Cosmos

Plato, the archrationalist, explained the details of nature by their participation in ‘ideas,’ which all depended on the supreme idea of the ‘good.’ Protagoras and Democritus were empiricists. The latter explained the whole cosmos, including gods as well as men, and thoughts as well as things, by their composition out of atomic elements; Protagoras explained truth, which for Plato was the absolute system of the ideas, as a collective name for men’s opinions. Rationalists prefer to deduce facts from principles. Empiricists prefer to explain principles as inductions from facts. Is thought for the sake of life? or is life for the sake of thought? Empiricism inclines to the former, rationalism to the latter branch of the alternative. God’s life, according to Aristotle and Hegel, is pure theory. The mood of admiration is natural to rationalism. Its theories are usually optimistic, supplementing the experienced world by clean and pure ideal constructions.

Only then might we believe that all things really do belong together, instead of being connected by the bare conjunctions ‘with’ or ‘and.’ The notion that this latter pluralistic arrangement may obtain is deemed ‘irrational’; and of course it does make the world partly alogical or non-rational from a purely intellectual point of view. Monism thus holds the oneness to be the more vital and essential element. The entire cosmos must be a consolidated unit, within which each member is determined by the whole to be just that, and from which the slightest incipiency of independence anywhere is ruled out. With Spinoza, monism likes to believe that all things follow from the essence of God as necessarily as from the nature of a triangle it follows that the angles are equal to two right angles. The whole is what yields the parts, not the parts the whole. The universe is tight, monism claims, not loose; and you must take the irreducible whole of it just as it is offered, or have no part or lot in it at all. The only alternative allowed by monistic writers is to confess the world’s non- rationality — and no philosopher can permit himself to do that. The form of monism regnant at the present day in philosophic circles is absolute idealism. For this way of thinking, the world exists no otherwise than as the object of one infinitely knowing mind. The analogy that suggests the hypothesis here is that of our own finite fields of consciousness, which at every moment envisage a much-at-once composed of parts related variously, and in which both the conjunctions and the disjunctions that appear are there only in so far as we are there as their witnesses, so that they are both ‘noetically’ and monistically based.

Particularly so by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison, in his Man and the Cosmos; by L. T. Hobhouse, in chapter xii (“The Validity of Judgment”) of his Theory of Knowledge; and by F. C. S. Schiller, in his Humanism, essay xi. Other fatal reviews (in my opinion) are Hodder’s, in the Psychological Review, vol. i, 1894, p. 307; Stout’s in the Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 1901-2, p. 1; and MacLennan’s in (The Journal of Philosophy, Psychology and Scientific Methods, vol. i, 1904, p. 403).

Meanwhile, a pure experience can be postulated with any amount whatever of span or field. If it exert the retrospective and appropriative function on any other piece of experience, the latter thereby enters into its own conscious stream. And in this operation time intervals make no essential difference. After sleeping, my retrospection is as perfect as it is between two successive waking moments of my time. Accordingly if, millions of years later, a similarly retrospective experience should anyhow come to birth, my present thought would form a genuine portion of its long-span conscious life. ‘Form a portion,’ I say, but not in the sense that the two things could be entitatively or substantively one — they cannot, for they are numerically discrete facts — but only in the sense that the functions of my present thought, its knowledge, its purpose, its content and ‘consciousness,’ in short, being inherited, would be continued practically unchanged. Speculations like Fechner’s, of an Earth-soul, of wider spans of consciousness enveloping narrower ones throughout the cosmos, are, therefore, philosophically quite in order, provided they distinguish the functional from the entitative point of view, and do not treat the minor consciousness under discussion as a kind of standing material of which the wider ones consist.74

As this is not an ethical but a psychological essay, it is quite sufficient for our purposes to lay it down as an empirical fact that we strive to formulate rationally a tangled mass of fact by a propensity as natural and invincible as that which makes us exchange a hard high stool for an arm- chair or prefer travelling by railroad to riding in a springless cart. Whatever modes of conceiving the cosmos facilitate this fluency of our thought, produce the sentiment of rationality. Conceived in such modes Being vouches for itself and needs no further philosophic formulation. But so long as mutually obstructive elements are involved in the conception, the pent-up irritated mind recoiling on its present consciousness will criticise it, worry over it, and never cease in its attempts to discover some new mode of formulation which may give it escape from the irrationality of its actual ideas. Now mental ease and freedom may be obtained in various ways.

Fechner in his Zend-Avesta and elsewhere assumes that mental and physical life run parallel, all memory-processes being, according to him, co- ordinated with material processes. If an act of yours is to be consciously remembered hereafter, it must leave traces on the material universe such that when the traced parts of the said universe systematically enter into activity together the act is consciously recalled. During your life the traces are mainly in your brain; but after your death, since your brain is gone, they exist in the shape of all the records of your actions which the outer world stores up as the effects, immediate or remote, thereof, the cosmos being in some degree, however slight, made structurally different by every act of ours that takes place in it.