Part 11 (1/2)
Most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first, but they will deny these latter implications. The case, they will say, resembles that of s.e.xual love. Originating in the animal need of getting another generation born, this pa.s.sion has developed secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that, if you ask why another generation ought to be born at all, the answer is: 'Chiefly that love may go on.' Just so with our intellect: it originated as a practical means of serving life; but it has developed incidentally the function of understanding absolute truth; and life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted.
But truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and universals, so the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly in this region, without any need of redescending into pure experience again.
If the contrasted tendencies which I thus designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader, perhaps an example will make them more concrete. Mr. Bradley, for instance, is an ultra-rationalist. He admits that our intellect is primarily practical, but says that, for philosophers, the practical need is simply Truth.[1] Truth, moreover, must be a.s.sumed 'consistent.'
Immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities, terms and relations, to be understood as truth at all. Yet when so broken it is less consistent than ever. Taken raw, it is all undistinguished. Intellectualized, it is all distinction without oneness. 'Such an arrangement may _work_, but the theoretic problem is not solved' (p. 23). The question is, '_How_ the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness' (p. 118). To go back to pure experience is unavailing. 'Mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' (p. 104).
Even if your intuition is a fact, it is not an _understanding_. 'It is a mere experience, and furnishes no consistent view' (pp. 108-109).
The experiences offered as facts or truths 'I find that my intellect rejects because they contradict themselves. They offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it cannot repeat as its own.... For to be satisfied, my intellect must understand, and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in the lump' (p. 570). So Mr. Bradley, in the sole interests of 'understanding' (as he conceives that function), turns his back on finite
[Footnote 1: _Appearance and Reality_, pp. 152-133.]
experience forever. Truth must lie in the opposite direction, the direction of the absolute; and this kind of rationalism and naturalism, or (as I will now call it) pragmatism, walk thenceforward upon opposite paths. For the one, those intellectual products are most true which, turning their face towards the absolute, come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one. For the other, those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular wave or wavelet. Such confluence not only proves the intellectual operation to have been true (as an addition may 'prove' that a subtraction is already rightly performed), but it const.i.tutes, according to pragmatism, all that we mean by calling it true. Only in so far as they lead us, successfully or unsuccessfully, into sensible experience again, are our abstracts and universals true or false at all.
III
In Section the 6th of my article, 'A world of pure experience,' I adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds; but I left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd.
The usual reason given for its being absurd is that it a.s.sumes one object (to wit, the world) to stand in two relations at once; to my mind, namely, and again to yours; whereas a term taken in a second relation cannot logically be the same term which it was at first.
I have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists, and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly, if it were valid, that I am bound to give it an attentive ear, and seriously to search its strength.
For instance, let the matter in dispute be a term _M_, a.s.serted to be on the one hand related to _L_, and on the other to _N_; and let the two cases of relation be symbolized by _L--M_ and _M--N_ respectively.
When, now, I a.s.sume that the experience may immediately come and be given in the shape _L--M--N_, with no trace of doubling or internal fission in the _M_, I am told that this is all a popular delusion; that _L--M--N_ logically means two different experiences, _L--M_ and _M--N_, namely; and that although the absolute may, and indeed must, from its superior point of view, read its own kind of unity into _M_'s two editions, yet as elements in finite experience the two _M_'s lie irretrievably asunder, and the world between them is broken and unbridged.
In arguing this dialectic thesis, one must avoid slipping from the logical into the physical point of view. It would be easy, in taking a concrete example to fix one's ideas by, to choose one in which the letter _M_ should stand for a collective noun of some sort, which noun, being related to _L_ by one of its parts and to _N_ by another, would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both relations. Thus, one might say: 'David Hume, who weighed so many stone by his body, influences posterity by his doctrine.' The body and the doctrine are two things, between which our finite minds can discover no real sameness, though the same name covers both of them. And then, one might continue: 'Only an absolute is capable of uniting such a non-ident.i.ty.' We must, I say, avoid this sort of example; for the dialectic insight, if true at all, must apply to terms and relations universally. It must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective; and if we prove it by concrete examples, we must take the simplest, so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions.
Taken thus in all its generality, the absolutist contention seems to use as its major premise Hume's notion 'that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences, and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences.' Undoubtedly, since we use two phrases in talking first about '_M_'s relation to _L_' and then again about '_M_'s relation to _N_,' we must be having, or must have had, two distinct perceptions;--and the rest would then seem to follow duly. But the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two _phrases_; and this suggests that the argument may be merely verbal. Can it be that the whole dialectic achievement consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a const.i.tution similar to that of the language in which we describe it? Must we a.s.sert the objective doubleness of the _M_ merely because we have to name it twice over when we name its two relations?
Candidly, I can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic conclusion![1] for, if we think, not of our words, but of any simple concrete matter which they may be held to signify, the experience itself belies the paradox a.s.serted. We use indeed two separate concepts in a.n.a.lyzing our object, but we know them all the while to be but subst.i.tutional, and that the _M_ in _L--M_ and the _M_ in _M--N_ _mean_ (_i.e._, are capable of leading to and terminating in) one self-same piece, _M_, of sensible experience. This persistent ident.i.ty of certain units, or emphases, or points, or objects, or members--call them what you will--of the experience-continuum, is just one of those conjunctive features of it, on which I am obliged to insist so emphatically. For samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasible structure. When I hear a bell-stroke and, as life flows on, its after-image dies away, I still hark back to it as 'that same
[Footnote 1: Technically, it seems cla.s.sable as a 'fallacy of composition.' A duality, predicable of the two wholes, _L--M_ and _M--N_, is forthwith predicated of one of their parts, _M_.]
bell-stroke.' When I see a thing _M_, with _L_ to the left of it and _N_ to the right of it, I see it _as_ one _M_; and if you tell me I have had to 'take' it twice, I reply that if I 'took' it a thousand times, I should still _see_ it as a unit.[1] Its unity is aboriginal, just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal. It comes unbroken as _that M_, as a singular which I encounter; they come broken, as _those_ takings, as my plurality of operations. The unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate. I do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it, and relegate the unity (now taken as a bare postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable) to the region of the absolute's mysteries. I do not easily fathom this, I say, for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling; yet all that I can catch in their talk is the subst.i.tution of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify. They stay with the words,--not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came, and which is always ready to reabsorb them.
[Footnote 1: I may perhaps refer here to my _Principles of Psychology_, vol. i, pp. 459 ff. It really seems 'weird' to have to argue (as I am forced now to do) for the notion that it is one sheet of paper (with its two surfaces and all that lies between) which is both under my pen and on the table while I write--the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so brazen. Yet I sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity!]
IV
For aught this argument proves, then, we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers. But the denial of one thing in many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic difficulty. Man can't be good, said the sophists, for man is _man_ and _good_ is good; and Hegel and Herbart in their day, more recently H.
Spir, and most recently and elaborately of all, Mr. Bradley, inform us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit, and that not one of the conjunctive relations between things, which experience seems to yield, is rationally possible.
Of course, if true, this cuts off radical empiricism without even a s.h.i.+lling. Radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face-value, holding them to be as real as the terms united by them.
The world it represents as a collection, some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related. Two parts, themselves disjoined, may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which they are severally connected, and the whole world eventually may hang together similarly, inasmuch as _some_ path of conjunctive transition by which to pa.s.s from one of its parts to another may always be discernible. Such determinately various hanging-together may be called _concatenated_ union, to distinguish it from the 'through-and-through'
type of union, 'each in all and all in each' (union of _total conflux_, as one might call it), which monistic systems hold to obtain when things are taken in their absolute reality. In a concatenated world a partial conflux often is experienced. Our concepts and our sensations are confluent; successive states of the same ego, and feelings of the same body are confluent. Where the experience is not of conflux, it may be of conterminousness (things with but one thing between); or of contiguousness (nothing between); or of likeness; or of nearness; or of simultaneousness; or of in-ness; or of on-ness; or of for-ness; or of simple with-ness; or even of mere and-ness, which last relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise, at any rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse.' Now Mr. Bradley tells us that none of these relations, as we actually experience them, can possibly be real.[1] My next duty, accordingly, must be to rescue radical empiricism from Mr. Bradley. Fortunately, as it seems to me, his general contention, that the very notion of relation is
[Footnote 1: Here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations. It may well be that we _attribute_ a certain relation falsely, because the circ.u.mstances of the case, being complex, have deceived us. At a railway station we may take our own train, and not the one that fills our window, to be moving. We here put motion in the wrong place in the world, but in its original place the motion is a part of reality. What Mr. Bradley means is nothing like this, but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real, and that, even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats, relations are impossible of comprehension.]
unthinkable clearly, has been successfully met by many critics.[1]
It is a burden to the flesh, and an injustice both to readers and to the previous writers, to repeat good arguments already printed. So, in noticing Mr. Bradley, I will confine myself to the interests of radical empiricism solely.
V