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A Pluralistic Universe by William James

W >> William James >> A Pluralistic Universe




Fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many
sense-organs of the earth's soul. We add to its perceptive life so
long as our own life lasts. It absorbs our perceptions, just as they
occur, into its larger sphere of knowledge, and combines them with the
other data there. When one of us dies, it is as if an eye of the world
were closed, for all _perceptive_ contributions from that particular
quarter cease. But the memories and conceptual relations that have
spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the
larger earth-life as distinct as ever, and form new relations and grow
and develop throughout all the future, in the same way in which our
own distinct objects of thought, once stored in memory, form new
relations and develop throughout our whole finite life. This is
Fechner's theory of immortality, first published in the little
'Buechlein des lebens nach dem tode,' in 1836, and re-edited in greatly
improved shape in the last volume of his 'Zend-avesta.'

We rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean. We grow out of
her soil as leaves grow from a tree. The wavelets catch the sunbeams
separately, the leaves stir when the branches do not move. They
realize their own events apart, just as in our own consciousness, when
anything becomes emphatic, the background fades from observation. Yet
the event works back upon the background, as the wavelet works upon
the waves, or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the
branch. The whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has
happened, and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action
having occurred. A grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots:--so
our outlived private experiences, impressed on the whole earth-mind as
memories, lead the immortal life of ideas there, and become parts of
the great system, fully distinguished from one another, just as we
ourselves when alive were distinct, realizing themselves no longer
isolatedly, but along with one another as so many partial systems,
entering thus into new combinations, being affected by the perceptive
experiences of those living then, and affecting the living in their
turn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so.

If you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a
common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct
personality, Fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own
exists in any sense _less for itself_ or _less distinctly_, when
it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there
distinguished and defined.

--But here I must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes. Thus
is the universe alive, according to this philosopher! I think you
will admit that he makes it more _thickly_ alive than do the other
philosophers who, following rationalistic methods solely, gain the
same results, but only in the thinnest outlines. Both Fechner and
Professor Royce, for example, believe ultimately in one all-inclusive
mind. Both believe that we, just as we stand here, are constituent
parts of that mind. No other _content_ has it than us, with all the
other creatures like or unlike us, and the relations which it finds
between us. Our eaches, collected into one, are substantively
identical with its all, tho the all is perfect while no each is
perfect, so that we have to admit that new qualities as well as
unperceived relations accrue from the collective form. It is thus
superior to the distributive form. But having reached this result,
Royce (tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to
me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary
idealistic philosopher) leaves us very much to our own devices.
Fechner, on the contrary, tries to trace the superiorities due to the
more collective form in as much detail as he can. He marks the various
intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity,--as we are to
our separate senses, so is the earth to us, so is the solar system
to the earth, etc.,--and if, in order to escape an infinitely long
summation, he posits a complete God as the all-container and leaves
him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their
absolute, he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to
him in the shape of the earth-soul, through which in the nature of
things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping
superhuman realms, and with which our more immediate religious
commerce at any rate has to be carried on.

Ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out. It
recognizes only the extremes, as if, after the first rude face of the
phenomenal world in all its particularity, nothing but the supreme in
all its perfection could be found. First, you and I, just as we are in
this room; and the moment we get below that surface, the unutterable
absolute itself! Doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination?
Isn't this brave universe made on a richer pattern, with room in
it for a long hierarchy of beings? Materialistic science makes it
infinitely richer in terms, with its molecules, and ether, and
electrons, and what not. Absolute idealism, thinking of reality only
under intellectual forms, knows not what to do with _bodies_ of
any grade, and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or
correspondence. The resultant thinness is startling when compared with
the thickness and articulation of such a universe as Fechner paints.
May not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha
and omega, and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate
religious object, argue a certain native poverty of mental demand?
Things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want
them, for our need sharpens our wit. To a mind content with little,
the much in the universe may always remain hid.

To be candid, one of my reasons for saying so much about Fechner has
been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear
more evident by an effect of contrast. Scholasticism ran thick; Hegel
himself ran thick; but english and american transcendentalisms run
thin. If philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of
logic,--and I believe it is, logic only finding reasons for the vision
afterwards,--must not such thinness come either from the vision being
defective in the disciples, or from their passion, matched with
Fechner's or with Hegel's own passion, being as moonlight unto
sunlight or as water unto wine?[4]

But I have also a much deeper reason for making Fechner a part of my
text. His _assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and
separate themselves_, the same assumption by which absolutism explains
the relation of our minds to the eternal mind, and the same by
which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of
subordinate mental elements, is not one which we ought to let pass
without scrutiny. I shall scrutinize it in the next lecture.




LECTURE V


THE COMPOUNDING OF CONSCIOUSNESS

In my last lecture I gave a miserably scanty outline of the way
of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled
richness of his imagination of details. I owe to Fechner's shade an
apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential
quality of his genius; but the time allotted is too short to say more
about the particulars of his work, so I proceed to the programme
I suggested at the end of our last hour. I wish to discuss the
assumption that states of consciousness, so-called, can separate and
combine themselves freely, and keep their own identity unchanged while
forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope.

Let me first explain just what I mean by this. While you listen to
my voice, for example, you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily
sensation due to your clothing or your posture. Yet that sensation
would seem probably to be there, for in an instant, by a change of
attention, you can have it in one field of consciousness with the
voice. It seems as if it existed first in a separate form, and then as
if, without itself changing, it combined with your other co-existent
sensations. It is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks
that we exist in the absolute. The absolute, it thinks, makes the
world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal
act.[1] To 'be,' _really_ to be, is to be as it knows us to be, along
with everything else, namely, and clothed with the fulness of our
meaning. Meanwhile we _are_ at the same time not only really and as it
knows us, but also apparently, for to our separate single selves we
appear _without_ most other things and unable to declare with
any fulness what our own meaning is. Now the classic doctrine of
pantheistic idealism, from the Upanishads down to Josiah Royce, is
that the finite knowers, in spite of their apparent ignorance, are one
with the knower of the all. In the most limited moments of our private
experience, the absolute idea, as Dr. McTaggart told us, is implicitly
contained. The moments, as Royce says, exist only in relation to it.
They are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence. Of
the larger self that alone eternally is, they are the organic parts.
They _are_, only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being.

There is thus in reality but this one self, consciously inclusive of
all the lesser selves, _logos_, problem-solver, and all-knower; and
Royce ingeniously compares the ignorance that in our persons breaks
out in the midst of its complete knowledge and isolates me from you
and both of us from it, to the inattention into which our finite minds
are liable to fall with respect to such implicitly present details as
those corporeal sensations to which I made allusion just now. Those
sensations stand to our total private minds in the same relation in
which our private minds stand to the absolute mind. Privacy means
ignorance--I still quote Royce--and ignorance means inattention. We
are finite because our wills, as such, are only fragments of the
absolute will; because will means interest, and an incomplete will
means an incomplete interest; and because incompleteness of interest
means inattention to much that a fuller interest would bring us to
perceive.[2]

In this account Royce makes by far the manliest of the post-hegelian
attempts to read some empirically apprehensible content into the
notion of our relation to the absolute mind.

I have to admit, now that I propose to you to scrutinize this
assumption rather closely, that trepidation seizes me. The subject is
a subtle and abstruse one. It is one thing to delve into subtleties by
one's self with pen in hand, or to study out abstruse points in
books, but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them.
Nevertheless I must not flinch from my task here, for I think that
this particular point forms perhaps the vital knot of the present
philosophic situation, and I imagine that the times are ripe, or
almost ripe, for a serious attempt to be made at its untying.

It may perhaps help to lessen the arduousness of the subject if I put
the first part of what I have to say in the form of a direct personal
confession.

In the year 1890 I published a work on psychology in which it became
my duty to discuss the value of a certain explanation of our higher
mental states that had come into favor among the more biologically
inclined psychologists. Suggested partly by the association of ideas,
and partly by the analogy of chemical compounds, this opinion was
that complex mental states are resultants of the self-compounding of
simpler ones. The Mills had spoken of mental chemistry; Wundt of a
'psychic synthesis,' which might develop properties not contained in
the elements; and such writers as Spencer, Taine, Fiske, Barratt, and
Clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which, in the
absence of souls, selves, or other principles of unity, primordial
units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing
themselves together in successive stages of compounding and
re-compounding, and thus engendering our higher and more complex
states of mind. The elementary feeling of A, let us say, and the
elementary feeling of B, when they occur in certain conditions,
combine, according to this doctrine, into a feeling of A-plus-B, and
this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of C-plus-D,
until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of
awareness, without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond
the feelings of the several letters themselves, being supposed to
exist. What each of them witnesses separately, 'all' of them are
supposed to witness in conjunction. But their distributive knowledge
doesn't _give rise_ to their collective knowledge by any act, it _is_
their collective knowledge. The lower forms of consciousness 'taken
together' _are_ the higher. It, 'taken apart,' consists of nothing
and _is_ nothing but them. This, at least, is the most obvious way
of understanding the doctrine, and is the way I understood it in the
chapter in my psychology.

Superficially looked at, this seems just like the combination of H_2
and O into water, but looked at more closely, the analogy halts badly.
When a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen
combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance
'water,' he knows (if he believes in the mechanical view of nature)
that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact.
That fact is that when H_2 and O, instead of keeping far apart, get
into closer quarters, say into the position H-O-H, they _affect
surrounding bodies differently_: they now wet our skin, dissolve
sugar, put out fire, etc., which they didn't in their former
positions. 'Water' is but _our name_ for what acts thus peculiarly.
But if the skin, sugar, and fire were absent, no witness would speak
of water at all. He would still talk of the H and O distributively,
merely noting that they acted now in the new position H-O-H.

In the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the
sugar, fire, or skin. The lower feelings produced _effects on it_,
and their apparent compounds were only its reactions. As you tickle
a man's face with a feather, and he laughs, so when you tickle his
intellectual principle with a retinal feeling, say, and a muscular
feeling at once, it laughs responsively by its category of 'space,'
but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those
simpler feelings. It is rather a new and unique psychic creation which
their combined action on the mind is able to evoke.

I found myself obliged, in discussing the mind-dust theory, to urge
this last alternative view. The so-called mental compounds are simple
psychic reactions of a higher type. The form itself of them, I said,
is something new. We can't say that awareness of the alphabet as
such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses, each of a separate
letter; for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses, of single
letters _without_ others, while their so-called sum is one awareness,
of every letter _with_ its comrades. There is thus something new in
the collective consciousness. It knows the same letters, indeed, but
it knows them in this novel way. It is safer, I said (for I fought shy
of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination), to treat
the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact, the
substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses,
and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they
alone are produced, other more complex physiological conditions result
in its production instead. Do not talk, therefore, I said, of the
higher states _consisting_ of the simpler, or _being_ the same with
them; talk rather of their _knowing the same things_. They are
different mental facts, but they apprehend, each in its own peculiar
way, the same objective A, B, C, and D.

The theory of combination, I was forced to conclude, is thus
untenable, being both logically nonsensical and practically
unnecessary. Say what you will, twelve thoughts, each of a single
word, are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the whole
sentence. The higher thoughts, I insisted, are psychic units, not
compounds; but for all that, they may know together as a collective
multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known
separately by as many simple thoughts.

For many years I held rigorously to this view,[3] and the reasons for
doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the
opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of
a whole to its parts. If untenable in finite psychology, that opinion
ought to be untenable in metaphysics also. The great transcendentalist
metaphor has always been, as I lately reminded you, a grammatical
sentence. Physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses,
these of words, the words of syllables, and the syllables of letters.
We may take each word in, yet not understand the sentence; but if
suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes, the sense of each
word is taken up into that whole meaning. Just so, according to
our transcendentalist teachers, the absolute mind thinks the whole
sentence, while we, according to our rank as thinkers, think a clause,
a word, a syllable, or a letter. Most of us are, as I said, mere
syllables in the mouth of Allah. And as Allah comes first in the order
of being, so comes first the entire sentence, the _logos_ that forms
the eternal absolute thought. Students of language tell us that speech
began with men's efforts to make _statements_. The rude synthetic
vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped,
and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts. It is not
as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them, then
made words of the syllables and sentences of the words;--they actually
followed the reverse order. So, the transcendentalists affirm, the
complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts, and
we finite creatures _are_ only in so far as it owns us as its verbal
fragments.

The metaphor is so beautiful, and applies, moreover, so literally to
such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience, that by merely
hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally.
We see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a whole
shower, no single feather without a whole bird, neck and crop, beak
and tail, coming into being simultaneously: so we unhesitatingly lay
down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the
whole also is. And then, since everything whatever is part of the
whole universe, and since (if we are idealists) nothing, whether part
or whole, exists except for a witness, we proceed to the conclusion
that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole
ground of being of every partial fact, the fact of our own existence
included. We think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers,
so to speak, which help to constitute that absolute bird. Extending
the analogy of certain wholes, of which we have familiar experience,
to the whole of wholes, we easily become absolute idealists.

But if, instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor, be
it sentence, shower, or bird, we analyze more carefully the notion
suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's
eternal field of consciousness, we find grave difficulties arising.
First, the difficulty I found with the mind-dust theory. If the
absolute makes us by knowing us, how can we exist otherwise than _as_
it knows us? But it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else.
Yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced, as idealism
affirms, we surely exist otherwise, for we experience _ourselves_
ignorantly and in division. We indeed differ from the absolute not
only by defect, but by excess. Our ignorances, for example, bring
curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled, for it owns
eternally the solution of every problem. Our impotence entails pains,
our imperfection sins, which its perfection keeps at a distance. What
I said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute
experience and our experiences. Their relation, whatever it may be,
seems not to be that of identity.

It is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with
our being only the absolute's mental objects. A God, as distinguished
from the absolute, creates things by projecting them beyond himself as
so many substances, each endowed with _perseity_, as the scholastics
call it. But objects of thought are not things _per se_. They are
there only _for_ their thinker, and only _as_ he thinks them. How,
then, can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think
themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them? It is as if the
characters in a novel were to get up from the pages, and walk away and
transact business of their own outside of the author's story.

A third difficulty is this: The bird-metaphor is physical, but we
see on reflection that in the _physical_ world there is no real
compounding. 'Wholes' are not realities there, parts only are
realities. 'Bird' is only our _name_ for the physical fact of a
certain grouping of organs, just as 'Charles's Wain' is our name for a
certain grouping of stars. The 'whole,' be it bird or constellation,
is nothing but our vision, nothing but an effect on our sensorium when
a lot of things act on it together. It is not realized by any organ
or any star, or experienced apart from the consciousness of an
onlooker.[4] In the physical world taken by itself there _is_ thus no
'all,' there are only the 'eaches'--at least that is the 'scientific'
view.

In the mental world, on the contrary, wholes do in point of fact
realize themselves _per se_. The meaning of the whole sentence is
just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is; the
absolute's experience _is_ for itself, as much as yours is for
yourself or mine for myself. So the feather-and-bird analogy won't
work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent
with a vision produced in it _by_ our several minds analogous to the
'bird'-vision which the feathers, beak, etc., produce _in_ those same
minds. The 'whole,' which is _its_ experience, would then be its
unifying reaction on our experiences, and not those very experiences
self-combined. Such a view as this would go with theism, for the
theistic God is a separate being; but it would not go with pantheistic
idealism, the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally
_parts_ of God, and he only ourselves in our totality--the word
'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finite
facts.

I am dragging you into depths unsuitable, I fear, for a rapid lecture.
Such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle, so to
speak, and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views. The practical
upshot of the matter, however, so far as I am concerned, is this, that
if I had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago, I should
unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties, and developed them at
still greater length, to show that the hypothesis of the absolute
was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view, but
self-contradictory as well, its notion that parts and whole are only
two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny. If you
stick to purely physical terms like stars, there is no whole. If you
call the whole mental, then the so-called whole, instead of being one
fact with the parts, appears rather as the integral reaction on those
parts of an independent higher witness, such as the theistic God is
supposed to be.

So long as this was the state of my own mind, I could accept the
notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no
more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust I had accepted it in
the lower spheres. I found myself compelled, therefore, to call
the absolute impossible; and the untrammelled freedom with which
pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers
which Lotze and others had set down long before I had--I had done
little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised
me not a little, and made me, I have to confess, both resentful and
envious. Envious because in the bottom of my heart I wanted the same
freedom myself, for motives which I shall develop later; and resentful
because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the
privilege of blowing both hot and cold. To establish their absolute
they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when
employed against it. It seemed to me that they ought at least to have
mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely. I had
yielded to them against my 'will to believe,' out of pure logical
scrupulosity. They, professing to loathe the will to believe and to
follow purest rationality, had simply ignored them. The method was
easy, but hardly to be called candid. Fechner indeed was candid
enough, for he had never thought of the objections, but later writers,
like Royce, who should presumably have heard them, had passed them by
in silence. I felt as if these philosophers were granting their will
to believe in monism too easy a license. My own conscience would
permit me no such license.