Some Problems of Philosophy

A backward glance at the evolution of philosophy will reward us here. The earliest philosophers in every land were encyclopaedic sages, lovers of wisdom, sometimes with, and sometimes without a dominantly ethical or religious interest. They were just men curious beyond immediate practical needs, and no particular problems, but rather the problematic generally, was their specialty. China, Persia, Egypt, India, had such wise men, but those of Greece are the only sages who until very recently have influenced the course of western thinking. The earlier Greek philosophy lasted, roughly speaking, for about two hundred and fifty years, say from 600 B. C. onwards. Such men as Thales, Heracleitus, Pythagoras, Parmenides, Anaxagoras, Empedocles, Democritus, were mathematicians, theologians, politicians, astronomers, and physicists. All the learning of their time, such as it was, was at their disposal. Plato and Aristotle continued their tradition, and the great mediaeval philosophers only enlarged its field of application. If we turn to Saint Thomas Aquinas’s great ‘Summa,’ written in the thirteenth century, we find opinions expressed about literally everything, from God down to matter, with angels, men, and demons taken in on the way. The relations of almost everything with everything else, of the creator with his creatures, of the knower with the known, of substances with forms, of mind with body, of sin with salvation, come successively up for treatment. A theology, a psychology, a system of duties and morals, are given in fullest detail, while physics and logic are established in their universal principles.

No one could have foreseen in advance the extraordinary fertility of the more insipid mathematical aspects which these geniuses ferreted out. No one could have dreamed of the control over nature which the search for their concomitant variations would give. ‘Laws’ describe these variations; and all our present laws of nature have as their model the proportionality of v to t, and of s to t which Galileo first laid bare. Pascal’s discovery of the proportionality of altitude to barometric height, Newton’s of acceleration to distance, Boyle’s of air-volume to pressure, Descartes’ of sine to sine in the refracted ray, were the first fruits of Galileo’s discovery. There was no question of agencies, nothing animistic or sympathetic in this new way of taking nature. It was description only, of concomitant variations, after the particular quantities that varied had been successfully abstracted out. The result soon showed itself in a differentiation of human knowledge into two spheres, one called ‘Science,’ within which the more definite laws apply, the other ‘General Philosophy,’ in which they do not. The state of mind called positivistic is the result. ‘Down with philosophy!’ is the cry of innumerable scientific minds. ‘Give us measurable facts only, phenomena, without the mind’s additions, without entities or principles that pretend to explain.’ It is largely from this kind of mind that the objection that philosophy has made no progress, proceeds.

But to assume therefore, that the only possible philosophy must be mechanical and mathematical, and to disparage all enquiry into the other sorts of question, is to forget the extreme diversity of aspects under which reality undoubtedly exists. To the spiritual questions the proper avenues of philosophic approach will also undoubtedly be found. They have, to some extent, been found already. In some respects, indeed, ‘science’ has made less progress than ‘philosophy’ — its most general conceptions would astonish neither Aristotle nor Descartes, could they revisit our earth. The composition of things from elements, their evolution, the conservation of energy, the idea of a universal determinism, would seem to them commonplace enough — the little things, the microscopes, electric lights, telephones, and details of the sciences, would be to them the awe-inspiring things. But if they opened our books on metaphysics, or visited a philosophic lecture room, everything would sound strange.

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.

HO W C O MES TH E world to be here at all instead of the nonentity which might be imagined in its place? Schopenhauer’s remarks on this question may be considered classical. ‘Apart from man,’ he says, ‘no being wonders at its own existence. When man first becomes conscious, he takes himself for granted, as something needing no explanation. But not for long; for, with the rise of the first reflection, that wonder begins which is the mother of metaphysics, and which made Aristotle say that men now and always seek to philosophize because of wonder — The lower a man stands in intellectual respects the less of a riddle does existence seem to him... but, the clearer his consciousness becomes the more the problem grasps him in its greatness. In fact the unrest which keeps the never stopping clock of metaphysics going is the thought that the non-existence of this world is just as possible as its existence.

‘cause’ that ‘you may expect certain sequences,’ etc etc. We shall find plenty of examples in the rest of this book; so I go back now to the more general question of whether the whole import of the world of concepts lies in its relation to perceptual experience, or whether it be also an independent revelation of reality. Great ambiguity is possible in answering this question, so we must mind our Ps and Qs. The first thing to notice is that in the earliest stages of human intelligence, so far as we can guess at them, thought proper must have had an exclusively practical use. Men classed their sensations, substituting concepts for them, in order to ‘work them for what they were worth,’ and to prepare for what might lie ahead. Class-names suggest consequences that have attached themselves on other occasions to other members of the class — consequences which the present percept will also probably or certainly show.

The present percept in its immediacy may thus often sink to the status of a bare sign of the consequences which the substituted concept suggests. The substitution of concepts and their connections, of a whole conceptual order, in short, for the immediate perceptual flow, thus widens enormously our mental panorama. Had we no concepts we should live simply ‘getting’ each successive moment of experience, as the sessile sea-anemone on its rock receives whatever nourishment the wash of the waves may bring. With concepts we go in quest of the absent, meet the remote, actively turn this way or that, bend our experience, and make it tell us whither it is bound. We change its order, run it backwards, bring far bits together and separate near bits, jump about over its surface instead of plowing through its continuity, string its items on as many ideal diagrams as our mind can frame. All these are ways of handling the perceptual flux and meeting distant parts of it; and as far as this primary function of conception goes, we can only conclude it to be what I began by calling it, a faculty superadded to our barely perceptual consciousness for its use in practically adapting us to a larger environment than that of which brutes take account. We harness perceptual reality in concepts in order to drive it better to our ends.

Does our conceptual translation of the perceptual flux enable us also to understand the latter better? What do we mean Scone by making us ‘understand’? Applying our pragmatic rule to the interpretation of the word, we see that the better we understand anything the more we are able to tell about it. Judged by this test, concepts do make us understand our percepts better: knowing what these are, we can tell all sorts of farther truths about them, based on the relation of those whats to other whats. The whole system of relations, spatial, temporal, and logical, of our fact, gets plotted out. An ancient philosophical opinion, inherited from Aristotle, is that we do not understand a thing until we know it by its causes. When the maidservant says that ‘the cat’ broke the tea-cup, she would have us conceive the fracture in a causally explanatory way. No otherwise when Clerk-Maxwell asks us to conceive of gas-electricity as due to molecular bombardment. An imaginary agent out of sight becomes in each case a part of the cosmic context in which we now place the percept to be explained; and the explanation is valid in so far as the new causal that is itself conceived in a context that makes its existence probable, and with a nature agreeable to the effects it is imagined to produce. All our scientific explanations would seem to conform to this simple type of the ‘necessary cat.’ The conceived order of nature built round the perceived order and explaining it theoretically, as we say, is only a system of hypothetically imagined thats, the whats of which harmoniously connect themselves with the what of any that which we immediately perceive.

Berkeley applied the same sort of criticism to the notion of bodily substance. ‘When I consider,’ he says, ‘the two parts (“being” in general, and “supporting accidents”) which make the signification of the words “material substance,” I am convinced there is no distinct meaning annexed to them.... Suppose an intelligence without the help of external bodies to be affected with the same train of sensations that you are, imprinted in the same order, and with like vividness in his mind. I ask whether that intelligence hath not all the reason to believe the existence of corporeal substances, represented by his ideas, and exciting them in his mind, that you can possibly have for believing the same thing.’ Certain grouped sensations, in short, are all that corporeal substances are known-as, therefore the only meaning which the word ‘matter’ can claim is that it denotes such sensations and their groupings. They are the only verifiable aspect of the word.

There are innumerable modes of union among its parts, some obtaining on a larger, some on a smaller scale. Not all the parts of our world are united mechanically, for some can move without the others moving. They all seem united by gravitation, however, so far as they are material things. Some again of these are united chemically, while others are not; and the like is true of thermic, optical, electrical, and other physical connections. These connections are specifications of what we mean by the word oneness when we apply it to our world. We should not call it one unless its parts were connected in these and other ways. But then it is clear that by the same logic we ought to call it ‘many.’ so far as its parts are disconnected in these same ways, chemically inert towards one another or nonconductors to electricity, light and heat.

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.