A Pluralistic Universe by William James
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William James >> A Pluralistic Universe
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Lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of
Leibnitz's, and they exactly fall in with what I say of the absolutist
conception. The world projected out of the creative mind by the
_fiat_, and existing in detachment from its author, is a sphere of
being where the parts realize themselves only singly. If the divine
value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at,
then, Lotze rightly says, the world surely becomes poorer and not
richer for God's utterance of the _fiat_. He might much better have
remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme,
without following it up by a creative decree. The scheme _as such_ was
admirable; it could only lose by being translated into reality.[10]
Why, I similarly ask, should the absolute ever have lapsed from the
perfection of its own integral experience of things, and refracted
itself into all our finite experiences?
It is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them
have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this
point of view. Mr. McTaggart, for example, writes: 'Does not our very
failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it? ... In
so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe, we are not
perfect ourselves. And as we are parts of the universe, that cannot be
perfect.'[11]
And Mr. Joachim finds just the same difficulty. Calling the hypothesis
of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth,' he
calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all
things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in
its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds, a
self-assertion which in its extreme form is error,--he calls this
problem, I say, an insoluble puzzle. If truth be the universal _fons
et origo_, how does error slip in? 'The coherence theory of truth,' he
concludes, 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very
entrance of the harbor.'[12] Yet in spite of this rather bad form
of irrationality, Mr. Joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate
certainty'[13] of the theory shipwrecked, the correctness of which
he says he has 'never doubted.' This candid confession of a fixed
attitude of faith in the absolute, which even one's own criticisms and
perplexities fail to disturb, seems to me very significant. Not only
empiricists, but absolutists also, would all, if they were as candid
as this author, confess that the prime thing in their philosophy
is their vision of a truth possible, which they then employ their
reasoning to convert, as best it can, into a certainty or probability.
I can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that
_he_ at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities, but that
the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneous
copies, and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute's book
alone. For, he will ask, is not the absolute defined as the total
consciousness of everything that is? Must not its field of view
consist of parts? And what can the parts of a total consciousness be
unless they be fractional consciousnesses? Our finite minds _must_
therefore coexist with the absolute mind. We are its constituents, and
it cannot live without us.--But if any one of you feels tempted to
retort in this wise, let me remind you that you are frankly employing
pluralistic weapons, and thereby giving up the absolutist cause. The
notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being
depends is the rankest empiricism. The absolute as such has _objects_,
not constituents, and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own
several accounts, those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional
to the absolute consciousness, and not as elements implicated in its
definition. The absolute is a rationalist conception. Rationalism
goes from wholes to parts, and always assumes wholes to be
self-sufficing.[14]
My conclusion, so far, then, is this, that altho the hypothesis of the
absolute, in yielding a certain kind of religious peace, performs
a most important rationalizing function, it nevertheless, from
the intellectual point of view, remains decidedly irrational. The
_ideally_ perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the _parts
also are perfect_--if we can depend on logic for anything, we can
depend on it for that definition. The absolute is defined as the
ideally perfect whole, yet most of its parts, if not all, are
admittedly imperfect. Evidently the conception lacks internal
consistency, and yields us a problem rather than a solution. It
creates a speculative puzzle, the so-called mystery of evil and of
error, from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free.
In any pluralistic metaphysic, the problems that evil presents are
practical, not speculative. Not why evil should exist at all, but how
we can lessen the actual amount of it, is the sole question we need
there consider. 'God,' in the religious life of ordinary men, is the
name not of the whole of things, heaven forbid, but only of the ideal
tendency in things, believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to
co-operate in his purposes, and who furthers ours if they are worthy.
He works in an external environment, has limits, and has enemies. When
John Mill said that the notion of God's omnipotence must be given up,
if God is to be kept as a religious object, he was surely accurately
right; yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region
of God's name, that so simple and truthful a saying was generally
treated as a paradox: God, it was said, _could_ not be finite. I
believe that the only God worthy of the name _must_ be finite, and I
shall return to this point in a later lecture. If the absolute exist
in addition--and the hypothesis must, in spite of its irrational
features, still be left open--then the absolute is only the wider
cosmic whole of which our God is but the most ideal portion, and which
in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious
hypothesis at all. 'Cosmic emotion' is the better name for the
reaction it may awaken.
Observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute
gives rise to, and from which the finite God remains free, are due to
the fact that the absolute has nothing, absolutely nothing, outside of
itself. The finite God whom I contrast with it may conceivably have
_almost_ nothing outside of himself; he may already have triumphed
over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe; but
that fraction, however small, reduces him to the status of a
relative being, and in principle the universe is saved from all the
irrationalities incidental to absolutism. The only irrationality left
would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused, and
of this I hope to say a word more later.
I have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that I will
add only two other counts to my indictment.
First, then, let me remind you that _the absolute is useless for
deductive purposes_. It gives us absolute safety if you will, but
it is compatible with every relative danger. You cannot enter the
phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp, and name
beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there. Whatever the
details of experience may prove to be, _after the fact of them_
the absolute will adopt them. It is an hypothesis that functions
retrospectively only, not prospectively. _That_, whatever it may be,
will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute
was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle.
Again, the absolute is always represented idealistically, as the
all-knower. Thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame
an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind, owing to the
enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem
obliged to carry. One of the many _reductiones ad absurdum_ of
pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute One is as
follows: Let there be many facts; but since on idealist principles
facts exist only by being known, the many facts will therefore mean
many knowers. But that there are so many knowers is itself a fact,
which in turn requires _its_ knower, so the one absolute knower has
eventually to be brought in. _All_ facts lead to him. If it be a fact
that this table is not a chair, not a rhinoceros, not a logarithm, not
a mile away from the door, not worth five hundred pounds sterling, not
a thousand centuries old, the absolute must even now be articulately
aware of all these negations. Along with what everything is it must
also be conscious of everything which it is not. This infinite
atmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to be
explicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as
to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy. Furthermore,
if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly, the absolute has to have
already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness. The
rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the
more desirable material. One would expect it fairly to burst with such
an obesity, plethora, and superfoetation of useless information.[15]
I will spare you further objections. The sum of it all is that the
absolute is not forced on our belief by logic, that it involves
features of irrationality peculiar to itself, and that a thinker
to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' (to use Mr.
Joachim's words), is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an
emotionally rather sublime hypothesis. As such, it might, with all its
defects, be, on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal
grandeur, more rational than anything else in the field. But meanwhile
the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival: _reality MAY
exist in distributive form, in the shape not of an all but of a set of
caches, just as it seems to_--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis.
_Prima facie_ there is this in favor of the caches, that they are at
any rate real enough to have made themselves at least _appear_ to
every one, whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to
only a few mystics, and indeed to them very ambiguously. The advocates
of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is
infected and undermined by self-contradiction. If we are unable to
assimilate their arguments, and we have been unable, the only course
we can take, it seems to me, is to let the absolute bury the absolute,
and to seek reality in more promising directions, even among the
details of the finite and the immediately given.
If these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you, or even
sacrilegious, I am sorry. Perhaps the impression may be mitigated by
what I have to say in later lectures.
LECTURE IV
CONCERNING FECHNER
The prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands.
The logical proofs of it miss fire; the portraits which its best
court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme;
and, apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with _it_ all is
well, and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise
to its eternal point of view, it yields us no relief whatever. It
introduces, on the contrary, into philosophy and theology certain
poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should
have heard.
But if we drop the absolute out of the world, must we then conclude
that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness
than our consciousness? Is our whole instinctive belief in higher
presences, our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship,
to count for nothing? Is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with
incorrigibly social and imaginative minds?
Such a negative conclusion would, I believe, be desperately hasty,
a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath. Logically it is
possible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them with
the absolute at all. The treaty of offensive and defensive alliance
which certain groups of the Christian clergy have recently made with
our transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on a
well-meaning but baleful mistake. Neither the Jehovah of the old
testament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in common
with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man;
and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of
Abraham, of David, and of Jesus, after first developing into each
other, were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective
and modern minds, I reply that although in certain specifically
philosophical minds this may have been the case, in minds more
properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite
another path. The whole history of evangelical Christianity is there
to prove it. I propose in these lectures to plead for that other line
of development. To set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper
framework, so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all
alternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do for
many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance
with philosophy--I will contrast it with a system which, abstractly
considered, seems at first to have much in common with absolutism, but
which, when taken concretely and temperamentally, really stands at the
opposite pole. I refer to the philosophy of Gustav Theodor Fechner, a
writer but little known as yet to English readers, but destined, I am
persuaded, to wield more and more influence as time goes on.
It is the intense concreteness of Fechner, his fertility of detail,
which fills me with an admiration which I should like to make this
audience share. Among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the
past was a lady all the tenets of whose system I have forgotten except
one. Had she been born in the Ionian Archipelago some three thousand
years ago, that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure
of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper. The
world, she said, is composed of only two elements, the Thick, namely,
and the Thin. No one can deny the truth of this analysis, as far as it
goes (though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it
has itself a rather 'thin' sound), and it is nowhere truer than in
that part of the world called philosophy. I am sure, for example, that
many of you, listening to what poor account I have been able to
give of transcendental idealism, have received an impression of its
arguments being strangely thin, and of the terms it leaves us with
being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as
this. Some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition;
but thin as that has been, I believe the doctrines reported on to have
been thinner. From Green to Haldane the absolute proposed to us to
straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which
our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one
tries to make a whit concreter. If we open Green, we get nothing but
the transcendental ego of apperception (Kant's name for the fact that
to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed), blown up
into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole
universe. Nature, Green keeps insisting, consists only in
relations, and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal;
a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the
relations by which it determines other things. Present to whatever is
in succession, it is not in succession itself. If we take the Cairds,
they tell us little more of the principle of the universe--it is
always a return into the identity of the self from the difference of
its objects. It separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of
them in their separation from one another, while at the same time it
binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness.
This seems the very quintessence of thinness; and the matter hardly
grows thicker when we gather, after enormous amounts of reading, that
the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such, and
that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune
'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work. The
whole active material of natural fact is tried out, and only the
barest intellectualistic formalism remains.
Hegel tried, as we saw, to make the system concreter by making the
relations between things 'dialectic,' but if we turn to those who use
his name most worshipfully, we find them giving up all the particulars
of his attempt, and simply praising his intention--much as in our
manner we have praised it ourselves. Mr. Haldane, for example, in his
wonderfully clever Gifford lectures, praises Hegel to the skies, but
what he tells of him amounts to little more than this, that 'the
categories in which the mind arranges its experiences, and gives
meaning to them, the universals in which the particulars are grasped
in the individual, are a logical chain, in which the first presupposes
the last, and the last is its presupposition and its truth.' He hardly
tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme. He says indeed
that absolute mind in itself, and absolute mind in its hetereity or
otherness, under the distinction which it sets up of itself from
itself, have as their real _prius_ absolute mind in synthesis; and,
this being absolute mind's true nature, its dialectic character must
show itself in such concrete forms as Goethe's and Wordsworth's
poetry, as well as in religious forms. 'The nature of God, the nature
of absolute mind, is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic, and
so the nature of God as presented in religion must be a triplicity,
a trinity.' But beyond thus naming Goethe and Wordsworth and
establishing the trinity, Mr. Haldane's Hegelianism carries us hardly
an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit.
Equally thin is Mr. Taylor, both in his principles and in their
results. Following Mr. Bradley, he starts by assuring us that reality
cannot be self-contradictory, but to be related to anything really
outside of one's self is to be self-contradictory, so the ultimate
reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole. Yet all he
can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is
that the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and can
of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor.'
Mr. McTaggart treats us to almost as thin a fare. 'The main practical
interest of Hegel's philosophy,' he says, 'is to be found in the
abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is
rational and righteous, even when we cannot see in the least how it is
so.... Not that it shows us how the facts around us are good, not that
it shows us how we can make them better, but that it proves that they,
like other reality, are _sub specie eternitatis_, perfectly good, and
_sub specie temporis_, destined to become perfectly good.'
Here again, no detail whatever, only the abstract certainty that
whatever the detail may prove to be, it will be good. Common
non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the
generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born.
The peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt
for merely vital functions like enthusiasm, and its pretension to turn
our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically
mediated certainties, to question which would be absurd. But the whole
basis on which Mr. McTaggart's own certainty so solidly rests, settles
down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts Hegel's
gospel, namely, that in every bit of experience and thought, however
finite, the whole of reality (the absolute idea, as Hegel calls it) is
'implicitly present.'
This indeed is Hegel's _vision_, and Hegel thought that the details of
his dialectic proved its truth. But disciples who treat the details of
the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision, are surely,
in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness, no
better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted
faiths. We have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic
proofs. Mr. McTaggart picks plenty of holes of his own in Hegel's
logic, and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be
mystical, not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions,'
which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us
in the lurch, in spite of all their superiority, and that in the end
vision and faith must eke them out. But how abstract and thin is
here the vision, to say nothing of the faith! The whole of reality,
explicitly absent from our finite experiences, must nevertheless
be present in them all implicitly, altho no one of us can ever see
how--the bare word 'implicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the
monistic system on its slender point. Mr. Joachim's monistic system of
truth rests on an even slenderer point.--_I have never doubted_,'
he says, 'that universal and timeless truth is a single content or
significance, one and whole and complete,' and he candidly confesses
the failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this immediate
certainty' to the level of reflective knowledge. There is, in short,
no mediation for him between the Truth in capital letters and all
the little 'lower-case' truths--and errors--which life presents. The
psychological fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough.
The whole monistic pyramid, resting on points as thin as these, seems
to me to be a _machtspruch_, a product of will far more than one of
reason. Unity is good, therefore things _shall_ cohere; they _shall_
be one; there _shall_ be categories to make them one, no matter what
empirical disjunctions may appear. In Hegel's own writings, the
_shall-be_ temper is ubiquitous and towering; it overrides verbal and
logical resistances alike. Hegel's error, as Professor Royce so well
says, 'lay not in introducing logic into passion,' as some people
charge, 'but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic....
He is [thus] suggestive,' Royce says, 'but never final. His system as
a system has crumbled, but his vital comprehension of our life remains
forever.'[1]
That vital comprehension we have already seen. It is that there is a
sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves, but
may vaguely be treated as also their own others, and that ordinary
logic, since it denies this, must be overcome. Ordinary logic denies
this because it substitutes concepts for real things, and concepts
_are_ their own bare selves and nothing else. What Royce calls Hegel's
'system' was Hegel's attempt to make us believe that he was working
by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic, when in reality
sensible experiences, hypotheses, and passion furnished him with all
his results.
What I myself may mean by things being their own others, we shall see
in a later lecture. It is now time to take our look at Fechner, whose
thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin, abstract, indigent,
and threadbare appearance, the starving, school-room aspect, which the
speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present.
There is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between
the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods
concretely can do. If the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the
'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal,' the whole of
reason, or reality, or spirit, or the absolute idea, or whatever it
may be called, in all our finite thinking, and if this reason worked
(for example) by the dialectical method, doesn't it seem odd that
in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known, in
'science,' namely, the dialectical method should never once have been
tried? Not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs
to my mind. Hypotheses, and deductions from these, controlled by
sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere, are to
be thanked for all of science's results.
Fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his
metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a
few of the facts about his life.
Born in 1801, the son of a poor country pastor in Saxony, he lived
from 1817 to 1887, when he died, seventy years therefore, at Leipzig,
a typical _gelehrter_ of the old-fashioned german stripe. His means
were always scanty, so his only extravagances could be in the way
of thought, but these were gorgeous ones. He passed his medical
examinations at Leipzig University at the age of twenty-one, but
decided, instead of becoming a doctor, to devote himself to physical
science. It was ten years before he was made professor of physics,
although he soon was authorized to lecture. Meanwhile, he had to make
both ends meet, and this he did by voluminous literary labors. He
translated, for example, the four volumes of Biot's treatise on
physics, and the six of Thenard's work on chemistry, and took care of
their enlarged editions later. He edited repertories of chemistry
and physics, a pharmaceutical journal, and an encyclopaedia in eight
volumes, of which he wrote about one third. He published physical
treatises and experimental investigations of his own, especially in
electricity. Electrical measurements, as you know, are the basis of
electrical science, and Fechner's measurements in galvanism, performed
with the simplest self-made apparatus, are classic to this day.
During this time he also published a number of half-philosophical,
half-humorous writings, which have gone through several editions,
under the name of Dr. Mises, besides poems, literary and artistic
essays, and other occasional articles.
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