1. Modern Philosophy has moved along two increasingly divergent lines. One, traversed by Galileo, Descartes, Newton, and Laplace, had for its goal the absolute disengagement of the physical from the mental, i. e. the objective from the subjective aspect of phenomena, so that the physical universe, thus freed from all the complexities of Feeling, might be interpreted in mechanical terms. As a preliminary simplification of the problem this was indispensable; only by it could the First Notion of primitive speculation be replaced by the Theoretic Conception of scientific speculation.204 The early thinker inevitably invested all external objects with properties and qualities similar to those he assigned to human beings, and their actions he assigned to human motives. Sun, moon, and stars seemed living beings; flames, streams, and winds were supposed to be moved by feelings such as those known to move animals and men. Nor was any other conception then possible: men could only interpret the unknown by the known, and their standard of all action was necessarily drawn from their own actions. Not having analyzed Volition and Emotion, above346 all not having localized these in a neuro-muscular system, men could not suspect that the movements of planets and plants, and of streams and stones, had motors of a different kind from the movements of animals. The scientific conception of inert insensible Matter was only attained through a long education in abstraction; and is assuredly never attained by animals, or by savages. But no sooner were vital conditions recognized, than the difference between vital and mechanical movements emerged. When men learned that many of their own actions were unaccompanied either by Love or Hate, by Pleasure or Pain, and that many were unprompted by conscious intention, while others were unaccompanied by conscious sensation, they easily concluded that wherever the special conditions of Feeling were absent, the actions must have some other motors. Intelligence, Emotion, Volition, and Sensation being one by one stripped away from all but a particular class of bodies, nothing remained for the other bodies but insensible Matter and Motion. This was the Theoretic Conception which science substituted for the First Notion. It was aided by the observation of the misleading tendency of interpreting physical phenomena by the human standard, substituting our fancies in the place of facts, manipulating the order of the universe according to our imagination of what it might be, or ought to be. Hence the vigilance of the new school in suppressing everything pertaining to the subjective aspect of phenomena, and the insistance on a purely objective classification, so that by this means we might attain to a knowledge of things as they are. By thus withdrawing Life and Mind from Nature, and regarding the universe solely in the light of Motion and the laws of Motion, two great scientific ends were furthered, namely, a classification of conceptions, and a precision of terms. Objective phenomena made a class apart, and the great347 aim of research was to find a mathematical expression for all varieties under this class. Masses were conceived as aggregates of Atoms, and these were reduced to mathematical points. Forces were only different modes of Motion. All the numberless differences which perception recognized as qualities in things, were reduced to mere variations in quantity. Thus all that was particular and concrete became resolved by analysis into what was general and abstract. The Cosmos then only presented a problem of Mechanics. 2. During this evolution, the old Dualism (which conceived a material universe sharply demarcated from the mental universe) kept its ground, and attained even greater precision. The logical distinction between Matter and Mind was accepted as an essential distinction, i. e. representing distinct reals. There was on the one side a group of phenomena, Matter and Force; on the other side an unallied group, Feeling and Thought: between them an impassable gulf. How the two were brought into relation, each acting and reacting on the other, was dismissed as an “insoluble mystery”—or relegated to Metaphysics for such minds as chose to puzzle over questions not amenable to experiment. Physics, confident in the possession of mathematical and experimental methods which yielded definite answers to properly restricted questions, peremptorily refused to listen to any suggestion of the kind. And the career of Physics was so triumphant that success seemed to justify its indifference.
3. In our own day this analytical school has begun to extend its methods even to the mental group. Having reduced all the objective group to mathematical treatment, it now tries to bring the subjective group also within its range. Not only has there been more than one attempt at a mathematical Psychology; but also348 attempts to reduce Sensibility, in its subjective no less than in its objective aspect, to molecular movement. Here also the facts of Quality are translated into facts of Quantity; and all diversities of Feeling are interpreted as simply quantitative differences.
4. Thus far the one school. But while this Theoretic Conception stripped Nature of consciousness, motive, and passion, rendering it a mere aggregate of mathematical relations, a critical process was going on, which, analyzing the nature of Perception, was rapidly moving towards another goal. Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, directing their analysis exclusively to the subjective aspect of phenomena, soon broke down the barriers between the physical and mental, and gradually merged the former in the latter. Matter and its qualities, hitherto accepted as independent realities, existing where no Mind perceived them, were now viewed as the creations of Mind—their existence was limited to a state of the percipient. The old Dualism was replaced by Idealism. The Cosmos, instead of presenting a problem of Mechanics, now presented a problem of Psychology. Beginning with what are called the secondary qualities of Matter, the psychological analysis resolved these into modes of Feeling. “The heat which the vulgar imagine to be in the fire and the color they imagine in the rose are not there at all, but are in us—mere states of our organism.” Having gained this standing-place, there was no difficulty in extending the view from the secondary to the primary qualities. These also were perceptions, and only existed in the percipient. Nothing then remained of Matter save the hypothetical unknown x—the postulate of speculation. Kant seemed forever to have closed the door against the real Cosmos when he transformed it into a group of mental forms—Time, Space, Causality, Quantity, etc. He propounded what may be called a theory349 of mental Dioptrics whereby a pictured universe became possible, as Experience by its own a priori laws moulded itself into a consistent group of appearances, which produced the illusion of being a group of realities. He admitted, indeed, that by the operation of Causality we are compelled to believe in a Real underlying the appearances; but the very fact that this Causality is a subjective law, is proof, he said, of its not being an objective truth. Thus the aim of the mechanical conception was to free research from the misleading complexities of subjective adulterations, and view things as they are apart from their appearances; but this aim seemed illusory when Psychology showed that Time, Space, Matter, and Motion were themselves not objective reals except in so far as they represented subjective necessities; and that, in short, things are just what they appear, since it is only in the relation of external reals to internal feelings that objects exist for us.
5. Idealism has been the outcome of the psychological method. It has been of immense service in rectifying the dualistic conception, and in correcting the mechanical conception. It has restored the subjective factor, which the mechanical conception had eliminated. It has brought into incomparable clearness the fundamental fact that all our knowledge springs from, and is limited by, Feeling. It has shown that the universe represented in that knowledge, can only be a picture of the system of things as these exist in relation to our Sensibility. But equally with the mechanical conception it has erred by incomplete analysis. For a complete theory of the universe, or of any one phenomenon, those elementary conditions which analysis has provisionally set aside must finally be restored. When Quality is replaced by Quantity, this is an artifice of method, which does not really correspond with fact. The quality is the fact given in feeling, which350 we analytically refer to quantitative differences, but which can never be wholly resolved into them, since it must be presupposed throughout. One color, for example, may be distinguished from another as having more or fewer undulations; and so we may by abstraction, letting drop all qualitative characters, make a scale of undulations to represent the scale of colors. But this is an ideal figment. It is the representation of one series of feelings by another series of different feelings. No variation of undulations will really correspond with variation in color, unless we reintroduce the suppressed quality which runs through all color. Attempt to make one born blind feel, or even understand, Color by describing to him the kind of wave-movement which it is said to be, and the vanity of the effort will be manifest. Movement he knows, and varieties of movement as given in tactile and muscular sensations; but no combination and manipulation of such experiences can give him the specific sensation of Color. That is a purely subjective state, which he is incapable of experiencing, simply because one of the essential factors is absent. One set of objective conditions is present, but the other set (his sense-organ) is defective. Without the “greeting of the spirit” undulations cannot become colors (nor even undulations, for these also are forms of feeling). Besides the sense-organ there is needed the feeling of Difference, which is itself the product of past and present feelings. The reproduction of other colors, or other shades of color, is necessary to this perception of difference; and this involves the element of Likeness and Unlikeness between what is produced and reproduced. So that a certain mental co-operation is requisite even for the simplest perception of quality. In fact, psychological analysis shows that even Motion and Quantity, the two objective terms to which subjective Quality is reduced, are themselves Fundamental Signatures of Feeling;205351 so that here, as elsewhere, it is only by analytical artifice that the objective can be divorced from the subjective. Matter is for us the Felt; its Qualities are differences of Feeling.
6. Not that this result is to be interpreted as freeing our Theoretic Conception from its objective side, and landing us in Idealism, which suppresses the real universe. The denial of all reality apart from our minds, is a twofold mistake: it confounds the conception of general relations with particular relations, declaring that because the External in its relation to the sentient organism can only be what it is felt to be, therefore it can have no other relations to other individual reals. This is the first mistake. The second is the disregard of the constant presence of the objective real in every fact of Feeling: the Not-Self is emphatically present in every consciousness of Self.
The legitimate conclusion is neither that of Dualism nor of Idealism, but what I have named Reasoned Realism (Problems, Vol. I. p. 201), which reconciles Common Sense with Speculative Logic, by showing that although the truth of things (their Wahrheit) is just what we perceive in them (our Wahrnehmung), yet their reality is this, and much more than this. Things are what they are felt to be; and what they are thought to be, when thoughts are symbols of the perceptions. Idealism declares that they are nothing but this. It is against this nothing but that Common Sense protests; and the protest is justified by Reasoned Realism, which, taking a comprehensive survey of the facts, thus answers the idealist: “Your synthesis is imperfect, since it does not include all the data—notably it excludes the fact of an objective or Not-Self element in every feeling. You may, conceivably, regard the352 whole universe as nothing but a series of changes in your consciousness; but you cannot hope to convince me that I myself am simply a change in yourself, or that my body is only a fleeting image in your mind. Hence although I conclude that the Not-Self is to you, as to me, undivorceable from Self, inalienable from Feeling, in so far as it is felt, yet there must nevertheless be for both of us an existence not wholly coextensive with our own. My world may be my picture of it; your world may be your picture of it; but there is something common to both which is more than either—an existent which has different relations to each. You are not me, nor is the pictured Cosmos me, although I picture it. Looking at you and it, I see a vast whole of which you are a small part; and such a part I conclude myself to be. It is at once a picture and the pictured; at once subjective and objective. To me all your modes of existence are objective aspects, which, drawing from my own experience, I believe to have corresponding subjective aspects; so that your emotions, which to me are purely physical facts, are to you purely mental facts. And psychological analysis assures me that all physical facts are mental facts expressed in objective terms, and mental facts are physical facts expressed in subjective terms.”
7. But while Philosophy thus replaces the conceptions of Dualism and Idealism by the conception of the Two-fold Aspect, the special sciences in their analytical career have disregarded the problem altogether. The mechanical theory of the universe not only simplified research by confining itself solely to the objective aspect of phenomena, but by a further simplification set aside all vital and chemical relations, to deal exclusively with mechanical relations. In ascertaining the mathematical relations of the planetary system, no elucidation could possibly be gained from biological or chemical conceptions; the353 planets therefore were provisionally stripped of everything not mechanical. In systematizing the laws of motion, it was necessary to disengage the abstract relations from everything in any way resembling spontaneity, or extra-mechanical agency: Matter was therefore, by a bold fiction, declared to be inert, and its Motion regarded as something superadded from without.
7a. And this was indispensable for the construction of those ideal laws which are the objects of scientific research. Science, as we often say, is the systematization of Experience under the forms of ideal constructions. Experience implies Feeling, and certain fundamental Signatures, all reducible to the primary discernment of Likeness and Unlikeness. Hence Science is first a classification of qualities or discerned likenesses and differences; next a measurement of quantities of discerned likenesses and differences. Although measurement is itself a species of classification, it is distinguished by the adoption of a standard unit of comparison, which, being precise and unvarying, enables us to express the comparisons in precise and unvarying symbols. Whether the unit of length adopted be an inch, a foot, a yard, a mile, the distance of the earth from the sun, or the distances of the fixed stars, the quantities thus measured are symbols admitting of one invariable interpretation. The exactness of the mathematical sciences is just this precision and invariability of their symbols, and is not, as commonly supposed, the source of any su............