whom are exactly described by Aristotle, when he
says to iv dp%V 'yivopevov tcatcov ov rod tv^ovtos
<yvcovai dWa ttoXltikov dvSpbs. But neither of those
consummate politicians has ever yet been pro-
perly appreciated.
APPENDICES.
APPENDICES.
a. ON THE RELATION OF ARISTOTLE
TO PLATO.
IS Aristotle Plato's complement, or his antipodes ? A
word on this vexata qucestio is necessary to justify and
explain some expressions in the text.
When we look closely into Plato, we perceive that
there are in fact two Platos. There is the true Plato,
the Plato always indicated by the world when it refers
to Platonism, the Plato of the Protagoras and the Gorgias,
the Phczdo and the Eulhydemus, the Phccdrus and the
Symposium, the Republic and the Timceus : the Plato of
dream, myth, mysticism, idealism, dramatic irony and
comedy, literary grace and classic beauty : the Plato of
paederasty and poetic insight, childish puerility and logical
imbecility a : and there is another Plato, the anti-Plato
of the Sophist and Thecetetus, the Phikbus and Parmenides,
&c, who has lost all these graces and qualities, dropped
down to earth, ceased to soar, and become sober,
methodical, realistic and critical. The first Plato opposes
Aristotle : the second closely resembles him. The dif-
ference between these two Platos is indeed so striking
that some critics are led to deny the authenticity of some
* The apology for this is always that Plato lived in an age before
logic (Jowett). But Aristotle did not invent logic, he only analysed
and methodised it. Vixere fortes ante Agatnemnona : there were
good reasoners before Aristotle.
S
258 ON THE RELATION OF
of these dialogues in the later manner. But the diffi-
culty of this solution is to draw the line between what
is genuine and what not.
My own solution of this mystery I give here for what
it is worth : it seems to me to carry its truth on its face.
Aristotle was twenty years with Plato, and the cham-
pions of Plato never tire of laying emphasis on his debt
to his master. And certainly he owed him much, but
less than is commonly supposed. For did Plato owe
nothing to Aristotle ? Are not action and reaction equal
and opposite ? Can we imagine any one associating for
twenty years with such a mind as Aristotle and gaining
nothing by it ? Look at the reciprocal influence of the
post-Kantian transcendental philosophers in Germany.
These dialogues, full of the spirit of Aristotle, were doubt-
less written by Plato after Aristotle's criticism had taught
him to modify his own views. They are not prior, but
posterior to Aristotle himself, even though they may be
prior to Aristotle's works.
What makes this hypothesis almost more than an hypo-
thesis is the very singular fact, that we find in these
dialogues Aristotelean turns of expression, little fragments
of insight, terminology, and thought, detached, yet syste-
matic ; at home in Aristotle's system, but appearing in Plato
exactly like organic fossils in a rationalistic inorganic
deposit incapable of producing them itself. In Aristotle
they are parts of an organic whole ; we see how he got
at them : in Plato, on the contrary, they are like fish
out of water or flies in amber : we cannot understand how
they got there ; they are inserted, in some unintelligible
manner, from outside. They presuppose and argue a
ARISTOTLE TO PLATO. 259
biological and evolutionary scheme, to which Plato had
not the key. (Consider, for example, the Xo'yos and 8ia<f>6pa
in Thecztetus b (at the end), the fj irparrj o-vanXoKr) in Sophist
(262. C), the yeveais and ova-la in Phikbus (53. E. 54),
the criticisms of the ideal theory in Parmenides, all
brought in so strangely in the lump as if taken from some
extraneous source.)
The only possible explanation of these curiosities is the
influence of Aristotle, whether Plato wrote these dialogues
or not. Observe, too, that this theory is the only one
which accounts for the remarkable silence of Aristotle as
to these dialogues. The silence of Aristotle does not
indeed prove that Plato did not write them. But it is
impossible to understand why in certain cases Aristotle
should not have referred to them, except on this hypothesis ;
and on this hypothesis it is easy to see why. He would
and commonly does refer to Plato for Plato's own views.
But he would naturally not refer to Plato for views which
were not Plato's, but only reflections of his own. If, for
example, the criticisms on the ideal theory were Plato's
own, we cannot understand how it is that Aristotle never
makes the faintest allusion to them in the corresponding
passage in his Metaphysics, where he presents arguments
almost identical beyond all doubt as if they were his own.
And so in fact they are : they spring from the core of his
philosophy and are instinct with his own spirit. No one
capable of understanding that will ever doubt who origin-
b In a note on Thealelns, 156 A, Zeller says 'the preterite {fa}
' is used here as in the Aristotelean expression ri ?)v eirai.' And
in point of fact the Sophist and Theatetus are full of Aristotelean
reminiscences, as it were, which cannot be explained by anticipation.
S 2
2 6o ON THE RELA TION OF
ated them. We never get a hint of them in any Platonic
dialogue, till they leap, fully armed, into existence in the
Parmenides. Had Plato been capable of originating them,
some germs, at least, of them would have crossed his mind
before. But in fact, the point of view implied in the
criticisms is diametrically opposed to that of Plato : it is
a change of the philosophical centre of gravity, and the
outcome of a mind totally different from his own.
For the truth is that the real Plato, the original Plato-
nising Plato, is the opposite pole, the antipodes of Aris-
totle : their spirits are different in kind. Aristotle is biology,
evolution, analysis, experience, dissection of the concrete ;
he is, in his own language, a (pvaixbs: whereas Plato is
a AoyiKor, rationalistic ; his philosophy is the hypostasis
of abstractions ; and his method of arriving at truth is the
futile endeavour to strike it, by dialectical quibbling with
vague and empty abstractions, from the collision of heads
that do not contain it. Two negatives, except in mathe-
matics, will never make an affirmative : empty disputation
can never end in any positive acquisition, nor will you ever
succeed in deriving the real from the rational, the concrete
from the abstract, the incarnate individual thing from its
logical husk.
But the difference and the contrast between the two
philosophers has a deeper root still. Aristotle really was
a philosopher. But Plato was a philosopher malgre lui :
at heart he was a politician. This is why he never can
leave the politicians alone. They turn up constantly under
his pen, in or out of season ; he cannot keep away from
them ; the public life, the society of the city, is ever
before his eyes : a perpetual unrest, a hankering after the
ARISTOTLE TO PLATO. 261
sphere of politics, whose actors he is always denouncing,
haunts the pages of Plato : his very denunciations are only
a twisted proof of the fact that he was realiy born
for politics and had missed his vocation, and felt it.
His sensitive pride shrank from the dirty work involved
in all politics (especially then), yet he could not bring
himself to shake off the spell, and while he turned away
from public life, his soul remained in spite of him hovering
round it, half regretfully, like the moth round the candle.
Political yearning, dissatisfaction with pure contemplation,
a longing to interfere practically, tinged with melancholy,
runs through every page of Plato. This is that which
gives them that faint aroma, that subtle flavour of
sourness and misanthropy.
But in Aristotle there is none of this. His attitude is
always dtvpias Zvaca ; calm, pure, critical, dispassionate ;
his style is that of a man thinking to himself, solely for
the eliciting of the truth, without a vestige of literary
appeal : he has no preference for any one part of the
stupendous whole more than another; all comes alike
to him. He examines, with equal absorbed scientific
curiosity, the parts of the lobster or the revolutions of
states, the saltness of the sea or the nature of the
syllogism, the sponges at the bottom or the magnani-
mous man at the top There is no disturbing, disquieting
passion here ; it is the cold, pure, dry light that makes
the wisest soul.
b. THE IMPOSSIBILITY OF 'NATURAL
SELECTION.'
THE theory of Natural Selection made Darwin's for-
tune ; it gained him the reputation of a great original
thinker, and he was credited, on the strength of it,
with having ' placed evolution on a scientific basis.'
Really, it is a little ridiculous. How could Darwin, how
could all those enemies who were so anxious to disprove
his theory, fail to perceive, what stares us in the face,
that that theory is impossible ? For consider. Is it possible
for Nature to select those variations which are selected
by man ? Certainly not. And why ? Because they are
so slight as to be all but imperceptible, and consequently
of no value whatever to the organism. Still less possible
is their accumulation in any one direction, seeing that
intercrossing would instantly destroy them.
Over and over again, in volume after volume, Darwin
never wearies of insisting i. That the variations actually
selected by man are so slight as to be almost impercep-
tible even to a trained eye\ 2. That Nature can select
only beneficial variations. 3. That free intercrossing will
instantly obliterate all. And yet, with a blindness al-
together extraordinary, and a little irritating, he never
sees, — it never crosses his mind, — that exactly for these
reasons his Natural Selection is impossible. But how can
anything be plainer ? And how can we attribute great
* When we consider the innumerable myriads of individuals that
constitute many a species, as e.g. the common cod, herring, migratory
locust, or the 'white ant,' the utter impotence and futility of a single
almost imperceptible variation in one individual will appear in all
its absurdity.
THE IMPOSSIBILITY, &c. 263
powers of thought to the man who could spend his whole
life in meditating on the point without detecting so obvious
a fallacy ?
But Darwin possessed an unrivalled knowledge of the
facts of Nature ? Precisely : and the wonderful thing is,
that his facts annihilate Ids theory, though he never sees it.
Innumerable facts adduced by himself, and others, show
that, somehow or other, by some organic chemistry mys-
terious to us, organic beings possess the power of origin-
ating abrupt and considerable modifications in their own
structure. And geology harmonises with this b . Now this
formative organic power is exactly what Aristotle means
by (frvcris . And though by reason of his limited experience
Aristotle believed this power to be more fixed and in-
variable than perhaps it is, he is none the less perfectly
right in the main. Darwin's theory is an attempt to over-
look and ignore this power, though no man's writings prove
it more irrefutably than his own. And his works will owe
their permanent value not to the theory which they contain,
but to the rich mine of facts, which he accumulated to
support it, though they do, in reality, destroy it altogether.
His thesaurus of facts testifies to the organic power of
Nature; his theory strives impotently to reduce her to
mechanics, a kind of blasphemy congenial to the present
age, which does not understand the old wisdom of Aris-
totle — ovk eaTtv e£ aWov yevovs fxtTaftavTa Set£czi.
b Geology shows us no such infinitesimally graduated continuity
as Darwin's theory requires : it gives us no dissolving views : it shows
us indeed continuity of a kind, but it is the discontinuous continuity
of a ladder, not that of a slope. Natura facit salius ; she goes by
degrees, but still she leaps.
c. ON THE HINDOO 'SYLLOGISM.'
IT is often asserted, and commonly believed, that the
Hindoos discovered the syllogism independently of Aris-
totle : and it has even been recently insinuated by some
that he derived it from them.
Now, Aristotle certainly never derived his syllogism
from Hindoo philosophy, for the simplest of all reasons, —
it is not there. The error on this head is due to three
causes : first, the desire in some quarters to over-value
Hindoo philosophy : secondly, the necessities of trans-
lation, scholars being in a manner compelled to employ
such terms as syllogism, middle term, &c, as equivalents for
Sanskrit words a : thirdly and principally, to ignorance of
what syllogism really means.
It is true that the European, educated in Aristotelean
logic, on contemplating the Hindoo five-membered form
of inference, seems to recognise, in the last three members,
the syllogism. But observe, that he sees only what he
brings. He sees the syllogism: the Hindoos did not. To
the notion of syllogism, — the combination of two premisses
containing three terms, so as to generate something entirely
different, the conclusion — they never attained. And why ?
Precisely because they lacked the previous conception that
* See e.g. Gough's Vaiseshika Aphorisms of Kanada, or Monier
Williams' Dictionary, s.w., T^TTJ 77 TrfTT &c. A middle term
obviously implies other two, ami the conception of syllogism, as such.
The Hindoo conception is quite different, not syllogism, but a
sort of train, such as that indicated by Locke.
ON THE HINDOO 'SYLLOGISM: 265
made the discovery possible. Aristotle discovered syllogism,
the logical aspect of essence, because he was familiar with
essence in general and elsewhere. But such a notion is
wholly foreign to Hindoo philosophy. Hindoo philosophy
knows nothing of essence in this analytical and Aristo-
telian sense b . What the Hindoos mean by essence is a
mysterious, mystical, transcendental identity : a hidden,
underlying, abstract, incognisable, pantheistic or material-
istic Unity, the exact antipodes of Aristotle's otaia.
To confound Aristotle's syllogism with the Hindoo
process is an error reposing on a misunderstanding both
of Aristotle's syllogism and the whole spirit of Hindoo
philosophy c . Their inference from a mark indicative of
universal pervasion, though acute and partially adequate,
will not bear a moment's comparison with Aristotle's per-
fect analysis. No glimpse of syllogism, of that logical
chemistry whereby a conclusion emerges of necessity from
the combination of elements wholly different from it, ever
came to them. Nor can anything show us what we owe
to Aristotle better than a consideration of how little the
b Modem thought has paid a heavy penalty for rejecting the term
quiddity •, which has a strange unfamiliar sound. And yet qua7itity
and quality are excellent and indispensable terms. When we speak
of humanity, mortality, fluidity, &c, we do but give special instances
of that, whose general expression is quiddity. The Schoolmen were
wiser than their enemies : they did not make philosophy contradict
grammar by eliminating the nouns.
c No two things could be more opposed to each other than Aris-
totelean and Hindoo philosophy. The Hindoos are the victims of
abstraction : it is the root alike of their religion, their ethics, their
theory and practice : abstraction from the world, abstraction from
others, abstraction from self: it is their ideal, their core, and their
curse.
266 ON THE HINDOO 'SYLLOGISM:
Hindoos, with all their metaphysical subtlety d , could
achieve without him. Had Aristotle never existed, it is
doubtful whether thought would ever have been adequately
analysed at all. Certainly no modern philosopher could
have done it. It takes an Aristotle to discover syllogism,
just as it takes a Mill to discover that it is wrong.
d The really interesting thing that the old Hindoos have given us
is not what their language contains, but that language itself: and
I take this opportunity of entering a protest against the barbarous,
ridiculous, and utterly abominable custom of printing it, in Europe,
in Roman characters, by which its beauty is wholly destroyed. What
should we think of Homer or Plato so printed? It is like putting
a tall hat on Pericles, or dressing Julius Caesar in a suit of ' dittoes.'
d. ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST.
FEW people would credit Aristotle with any geological
insight, still less associate him with that doctrine of
continuous geological change which Lyell and others have
made so familiar to us. Therefore I feel sure that the
reader will be obliged to me for recalling his attention
to the following remarkable passage in his Metcorologica
(cap. 14) :—
' The same places in the earth are not always water, or
' dry land, but they change, according as rivers come into
' being, or run dry and disappear. Therefore continent
1 and sea change places, nor does the former remain ever
• land, nor sea sea, but sea arises where there was land,
' and where now there is sea will again be land. This
' however we must suppose to take place with a certain
' periodical regularity. Its original cause and starting-
' point lies in this, that the interior of the earth, like that
' of plants and animals, has its season of maturity and
' old age. Only that in the case of the animals and plants,
' the whole necessarily flourishes and decays together ;
' whereas with the earth it comes about in bits at a time,
' through the action of cold and heat. These increase
' and diminish under the influence of the sun and the
' cosmical revolution a . Hence parts of the earth acquire
' different potentialities, and the capacity of remaining
' watery for a certain time, after which they dry up and
' grow old again : while other places revive and become
* This reminds us curiously of some modern theories as to the
cause of an Ice A?e.
268 ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST.
' watery, by turns. Necessarily, then, as the places dry,
1 springs must disappear; and when this happens the rivers
' must first diminish in size, and finally dry up altogether.
' But the rivers changing their places, disappearing in one
' place and appearing in another, the sea must change
' also, making dry land in one place, where it recedes
' being forced back by the rivers, and forming lagoons in
' another, where river deposits had previously filled it up
' and made dry land. But because all the physical change
* of the earth takes place by continuous increment and in
1 periods of immense length as compared with our own If',
' it escapes our notice. Just so in former ages have whole
' races of men died out and disappeared without any
' recollection of the whole change from start to finish.
' Such destructions are occasioned on the largest scale
' and most speedily by war : others are due to plagues,
' or droughts, either very large and sudden, or little by
' little. In this manner even the migrations of such races
' escape notice, owing to the fact that some keep leaving
1 the old locality, while others remain, till at last the place
' can no longer afford a subsistence for any considerable
1 number. From the date of the first emigration, then,
' down to the last, long periods would elapse, so that
' nobody would remember it : but length of time would
' obliterate all memory of it, even while there was still
1 some remnant in the original home. Just in this manner
' must we suppose it comes about that no one can re-
' member when the various races first immigrated into
' localities that were formerly swamps and lagoons, but
' subsequently changed and became dry. For seeing
' that this change took place by gradual addition in a
ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST. 269
' very long period of time, no one would be able to re-
' member, who came first, or when, or what the places
' were like when they arrived. As, for example, has
1 occurred in Egypt : a place which is obviously getting
' drier and drier, the whole district being plainly the
1 accumulated deposit of the Nile. But owing to the fact
' that as the swampy parts gradually dried those who lived
* nearest them would keep coming in to inhabit them,
' length of time has destroyed all recollection of the
1 beginning. However, the mouths are all, with the ex-
' ception of the Canopic, obviously the work not of the
' river but of man. Moreover Egypt was formerly called
' Thebes. And Homer, so recent, as it were, in com-
' parison with such changes, bears witness to the point :
' for he alludes to that country as though Memphis were
' not in his day, or at any rate not so large as it is now.
'Just as was to be expected. For the lower parts were
' colonised later than those higher up the river : since
' the districts nearest the point of deposit would neces-
' sarily remain swampy longest, owing to the lagoons being
' formed always at the lowest points \ As time goes on
1 this changes, and the place becomes habitable : since
' such districts improve by drying. Those, on the other
' hand, that were formerly good grow too dry and so de-
' teriorate. This has befallen Greece, particularly the
' territory of Argos and Mycenae. In the time of the
' Trojan war, the territory of Argos could support but
' few inhabitants, owing to its swampy nature j while that
b ' Near the sea, the Nile forms many great lagoons, enclosed by
1 tongues of earth or sand, and communicating with the .Mediterranean
'by breaches in the banks.' — Lenormant's Ancient History of the
East, p. 194.
270 ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST.
1 of Mycenae was good, and held, therefore, in more
' honour. Now, the parts are reversed, for the reason
'above stated: Mycenae having become absolutely dry
' and arid, and Argos, its dry places having become moist,
' being now good land.
' Exactly, then, as has happened in this small instance,
1 so must we suppose things to come about on a large
' scale in the case of large areas of land. There are, how-
' ever, some persons of limited views who would find the
1 cause of such phenomena as these in some universal
' catastrophe, some cosmical recreation of things. Hence,
' too, they assert that the sea is drying up and growing
' smaller, because there are obviously more places dry
' now than there used to be. And this is true : yet their
' inference is false. There are, in fact, many places now
' dry that were wet : but then, the converse holds also :
' for if they look they will find many places where the
' sea has gained upon the land. The cause of this, how-
' ever, we must not seek for in any universal catastrophe :
' it would, indeed, be absurd to turn the universe upside
' down in order to account for such trifling and insigni-
' ficant changes. For the earth is with all its bulk a mere
' nothing in comparison with the whole heaven. We
' should rather look for the cause of all these changes in
' some periodically returning and appointed flood of waters,
' analogous to what we see in a monsoon c , only on a
' colossal scale : such, too, as comes not always in the
' same places, but varies in locality, like the so-called
' Deucalionic deluge (which had to do especially with the
c This exactly conveys Aristotle's meaning, although he was not
familiar with monsoons.
ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST. 271
' region of Greece, and, in particular, its older part, that
' is, the district about Dodona and the Achelous ; a river
' which has changed its bed in many places. There in
1 former times dwelt the Selli, and those of old called
'Greeks, but now Hellens.) Whensoever, then, such a
' flood takes place we must suppose that its effects endure
' for a long period, and that the case is similar to that
1 of rivers in the normal state of things. (Some persons
' think that the reason why some rivers are perennial,
' and others not, is the size of their subterranean re-
' servoirs : we hold, on the contrary, that it is the great
' size, density, and coldness of the high lands that supply
' them : since these can best receive, retain, and produce
' water : whereas those rivers fail in water soonest, which
1 run under systems of hills small in bulk or porous, stoney,
1 or argillaceous in substance.) Just so, in the case of
' the supposed flood, those places would best retain their
' moisture Avhich resemble the high lands supplying ever-
' flowing rivers. In time, these evidently become drier,
1 and at the same time the watery parts would grow smaller,
' till a new periodical inundation should return.
' Since, now, it is necessary that if the whole is to abide
' it must suffer change of a kind, but not wholesale de-
' struction and recreation, then, as we say, it is impossible
' for the same parts to remain always land or water
' whether marine or fluviatile. This is proved by the
' facts : for example, the land of the Egyptians, whom
' we call the most ancient of men, has obviously all come
' into being, and is the work of the river, as any one can
' see for himself by examining the place. The part ad-
jacent to the Red Sea is a sufficient proof. One of their
272 ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST.
' Kings attempted to dig a canal here, as it would be
' of no small advantage to them if the place could be
1 made navigable from sea to sea : and Sesostris is said
' to have been the first of the old kings to make the
' attempt : he found, however, that the land was below the
1 sea-level. Therefore both he, and Dareius after him,
' abandoned canal-cutting, lest the current of the river
' should be destroyed by mixing with the sea. It is,
' therefore, clear that there was formerly here one con-
' tinuous sea. And this is why the country about Am-
' monian Libya seems disproportionately lowlying and
' hollow compared with the country seawards from it.
' Plainly there has been depositing here, and there must
' have been lagoons and spits of land. But as time went
' on the water, left behind in lagoons, dried up, and has
' long disappeared. Again, the rivers have added so
' much by accumulation to Lake Maeotis, that only ships
' drawing much less water than those of sixty years ago
' can now get in. From this it is easy to see that the
1 bottom of this lake, like that of other lakes, is the work of
' the rivers, and must finally dry up altogether. Again,
' the Bosphorus is in continual flow, owing to the accu-
' mulation always going on, and any one may see with his
' own eyes how the thing takes place even now. As
' often as the stream made a beach on the Asian side,
' a lagoon would form behind it, originally of small size :
' this would subsequently dry up ; and afterwards, another
' beach, starting from the first, would form, and another
' lagoon ; and so on continuously. And this going on,
' as time proceeded a kind of river must have come about :
'finally this too would dry up.
ARISTOTLE AS A GEOLOGIST. 273
' // is plain , then, since time never fails, and the whole
' Is eternal, that neither the Don nor the Nile flows for ever,
' but that there must have been a time when the land from
' which they flow was dry ; since their work has its term, but
1 time has none. And the like holds of all other rivers.
1 Well then, if rivers arise and pass away, and the same
1 parts of the earth are not always watery, the sea loo must
' change. But the sea receding here and gaining there, then
' obviously no parts of the whole earth remain always either
' sea or land, but all change, in time, from sea to land, and
' land to sea?
Who could believe that this curious passage, which reads
like a chapter of de la Be'che's Geological Observer, was
written two thousand years ago? Observe that Aristotle
is alive to a possibility too much ignored by modern
extreme Uniformitarians 3 the possibility of agencies on
a colossal scale still working regularly yet escaping our
notice owing to the shortness of our life ; just as the
periodical strike of a clock would seem an irregular
catastrophe to beings that lived and died every second.
e. FORCE.
♦
WHAT is Force? Modern Science can show us, in a
thousand ways, modo hcereat in ipso experimento, but
whenever she tries to tell us what it is, she is quite unable
to do it. Now, this is just where Aristotle can help her.
What is Aristotle's definition of Motion ? The realisation
of the possible, as such. And what does he mean by that?
Let us see a .
Suspend a ball of lead by a string. This lead has in
it a power of falling to the ground. Cut the string : it
falls : there is the realisation of the possibility, one species
of motion, falling. Any material body has the power of
being elsewhere than it is ; place it elsewhere : there you
have the realisation of the possibility, local motion. Water
has the power of becoming, under different conditions of
heat, solid, liquid, or gaseous; submit it to those conditions,
and you have, accordingly, ice, water, or steam; the pos-
sibility is realised by freezing, melting, or vaporisation.
Drop a piece of potassium into water; you will get another
realisation of a possibility, chemical combination, combustion,
or burning. Throw a beam of light through Iceland Spar,
you get the realisation of another power, polarisation.
Bring one magnet near another : you get another instance,
in attraction or repulsion. Is this rock sandstone or lime-
stone ? if the latter, a solution of acid will cause it to
effervesce ; apply it ; the power is realised, effervescence.
1 Illustrations only are possible here : but the reader who, with
Aristotle's definition in his eye, would run over, e.g. , Faraday's Lec-
tures on the Various Forces of Nature, would still better appreciate
the scientific beauty and value of Aristotle's wonderful definition.
FORCE. 275
Chloride of sodium has the power of crystallising in cubes:
prepare it, and you have crystallisation. Any fertilised
germ-cell has the power of becoming this or that plant
or animal : here you have another species of the realisation
of the possible — growth. And so on.
Now, what is it that is common to all these various
manifestations of force? Aristotle alone can tell, he can
define force : it is, the realisation of the possible. This is
that which is common to mechanical motion, to chemical
combination, to organic growth. The fundamental error
of modern speculative physical science is the attempt to
reduce the general to one of its species : to reduce all
forms of motion to mechanical motion, which is impossible.
They differ in kind.
Aristotle's definition exhibits the true relation of force
to matter, about which so much nonsense is talked now-
adays b . It is the posse which is continuous and eternal,
not the esse : matter, not force. Force arises only when
the conditions are suitable, as any man can see who has
ever struck a match. The power lies quiet till the con-
ditions are appropriate : then you get the force : the
realised possibility.
' Show me a man who can define, and I will follow him
1 to the end of the world.'
h Of all the pseudo-scientific theories of to-day, none is so absurd
as the talk about '■immaterial centres of force,' as if, forsooth ! force
could exist by itself. Force is an act. Similarly, the man of science
who sneers at Aristotle tells you on the same page that matter is
indestructible, although it is only in the Aristotelean sense of the word
matter that this is true. Every particular form of matter is, as such,
destructible : it is only matter, as such, the abstract and incognisable
residual something, which cannot be destroyed.
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