MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO
DALLAS • SAN FRANCISCO

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, LTD.

TORONTO

HUMANISM

BY THE SAME AUTHOR

RIDDLES OF THE SPHINX

A STUDY IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HUMANISM

NEW AND REVISED EDITION
LONDON : MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1910.

"AXIOMS AS POSTULATES"

IN

PERSONAL IDEALISM

EDITED BY HENRY STURT
LONDON: MACMILLAN ANDICO., LTD. 1902.

STUDIES IN HUMANISM

SECOND EDITION
LONDON : MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1912.

FORMAL LOGIC

A SCIENTIFIC AND SOCIAL PROBLEM
MACMILLAN AND CO., LTD. 1912.

PLATO OR PROTAGORAS?

BEING A CRITICAL EXAMINATION OF THE 'PROTA
GORAS' SPEECH IN THE THEJETETUS, WITH
SOME REMARKS UPON ERROR.

OXFORD: B. H. BLACKWELL.
LONDON : SIMPKIN, MARSHALL & CO. 1908. is. net.

HUMANISM

PHILOSOPHICAL ESSAYS

BY

F. c. s. SCHILLER, M.A., D.SC.

FELLOW AND SENIOR TUTOR OF CORPUS CHRISTI COLLEGE, OXFORD

SECOND EDITION, ENLARGED

MACMILLAN AND CO., LIMITED

ST. MARTIN'S STREET, LONDON

1912

COPYRIGHT

First Edition, 1903
Second Edition, 1912

TO MY DEAR FRIEND
THE HUMANEST OF PHILOSOPHERS

WILLIAM JAMES

WITHOUT WHOSE EXAMPLE

AND UNFAILING ENCOURAGEMENT

THIS BOOK WOULD NEVER HAVE BEEN WRITTEN

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

THAT a new edition of Humanism has not appeared
simultaneously with that of Studies in Humanism is due
to the facts that both volumes could not be passed
through the press together, and that Humanism needed
rather more revision. I have also taken the opportunity
of enlarging it by the addition of four papers published
between 1907-9, which seemed congruous with its subject.
They have been inserted after Essay XII in order to
produce a minimum of dislocation in the old order.

The only other point to which attention need be
drawn in this Preface is that its forerunner in the first
edition has not been found to prophesy falsely. The
prediction that Protagoras would be found on re-examina
tion to hold his own against Plato (p. xxi of this edition)
has been fulfilled in Essays II and XIII-XV of Studies
ft in Humanism, the pamphlet on Plato or Protagoras ?
and articles in Mind Nos. 68 and 78. The prediction
(p. x, p. xiv/i of this edition) that Pragmatism would be
found to be primarily a criticism of the traditional Logic
and the promise of a reformed Logic, has been to some
extent fulfilled in my Formal Logic (1912), though a
complete systematic exposition of the Logic of Real
Knowing has not yet appeared, and meantime the two
Humanism volumes together with Axioms as Postulates
must be regarded as containing aspirations towards it.

Lastly, it may be noted that the choice of the word

x HUMANISM

' Humanism ' as expressive of what is the most distinctive
novelty in the Pragmatic Movement has been vindicated
not only by the copious misunderstandings to which the
obscurity and clumsiness of the word have exposed
' Pragmatism/ and by the confirmation of the ancient
Humanism of Protagoras, but also, quite specifically, by
the criticisms of Formal Logic. It has there been shown,
by a systematic examination of the traditional ' Logic/
that at no point do its doctrines escape from the fatal
dilemma ' either verbalism or psychology/ until it is con
fessed that its fundamental presupposition is to abstract
from meaning altogether. It follows that it is in fact
impossible to abstract from the human aspect of know
ing, and to dehumanize Logic. Expellas hominem logica,
tamen usque recurret. The effort to do so only ends by
making Logic meaningless and worthless, and further
refutes itself by rendering the traditional Logic, even
formally, self-contradictory, because after all it is not
openly admitted to be, what in fact it is, viz., in the
strictest sense, nonsense.

OXFORD, June 1912.

PREFACE TO THE FIRST EDITION

THE appearance of this volume demands more than the
usual amount of apology. For the philosophic public,
which makes up for the scantiness of its numbers by the
severity of its criticism, might justly have expected me to
follow up the apparently novel and disputable position I
had taken up in my contribution to Personal Idealism
with a systematic treatise on the logic of ' Pragmatism.'
And no doubt if it had rested with me to transform wishes
into thoughts and thoughts into deeds without restrictions
of time and space, I should willingly have expanded my
sketch in Axioms as Postulates into a full account of the
beneficent simplification of the whole theory of knowledge
which must needs result from the adoption of the principles
I had ventured to enunciate. But the work of a college
tutor lends itself more easily to the conception than to the
composition of a systematic treatise, and so for the present
the philosophic public will have to wait.

The general public, on the other hand, it seemed more
feasible to please by an altogether smaller and more
practicable undertaking, viz., by republishing from various
technical journals, where conceivably the philosophic public
had already read them, the essays which compose the bulk
of this volume. I have, however, taken the opportunity
to add several new essays, partly because they happened
to be available, partly because they seemed to be needed

xii HUMANISM

to complete the doctrine of the rest. And the old material
also has been thoroughly revised and considerably aug
mented. So that I am not without hopes that the
collection, though discontinuous in form, will be found to
be coherent in substance, and to present successive aspects
of a fairly systematic body of doctrine. To me at least
it has seemed that, when thus taken collectively, these
essays not only reinforced my previous contentions, but
even supplied the ground for a further advance of the
greatest importance.

It is clear to all who have kept in touch with the
pulse of thought that we are on the brink of great events
in those intellectual altitudes which a time-honoured satire
has described as the intelligible world. The ancient
shibboleths encounter open yawns and unconcealed deri
sion. The rattling of dry bones can no longer fascinate
respect nor plunge a self-suggested horde of fakirs in
hypnotic stupor. The agnostic maunderings of impotent
despair are flung aside with a contemptuous smile by the
young, the strong, the virile. And there is growing up a
reasonable faith that even the highest peaks of speculation
may prove accessible to properly-equipped explorers, while
what seemed so unapproachable was nothing but a cloud-
land of confused imaginings. Among the more marked
symptoms that the times are growing more propitious to
new philosophic enterprise, I would instance the conspicuous
success of Mr. Balfour's Foundations of Belief ; the magnifi
cent series of William James's popular works, The Will to
Believe, Human Immortality, and The Varieties of Religious
Experience ; James Ward's important Gifford Lectures on
Naturalism and Agnosticism ; the emergence from Oxford,
where the idealist enthusiasm of thirty years ago long
seemed to have fossilized into sterile logic-chopping or to
have dissolved into Bradleian scepticism, of so audacious a
manifesto as Personal Idealism ; and most recently, but not

PREFACE

Xlll

least full of future promise, the work of the energetic
Chicago School headed by Professor Dewey.1 It seemed
therefore not impolitic, and even imperative, to keep up
the agitation for a more hopeful and humaner view of
metaphysics, and at the same time to herald the coming
of what will doubtless be an epochmaking work, viz.
William James's promised Metaphysics.

II

The origin of great truths, as of great men, is usually
obscure, and by the time that the world has become
cognizant of them and interested in their pedigree, they
have usually grown old. It is not surprising therefore
that the central thought of our present Pragmatism, to wit
the purposiveness of our thought and the teleological
character of its methods, should have been clearly stated
by Professor James so long ago as iS/p.2 Similarly I
was surprised to find that I had all along been a pragma-
tist myself without knowing it, and that little but the
name was lacking to my own advocacy of an essentially
cognate position in iSg2.3

But Pragmatism is no longer unobserved ; it has by
this time reached the ' Strike, but hear me ! ' stage, and
as the misconceptions due to sheer unfamiliarity are
refuted or abandoned it will rapidly enter on the era
of profitable employment. It was this latter probability
which formed one of my chief motives for publishing

1 They have published a number of articles in the Decennial Publications of
the University ; their Studies in Logical Theory are announced, but have not yet
reached me. Though proceeding from a different camp, the works of Dr. J. E.
MacTaggart and Prof. G. H. Howison should also be alluded to as adding to
the salutary ferment. For while ostensibly (and indeed ostentatiously) employing
the methods of the old a priori dogmatism they have managed to reverse its
chief conclusions, in a charming but somewhat perplexing way. I have on pur
pose confined this enumeration to the English-speaking world ; but in France
and even in Germany somewhat similar movements are becoming visible.

2 In his ' Sentiment of Rationality' in Mind, O.S. No. 15.

3 In Reality and 'Idealism.' Cp. pp. 119-121.

xiv HUMANISM

these essays. The practical advantages of the prag-
matist method are so signal, the field to be covered
is so immense, and the reforms to be effected are so
sweeping, that I would fain hasten the acceptance of
so salutary a philosophy, even at the risk of prematurely
flinging these informal essays, as forlorn hopes, against
the strongholds of inveterate prejudice. It is in the hope
therefore that I may encourage others to co-operate and
to cultivate a soil which promises such rich returns of
novel truth, that I will indicate a number of important
problems which seem to me urgently to demand treatment
by pragmatic methods.

I will put first a reform of Logic. Logic hitherto has
attempted to be a pseudo-science of a non-existent and
impossible process called pure thought. Or at least we
have been ordered in its name to expunge from our think
ing every trace of feeling, interest, desire, and emotion, as
the most pernicious sources of error.

It has not been thought worthy of consideration that
these influences are the sources equally of all truth and
all-pervasive in our thinking. The result has been that
logic has been rendered nothing but a systematic mis
representation of our actual thinking. It has been made
abstract and wantonly difficult, an inexhaustible source
of mental bewilderment, but impotent to train the mind
and to trace its actual workings, by being assiduously kept
apart from the psychology of concrete thinking. Yet a
reverent study of our minds' actual procedures might have
been a most precious aid to the self-knowledge of the
intellect. To justify in full these strictures (from which
a few only of modern logicians, notably Professors
Sigwart and Wundt, and Mr. Alfred Sidgwick,1 can be
more or less exempted) would be a long and arduous

1 Whose writings, by reason perhaps of the ease of their style, have not
received from the experts the attention they deserve.

PREFACE

xv

undertaking. Fortunately, however, a single illustration
may suffice to indicate the sort of difference Pragmatism
would introduce into the traditional maltreatment.

Let us consider a couple of actual, and probably
familiar, modes of reasoning, (i) The world is so bad
that there must be a better ; (2) the world is so bad that
there cannot be a better. It will probably be admitted
that both of these are common forms of argumentation,
and that neither is devoid of logical force, even though
in neither case does it reach ' demonstration.' And yet
the two reasonings flatly contradict each other. Now
my suggestion is that this contradiction is not verbal,
but deep-rooted in the conflicting versions of the nature
of thought which they severally exemplify. The second
argument alone it would seem could claim to be strictly
' logical.' For it alone seems to conform to the canons of
the logical tradition which conceives reasoning as the
product of a ' pure ' thought untainted by volition. And
as in our theoretical reflections we can all disregard the
psychological conditions of actual thinking to the extent
of selecting examples in which we are interested merely
as examples, we can all appreciate its abstract cogency.
In arguing from a known to an unknown part of the
universe, it is ' logical ' to be guided by the indications
given by the former. If the known is a ' fair sample ' of
the whole, how can the conclusion be otherwise than
sound ? At all events how can the given nature of the
known form a logical ground for inferring in the unknown
a complete reversal of its characteristics ?

Yet this is precisely what the first argument
called for. Must not this be called the illogical caprice
of an irrational desire ? By no means. It is the
intervention of an emotional postulate which takes the
first step in the acquisition of new knowledge. But for
its beneficent activity we should have acquiesced in our

xvi HUMANISM

ignorance. But once an unknown transfiguration of the
actual is desired, it can be sought, and so, in many cases,
found. The passionless concatenations of a ' pure '
thought never could have reached, and still less have
justified, our conclusion : to attain it our thought needs
to be impelled and guided by the promptings of volition
and desire.

Now that such ways of reasoning are not infrequent
and not unsuccessful, will, I fancy, hardly be denied.
Indeed if matters were looked into it would turn out
that reasonings of the second type never really occur
in actual knowing, and that when they seem to do so,
we have only failed to detect the hidden interest which
incites the reason to pretend to be ' dispassionate.' In
the example chosen, e.g., it may have been a pessimist's
despair that clothed itself in the habiliments of logic, or
it may have been merely stupidity and apathy, a
want of imagination and enterprise in questioning nature.
But, it may be said, the question of the justification
de jure of what is done de facto still remains. The votary
of an abstract logic may indignantly exclaim — ' Shall I
lower my ideal of pure thought because there is little
or no pure thinking ? Shall I abandon Truth, immutable,
eternal, sacred Truth, as unattainable, and sanction as
her substitute a spurious concretion of practical ex
perience, on the degrading plea that it is what we need
to live by, and all we need to live by? Shall I, in
other words, abase myself? No! Perish the thought!
Perish the phenomenal embodiment of Pure Reason out
of Time and Place (which I popularly term "myself")
rather than that the least abatement should be made
from the rigorous requirements of my theory of Thought ! '

Strong emotional prejudices are always hard to
reason with, especially when, as here, their nature is so
far misconceived that they are regarded as the revelations

PREFACE xvii

of Pure Reason. Still, in some cases, the desire for
knowledge may prove stronger than the attachment to
habitual modes of thought, and so it may not be wholly
fruitless to point out (i) that our objections are in no
wise disposed of by vague charges of a ' confusion of
psychology and logic ' ; (2) that the canons of right
Thought must, even from the most narrowly logical of
standpoints, be brought into some relation to the pro
cedures of actual thinking ; (3) that in point of fact the
former are derived from the latter ; (4) that if so, our
first mode of reasoning must receive logical recognition,
because (5) it is not only usual, but useful in the 'dis
covery ' of ' Truth ' ; (6) that a process which yields
valuable results must in some sense be valid, and (7)
that, conversely, an ideal of validity which is not realizable
is not valid, even as an ideal. In short, how can a logic
which professes to be the theory of thought set aside as
irrelevant a normal feature of our thinking ? And if it can
not, is it not evident that, when reformed by Pragmatism,
it must assume a very different complexion, more natural
and clearer, than while its movements were shackled by
the conventions of a strait-laced Intellectualism ?

Secondly, Pragmatism would find an almost in
exhaustible field of exploration in the sciences, by
examining the multifarious ways in which their ' truths '
have come to be established, and showing how the
practical value of scientific conceptions has accelerated
and decided their acceptance. Nor is it over-sanguine
to suppose that a clearer consciousness of the actual
procedure of the sciences will also lead to the critical
rejection of notions which are not needed, and are not
useful, and facilitate the formation of new conceptions
which are needed.1

1 Most opportunely for my argument the kind of transformation of our
scientific ideas which Pragmatism will involve has received the most copious and
admirable illustration in Professor Ostwald's great Naturphilosophie. Professor

b

xviii HUMANISM

In the field of Ethics Pragmatism naturally demands
to know what is the actual use of the ethical ' principles '
which are handed on from one text-book to another.
But it speedily discovers that no answer is forthcoming.
Next to nothing is known about the actual efficacy of
ethical principles : Ethics is a dead tradition which has
very little relation to the actual facts of moral sentiment.
And the reason obviously is that there has not been a
sufficient desire to know to lead to the proper researches
into the actual psychological nature and distribution of
the moral sentiments. Hence there is implicit in
Pragmatism a demand for an inquiry to ascertain the
actual facts, and pending this inquiry, for a truce to the
sterile polemic about ethical principles. In the end this
seems not unlikely to result in a real revival of Ethics.

If finally we turn to a region which the vested
interests of time-honoured organizations, the turbid
complications of emotion, and a formalism that too often
merges in hypocrisy, must always render hard of access
to a sincere philosophy, and consider the attitude of
Pragmatism towards the religious side of life, we shall
find once more that it has a most important bearing.
For in principle Pragmatism overcomes the old antithesis
of Faith and Reason. It shows on the one hand that
' Faith ' must underlie all ' Reason ' and pervade it, nay,
that at bottom rationality itself is the supremest postulate
of Faith. Without Faith, therefore, there can be no
Reason, and initially the demands of ' Faith ' must be as
legitimate and essentially as reasonable as those of the
' Reason ' they pervade. On the other hand, it enables
us to draw the line between a genuine and a spurious
' Faith.' The spurious ' faith,' which too often is all
theologians take courage to aspire to, is merely the

Ostwald is not a professional philosopher at all, but a chemist, and has very
likely never heard of Pragmatism ; but he sets forth the pragmatist procedure
of the sciences in a perfectly masterly way.

PREFACE

xix

smoothing over of an unfaced scepticism, or at best a
pallid fungus that, lurking in the dark recesses of the
mind, must shun the light of truth and warmth of action.
In contrast with it a genuine faith is an ingredient in
the growth of knowledge. It is ever realizing itself in
the knowledge that it needs and seeks — to help it on to
further conquests. It aims at its natural completion in
what we significantly call the making true or verification,
and in default of this must be suspected as mere make-
believe. And so the identity of method in Science and
Religion is far more fundamental than their difference.
Both rest on experience and aim at its interpretation : both
proceed by postulation ; and both require their anticipa
tions to be verified. The difference lies only in the mode
and extent of their verifications : the former must doubtless
differ according to the nature of the subject ; the latter
has gone much further in the case of Science, perhaps
merely because there has been so much less persistence
in attempts at the systematic verification of religious
postulates.

Ill

It is clear, therefore, that Pragmatism is able to
propound an extensive programme of reforms to be
worked out by its methods. But even Pragmatism is not
the final term of philosophic innovation : there is yet a
greater and more sovereign principle now entering the
lists of which it can only claim to have been the fore
runner and vicegerent. This principle also has long been
working in the minds of men, dumb, unnamed and
unavowed. But the time seems ripe now formally to
name it, and to let it loose in order that it may receive
its baptism of fire.

I propose, accordingly, to convert to the use of
philosophic terminology a word which has long been

xx HUMANISM

famed in history and literature, and to denominate
HUMANISM the attitude of thought which I know to be
habitual in William James and in myself, which seems to
be sporadic and inchoate in many others, and which is
destined, I believe, to win the widest popularity. There
would indeed be no flavour of extravagance and paradox
about this last suggestion, were it not that the professional
study of Philosophy has so largely fallen into the hands
of recluses who have lost all interest in the practical
concerns of humanity, and have rendered philosophy like
unto themselves, abstruse, arid, abstract and abhorrent.
But in itself there is no reason why this should be the
character of philosophy. The final theory of life ought
to be every man's concern, and if we can dispel the notion
that the tiresome technicalities of philosophy lead to
nothing of the least practical interest, it yet may be.
There is ground, then, for the hope that the study of a
humaner philosophy may prove at least as profitable and
enjoyable as that of the ' humaner ' letters.

In all but name Humanism has long been in existence.
Years ago I described one of its most precious texts,
William James's Will to Believe} as a " declaration of the
independence of the concrete whole of man with all his
passions and emotions unexpurgated, directed against
the cramping rules and regulations by which the Brahmins
of the academic caste are tempted to impede the free
expansion of human life," and as " a most salutary
doctrine to preach to a biped oppressed by many
' -ologies,' like modern man, and calculated to allay his
growing doubts whether he has a responsible personality
and a soul and conscience of his own, and is not a mere
phantasmagoria of abstractions, a transient complex of
shadowy formulas that Science calls ' the laws of nature.' "
Its great lesson was, I held, that " there are not really

1 In reviewing it for Mind in October 1897 (N.S. No. 24, p. 548).

PREFACE xxi

any eternal and non-human truths to prohibit us from
adopting the beliefs we need to live by, nor any infallible
a priori tests of truth to screen us from the consequences
of our choice." Similarly Professor James, in reviewing
Personal Idealism?- pointed out that " a re-anthropo
morphized universe is the general outcome of its philo
sophy." Only for re-anthropomorphized we should hence
forth read re-humanized, ' Anthropomorphism ' is a term
of disparagement whose dyslogistic usage it may prove
difficult to alter.2 Moreover, it is clumsy, and can hardly
be extended so as to cover what I mean by Humanism.
There is no need to disclaim the truth of which it is the
adumbration, and a non-anthropomorphic thought is sheer
absurdity ; but still what we need is something wider and
more vivid.

Similarly I would hint at affinities with the great
saying of Protagoras, that Man is the Measure of all
things. Fairly interpreted, this is the truest and most
important thing that any thinker ever has propounded.
It is only in travesties such as it suited Plato's dialectic
purpose to circulate that it can be said to tend to
scepticism ; in reality it urges Science to discover how
Man may measure, and by what devices make concordant
his measures with those of his fellow-men. Now measure
ment is that in which ancient science failed. Protagoras
alone demanded it, and Humanism need not cast about
for any sounder or more convenient starting-point.

For in every philosophy we must take some things for
granted. Humanism, like Common Sense, of which it
may fairly claim to be the philosophic working out, takes
Man for granted as he stands, and the world of man's
experience as it has come to seem to him. This is the
only natural starting-point, from which we can proceed in

1 Mind for January 1903 (N.S. No. 45, p. 94).

2 I tried to do this in Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. v. §§ 9'12- But ! now think
the term needs radical re-wording.

xxii HUMANISM

every direction, and to which we must return, enriched
and with enhanced powers over our experience, from all
the journeyings of Science. Of course this frank, though
not therefore ' uncritical,' acceptance of our immediate
experience and experienced self will seem a great deal to
be granted by those addicted to abstruser methods.
They have dreamt for ages of a priori philosophies
' without presuppositions or assumptions,' whereby Being
might be conjured out of Nothing and the sage might
penetrate the secret of creative power. But no obscurity
of verbiage has in the end succeeded in concealing the
utter failure of such preposterous attempts. The a priori
philosophies have all been found out.

And what is worse, have they not all been detected in
doing what they pretended to disclaim ? Do they not
all take surreptitiously for granted the human nature
they pride themselves on disavowing? Are they not
trying to solve human problems with human faculties ?
It is true that in form they claim to transcend our nature,
or to raise it to the superhuman. But while they profess
to exalt human nature, they are really mutilating it — all
for the kingdom of Abstraction's sake ! For what are
their professed starting-points, — Pure Being, the Idea, the
Absolute, the Universal I, but pitiable abstractions from
experience, mutilated shreds of human nature, whose real
value for the understanding of life is easily outweighed
by the living experience of an honest man ?

All these theories then de facto start from the im
mediate facts of our experience. Only they are ashamed
of it, and assume without inquiry that it is worthless as a
principle of explanation, and that no thinker worthy of
the name can tolerate the thought of expressly setting
out from anything so vulgar. Thus, so far from assum
ing less than the humanist, these speculations really must
assume a great deal more. They must assume, in

PREFACE xxiii

addition to ordinary human nature, their own met-
empirical starting-points and the correctness (always
more than dubious) of the deductions whereby they have
de facto reached them.

' Do you propose then to accept as sacrosanct the
gross unanalysed conceptions of crude Common Sense,
and to exempt them from all criticism ? ' No, I only
propose to start with them, and to try and see whether
we could not get as far with them as with any other, nay,
as far as we may want to get. I have faith that the
process of experience that has brought us to our present
standpoint has not been wholly error and delusion, and
may on the whole be trusted. And I am quite sure that,
right or wrong, we have no other, and that it is e.g.
grotesque extravagance to imagine that we can put our
selves at the standpoint of the Absolute. I would
protest, therefore, against every form of ' a priori meta
physical criticism ' that condemns the results of our
experience up to date as an illusory ' appearance ' without
trial. For I hold that the only valid criticism they can
receive must come in, and through, their actual use. It
is just where and in so far as common-sense assumptions
fail to work that we are theoretically justified, and
practically compelled, to modify them. But in each such
case sufficient reasons must be shown ; it is not enough
merely to show that other assumptions can be made, and
couched in technical language, and that our data are
abstractly capable of different arrangements. There are,
I am aware, infinite possibilities of conceptual re
arrangement, but their discovery or construction is but
a sort of intellectual game, and has no real importance.

In point of method, therefore, Humanism is fully able
to vindicate itself, and so we can now define it as the
philosophic attitude which, without wasting thought upon
attempts to construct experience a priori, is content to

xxiv HUMANISM

take human experience as the clue to the world of human
experience, content to take Man on his own merits, just
as he is to start with, without insisting that he must first
be disembowelled of his interests and have his individu
ality evaporated and translated into technical jargon,
before he can be deemed deserving of scientific notice.
To remember that Man is the measure of all things, i.e.
of his whole experience-world, and that if our standard
measure be proved false all our measurements are vitiated ;
to remember that Man is the maker of the sciences
which subserve his human purposes ; to remember that an
ultimate philosophy which analyses us away is thereby
merely exhibiting its failure to achieve its purpose, that,
and more that might be stated to the same effect, is the real
root of Humanism, whence all its auxiliary doctrines spring.
It is a natural consequence, for instance, that, if the
facts require it, " real possibilities, real indeterminations,
real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes
and escapes, a real God and a real moral life, just as
common sense conceives these things, may remain in
humanism as conceptions which philosophy gives up the
attempt either to ' overcome ' or to reinterpret." ] And
whether or not Humanism will have to recognize the
ultimate reality of all the gloomier possibilities of James's
enumeration, it may safely be predicted that its ' radical
empiricism' will grant to the possibilities of 'pluralism ' a
more careful and unbiassed inquiry than monistic pre
conceptions have as yet deigned to bestow upon them.
For seeing that man is a social being it is natural that
Humanism should be hospitable to the view that the
universe is ultimately ' a joint-stock affair.' And again,
it will receive with appropriate suspicion all attempts to
explain away the human personality which is the formal

1 James, Will to Believe (p. ix. ). I have substituted humanism for
empiricism

PREFACE

XXV

and efficient and final cause of all explanation, and
will rather welcome it in its un mutilated, undistorted
immediacy as (though in an uncongenial tongue) the ' a
priori condition of all knowledge.' And so it will approve
of that '•personal idealism ' which strives to redeem the
spiritual values an idealistic absolutism has so treacher
ously sold into the bondage of naturalism.

With ' Common Sense ' it will ever keep in touch by
dint of refusing to value or validate the products of merely
speculative analyses, void of purpose and of use, which
betoken merely a power to play with verbal phrases. Thus
Humanism will derive, combine and include all the doctrines
which may be treated as anticipations of its attitude.

For Pragmatism itself is in the same case with Personal
Idealism, Radical Empiricism and Pluralism. It is in
reality only the application of Humanism to the theory of
knowledge. If the entire man, if human nature as a whole,
be the clue to the theory of .all experience, then human
purposiveness must irrigate the arid soil of logic. The
facts of our thinking, freed from intellectualistic perver
sions, will clearly show that we are not dealing with abstract
concatenations of purely intellectual processes, but with
the rational aims of personal thinkers. Great, therefore,
as will be the value we must claim for Pragmatism as a
method, we must yet concede that man is greater than
any method he has made, and that our Humanism must
interpret it.

IV

It is a well-known fact that things are not only known
by their affinities but also by their opposites. And the
fitness of the term Humanism for our philosophic purpose
could hardly better be displayed than by the ready
transfer of its old associations to a novel context.

A humanist philosopher is sure to be keenly interested

xxvi HUMANISM

in the rich variety of human thought and sentiment,
and unwilling to ignore the actual facts for the sake of
bolstering up the narrow abstractions of some a priori
theory of what ' all men must ' think and feel under penalty
of scientific reprobation. The humanist, accordingly, will
tend to grow humane, and tolerant of the divergences of
attitude which must inevitably spring from the divergent
idiosyncrasies of men. Humanism, therefore, will still
remain opposed to Barbarism. But Barbarism may show
itself in philosophy in a double guise, as barbarism of
temper and as barbarism of style. Both are human
defects which to this day remain too common among
philosophers. The former displays itself in the inveterate
tendency to sectarianism and intolerance, in spite of the
discredit which the history of philosophy heaps upon it.
For what could be more ludicrous than to keep up the
pretence that all must own the sway of some absolute
and unquestionable creed ? Does not every page of
every philosophic history teem with illustrations that a
philosophic system is an unique and personal achievement
of which not even the servilest discipleship can transfuse
the full flavour into another's soul ? Why should we
therefore blind ourselves to the invincible individuality of
philosophy, and deny each other the precious right to
behold reality each at the peculiar angle whence he sees
it ? Why, when others cannot and will not see as we
do, should we lose our temper and the faith that the
heavenly harmony can only be achieved by a multi
tudinous symphony in which each of the myriad centres
of experience sounds its own concordant note ?

As for barbarism of style, that too is ever rampant,
even though it no longer reaches the colossal heights
attained by Kant and Hegel. If Humanism can restore
against such forces the lucid writing of the older English
style, it will make Philosophy once more a subject gentle-

PREFACE

XXVll

men can read with pleasure. And it can at least contend
that most of the technicalities which disfigure philosophic
writings are totally unneeded, and that the stringing
together of abstractions is both barbarous and dangerous.
Pedagogically it is barbarous, because it nauseates the
student, and because abstract ideas need to be illumined
by concrete illustrations to fix them in the mind : logic
ally it is dangerous, because abstractions mostly take
the form of worn-out metaphors which are like sunken
rocks in navigation, so that there is no more fatal cause
of error and deception than the trust in abstract dicta
which by themselves mean nothing, and whose real meaning
lies in the applications, which are not supplied.

In history, however, the great antithesis has been be
tween Humanism and Scholasticism. This also we may
easily adopt, without detracting from its force. For
Scholasticism is still one of the great facts in human
nature, and a fundamental foible of the learned world.
Now, as ever, it is a spirit of sterilizing pedantry that avoids
beauty, dreads clearness and detests life and grace, a spirit
that grovels in muddy technicality, buries itself in the
futile burrowings of valueless researches, and conceals it
self from human insight by the dust-clouds of desiccated
rubbish which it raises. Unfortunately the scholastic
temper is one which their mode of life induces in pro
fessors as easily as indigestion, and frequently it renders
them the worst enemies of their subjects. This is deplor
able but might be counteracted, were it not thought
essential to a reputation for scientific profundity at least
to seem scholastic. Humanism therefore has before it an
arduous fight with the Dragon of Scholasticism, which,
as it were, deters men from approaching the golden apples
that cluster on the tree of knowledge in the garden of
the Hesperides.

And lastly, may we not emphasize that the old associ-

xxviii HUMANISM

ations of the word would still connect with Humanism a
Renascence of Philosophy ? And shall we not accept this
reminiscence as an omen for the future ? For it is clear,
assuredly, that Philosophy has still to be born again to
enter on her kingdom, and that her votaries must still be
born again to purge their systems of the taint of an
inveterate barbarism. But some of these suggestions
verge, perhaps, upon the fanciful : it suffices to have shown
that Humanism makes a good name for the views I seek
to label thus, and that in such extension of its meaning
its old associations lose no force but rather gain a subtler
flavour.

To claim that in its philosophic use Humanism may
retain its old associations is not, however, to deny that
it must enter also into new relations. It would be vain,
for instance, to attempt concealment of the fact that to
Naturalism and Absolutism its antagonism is intrinsic.
Naturalism is valid enough and useful as a method of
tracing the connexions that permeate reality from the
lowest to the highest level : but when taken as the last
word of philosophy it subjects the human to the arbitra
ment of its inferior. Absolutism, on the other hand,
cherishes ambitions to attain the superhuman ; but, rather
than admit its failure, it deliberately prefers to delude
itself with shadows, and to reduce concrete reality to the
illusory adumbration of a phantom Whole. The difference
thus is this, that whereas Naturalism is worthy of respect
for the honest work it does, and has a real use as a partial
method in subordination to the whole, Absolutism has no
use, and its explanatory value is nothing but illusion.
As compared with these, Humanism will pursue the
middle path ; it will neither reject ideals because they
are not realized, nor yet despise the actual because it can
conceive ideals. It will not think the worst of Nature,
but neither will it trust an Absolute beyond its ken.

PREFACE

XXIX

I am well aware that the ideas of which the preceding
pages may have suggested the barest outline are capable
of endless working out and illustration. And though I
believe myself to have made no assertion that could not
be fully vindicated if assailed, I realize most keenly that
a complete statement of the Humanist position far tran
scends, not only my own powers, but those of any single
man. But I hoped that those who were disposed to sym
pathy and open-mindedness would pardon the defects and
overlook the gaps in this informal survey of a glorious
prospect, while to those who are too imperviously encased
in habit or in sloth, or too deeply severed from me by
an alien idiosyncrasy, I knew that I could never hope to
bring conviction, however much, nor to avoid offence,
however little > I might try to say. And so I thought the
good ship Humanism might sail on its adventurous quest
for the Islands of the Blest with the lighter freight of these
essays as safely and hopefully as with the heaviest cargo.

F. C. S. SCHILLER.

OXFORD, August 1903.

CONTENTS

ESSAY PAGE

I. THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS . . i

II. 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE . . . .18

III. TRUTH ...... 44

IV. LOTZE'S MONISM ..... 62

V. NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY AND THE KANTIAN

A PRIORI ..... 85

VI. THE METAPHYSICS OF THE TIME-PROCESS . 95

VII. REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' . . .no

VIII. DARWINISM AND DESIGN. . . . 128

(y£/THE PLACE OF PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY . 157

J CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES . . .166

XI. ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES . . .183

XII. ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE . . . 204

XIII. HUMISM AND HUMANISM. . . . 228

XIV. SOLIPSISM ...... 249

XV. INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION . . . 268

XVI. FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY . . . 283

XVII. THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY . . .313

'.. XVIII. THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF IMMORTALITY . 335
XIX. PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC INVESTIGATION

OF A FUTURE LIFE . . . - 351

INDEX .... 375

THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS1

ARGUMENT

The place of Conduct in Philosophy : (a) The absolutist reduction of Conduct to
' appearance ' ; (b) the pragmatist reaction which makes conduct primary
and thought secondary. Is Pragmatism irrationalism ? No, but it
explains it by exposing the inadequacy of intellectualism. Ways of
reaching Pragmatism (i) by justification of 'faith' against 'reason,' (2)
historical, (3) evolutionary. The definition of Pragmatism. Its relation
to psychological teleology. The supremacy of ' Good ' over ' True ' and
' Real. ' Kant's Copernican Revolution, and the complication of the
question of reality with that of our knowledge. A further similar step
necessitated by the purposiveness of actual knowing. The function of
the will in cognition. ' Reality ' as the response to a will to know, and
therefore dependent in part on our action. Consequently (i) 'reality'
cannot be indifferent to us ; (2) our relations to it quasi-personal ; (3)
metaphysics quasi-ethical ; (4) Pragmatism as a tonic : the venture of
faith and freedom ; (5) the moral stimulus of Pragmatism.

WHAT has Philosophy to say of Conduct ? Shall it
place it high or low, exalt it on a pedestal for the

1 This essay, originally an Ethical Society address, is reprinted from the
July 1903 number of the International Journal of Ethics with some additions,
the chief of which is the note on pp. 11-12. Its title seems of course to put the
cart before the horse, but it is easy to reply that nowadays it is no longer im
practicable to use a motor car for the removal of a dead horse. The paradox
is, moreover, intentional. It is a conscious inversion of the tedious and
unprofitable disquisitions on ' the metaphysical basis of ' this, that, and the other,
which an erroneous conception of philosophical method engenders. They are all
wrong in method, because we have not de facto a science of first principles of
unquestionable truth from which we can start to derive the principles of the
special sciences. Plato certainly failed to deduce the principles of the sciences
from his metaphysical Idea of Good, and it may be doubted whether any one
has ever really deduced anything from metaphysics. The fact is rather that our
' first ' principles are postulated by the needs, and slowly secreted by the labours, of
the special sciences, or of such preliminary exercises of our intelligence as build
up the common-sense view of life.

So what my title means is, not an attempt to rest the ' final synthesis '
upon a single science, but rather that among the contributions of the special
sciences to the final evaluation of experience that of the highest, viz. ethics, has,
and must have, decisive weight.

I B

2 HUMANISM i

adoration of the world or drag it in the mire to be
trampled on by all superior persons ? Shall it equate
it with the whole or value it as nought ? Philosophers
have, of course, considered the matter, though not perhaps
as carefully nor as successfully as they ought. And
so the relations of the theory to the practice of life,
of cognition to action, of the theoretical to the practical
reason, form a difficult and complicated chapter in the
history of thought.1 From that history one fact, however,
stands out clearly, viz. that the claims on both sides are
so large and so insistent that it is hardly possible to
compromise between them. The philosopher is not on
the whole a lover of compromise, despite the solicitations
of his lower nature. He will not, like the ordinary man
of sense, subscribe to a plausible platitude like, e.g.
Matthew Arnold's famous dictum that Conduct is three-
fourths of Life. Matthew Arnold was not a philosopher,
and the very precision of his formula arouses scientific
suspicions. But anyhow the philosopher's imperious
logic does not deal in quarters ; it is prone to argue aut
Caesar aut nullus ; if Conduct be not the whole life, it is
naught. Which therefore shall it be ? Shall Conduct be
the substance of the All, or the vision of a dream ?

Now, it would seem at first that latterly the second
alternative had grown philosophically almost inevitable.
For, under the auspices of the Hegelizing ' idealists,'
Philosophy has uplifted herself once more to a meta
physical contemplation of the Absolute, of the unique
Whole in which all things are included and tran
scended. Now whether this conception has any logical
meaning and value for metaphysics is a moot point,
which I have elsewhere treated ; 2 but there can hardly
be a pretence of denying that it is the death of morals.
For the ideal of the Absolute Whole cannot be rendered
compatible with the antithetical valuations which form
the vital atmosphere of human agents. They are partial

1 Cp. Essay ii. on ' Useless ' Knowledge for its treatment by Plato and
Aristotle.

2 Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. x. , Formal Logic, p. 129 n.

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 3

appreciations, which vanish from the standpoint of the
Whole. Without the distinctions of Good and Evil,
Right and Wrong, Pleasure and Pain, Self and others,
Then and Now, Progress and Decay, human life would
be dissolved into the phantom flow of an unmean
ing mirage. But in the Absolute the moral distinctions
must, like all others, be swallowed up and disappear.
The All is raised above all ethical valuation and moral
criticism : it is ' beyond Good and Evil ' ; it is timelessly
perfect, and therefore incapable of improvement. It
transcends all our antitheses, because it includes them.
And so to the metaphysician it seems an easy task to
compose the perfection of the whole out of the imperfec
tions of its parts : he has merely to declare that the point
of view of human action, that of ethics, is not and cannot
be final. It is an illusion which has grown transparent
to the sage. So, in proportion as his insight into absolute
reality grows clearer, his interest in ethics wanes.

It must be confessed, moreover, that metaphysicians
no longer shrink from this avowal. The typical leader
of this philosophic fashion, Mr. F. H. Bradley, never
attempts to conceal his contempt for ethical considera
tions, nor omits a sneer at the pretensions of practice to
be heard in the High Court of Metaphysics. " Make the
moral point of view absolute," he cries,1 " and then realize
your position. You have become not merely irrational,
but you have also broken with every considerable
religion."

And this is how he dismisses the appeal to practice,2
" But if so, what, I may be asked, is the result in practice ?
That I reply at once is not my business " ; it is merely
a "hurtful3 prejudice" if "irrelevant appeals to practical
results are allowed to make themselves heard."

Altogether nothing could be more pulverizing to
ethical aspiration than chapter xxv. of Mr. Bradley's
Appearance and Reality?

1 Appearance and Reality , pp. 500-1. 2 Ibid. p. 450.

3 But does not this "•hurtful" reaffirm the ethical valuation. which Mr. Bradley
is trying to exclude ?

4 That such is the ethical purport of this philosophic teaching is confirmed by

4 HUMANISM i

And the worst of it all is that this whole treatment of
ethics follows logically and legitimately from the general
method of philosophizing which conducts to the meta
physical assumption of the Absolute.

Fortunately, however, there appears to be a natural
tendency when the consequences of a point of view have
been stated without reserve, and become plain to the
meanest intelligence, to turn round and try something
fresh. By becoming openly immoralist, metaphysic has
created a demand for its moral reformation. So, quite
recently, there has become noticeable a movement in a
diametrically opposite direction, which repudiates the
assumptions and reverses the conclusions of the meta
physical criticism of ethics which we have been considering.
Instead of regarding contemplation of the Absolute as
the highest form of human activity, it sets it aside as
trivial and unmeaning, and puts purposeful action above
purposeless speculation. Instead of supposing that Action
is one thing and Thought something alien and other, and
that there is not, therefore, any reason to anticipate that
the pure contemplations of the latter will in any way
relate to or sanction the principles which guide the
former, it treats every judgment as an act and Thought
as a mode of conduct, as an integral part of active
life. Instead of regarding practical results as irrelevant,
it makes Practical Value an essential ingredient and
determinant of theoretic truth. And so far from admitting
the claim to independence of an irresponsible intelligence,
it regards knowledge as derivative from conduct and as
involving distinctively moral qualities and responsibilities in
a perfectly definite and traceable way. In short, instead
of being reduced to the nothingness of an illusion, Con
duct is reinstated as the all-controlling influence in every
department of life.

It may be admitted, however, that all effective ethical
effort ultimately demands a definite attitude towards

the ingenious but somewhat flippant exposition of the same doctrine in Prof.
A. E. Taylor's Problem of Conduct. The real problem of this book would
appear to be why any one should trouble about such a theoretic absurdity as
morals at all.

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 5

life as a whole, and it therefore becomes an urgent need
to find a philosophy which will support, or at least will
not paralyse, moral effort. The new method of philoso
phizing will supply this desideratum in an almost perfect
way. It has been called Pragmatism by the chief author
of its importance, Professor William James, whose Varieties
of Religious Experience so many others besides the pro
fessional readers of philosophic literature have been
enjoying. But the name in this case does even less
than usual to explain the meaning, and as the nature of
Pragmatism has been greatly and conspicuously misunder
stood, we must try to put it in a clearer light.

We may best begin by mentioning a few of the ways
in which Pragmatism may be reached, before explaining
how it should be defined. For many have conceived a
considerable prejudice against it by reason of the method
by which William James approached it

James first unequivocally advanced the pragmatist
doctrine in connexion with what he called the ' Will to
believe.' * Now this Will to believe was put forward as
an intellectual right (in certain cases) to decide between
alternative views, each of which seemed to make a
legitimate appeal to our nature, by other than purely
intellectual considerations, viz. their emotional interest and
practical value. Although James laid down a number of
conditions limiting the applicability of his Will-to-believe,
the chief of which was the willingness to take the risks
involved and to abide by the results of subsequent ex
perience, it was not perhaps altogether astonishing that
his doctrine should be decried as rank irrationalism.

Irrationalism seemed a familiar and convenient label
for the new doctrine. For irrationalism is a permanent
or continually recrudescent attitude of the moral con
sciousness, the persistent vogue of which it has always
been hard to explain. It is ably and brilliantly

1 He had, however, laid the foundation of his doctrine long before in an article
in Mind (1879). And, though the name is new, anticipations of the thing run
through the whole history of thought. Indeed, this was to be expected, seeing
that the actual procedure of the human mind has always been (unconsciously)
pragmatist.

6 HUMANISM i

exemplified at the present day by Mr. Balfour's Founda
tions of Belief, and, in a less defensible form, by Mr.
Benjamin Kidd. And if, instead of denouncing it, we
try to understand it, we shall not find that it is entirely
absurd. At bottom indeed it indicates little more than a
defect in the current rationalism, and a protest against
the rationalistic blindness towards the non-intellectual
factors in the foundation of beliefs. Common Sense
has always shown a certain sympathy with all such
protests against the pretensions of what is called the pure
intellect to dictate to man's whole complex nature. It
has always felt that there are ' reasons of the heart of
which the head knows nothing,' postulates of a faith that
surpasses mere understanding, and that these possess a
higher rationality which a bigoted intellectualism has
failed to comprehend.

If, then, one had to choose between Irrationalism and
Intellectualism, the former would undoubtedly have to be
preferred. It is less inadequate to life, a less violent
departure from our actual behaviour, a less grotesque
caricature of our actual procedure. Like Common Sense,
therefore, Pragmatism sympathizes with Irrationalism in
its blind revolt against the trammels of a pedantic In
tellectualism. But Pragmatism does more ; it not only
sympathizes, it explains. It vindicates the rationality of
Irrationalism, without becoming itself irrational; it restrains
the extravagance of Intellectualism, without losing faith
in the intellect.1 And it achieves this by instituting a new
analysis of the common root both of the reason and of
the emotional revulsion against its pride. By showing
the ' pure ' reason to be a pure figment, and a psychological
impossibility, and the real structure of the actual reason
to be essentially pragmatical, and permeated through and
through with acts of faith, desires to know and wills to
believe, to disbelieve and to make believe, it renders
possible, nay unavoidable, a reconciliation between a
reason which is humanized and a faith which is rationalized

1 This passage has actually been quoted by a critic as cogent evidence that
Pragmatism is irrationalism ! Cp. Mind, No. 75, p. 431, and No. 71, p. 426.

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 7

in the very process which shows their antithesis to be an
error.

That, however, Pragmatism should have begun by
intervening in the ancient controversy between Reason
and Faith was something of an accident. In itself it
might equally well have been arrived at by way of a
moral revolt from the unfruitful logic-chopping and aimless
quibbling which is often held to be the sum total of
philosophy.

Or again, it might be reached, most instructively, by a
critical consideration of many historic views, notably those
of Kant and Lotze,1 and of the unsolved problems which
they leave on our hands. Or, once more, by observing
the actual procedure of the various sciences and their
motives for accepting, maintaining, and modifying the
' truth ' of their various propositions, we may come to
realize that what works best in practice is what in
actual knowing we accept as ' true.'

But to me personally the straightest road to Pragmatism
is one which the extremest prejudice can scarce suspect
of truckling to the encroachments of theology. Instead
of saying like James, ' so all-important is it to secure
the right action that (in cases of real intellectual alter
natives) it is lawful for us to adopt the belief most
congenial with our spiritual needs and to try whether our
faith will not make it come true,' I should rather say ' the
traditional notion of beliefs determined by pure reason
alone is wholly incredible. For is not " pure " reason a
myth ? How can there be such a thing ? How, that is,
can we so separate our intellectual function from the whole
complex of our activities, that it can operate in real in
dependence of practical considerations ? I cannot but
conceive the reason as being, like the rest of our equip
ment, a weapon in the struggle for existence and a means
of achieving adaptation. It must follow that the use, which
has developed it, must have stamped itself upon its inmost
structure, even if it has not moulded it out of pre-rational

1 Or, as James suggested, and as Prof. A. W. Moore has actually done
in the case of Locke (see his Functional versus the Representational Theory
of Knowledge), by a critical examination of the English philosophers.

8 HUMANISM i

instincts. In short, a reason which has not practical value
for the purposes of life is a monstrosity, a morbid aberra
tion or failure of adaptation, which natural selection must
sooner or later wipe away.'

It is in some such way that I should prefer to pave the
way for an appreciation of the aims of Pragmatism.
Hence we may now venture to define it as the thorough
recognition that the purposive character of mental life
generally must influence and pervade also our most
remotely cognitive activities.1

In other words, it is a conscious application to the
theory of life of the psychological facts of cognition as
they appear to a teleological Voluntarism. In the light
of such a teleological psychology the problems of logic
and metaphysics are rejuvenated by the decisive weight
given to the conceptions of Purpose and End. Or
again, it is a systematic protest against the practice
of ignoring in our theories of Thought and Reality
the purposiveness of all our actual thinking, and the
relation of all our actual realities to the ends of our
practical life. It is an assertion of the sway of human
valuations over every region of our experience, and a denial
that such valuation can validly be eliminated from the
contemplation of any reality we know.

Now inasmuch as such teleological valuation is also
the special sphere of ethical inquiry, Pragmatism may be
said to assign metaphysical validity to the typical method
of ethics. At a blow it awards to the ethical conception
of Good supreme authority over the logical conception of
True and the metaphysical conception of Real. The
Good becomes a determinant both of the True and of the
Real, and their secret inspiration. For from the pursuit
of the latter we may never eliminate the reference to the
former. Our apprehension of the Real, our comprehension
of the True, is always effected by beings who are aiming
at the attainment of some Good, and choose between rival
claimants to reality and truth according to the services

1 For a further discussion of the definition of Pragmatism, cp. Studies in
Humanism, Essay i., and my article in the Encycl. Britann. ed. xi.

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 9

they render. Is it not then a palpable absurdity to deny
that this fact makes a stupendous difference?

Pragmatism then has taken a further step in the
analysis of our experience which amounts to an important
advance in that self-knowledge on which our knowledge
of the world depends. Indeed, this advance seems to be
of a magnitude comparable with, and no less momentous
than, that which gave to the epistemological question
priority over the ontological.

It is generally recognized as the capital achievement
of modern philosophy to have perceived that a solution
of the ontological question — What is Reality ? — is not
possible until it has been decided how Reality can come
within our ken. Before there can be a real for us at all,
the Real must be knowable, and the notion of an un
knowable reality is useless, because it abolishes itself.
The true formulation therefore of the ultimate question of
metaphysics must become — Wkat can I know as real?
Thus the effect of what Kant (very infelicitously) called
the Copernican Revolution in philosophy is that ontology,
the theory of Reality, comes to be conditioned by epistem-
ology, the theory of our knowledge.

But this truth is incomplete until we realize all that is
involved in the knowledge being ours and recognize the
real nature of our knowing. Our knowing is not the
mechanical operation of a passionless ' pure ' intellect,
which

Grinds out Good and grinds out 111,
And has no purpose, heart, or will.

Pure intellection is not a fact in nature ; it is a logical
fiction which will not really serve even the purposes of
technical logic. In reality our knowing is driven and
guided at every step by our subjective interests and
preferences, our desires, our needs and our ends. These
form the motive powers also of our intellectual life.

Now what is the bearing of this fact on the traditional
dogma of an absolute truth and ultimate reality existing
for themselves apart from human agency ? It must
utterly debar us from the cognition of ' Reality as it is in

io HUMANISM i

itself and apart from our interests ' ; if such a thing there
were, it could not be known, nor rationally believed in.

For our interests impose the conditions under which
alone Reality can be revealed. Only such aspects of
Reality can be revealed as are (i) knowable and
(2) objects of an actual desire, and consequent attempt,
to know. All other realities or aspects of Reality, which
there is no attempt to know, necessarily remain unknown,
and for us unreal, because there is no one to look for
them. Reality, therefore, and the knowledge thereof,
essentially presuppose a definitely directed effort to know.
And, like other efforts, this effort is purposive ; it is neces
sarily inspired by the conception of some good (' end ')
at which it aims. Neither the question of Fact, therefore,
nor the question of Knowledge can be raised without
raising also the question of Value. Our ' Facts ' when
analysed turn out to be ' Values,' and the conception of
' Value ' therefore becomes more ultimate than that of
' Fact' Our valuations thus pervade our whole experience,
and affect whatever ' fact,' whatever ' knowledge ' we
consent to recognize. If, then, there is no knowing without
valuing, if knowledge is a form of Value, or, in other
words, a factor in a Good, Lotze's anticipation * has
been fully realized, and the foundations of metaphysics
have actually been found to lie in ethics.

In this way the ultimate question for philosophy
becomes — What is Reality for one aiming at knowing
what ? ' Real ' means, real for what purpose ? to what
end ? in what use ? in what context ? in preference to
what alternative belief? The answers always come'Tin
terms of the will to know which puts the question. This
at once yields a simple and beautiful explanation of the
different accounts of Reality which are given in the
various sciences and philosophies. The purpose of the
questions being different, so is their purport, and so must
be the answers. For the direction of our effort, itself
determined by our desires and will to know, enters as a
necessary and ineradicable factor into whatever revelation

1 Metaphysics (Eng. Tr. ), ii. p. 319.

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS n

of Reality we can attain. The response to our questions
is always affected by their character, and that is in our
power. For the initiative throughout is ours. It is for us
to consult the oracle of Nature or to refrain ; it is for us
to formulate our demands and to put our questions. If
we question amiss, Nature will not respond, and we
must try again. But we can never be entitled to assume
either that our action makes no difference or that nature
contains no answer to a question we have never thought
to put.1

It is no exaggeration therefore to contend, with Plato,
that in a way the Good, meaning thereby the conception
of a final systematization of our purposes, is the supreme
controlling power in our whole experience, and that in
abstraction from it neither the True nor the Real can
exist. For whatever forms of the latter we may have
' discovered,' some purposive activity, some conception of
a good to be attained, was involved as a condition of the

1 That the Real has a determinate nature which the knowing reveals but does
not affect, so that our knowing makes no difference to it, is one of those sheer
assumptions which are incapable, not only of proof, but even of rational defence.
It is a survival of a crude realism which can be defended only, in a pragmatist
manner, on the score of its practical convenience, as an avowed fiction. In this
sense and as a mode of speech, we need not quarrel with it. But as an ultimate
analysis of the fact of knowing it is an utterly gratuitous interpretation. The
plain fact is that we can come into contact with any sort of reality only in
the act of ' knowing ' or experiencing it. As unknowable, therefore, the Real
is nil, as unknown, it is only potentially real. What is there in this situation to
sanction the assumption that what the Real is in the act of knowing, it is also
outside that relation? One might as well argue that because an orator is
eloquent in the presence of an audience, he is no less voluble in addressing
himself. The simple fact is that we know the Real as it is when we know it ;
we know nothing whatever about what it is apart from that process. It is
meaningless therefore to inquire into its nature as it is in itself. And I can see
no reason why the view that reality exhibits a rigid nature unaffected by our
treatment should be deemed theoretically more justifiable than its converse,
that it is utterly plastic to our every demand — a travesty of Pragmatism which
has attained much popularity with its critics. The actual situation is of course
a case of interaction, a process of cognition in which the ' subject ' and the
' object ' determine each the other, and both ' we ' and ' reality ' are involved,
and, we might add, evolved. There is no warrant therefore for the assumption
that either of the poles between which the current passes could be suppressed
without detriment. What we ought to say is that when the mind ' knows '
reality both are affected, just as we say that when a stone falls to the ground
both it and the earth are attracted.

We are driven, then, to the conviction that the ' determinate nature of reality '
does not subsist ' outside ' or ' beyond ' the process of knowing it. It is merely
a half-understood lesson of experience that we have enshrined in the belief that it
does so subsist. Things behave in similar ways in their reaction to modes

12 HUMANISM i

discovery. If there had been no activity on our part, or
if that activity had been directed to ends other than it
was, there could not have been discovery, or that discovery.

We must discard, therefore, the notion that in the
constitution of the world we count for nothing, that it
matters not what we do, because Reality is what it is,
whatever we may do. It is true on the contrary that our
action is essential and indispensable, that to some extent
the world (our world) is of our making, and that without
us nothing is made that is made. To what extent and
in what directions the world is plastic and to be moulded
by our action we do not know as yet. We can find out
only by trying : but we know enough for Pragmatism to
transfigure the aspect of existence for us.

It frees us in the first place from what constitutes
perhaps the worst and most paralysing horror of the
naturalistic view of life, the nightmare of an indifferent
universe. For it proves that at any rate Nature cannot
be indifferent to us and to our doings. It may be hostile,

of treatment, the differences between which seem to us important. From this
we have chosen to infer that things have a rigid and unalterable nature. It might
have been better to infer that therefore the differences between our various
manipulations must seem unimportant to the things.

The truth is rather that the nature of things is not determinate but determinable ,
like that of our fellow-men. Previous to trial it is indeterminate, not merely for our
ignorance, but really and from every point of view, within limits which it is our
business to discover. It grows determinate by our experiments, like human
character. We all know that in our social relations we frequently put questions
which are potent in determining their own answers, and without the putting
would leave their subjects undetermined. ' Will you love me, hate me, trust
me, help me ? ' are conspicuous examples, and we should consider it absurd to
argue that because a man had begun social intercourse with another by knocking
him down, the hatred he had thus provoked must have been a pre-existent reality
which the blow had merely elicited. All that the result entitles us to assume
is a capacity for social feeling variously responsive to various modes of stimulation.
Why, then, should we not transfer this conception of a determinable indeter-
mination to nature at large, why should we antedate the results of our manipula
tion and regard as unalterable facts the reactions which our ignorance and
blundering provoke? To the objection that even in our social dealings not all
the responses are indeterminate, the reply is that it is easy to regard them as
having been determined by earlier experiments.

In this way, then, the notion of a ' fact-in-itself ' might become as much of a
philosophic anachronism as that of a ' thing-in-itself,' and we should conceive
the process of knowledge as extending from absolute chaos at the one end (before
a determinate response had been established) to absolute satisfaction at the other,
which would have no motive to question the absolutely factual nature of its
objects. But in the intermediate condition of our present experience all
recognition of ' fact ' would be provisional and relative to our purposes and
inquiries. Cp. Studies in Humanism, Essays xviii., xix.

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 13

and something to be fought with all our might ; it may
be unsuspectedly friendly, and something to be co-operated
with with our whole heart ; it must respond in varying
ways to our various efforts.

Now, inasmuch as we are most familiar with such
varying responsiveness in our personal relations with
others, it is, I think, natural, though not perhaps necessary,
that a pragmatist will tend to put a personal interpre
tation upon his transactions with Nature and any agency
he may conceive to underlie it. Still even ordinary
language is aware that things behave differently according
as you ' treat ' them, that e.g., treated with fire sugar burns,
while treated with water it dissolves. Thus in the last
resort the anthropomorphic ' humanism ' of our whole
treatment of experience is unavoidable and obvious ; and
however much he wills to disbelieve it the philosopher
must finally confess that to escape anthropomorphism he
would have to escape from self. And further, seeing
that ethics is the science of our relations with other
persons, i.e. with our environment qua personal, this
ultimateness of the personal construction we put upon
our experience must increase the importance of the
ethical attitude towards it. In other words, our meta
physics must in any case be quasi-ethical.

It may fairly be anticipated, secondly, that Pragmatism
will prove a great tonic to re-invigorate a grievously
depressed humanity. It sweeps away entirely the stock
excuse for fatalism and despair. It proves that human
action is always a perceptible, and never a negligible,
factor in the ordering of nature, and shows cause for the
belief that the disparity between our powers and the
forces of nature, great as it is, does not amount to
incommensurability. And it denies that any of the great
questions of human concern have been irrevocably
answered against us. For most of them have not even
been asked in a pragmatic manner, i.e. with a determina
tion to test the answers by the value of the consequences,
and in no case has there been that systematic and clear
sighted endeavour which extorts concessions, or at least

i4 HUMANISM r

an answer, from reluctant nature. In short, no doctrine
better calculated to stir us to activity or more potent to
sustain our efforts has ever issued from the philosophic
study.

It is true that to gain these hopes we must make bold
to take some risks. If our action is a real factor in
the course of events, it is impossible to exclude the
contingency that if we act wrongly it may be an
influence for ill. To the chance of salvation there must
correspond a risk of damnation. We select the condi
tions under which reality shall appear to us, but this
very selection selects us, and if we cannot contrive to
reach a harmony in our intercourse with the real, we
perish.

But to many this very element of danger will but add
to the zest of life. For it cannot but appear by far
more interesting than the weary grinding out of a
predetermined course of things which issues in meaning
less monotony from the unalterable nature of the All.
And the infinite boredom with which this conception of
the course of nature would afflict us, must be commingled
with an equal measure of disgust when we realize that on
this same theory the chief ethical issues are eternally and
inexorably decided against us. Loyal co-operation and
Promethean revolt grow equally unmeaning. For man
can never have a ground for action against the Absolute.
It is eternally and inherently and irredeemably perfect,
with a ' perfection ' which has lost all meaning for
humanity, and so leaves no ground for the hope that the
' appearances ' which make up our world may somehow
be remoulded into conformity with our ideals. As they
cannot now impair the inscrutable perfection of the
Whole, they need not ever alter to pander to a criticism
woven out of the delusive dreams of us poor creatures
of illusion.

It is a clear gain, therefore, when Pragmatism holds
out to us a prospect of a world that can become better,
and even has a distant chance of becoming perfect,
in a sense which we are able to appreciate. The

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 15

only thing that could be preferred to this would be a
universe whose perfection could not only be metaphysically
deduced, but actually experienced : but such a one our
universe emphatically is not.

Hence the indetermination which, as William James
has urged,1 Pragmatism introduces into our conception of
the world is essentially a gain. It brings out a con
nexion with the ethical conception of Freedom and the
old problems involved in it, which we need not here
consider.2 When we do, we may see that while deter
minism has an absolutely indefeasible status as a scientific
postulate, and is the only assumption we can use in our
practical calculations, we may yet have to recognize the
reality of a certain measure of indetermination. It is
a peculiarity of ethics that this indetermination is forced
upon it, but in itself it is probably universal. In its
valuation, however, we may differ somewhat from James,
regarding it neither as good nor as ineradicable. Our
indeterminism, moreover, cannot have the slightest ethical
value unless it both vindicates and emphasizes our moral
responsibility.

This brings us to our last point, viz. the stimulus to
our feeling of moral responsibility which must accrue
from the doctrine of Pragmatism. It contains such a
stimulus, alike in its denial of a mechanical determination
of the world which is involved in its partial determination
by our action, and in its admission that by wrong
action we may evoke a hostile response, and so provoke
our ruin. But in addition it must be pointed out that
if every cognition, however theoretical, be an act, and so
must have a practical purpose and value, it is potentially
a moral act. We may incur indeed the gravest responsi
bilities in selecting the aims of our cognitive activities.
We may become not merely wise or foolish but also
good or bad by willing to know the good or the bad ;
nay, our very will to know may so alter the conditions
as to evoke a response congenial with its character.

It is a law of our nature that what we seek that we

1 Will to Believe, p. ix. 2 Cp. Essay xvi.

16 HUMANISM i

shall, in some measure, find. Like a rainbow, Life
glitters in all the colours ; like a rainbow also it adjusts
itself to every beholder. To the dayflies of fashion
life seems ephemeral ; to the seeker after permanence, it
strikes its roots into eternity. To the empty, it is a
yawning chasm of inanity ; to the full, it is a source of
boundless interest. To the indolent, it is a call to
despairing resignation ; to the strenuous, a stimulus to
dauntless energy. To the serious, it is fraught with
infinite significance ; to the flippant, it is all a somewhat
sorry jest. To the melancholic, each hope is strangled
in its birth ; to the sanguine, two hopes spring from
every grave of one. To the optimistic, life is a joy
ineffable ; to the pessimistic, the futile agony of an
atrocious and unending struggle. To love it seems that
in the end all must be love ; to hate and envy it becomes
a hell. The cosmic order, which to one displays the
unswerving rigour of a self-sufficient mechanism, grows
explicable to another only by the direct guidance of the
hand of God. To those of little faith the heavens are
dumb ; to the faithful, they disclose the splendours of a
beatific vision.

So each sees Life as what he has it in him to perceive,
and variously transfigures what, without his vision, were
an unseen void. But all are not equally clear-sighted,
and which sees best, time and trial must establish. We
can but stake our little lives upon the ventures of our
faith. And, willing or unwilling, this we do and must.

In conclusion let us avow that after professing to
discuss the relations of Philosophy and Practice, we
seem to have allotted an undue share of our time to the
former, and to have done little more than adumbrate the
practical consequences of the new philosophy. In extenu
ation we may urge that the stream of Truth which waters
the fertile fields of Conduct has its sources in the remote
and lonely uplands, inter apices philosophiae, where the cloud-
capped crags and slowly grinding glaciers of metaphysics
soar into an air too chill and rare for our abiding habita
tion, but keenly bracing to the strength of an audacious

i THE ETHICAL BASIS OF METAPHYSICS 17

climber. Here lie our watersheds ; hither lead the passes
to the realms unknown ; hence part our ways, and here
it is that we must draw the frontier lines of Right and
Wrong. It would seem, moreover, that in the depths of
every soul there lurks a metaphysic aspiration to these
heights, a craving to behold the varied patterns that com
pose life's whole spread out in their connexion. With
the right guides such ascents are safe, and even though
at first twinges of mountain-sickness may befall us, yet in
the end we shall return refreshed from our excursion and
strengthened to endure the drudgery and commonplace
that are our daily portion.

II

'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE1

ARGUMENT

The idealistic art of passing into ' other ' worlds. A visit to Plato in a world
of superior ' reality.' The difficulty of proving the reality of such
experiences to others unless they lead to useful knowledge. Is the true
always useful! Aristotle denies the connexion between theoretic truth
and practical use, and prefers the former as higher and diviner. The
Pragmatist rejection of this dogma of the superior dignity of speculation.
Four possibilities as to the relation of Knowledge and Action, (i) Plato's
view : Knowledge the presupposition of Action, to which it naturally
leads, = the True the source of the Good; (2) Aristotle's: Pure Know
ledge unrelated to Action, the highest Truth to the Good for man ; (3)
Kant's : the same relation, but Action ultimately superior to Knowledge ;
(4) Pragmatism the converse of Plato's, i.e. Action primary, Knowledge
secondary, the Good the source of the True.

Critique of Aristotelianism, — (i) 'Truth' not superhuman, but as
human as ' Good. ' ' True ' means true for us as practical beings.
The recognition of ' objective truth ' a gradual achievement and = the con
struction of a common world in which we can act together. (2) Perceived
reality relative to our senses. (3) The ' eternal ' truths as postulates.
(4) Theoretical principles, like practical, get their meaning from their
use, and are called ' true ' if they prove useful. Hence ' necessary '
truth only = needful. Implications of the dicta the true is usefu! and the
useless is false. No knowledge really useless, for the really useless
is not knowledge. Examples — Knowledge about the Absolute and about
an ' other ' world unconnected with this.

IT will readily be understood that once the idealistic art
of waking oneself up out of our world of appearances and
thereby passing into one of higher reality 2 is fully mastered,
the temptation to exercise it becomes practically irresistible.
Nevertheless, it was not until nearly two years (as men
reckon time) after the first memorable occasion when he
discoursed to me concerning the adaptation of the Ideal

1 From Mind, N.S. No. 42 (April 1902), with some additions.
2 Cp. pp. 113 note, 367-9.

18

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 19

State to our present circumstances l that I succeeded in
sufficiently arousing my soul to raise it once again to that
supernal Academe where the divine Plato meditates in
holy groves beside a fuller and more limpid stream than
the Attic Ilissus.

When I was breathlessly projected into his world, Plato
was reclining gracefully beside a moss-grown boulder and
listening attentively to a lively little man who was dis
coursing with an abundance of animation and gesticulation.
When he observed me, he stopped his companion, who
immediately came hurrying towards me, and after politely
greeting me, amiably declared that the Master would be
delighted to converse with me. I noticed that he was a
dapper little man, apparently in the prime of life, though
beginning to grow rather bald about the temples. He
was carefully robed, and his beard and his hair, such as it
was, were scented. One could not help being struck by his
refined, intelligent countenance, and hisquick, observant eyes.

As soon as Plato had welcomed me, his companion
went off to get, he said, a garden chair from a gleaming
marble temple (it turned out to be a shrine of the Muses)
at a little distance, and I naturally inquired of Plato who
the obliging little man was.

' Why, don't you know ? ' he replied, ' don't you re
cognize my famous pupil, Aristotle ? '

' Aristotle ! No, I should never have supposed he was
like that.'

' What then would you have expected ? '

' Well, I should have expected a bigger man for one
thing, and one far less agreeable. To tell the truth, I
should have expected Aristotle to be very bumptious and
conceited.'

' You are not quite wrong,' said Plato with an indulgent
smile, ' he was all you say, when he first came hither.
But this is Aristotle with the conceit taken out of him, so
that you now behold him reduced to his true proportions
and can see his real worth.'

1 The contents of this interview have not yet been divulged, for reasons which
will appear from the course of the present narrative.

20 HUMANISM ii

' Ah ! that explains much. I now see why you are even
greater and more impressive than I expected, and why he
appears to be on such good terms with you once more.'

' Oh yes, we have made up our differences long ago,
and he has now again the same keen, unassuming spirit
with which he first charmed me, as a boy. Not that I
was ever very angry with him even formerly. Of course
his criticisms were unfair, and, as you say, his great abilities
rendered him conceited, but you must remember that he
had to make a place for himself in the philosophic world,
and that he could do this only by attacking the greatest
reputation in that world, viz. mine. But you see he is
returning, and I want to ask you how you fared after our
last meeting. Did you find it difficult to get back to
your world ? '

' I hardly know, Plato, how I managed it. And, oh,
the difference when I awoke in the morning ! How
sordid all things seemed ! '

' And did you tell your pupils what my answers were
to your questions ? '

' I did, and they were much interested, and, I am afraid
I must add, amused.'

' And after that what did you do ? Did you persuade
your political men to enact laws in the Ecclesia such as
those we showed to be best ? '

' I fear I have not yet quite succeeded in doing this.'

' Why, what objections have you failed to overcome ? '

' I have not yet even overcome the first and greatest
objection of all. I have not published the account of our
conversation.'

' Why not ? '

' To tell you the truth, I was afraid ; I feared that your
arguments might fare ill among the British Philistines.'

' Why should they fare ill, seeing that, both for other
reasons and to please you, I was conservative, wonderfully
how, amid all my reforms, and proposed nothing revolu
tionary, but essayed only gently to turn to the light the
eyes of the Cave-dwellers whom you mention ? '

' You don't know how insensitive they are to the light.'

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 21

'Yet I was only preaching to them the necessity of
self-realization.'

' I know that ; but your language would have sounded
unfamiliar.'

' Then you should repeat it, until it sounds familiar.'

' How splendidly you must have lectured, Plato ! I
hardly dare however to follow your advice. However
mildly I might put them, your proposals would have
shocked the British public.'

' And yet you told me that the infinitely more re
volutionary and unsparing proposals of my Republic
command universal admiration, and are held to be salutary
in the education of youth.'

' Ah, but then they are protected by the decent
obscurity of a learned language ! '

' Surely your language is learned enough, and by the
time they have passed through your mind my ideas will
be obscure enough to make them decent and safe.'

' You are victorious as ever, Plato, in argument. But
you do not persuade me, because there is another obstacle,
even greater than that which I have mentioned.'

' Will you not tell me what it is ? '

' I hardly know how to put it. But though it now
seems almost too absurd even to suggest such a thing,
you know everybody to whom I spoke disbelieved that I
had really conversed with you, and thought that I had
dreamt it all, or even invented the whole matter.'

' That, as you say, is too absurd.'

' Nevertheless, so long as people believed this, you see
it was vain for me to try to persuade them of the
excellence of your proposals. For I do not happen to
have been born the son of a king myself, and am of no
account for such purposes.'

' Still they could not have supposed that you could
have invented all you said yourself.'

' I am afraid they did.'

' That was very unreasonable of them.'

' I am not so sure of that. For after all they had only
my word for it that I had really met you.'

22

HUMANISM

' But did they not recognize what I said, and my
manner of saying it? '

' Not so as to feel sure.'

' And did they not think your whole account intrinsically
probable and consistent ? '

' I hope I made it appear so.'

' Surely they did not think that you could invent a
world like mine ? '

' I suppose they thought I might have dreamt it.'

' What, a world so much better, more beautiful, co
herent and rational, and, in two words, more real, than
that in which they lived ? '

' There is nothing in all this to make it seem less of a
dream rather than more.'

' Do you think they will believe you after this second
visit ? '

' I doubt it. Why should they ? '

' It would seem, then, that we have no means of con
vincing these wretches of the truth.'

' I fear not ; so long as they can reasonably maintain
that it is no truth at all.'

' You do not surely propose to defend their conduct ? '

' No, but I think it is by no means as unreasonable as
you suppose.'

' I see that you are preparing to assert a greater
paradox than ever I listened to from Zeno.'

' I am afraid that it may appear such.'

' Will you not quickly utter it ? You see how keenly
Aristotle is watching you, like a noble dog straining at
the leash.'

' Let me say this, then, that though I can no more
doubt your existence and that of the lovely world wherein
you abide than I can my own, yet I cannot blame my
fellow -men for refusing to credit all this on my sole
assertion. They have not seen you, nor can they, seeing
that you will neither descend to them nor can they rise
to you. Your world and theirs have nothing in common,
and so do not exist for each other.'

' You forget yourself, my friend.'

USELESS' KNOWLEDGE

' True, I am a link between them. But what I have
experienced is not directly part of their _ experience. It is
far more probable, therefore, that I am Tying or cteluded
than that I should establish a connexion between two
worlds. Before they need, or indeed can, admit that
what I say is true, I must show them how, in consequence
of my visits to your higher world, I am enabled to act
more successfully in theirs. You see, Plato, I am exactly
in the position of your liberated Cave-dweller when he
returns to his fellow-prisoners. They need not, can not,
and will not, believe that I speak the truth concerning
what I have seen above, unless I am also able to discern
better the shadows in their cave below.'

' And this must surely be the case.'

' I notice that you assumed this, but you did not
explain how it was that the higher knowledge of the
Ideas, for example the ability to understand the motions
of the heavenly bodies, was useful for enabling men to
live better.'

' But surely Knowledge is one, and the True and the
Beautiful must also be useful.'

' I am not denying that, although your friend Aristotle
would, unless he has greatly changed his opinion ; I am
only saying that you have assumed this too lightly.'

Instead of replying Plato looked at Aristotle, who with
a slight hesitation ventured to suggest that possibly I was
right, and that he had always been of the opinion that his
master had overrated the practical usefulness of scientific
knowledge. Plato meditated for a while before replying.

' It is possible that there are difficulties here which
escaped my notice formerly. But did I not prove that
the soul attuned to the harmonies of the higher sphere
of true reality was also necessarily that most capable of
dealing with the discords of phenomenal existence ? '

' No doubt, Plato, your spectator of all time and all
existence is a very beautiful being, and I too trust that in
the end you may be right in thinking that Truth and
Goodness must be harmonious. But neither in your time,
nor in the many years that have passed since, has it

24 HUMANISM n

come about that the pursuit of abstract knowledge has
engendered the perfect man. I greatly doubt whether
you convinced even your own brothers by your argument
in the Republic, and you have certainly failed to convince
those who have deemed themselves the greatest philosophers
from the time of Aristotle to the present day. They
would all in private scoff at the notion that speculative
knowledge was by nature conducive to practical excellence,
even though a few of the more prudent might not think
it expedient to state this in public, while as for the great
majority, they are always crying aloud that it is sacrilege
and profanation to demand practical results from their
meditations, and that only an utterly vulgar and ill-
educated mind is even interested in the practical con
sequences which theoretical researches may chance to
have. And this temper we observe not only among the
philosophers proper, who are few and speak a " language
of the gods " unintelligible to the many, but also more
patently among those who pursue the sciences and the
arts, and hold that " Truth for the sake of Truth " and
" Art for the sake of Art " alone are worthy of their
consideration.'

' Is it true, Aristotle, that you also hold such opinions ? '
' May I be permitted, oh my master, to expound my
views at length, and yet briefly, as compared with the
importance of the subject ? You know that I do not find
the method of question and answer the most convenient
to express my thoughts (Plato nodded). Well, then, let
me say first of all that I do not hold it true that specula
tive wisdom (ao(j)ia) is the same as practical wisdom
(fypovyais}, or that the latter is naturally developed out of
the former. I must, therefore, with all respect agree with
our critic from a lower world that you have too easily
identified the two. They are quite distinct, and have
nothing to do with each other.'

Then observing an involuntary shudder on my part,
' Oh, I know,' he continued, ' what you are wishing to
object. How can a-o<j>ia exist without the help of
<f>povrj(7i<; in beings that have to act practically in a social

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 25

life, seeing that it does not as such concern itself with the
means of human happiness ? l I confess to an over
statement. It is not quite true that crania and $povY)cn<s
have nothing to do with each other. There is a connexion,
because practical wisdom has to provide speculative with
the material conditions of its exercise. In other words,
men are too imperfect to live the divine life of contempla
tion wholly and always. They must to some extent busy
themselves with the needs of the perishable part of their
nature, and the contingencies and changes of the sublunary
sphere. And the regulation and satisfaction of such needs,
the whole V\TJ of things that are capable of being otherwise
(evSe%ofAeva>v aXXca? e^eiv), appertains to practical wisdom.
' Without it, therefore, speculative wisdom could not
exist among men, or at least could not be self-supporting.
But it does not follow that it thereby becomes dependent
on practical wisdom, and still less, derivative from it.
Practical wisdom serves speculative like a faithful servant.
It is the trusty steward who has so to order the household
that its master may have leisure for his holy avocations.
It would be truer, therefore, to say that practical wisdom
depends on speculative, without which life would lose its
savour. But best of all is it to say that the two are
essentially distinct and connected only by the bond of an
external necessity.

' Having shown thus that practical and theoretical
activity (evepjeta) are different in kind, let me explain
next why the latter is the better, and the relation between
them which I have described is a just one.

' They differ in their psychological character, in their
object and in their value. Practical wisdom is the
function of a lower and altogether inferior " part of the
soul," of that " passive reason " (7/01)9 Tra^rt/co?) which we
put forth only while we deal with a " matter " whose
resistance we cannot wholly master. Speculative activity, on
the other hand, is the divine imperishable part of us which,
small as it is in bulk in most men, is yet our true self.

' Again the object of practical wisdom is the good for

1 Cp. Eth, Nic. vi. 12. i.

26 HUMANISM n

man and the transitory flow of appearances in the im
permanent part of the universe. But the good which is
the object of our practical pursuit is peculiar and restricted
to man. It is different for men and for fishes,1 and
although I do not deny that man's is the higher and that
therefore fishing is legitimate sport, I feel bound to point
out that there are many things in the world far diviner
than man. The object of speculation, on the other hand,
is the eternal and immutable which is common to all.
I mean to include under this not merely the eternal truths,
such as the principles of metaphysics and mathematics,
but the eternal existences of the heavenly bodies and the
unvarying character of the perceptions which are the same
for all beings, e.g., those of colour, shape, size, etc.

' Whence it follows, lastly, that the value of speculation
is incomparably superior to that of practice. It is not
useful, and that it should occasionally lead to useful
results is merely a regrettable accident. In itself it is
beautiful and the beautiful is self-sufficient. But it is
not useful, because it is exalted far above the useful, and
to demand use for knowledge is, literally, impiety. For
to contemplate the immutable objects of theoretical truth
is in the strictest sense to lead the life divine. For it
contemplates the higher and more perfect, even though it
cannot grasp the absolutely perfect as continuously as God
can contemplate His own absolute perfection. Still to do
this, in however passing a fashion, is to rise above death
and impermanence and decay. It is to immortalize
oneself.

' It follows, therefore, logically and in point of fact,
that any attempt to hinder or control the concern with
Pure Truth, is an outrage upon what is highest and best
and holiest in human nature, an outrage which the law
should punish and all good men rebuke, with the utmost
severity. Truth demands not merely toleration for herself
from the State, but also the unsparing suppression of
every form of Error, of every one who from whatever
motive, whether from ignorance or sordidness or a mis-

1 Cp. Eth. Nic. vi. 7. 4.

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 27

taken and degrading moral enthusiasm, attempts to put
any hindrance in the way of her absolute supremacy.'

Towards the end of this diatribe, to which I had at
various points shown myself unable to listen without
writhing, Aristotle had wrought himself up into a state
of fervour of which I should hardly have deemed him
capable. Plato, however, skilfully provided for the con
tinuation of the discussion by blandly remarking : —

' Bravo, Aristotle, you have spoken most interestingly,
and shown not only the analytic subtlety for which you
are famous, but also that true enthusiasm which proves
that you are not merely a logical perforating machine for
windbags and other receptacles of gaseous matter. I will
leave it, however, to our visitor to answer you, partly
because the question has, it would seem, grown somewhat
beyond my ken, and partly because I can see that he
has not a little to say, and foresee that your differences
will prove most entertaining and instructive.'

'You are right, Plato, in thinking that I differ pro
foundly with the doctrine to which Aristotle has just given
such eloquent expression. But I feel that I am hardly
equal single-handed to cope with Aristotle, and I wish
that lames were present to support me and to persuade
you both of what I believe to be right and reasonable.'

' And who is lames ? '

1 A philosopher, Plato, of the Hyperatlanteans, very
different from the " bald-headed little tinkers " who are
philosophers, not by the grace of God, but by the favour
of some wretched " thinking-shop," and a man (or shall
I rather call him a god ?) after your own heart. But,
alas, he has been bridled, like Theages, by his own, and
so has not yet been enabled to set forth fully the doctrine
which he has named l Pragmatism, and which I would
fain advance against that of Aristotle.'

' You describe a man whom I should be eager to
welcome. You must bring him with you the next time
you come, having told him what we have discussed.'

1 Strictly speaking, I am reminded, it was Mr. C. S. Peirce, but it would
seem to follow from pragmatist principles that a doctrine belongs to him who
makes an effective use of it.

28 HUMANISM „

1 1 will if I can.'

' As for your present difficulty, you need not be afraid.
You shall argue, with me as judge, and I will see to it
that Aristotle obtains no unfair advantage over you.'

' You embolden me to try my best.'

' I do not think that courage is what you lack.'

' If I have courage, it is like yours, that which comes
nearest to that of despair.'

' I never quite despaired.'

' Nor will I, though it is hard not to, to one regarding
the present position of philosophy.'

' Aristotle is beginning to think that you are not going
to answer him.'

' Then I will delay no longer. And first of all let me
say that besides the views which have been taken by you
and by Aristotle there seem to me to be two others, and
that if you have no objection, I will state them, first
recapitulating your own.'

' I have never an objection to be instructed.'

' I will begin with your own view then. It seemed to
me to assume that there was no real or ultimate difference
between the use of the reason in matters practical and
matters theoretical. Knowledge was one and all action
depended on knowledge, right action presupposing right
knowledge. Knowledge, therefore, was useful, and there
was no real opposition between the True and the Good,
because the True could not but be good and the Good
true. Nevertheless, Goodness was born of Truth rather
than Truth of Goodness. Have I understood you aright ? '

' You have put things more definitely than I did, but
not perhaps amiss.'

' Aristotle, on the other hand, whom we have just heard,
clearly thinks that Truth and Goodness have nothing to
do with each other.'

' Pardon me, there is a goodness also of Truth, and
in a sense speculative activity (Oecopia) is also action

' Yes, I know that ; you mean as exercise of function ?
The speculative life also is something we do, it is the

ii 'USELESS" KNOWLEDGE 29

exercise of a characteristic human activity, and so has an
excellence and contributes to our happiness.'

' Precisely.'

' Very well then, what I meant was that you did not
derive practical from theoretic activity.'

' Certainly not.'

' The two are as far opposed as is practically possible.'

' Yes.'

' But speculative wisdom is by far the loftier ? '

' Of course.'

' And far too lofty to be useful ? '

' So I maintain.'

' Very well again. Now for a third view. Is it not
possible to maintain with you that the practical and the
speculative reason are different and opposed to each other,
but that the former is the superior, so that in the end we
must believe and practically act on what we do not know
to be true ? And is not this the converse of your view,
Aristotle ? '

' I suppose it is, but if that is your view, I tell you
frankly that I never heard anything more absurd.'

' In that case it is lucky, perhaps, that it is not my
view.'

' Who then has been confused enough in his mind to
propound it ? '

' It is the view of the great Scythian, Kant, who nearly
criticized the reason out of the world.'

' Ah, I know, a queer little hunchback of a barbarian !
He came here once, not so very long ago, but would not
stay and could not say anything intelligible. I could only
make out that he was seeking the Infinite (faugh !), and
was impelled by something he called a Categorical Im
perative (unknown alike to logic and to grammar).
Possessed by evil demons he seemed to us. Nothing
Hellenic about him at all events ! '

' I don't wonder at what you say, nor that Plato
agrees with you. Nevertheless, he was a remarkable
man, on his way, perhaps, to a higher truth, to which
we may follow him, passing through the absurdity of

30 HUMANISM n

his actual view, which is far greater than I have had
time to indicate.'

' Let us go on, then, at once to something more
reasonable.'

' I will go on then to the view of the Pragmatists.
May one not say, fourthly, that there is no opposition
between speculative and practical wisdom because the
former arises out of the latter and remains always deriva
tive and secondary and subservient and useful ? '

' One may say that or any other nonsense, but if one
does, one must say what one means. And one cannot
always prove what one says.'

' I thought that would excite you, Aristotle. But I
thought it better to reveal to you the whole aim of my
argument before I proceeded to reach it.'

' You are still far from your aim.'

' I am coming to it, in good time. Meanwhile have
you observed that this position which I hope to reach is
the exact converse of the first, of Plato's ? '

' You mean that you also deny the opposition between
Oecopia and 7rpa^t<;, but derive the former from the
latter ? '

' Exactly so. I entirely deny the independence of the
speculative reason. And I assert that you were quite
wrong in drawing the distinctions you did between the
objects of Becopia and of 7rpa£t,<?.'

' Do you then deny that the good which is the aim of
practical wisdom is merely human ? '

' Not at all ; but I assert that the true, which you
imagine to be in some sense superhuman, is also merely
human. It is the true for us, the true for us as practical
beings •, just as the good is the good for us.'

1 How so ? '

' Why, quite simply. Are not colour and shape and
size perceived by the senses ? '

1 Certainly.'

' And are not the senses human, and relative to us and
to our needs in life, in the same way as our perception of
the good and the sweet ? '

ii ' USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 31

' I don't see why I need suppose them to be merely
human.'

' I don't see how you can show them to be anything
more. How do you know that your fishes see white as
you do? And even if they did, that would only show
that their senses were constructed like yours, and fitted
to see and avoid you when you dangle a worm before
their eyes with evil intent. And, generally, how do you
fancy you can refute Protagoras' great maxim " that which
appears to each, is ? " It is literally true, so soon as we
look more exactly. Each being in the universe from
your God (if indeed He be in the universe) down to the
humblest blackbeetle, has his own individual way of
perceiving his experience, and when we say that several
perceive the same things what we really mean is that they
act in a corresponding manner towards them. When you
and I both see " red," that means that we agree in the
arranging of colours, but leaves inscrutable (and indeed
unmeaning} the question whether your experience in seeing
" red " is the same as mine.

' And this agreement is both difficult, partial, and
derivative. It is the fruit of much effort and of a long
struggle, and not an original endowment. It has had to
be carried to a certain pitch in order that it might be
possible for men to live together at all. It has grown
because it was useful and advantageous and those who
could manage to perceive things in practically the same
way prospered at the expense of those who could not.
Thus the objectivity of our perceptions is essentially
practical and useful and teleologicaL How then can you
venture to ascribe to the gods, with whom you do not live,
the perceptions which have come to exist as " the same "
for your senses, only in order that you might be able to
live with your fellow-creatures ? '

' Even though our senses are different may we not
perceive by their means the divine order of the same
universe which higher beings perceive by such modes of
cognition as are worthy of them ? '

' Really, Aristotle, it astonishes me that you, living in

32 HUMANISM „

a more real world, should still cling to the independently
objective reality of the world you have now quitted for
more than 2000 years. Do you perceive it now ? '

' No, but I did, and it may still be a part of the world
which I no longer perceive.'

' Where then is it with reference to your present world ?
Is it north, south, east, or west ? Or is it not in the same
space with it at all ? '

' Still it is in space. And I still perceive a world.'

' So does every one who dreams. Your perceiving it,
therefore, is no proof that it is ultimately real. And if
you had entirely forgotten what you experienced formerly,
would you even be able to assert that it once was real for
you ? Would not its reality have become like unto the
reality of a forgotten dream ? How can you venture,
then, to attribute to all beings perception of one and the
same world ? '

' Perhaps I was mistaken about the world in which I
then lived. But this present world at least is real, and
seems to me fair enough to be worthy of being perceived
even by the gods.'

' It is real no doubt for you, and for me also, while I
am in it. But you may remember that what started the
argument was the difficulty I had in convincing the
denizens of your former world of the superior reality of
this in which we now are. And besides, how do you
know that beings still higher than you, if you do not
resent my mentioning such, may not enjoy the contempla
tion of worlds vastly more perfect even than yours ? '

' Still this process cannot go on to infinity. You must
at last conceive a world of ultimate reality, the contempla
tion of which by the supreme being would be absolute
truth.'

' No doubt ; you are speaking of what Plato would
call the world of Ideas. But still that does not affect the
argument. The world and the truth and the good we
were discussing are those relative to us?

' I see that I was wrong in basing my argument for
absolute truth on the perceptions of the senses. But of

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 33

the eternal truths of mathematics and the like one may
surely affirm that they necessarily exist for all intelli
gences ? '

' Even this is more than I can grant you.'

' How so ? '

' They seem to me to be also relative to us ; nay,
human institutions of the plainest kind.'

' Is it not self-evident and absolutely certain that the
straight line is the shortest between two points ? '

' That is our definition of distance. It will do in the
sense in which you use it, if I may add, " for one living
in a spatial world which behaves like ours, and apparently
yours, once he has succeeded in postulating a system of
geometry which suits his world." '

' I really do not understand you.'

' I fear I have not the space to explain myself, and to
show you the practical aim of our assumptions concerning
" Space," even if I dared to discuss the foundations of
geometry in the presence of Plato. But it really does
not affect my point. What I desire to maintain is that
the eternal truths are at bottom postulates, demands we
make upon our experience because we need them in order
that it may become a cosmos fit to live in.'

' But I do not find myself postulating them at all.
They are plainly self-evident and axiomatic.'

' That is only because your axioms are postulates so
ancient and so firmly rooted that no one now thinks of
disputing them.'

' Your doctrine seems as monstrous as it is unfamiliar.'

' I can neither help that nor establish it fully at this
juncture. Perhaps, if the gods are willing, I shall find
another occasion l to expound to you the proofs of this
doctrine, and even, if the gods are gracious, to convince
you. For it seems to me that in a manner you already
admit the principle of my doctrine.'

' It would greatly surprise me if I did.'

' You contend, do you not, that concerning ethical
matters it is impossible to have the right opinion without,

1 See Axioms as Postulates.

34 HUMANISM n

at the same time or before, having the right habit of
action, so that, as Roger Ascham has said, " ill-doings
breed ill-thinkings, and of corrupted manners spring
perverted judgments " ? '

' And do I not contend rightly ? '

' I am not denying that your view is right, though
perhaps you over-state the impossibility of separating
ethical theory from ethical practice. What I should like
you to see, however, is that this same doctrine may be
extended also to speculative matters. Why should we
not contend that the true meaning and right understanding
of theoretical principles also appears only to him who is
proposing to use them practically ? Can we not say that
the Scythian was both prudent and wise who would not
grant that 2 and 2 made 4 until he knew what use was
to be made of the admission ? Just as the wicked man
destroys his intellectual insight into ethical truth by his
action,1 so the mere theorist destroys his insight and
understanding of " theoretical " truth by refusing to use
that truth and to apply it practically, failing to see that,
both in origin and intention, it is a mass of thoroughly
practical devices to enable us to live better.'

' I cannot admit that the two cases are at all parallel.
In practical matters indeed I rightly hold that action and
insight are so conjoined as not to admit of separation, but
to extend this doctrine to the apprehension of theoretic
truth would lead to many absurdities.'

' For instance ? '

' Well, for one thing, you would have to go into training
for the attainment of philosophic insight after the fashion
of an Indian Gymnosophist whom I once met in Asia
and who wished to convert me to the pernicious doctrine
that all things were one.'

' How did he propose to effect this ? '

' Well, in the first place he declared that truths could
not be implanted in the soul by argument, but must grow
out of its essence by its own action. So he refused to
give any rational account of his opinions, but told me

1 Cp. Eth, Nic. vi. 5. 6, vi. 12. 10, vii. 8. 4.

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 35

that if I submitted to his discipline, I should infallibly
come to see for myself what he knew to be true. I asked
him how, and was amused to find that he wanted me to
sit in the sun all day in a stiff and upright posture,
breathing in a peculiar way, stopping the right nostril
with the thumb, and then slowly drawing in the breath
through the left, and breathing it out through the right.
By doing this and ejaculating the sacred word " Om " ten
thousand times daily, he assured me I should become a
god, nay, greater than all gods. I asked him how soon
this fate was likely to befall me, if I tried. He thought
enlightenment might come to me in one year, or ten, or
more. It all depended on me. I replied that even if I
failed to get a sunstroke I should be more likely to
become an idiot than a god, but that I should already
be one if I tried anything so silly. You, however,
seem to me to be committing yourself to the same
absurdity when you try to extend to contemplation the
method which is appropriate only to action.'

' But that, Aristotle, is just the point to be proved.
My contention is that Pragmatism extends to the ac
quisition of theoretical principles a method as appropriate
to them as to practice. As for Gymnosophistic, I think
that your Indian friend's method was really quite different
For though he professed to reach truth by training, there
was no rational connexion between the truths he aimed at
and the methods he advocated, which indeed could only
produce self-deception. In moral matters, on the other
hand, it is, as you say, necessary to dispose the mind for
the perception of truth by appropriate action. If we
declined to do this we should not start with a mind free
from bias and impartially open to every belief — for that
is impossible — but with one biassed by different action in
a different direction. So that really the training you
demand is only what is needed to clear away the anti-
moral prejudices to which our character would otherwise
predispose us. Is this not so?'

' Certainly ; you speak well so far.'

' Thank you. May I point out next that the method

36 HUMANISM n

of Pragmatism is precisely the same in theoretic as in
practical matters ? In neither can the truth or falsehood
of a conception be decided in the abstract and without
experience of the manner of its working. It gets its real
meaning only in, from, and by, its use : apart from its use
the meaning of any " truth " remains potential. And you
can use it only if you desire to use it. And the desire to
use it can only arise if it makes a difference to you
whether or not you conceive it, and, if so, how. You
must, therefore, desire, or, as I should say, postulate it, if
you are to have it at all. If, on the other hand, your
practical experience suggests to you that a certain con
ception would be useful, if it zuere true, you will reasonably
give it a trial to see whether it is not " true," and if thus
you discover it and find that you can work with it, you
will certainly call it " true " and believe that it is " true,"
and has been so from all eternity, and all this the more
confidently and profoundly, the more extensively useful it
appears. Thus it is by hypothetically postulating what
we desire to be true because we expect it to be use
ful, and accepting it as true if we can in any way
render it useful, that we seem to me manifestly to
come by our principles. Nor do I see how we could
really come by them in any other way, or that we should
be prudent if we admitted their claims to truth on any
other ground.'

' Might they not be self-evident ? '

' Self-evidence only seems an accident of our state of
mind and in no way a complete guarantee of truth. To
none do so many things seem so strongly self-evident as
to the insane. Much that was false has been accepted
as self-evident and no doubt still is. Its self-evidence
only means that we have ceased to question a principle,
or not yet begun to do so.'

' And can you not see that there are intrinsically
necessary truths ? '

' Not a bit. Unless by necessary you mean needful, an
intrinsic necessity seems to me a contradiction. Necessity
is always dependence, and so hypothetical.'

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 37

' You blaspheme horribly against the highest beings in
the universe, the Deity and the Triangle ! '

' Even though you should threaten to impale me on
the acutest angle of the most acute-angled specimen of the
latter you can find in your world of " necessary matter "
(/jbrj evSe%o[jiev(0v aXXo)<? e^ew), I should not refrain
from speaking thus. For I want you to see the exact
point of my doctrine, and where it diverges from
your own.'

' Of course — I see that. If you can prove your
derivation of the Axioms and show that the necessary is
only the needful, the speculative reason must say a long
farewell to its independence.'

' Perhaps it will be none the worse for that.'

At this point Plato interposed a question.

' Have I understood you rightly, most astonishing
young man, to affirm that theoretic truth was wholly
derivative and subservient to practical purposes ? '

' You have.'

' In that case would you not have to regard theoretic
falsehood as, in the last resort, practical uselessness ? '

' You are very nearly right, Plato ; the practical use
lessness of the theoretic " truth " which turns out to be
false is what convinces us. I am glad I have made my
point so clear to you.'

' And would you contend generally that the " useless "
and the " false " were not two things but one, doubly
named ? '

' Not quite. For the useless is not always dismissed
as " false." It may also be rejected as " unreal," as is
done by those who, deeming dreams to be useless, account
them unreal. And perhaps it might be most accurate to
call the " useless " " unmeaning " rather than " false." But
that hardly matters, for the unmeaning will be called
" false " or " unreal " as suits our purpose.'

' It seems however that you do not say that the false is
useless ? '

' Not until you see that when you can call it false you
must already have discovered the limits of its use.

38 HUMANISM n

And certainly I would not deprive you, Plato, of all
men of your " noble lies" '

' Nor would you say that the useful and the true were
quite the same ? '

' Not, except in the ideal state, in which no use could
be found but for the whole truth, and all were too reason
able and too well educated to desire to pursue seeming
" truths " which were useless and therefore to be judged
false. But might we not ask Aristotle to tell us all that
logically follows from the two propositions which I am
maintaining, viz. that whatever is true is useful and that
whatever is useless is false ? '

' Yes. I think you could assist us greatly, Aristotle,
by doing this.'

' I shall do so with the greatest pleasure, that, to wit,
of logical contemplation. If whatever is true is useful it
follows that (i) nothing true is useless, and (2) that nothing
useless is true, that (3) whatever is useless is false, that (4)
some things useful are true, and (5) not false, while (6)
some things false are useless and (7) not useful. But since
your second proposition that whatever is useless is false,
is the third of those which follow from your first, that
whatever is true is useful, being indeed its " obverted
contra-positive," it is clear that in this also all the others
are implied.'

'What a thing it is to be a formal logician and con
versant with the forms of immediate inference ! I myself
have never been able to break myself of the habit of
trying to convert an universal affirmative simply, and I
suppose I ought now to be able to guess how far you are
from agreeing with a statement which I found lately in a
book by one of your Oxford sophists,2 who seemed to be
discussing much the same questions, that "the false is the
same as the theoretically untenable " ? You would rather
say that it was " the same as the practically untenable " ? '

' Yes, the false is that which fails us, and causes us to
fail. For I would go on to say that the theoretically

1 Repiiblic, 414 C.
2 Bradley, Appearance and Reality, p. 155.

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 39

untenable always turns out to be so called because it is
practically untenable.'

' The sophist whom, with difficulty, I read seemed to
see no way from the one to the other.'

' I don't suppose he wished to. It would have upset his
whole philosophy, and you know how ready philosophers
are to declare inexplicable and not to be grasped by man
whatever " difficulty " reveals the errors into which they
have plunged.'

' Yes, there is no Tartaros to which they would not
willingly descend rather than confess that they have
started on the wrong track. But even you have asserted
the existence of a better way rather than shown it
to us.'

' I must confess, Plato, that much as I should have
wished to show you that my way is both practical and
practicable I have not had the time to do this. But if I
had, I feel sure that I could do so.'

' Say on ; there is no limit but life itself to the search
for Truth.'

' That is all very well for you, whose abode has been
in these pleasant places for so long, and to whom, it
seems, there comes neither death nor change. But 7
have to go back.'

' To your pupils ? '

' Yes, and already I feel the premonitory heaviness in
my feet It will slowly creep upwards, and when it
reaches the head I shall go to sleep and wake again in
another world far from you.'

' I am sorry ; though it will interest us to see how you
vanish. But before you pass away, will you not, seeing
that all truth you say is practical, tell us what in this
case is the practical application of the " truths " you have
championed ? '

'With the greatest pleasure, Plato, that is what I
was coming back to. They form my excellent excuse
for neglecting to tell men about your ideas.'

' I do not quite see how.'

' WThy, so long as my knowledge of your world is

40 HUMANISM „

useless to them, it is for them, literally and in the
completest way, false ! '

1 But surely both they and you must admit that there
is much useless knowledge ? '

' There is much, of course, which is so called, and
actually is useless for certain purposes, but nothing which
can be so for all. Much that is " useless " is so because
certain persons refuse to use it or are unable to do so.
Pearls are useless to swine, and, as Herakleitos said, gold
to asses. And so neither ass nor hog could truly call
them precious. Or, again, often what is called useless is
that which is indirectly useful. It is useful as logically
completing- a system of knowledge which is useful in other
parts and as a whole. Or perhaps in some cases the use
is prospective and has not yet been discovered. A great
deal of mathematics would be in this position. But if
no use could be found for mathematics, they would sink
into the position of difficult games, and then their only
use would be to amuse those who liked to play with
them. Or lastly, there is a good deal of knowledge which
is comparatively, or as Aristotle would say, accidentally,
useless, because the time spent in acquiring it might be
more usefully employed otherwise. For instance, you
might count the hairs on Aristotle's head, and the
knowledge might enable you to win a bet that their
number was less than a myriad. But ordinarily such
knowledge would be deemed useless, seeing that you
might have been better employed.'

' But would these explanations cover all the facts ? '

' Not perhaps quite all in our world, in which there is
also seeming " useless knowledge," which is not really
knowledge at all, but falsely so called ; being as it were
a parasitic growth upon the real and useful knowledge,
or even a perversion thereof, a sort of harmless tumour
or malignant cancer, which would not arise in a healthy
state and should be extirpated wherever it appears.'

' Still it exists.'

' As evil exists ; indeed it seems to be merely one
aspect of the evil that exists.'

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 41

' Are you not now extending your explanations so
far that your paradox is in danger of becoming a truism ?
Can you any longer give me an instance of really useless
knowledge ? '

' Of course not, Plato, seeing that my contention is that
whatever is truly knowledge is useful, and whatever is
not useful is not truly knowledge, while in proportion as
any alleged knowledge is seen to be useless it is in
danger of being declared false ! The only illustration I
can give, therefore, is of knowledge falsely so-called,
which is thought to be useful, but is really useless, and
therefore false or, if you prefer, unmeaning.'

' Even of that we should like an example.'

' I see, Plato, that you are willing to embroil me with
most of the philosophers in my world. For if I am to
speak what is in my mind, I must say that knowledge of
the Absolute or, what comes to the same, of the Un
knowable, seems to me to be of the kind you require.
Aristotle, no doubt, might speak similarly of your own
Idea of the Good.'

' Oh, but I intended it to be supremely useful both in
knowledge and in action.'

' No doubt you did, but because you were not able
to make this plain, Aristotle would not admit it to be
true.'

' We had better let bygones be bygones.'

' Very well ; let me in that case give you another
example, which now concerns us nearly, of knowledge
which seems false, because it seems useless. I mean
knowledge about the world in which we now are,
regarded with the eyes of those whom in a little while
I shall no longer dare to call benighted dwellers in the
Cave. Until we can make our world useful to them, it
is false : I am a liar and you are the unreal figments of
my creative imagination.'

' You quite alarm me. Can you not devise a way,
then, whereby we might prove ourselves useful, and so
existent, to your friends ? '

' Certainly. Could you not appear at a meeting of

42 HUMANISM i,

the Society for Psychical Research and deliver a lecture,
in your beautiful Attic, on the immortality of the soul ?
That would be very useful ; it might induce some few
really to concern themselves with what is to befall them
after death, and lead them perhaps to amend their lives.
I know the Secretary of the Society quite well, and I
think we could arrange a good meeting for you ! '

' 'EiV^/^ei &vdpw7T€. I could not think of such a
thing : it would be too degrading. Besides, to tell you
the truth, I have long ceased to feel any practical interest
in the generality of men and their world. I would do
something for you, but you already know and do not
need persuading. Can I not do something to benefit
you personally, whether it was useful, and therefore con
vincing, to others or not ? '

' I suppose, Plato, it is conceivable that you could,
if you liked, but that it is very likely that you would
not like.'

' I have already told you that I will do anything
short of mixing myself up with a world like yours. I
once tried it, soon after I came here, but I soon discovered
that Herakleitos was right in thinking that souls retained
their power of smell. Indeed, I suppose my nose must
have become absurdly sensitive, for I was driven back
by the stench of blood before I had got very far into its
sphere. I simply could not go on.'

' I do not wonder. Things are as bad as ever in this
respect, except that we have grown more hypocritical
about our murders. But I can tell you how you could
not only help me, but even persuade the others.'

1 How ? '

' By useful knowledge.'

' Of what ? '

' Could you not by some divination predict to me
what horses were about to win what races, or what
stocks were going to rise or fall how far ? Such know
ledge would be most useful and therefore truest by the
admission of all men : it would enable me to amass great
riches, and if I were rich enough all would believe

ii 'USELESS' KNOWLEDGE 43

whatever I might choose to say. Money talks, as the
saying is, and none dare doubt but that it speaks the
truth. In this manner I might get men to credit the
whole story of my visit to you. For my credit would
then be practically limitless.'

' I suppose you are joking and do not seriously expect
of me anything so atrocious. Besides, why should you
attribute to me, or to any of those who have departed
to higher spheres, any such capacity for knowing what
goes on in the world we are glad to have abandoned ? '

' I am sure I don't know ; only that is what men
commonly suppose about such matters. They think
that there is far more education in death than ever there
was in life, and that even the greatest fool, so soon as
ever he is dead, may be expected to be wise enough to
know all things, and good enough to place his knowledge
at their disposal.'

' They seem to me as foolish as they are selfish.'

' No doubt ; still there is that germ of truth about
their action which we saw. Whatever knowledge cannot
be rendered somehow useful cannot be esteemed real.'

' Alas, that it should be so ! '

' I do not on the whole regret it, although I can see it
must annoy you to be considered as part of the non
existent of which you always thought so meanly. But
really I must be going, and return to my Cave to
convince, if possible, my fellow Troglodytes that you
still live and think, and to impress on them, if I can,
the importance of the " two-world problem," both for
its own sake and as an illustration of the truth of
Pragmatism.'

Ill

TRUTH l

ARGUMENT

Importance of the question What is Truth, ? when not asked rhetorically.

I. Answers logical, (i) Truth as agreement with reality. Breaks
down over the question of the knowledge of this agreement. (2) Truth
as systematic coherence. Open to objections on the ground (i) that not
all systems are true ; (2) no system is true ; (3) many systems are true ; (4)
truth even if system, is more than system, (i) How about systematic
falsehood? (2) How about the imperfection of all actual systems? (3)
Howabout the possibility of alternative systems? (4)Howabout systems not
accepted as true because distasteful, and agreeable truth accepted without
being systematic ? Is this last argument an invalid appeal to psychology ?
No, for there is no ' pure ' thought, and without psychological interest,
etc., thought could neither progress nor be described. The psychological
side of 'system' and 'coherence.' The necessity of immediate appre
hension. Coherence feelings. The infinite regress in inference, if its
immediacy be denied. Non-logical ' coherence.' Interest as the cement
of coherence.

II. Answers psychological. Question as to (i) the psychical nature
of the recognition of truth ; (2) the objects to which this recognition is
referred, (i) Truth as a form of value. Valuation at first random and
individual. The ultimateness of the truth - valuation. Meaning of
' simple ' and ' complex ' for a pragmatist psychology. Truth-valuation
' simple ' for logic.

III. (2) Objectivity of truth. ' Truth ' and ' fact,' ' formal ' as a means
to 'material' truth. Subjective truth-valuations gradually organized (i)
into subordination to individual, (2) into conformity with social ends.
Usefulness as the principle of selection and criterion of truth. Need for
the social recognition of truth. Special cases explained.

Of all philosophic questions that of Truth is perhaps
the most hackneyed and unanswerable, when treated in
the usual fashion. Now the usual fashion is to indulge
either in ecstatic rhapsodies about the sacredness of

1 This paper was written for this volume in order to complete, with Axioms
as Postulates and the two essays which precede it, the outline of a pragmatist
theory of knowledge. It will be observed that although these four papers do
not of course claim to be exhaustive, they supplement one another.

44

HI TRUTH 45

Truth or in satirical derision of pretensions to have
actually attained it. Both these procedures are assured
beforehand of popular applause, but both render the
question — What is Truth ? one thoroughly rhetorical,
and so perhaps the one is the proper answer to the other,
and 'jesting Pilate' has a right to smile at the enthusiast.
Nor have the philosophers done much to improve the
situation. Ever since one of the noblest Plato's ' noble
lies ' proclaimed the doctrine that philosophers are lovers
of truth, they have been quite willing to believe this, and
have often found a people willing to be deceived politely
willing to admit it But perhaps because their passion,
even when most genuine, was too distantly ' platonic,'
this philosophic love of truth has hardly influenced
perceptibly the course of things, and it might remain in
doubt whether the Pragmatist philosopher also would
care and dare to obtain some more substantial token of
Truth's favours, were it not that the cheapest condemna
tion of his enterprise is to accuse him of a malicious
joy in the destruction of Truth's very notion. It becomes
incumbent on him therefore to refute such slanders, and
to make clear how exactly he proposes to approach, and
in what sense to derive, the notion of Truth.

This essay, therefore, must examine — I. the chief
current definitions of Truth, which lay claim to logical
validity, and to show that they are neither tenable, nor
even intelligible, without reference to its psychological
character; II. to describe that psychological character;
and III. to explain how Pragmatism extends and alters
the traditional conceptions on the subject.

Under the head of unpsychological, logical, or ' meta
physical' definitions may be instanced (i) the well-known
dictum that truth consists in an ' agreement ' or ' corre
spondence ' of thought with its object, viz. reality. This
however speedily leads to a hopeless impasse, once the

46 HUMANISM

in

question is raised — How are we to know whether or not
our ' truth ' ' corresponds ' or ' agrees ' with its real object ?
For to decide this question must we not be able to com
pare ' thought ' and ' reality,' and to contemplate each as
it is apart from the other ? This however seems impos
sible. ' Thought ' and ' Reality ' cannot be got apart, and
consequently the doctrine of their ' correspondence ' has
in the end no meaning. We are not aware of any reality
except by its representation in our ' thought,' and per
contra, the whole meaning of ' thought ' resides ultimately
in its reference to ' reality.' Again, even if it were
assumed that somehow the independent reality mirrored
itself in our thought, how should we discover whether
or not this image was 'true,' i.e. agreed with the in
accessible reality it claimed to represent ? This whole
theory of truth therefore would seem futile. Having
started from the radically untrue and unworkable
assumption that ' truth ' and ' fact,' ' thought ' and ' reality,'
are two things which have to be brought into relation,
it is inevitably driven to the admission that no such
relation can validly be established.

(2) A second logical definition looks at first more
promising. It conceives truth as essentially systematic
coherence, the ' true ' being that which ' fits ' into a
' system,' the ' false ' that which is discrepant with it.
This has the immense advantage of not creating the
chasm between ' truth ' and ' reality ' in which the former
definition was engulfed. Both these conceptions remain
immanent in the process of knowledge, which is the
construction of a system of ' reality ' known to be ' true '
by the coherence of its parts.

This account undoubtedly brings out important features
in the nature of Truth, but as it stands, it is so in
complete and misleading that we can hardly follow the
fashionable logic of the day in accepting it as all we
can reasonably want to know about truth. In fact, when
we discount the air of mystery, the obscure phraseology
and the pompous magniloquence with which this doctrine
is propounded, we shall find that all it comes to is that

in TRUTH 47

consistency is a mark of truth, and that when we find
that we can maintain our conceptual interpretations of
our experiences we come to treat them as realities. But
to take the pronouncement that truth is what jits in a
system as therefore final would be ludicrously rash, and
to detect the limitations of the formula, it suffices to
consider what may be said in favour of a string of
counter-propositions, such as, e.g. (i) that not all ' systems '
are true, (2) that no 'system' is 'true,' (3) that many
systems are true, and (4) that even if all truth be
systematic, it is not thereby adequately defined.

(1) To define truth as systematic is at once to raise
the question of systematic falsehood. For false as
sumptions also manifestly tend to complete themselves
in a system of inferences, to cohere together, to assimilate
fresh facts, and to interpret them into conformity with
themselves ; in short, to assume all the logical features
that are claimed for ' truth.' Does it not follow, there
fore, that something more than systematic coherence is
needed to determine truth ? As not all systems are true,
must we not suggest a further criterion to distinguish true
from false ?

The reply to this objection would have to take the
form largely of an acceptance thereof. It would have to
be admitted that in proportion as a falsehood or a lie
became more systematic, its prospects of being accepted
as true grew greater, that coherent lies did often win
acceptance, and that a perfectly coherent lie (or error)
would be tantamount to absolute truth. Lies can be
called false only when they have been found out, and they
are found out just because sooner or later they do not
fit into our system of ' truth.' These systematic falsehoods
are never quite systematic enough, and so the mimicry of
truth by false systems, so far from subverting, rather con
firms the doctrine that truth is systematic.

(2) This defence paves the way for a new assault.
It would be adequate if we really had an indefeasible
system of absolute truth by whose aid we might detect
the inconsistencies of the pseudo-systems. But where

48 HUMANISM

in

shall we find such truth ? The bodies of ' truth ' which
de facto we acknowledge in our sciences are all partial
systems, incomplete in themselves and discrepant with
each other. If nothing short of absolute truth is perfectly
systematic, and if all our systems are imperfect, is not all
our ' truth ' tainted with falsehood, and must it not be
admitted that no (actual) ' systems ' are ' true ' ? To talk
of the mimicry of true by false systems is misleading ;
we should remember that, in addition to the protective
mimicry of Bates, there exists another form (f Miillerian ')
in which the mimics co-operate to advertize the undesirable
character they have in common. And so our systems
may all be mimicking each other and may all be false.

Again, I think, the contention must in substance be
admitted. The actual systems of our sciences are con
tinually being convicted of error, and cannot seriously
sustain their claim to the deference due only to the perfect
system. Still, in extenuation one might urge (a) that
ignorance is not necessarily error, nor incompleteness
falsehood ; (£) that experience would seem to show that
even when coherent systems of interpretation have to be
recast, what occurs is a transformation rather than a
revolution, reinterpreting rather than destroying the
' truths ' of the older order. Though, therefore, our
' systems ' may not be wholly ' true,' we may conceive
them as progressively approximating to the truth. And
so (c) we must conceive them as in the end converging in
one absolute and all-embracing system which alone would
be strictly and indubitably ' true.'

(3) This last defence, however, still contains a hazardous
assumption. Is the ideal of a complete system absolutely
true really the straightforward, unambiguous notion which
it seems ? Are we entitled to argue from the unity of a
concept to a similar unity of the concrete ways of exempli
fying that concept, and so to assume that there is one
system and no more, into which all truth must finally be
fitted ? The assumption is a seductive one, and underlies
all monistic argument. But still it is an assumption, and
begs some very puzzling questions. It assumes the

Ill

TRUTH 49

absolute determination of the universe, and it is only on
this assumption that the inference is cogent, that ' truth '
and ' reality ' can only be completely construed in one
single way. If we doubt, or deny, or demand proof of,
this assumption, it may well be that many alternative
systems may be ' true,' that ' reality ' can be constructed
in various ways by our varying efforts. The poet may
have exaggerated in suggesting

There are nine-and-sixty ways

Of composing tribal lays,

And every single one of them is right ;

but still the more sincerely and completely we recognize
the presence of human activity in the construction of
' truth ' and ' reality,' the more clearly is their contingence
suggested, and the less plausible does it seem that all these
apparently arbitrary procedures are foredoomed to issue
in the unveiling of one single, inevitable, and pre-existing
' system.' And if we doubt the legitimacy of this assump
tion, it follows at once that we cannot decide the measure
of truth possessed by our actual bodies of knowledge by
the mere test of systematic coherence. System A may
need reinterpretation into A' to fit in with system B
in the final system X ; but we might as well or better
reinterpret B into B', so that it would fit with A into
the final system Y. In such a case are we to consider
A + B' or A' + B as ultimately true ?

In short, our logic as well as our metaphysic will have
to concern itself more scrupulously and less perfunctorily
with pluralistic possibilities.

(4) The last objection has brought out the fact that in
assuming truth to be univocally determined by the con
ception of a ' system,' we went too far, and uncritically
settled an important issue ; we have now to face a criticism
urging that the conception of a system in another direction
does not go far enough to determine the nature of ' truth.'
To win from us recognition as ' truth,' it is not enough to
have a number of coherent judgments connected in a
system. The ' system ' to be true must also have value

E

50 HUMANISM m

in our eyes ; the demand for ' system ' is but part of a
larger demand for a ' harmony ' (actual or at least ideal)
in our experience ; it is not merely a matter of formal
logical consistency, but also of emotional satisfaction.
Hence no system is judged intellectually ' true ' unless it
is also a good deal more than this, and embraces and
satisfies other than the abstractly intellectual aspects of
experience. Thus no completely pessimistic system is
ever judged completely ' true ' ; because it leaves unre-
moved and unresolved a sense of final discord in existence,
it must ever stimulate anew to fresh efforts to overcome
the discrepancy.1 And conversely, it is by no means rare
that what impresses us as conducive to harmony should
be declared ' true ' with little or no inquiry into its syste
matic coherence ; indeed, it is probably such perception
of their aesthetic self-evidence that often accounts for the
adoption of the ' axiomatic ' postulates that form first
principles for knowledge.2

Thus the notion of ' system ' proves doubly insufficient
to define ' truth.' There is ' system ' which is not valued
as ' true,' and there is ' truth ' which is so valuable that it
need not be ' system.' We need ' system ' only as a
means to the higher notion of ' harmony,' 3 and where we
can get the latter without the former, we can readily dis
pense with it.

The bulk, however, of logicians would in all probability
strenuously object to this last argument. They would
protest against the contamination of the question of
' truth ' with questions of ' harmony ' and ' valuation.' To
refer to these is to overpass the bounds of logic, it is to
trespass on the lower ground of psychology in which
thought soon gets bogged in the reedy marshes of psychical
fact. No good can come of such an intermixture of
psychology with logic ; our criterion of truth must be
logical, our thought ' pure.' To talk of desire, interest,
and feeling in a logical context is sheer madness, and to
require logical theory to take account of their existence
is to require it to adjust itself to the alogical.

1 Cp. p. 200. 2 Cp. Axioms as Postulates, § 48. 3 Cp. p. 189.

in TRUTH 51

If the defence of logical conventions is imprudent
enough to take this ground, it can meet with nothing but
disaster. For we shall at once have to defy the logician
(i) to produce his 'pure' thought ; (2) to account for the
movement of thought by anything but an appeal to
psychological motives, desire, feeling, interest, attention,
will, etc. ; (3) even to describe what he conceives to
happen in strictly logical terms and without constant
recourse to psychology.

The first two of these points will probably be conceded
by all except belated Hegelians, but the third may need
some illustration, the more so as we may draw from it
also an independent (fifth) reason for denying the adequacy
of the conception of truth as a system. I may point
out therefore (5) that the ultimate terms of this (as of
every other) definition of Truth are primarily psychological.
If we take it that a ' system ' means a body of coherent
judgments, it needs but a little reflection to see that the
logical evaluation of the ' system ' presupposes its psychical
existence, and the previous discussion of a number of
psychological questions, (i) How, e.g. is the system
recognized ? (2) What is the nature, and what (3) the
cause of its ' coherence ' ?

As to (i) it must surely be admitted that the logical
system, to be a system for us, must be apprehended as
such by us. Before, that is, an alleged ' truth ' can be
subjected to logical reflection, it has to be actually judged
' true ' ; its truth has to be felt before it is understood.
Even, therefore, if logic could find and reserve for itself
among our conscious processes such a thing as a process
of ' pure ' thought, a distinct mental act would yet be
necessary for its apprehension, and this act would be
psychological. In other words, no truth actually occurs
without, in the first place, a psychic process ; hence every
truth as such is conditioned by a variety of psychological
influences of the kind just mentioned.

The attempt, therefore, to represent ' thought ' and
a fortiori 'truth,' as wholly an affair of mediation between
self-subsistent relations fails ; at every step in its progress

52 HUMANISM m

the mediate inference has to be immediately recognized,
and the mediate ' knowledge-about ' rests upon and returns
into an immediate ' acquaintance-with.' l If, therefore,
we call them respectively ' thought ' and ' feeling,' we
shall have to say that an ' element ' of ' feeling ' is bound
up with and accompanies every act of ' thought,' and that
no actual thought either is or can be conceived as ' pure.'
Moreover the movement of thought would have in any
case to be pronounced psychological. For the selection
of the points in the self-subsistent system, between which
the thought mediated, could not be ascribed to the
intrinsic nature of the system, but only to the human
interest which effects the selection.

Now if such be the state of the case, why on earth
should it not be recognized in logic ? Logic, I presume, in
the very act of constituting norms for thought, presup
poses the facts of thought, and if all actual thinking, good,
bad, or indifferent, is impelled by interest, then interest
ipso facto must become a factor in the logical analysis of
thought. Why, then, should we insist on tortuous and
complicated misdescriptions in terms of ' pure thought '
of processes which are quite simple and intelligible when
we consent to regard their full psychic nature?2

(2) Mutatis mutandis, what has been said of the
logical system applies also to its ' coherence.' The
coherence of judgments is a psychical fact which justifies,
nay demands, psychological treatment. We find accord
ingly that it is (a] a matter of immediate apprehension.
However we refine upon the logical concept of coherence,
we can do nothing without observing that de facto judg
ments stick together. (U] We observe also certain co
herence ' feelings,' whose strength is best measured by
that of the feeling of (logical) necessity 3 which supervenes

1 James, Princ. of Psych. i. p. 221.

2 All the squabbles about the ' activity ' or ' movement ' of thought are due
to perversities of this sort. Abstract thought is not active, or even alive ; it does
not exist. What is active is the thinking being with a certain psychical idio
syncrasy in consequence whereof he pursues his ends by various means, among
which thinking is one. The nature of his thought everywhere refers to the
purpose of his thinking.

3 See Personal Idealism, p. 70, note.

in TRUTH 53

when we try to part the ' coherent ' judgments. Truths
' cohere ' when they afford us the peculiar satisfaction of
feeling that they ' belong together,' and that it is 'impossible'
to separate them.1

And (c) if the cohesion of our thoughts, the belonging
together, e.g. of A — B, were not immediately felt, but had to
be established by mediate reasoning, it would follow that
for any two truths to cohere a reason would have to be
alleged why they should do so. But this would have to
be another truth, and the attempt to ' understand ' the
immediate psychical cohesion would have to be renewed
upon this, until it became obvious that an infinite process
was implicit in the simplest inference.2 Is it not much
more reasonable to suppose that the cohesiveness is a
psychical feature of the thinking itself? Finally (cT) it
would seem that not every sort of coherence in thought
was regarded as logically important. The sort of
coherences, e.g. which proceed from associations and
lead to puns and plays upon words are relegated to that
undignified limbo in which ' fallacies ' are huddled together.
But if not all coherence is logical, then the logician
plainly needs a preliminary psychology to distinguish for
him the kind of coherence which is his concern.

(3) If logic is to make the attempt to exclude
psychology, the real cause of logical coherence must be
pronounced to be extralogical. For it is nothing that
can plausibly be represented 3 as inherent in the nature of
thought qua thought, i.e. of thought as logicians abstractly

1 It is never strictly impossible to reject a ' truth,' only in some cases the
cost is excessive. To accept, e.g. a formal contradiction, stultifies the assumption
that definite meanings exist, and should consequently debar us from the further use
of thinking. This is too much, and as we have an alternative we usually prefer
to reconsider the thought that has ended in a contradiction. Moreover, if we
desire to entertain contradictory beliefs, there is a much easier way ; we have
merely to refuse to think them together. This indeed is what the great majority
of men have always done.

2 For an amusing illustration of this existence of an immediate apprehension
in all mediate cogency see ' Lewis Carroll's ' dialogue between Achilles and the
Tortoise in Mind, N.S. No. 14, p. 278.

3 I am willing to suppose it just possible to translate all the features of our
thinking into a completely and consistently intellectualist phraseology. Philo
sophers have made endless attempts to do so, but none have succeeded, though it
is I suppose a merit of Hegel's to have tried more elaborately, and to have failed
more obscurely, than the rest. But the philosophers' insistence on reducing
everything to pure thought is merely one of their professional prejudices.

54 HUMANISM m

conceive it. The cause of logical coherence may be
summed up in the one word interest, and ' thought '
which is not set in motion by interest does not issue in
thinking at all. If, therefore, interest is to be tabooed, the
whole theory of thought becomes a mere mass of useless
machinery. For it is interest which starts, propels,
sustains, and guides the ' movement ' of our thought. It
effects the necessary selection among the objects of our
attention, accepting what is consonant, and rejecting what
is discrepant, with our aim in thinking. If, then, the
purposiveness of our thought is its central feature, psycho
logically, how can a logic set it aside without the grossest
travesty ? How fundamental is the fact of purposive
interest in mental life is apparent from the cases where
the normal control of consciousness is weakened or
suspended. In sleepiness, reverie, dream, delirium, mad
ness, etc., the purposive guidance of our thought grows
lax — with the result that anarchy speedily overtakes the
soul. Thoughts ' cross ' the mind in the most ' illogical '
way, and though our mental images may still continue to
mimic meaning, they have ceased to mean anything
coherent, and pro tanto logical thinking ceases to exist.

Thus in trying to understand the doctrine that truth is
system we have been driven to the conclusion that in
psychology, if anywhere, the clue to the mystery of truth
must lie. For not only the definitions we have examined,
but all others of the sort, must presuppose a psychological
treatment of the psychical facts.1

ii

Let us turn therefore to psychology. And to begin
with let us formulate our psychological questions more
precisely, as (i) what is the psycJiical nature of the
'recognition' of 'truth'? and (2) to what part of our
experience is this recognition attached ?

1 The definition, e.g. that truth is what -we are forced to believe, obviously
implies psychological presuppositions as to the nature of ' belief and ' necessity."
Other inadequate formulas are discussed in Riddles of the Sphinx (new &&.}, pp. 83-9.

in TRUTH 55

To the first question the summary answer would
appear to be that Truth is a form of Value, and for this
reason related to, and largely interchangeable with, our
other modes of valuation. Now such valuation of our
experience is a natural, and in the normal consciousness
an almost uninterrupted, process. We are for ever
judging things as ' true ' and ' false,' ' good ' and ' bad,'
' beautiful ' and ' ugly,' ' pleasant ' and ' unpleasant.' So
continuous is this habit that existence without ' apprecia
tion,' ' fact ' without ' value,' is rather a figment of abstrac
tion than a possible psychical experience. Now it is the
de facto existence of this habit of valuation that gives rise
to the normative sciences, and the function of logic as a
normative science is to regulate and systematize our
spontaneous valuations of ' true ' and ' false.' For ot
course these logical valuations also will need regulation.
At first they are bestowed by individuals pretty much 'at
random. Anything may commend itself to anybody, as
' true,' nay, even as the truth,1 and there are no guarantees
that any man's valuations will be consistent with any
other man's, or even with his own at other times. It is
only as the needs of social intercourse and of consistent
living grow more urgent that de facto ' truth ' grows
systematic and ' objective,' i.e. that there come to be
truths which are (roughly) ' the same for all.' And finally,
when most of the hard work has actually been done, the
logician arises and ' reflects ' on the genesis of ' truth,'
which, in the end, he mostly misrepresents.

It is fairly plain, therefore, that the psychical fact of
the existence of truth-valuation must be the starting-point
for the psychological account of truth. Whether it should
be called the foundation of the whole structure, or whether
it should not be likened to the intrinsic nature of the
bricks of which the structure is built up, seems to be a
matter of the choice of metaphors. At any rate without
this valuation there would be no ' truth ' at all.

Of course, however, further psychological questions
may be raised about it. We may ask, for instance,

1 Cp. the inexhaustible variety of the ' systems ' of religion and philosophy.

56 HUMANISM

in

whether the fact that we judge things true and false is
psychologically simple and ultimate, or whether we could
not analyse out a common element of value from our
various valuations. The answer to such questions might
grow long and somewhat intricate, but we are hardly
bound to go into them very deeply. It will suffice to
point out that the ' simple ' in psychology can only mean
what it is no use to analyse further} In other words, the
distinction of ' simple ' and ' complex ' is always relative
to the purpose of the inquiry. The ' elements ' out of
which the ' complex ' states of mind are put together do
not exist as psychic facts. In the actual experiencing,
most states of consciousness form peculiar and recognizable
wholes of experience, which feel ' simple.' Thus the taste
of lemonade is emphatically not the taste of sugar plus
the taste of lemon ; though of course it is by squeezing
the lemon and dissolving the sugar that we compose the
lemonade and procure ourselves the taste. The ex
periences which really are ' complex ' to feeling are
comparatively rare, as e.g. when we feel the struggle
of incompatible desires. On the other hand, when we
reflect upon our experience, it is easy enough to represent
it all as ' complex,' and to break it up into factors, which,
we say, were present unobserved in the experience. But
the justification of this procedure is that it enables us
to control the original experience, and the factors which the
' analysis ' arrives at are whatever aids this purpose. It
is in no wise incumbent on us to go on making distinc
tions for their own sake and from inconsistent points of
view, without aim and without end. Indeed the practice
of aimless analysis, though it seems to form the chief
delight of some philosophers, must be pronounced to be
as such trivial, irrelevant, and invalid. We have a right
therefore to declare ' simple ' and ultimate what it is
useless to treat as ' complex ' for the purpose in hand, and
in this instance we shall do well to avail ourselves of this

1 I owe this definition to Prof. A. W. Moore's excellent account of the
functional theory of knowledge in Locke in the Chicago University Contributions
to Philosophy, vol. iii. p. 23.

in TRUTH 57

right. For an analysis of the valuation ' true ' and ' false/
whether or not it is possible for other purposes, would
hardly be germane to logic.

Ill

We are however still sufficiently remote from what
is ordinarily meant by ' truth.' For truth is conceived
as something ' objective ' and ' coherent,' while the truth-
valuations we have recognized are individual claims, and
so far seem chaotic. We may have found indeed the
bricks out of which the temple of Truth is to be built, but
as yet we have but a heap of bricks and nothing like a
temple. Before, moreover, we can venture to erect the
actual structure of objective Truth we must consider (a)
the nature of the ground over which the truth-valuation
is used, (If) the way in which our bricks cohere, i.e. the
'formal ' nature of truth.

As to (a), the use of ' truth ' lies in the valuation of
' fact ' : ' truth ' is value in the apprehension of ' fact.'
The objects of our contemplation when valued as ' true '
become ' facts,' and ' facts ' (or what we take to be such)
become available for knowledge when valued as ' true.'
The system of truth therefore is constructed by an inter
pretation of ' fact.' But this interpretation conforms to
certain building laws, as it were. It consists in the use
of concepts, and postulates the fundamental principles of
thought.

Hence (£) these result in a certain formal character of
truth. Every assertion formally claims to be ' true,' and
causes endless confusion if this formal claim is identified
with real, and even ' absolute,' truth. Again, whatever is
harmonious ('consistent') with the fundamental assump
tions of our conceptual interpretation of reality is in one
sense ' true.' Any non-contradictory collocation of words
has formal truth. But it is truth in a narrower sense
than that required for ' material ' truth.1 In its fullest

1 Cp. p. 98 note.

58 HUMANISM m

sense our truth must harmonize, not only with its own
formal postulates but with our whole experience, and it
may well be that the merely formal truth of consistency
is never able to attain results sufficient for our wider
purpose, and so is not fully ' true.' In point of fact it is
useful within limits ; to show that a ' truth ' follows
formally is not enough to prove it de facto true, but tests
our premisses ; to show that it involves a formal flaw is
not enough to invalidate it, but requires us to re-word it.
For we would rather renounce our conclusion than the use
of our formal principles.

After premising which we may return to our problem
of constructing an objective truth out of subjective truth-
valuations, of, as we saw, the most varied nature. Every
one of these subjective valuations is the product of a
psychological interest, and aims at the satisfaction of
such an interest. But even in the individual there is
much regulation of his subjective valuations, and some
consolidation and subordination of interests under the
main purposes of his life. Hence many of his initial
interests will be suppressed, and the valuations which
ministered to them will tend to be withdrawn, to be
judged useless and, ultimately, false. In other words,
there begins to operate among our subjective truth-
valuations the great Pragmatist principle of selection, viz.
that the ' useless ' is not to be valued as ' true.' The ' use '
appealed to and the ' truth ' extracted by this criterion
are wholly psychological and, at first, only individual.
But not even of the individual is it true to say that his
feeling a thing ' true ' and calling it so makes it so. His
' intuitions,' guesses, and demands have to be verified, and
are sifted by the manner of their working. Thus the
question of the sustaining of the valuation after it is
made is a distinct one ; and is perhaps the one we mostly
want to raise when we inquire : What is truth?

This question becomes more intricate, but also more
interesting, when we take into account the social environ
ment. For man is a social being, and truth indubitably
is to a large extent a social product. For even though

in TRUTH 59

every truth may start in a minority of one, its hold upon
existence is exceedingly precarious, unless it can con
trive to get itself more extensively appreciated. Truth
is one of the few things of which no one desires a
monopoly. Those unfortunate enough to have acquired
and retained an exclusive view of truth are usually secluded
in prisons or asylums, unless their ' truth ' is so harmlessly
abstruse as not to lead to action, when they are sometimes
styled philosophers ! Truth, then, to be really safe, has to
be more than an individual valuation ; it has to win social
recognition, to transform itself into a common property.

But how ? It is by answering this question that
Pragmatism claims to have made a real advance in our
comprehension of truth. It contends that once more, """^
only more signally and clearly than in the individual's
case, it is the usefulness and efficiency of the propositions
for which ' truth ' is claimed that determines their social
recognition. The use-criterion selects the individual
truth-valuations, and constitutes thereby the objective
truth which obtains social recognition. Hence in the
fullest sense of Truth its definition must be pragmatic.
Truth is the useful, efficient, workable, to which our
practical experience tends to restrict our truth-valuations ;
if anything the reverse of this professes to be true, it is
(sooner or later) detected and rejected.

As an account of Truth this is not so much a
speculative theory as a description of plain fact. When
ever we observe a struggle between two rival theories of
events we find that it is ultimately the greater con-
duciveness of the victor to our use and convenience that
determines our preference and its consequent acceptance
as true. Illustrations of this fact might be multiplied
without limit, because in every advance of knowledge
there is always something of a struggle between the old
values which seemed true, and the new, which are better.
The shocking cases occur when the convenience of a
science is sacrificed to that of its practitioners, and
doctrines continue to be taught, like formal logic, though
they are known to be false. These exemplify an

6o HUMANISM

in

illegitimate use of the pragmatic principle. As a
legitimate case we may allude to the well-known fact
that what decided the rejection of the Ptolemaic epicycles
in favour of the Copernican astronomy was not any
sheer failure to represent celestial motions, but the
growing cumbrousness of the assumptions and the grow
ing difficulty of the calculations which its ' truth ' involved.
Similarly when I affirm (as I have now been doing for
a good many years) that the metaphysical theory
of the Absolute is false, I only mean that it is useless,
that it simplifies nothing and complicates everything, and
that its supposed advantages are one and all illusory.
And I hope that as the pragmatist way of looking at
things grows to be more familiar, more of my philosophic
confreres will allow themselves to perceive these simple
facts.

Of course there still remain complications of detail
about the doctrine that social usefulness is an ultimate
determinant of ' truth.' It is obvious, for example, that
delicate questions may arise out of the fact that not only
does what works receive social recognition, but also that
what receives social recognition for this very reason
largely works. Effete superstitions always try to sustain
their ' truth ' in this way. Again, there may be old-
established mental industries which have outlived their use
fulness, but have not yet been condemned as false. Other
truths again are intrinsically of so individual a character
that society accepts, e.g. Smith's statement that he has a
headache, or that he dreamt a dream, on his ipse dixit.
And while new truths are struggling for recognition, it
may come about that much that is useful is thought to
be useless and vice versa, and that the discrepancy
between truth as it is supposed, and as it turns out, to be,
grows great. Then, again, few societies are so severely
organized with a sole view to efficiency as not to tolerate
a considerable number of useless persons pursuing
' useless ' knowledge, or useful knowledge in a useless
way. Of course there is a certain amount of social
pressure brought to bear upon such persons, but it is not

in TRUTH 61

enough to produce complete social agreement, and the
elimination of all discrepant truth. Indeed, the toleration
of socially useless, and even pernicious, ' truths,' which are
individually entertained, seems on the whole to be
increasing. This only shows that we can afford the
luxury. In earlier times the thinkers of divergent views
had short shrift granted them, and so, partly as the result
of much past brutality, we now enjoy considerable bodies
of ' objective ' truth. And considering how much use
philosophers have always made of this indulgence to
differ from their fellows, it would be gracious if they at
least gave honour where honour was due, and appreciated
the labours of their ancestors, instead of attributing the
whole credit of the conformity which exists to the initial
constitution of the Absolute. Or if they insist on it,
they might at least, in common fairness, attempt to tell us
to whom the discredit should attach for the discrepancy
and nonconformity, which exist no less and are by far
more troublesome, even if they are too indolent to help
in the practical work of science, which enlarges the limits
of practical agreement and constitutes objective truth.

To sum up ; the answer to the question — What is
Truth ? — to which our Pragmatism has conducted us, is -
this. As regards the psychical fact of the truth-valuation,
Truth may be called an ultimate attitude and specific
function of our intellectual activity. As regards the
objects valued as ' true,' Truth is that manipulation of
them which has after trial been adopted as useful, primarily
for any human end, but ultimately for that perfect
harmony of our whole life which forms our final aspiration.

IV
LOTZE'S MONISM1

ARGUMENT

Lotze's proof of Monism fails because ( i ) he was not entitled to postulate an
underlying unity of things ; (2) his argument for it is unsound and con
tradictory ; (3) it has no scientific value, nor (4) can it be equated with
God ; nor (5), even when it has been, does it contribute anything to
religious philosophy, (i) A Unity of the Universe or Absolute, on
Lotze's own showing, is not needed to explain the interaction of things,
and in its sole tenable form is insufficient to refute Pluralism. Lotze's own
view of Substance refutes his Absolute. (2) Lotze not entitled to hypos-
tasize his unity, nor is its immanent causality more intelligible than the
transeunt causality of things. The argument from commensurability
is invalid. Can commensurability be conceived as a fortuitous growth ?
(3) The Absolute guarantees neither causality, nor orderly succession,
nor change, nor rationality, nor the existence of spiritual beings. (4) Its
identification with God is assumed and not proved, and really impossible.
(5) It aggravates the problem of Freedom, Change, and Evil. A real
' God ' must be a moral being and provable a posteriori from the facts of
our actual world. All the a priori proofs worthless because too wide.

LOTZE'S reputation as a sound and cautious thinker
deservedly stands so high that any attempt to question
the cogency of his argument is naturally received with
suspicion, and needs to be fully and clearly established
before its conclusions can win acceptance. As, however,
no true view is in the long run strengthened by stifling
the objections against it, and no false view can in the end
be considered beneficial to the highest interests of man
kind without thereby implying a profoundly pessimistic
divorce between Truth and Goodness, I will venture
to set forth my reasons for denying the success of Lotze's
proof of Monism. And while I trust that my criticism

1 Reprinted (with some additions) from The Philosophical Review of May 1896.

62

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 63

will always remain sensible of the extent of my obligations
to the author criticized, I feel it would be useless to try
to conceal on that account the extent of my divergence
from him, and so will commence by stating the proposi
tions which I hope to establish in the course of this
paper.

They are as follows :

I. That Lotze had not on his own principles any ground
for seeking an underlying unity of things.

II. That his argument in reaching it is unsound, and
conflicts with his own truer insight.

III. That, when reached, it throws no light on any
of the problems it is supposed to explain.

IV. That it is not essentially connected with the religious
conception of a God, nor with Lotze s treatment of that
conception.

V. That even when it is so connected, it does not
contribute anything of value to religious philosophy.

I am aware that these propositions do not mince
matters, and that I shall probably be called on to explain
how a thinker of Lotze's eminence should have laid
himself open to such sweeping censure. I may therefore
fittingly preface my remarks by a theory of the way
in which such lapses are psychologically explicable. The
theory I would advance is in brief that the elaborate
thoroughness and detail of Lotze's discussions occasionally
avenge themselves on Lotze also, by generating a readiness
finally to accept the first clue out of the labyrinth which
offers itself, so that at the end of a chapter full of the
subtlest and minutest criticism he sometimes consents
to adopt views which certainly would not have passed
muster at the beginning. A similar effect produced on
the reader, who is loth to believe that the display of
so much acumen should be followed by momentary
relapses into untenable positions, relaxes his critical atten
tion, and so possibly explains his acquiescence in Lotze's
conclusions. I have sometimes felt that the process

64 HUMANISM iv

in question is well exhibited, e.g. in the chapter on Time
in the Metaphysics^ and that the disproportionate abrupt
ness and the obscurity of its conclusion are similarly
conditioned by a temporary lapse of the critical faculty.

The fullest statement of the grounds on which Lotze
asserts the existence of an underlying unity of things is
of course to be found in the sixth and seventh chapters
of the Metaphysics (since the Outlines of the Philosophy
of Religion merely accepts it as established in the Meta
physics], and though the argument is well known, it will
not be inappropriate to sketch its course in so far as
it bears on the present discussion. It will be remembered
that Lotze is driven to postulate a unity of things by
the metaphysical difficulties discovered in the conception
of Causation, taken as the assertion that one thing
influences another. The impossibility of explaining such
transeunt causation compels to the inference that things
are not really separate and independent, but embraced
in a unity which is the medium in which they exist,
and renders superfluous any further question as to how
change in A passes over to become a change in
B. Thus by means of this unity, which in the
Philosophy of Religion is frankly called the Absolute, all
transeunt becomes immanent action, and is held thereby
to have been explained. The next step, which it requires
careful reading to recognize as an advance at all, is
to treat this unity as prior to, and more real than, the
plurality of things it serves to connect. Accordingly
(Met. § 70) it is hypostasized as ' the single truly existing
substance,' and it is explained at length how the self-
maintenance of the identical meaning of this Absolute
may be conceived as producing the world of experience
with its regular succession of phenomena. The discussion
closes with a vigorous protest against recognizing ' things '
as anything more than actions of the Absolute upon
spiritual beings, which, by being centres of experience,
are thereby rendered independent of the Absolute

(§§ 97, 98).

It seems on the face of it that the argument ends in

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 65

something very like self-contradiction, inasmuch as it
seems to assert that spiritual beings are ipso facto
independent of the Absolute, after inferring the existence
of that Absolute from the fact that ' things ' (in which
spiritual beings are presumably included, even if they do
not constitute the whole class) could not be independent.1
But it may be shown that verbal contradictions are not the
only nor the most serious flaws to be found in Lotze's
argument.

I. It is in the first place by no means clear that a
unity of things must be specially provided to account for
the fact that things act on one another. This necessity
only exists if the problem it is to solve is a valid one, i.e.
if the fact of interaction really requires explanation. If it
does not, there is no basis for any further argument.
And it may be plausibly contended that it does not.

For interaction is essential to the existence of the
world in a more fundamental manner than even Lotze
suggests. It is the. condition of there being a world at all.
Without it there could be no things, no plurality, and
hence no assemblage of things, no world. For each of
the possible constituents of a world, holding no sort of
communication with any other, would remain shut up in
itself. It is easy to illustrate this by showing that in
every case in which we predicate the coexistence of
several things, we imply that they, directly or indirectly,
act on one another. E.g. in the case of the gravitation
of all the bodies in the universe, the interaction is direct ;
in the case, e.g., of Hamlet and the Chimera it takes place
through the medium of a mind which connects them.
But interaction in some way there must be, if coexistence
is to be recognized. We may therefore confidently
affirm that without interaction there is no coexistence, and
without coexistence there is no world. The existence of

1 Lotze generally prefers to use ' unabhdngig' when proving that there must
be an all-embracing unity, ' selbstandig' when showing that the unity cannot
embrace the conscious centres of experience. But he sometimes, as e.g. in
Outlines of Philosophy of Religion, § 18, uses selbstandig also in the first case, so
that the verbal conflict is complete. The English translation obscures the point
by rendering selbstandig by ' self-dependent ' in § 98 and by ' independent in
§69-

F

66 HUMANISM iv

interaction is just as primary a fact as the existence of the
world itself, and the assertion that things act on one
another is, in Kant's phrasing, an ' analytical ' proposition,
which merely expands what was already asserted in
saying ' there is a world.'

But is this latter proposition one which requires
explanation ? Have we not learnt from Lotze himself1
that it is an improper question to ask why there should
be a world at all, since the given existence of the world
is the basis and presupposition of all our questionings ?
That has always seemed to me one of the most luminous
and valuable of Lotze's contributions to philosophy, and
if it is an error to attempt to derive the existence of the
world, it must be equally mistaken to derive the interaction
of the world's elements. For coexistence and interaction
have been shown to be equivalent.

The problem of interaction, therefore, disappears.
Or rather, it is merged in that of the existence of a
world in general of which it is a variant. And the
existence of a world is not a problem for philosophy.
There is not, then, on Lotze's principles any need to
recognize any unity of things other than that which
consists of their actual interactions. Having a plurality
of interacting things given it, our thought may distinguish
a unity implied in this, viz. the possibility of their
interaction. But this unity is not more real or more
valuable than the plurality, but less so. Nor can it be
extolled as the ground of all reality. It is merely an
ideal reflection of the actual. It does not assert more
than that when a thing is actual it must be conceived as
also possible, and in this case we are forbidden to pry
into the questions how either the actuality or the
possibility came about. So far from unity in this sense
therefore being a royal road to Monism, it is the common
ground which Monism shares with Pluralism ; nay, it is
the very fact which, by implying plurality, renders
possible the metaphysical doctrine that plurality is the
ultimate term of all real philosophic explanation.

1 E.g., Met. §§ 5 and 11, Trans, pp. 36, 46.

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 67

Similar conclusions may be extracted from Lotze's
theory of substantiality. He tells us (§ 37, Trans, p.
i oo) that the notion of a kernel of substance is a useless
superstition, that "it is not in virtue of a substance con
tained in them that things are, they are when they are
able to produce an appearance of there being a substance
in them." All this is excellent and most important. For
it marks the abandonment of the unknowable substrate
view of substance and the return to the older and truer
conception of Aristotle, that a thing is what it does,
that substance is actuality (evepyeia) and not potentiality
(SiW/u?).1 But presumably this declaration is applicable
also to "the single truly existing substance" (Trans. § 70,
p. 167), and we ought then to say 'it is not in virtue of
a single substance underlying them that things are ; they
are when they are able to produce the appearance of there
being such a substance.' In other words, we have no real
right to infer that there is a substantial One underlying
the interactions of the Many.2 The unity which is
involved as a conceptual possibility in the actual plurality
is a unity in the Many and of the Many, and must not
be hypostasized into anything transcendent or more truly
existent. If it is, the problem of the relations of the One
and the Many at once becomes insoluble, simply because
by calling it existent we are compelled to construe its
existence as analogous to that of the Many, which it
cannot be if its function is to be that of uniting the
Many. Is not then the necessity of the One as the
world-ground an illusion of the same order as that of an
underlying substance ? 3

It appears, then, that Lotze sets out to find a unity
which, on his own showing, he did not need to find, and
finds it in a way which conflicts with the implications of
his own doctrine of the self-evidence of the world's exist
ence and of his own view of substantiality.

II. In tracing the further development of Lotze's

1 See the essay on Activity and Substance, §§1,7.

2 Cp. p. 224, note.

* Cp. Kiddies of the Sphinx, ch. x.

68 HUMANISM

IV

conception of the Unity of Things, the point of capital
importance is the process whereby the unity becomes
hypostasized into a real existence superior to the plurality
which it unites. To explain interaction there is only
needed a unity in the Many, not a One creating and
embracing the Many, a union, not a unit. And, as we
have seen, this union does not need explanation. Lotze,
I however, having failed to see that in its general and
' abstract form the possibility of causation needs not to be
deduced, has to reject transeunt action as inexplicable
and to try to substitute immanent action in its place.
We are accordingly told that the interactions of things
become intelligible when regarded as the ways in which
the Absolute changes its states. The question as to why
it is intrinsically a more intelligible conception that a
being should change its own states rather than those of
another is not raised in this connexion. We are merely
told that de facto we do not " scruple about accepting it
as a given fact" (§ 68, Trans, p. 164). Yet in § 46
Lotze had clearly seen that while we treat " this immanent
operation, which develops state out of state within one
and the same essential being, as a matter of fact calling
for no further effort of thought," " this operation in its turn
remains completely incomprehensible in respect of the
manner in which it comes about." " We acquiesce in the
notion of immanent operation, not as though we had any
insight into its genesis, but because we feel no hindrance
to recognizing it without question as a given fact." Does
not this pretty decisively admit that the superior in
telligibility of immanent as compared with transeunt
action is not logical but merely psychological, and due to
the familiarity with it which we seem to find in our own
inner experience ?

But is it permissible to argue that because immanent
action passes unchallenged in our own case it should
therefore do so likewise in the case of the Absolute ?

Perhaps we shall be able to decide this when we have
analysed the reasons why it seems natural to us that one
state of our consciousness should be followed by another.

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 69

Let us ask then why we should change. This question
may be taken in two senses, according as the stress is
laid on the ' we ' or on the ' change.' In the first case
the question will refer to the preservation of identity in
immanent change, and can be answered only by an appeal
to inner experience. That Av A2, A3 are all states of A
is in our own case based on our feeling of our continuity
and identity. We can change, because we are conscious
beings with a feeling of our identity. But in so far as
we have here the ground for our easy acceptance of the
conception of immanent action, it is evidently inapplicable
to the Absolute. We can neither feel the Absolute's
continuity like our own, nor even infer it like other
people's on the analogy of our own. For if the Absolute
can be conceived as conscious at all, its consciousness
would differ radically from ours in that it would be all-
embracing, not merely in the sense of having representa
tions of all things within it, but in the sense of actually
being and feeling the inner and unique continuity of each
thing.

If, secondly, we ask why we change, instead of remaining
as we are, our common reason seems unhesitatingly to
answer, either because we are stimulated from without, or
because our psychical condition is disequilibrated, is one
of unsatisfied desire, so that we long to change it. In
neither case do we consider ourselves subject to unprovoked
and capricious changes. In the first case, immanent change
in ourselves distinctly presupposes transeunt action upon
us from without and consists only of our self-maintenance
against such action. In the second case there is pre
supposed a defect of nature which puts a good we desire
beyond our reach. But in the Absolute immanent change
can be explained in neither of these ways. There is
nothing outside it to stimulate it to self-maintenance.
Nor can we not rashly ascribe to an Absolute which is to
have any religious value an essential want or defect in its
nature. The very considerations, therefore, that render
immanent action intelligible in our own case are utterly
unthinkable in the Absolute's ; the very reasons which

70 HUMANISM iv

render it natural that we should change render it
very unreasonable that the Absolute should. If it does
change, both the fact and the manner of that change must
remain wholly inexplicable facts. And if transeunt action
be a mystery, immanent action in the Absolute is not
only as great a mystery, but, in addition, comes very near
to being an absurdity.

Taking next the argument from commensurability
(Met. § 69), I cannot see either that it validly leads to
any conclusion at all, or to the conclusion Lotze desires.
It argues from the fact that all things are comparable or
commensurable to a ground of this commensurability. If
all things had been quite incommensurable, like, e.g.t
sweet and red, there would have been no principle of
connexion between them. There would have been no
reason to expect the consequence F from the relation of
two incommensurables A and B, rather than any other.
For that relation would have been the same as that of A
to M or B to N or M to N. Hence there would be no
reason for any definite connexion whatever. Commensur
ability, therefore, being a fact, its origin from a single root
in the permanent immanence of the elements of the world
in one being is rendered probable.

Now this argument seems to lack cogency. Its
very statement seems defective, and involves an ' un
distributed middle ' in arguing from the common incom
mensurability of the relation of A to B and of M to N to
their identity, in spite of the fact that incommensurables
may be very various. And even if we overlooked this,
the logical inference from the supposition that every pair
of the world's elements stood in the same relation would
seem to be not to a world of a chaotic and infinite variety,
but to one of eternal monotony, in which whatever com
bination of elements was tried the same consequence
always ensued !

Nor, looking at the matter more broadly, can I see
that commensurability proves anything. In a very general
sense it must, of course, be granted ; for if the elements
of a proposed universe had turned out to be absolutely

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 71

incommensurable, no world could have resulted. There
cannot, therefore, be any things strictly incommensurable
in the world, — even red, sweet, and loud are comparable
at least as sensations, — and it is mere tautology to say
that the elements forming a world must have been com
mensurable to form a world. Nor does this carry us
beyond the possibility of interaction which we saw was
implied in actual plurality.

Moreover, it would seem that by arguing from the
existence of commensurability to a source of commensur-
ability Lotze rendered his argument obnoxious to an
objection which he elsewhere admits to be valid. The
course of his argument here runs parallel to that of the
old teleological argument, which has been so successfully
challenged by Darwinism.1 The teleological argument in
biology proceeded from the given existence of adaptation
in structure to an intelligent source of that adaptation
— i.e. it argued from an adaptation to an adapter. But
Darwinism seemed to show that the same result might
occur without supposing any original and pre-existent
fitness of structure, merely by the survival of better
adapted structures. As against this objection Lotze
admits that the old teleology loses its demonstrative force :
he admits (Phil, of Religion, § 1 1 s. f.) that the completely
automatic origin even of the most perfectly adapted
system is not impossible, but only improbable, and that
it is not unthinkable (ibid. § 1 2 s. f.) that an original Chaos
should develop itself into a purposively ordered nature.

But if so, a logical extension of the same argument
would seem to be fatal to Lotze's position here. Why
should not the initial commensurability of the elements
of the world itself have arisen by a process of natural
selection similar to that which has guided its subsequent
development? Given the necessary conditions, and the
argument seems to work equally well. Just as in the
biological field it presupposed the possibility of indefinite
variation in all directions, so here in ontology it might,
it seems, suppose an indefinite multitude of elements of

1 See, however, the essay on Darwinism and Design.

72 HUMANISM

IV

possible worlds, some commensurable, the immensely
greater number not. If so, it would be possible to con
ceive the world as constituting itself out of a fortuitous
concourse of the atoms which happened to be congruous
or commensurable, while those which were not would
simply stay out, and appear in the actual results as little
as the countless variations which did not survive. In
both cases the essence of the argument would be the
same, and consist in destroying the unique peculiarity of
the actual result by regarding it as one out of an indefinite
number of possible results. Against the atheism thus
implicit in the Darwinian method Lotze's argument seems
to afford no adequate protection. He cannot show that
the inference he draws to an underlying unity of the
world is the only one conceivable. The supposed origin
of a commensurable world out of an indefinite number of
commensurable and incommensurable elements is thinkable.

Whether, to be sure, it is also tenable is another
question, which, personally, I would answer by a strenuous
negative. For if the immense majority of things were
really incommensurable with us and our world, they would
be unknowable. Hence we could have no positive ground
for affirming their existence. And we have no right to
affirm unknowables merely for the sake of discrediting
the known. Hence this bare possibility could not, to my
mind, be actually propounded as an explanation of the
order of nature, nor held to detract from the purposiveness
we actually find there. But this protest does not help
Lotze ; the bare possibility of thinking such a process is
enough to set aside his contention that his own solution
is alone conceivable.1 His argument moved wholly in
the region of abstract metaphysics, and as an abstract
possibility the Darwinian plea seems just as sound. We
may not have the right to apply it to our actual world,
but Lotze's argument is in no better case.

Altogether, then, it would seem as if ' not proven ' was
the most lenient verdict that could be passed on Lotze's
derivation of the Unity of Things.

1 Cp. Microc. ii. p. 598.

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 73

III. But what shall we say of the metaphysical value
of this conception in the explanation of things ?

(1) It has already been shown that it does nothing to
solve the problem of Causation and to relieve the difficulty
Lotze discovers in the action of things on one another.

(2) Does it explain, then, the orderly succession of
events ? Lotze labours hard to show this. He regards
the changes of the world as being so ordered by the
Absolute as to preserve at each moment the unchanging
self-identity of the Absolute, the equation M=M, and to
give " a new identical expression of the same meaning,"
in a harmony which is " not pre-established, but which at
each moment reproduces itself through the power of the
one existence." This hypothetical meaning of the Absolute
has to explain all the peculiarities about the succession
of events which Lotze finds in the world and all those he
wishes to find. Nor, obviously, is it possible to gainsay
him so long as that meaning is admitted to be inscrutable.
One can protest only that an inscrutable meaning is no
better than none at all. But for all that I would contend
that the introduction of the Absolute had made events
not easier to understand but harder. At first indeed it
might seem, as Lotze argues (Met. § 72), that when one
thing in the world changes, the rest must maintain the
identical meaning of the world by counterbalancing
changes. But what if we raise the question why anything
should change at all ?

(3) It will appear, I think, that no rational case is
made out for the existence of change at all. The
conception of the Absolute in itself contains no suggestion
of change. Its sole aim, apparently, is to keep on
affirming its own identity in an eternal tautology, and
why it should pretend to change in doing this remains
unintelligible. The only thing we know about it, viz.
the unchanging identity of the meaning it preserves in
the world, distinctly suggests an equal immutability for
the expression of that meaning. Thus the fact of change
has to be accepted as empirically characteristic of the
Absolute, but it is rendered more unintelligible by the

74 HUMANISM iv

assertion that all the changing aspects of things always
mean one and the same thing.

(4) The belief that the world has a meaning, that
the riddle of life has an answer, has always been the
common inspiration of religious, philosophic, and scientific
minds. To be disabused of it would plunge us into the
deepest abyss of negation where scepticism fraternizes
with pessimism. Hence it is at first reassuring to hear
Lotze speaking so emphatically of the meaning of the
universe as the supreme law which determines the suc
cession of events. It is not until one attempts to work
out the conception in connexion with his Absolute, that
one is regretfully forced to the conclusion that the
meaning of the universe is really unmeaning.

Lotze tells us that the meaning of the Absolute has
to be maintained against the changes set up, we know
not how, in its parts. That is the reason why B follows
on A in orderly succession. But how can any action of
the parts of the whole conceivably imperil the identical
meaning of the whole ? They have not a irov <TT£>
outside the universe whence they could break in upon
its order and affect its meaning or value. And if these
could be in any way jeopardized, why should not any
means be as competent to re-establish the equation
M — Ma.s any other ? Why should not C or X or Y follow
as effectively on A as B ? Where there is absolute choice
of means, unvarying order becomes inexplicable. One
would expect rather an agreeably various or sportively
miraculous succession of events. Thus the introduction
of an Absolute, on which no laws are binding, because
it makes them all, really leaves the order of the world
at the mercy of a principle which for ever threatens to
reduce it to Chaos.

Nay, more ; neither the existences nor the changes
of the world can have any meaning if they are absolutely
dependent on the Absolute, and are merely instruments
in the expression of its ' identical meaning.' That
meaning may be expressed by one thing as well as by
another, it may be preserved by one variation as surely

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 75

as by another. Thus both events and existences lose
all special significance and intrinsic relation to the supposed
meaning. The same holds true of the past of the world
with respect to its subsequent course. The caprice of
the Absolute cannot be controlled even by its own past.

(5) The foregoing will have shown, I hope, that
Lotze was not very successful in avoiding the besetting
sin of all Monism, whenever it is sincerely scrutinized,
viz. that of reducing the Many to mere phantoms, whose
existence is otiose and impotent. But a disregard of
the practical absurdities that might result from too rigid
a theory was not one of Lotze's weaknesses, and so when
we come to the last sections of his ontology we find him
saving the significance of the Many by a volte-face
which is assuredly more creditable to his heart than to
his head. He recognizes that beings which are merely
immanent in the Absolute have no raison d'etre, and so
denies the existence of things. Spiritual beings, on the
other hand, in virtue of their consciousness, detach
themselves from and step out of the Absolute ; they stand
as it were on their own feet and become independent
members of the cosmos. I heartily agree ; but I am at
a loss how to reconcile this with the previous course of
his argument. What use was there in emphasizing the
one ground of all existence, if finally everybody that is
anybody is to escape and ' detach ' himself from the
underlying unity of the Absolute ? Doubtless Lotze's
doctrine is here completely in accord with the facts,
doubtless it is true, as Professor Pringle Pattison says,
that a spiritual being preserves its own centre even in
its dealings with the Deity ; no doubt also Lotze's
own doctrine required such quasi-independent spirits to
provoke Providence by the freaks of their free will and
to generate the necessary friction in order to make the
Absolute's maintenance of its identical meaning something
more than child's play ; but how is the incomprehensible
feat accomplished ?

The points mentioned should, I believe, suffice to prove
my contention that the Absolute is not a principle of

76 HUMANISM

IV

explanation that has any scientific or philosophic value.
It resolves no difficulties, it aggravates many, it creates
some of an utterly insoluble character. And by undoing
his own work in the case of conscious beings and insisting
on detaching them from his Absolute, Lotze himself may
be considered to have afforded practical confirmation of
this view.

IV. It remains to discuss the identification of the Unity
of Things with the Deity. In the Outlines of the PJtilosophy
of Religion Lotze accepts the Unity of Things which
renders interaction possible as the basis of the conception
of God, thereby making his metaphysical argument his
means of proving the existence of God. One might have
expected him therefore to go on to develop the conse
quences of this conception and to show how they agreed
with the religious notions on the subject. This is not,
however, what Lotze actually does. He makes no attempt
to show that the Unity of Things, as discovered by
metaphysics, must be susceptible of the religious predicates,
must be conceived as personal, holy, just, and wise, nor
that these attributes may be empirically inferred from the
manner in which the Absolute unites the universe. Instead
of this, he contents himself with entitling his second chapter
' Further Determinations of the Absolute/ and then goes
on to prove that God cannot rightly be conceived as other
than spiritual and personal. Now against the contents of
this chapter I have not a word to say ; his argument in
it seems to me most admirable and cogent. What I do
wish to protest against is the way in which he shifts his
ground, is the per d/3 avis et? aXXo 761/05 which his method
at this point involves. For instead of developing a
metaphysical conception, he here passes over to a criticism
of popular conceptions of and objections to the nature of
the Deity, and these are in every case disposed of by
arguments which have nothing to do with the Absolute's
function of unifying the world. Thus the spirituality of
God is proved by showing that materialism is inadequate
and dualism sterile ; His personality, by showing that
while no analogy in our experience justifies conceptions

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 77

like those of an unconscious reason or impersonal spirit,
our own personality is so imperfect that perfect personality
is capable of forming an ideal which can be attributed to
the Deity. But what has all this to do with the Unity of
Things ? Such arguments are quite independent of his
metaphysical monism, and are not brought into any logical
connexion with it merely by calling the Unity of Things
God. It would have been far more to the purpose to
show how the Unity of Things could be personal and
moral. But this is what no monist ever succeeds in doing.
1 would contend, then, that just as the hypostasization
of the Unity of Things was unnecessary in the Metaphysics,
so its deification is unnecessary in the Philosophy of
Religion. Not even for monotheistic religions is there
any necessary transition from the assertion of one Absolute
to that of one God. For the unity of the Godhead in
monotheism is primarily directed against the disorders of
polytheism, and intended to safeguard the unity of plan
and operation in the Divine governance of the world ; it
cannot be equated with the unity of the Absolute, unless
the conceptions of plan and guidance are applicable to
the latter. But this is just what we have seen they are
not : the Absolute could have no plan and could guide
nothing ; its unity therefore has no religious value.

The reason, then, for this hiatus in Lotze's argumenta
tion is simply this, that an Absolute is not a God and
that none of the Divine attributes can be extracted from
it. Hence Lotze must perforce derive them from con
siderations of a different kind.

V. In the sequel, moreover, this derivation of the Deity
from the metaphysical unity of things is for the most part
ignored, and the interesting discussions in which Lotze
elucidates the nature of the fundamental religious concep
tions presuppose nothing but the traditional conceptions
and historically given problems of religious philosophy.
Throughout the whole of this most valuable part of Lotze's
book (§§ 21-70) I cannot find that he expresses any
opinion rendered logically necessary by his doctrine of
the Absolute, while there seem to be several, e.g., the

78 HUMANISM

IV

defence of Free Will, which accord with it but badly. As
already stated, Lotze cannot dispense with this conception
in order to uphold the conception of a Divine governance,
which re-establishes the ' identical meaning ' of the world
against the disturbances due to free actions. And it is
in this way that he explains the fact that the world
exhibits a succession of phases, all of which, we are
required to believe, mean one and the same thing. But
the reflection is obvious that these ' free ' actions also
are included in the Absolute, and that their existence is
one of its given characteristics. Metaphysically, therefore,
we have to say that the Absolute is subject to these un
caused perturbations, which exhibit its internal instability.
It is this inner instability which is the ultimate ground
for change, and the question which in the Metaphysics
(§ 83) Lotze tried so hard to put aside, viz. as to the
reason why the Absolute is in motion, returns with renewed
force. Lotze had there contended that the motion must
be accepted as a fact and its direction likewise. But can
the kind of motion be similarly accepted ? We may not
in ordinary life require an explanation when we see a
man walking in the usual fashion, but when we see him
staggering along as though about to fall and only just
preserving his equilibrium, we think that such a mode of
progression requires an explanation, and probably put it
down to alcohol. Yet this somewhat undignified simile,
si parva licet componere magnis, exactly expresses the
characteristic motion of the Absolute according to Lotze.
The world is ever recovering the equilibrium which is
constantly endangered ; it maintains itself in a constant
struggle against the consequences of its own inner in
stability. And what we call Evil is merely one of the
incidents of the struggle. If then it were true that the
motion of the world required no explanation, it would be
equally true that the evil of the world required none.
But this is not only a conclusion monstrous in itself, but
one by no means accepted by Lotze. He admits that
the problem of Evil is a real one, and only regrets the
failure of all the solutions proffered. But of this more

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 79

anon. At present I content myself with noting that
though the admission of Free Will affords a logical ground
for the conception of a Divine guidance and providence,
it re-arouses scruples about the Absolute which had only
with difficulty been quieted.

It is not until we come to § 71 that the Unity of
Things intervenes again in Lotze's discussion, and then it
intervenes with disastrous effect. For it is appealed to
only to refute the attempt to account for the existence of
Evil by the limitations of the divine activity by the original
nature of the world's constituents. But, Lotze remarks, if
so, it would be necessary to assume a second superior
deity in order to account for the action of the first upon
such a world. And if we admit that the Deity is to be
identified with the unity which makes interaction possible,
it must be admitted that his objection is quite sound. But
with this rejection of a Deity who can have an intelligent
purpose, and a need to guide the course of the world,
just because he is not unlimited in the choice of his
means, vanishes the last hope of solving the problem
of Evil.

The magnitude of this problem and the futility of all
the solutions he mentions is quite frankly confessed by
Lotze both in Philosophy of Religion (§§ 70-74) and in the
Microcosm ( Trans, ii. pp. 716 ff.). He admits that
pessimistic inferences might quite well be drawn from this
failure of philosophy, and does not believe that pessimism
can theoretically be refuted. But pessimism is merely a
cheap and easy way of getting rid of the problem, and he
himself prefers to cling to the belief in a solution he can
not see, and to persevere in a search which is nobler and
more difficult Thus in Lotze also knowledge finally has
to take shelter with faith and to return dejected to the
home whence it set out with such sanguine hopes of
making clear the riddle of existence. Lotze's language is
certainly frank enough, and if frankness were all that is
needed his honest declaration of his insolvency might be
condoned. But one has a right to expect that a philo
sopher whose arguments lead him into such manifest

8o HUMANISM

IV

bankruptcy should be prompted thereby to re-examine
and possibly to revise his premisses ; and this Lotze fails
to do. The suspicion that the nature of the Absolute
which he has identified with the Deity may have something
to do with the lamentable failure of his attempts to
account for Evil never seems to enter his mind. The
conclusions of his philosophy may be in the most patent
conflict with the facts, but so much the worse for the facts.
We are bidden to have faith in the impossible, if necessary,
and pessimism is waved aside with a sneer as being too
easy and obvious.

Now that a writer ordinarily so sympathetic as Lotze
should have acquiesced in so flimsy a theodicy shows, I
think, the desperate straits to which he was reduced, and
seriously detracts from the value of his religious philosophy.
I am very far from denying that an element of faith must
enter into our ultimate convictions about the world ; for
whoever admits the reality of Evil and the possibility of
its elimination thereby declares his faith in an ideal which
is not yet realized. But surely we have a right to demand
that our intellect should only be required to believe in a
solution which it does not see, not in one which it sees to
be impossible. Now the nature of faith is of the latter
sort on Lotze's theory, as we shall see and as he all but
admits. It may be meritorious to attempt what is difficult,
but it is mere folly to attempt the impossible. Very few,
therefore, whether pessimists or otherwise, are likely to be
attracted by Lotze's ' faith.' And his sneer at pessimism
is a little ungenerous. Pessimism may be cheap and easy
and obvious intellectually. That is an excellent reason
for meeting it with the strongest, most comprehensible
and obvious arguments we can, — to prevent simpler minds
from falling into it. But pessimism is assuredly not a
cheap and easy view to hold emotionally. The burden of
most lives is so heavy that none can desire to crush them
selves down utterly by dwelling on the futility and worth-
lessness of it all. No one, therefore, is willingly a pessimist :
every one would fain believe in a more inspiriting view.
But all the encouragement Lotze gives is that pessimism

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 81

is theoretically tenable and any other view is extremely
difficult !

Yet he is quite right ; that is all the encouragement he
is able to give. He cannot account for the existence of
Evil ; he cannot deny that it conflicts utterly with hig:
conception of God. For he has from the very first scorned
the common philosophic device of calling God a powej-
which has no moral attributes or preferences. His Gocj
is intended to be theistic and not a mere cloak forf
pantheism. Yet by identifying God with the Absolute]
he inevitably opens the way for this very kind of pantheism.'
Once equate God with the totality of existence, and no!
one can understand how there can be in the All art
element which is alien to the All. All the phases of
existence, therefore, are alike characteristic of the All;
God is evil as well as good, or better still, non-moral and
indifferent, manifesting himself in all things alike. But
this conception, to which its premisses irresistibly drive
Lotze's argument, no less than every other form of Monism,
is certainly neither the God of what is commonly under
stood as religion, nor can it do the work of one. It is as
impotent as a practical power as it was sterile as a
theoretical principle. Its sole value would seem to have
been to have drawn attention to certain incompatibilities
and inconsistencies in the existing conception of the Deity.

And the importance of this service should not lightly
be disparaged. If Lotze's careful, candid, and yet sym
pathetic examination failed to clear away the incompati
bilities alluded to, we may be sure that others will not
succeed, and that it is time to consider whether the
requirements both of religion and of philosophy may not
be better met by a different conception of the Deity.
We must not be tempted by the ease with which an
(unmeaning) Absolute is arrived at to accept it in lieu of
the more difficult demonstration of a real God. And I
believe that a clearer conception of the Deity, more clearly
differentiated from the All of things, could not fail also to
be of the greatest practical value. At present the con
ception of the Deity is not clearly defined ; it melts away

G

82 HUMANISM

IV

into mist at various points ; it requires a certain ' atmo
sphere ' to be perceived. But a God who requires an
' atmosphere ' has to be kept at a certain distance by his
worshippers, and so is conducive neither to intimacy of
communion nor to robustness of faith. This, however,
is a line of thought I must leave to theologians to work
out.

The general philosophical conclusion which I would
draw from Lotze's lack of success in defining the con
ception of God is that of the futility of the a priori
proofs of God's existence. Their common weakness lies
in their being far too abstract. They are in consequence
applicable to the conception of a universe as such and
not to our particular world. Thus the ontological proof
argues that there must be a God from the fact that
there is a world at all ; the cosmological, from the fact of
causation taken in the abstract : the physico-theological,
even, is made to argue quite generally from order to a
designer thereof. Lotze's proof from interaction is of
an exactly similar character. It argues generally and
abstractly from the existence of interaction to a ground
of interaction. It is, in fact, a form of the ontological
proof, since interaction is the presupposition of there
being a world at all.

Now the flaw in all these arguments is the same.
They fail because they attempt to prove too much. If
they hold at all, they hold quite generally and are
applicable to any sort of a world. In any world we
could argue from its existence to a God, from its change
to a First Cause, from its arrangement to a designer,
from its interaction to a single ground of its possibility ;
the argument is in each case quite unaffected by the
nature of the world about which it is used. It follows
that the God derived by such an argument must
similarly be catholic in his applicability and indifferent
to the contents of the world. The best and the worst of
thinkable worlds must alike have God for their cause and
for the ground of their interaction. The inference from
the world to God would be equally good, therefore, in

iv LOTZE'S MONISM 83

Heaven and in Hell. The deity, therefore, inferred by
this mode of argumentation must be essentially indifferent
to moral distinctions, and this is the ultimate reason why
the attempt to ascribe moral attributes to him in the end
invariably breaks down. In Lotze's case, e.g., the world
would just as much imply a God whether its interactions
were perfectly harmonious or utterly discordant ; and God,
therefore, cannot be conceived as a principle deciding
which of these thinkable cases is to be realized.

Now all this is not at all what we wanted the proofs
of God's existence to do. We did not want a proof
which held good in all thinkable universes, but one
which should hold in our actual given world, and give us
an assurance that whatever might be the misfortunes of
possible universes, there was in our actual world a power
able and willing to direct its course. But this the ' proofs '
haughtily declined to do ; they mocked us instead with
characterless deities ' for application to any universe.'
Yet there is not, at least in the case of the cosmological
and physico - theological proofs, any reason why they
should not be given a specific application. On the contrary,
a much stronger argument can be made for assuming a
cause and beginning of its motion for our existing order
of things than for ' a universe ' as such, for interpreting
the actual order and development of our world by an
intelligent purpose than a mere order in the abstract.
Even the ontological proof, if we adopt Lotze's version of
its real meaning (Phil, of Religion, § 6), may be given
a more pointed reference by making it express the con
viction that the totality of the True and the Good and
the Beautiful must be provided with a home in our world.

Thus the objections to all the proofs may be obviated
by making them proofs a posteriori, and basing them, not
on the nature of existence in the abstract, but on the
nature of our empirical world. The same might be done
also with the argument from interaction : it might be
claimed that the peculiar nature of the interaction of
things was such that a single underlying existence might
be inferred in our case, although in general a unity in the

84 HUMANISM iv

Many was alone needed. And indeed Lotze comes very-
near at times to seeing that this was the proper method
of proving the unity of things, as, e.g., when (Met. §§85,
90) he insists that his Absolute is never actual as an
abstract form which subsequently receives a content, but
always has a perfectly determinate and concrete value.
But if so, why did he use such perfectly abstract
arguments in order to prove its existence ? Why did he
not derive the Absolute in its concreteness from the
concrete facts in which it manifests itself? Had he done
so, he would have disarmed most of the above criticism
and would have closed the road to many a misconception
and many a difficulty. It would have been needless to
ask, e.g., why the Absolute should be in motion, for in
arriving at it we should have had to state the reason not
only for the motion but also for its amount and direction.
Again, it would have been superfluous to puzzle ourselves
as to how the One united the Many ; for it would have
been as a definite mode of combining the Many that we
should have found the One.

No doubt such methods of discovering first principles
are less easy, less sweeping, and therefore less attractive ;
the philosopher moves more smoothly in a cloudland
where he can manipulate abstractions which seem to
assume whatever shape he wills. But the philosophic
interpretation of the concrete experiences of life is far
safer and, in the end, more satisfying. And whatever the
defects of his own practice, it is to Lotze as much as to
any one that we owe the conviction that even the most
imposing castles which philosophers have builded in
the air have had no other source than the experience of
the actual whence to draw their materials and their
inspiration.

NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY AND THE
KANTIAN A PRIORI1

ARGUMENT

Importance of geometry as a type of philosophic method, and consequently of
the metageometrical ideas. I. Fallacy of the fourth-dimension analogy.
Non-Euclidean three dimensional ' spaces,' come with Euclidean under
the genus of general geometry. They form coherent and thinkable
systems analogous to Euclid's, but so far not useful because too com
plicated. II. I^ecessity of distinguishing between perceptual and
conceptual spaces. Geometrical spaces all alike conceptual constructions,
~" and the physical world not ' in ' any one of them. III. Philosophic im
portance of this. The ' certainty of geometry ' not peculiar, but
identical with the logical necessity of consistent assumptions elsewhere.
The real validity of geometry empirical and = its usefulness when
applied. Universality and necessity of geometrical judgments as results
of postulation. Kant's account of space vitiated by his failure to observe
the ambiguities of the term.

FROM the days of Pythagoras and Plato down to those
of Kant and Herbart the mathematical sciences, and
especially geometry, have played so important a part in
the discussions of philosophers as models of method and
patterns of certitude, that philosophy cannot but be
extremely sensitive to any change or progress occurring
in the views of mathematicians. Accordingly the philo
sophic world was considerably startled, not so many years
ago, to hear that certain mathematicians and physicists
had had the audacity to question the assumptions con-

1 From the Philosophical Review of March 1896, since when the subject has
not, of course, stood still. I am painfully aware that as an account of meta-
geometry this paper is quite inadequate, but as students of philosophy are still
obfuscated with the mystical mathematics of metaphysicians, and as the capital
importance of the distinction of perceptual and conceptual space is still ignored,
even so slight a treatment may retain some pedagogical value.

85

86 HUMANISM v

cerning the nature of Space, which had been consecrated
by the tradition of 2000 years and set forth in the
geometry of Euclid. The possibilities of non-Euclidean
spaces, which were as yet necessarily ill-defined and ill-
understood, promptly attracted the adherents of all views
for which orthodox science appeared to have no room,
and no notion seemed too fantastic to become credible, if
not intelligible, in space of four or more dimensions.
The mathematicians themselves, who were engaged in
elaborating the new conceptions, were too busy or too
uncertain of their ground to resist successfully this
inundation of extravagance, and the consequent discredit
into which the subject fell seems to have killed the
general interest in it everywhere but in France. Mean
while mathematicians proceeded quietly with the work of
analysing the new conceptions and of testing them by
deducing their consequences, and thereby reached a clearer
consciousness of their import. The result has been that
saner views have begun to prevail, and that the sensational
features of the new geometry have been mitigated or
eliminated. The question has become arguable without the
opposing champions considering each other respectively
unintelligible cranks or unimaginative stick-in-the-muds.
Not but what the rhapsodical view still periodically finds
expression in print,1 but the tendency of the interesting
exchange of opinions which has been going on for the
last few years in the French philosophical and scientific
journals between MM. Delbceuf, Renouvier, Poincare,
Calinon, Lechalas, De Broglie, etc., seems to me to be
decidedly in the direction of agreement based upon a
retreat from extreme and extravagant positions on either
side. In other words, the blare of trumpets which
announced and advertized the arrival of the new claimant
to scientific recognition is over, the pachydermatous ears
of the established conservatism have recovered from the
shock, and preparations are being made to assign to the
newcomer a definite place in the array of the sciences.
The time then seems to be becoming opportune for

1 E.g. , Monist, iv. p. 483.

v NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY 87

attempting to summarize some of the results of this
controversy, with a view to (a) bringing out the most
important points established by the new ' metageometry/
(b} considering what light they throw on the nature of
Space, (c) estimating what changes will have to be made
in the references to geometry which philosophers have
been so addicted to making. It is indeed possible that
the attempt is still premature, that the parties are still too
bitter to be completely reconciled, that the subject is still
too inchoate and chaotic for its full significance to be
determined. In that case the present writer would
console himself with the reflection that his efforts can at
least do no harm, and may possibly even do good by
inducing philosophers to revise their antiquated notions
concerning the meaning of the conception of ' Space.'

I. I shall begin, therefore, by referring to a point which
the metageometers do not seem to have satisfactorily
established, and that is the value of the conception of a
fourth dimension. I say advisedly ' of the conception,'
for the actual existence, or even the possibility of
imagining, a fourth dimension seems to have been
practically given up. The chief value of the conception
seems nowadays to be situated in the possibility of
making symmetrical solids coincide by revolving them in
a fourth dimension. But this seems a somewhat slender
basis on which to found the conception of a fourth
dimension, and the same end could apparently l also be
achieved by means of the conception of a ' spherical '
space. Here then, probably, is the reason why of late
the fourth dimension has not been so prominent in the
forefront of the battle, and why its place has, with a great
advance in intelligibility, been taken by spherical and
pseudo-spherical three-dimensional ' space.'

It is on rendering these latter thinkable that the non-
Euclideans have concentrated their efforts, and, so far as I
can judge, they have, in a large measure, been successful.
It has been shown that Euclidean geometry may, nay,
logically must, be regarded as a special case of general

1 Cp. Delboeuf, Rev. Phil. xix. 4.

88 HUMANISM v

geometry, and as logically on a par with spherical and
pseudo-spherical geometry. It is a species of a genus,
and the differentia which constitutes it is the famous
' postulate of Euclid/ which Euclid postulated because he
could not prove it, and which the failures of all his
successors have only brought into clearer light as an
indispensable presupposition. The non-Euclideans, on
the other hand, have shown that it does not require proof,
because it embodies the definition of the sort of space
dealt with by ordinary geometry ; and that in both of its
equivalent forms, whether as the axiom of parallels or of
the equality of the angles of a triangle to two right angles,
it forms a special case intermediate between that of spherical
and that of pseudo-spherical space. In spherical space
nothing analogous to the Euclidean parallels is to be
found ; in pseudo-spherical space, on the other hand,
not one, but two ' parallels ' may be drawn through any
point. So while spherical triangles always have their
angles greater than two right angles, the pseudo-spherical
triangles always have them less than two right angles.
Moreover, the Euclidean case can always be reached by
supposing the ' parameter ' of the non-Euclidean spaces
infinitely large. So much for the possibility of a general
geometry, including the Euclidean amongst others.

It has also, I think, been shown that the non-Euclidean
geometries would form coherent and consistent systems,
like the Euclidean, in which an indefinite number of
propositions might be shown to follow from their initial
definitions. They are, that is to say, thoroughly thinkable
and free from contradiction, and intellectually on a level
with the Euclidean conception of space. They are
thinkable, — but (as yet) no more ; and this explains their
defence against the two objections upon which their more
unprejudiced opponents incline to lay most stress. It is
objected (i) that there is, e.g., no such thing as a spherical
space, only a spherical surface. True ; but there is nothing
to prevent us from conceiving the peculiar properties of a
spherical surface as pervading every portion of the space
it bounds. We can conceive a spherical surface of a

v NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY 89

constant curvature making up the texture of space, just as
well as the Euclidean plane surface. This intrinsic texture
would produce uniform and calculable deformation or
' crinkling ' in all bodies immersed in it, and these might
conceivably be aware of this deformation as they moved
in a non-Euclidean space, just as they are now aware of
the direction of their movements. In the ' Euclidean '
case the homogeneity of Space is entire in all respects,
in the spherical only in some. It is argued (2) that meta-
geometry is dependent on Euclidean geometry, because it
is reached only through the latter. But it is not clear
that it may not be logically independent, even though
historically it has developed out of Euclidean geometry,
and even though psychologically the latter affords the
simplest means of representing spatial images. And it
has become clear that both the conception of a ' manifold '
and that of a ' general ' space admitting of specific
determinations is logically prior to that of Euclidean
space.

Theoretically, then, metageometry seems to be able
to give a very good account of itself. But it must be
confessed that this at present only accentuates its practical
failure. It is admitted that Euclidean geometry yields the
simplest formulas for calculating spatial relations, and even
M. Calinon x hardly ventures to hope that non-Euclidean
formulas will be found serviceable. Metageometers

0 CU_t..«-*«-vO

mostly confine themselves to supposing imaginary worlds, |
of which the laws would naturally suggest a non-Euclidean
formulation.2 In short, practically the supremacy of the
old geometry remains incontestable, because of its greater t- u r
simplicity and consequent facility of application.

II. I pass on to the second question, the light thrown
by non-Euclidean geometry on the nature of Space. In
this respect incomparably its most important achievement
seems to have been to force upon all the distinction
between perceptual and conceptual space, or rather spaces.
On this point both parties are at one, and we find, e.g.,

1 Rev. Phil, xviii. 12.

2 E.g. , M. Poincar6, Rev. de MM. iii. 6, pp. 641 ff.

90 HUMANISM v

M. Delbceuf1 and M. Poincar6 2 stating the characteristics
of Euclidean space and its fundamental distinction from
perceptual space in almost identical terms. The former is
one, empty, homogeneous, continuous, infinite, infinitely
divisible, identical, invariable ; the latter is many, filled,
heterogeneous, continuous only for perception (if the
atomic view of matter holds), probably finite, not infinitely
divisible and variable. Both sides agree that our physical
world is neither in Euclidean nor in non-Euclidean space,
both of which are conceptual abstractions ; their dispute
is merely as to which furnishes the proper method for
calculating spatial phenomena.3 Thus all the geometrical
spaces are grounded on the same experience of physical
space, which they interpret and idealize differently, while
seeking to simplify and systematize it by means of the
various postulates which define them.

But if conceptual and perceptual space are so different,
have they anything in common but the name ? If the
former are abstracted from the latter, upon what principles
and by what methods does the abstraction proceed ?

I conceive the answer to this important question to be,
by the same methods as those by which ' real ' or physical
space is developed out of the psychological spaces. For,
as M. Poincare4 well shows, we form our notion of real
space by fusing together the data derived from visual,
tactile, and motor sensations. That fusion is largely
accomplished by ignoring the differences between their
several deliverances and by correcting the appearances to
one sense by another, in such a manner as to give the
most complete and trustworthy perception of the object.
We manipulate the data of the senses in order to perceive
things (in ' real ' space), and at a higher stage the same
purposive process yields conceptual space, of course at
first in its simplest form, the Euclidean. And (though I
have not found this stated) all the characteristics of
Euclidean space may be shown to have been constructed

1 Rev. Phil, xviii. n. 2 Rev. de Mtt. iii. p. 632.

3 Cp. Calinon, Rev. Phil, xviii. 12, " Sur I'ind^termination g£om£trique de
1'univers." 4 Loc. cit.

v NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY 91

in this manner. Just as, e.g., the varying appearances of
things to the different senses were ignored in order to
arrive at their ' real ' place, so the varying and irregular
deformations to which they are subjected at different
places, when abstracted from, lead to the homogeneity of
space. They are slight enough to be neglected, but if
they were larger and followed some definite and simple
law, they might suggest a non-Euclidean geometry.
Similarly, geometrical space is one and infinite, because
so soon as we abolish any boundary in thought, we can
abolish all ; it is infinitely divisible, because so soon as
the division is conceived of as proceeding in thought the
same act may be repeated as often as we please. And
so on ; geometrical space appears throughout as a con
struction of the intellect, which proceeds by the ordinary
methods of that intellect in the achievement of its peculiar
purposes. Nor is there anything new or mysterious about
the process ; no new faculty need be invoked, no new
laws of mental operation need be formulated.

III. That the philosophic importance of this result is
capital, is surely evident. The certainty of geometry is
thereby shown to be nothing but the certainty with
which conclusions follow from non-contradictory premisses;
in each geometry it flows from the definitions. The
certainty with which the sum of the angles of a triangle
may be asserted to equal two right angles in Euclidean
geometry, is precisely the same as that with which it
may be shown to be greater or less in non-Euclidean
systems.

This shows that certainty in the sense of intrinsic con
sistency has nothing to do with the question of the value
and real validity of a geometry. The latter depends on
the possibility of systematizing our spatial experience by
means of the geometry. Our experience being what it
is, we find the Euclidean the simplest and most effective
system, alike to cover the facts and to calculate the
divergences between the ideal and the actual results ; and
so we use it. But if our experience were different, a
non-Euclidean system might conceivably seem prefer-

92 HUMANISM v

able. In short, as applied, a geometry is not certain, but
useful.1

Again, the necessity of geometry is simply the necessity
of a logical inference — hypothetical, and in no wise
peculiar to geometry. Similarly, the universality of
geometrical judgments is by no means peculiar to them,
but may be explained as arising out of the methodological
character of the assumptions on which they rest. If we
decide to make certain assumptions because they are the
most serviceable, we can certainly know beforehand that we
shall always and under all circumstances judge accordingly.
To expect us to do otherwise, would be to expect us to
stultify ourselves. And certainly we have a great in
terest in upholding the universal validity of geometrical
judgments. Is it a small thing to be able to draw a
figure on paper in one's study, and on the strength of it,
and by virtue of the homogeneity of space, to draw
inferences about what happens beyond the path of the
outmost sun ? Should we not be incredible idiots, if we
allowed any cheat of appearances to cajole us into a
moment's doubt of so precious an organon of knowledge ?
It would seem, then, that the chief result of metageometry
is to raise into clearer consciousness the nature of the
complex processes whereby we organize our experiences,
and to assimilate the case of space to our procedure
elsewhere.2

But it has already become abundantly evident that a
view of Space, such as that propounded, provokes conflicts
with ancient and venerable views that have long adorned
the histories of Philosophy. Among them Kant's con
ception of the apriority of Space is pre-eminent.

At a cursory glance it might indeed seem as though
the new geometry afforded a welcome support to the
Kantian position. If Euclidean geometry alone could
prove the possibility of synthetic judgments a priori, could
enrich us with absolutely certain knowledge absolutely
independent of experience, could sustain an all-embracing,

1 Cp. Poincar^'s La Science et r Hypothese, pp. 66-7.
2 Cp. Axioms as Postulates, §§ 40-43.

v NON-EUCLIDEAN GEOMETRY 93

though empty, form of pure intuition, surely now that it
is reinforced by an indefinite number of sister sciences, a
boundless extension of our a priori knowledge might
reasonably be anticipated. Unfortunately it proves a
case of ' too many cooks ' and the embarrassment of
riches, rather than of ' the more the merrier.' To suppose
three a priori forms of intuition corresponding to the three
geometries is evidently not feasible, for they are in hope
less conflict with each other. If it is a universal and
necessary truth that the angles of a triangle are equal to
two right angles, it cannot be an equally universal and
necessary truth that they are greater, according as we
happen to be speaking of a Euclidean or of a spherical
triangle. Clearly, there must be something seriously
wrong about the assumed relation of geometry to space,
or about the import of the criterion of apriority. Just as
the de facto existence of geometry seemed to Kant to
prove the possibility of an a priori intuition of Space, so
the de facto existence of metageometry indicates the
derivative nature of an intuition Kant had considered
ultimate.

And the analysis thus necessitated rapidly discovers
the seat of the error. Kant, like all philosophers before
and far too many since his time, regards the conception
of Space as simple and primary and the word as un- C
ambiguous. He does not distinguish between physical
and geometrical space, between the problems of pure and
of applied geometry. Hence he is forced to make his •
Anschauung an unintelligible hybrid between a percept
and a concept, to argue alternately that ' space ' could not
be either, and to infer that it must therefore be some third
thing. The possibility that it might be both never struck
him. Still less did he suspect that each of these alternatives
was complex, and that perceptual space was constructed
out of no less than three sensory spaces, while it was
susceptible of three different conceptual interpretations.
What Kant calls ' space ' therefore is not really one, but
seven, and the force of his argument is made by their
union. Confined to any one of them, the argument falls

94 HUMANISM v

to pieces. When we see these facts as clearly as the
development of metageometry has compelled us to see
them, we must surely confess that the Kantian account of
Space is hopelessly and demonstrably antiquated and can
lend no support to the rest of his system. And should
we not henceforth take care to eschew the vice of talking
vaguely of ' space ' without specifying what kind of space
we mean, whether conceptual or perceptual, and what
form of each ? Even pedagogically, one would think,
there can no longer be any advantage in confusing what
is capable of being so clearly distinguished.

It would exceed my limits if I were to try to investigate
whether Kant has not been guilty of a parallel confusion
between felt succession and conceptual time in his account
of the latter, still more were I to discuss whether after the
withdrawal of the ' forms of pure intuition ' any meaning
could continue to be assigned to the Kantian conception
of the a priori} I shall conclude, therefore, with the modest
hope that some of the many professed believers in the
Transcendental Aesthetic will not disdain to define their
position in face of the development of modern meta
geometry.

1 Cp. Axioms as Postulates, §§ 10-25.

VI
THE METAPHYSICS OF THE TIME-PROCESS1

ARGUMENT

Significance of Dr. McTaggart's admission that the Hegelian Dialectic cannot
explain the reality of succession ' in Time.' The reason of its failure,
viz. that Time, Change, and Individuality are features of Reality we
abstract from in our formation of Concepts. Hence abstract metaphysics
always fail to account for Reality. Must we then either accept sceptic
ism or reject a procedure on which all science rests ? No ; for to admit
the defects of our thought-symbols for reality need merely stimulate us to
improve them. As for science, it uses abstractions in a radically differ
ent way, to test and to predict experience. Thus ' law ' is a methodo
logical device for practical purposes. Science practical both in its origin
and in its criterion, and ethics as the science of ends conditions meta
physics. Such an ethical metaphysic accepts and implies the reality of
the Time-process. And therefore it has a right to look forward to the
realization of its ends in time, and forms the true Evolutionism.

I DO not know whether Dr. McTaggart's interesting
investigation of the relations of the Hegelian Dialectic
to Time (or rather to the Time-process ~) has obtained
the attention it merits, but the problem he has so ably
handled is of such vital importance, and the attitude of

j l A reply, in Mind, N.S., No. 13 (January 1895), to Dr. McTaggart's
f articles in N.S. , Nos. 8 and 10, which were subsequently included in his Studies
\ in the Hegelian Dialectic, chap. v. , to which Dr. McTaggart has appended a
i note (pp. 197-202) replying to me (so far as his standpoint permitted). His
chief contention is that the ' timeless ' concept is not, ;as I maintained, a methodo
logical device but a necessity of thought. To which the reply is that all
• ' necessities of thought ' are primarily methodological devices. See Axioms as
Postulates. I have reprinted the article as it stood, in order not to blur its
anticipations of Pragmatism.

2 I prefer to use the latter phrase in order to indicate that I do not regard
' Time ' as anything but an abstraction formed to express an ultimate character-
' istic of our experience, and in order to check, if possible, the tendency of
metaphysicians to substitute verbal criticism of that abstraction for a consideration
of the facts which we mean when we say, e.g. that ' the world is in Time. ' To
this tendency, Dr. McTaggart also sometimes succumbs (e.g. Studies in the
Hegelian Dialectic, pp. 161-3), and it seems to me to' be at the root of most
of the metaphysical puzzles on the subject.

95

96 HUMANISM vi

current philosophy towards it is so obscure, that no
apology is needed for a further discussion of his results.
That those results came upon me with the shock of
novelty I cannot, indeed, pretend ; for the impossibility
of reconciling the truth of the Dialectic with the reality
of the Time-process has long been familiar to me as the
chief, and, to me, insuperable difficulty of the Hegelian
position. I propose, therefore, to take for granted the
reluctant conclusion of Dr. McTaggart's almost scholastic
ingenuity, namely, that there is no known way of
reconciling the (admitted) existence of the Time-process
with the (alleged) ' eternal perfection of the Absolute
Idea ' — at all events until some other commentator of
Hegelism has attempted to revise and refute Dr.
McTaggart's arguments — and I wish to consider what
inferences may be drawn from it with respect to the
method of metaphysical speculation in general.

Before doing so, however, a word ought, perhaps, to be
said on what Dr. McTaggart himself inclines to regard
as the positive result of his inquiry, the fact namely that
he has not been able to show that there is no possible
synthesis of the Absolute Idea with the Time-process,
and that he is consequently "entitled to believe that one
more synthesis remains as yet unknown, which shall
overcome the last and most persistent of the contradictions
inherent in appearance." For faint as is the hope which
nourishes this belief, and groundless as are the assumptions
from which that hope may, I think, be shown to spring,
one may yet congratulate Dr. McTaggart on the candour
with which he distinguishes his faith in the Unknown
Synthesis from the cogency of a logical demonstration,
and on the diffidence with which he declines to avail
himself of the easy convenience of Mr. Bradley's maxim
that " what may be, and must be, that certainly is."
For certainly, if one does not scruple to regard utter
ignorance as the possibility that ' may be,' and the
subjective need of saving one's own theory as the
necessity that ' must be,' there is no difficulty which
cannot be evaded by the application of that maxim and

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 97

no contradiction which cannot be so ' reconciled.' My
only fear would be that if such an axiom were admitted
at the beginning of philosophy, it would also prove its
end. Dr. McTaggart, however, is to be congratulated on
having eschewed the dangers of Mr. Bradley's ' short way
with the insoluble,' and on preferring to base his accept
ance of conflicting views on the ancient, time-honoured
and extra-logical principle of Faith. Still more admir
able, perhaps, is the robustness of a faith which overlooks
the curious inconsistency of denying the metaphysical
value of Time, and yet expecting from the Future the
discovery of the ultimate synthesis on which one's whole
metaphysic depends. For myself I avow that such faith
is beyond my reach. If I were driven to the conclusion
that the inexorable necessities of my mental constitution
directly conflicted with patent and undeniable facts of
experience, I fear I should be beset by a sceptical distrust
of the ultimate rationality of all things rather than solaced
by visions of an ' unknown synthesis.'

But in this case I hope to show that there is no
need to respect a faith one cannot share, and that Dr.
McTaggart has given more to faith than faith demands.

If the contradiction cannot be solved, it can at least '
be exposed and explained. And unless I am very much
mistaken, it will appear that the incompatibility between
the assertion of the reality of the Time-process and its
comprehension by any system of ' eternal ' logical truth
(whether Hegel's or any one else's) has its origin in very
simple and obvious considerations.

Dr. McTaggart cannot find room for the reality of
the Time-process, i.e. of the world's changes in time and
space, within the limits of Hegel's Dialectic. But is
this an exclusive peculiarity or difficulty of Hegel's
position ? Is the Time-process any more intelligible on
the assumptions of any other purely logical l system, as,
for instance, on those of Plato or Spinoza ? I think
the difficulty will be found to recur in all these systems.
And this shows that it is not accidental, but intrinsic

1 I.e. intellectualist.

H

98 HUMANISM vi

to the modus operandi of all systems of abstract
metaphysics.

They cannot account for the time-factor in Reality,
because they have ab initio incapacitated themselves from
accounting for Time as for change, imperfection and
particularity — for all indeed that differentiates the realities
of our experience from the ideals of our thought. And
their whole method of procedure rendered this result
inevitable. They were systems of abstract truth, and
based on the assumption on which the truth of abstraction
rests.1 They aimed at emancipating philosophy from
the flux to which all human experience is subject, at
interpreting the world in terms of conceptions, which
should be true not here and now, but ' eternally ' and
independently of Time and Change. Such conceptions,
naturally, could not be based upon probable inferences
from the actual condition of the world at, or during, any
time, but had to be derived from logical necessities
arising out of the eternal nature of the human mind as
•such. Hence those conceptions were necessarily abstract,
land among the things they abstracted from was the time-
'^aspect of Reality.

Once abstracted from, the reference to Time could
not, of course, be recovered, any more than the indi
viduality of Reality can be deduced, when once ignored.
The assumption is made that, in order to express the
' truth ' about Reality, its ' thisness,' individuality, change
and its immersion in a certain temporal and spatial
environment may be neglected, and the timeless validity
of a conception is thus substituted for the living, changing
and perishing existence we contemplate. Now it is not
my purpose here to dispute, or even to examine, the
correctness of this assumption itself. What I wish here
to point out is merely that it is unreasonable to expect
from such premisses to arrive at a deductive justification

1 I have in this sentence purposely used ' truth ' in two senses, in order to
emphasize a distinction, which is too often overlooked, between the conceptual
interpretation of reality, which is truth in the narrower sense, and the validity
or practical working of those conceptual symbols, which constitutes their truth in
a wider sense. In the former sense ' truth ' is merely a claim which may, or
may not, be ratified by experience (see below, p. 100, and above, p. 57).

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 99

of the very characteristics of Reality that have been
excluded.

The true reason, then, why Hegelism can give no
reason for the Time-process, i.e. for the fact that the
world is ' in time/ and changes continuously, is that it was
constructed to give an account of the world irrespective
of Time and Change. If you insist on having a system
of eternal and immutable 'truth,' you can get it only by
abstracting from those characteristics of Reality, which
we try to express by the terms individuality, time, and
change. But you must pay the price for a formula that
will enable you to make assertions that hold good far
beyond the limits of your experience. And it is part of
the price that you will in the end be unable to give a
rational explanation of those very characteristics, which
had been dismissed at the outset as irrelevant to a
rational explanation. Thus the whole contradiction
arises from a desperate attempt to eat one's cake and
yet have it, to secure the eternal possession of absolute
truth and yet to profit by its development in time !
Surely this is not a fitting occasion for invoking that
supreme faculty of Faith to which philosophy, perhaps
as much as theology, must ultimately make appeal !

If these considerations are valid, the idea of accounting
for the time-process of the world on any system of
abstract metaphysics is a conceptual jugglery foredoomed
to failure, and must be declared mistaken in principle.
But there remain two questions of great importance :
(i) Do such systems of abstract metaphysics lose all
value ? (2) Is there any other way of manipulating the
time-process so as to fit it into a coherent systematic
account of the world ?

In answering the first question it will be necessary to
supplement the negative criticism of the claims of abstract
metaphysics by tracing the consequences of their utter
rejection. I have so far contended that no abstract
metaphysic could say the last word about the world, on
the ground that it was ex vi definitionis forced to reject
some of the chief characteristics of that world. But if it

ioo HUMANISM vi

cannot give us the whole truth, can it give us any truth?
Is not the alternative to the rejection of the full claims
of Hegelism (and kindred systems) a sceptical despair of
the power of the reason to find a clue out of the labyrinth
of experience ?

Such a plea would not be devoid of a certain plausi
bility. Stress might be laid on the fact that the funda
mental assumption of all abstract metaphysics is the
fundamental assumption also of all science, that the whole
imposing structure of the ' laws of nature ' is formulated
without reference to the temporal and spatial environment
and the individual peculiarities of the things which ' obey '
these laws, and so likewise lays claim to an eternal
validity. How then can Metaphysic dare to reject an
assumption which supports the whole of Science ? Again,
it may be urged that from its very nature philosophy is
an interpretation of experience in terms of thought, and
must necessarily exhibit the intrinsic peculiarities of human
thought. If abstraction, therefore, is characteristic of all
our thinking, if all truth is abstract, it would seem that
all philosophy must stand or fall with the abstract formulas
in which alone our thought can take cognizance of reality,
and may not dream of casting off the shackles, or denying
the sufficiency, of the systems of abstract truth which the
ingenuity of the past has propounded.

Nevertheless I incline to think that it is possible to
steer the human reason safely through between the Scylla
of Scepticism and the Charybdis of an Idea absolutely
irreconcilable with experience. But to do so it is im
perative to define exactly the part played by abstraction
in a philosophic account of the world.

Evidently, in the first place, it does not follow that
because all truth in the narrower sense (v. note, p. 98) is
abstract, i.e. because all philosophy must be couched in
abstract terms, therefore the whole truth about the universe
in the wider sense, i.e. the ultimate account that can be
given of it, can be compressed into a single abstract
formula, and that the scheme of things is nothing more
than, e.g. the self-development of the Absolute Idea. To

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 101

draw this inference would be to confuse the thought-
symbol, which is, and must be, the instrument of thought,
with that which the symbol expresses, often only very
imperfectly, viz. the reality which is ' known ' only in
experience, and can never be evoked by the incantations
of any abstract formula. If we avoid this confusion we
shall no longer be prone to think that we have disposed
of the thing symbolized when we have brought home
imperfection and contradiction to the formulas whereby
we seek to express it — an accusation which, I fear, might
frequently be made good against the destructive part of
Mr. Bradley's " Appearance and Reality " — to suppose, e.g.,
that Time and Change cannot really be characteristic
of the universe, because our thought, in attempting to
represent them by abstract symbols often contradicts
itself. For evidently the contradiction may result as well
from the inadequacy of our symbols to express realities
of whose existence we are directly assured by other factors
in experience, and which consequently are data rather
than problems for thought, as from the ' merely apparent '
character of their reality ; so the moral to be drawn may
only be the old one, that it is the function of thought to
mediate and not to create.1 If so, our proper attitude
will be this, that while we shall not hesitate to represent
the facts of experience by conceptual symbols, we shall
always be on our guard against their misrepresenting
them, and ever alive to the necessity of interpreting our
symbols by a reference to reality. In this manner I
conceive that it would be possible to utilize the terms
of abstract metaphysics, whenever they seemed to yield
useful formulas, without erecting them into fetishes and
giving them the entire mastery over our reason. From
the tyranny of abstractions there would thus always be
an appeal to the immediacy of living experience, and by it
many a difficulty which appals on paper would be shown
to be shadowy in the field. And conversely, it would
perhaps be possible for philosophy to grapple somewhat
more effectively with the real difficulties of actual life.

1 Dr. McTaggart has commented on this passage (Studies, pp. 110-3).

102 HUMANISM

VI

Nor can I see why philosophers should fight shy of
such a procedure. For surely the admission that philosophy
is an interpretation of experience in terms of thought
does not preclude us from the reinterpretation of our
symbols by a reference to experience wherever that may
seem expedient and profitable. Why should we commit
ourselves to a task which must prove either illusory or
impossible, that of the rational deduction of the self-
evident ? It is true that philosophic explanation came
into being because experience is not wholly self-explaining.
But to admit this is not to imply that everything requires
explanation. For all explanation must set out from
certain data, which may either be accepted as facts or
considered self-evident, and in no wise necessitate or justify
the attempt to explain everything, an attempt which must
ultimately derive everything from nothing, by the power
alone of an intentionally obscure vocabulary. What the
data of such an ultimate explanation of the world should
be, admits, of course, of further discussion ; but I can see
no reason in the nature of philosophy as such why the
characteristic of Time should not be one of them. And
I if by a frank recognition of the reality of Time, Im
perfection and Individuality we can reach a deeper, more
complete and workable insight into the facts of experience,
why should our philosophy be worse than one which is
driven to reject them by ancient prejudices concerning
the perfections which the world ought to possess ?

The abstractions of metaphysics, then, exist as ex
planations of the concrete facts of life, and not the latter
as illustrations of the former ; and the Absolute Idea also
is not exempt from this rule. Nor is it to a different
conclusion concerning the subordination of abstract meta
physics that we are led by the consideration of the first
argument adduced in their favour, the fact that all science
shares their assumption.

That all science abstracts from the particularity and
time-reference of phenomena, and states its laws in the
shape of eternal and universal truths, is in a sense true.
But this fact will not bear the inference it is sought to

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 103

draw in favour of abstract metaphysics, and must not be
allowed to prejudice the inquiry into the proper method
of discovering an ultimate theory of the universe. For in
the first place the treatment of its initial assumption by
science differs widely from that of metaphysics. Science
does not refuse to interpret the symbols with which it
operates ; on the contrary, it is only their applicability to
the concrete facts originally abstracted from that is held
to justify their use and to establish their ' truth.' The
mathematical abstractions which enable astronomers to
calculate the path of a star are justified by their ap
proximate correspondence with its observed position, and
if there were any extensive or persistent divergence between
the calculation and experience, astronomers would be quite
ready to revise their assumptions to the extent even of
changing their fundamental notions concerning the nature
of space. But in the case of metaphysics the same
principle is not, apparently, to apply. If the Dialectic of
the Absolute Idea does not accord in its results with the
facts of life, we are not to suspect the Dialectic. It
possesses an intrinsic certainty by right divine which no
failure can be admitted to impair. If the logical (or
rather psychological} development of the Idea fails to
account for the development in time, we may at the
utmost postulate an ' unknown synthesis.' This may be
philosophy, but it does not look like science.

In the second place, let us ask why science abstracts
from the particularity of reality. Not, certainly, because
it does not observe it. Nor yet because it ascribes to
the deductions from its universal laws a precision which
they do not possess. On the contrary, it cheerfully admits
that all the laws of nature are hypotheses, represent not
the facts but tendencies, and are to be used merely as
formulas for calculating the facts. But why should we
want to calculate the facts by such universal formulas ?
The answer to this question brings us to the roots of the
matter. We make the fundamental assumption of science
that there are universal and eternal laws, i.e. that the
individuality of things together with their spatial and

104 HUMANISM

VI

temporal context may be neglected, not because we are
convinced of its theoretic validity, but because we are
constrained by its practical convenience. We want to be
able to make predictions about the future behaviour of things
for the purpose of shaping our own conduct accordingly.
Hence attempts to forecast the future have been the
source of half the superstitions as well as of the whole
of the science of mankind. But no method of divination
ever invented could compete in ingenuity and gorgeous
simplicity with the assumption of universal laws which
hold good without reference to time ; and so in the long
run it alone could meet the want or practical necessity
in question.

In other words this assumption is a methodological
device, and ultimately reposes on the practical necessity of
discovering formulas for calculating events in the rough,
without awaiting or observing their occurrence. To assert
this methodological character of eternal truths is not, of
course, to deny their validity — for it is evident that unless
the nature of the world had lent itself to a very consider
able extent to such interpretation, the assumption of
' eternal ' laws would have served our purposes as little as
those of astrology, necromancy, chiromancy, and catoptro-
mancy. What, however, must be asserted is that this
assumption is not an ultimate term in the explanation of
the world.

This does not, of course, matter to Science, which is
not concerned with such ultimate explanation, and for
which the assumption is at all events ultimate enough.
But it does matter to philosophy that the ultimate theoretic
assumption should have a methodological character. To
say that we assume the truth of abstraction because we
wish to attain certain ends, is to subordinate theoretic
' truth ' to a teleological implication ; to say that, the
assumption once made, its truth is ' proved ' by its prac
tical working, by the way in which it stands the test of
experience, is to assert this same subordination only a
little less directly. For the question of the ' practical
working of a truth will always ultimately be found

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 105

to resolve itself into the question whether we can live
by it.

In any case, then, it appears that scientific knowledge
is not an ultimate and unanalysable term in the explana
tion of things : Science subordinates itself to the needs
and ends of life alike whether we regard its origin —
practical necessity, or its criterion — practical utility. But
if so, the procedure of Science can no longer be quoted in
support of the attempt to found our ultimate philosophy
upon abstract and ' eternal ' universals. If the abstraction
from time, place, and individuality is conditioned by
practical aims, the next inquiry must evidently concern
the nature of these practical aims, to which all theoretic
knowledge is ultimately subsidiary. And if these aims
can be formed into a connected and coherent system, it
will be to the discipline which achieves this that we shall
iook for an ultimate account of the world. Is there then
a science which gives an orderly account of the ends of
life that are or should be aimed at ? Surely Ethics is as
much of a science as abstract metaphysics, and if it be
the science of ultimate ends, it seems to follow that our
ultimate metapJiysic must be ethical}

Let us consider next what the attitude of such an
ethical metaphysic would be to the metaphysical preten
sions of abstract universals and of the Time -process
respectively. It seems clear, in the first place, that prac
tical aims, or a system thereof, do not easily lend themselves
to statement in terms of abstract universals. For an end
or purpose seems to be intrinsically the affair of a finite
individual in space and time, and the attempt to regard
the timeless, immutable and universal as possessed of ends
seems to meet with insuperable difficulties. If, therefore,
the ultimate explanation of the world is to be in terms of
ends, it would seem as though it must be in terms of
individual ends, realized in and through the Time-process.
Nor is there anything repugnant to reason in the con
ception of an end realized in a time-process that would
render it difficult for a teleological explanation to admit

1 All this seems a very fairly definite anticipation of modern pragmatism (1903).

io6 HUMANISM

VI

the reality of the Time-process. On the contrary, if the
transition from means to end were instantaneous, the dis
tinction between them would vanish, and lose all meaning.
Still less has it been found repugnant either to the reason
or to the feelings of men to regard the Time-process as
the realization of an end or even of a multitude of in
dividual ends, e.g. as a process of spiritual redemption.
There is, therefore, perfect harmony between an ethical
metaphysic and the existence of individuals in Time and
Space, while that existence is found to be irreconcilable
with any abstract metaphysical formula.

We must conclude, then, that the method of explaining
the ultimate nature of the world by an abstract universal
formula, or a series of such, is not supported by the
methodological use of similar formulas in the natural
sciences, which, rightly considered, leads to very different
inferences. What compensation then has it to offer us
for its inability to take account of many of the chief data
which a comprehensive philosophy has to explain ? Surely
the full reality which has to be explained is the individual
in the Time-process. And though it will remain no trivial
task to exhibit the rationality of the Real, it has yet
become evident that rationality is but one of several attri
butes to be predicated of Reality, and that a mere ration
alism or ' panlogism,' therefore, can never be anything but
a one-sided philosophy.

We have to consider next the second question raised
(on p. 99) as to whether by pursuing a different method
philosophy is able to recognize the reality of the Time-
process. And if such philosophic recognition is possible,
what is the metaphysical value and methodological bearing
of the reality of Time (or rather of the Time-process) ?
Or is there possibly, as Dr. McTaggart suggests (Joe. cit.
p. 1 66), "something about Time which renders it unfit,
in metaphysics, for the ultimate explanation of the
universe " ? The prejudice to this effect is no doubt well-
founded from the standpoint of a philosophy whose initial
abstraction excludes Time. But if we decline to hamper
ourselves by a method which fails de facto to account for

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 107

Time and imperfection, while its claim de jure had to be
disallowed as ignoring the supreme practical limitations
under which the whole understanding operates, the case is
different It has already been shown that an ethical
metaphysic has no difficulty in conceiving the ultimate
end as realizable in the Time-process. And indeed from
such a standpoint it is possible to indicate an explanation
even of the Becoming which is so puzzling a characteristic
of the Real, and the source of all our conceptions of Time
and Change — it may be ascribed to the struggle of finite
existence to attain that ultimate end. Instead of being
left over as an inexplicable surd at the conclusion of a
metaphysical explanation, the Time-process thus becomes
an integral part of that explanation, and a fruitful source
of inquiry opens out to philosophy concerning its value in
the discovery and estimation of ultimate truth. It would
be impossible within the limits of this essay to attempt
any detailed account of the metaphysical conclusions to
which the admission of the reality of the Time-process
would lead. Suffice it to say that I am convinced that
the system we should arrive at would prove no less
coherent and complete than any of the great systems of
abstract metaphysics, and that the difficulties which it
may at first seem to involve are due to an (inconsistent)
reversion to the methods of abstract metaphysics.

There are, however, two points which it seems necessary
to emphasize. The first is that a metaphysic of the Time-
process will stand in the same relation to the explanation
of phenomena by their history, as a metaphysic of abstract
ideas stands to their explanation by universal laws, i.e.
the Historical Method will represent the application in
science of the metaphysical principle. But while to an
abstract metaphysic the Historical Method must ultimately
be foolishness, a metaphysic of the Time -process will
justify that method by expressing it in a metaphysical, i.e.
final, form. And this alone would suffice to prove its
superiority ; for nowadays we can as little dispense with
the explanation of things by their history as with their
explanation by universal ' laws.' A philosophy, then,

io8 HUMANISM

VI

which admits both and vindicates the use of the one, with
out invalidating the other (even though it regards its
importance as methodological and subordinate rather than
as supreme), is manifestly superior to a philosophy which
absolutely rejects one of the most valuable of the working
assumptions of science. And if we regard the fact that
there is a development of the world in Time as the essence
of Evolution, it is obvious that only a theory which accepts
this Time-process as an ultimate datum will be capable
of yielding a philosophy of Evolution and is worthy of
the name of Evolutionism.

The second point concerns the ultimate difficulties
which are left over in every known system of philosophy,
and form antinomies which are insoluble for the human
reason as it stands. Such on Dr. McTaggart's theory are
the existence of change and imperfection, such, in his
opinion, would be the beginning of the Time-process on
mine. Now in face of these facts an abstract metaphysic
is in an extremely awkward position. If it scorns to
excuse its failure by pious phrases concerning the infinite
capacity of a non-human mind to solve the insoluble, if it
dreads to have recourse to the more impious dpybs Xoyo<?
of Mr. Bradley, and to postulate an Absolute which
will ' absorb,' ' submerge,' ' suppress,' and ' reconcile ' all
difficulties ex officio, in a manner no doubt highly satisfac
tory to itself and Mr. Bradley, two alternatives remain.
Either the idea that a contradiction is a necessary proof
of falsehood must be given up, and one or both sides of
the antinomy must be accepted in spite of everything —
in which case it is hard to say what weapon would be left
wherewith to refute the most patent absurdities ; or one
must hope for such an enlargement of the human reason
as will give it an insight into what is at present incom
prehensible. For the difficulties in question have been
under scrutiny too long to render it credible that any
thinkable solution has been overlooked. If, however,
a development of the human mind be admitted, the
reality of the Time-process, in which that development
takes place, can no longer be denied, and abstract meta-

vi METAPHYSICS OF TIME-PROCESS 109

physic becomes indebted to it for the means to solve its
difficulties. Is it not curious then to go on maintaining
that the Time-process is unfit to form a factor in an ulti
mate philosophy ?

An evolutionist philosophy, on the other hand, would
not only be entitled, but bound, to await a solution of its
difficulties from the secular development of the Time-
process which had generated them. For its ultimate
appeal is not to the abstract reason but to experience, to
the Time-process in which that reason develops. It is
consequently an ignoratio elenchi to infer that a view lead
ing to an antimony is false, unless it can be shown that
the antinomy is a permanent one. But not only is this
impossible, but a solution ambulando may be expected on
two grounds, (i) Reality, i.e. the data of our reasonings,
may so change as no longer to suggest the antinomy.
For instance, the problem of imperfection would vanish if
reality attained to perfection and not even a memory
remained of the imperfect. And (2) the antinomy might
be resolved by such a development of the mind as would
enable it to see through its present difficulties. I am
aware that many of our present philosophers have a rooted
objection to putting their hope in the future ; yet it is
only in the direction of an abandonment of the prejudice
against the reality of Time that I can descry a future for
hope, a future for philosophy, and a philosophy for the
future.

VII
REALITY AND 'IDEALISM'1

ARGUMENT

Four questions about Reality — (i) how do we come to assert it, (2) its
primary character, (3) its criteria, (4) its ultimate character. Epistemo-
logical and metaphysical reality. Primarily everything is real, but none
of the current criteria for sifting it absolutely trustworthy in theory.
Their value is practical, and practical value is really the ultimate
criterion. Can we claim speculative value for such a test ? Yes, if the
whole process of knowing be conceived as an attempt to render our
experience harmonious. At present our success is imperfect, and so
divergent views may still be taken of ultimate reality. Hence it is
unnecessary to regard the real as a combination of abstract universals,
and quite possible to treat a plurality of individual persons as ultimate.

THE readers of Mr. Ritchie's papers will have learnt by
this time that they may expect to be entertained with
a clear account of his views, neatly phrased and intelligibly
presented, and not disdainful of an occasional touch of
humour. And in these respects they will have not been
disappointed by his brilliant disquisition on — What is
Reality ? — in the May number of the Philosophical
Review. But if they sought fresh light on one of the
most puzzling and fundamental of philosophic problems,
it is to be feared that they were not equally well satisfied.
Mr. Ritchie's paper is polemical rather than investigatory,
and he seems more concerned to make dialectical points
against his adversaries than to probe his subject to the
bottom. And as his adversaries' views are very various,
and often have little in common but their disagreement

1 From the Philosophical Review of September 1892. The late Professor D. G.
Ritchie, whose premature demise I, in common with all his pupils, have not
ceased to deplore, reprinted the article to which this is a reply in a volume ot
essays entitled Darwin and Hegel (1893), pp. 77-108.

no

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' in

with Mr. Ritchie's, and as, moreover, they are not stated
or definitely referred to, the total effect is somewhat
confusing. Nor is the confusion improved by the way
in which Mr. Ritchie discusses some two or three different
questions about reality in the same breath. The justifica
tion in his mind for this procedure evidently lies in the
fact that they all offer a basis for objections to his own
views, which he would, perhaps, not object to have called
Neo-Hegelian. But this does not constitute any intrinsic
kinship between the views he criticizes, and his discussion
would have gained largely if he had added to his
classification of the various sorts of reality a classification
of the various questions that may be raised about it. It
would be too much, perhaps, to expect Mr. Ritchie to
excel the rest of his school as much in substance as he
does in style, but it seems evident that he has, as little
as they, kept clear of the Hegelian confusion of epistemo-
logy and metaphysics, to which Professor Seth l has of late
drawn so much attention.

There are at least four questions, which Mr. Ritchie's
paper trenches upon. They are —

I. How do we know that there is any reality at all, or
how do we come to assert an external world ?

II. What is reality at the beginning of inquiry, i.e.
what is the primary datum to be explained ?

III. How is it to be explained — by what criteria do
we inquire into reality ?

IV. What does reality turn out to be — after inquiry ?
Of these, I. and III. seem to be epistemological, while

II. is psychological, and IV. plainly metaphysical. Mr.
Ritchie does not seem to distinguish II. from III.,
attributes his answer to III. without more ado to IV., and
refers to I. only at the end, by way of meeting a logical
objection to his view of IV. This confusion is shown also
in his method of proof. His real purpose is to establish
certain metaphysical views as to the nature of ultimate
reality, but he treats his subject for the most part as
if it were an epistemological inquiry into the criteria

1 Now Professor Pringle Pattison.

H2 HUMANISM

VII

of reality, and when, after establishing his metaphysical
view of reality to his satisfaction, he is confronted l by
the logical impossibility of identifying thought with its
object, he suddenly throws us back upon the primary
subjectivity of all experience. And all this without a
hint of a /xera/Sacrt? et? d\\o yevos. The connexion
is no doubt clear enough to Mr. Ritchie's mind, if, as must
be supposed, he follows T. H. Green in his fearful and
wonderful leap from the fact that all phenomena appear
to some individual self to the conclusion that they are,
therefore, appearances to a universal self; but he might at
least have warned us that his opponents have repeatedly
declared their inability to compass such saltatory exercises,
and regard the two halves of the argument as belonging
respectively to epistemology and to metaphysics, and the
transition from the one to the other as a paralogism.

If, however, we refuse to take this Greenian salto
mortale, it is evident that the first question must be
settled before any of the rest can arise at all. For, as
Professor Seth has so well pointed out, realism and
idealism mean very different things according as they
are taken in an epistemological or a metaphysical sense,
and " it is possible to be epistemologically a strenuous
realist and an idealist in the metaphysical sense of the
term." 2 Nay, " it is only in virtue of epistemological
realism that we can avoid scepticism, and so much as
begin our journey towards metaphysical idealism." If,
then, epistemological idealism is solipsism and "twin
brother to scepticism," it must be surmounted before the
nature of reality can be discussed. If it is not surmounted
— cadit quaestio — it becomes futile to discuss whether
the real is one or many, whether its criterion is consistency
or what, if there is no objectivity at all. Mr. Ritchie has,
of course, a perfect right to call a halt here, and to refuse
to discuss anything further until his opponents have
successfully emerged from the clutches of subjective
idealism. But once they have been permitted to escape,

1 Darwin and Hegel, p. 102.
* Philosophical Review, i. p. 142.

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 113

once he has conceded the objectivity of the phenomena
which form the content of consciousness, he is not entitled
to revert to the prior question. In other words, the
discussion of the question — What is reality ? — presupposes
a settlement of the question — Is there reality ? — in the
affirmative. It is only when reality has been admitted to
exist that we can begin to distinguish the real from the
unreal, and to enumerate the different sorts and criteria
of each.

It is necessary in the next place to put the primitive
datum explicandum in the proper light. The primary
psychological fact is that everything that is is real, and
that the burden of proof lies on those who deny that
anything is real. Nor does Mr. Ritchie dispute this,
though he minimizes its importance, and apparently fails to
see that reality in this sense rests on a totally different
footing from all others. For it is the primary fact which
all the rest are more or less complete theories to explain,
and to which they must be referred in order to test their
validity. If they prove capable of explaining what they
set out to explain, we may reach a loftier view of reality,
which will transfigure our primary datum for us, but
which even so cannot be considered in abstraction from
its basis ; if they do not, the other ' senses of reality '
are worthless. For their work is hypothetical and
derivative, and if the conditions under which we ascribed
reality to these interpreters of reality are not fulfilled,
their raison d^etre has vanished. But reality survives —
even though its inscrutable flux of phenomena should
laugh to scorn the attempts at comprehending it which
it provokes.

But this unique position of primary reality Mr. Ritchie
quite fails to appreciate.1 Hence it is on the basis of an

1 He does not even succeed in proving the unreality of dreams, by saying
that they are not self-coherent nor follow in an intelligible sequence on the
events of previous dreams. For their ' incoherence ' is not, as a rule, intrinsic,
nor anything that exists for the dream consciousness in the actual experiencing :
it is an ex post facto judgment (resting usually on an imperfect memory) which is
passed on them in our waking life. But awaking involves a breach of continuity,
and the consciousness which condemns the dream-experience is no longer the
consciousness which experienced it. And are we so sure that the coherence of
our ' waking ' life would survive a similar breach of continuity, such as might be

I

n4 HUMANISM vn

insufficient recognition of the psychological data that he
proposes to consider what reality is. This question is
plainly an ontological one, but Mr. Ritchie treats it as if it
were epistemological, and = ' How do we know a pheno
menon to be (ultimately) real?' I.e. he substitutes for
the ontological inquiry into the ratio essendi of reality an
epistemological inquiry into its ratio cognoscendi or the
criterion of reality, and then unhesitatingly attributes to
his results a metaphysical validity. Yet he seems quite
unaware that such a method, even if successful, would be
defective and inadequate. Even at its best, even if it
could be shown that reality could be known only as
a coherent system of thought-relations, it would not
necessarily follow that reality was nothing more, and he
would not necessarily have proved anything but the
impotence of his thought to grasp reality, by reducing
his symbolical expressions for reality to absurdity and
contradiction. Thus his proofs cannot prove what he
desires, and his refutations only recoil upon his method.

But it may be shown also that his criterion is not
valid. He suggests l a triple test of rationality, a triple
basis for the metaphysical assertion that reality is
thought, (i) "The agreement between the inferences
drawn from the experience of our different senses ; (2)
the agreement between the judgments of different
persons; (3) the harmony of present experience with
the results of their and our previous experience, constitute
between them the test of reality." It is to be feared that

effected, e.g. by 'death' if we 'awake' after it? For comparison therefore
with the intelligible sequence of successive dreams, we should require an
intelligible sequence in successive lives to make the parallel complete. Unless,
then, Mr. Ritchie has a transcendent knowledge of another life, whereby he
judges our waking life to be real, because of its coherence and intelligibleness
from the standpoint of the former, his comparison fails. It is true that we
sometimes suspect our dreams while still dreaming (though as all dreams are
' near waking,' we cannot be said to be ' nearer waking' then). But does not
our waking life lie under the same suspicion on the same grounds? If it is
permissible for once to appeal from the ' plain man ' to the man of genius, is it
not 'a mad, mad world, my masters'? Have not seers, prophets, and
philosophers in all ages testified that our earthly life was but a dream? And
if to these divinely-inspired ' dreamers ' we owe all the religions that have
swayed the lives of men, must not dreams and hallucinations be accounted most
real — in Mr. Ritchie's ' ethical ' sense ?
1 Loc. cit. p. 80.

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 115

" between them " they fall very far short of giving a
trustworthy test of reality.

(1) The first is open to objection as a matter of fact.
It is doubtful how far the testimonies of the various
senses really corroborate one another, and how far they
are not rather incommensurable and referred to the same
' thing ' for reasons of practical convenience. Are after
images and overtones, which regularly accompany sights
and sounds, to be esteemed unreal because we generally
find it convenient to neglect them ? And yet it is hard to
say to what data of touch they correspond. Again, what
can this criterion make of cases of hyperaesthesia of one
sense, or of an occasional activity of some special
sensitiveness ? Are they to be rejected because they
necessarily lie beyond confirmation by the other senses ?
So far as this criterion goes, there is nothing to prevent
a real thing from contravening it, and an ' unreal ' thing
from conforming to it. Is ' Pepper's ghost ' unreal because
it cannot be touched ? Or is a hallucination affecting
several senses to be esteemed real ?

(2) The second criterion is no better than the first.
So Mr. Ritchie ' smells a rat,' in the case of his hypo
thetical mouse,1 and limits its value by stipulating that
B, C, D, and E (who do not see it) should have good
eyesight. But how is it to be established that A (who
does see it) does not considerably surpass them in the
delicacy of his senses ? In this difficulty, Mr. Ritchie
proposes to call in expert opinion in the shape of " a
hungry cat." (What scorn he would pour on such an
appeal to the lower animals if it were a question of
establishing the objectivity of an apparition !) Very
good. But how if the cat side with the minority ? It is
to be hoped that Mr. Ritchie will prefer science to
democracy, and the authoritative judgment of Athanasius
and the cat against the rest of the world ! If he does
not, he might work out an amusing theory making the
Referendum the ultimate test of reality. That, at least,
would be a definite method of utilizing the experience

1 Loc. cit. p. 80.

n6 HUMANISM Vn

of others, such as is at present lacking. We act quite
inconsistently in sometimes submitting to the superior
delicacy of the expert's senses, and sometimes rejecting
it. A room full of unmusical or inartistic people would
hardly dispute about tones or colours with a single
musician or painter, but an assembly of non-sensitives
would probably deny that Macbeth saw a ghost (though
who more qualified than Macbeth to see the ghost of
Banquo ?). The colour-blind, perhaps because they are
in a minority, do not dispute the objectivity of colours
they cannot see, but upon what logical principle should
we be less forbearing towards those who claim to see
the ultra-violet and infra-red rays of the spectrum, or the
luminosity of a magnetic field ? — In short, just as the ex
cluding value of non-conformity was impaired in the
first case by the possibility of genuine hyperaesthesia in
the individual, so in the second it is impaired by the
possibility of collective hyperaesthesia. And just as in
the first case conformity did not exclude error, owing to
the possibility of complex hallucination, so it fails in the
second, owing to the possibility of collective hallucina
tion.

(3) The third criterion at first seems more valuable —
until we recollect that every new fact and every new
experience is in some degree out of harmony with and
contradictory of our previous experience.1 Would it not
be strange, then, to allow our own inexperience, and the
stupidity of our ancestors to exercise an absolute censor
ship over the growth of knowledge? Besides, it so
happens that in most cases when ' universal experience *
is appealed to, its voice is self-contradictory. (What
right have we, e.g. to reject countless traditions in order
to prove that miracles are ' contrary to experience ' ?)

But perhaps Mr. Ritchie does not contend that any
one of his criteria is singly sufficient as a test of reality
and proposes to employ them collectively. But if so,
should he not show some probability that they will

1 As " Herakleitos" says (in Mind I p. 28), " is not the new of two things
one, either itself false, or what renders all else false ? "

vn REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 117

always, or even normally, tend in the same direction ?
And even if they did, this would establish, not the
collective theoretic certainty of criteria, each of which was
individually fallible, much less a necessary basis for meta
physical inferences, but only a sort of practical probability,
which it might be convenient to act upon. Thus the
boasted rationality of the real reduces itself to this : upon
Mr. Ritchie's own showing rationality is not an ultimate
test, but resolvable into the three criteria he mentions,
and in the end their value turns out to be practical !

Yet it may be that humbling the pretensions of this
pseudo-rationality does good service in drawing attention
to the commonest and most influential of the practical
tests of reality, which may be said to have underlain and '
guided the development of all the rest. It lies in the
fact emphasized by Professor James in his wonderful
chapter on the perception of reality1 that that is ad
judged real which has intimate " relation to our emotional
,and active life," i.e. practical value. It is this criterion1 '
which has constituted the objective world of ordinary
men, by excluding from it the world of dreams, hallucina
tions, and the transient though normal ' illusions of the
senses.' It is this which accounts for the superior reality
so often ascribed to feelings, especially to pleasure and
pain, which Mr. Ritchie mentions.'2 It is this which
absorbs into it Mr. Ritchie's fifth, or 'ethical/ sense of
reality. It is this, lastly, which has moulded the whole
development of the intellect, and so pervades all Mr.
Ritchie's criteria and reduces them to dependence upon it.
Hence if we are to speak of any ' main (derivative) sense
of reality ' at all, it must certainly be conceded to
Professor James that " whatever things have intimate and ;
continuous connexion with my life, are things of whose ]
reality I cannot doubt."

But though there can be no doubt of the practical
importance of this criterion, there may be much about its
speculative value. The history of the practical struggle
which has evolved us and our minds seems to offer but

1 Princ. of Psych, ii. 295. 2 Darwin and Hegel, pp. 82-3.

n8 HUMANISM Vir

slender guarantees that our faculties should have been
fitted for, and our energies directed towards, those aspects
of reality which are of the greatest theoretic importance,1
and hence arguments from practical or moral necessity,
universal desires, and the like, are not usually supposed
to yield the safest approach to the ultimate reality of
things.

And not only must it be said that Mr. Ritchie's tests
are not, properly speaking, rational at all, but it must be
pointed out that he actually shrinks from mentioning in
this place the test of rationality in its simplest and
severest shape, viz. that of conformity to the necessary
laws of our thought. The omission is surprising, and
one would fain ascribe it to the perception that it would
have been too palpable a begging of the issue to have
made conformity with the laws of thought the test of
reality in an argument designed to show that reality
ultimately lay in the determinations of our thought. Or
can it be due to the fact that the chief characteristic of
reality is its Becoming, and that Becoming and its
defiance of the law of Contradiction is what our thought
has never been able to grasp ? Yet the criterion is not
without value. We are reluctant to admit facts and
explanations which seem to contravene it, such as, e.g.
the four-dimensionality of Space and the illusoriness of
Time, and would only accept them as inferences, e.g. from
the untying of Zollner's knots and the alleged occurrence
of premonitions, in the very last resort.

What then is the result of a critical survey of the
various criteria of reality ? Is it not that though all may
be of service, none can be entirely relied upon as the
ratio cognoscendi of reality ? There is no royal road to
omniscience any more than to omnipotence, even though
we do not hold with Mr. Ritchie that the two coincide.
The cognition of reality is a slow and arduous process,
and of its possession we cannot be sure until we possess
it whole. The only certain and ultimate test of reality is
the absence of internal friction, is its undisputed occupa-

1 Else should we not have developed, e.g. an electric sense?

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 119

tion of the field of consciousness, in a word, its self-
sufficiency. It is because reality does not display this
character that thought has to be called in to interpret it.
If it did, there would be no distinction between real and
unreal, between what is ' really ' presented and ' merely
imagined,' between the self and the world, and there
would be no such thing as thought. As Professor James
so well points out l a hallucinatory candle occupying the
whole field of consciousness would be equivalent to a real
one. But as a matter of fact the contents of consciousness
present no such permanence and self-evidence ; their
initial state is a fleeting succession of conflicting presenta
tions which supplant and contradict one another. Some
of these are frequently followed by painful, others by
pleasurable feelings, and the penalty of idle acquiescence
in the flux of phenomena is rapid death. So a dire
necessity is laid upon the subject to distinguish himself
from the world, and to set about thinking how phenomena
may be controlled. He naturally begins by ascribing to
the phenomena which are followed by pains or other
practically important consequences a reality not shared
by the rest. This first interpretation of the chaos of
presentations is probably the first for which we can have
direct testimony, and represents the view of reality taken
by savages and small children. It is merely an extension
of this view when the ' plain man,' in the condition of
' natural realism ' distinguishes hallucinations, fancies, and
dreams from true reality.

To effect this he uses whatever tests seem most
practically useful — among others those of ' coherence '
and ' consistency.' Thus, the plain man's view is simply
the first stage in the attempt to reach a harmony of the
real. The view of the physicists represents a second and
subsequent stage. And Mr. Ritchie's philosophy of the
ultimate nature of reality is possibly a third. Each leads
on to the other, because each is successively recognized
not to be a coherent and consistent account of the world
and not to eliminate the irrational and unsatisfactory

1 Princ. of Psychology, ii. 287.

120 HUMANISM

VII

element in experience. The plain man's ' things,' the
physicist's ' atoms,' and Mr. Ritchie's ' Absolute,' are all of
them more or less persevering and well-considered schemes
to interpret the primary reality of phenomena, and in this
sense Mr. Ritchie is entitled to call the ' sunrise ' a theory.1
But the chaos of presentations, out of which we have (by
criteria ultimately practical] isolated the phenomenon we
subsequently call sunrise, is not a theory, but the fact
which has called all theories into being.

In addition to generating hypothetical objects to
explain phenomena, this process of the interpretation ot
reality by our thought also bestows a derivative reality on
the abstractions themselves with which thought works. If
they are the instruments wherewith thought accomplishes
such effects upon reality, they must surely be themselves
real. Hence philosophers have long asserted the reality
of Ideas, and we commonly hold the triangle and the
space of mathematical abstraction to be the real triangle
and the real space. (Mr. Ritchie's fourth sense.) Similarly
the goals to which the methods of our thought tend — its
intrinsic ideals — acquire a hypothetical reality of a lofty
order. For it is evident that if the real nature of
phenomena is to be discovered by the way of thought,
the supreme ideals of that thought must be, or be realized
by, the ultimate reality. But it would not follow that
these ideals would render reality mere thought. For they
might point either at a reality which should transcend
thought, or at one of which thought should be but a
single activity — even as it is now the activity of real
beings.

But it is needless to discuss what would happen to
thought if reality had been rendered harmonious, in view
of the fact that no philosophy has succeeded in doing this.
The whole attempt is dependent for its validity on its
success, and its success is, to put it mildly, imperfect.
The scientific view of atoms goes behind the popular view
of ' things,' because it holds that the latter do not construct
a tenable view of phenomena. Mr. Ritchie would treat

1 Darwin and Hegel, p. 91.

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 121

the atoms similarly. But would he seriously contend that
he can already give an entirely consistent, coherent, and
intelligible view of the whole world, giving a reason why
everything is exactly what it is and not otherwise ? Of
course Mr. Ritchie does not lay claim to such omniscience.
But if he cannot, in what respect is he better than those
publicans and sinners, the ' plain men ' and the realists ?
If he cannot, why make such a fuss about formal coherency
and consistency as the test of reality ? By his own
admission they represent a postulate which is never
actually realized, and for aught we know never can be.
If he cannot, lastly, what boots it to explain that though
reality is not thought for us, it is for God ? l This free
and easy appeal to the Deity, in the midst of a discussion
of human knowledge, in order to silence an opponent and
to fill up any gap in the argument, ought surely to be as
severely reprobated as the mediaeval practice of ascribing
any ill-understood fact or bit of knowledge to the agency
of the Devil. The question is not whether to a divine
mind, supposing its existence to be tenable in Mr. Ritchie's
sense, Reality is Thought, but whether that assertion is a
valid defence against the objection that Mr. Ritchie has
given away his case when he has admitted that reality is
not thought to human minds. Until, then, Mr. Ritchie
can bring rather more convincing proof of his approaching
apotheosis and omniscience, it must be contended that he
has neither made out his assertion that rationality is the
test of reality, nor its connexion with the metaphysical
dogma that the real is ultimately the thought of a
' divine mind.'

This question as to the ultimate nature of reality,
forming the ultimate problem of ontology, brings us to
the fourth and last question which may be raised about
reality. And enough has been said concerning the
imperfections of our methods of interpreting reality, to
render it clear that we are as yet hardly entitled to
give any very confident answer to this question. From
a purely scientific standpoint, I can see no reason for

1 Darwin and Hegel, p. 88.

122 HUMANISM vii

attempting to prejudge the answer. It is pre-eminently a
question to be met with a solvitur ambulando. From
other points of view no doubt several different answers
may be given, and Mr. Ritchie's pantheistic doctrine
doubtless remains tenable, even though its epistemological
basis be insecure. But at least as much may be claimed
for the doctrine which Mr. Ritchie is most anxious to
refute, the doctrine which denies most emphatically that
existence is ever reducible to essence, and holds that the
individual is the real.

At all events it is, I think, possible to show that this
doctrine is neither uncritical nor unable to maintain itself
against Mr. Ritchie's objections. Mr. Ritchie regards it
as the uncritical product of the popular Vorstellung,
because it makes its appearance at a very early stage in
the interpretation of reality. But this should rather speak
in its favour, if it is able to reassert its validity after the
fullest critical examination of the facts and of objections
such as Mr. Ritchie's.

Those objections arise in the first place out of his
failure to appreciate the development in our conceptions
of individuality and reality which has corresponded to the
evolution of the objects which they symbolize, and in
the second, out of his misunderstanding the respective
positions which his opponents' logic assigns to thought-
symbols and that which they symbolize. To say that the
individual is the real and that the real is individual, is to
make a proposition concerning a reality beyond it. It
draws our attention to a fact which its terms cannot fully
express. It is an adjectival description of reality in terms
of thought-symbols. But it is not substantival. It is no
definition of reality, but a reference to it, which expresses
a characteristic feature intelligibly to real beings who can
feel the extra-logical nature of reality. Hence it does not
even necessarily state the essence of reality ; x for the
theoretic validity (not the practical convenience) of the
doctrine of essence is called in question, and the fortunes
of the expression certainly do not affect the existence of

1 I should now (1903) define 'essence' systematically in terms of purpose.

viz REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 123

reality. But Mr. Ritchie treats it as if the sum and
substance of all reality were supposed to be contained in
it, and dissects it mercilessly in order to show that there
is nothing in it. But in criticizing the terms of the
proposition he thinks he annihilates also the reality
beyond it. He is mistaken ; for he tramples only on the
shadow of his foe. The individual and the real (i.e. the
thing symbolized by those symbols of our speech) are not
a couple of categories, nor even fully defined concepts.
They are just sign-posts, which to a purely thinking
mind might convey no meaning, or the contradictory
meanings Mr. Ritchie criticizes, but which are meant for
beings who are real as well as rational. Mr. Ritchie
wilfully strips himself of one of his chief means of
understanding the world when he abstracts from his own
reality, and is then puzzled to find that he must be
either nothing or an unknowable thing-in-itself, if he be
not a bundle of universal thought-relations. So he comes
to the absurd conclusion that he is made up of the
products of one of his own activities ! Does not this
remind one of the hero of Andersen's fairy tale, who
became subservient to his shadow ? And so it is not
surprising that to one who holds that the individual is
the real, his polemic l should appear a cr/aa/m^ia, which
cannot grasp the logical position of reality, and results
only in a series of hystera protera.

For example, the individual is not ' everything which
is called one ' — things are called one because we attribute
to them this extra-logical character of individuality. Nor
is the individual what can be expressed by a single term
— because the latter is only the nearest logic can get to
expressing individuality. The individual is not a spiritual
or thinking substance — because the whole category of
substance rests upon and is abstracted from the individual,
is an attempt thought makes to symbolize a substantivity,
which its own adjectivity never properly expresses. The
individual is more than a meeting-point of universals,
because universals are not individuals, nor able to form

1 Darwin and Hegel, pp. 93-100.

124 HUMANISM vn

one, however many of them meet together. But they
never do meet in numbers sufficient for a quorum : the
attempt to reduce the individuals to universals generates
an infinite process, which is never equivalent to the finite
individual.

It is not, then, any logical difficulty which compels
us to modify the original sense of the assertion that
individuality is an ultimate and definitely determined
characteristic of reality, but the general flux of reality
itself. The individual also is in process, and so individu
ality becomes a characteristic of which reality may be
seen to have less or more. The individuality of a drop
of water is very evanescent ; the individuality of a
schoolboy, or even of a mule, is often found to be a very
stubborn fact. Once we have degrees, we can form a
standard of individuality ; and the scale may be prolonged
inferentially beyond what is actually given. Individuality
thereby becomes a hypothesis and an ideal, as well as a
characteristic of reality. The atom of physics is such a
hypothetical prolongation of the individual in one direction.
Monads and the like, are prolongations in another, and, in
the writer's opinion, a far more promising, direction. So
we can come to say that an individual is lacking in
individuality, i.e. shows this universal characteristic of
reality too indistinctly, seems to lend himself too easily
to ' explanation ' by universals, seems to borrow too much
from others, and the like.

But this in nowise trenches upon the value of individu
ality. It simply postulates that we must learn to think
of the individuality of the real as we have learned to
think of its reality, not as a completed being, but as
a becoming, i.e. as being a process. That which we
designate by the term individuality is a varying and
growing quantity, never wholly absent, but not always
fully developed. At the one end of the process are the
atoms — of which we can hardly discern the individuality.
At the other end are — let us say the angels — individuals
so perfectly individualized that, as mediaeval doctors
taught, each would form a species by himself.

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 125

And with all deference to the magni nominis umbra,
wherewith the Absolute has overshadowed the minds of
philosophers, it seems to me that it is to some such
conclusion as this that the course of science tends, rather
than to a single merely rational ' universal law,' from
which all existences might be necessarily deduced by purely
logical processes. Of the difficulties which the latter
alternative involves Mr. Ritchie gives us a sample on
page 95, which is valuable as containing a recognition by
one of his school, belated and inadequate though that
recognition be, of the gravity of questions that should
have been considered before ever it was enunciated that
reality was Thought. This is not the place to discuss
what meaning, if any, can be attached to the dictum that
' Thought realizes (does not this covertly reassert the
distinction it pretends to explain away ?) itself in its
Other in order to return into itself,' but it may be
remarked that Mr. Ritchie's 'dilemma' which drives him
to such a solution, presents no difficulties to those who
hold that the real is individual. For if the universe be
constituted by the interactions of real individuals, some
or all of whom display as one of their activities what we
call ' thought,' there is no such ' irrational ' and ' alien '
Other as troubles Mr. Ritchie ; for what ' confronts
thought ' is merely the whole of which it is the part and
the practical interpreter. Nor does thought itself ever
claim more for itself than this, whether it be in its
reference of every proposition to a reality beyond it, or
in its recognition of the necessity that an activity pre
supposes a real being as its substrate, or in its ultimate
foundation of all proof on the self-evident.1

Thus it is only an infirmity of our reason, causing us
to hypostasize abstractions, which leads us to speak of
' universal laws of nature,' as if they were more than
shorthand expressions for the habitual interactions of
realities. But as the subtlety of our insight draws nearer

1 This remark no longer seems to me adequate : the value of self-evidence
seems psychological rather than logical, and proof no longer needs 'foundations,'
if it can postulate its premisses and increase their probability indefinitely by the
confirmations of experience. Cf. Formal Logic, ch. xviii. §§ 2-3.

126 HUMANISM vn

to the subtlety of nature, the crudeness of our ' universal
laws ' begins to appear. We grow better able to appreciate
the real individuality of things, and so substitute specific
1 laws ' for general. We no longer ascribe John Doe's
death to the universal mortality of humanity, but get the
doctor to tell us precisely why John Doe, and no other,
died. As we know him better, we do not account for a
friend's conduct ' because he is a man,' but by a ' because
he is this man.' In all our explanations we seek to get
down to the particular, to do justice to the individual
peculiarity of things, to enlarge the part assigned to
personal idiosyncrasy. On the other hand, the less we
know about a thing the more confidently can we lump it
together with others and the more general are the state
ments which the calculus of probabilities emboldens us to
make about it. Hence though in the case of the lower
orders of individuality such appreciation of the peculiar
nature of each thing may still be an impracticable and
indefinitely distant ideal, with regard to higher orders the
principle is well established. We could hardly say with
the poet that ' the proper study for mankind is man,' if
there were not, even in the meanest, an inexhaustible
store of idiosyncratic reactions, — an individuality, in
short, which becomes more and more conspicuous as we
pass from the lower to the higher, and looks less and less
like a combination of abstract universals ! Hence, if we
are to hazard any assertions concerning ' Omniscience,' is
it not clear that it could have no use for universals, and
so far from regarding the individual as compounded of
them, would apprehend the idiosyncrasy of each thing in
its action, without the clumsy mediation of ' universal
laws ' ?

In conclusion, then, let us contend against Mr. Ritchie
that other views than his own of ultimate reality are
tenable, that they answer the epistemological and meta
physical difficulties at least as well as his, and are at
least as deserving of the name of idealism (if Berkeley
retains any claim to the doctrine he discovered !), and
that they are far concreter and in closer interaction with

vii REALITY AND 'IDEALISM' 127

the sciences than a metempirical misconception like the
Absolute. Nor need we blush to own that a view like
ours would not prove the popular Vorstellung of ' persons '
wholly false (even though it would tend to regard ' things '
as being only ' persons ' of a lower development of
individuality), and so might prove more attractive to the
' plain man.' For it is possible to be ' critical,' without
disregarding either humanity or reality.

VIII
DARWINISM AND DESIGN1

ARGUMENT

V

Question as to the Value of the Argument from Design in the light of
Darwinism. Its theological Importance ; its intrinsic flaws. The
Darwinian explanation of adaptation without adapting, by Variation and
Natural Selection. Is it final ? I. Natural Selection proves too much ;
it would apply equally to automata. But if intelligence is wholly
inefficacious why was it developed? II. The causes of Variation lie
beyond the scope of Darwinism, and to explain Evolution, therefore,
other factors must be added. III. Natural Selection does not necessarily
lead to change of species, nor exclude degeneration, nor guarantee pro
gression. A variable factor, therefore, must be added. IV. Darwinism
. does not explain the origin of adaptation, but presupposes it. Nor need
the struggle to adapt be more than the preservation of this initial adapta
tion. The struggle for bare existence brings no growth of adaptation ;
it is only when intelligence aims at ends and transforms the struggle for
life into one for good life that improvement comes. V. The true signi
ficance of Darwinism in the discovery of Natural Selection. Indefinite
variation a methodological assumption justified as a simplifying abstrac
tion. VI. But if it is understood as a description of actual fact, it rules
out teleology a priori and quite apart from fact. Teleology and the
calculus of probability. Hypothetically it is always possible to postulate
a non-teleological context to any apparently teleological event. Per
contra it is practically impossible to disprove the teleological interpreta
tion, and ultimately both views are postulations of a will to believe and
rest on an act of faith. VII. Summary : Darwinism not incompatible
with teleology if its assumptions are taken as methodological, and it is
arbitrary to take them as more. It is not necessarily hostile to teleology

^ and even indirectly furthers it by throwing into relief the miracle of pro-
• jjress. Evolutionism not necessarily unteleological.

THE question which is proposed for consideration in the
present essay concerns the value of what has been called
the Argument from Design, in the light, not so much of

1 Published in the Contemporary Review for June 1897. It had been my
intention to have followed this paper up with discussions of other scientific views
of Evolution (which explains my success in avoiding so much as the mention of
Prof. Weismann's name), and finally to attempt the philosophic formulation of

128

viii DARWINISM AND DESIGN 129

the very various and widely spread modes of thought
grouped together under the name of Evolutionism, but
rather of the particular form of Evolutionism which has
been popularized by the labours of Charles Darwin, and not
undeservedly bears his name. In face of the Darwinian
theory, and the account it gives of the pedigree of life,
are we any longer entitled to entertain the notion that a
more than human intelligence has anywhere or in any
way contributed to the making of what now exists ? Is
there any evidence to be found in the constitution or
working of any part of nature which directly testifies to
a divine creator ? These are old questions which, in
some form or other, men have probably asked ever since
they were men, and will probably continue to ask until
they have become beasts or angels. Their practical
importance will readily be admitted. For clearly our
attitude towards life will be very different, according as
we believe it to be inspired and guided by intelligence,
or hold it to be the fortuitous product of blind
mechanisms, whose working our helpless human intelli
gence can observe but in no wise control.

Although the Argument from Design has been taken
as a rough description of the subject to be treated, it will
yet be convenient, at the outset, both to restrict and
to expand its scope. It will be restricted in that the
discussion will turn exclusively on the argument as based
on living nature ; it will be expanded, in that its
subject will include the question of the action of intelli
gence generally in producing the present condition of1
things. That is to say, the possibility that though no
traces of a divine intelligence are to be found in the
history of the organic world, there has yet to be admitted
the action of human and animal intelligence, will not be
overlooked. For the world may have been brought into
its present shape by intelligent efforts, if not by intelligent

the conception of Progress which the current science assumes and the current
metaphysic denies, without comprehending its nature. But dis aliter visum, and
the paper (to which § IV. and the end of § VI. are additions), seemed worth
including even as a fragment. For a discussion of the ultimate philosophic
significance of Teleology, cp. Axioms as Postulates, § 45.

K

130 HUMANISM Vm

direction. We are not bound to assert a divine activity
so soon as we have asserted the activity of intelligence.
So it has to be confessed that before the Argument from
Design has any theological value, three things have to be
shown — (i) that intelligence, i.e. action directed to a
purpose, has been at work ; (2) that the intelligence has
not been that of any of the admitted existences ; and (3)
that from its mode of action this intelligence may fairly
be deemed divine.

But if it is necessary to draw attention to a leap
which the theologian's logic is too apt to commit, it is no
less important to point out that the denial of the
Argument from Design logically leads much further than
its opponents commonly dare to go. For it would seem
that a complete denial of design in nature must deny
the efficacy of all intelligence as such. A consistently
mechanical view has to regard all intelligence as otiose, as
an ' epi-phenomenal by-product,' or fifth wheel to the cart,
in absence of which the given results would no less have
occurred. And so, if this view were the truth, we
should have to renounce all effort to direct our fated and
ill-fated course adown the stream of time. Our con
sciousness would be an unmeaning accident. On the
other hand, if intelligence played the part in history
alleged by the second theory of its action, we might still
cherish a hope of steering the bark that carries our
fortunes at least into a temporary harbour ; if that of the
first theory, we might be moved to strain every muscle at
the behest of a helmsman who could envisage the goal
with unerring eye.

We have, then, three alternatives, of which the old
' Argument from Design ' undertook to represent one.
It was a simple-minded argument, as befitted a time
when the eventful history through which life has passed,
and the real intricacy of its phenomena, were as yet
scarcely suspected. It contented itself with observing
the variety and ingenuity of the means whereby living
beings attained their ends. The structure of the eye and
the ear, the prescience of instinct, the processes of growth

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 131

and birth, etc., provided it with inexhaustible material for
respectful admiration. Surely all this could not be the
result of blind chance, of unintelligent matter — it pro
ceeded from the hand of God.

In more modern language, the Argument from Design
essentially argued from the existence of adaptation to the
existence of an adapter. Beings would not have been so
admirably fitted for their conditions of life unless they
had been intelligently ' fitted ' for them. And the
adaptations were so wonderful that the adapter must
have been divine.

Now, it is easy to see that in this shape the Argument
from Design has several weak points quite apart from the
attacks which Darwinism has made on it. (i) The
thought of evolution, of a cosmic process, revealing itself
in the course of time, the thought that lends grandeur
and strength to the modern versions of the ancient plea,
was entirely foreign to it. Consequently it took the
process of adapting, whereby the adaptation arose to be
instantaneous and complete. Consequently it was sadly
perplexed by the fact that many adaptations were far
from perfect. When Helmholtz pointed out the optical
defects of the eye, and the ease with which they might
have been remedied, the defenders of the old teleology
were at a loss to answer a sacrilegious but exceedingly
awkward criticism. They could not admit what now the
teleological evolutionist may say without wincing — viz.
that the adaptations in themselves, and as they now
exist, form a somewhat imperfect and insufficient testi
mony for divine agency, and no testimony at all for a
divine omnipotence. And, (2) it was not shown that
animal intelligence might not have constructed the
adaptations actually found. This suggestion could be
ruled out only so long as the belief in the fixity of species
prevailed ; but it became far more tenable so soon as
practically unlimited time was allowed to intelligent
effort to reach the degree of adaptation exhibited. And
so there was nothing for it but to ascribe to the direct
contrivance of the Deity every adaptation and every

132 HUMANISM vm

instinct found in the organic world, to burden, for
example, the divine conscience with the fiendish ingenuity
with which a sphex-wasp stings into helplessness the
caterpillars it has selected to be the living food of its
young. The defence of the divine intelligence, in short,
was maintained at a ruinous expense to the divine
benevolence.

Thus the old Argument from Design was in a bad
way even before Darwinism appeared upon the scene with
pretensions to deliver the coup de grace. Darwin himself,
it is true, did not assert that no adapter existed. But he
did what was more effective ; he suggested an alternative
way in which adaptation might have arisen. This was
not immediately fatal to the theory of intelligent effort
as such ; for in human beings, at least, that theory
was generally admitted as a vera causa, and so could be
co-ordinated with the Darwinian explanation. But it
did leave the theory of an inferred divine adapter in
the logically indefensible position of being an additional
and superfluous explanation of facts already sufficiently
explained in other ways.

Darwin's alternative consisted in showing that the
existence of adaptations is conceivable and possible,
although there has been neither an adapter nor any process
of active adapting, but merely a sifting or eliminating of
the ' unfitter.' To show this, he required only two of the
postulates of his theory — (a) the existence of variability
in living organisms ; and (b~) the struggle for existence
among them leading to the survival of the fitter, or com
paratively fit, and the elimination of the unfitter, or
comparatively unfit. The variability of organisms was
further conceived as of such a character as to lead to
what were called ' accidental ' variations in every direction.
This was to indicate that no special tendency to vary in
any direction more than in any other was to be assumed,
and that the causes of variation, which Darwin forbore to
investigate, did not favour one sort of variation rather
than another. Darwin, therefore, supposed nature to
start with an indefinitely large supply of variations, some

via DARWINISM AND DESIGN 133

adaptive, the immensely greater number not. These
were sifted by the process of Natural Selection, which
eliminated the non-adapted and ill-adapted, so that only
the fit survived, and after a time organisms would be, in
a general way, adapted to their conditions of life. The
process by which these adaptations arose, therefore, was
a purely mechanical one, and did not imply any in
telligence. The sifting of variations by natural selection
would no more imply a purposive ordering than the
successive depositing of lighter and lighter detritus as a
river flows out into the sea.

The anti-teleologically minded, to whom the support
which biological facts had seemed to give to the belief in
design had long been hateful, were naturally delighted
with this easy and obvious way of disposing of the
appearance of intelligent adaptation. They loudly pro
claimed the disappearance of the Argument from Design,
and even their critics only ventured to object that
Darwinism had substituted one kind of teleology for
another, and made the good (or survival) of the organism
determine the conduct adopted by the race. This was a
poor consolation, and, in my opinion, an illusory one.
For it is not for the sake of the organism's good that the
conduct is adopted, but it so happens that conduct can
only become prevalent when it has survival -value,
and that the prevalent conduct and that adapted to the
conditions of life must coincide. In reality the process
is not teleological, but purely mechanical. This appears
quite clearly if it is supposed to act upon beings conceived
to be devoid of all intelligence, and it turns out that it
acts equally well. If animals were mere automata, their
variations would be sifted by natural selection in just the
same way, and it is quite possible and legitimate to apply
Darwinian methods of argument to astronomical physics
and the chemistry of the elements.

But if the Darwinian assumptions are equally applicable
to automata, they are, ultimately and in principle, just as
fatal to the view that animal intelligence plays any part
at all in the history of life as they are to the belief in its

134 HUMANISM

VIII

divine direction, and this logical implication is already
appearing in the ultra-Darwinian writings. It is quite
consistent of them to speak of the ' omnipotence ' of
natural selection and to reject or minimize all other
possible factors, like intelligent effort, use and disuse,
physical and chemical conditions, etc., as directive forces
in Organic Evolution.

If, then, Variation and Natural Selection are the alpha
and omega of the matter, and adequate to account for all
the facts, it would seem to be beyond doubt that there is
no longer any place for any sort of teleological argument.
Nevertheless, it may reasonably be contended that this
inference would be entirely erroneous, for the reasons to
be presently set forth.

I. The ease with which the Darwinian argument dis
penses with all intelligence as a factor in survival excites
suspicion. It is proving too much to show that adaptation
might equally well — i.e. as completely, if not as rapidly —
have arisen in automata. For we are strongly persuaded
that we ourselves are not automata, and strive hard to
adapt ourselves. In us at least, therefore, intelligent effort
is a source of adaptation. And the same will surely be
admitted in the case of the higher animals. How far
down the possibility of such intelligent co-operation in a
greater or less degree is admissible, depends very much
on people's preconceived notions ; but we are, at all events,
unable to fix any definite inferior limit beyond which
influence of intelligence cannot penetrate. Intelligence,
therefore, is a vera causa as a source of adaptations at
least co-ordinate with Natural Selection, and this can be
denied only if it is declared inefficacious everywhere, if all
living beings, ourselves included, are declared to be
automata.

But should this be attempted — and it would seem to
be involved, e.g. in the assumption of ' psychophysical
parallelism ' — a peculiar difficulty arises on the basis of
the Darwinian theory itself. If intelligence has no
efficacy in promoting adaptation — i.e. if it has no survival-
value, how comes it to be developed at all? On thej

vm DARWINISM AND DESIGN 135

Darwinian assumptions only those qualities can be
developed which have a value for survival. This must
be true also of intelligence, which, consequently, cannot
be mere surplusage.

It must therefore be admitted that Darwinism is
demonstrably wrong and refutes itself, if it seeks to deny
the possibility of purposive adaptation and to regard all
adaptation as the result of a mechanical natural selection.
If, however, intelligence is re-admitted as a vera causa,
there arises at least a possibility that other intelligence
besides that of trie known living beings may have been *
operative in the world's history.

II. We may scrutinize the initial assumptions of
Darwinism from which the anti-teleological consequences
flowed. We may ask whether variation is really as
' indefinite ' and ' accidental ' as represented. Is it really
so impossible to say anything about its causes ?

We are here entering on a battlefield of science where
the reputations of experts are still being made and
unmade. Hence it behoves a philosopher to be careful.
Nevertheless one may venture to make some remarks on
the general aspects of the question, and to assert that the
matter cannot possibly be left where Darwinism would
leave it. Thus (i) Darwinism puts aside the question of
the origin of variations. They are ' accidental,' that is,
beyond the pale of inquiry. Yet it seems to be a
perfectly good and legitimate scientific question to ask —
whence these variations ? What, in Professor E. D. Cope's
parlance, was the origin of the fittest? how, in Dr. J. G.
Schurman's words, do you account for the arrival as well
as for the survival of the fittest ? *

(2) Darwinism assumes the occurrence of indefinite
variation in every direction. That assumption is, as we
shall see, essential and quite justifiable as a methodological
device in examining the facts and in working out the
theory of Natural Selection ; but we have a perfect right
to ask whether it is actually itself a fact. That is, the
study of the variations which actually occur is a perfectly

1 Ethical Import of Darwinism, p. 78.

136 HUMANISM vm

legitimate one, and as initiated — e.g., in Bateson's recent
work on the subject l — it very distinctly suggests that
variation is frequently discontinuous, and that it is to
these discontinuous ' sports ' rather than to the accumula
tion of slight differences that we have to look for the
origin of many new species.

In both these respects, then, the non- Darwinian
evolutionists seek to penetrate deeper into the nature of
Organic Evolution than Darwin needed to do when he
established the reality and importance of Natural Selection,
and when Darwin's followers speak of the ' omnipotence of
Natural Selection,' they fail to observe that their opponents
have really turned their flank. For while they do not
deny the reality of Natural Selection, they go on to solve
problems which, on the basis of Darwinism, cannot be
discussed. Hence the Darwinians have not really any
logical locus standi — e.g., in many of their objections to the
' Lamarckian ' factors in evolution. Biologists must be
left a free hand in their attempts to determine the nature
and source of the variations actually occurring, and in
their theories to account for them. If, after admitting
the existence of natural selection, they go on to say
that variations are not indefinite and their causes not in
determinable, Darwinian orthodoxy has no right to interfere.
Or if it mistakenly does try to interfere, its defeat is certain.
For it is practically certain that some influences which
can only be called ' Lamarckian ' must affect both the
number and the character of the variations. Living
organisms are subject to the general physical and
chemical laws of nature, and these render variations in
certain directions practically impossible. It is very
probable also that they produce certain definite effects
upon the organisms exposed to them, and thus give a
definite direction to variation. Thus the force of gravity
imposes limits on the size to which organisms can grow
upon the earth ; high and low temperatures produce
definite effects upon all living tissue. Starvation also will
stunt the growth of all organisms. The efficacy, then, of

1 Materials for the Study of Variation.

viii DARWINISM AND DESIGN 137

these additional factors in determining both what sort of
variations can occur, and in what directions organisms
can vary, can hardly be disputed. Yet this admission
would seem to be a sufficient refutation of the extreme
claim that Natural Selection alone is competent to
account for everything and exhausts the list of the factors
in organic evolution which are logically admissible.

It follows that if the Darwinian factors are not an
adequate and complete account of what really happens,
we are at liberty to supplement them by any additional
factors we may require. Some such factors, such as
geographical isolation, are, of course, admitted even by
the ultra-Darwinians ; others, like sexual selection and
the inherited effects of use and disuse, were adopted by
Darwin himself; others, again, like the sensibility of
organisms and their conscious efforts to attain their ends,
are at least tolerated as worth discussing. What part, if
any, these factors actually play in the history of organisms
is still sub judice and cannot here be determined. It is
enough for the present argument that Darwinism is not
entitled to bar them out a priori as methodologically
inadmissible. For if they are not inadmissible, a breach
is made in the iron barrier with which the original con
ception of a mechanically complete Darwinism shut out
every possibility of teleology. It is so far attenuated
that it can no longer reject a priori the suggestion of the
possibility of one more teleological factor, viz. of a
purposive direction of the course of variation. Such a
purposive direction would still be hard to prove, because
its action would be cloaked under a mass of other causes
of variation, and because it would perhaps only display
itself clearly in the occurrence of variations leading on to
new species or new eras ; but it would no longer be unthink
able, and that would be no slight step towards a teleology.

III. It has been shown so far that if Darwinism is, as
may easily be done, made into a dogmatic denial of the
share of intelligence in Organic Evolution and of the
admissibility of determinable causes, of a limited number,
and of a definite direction of variations, it is demonstrably

138 HUMANISM vm

wrong ; we shall go on to assert that in any form it
leaves unexplained the main point, the very point it was
invented to explain, viz. Organic Evolution itself. This
may seem a startling statement when one remembers that
what led Darwin to propound his theory was precisely
the evidence for Organic Evolution, the evidence of the
descent of the existing forms of life from widely different
ancestors. Yet the statement is made under a due sense
of responsibility and with a full intention of proving it.

Darwin put forward his theory as an account of the
origin of species — it is asserted that there is nothing in
his theory in itself to account for the origination of
species. At least, in the sense that Darwinism formulates
causes which would logically lead to the evolution of new
forms of life. The Darwinian factors only state certain
conditions under which organisms have evolved, but they
contain nothing that would necessarily cause them to
evolve. They simply state that Natural Selection is a
general condition under which all life exists, whether it
evolves or not. It is equally applicable to species which
change and species which do not. Every form of life is
continually subject to the action of Natural Selection,
weeding out the unfit and promoting the survival of the
fit. But it does not follow that any particular form of
life will be transformed. The conditions of success may
be so various and so variable that on the whole no
possible variation can obtain the victory over any other,
and as a whole the species remains as it was. Let us
illustrate the way in which a species under natural
selection may yet persist unchanged. Suppose there is
in a definite area an animal, say an anemone, which has
a certain range of temperature and is variable, so that
while the mass of the species is violet, it tends to vary in
the direction both of blue and of red. Suppose, further,
that the blue variety can stand the cold best and the red
the heat, while the violet is intermediate in these respects.
Now suppose a succession of unusually cold seasons.
Clearly the blue anemones will flourish at the expense of
the violet, and the red will nearly die out. Next suppose

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 139

a succession of warm seasons ; clearly the red will recover
their strength and the preponderance of the blue will be
reduced. At the end of the cycle, red, blue, and violet
will very likely exist in their original proportions. That
is, though the Darwinian factors, variability and natural
selection, have been fully and continually operative, the
species has not changed. Such a case, though I have
intentionally chosen an imaginary one, is not merely
hypothetical ; it is illustrated by a small but sufficient
number of persistent species which have remained
unchanged from very early geological times. Darwin
himself1 mentions the Nautilus, the Lingula, and the
order of the Foraminifera, antique stick - in - the - muds
literally and metaphorically, which are the Chinese of the
animal world and have persisted without change from the
Laurentian and Silurian ages. And over shorter periods
a similar persistence under Natural Selection is the normal
condition of the organic world. Indeed, specific stability
is a much commoner result of Natural Selection than
Evolution.

And further, not only are the Darwinian factors
perfectly compatible with a changeless persistence of
species, but they are equally well satisfied by change in a
direction which is the reverse of that which is actually
found to prevail. For not merely progressive evolution
but also degeneration may come about under the impartial
operation of variability and Natural Selection. Under
certain circumstances the more lowly organized may be
the fitter — i.e. the better adapted to cope with the
conditions of life that prevail at the time ; and then
the higher must either die out or degenerate. Hence
biologists are familar with countless instances of de
generation everywhere. We ourselves are degenerate in
far more obvious and undeniable ways than sensationalists
like Nordau contend. We have lost our fur — all except
a few patches on the head — our ancestral tails, our pineal
eye, our sturdy claws and prehensile toes, the tapering tips
of our ears and the graceful power of attentively pricking

1 Origin of Species, ii. pp. 83, 90, 117.

140 HUMANISM vm

them up ; the vermiform appendix indeed remains as a
joy to the evolutionist and a profit to the doctor, but to
the patient the useless and dangerous relic of a damnosa
kereditas. And all this degeneration has taken place
under the action of Natural Selection.

Not but what there has also been much progression,
and that in the aggregate its amount has far exceeded
that of degeneration. This is just the reason why we
speak of the history of life as an evolution. Life has
been on the whole progressive ; but progress and retro
gression have both been effected under the same ' law ' of
Natural Selection. How, then, can the credit of the
result be ascribed to Natural Selection ? Natural Selection
is equally ready to bring about degeneration or to leave
things unchanged. How, then, can it be that which
determines which of the three possible (and actual) cases
shall be realized ? Let us grant that Natural Selection is
a permanent condition of life, from which no beings can
at any time escape. But for this very reason it cannot
be the principle of differentiation which decides which of
the alternative courses the evolution of life will in fact
pursue. It cannot be Natural Selection that causes one
species to remain stationary, another to degenerate, a third
to develop into a higher form. The constant pressure
which it exercises on organisms does not in the least
explain the actual course of evolution any more than
the constant pressure of the atmosphere determines the
direction in which we walk. The cause of the particular
changes which have led to the existing forms of life cannot
be found in an unchanging law of all life ; it must be
sought in forces whose intermittent action has made an
instrument of Natural Selection.

It is clear, then, that to explain the changes which
have resulted in the existing forms of life some variable
factor has to be added to Natural Selection. And as to
the nature of this factor Darwinism, qua Darwinism, tells
us nothing. There may have been one or more of them,
they may have been of all sorts. They may have been
nothing more recondite than climatic changes or geo-

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 141

graphical isolation, to mention two of Darwin's favourite
explanations when Natural Selection stands in need of
something to help it out in order that it may proceed to
the origination of species. Now clearly these causes of
the transmutation of species, and others that might be
instanced, are under the proper conditions adequate to
produce new species — though there is no apparent reason
why they should so predominantly produce higher species
—but that does not concern us here. The point to be
emphasized is that these additional factors lie beyond the
scope of the peculiarly Darwinian factors, which can have
nothing to say on the question whether they are to be
accepted or rejected. So long as the action of Natural
Selection as a permanent and universal condition of life
is conceded, there is nothing further to be said by the
Darwinian theory. If, then, there is no other scientific
objection to it, the notion of a purposive direction of
variation becomes admissible. Nay, it would be possible
to combine a belief in special creation with that in Natural
Selection, and claim that while Natural Selection alone
could not give rise to a new species, Natural Selection
plus special creation might account for the distribution and
succession of species. We should thus reach the paradoxi
cal result, that whereas Natural Selection was expressly
invented to supersede special creation, there is no necessity
to regard the two theories as incompatible ! I mention
this paradox merely to illustrate by it the helplessness of
mere Natural Selection and the necessity of appealing to
subsidiary theories in order to account for the facts of
Organic Evolution.

Of course, there is an abundance of such subsidiary
theories, and many of them are quite unteleological. One
may, for instance, continue to object to teleology on a
variety of general grounds. Only those objections will
not be specially grounded in Darwinism, and so far as
the latter goes, it will not be possible to rule out the
supposition that the process of Evolution may be guided
by an intelligent design.

IV. A further logical limitation of Darwinism is of a

142 HUMANISM vin

still more fundamental character. We have seen that
Darwinism can supply no theory of the origin of Variation.
Nor does it necessarily lead to the transmutation of species.
Nor does it as such involve a growth of adaptation or
yield an adequate account of Progress. But more than
all this, it does not even give an account of the origin of
adaptation. A little reflection will show that a certain
amount of adaptation must always be conceived to pre
exist before Natural Selection can begin to operate, the
amount, namely, which is requisite to enable the organisms
to exist, out of which the ' fit ' are subsequently to be
selected. There must be an existence of the fit before
there can be a survival of the fitter, and beings must be
capable of existing at all before the question of their
living better and surviving can be raised. Hence the
initial degree of adaptation needed for the existence of
organisms in the world together must always be pre
supposed by the Darwinian theory. It must renounce

• .

therefore its claim to have accounted for adaptation as

such, and so to have wholly superseded the teleological
argument.

Indeed, it may be questioned whether it ever involves
any growth of adaptation, or does more than describe the
means by which an already existing adaptation is preserved
through changes in the conditions of existence. It is clear
that a thing must be before it can be selected. And to be,
it must always be adapted to the conditions of existence.
It cannot be said to grow better adapted, unless it actually
manages to exist more copiously, or fully, or easily. But
can this be said to be true of the ordinary Darwinian
version of the history of organisms ? Is it true that they
have grown better adapted, and are better able to survive ?
Is not the struggle for existence, now as ever, a struggle
for a bare livelihood ? It boots not to suggest that many
or most of the beings who now just manage to exist
would have lived in comfort in a former age ; for apart
from the dubious truth of the assertion, it is clear the
fitness of each being must be measured by its ability to
exist under the conditions of its own time and place.

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 143

What seems to happen is rather this : we start with
adaptation, with a sufficient equilibrium between the
organism and its conditions of life to allow of its existence
(for a season). But this equilibrium is constantly en
dangered by the changes in its conditions of life ; hence
there is constant need for an adaptive response to these
changes, for novelty of adaptation. This response some
somehow manage to effect, and so survive ; the rest do
not, and therefore perish. And it is this process which
we dignify with the name of Natural Selection. But it
is the name only for the mechanism which just keeps
alive the sacred fire of life ; it neither lights it nor improves
its radiance. Nor do we come upon any incontestable
traces of improvement until we come upon the traces of
intelligence. It is only with beings that aim at ends,
conceive goods and frame ideals of better living, that there
begins that funding of the power over life which renders
possible the pursuit, not of mere life, but of good life, and
transfigures the struggle for existence by an ethical ideal.
Natural Selection is a universal condition of life, but it
is not for us a model or a guide. It is non-moral and
relieves us of no moral responsibility ; it remains within
our power to mould it well or ill.

V. It will, perhaps, be objected that in the anxiety to
invalidate the anti-teleological implications of Darwinism
we have gone too far, and denied its whole scientific
importance. For what is the value of Natural Selection
if it does not explain Evolution ? Such a result is too
monstrously paradoxical to be accepted as the outcome of
any argument, however solid it may seem.

This objection should be welcomed by anticipation,
because it leads on to a discussion of the real scientific
value of the Darwinian theory, and in so doing traces to
its real source the prima facie conflict between Darwinism
and teleology. In reality there is not involved in any
thing that has been said any disparagement of Darwin's
tireless scientific labour, nor does anything that has been
said in the slightest detract from the permanent value and
immense importance of his work. What is disputed is

144 HUMANISM Vm

not the valuable part of his work, nor the true meaning
of his theory, and these remain intact when a misinter
pretation of his theory and a misapplication, of his results
are controverted.

What, then, is the true significance of Darwin's work ?
It is to have established once and for all the reality, univers
ality and importance of Natural Selection as a condition of
organic life. That has been its main achievement rather
than the refutation of crude theories of creation and
teleology, or even the assignment of an all-sufficient cause
for the changes of organic forms. It is somewhat difficult
to establish this view by direct citation from the utterances
either of Darwin or of the other leading Darwinians, for
the reason that Darwin stumbled upon Natural Selection
in the endeavour to prove Evolution, and never was greatly
interested in, or even competent to discuss, the logic of
his theory. Hence its fundamental conceptions are intro
duced quite innocently and without formal definition, as
if their meaning could not possibly be mistaken ; hence,
also, terms like ' indefinite,' ' endless,' ' fortuitous,' sometimes
only mean, respectively, ' not obviously limited,' 'in sufficient
quantities,' and ' unexplored ' ; sometimes, as will be shown
presently, they seem, quite unconsciously, to mean much
more.1 This state of things is, however, explained when
we remember that there is abundant autobiographical
evidence that Darwin himself elaborated his theory in
support of evolutionism against creationism, and by con
crete examples rather than by abstract deductions ; for
by such methods he would naturally not become fully
conscious of its logical implications. Hence the extraction
of the logical root of the Darwinian theory becomes a
matter of philosophical interpretation which may be repre
sented somewhat as follows.

Suspecting Natural Selection to play a part in the
Evolution of life, Darwin had to determine what part of

1 Similarly Darwinian discussions of the definition of 'higher' and 'lower,'
of the persistence of lower forms and of the source of progression generally find
refuge in our immense ignorance of the past, and exhibit only the reluctance of
their authors to tie themselves down to precise formulations. — Cp. Origin of
Species, ii. pp. 117, 151, 243, 274. Wallace, Darwinism, p. 120.

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 145

the total effect was due to the factor which he called
Natural Selection. To solve this problem he adopted,
no doubt instinctively, the method by which all scientific
investigation proceeds in dealing with a complicated
problem. This method is that of abstraction, of abstrac
tion as a means of simplification. We isolate the factor
of which we seek to determine the value by taking cases
in which the other factors may be supposed to neutralize
each other, and so to be irrelevant to the result. Our result
is abstract, but, if the analysis has been carefully done,
it is applicable to the concrete facts.

This is precisely what Darwin did. The phenomena
of life are immensely complicated, and there was ample
reason to suppose that they were affected by all sorts
of influences. To lay bare the effect of Natural Selection,
it was necessary to simplify them by constructing an
ideal case from which other influences might be excluded.
This is the logical significance of the fundamental
assumptions of Darwinism. Darwin knew that organisms
varied. He did not know how much, or in what direction.
But if there was a definite direction about the variation
of organisms, this clearly might in various ways retard
or accelerate the action of Natural Selection, and would
in any event cloak it. It is obvious, for example, that
if a race of elephants tend to vary in the direction of
whiteness, then, though that variety may be weaker and
less well equipped for the struggles of life, there will
always be a certain supply of not-yet-eliminated white
elephants.1 Again the fate of the variety will be widely
different, according as men consider them unlucky and
kill them, or sacred and watch over them with especial
care.

In order, therefore, to avoid the initial complications
introduced by a possible tendency of variation in a
definite direction, it was logically necessary for Darwin
to assume that as a whole Variation had no definite
direction. Variations occurred of all sorts, advantageous,

1 It is supposed that albinos tend to be produced by in-breeding, and hence
the supply is always kept up in spite of Natural Selection.

L

146 HUMANISM

VIII

disadvantageous, and indifferent, hence, as a whole,
Variation was indefinite. Darwin, that is, did not
facilitate his task by supposing a mass of favourable
variations to give Natural Selection a good start ;
favourable variations were no commoner than they would
have been if they had been drawn at random from an
indefinite supply of possible variations of all sorts.

Similarly, in order to avoid the complicating question
whether these variations were not produced by definite
causes, and so tended in a definite direction, Darwin said
in effect — Let us suppose these indefinite variations to
be accidental. That is, let us waive the question of
where they came from. In this way he arrived at the
assumption of indefinite accidental variation on which
his theory proceeded.

It is clear, then, that this essential assumption of
Darwinism was originally methodological, that it was a
simplification of the facts assumed for purposes of analysis
and easier calculation. This is, of course, an everyday
procedure in all the sciences, and if a methodological
assumption has been skilfully selected, it does excellent
service. Now Darwin's assumption was an exceedingly
skilful one : for whether or not it was true that Variation
was absolutely indefinite and void of direction, it yet
ordinarily seemed sufficiently indefinite to enable the ideal
theoretical case to throw a most instructive light upon
the actual facts.

Perhaps the character of the assumption of indefinite
variation is best illustrated by a parallel methodological
fiction which has also played a great part in history.
I refer to the assumption of ' the economic man ' in
political economy. In order to build up the science of
wealth, the early economists disentangled the primary
laws of wealth-production by the methodological assump
tion of the ' economic man.' They said : Let us consider
man as a wealth -producing animal ; let us suppose,
therefore, that the production of wealth is his sole object
in life. In that case the economic man must be taken
as (i) absolutely laborious, as never distracted from his

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 147

work by emotional indisposition or laziness, as a perfect
wealth-producing machine ; (2) he must be taken as
absolutely intelligent, as always using the best means to
his end, as knowing how to use his labour to best
advantage, and how to sell its products in the most
advantageous manner ; (3) he must be taken as absolutely
selfish, as absolutely disregardful of any consideration but
that of how he could acquire the largest possible amount
of wealth. Having thus simplified economic facts, let us
see what will happen. So they proceeded to build up
the science of abstract economics. When it was objected
to them that their methodological assumption, the economic
man, did not exist in reality, the wiser among them
replied : ' Of course we know that, but the conditions
of actual business are sufficiently close to what they
would be under our ideal conditions to have much light
thrown on them by the latter.' And they gave thereby
a clue through the labyrinth of facts to the economists
who succeeded them, and were able by means of it to
calculate the effects in various departments of the
inaccuracy of the methodological assumption of the
' economic man.'

Now ' the economic man ' is an exact parallel to the
' accidental ' and ' indefinite ' variation of Darwin. They
are both methodological assumptions, travesties of the
truth, if taken as full and complete accounts of the actual
facts, epoch-making and indispensable organa of science,
if properly used. And the parallel extends still further.
As philosophers are well aware, there is everywhere in
the sciences a tendency to forget that methodological
assumptions are not necessarily true because they are
useful,1 a tendency to assert as a fact what was at first
assumed as an abstraction and a fiction for greater
convenience in examining the facts. Alike in ordinary
life and in science we are almost without exception given
over, not to the adoration of an unknown god, but to the
worship of forgotten abstractions and methodological

1 Even so excellent a thing as Pragmatism may be overdone ! In fact it
usually is, by its critics and in popular thinking, when methodological assumptions
of limited applicability are mistaken for absolute truths.

148 HUMANISM vm

fictions, and happy is he who can avoid bending the knee
to such bogeys.

For this idolatry leads to terrible confusions, as these
very cases show. When ' the economic man ' is taken
seriously, and made a practical ideal, he leads to results
which are incompatible with the maintenance of political
and social cohesion, and with the sanctity of moral laws.
And he provokes a reaction even worse than himself
in the direction of revolutionary socialism.

So, too, with the Darwinian assumption. When it is
taken as a fact and as the last word on the subject of
evolution, it leaves no room for the Argument from
Design, and leads to consequences entirely inconsistent
with any teleology. Moreover, the misrepresentation
of the principle of indefinite variation is a very easy and
common one, and has been adopted in this very article in
exhibiting the conflict between Darwinism and teleology.
But, once it is recognized as a misinterpretation, as a case
of confusing a method of examining facts with the facts
themselves, the danger of any further conflict is averted.

It remains to give practical confirmation of this inter
pretation of the real meaning of the Darwinian principle.
To do so, it may be pointed out, in the first place, that
Darwin assumed the indefiniteness of Variation initially
upon utterly insufficient evidence, or, rather, upon no
relevant evidence at all. For he was not in the position
to make any positive statements about the variations that
actually occurred, and had not had the time to study
them exhaustively. In fact, it is only in these days that
the actual facts of Variation are beginning to be observed
and recorded, and many generations of workers will
probably pass away before it will be possible to state
with approximate certainty what variations actually take
place, and can be conceived as likely to take place. If,
then, Darwin's knowledge of Variation were to be regarded
as the logical basis for asserting Variation to be in fact
indefinite, the foundations of Darwinism would have been
extremely insecure, and Darwin ought to have begun
with an exhaustive study of variations before broaching

vni DARWINISM AND DESIGN 149

his theory. Did he, as was to be expected from so
exceptionally cautious an inquirer, subject himself to this
preliminary investigation ? He did nothing of the sort.
He simply pointed to the known variety of variations as
approximately illustrative of his conception of ' indefinite
variation,' and went ahead. I can find nothing more
formal than a request 1 that ' the endless number of slight
variations and individual differences occurring in our
domestic productions, and in a lesser degree in those
under nature, be borne in mind.' In other words, he did
not attempt to prove the existence of indefinite variation
in its literal sense ; he took it for granted for the methodo
logical reasons aforesaid. Was it wrong to do this ?
Not unless science is deprived of the right of making
methodological assumptions. And the practical justifica
tion of Darwin's procedure is seen in the fact that his
theory has in the ripeness of time provided a guiding
thread and an impetus to the study of facts that might
otherwise long have eluded the grasp of science.

VI. That the facts of Organic Evolution really play
a very small part in producing the speculative bearing
of Darwinism will appear also if we inquire into the
reason of its anti-teleological action as commonly under
stood.

For it turns out that the destructiveness of Darwin
ism is a by-product of the theory which lurked in the
innocent-looking phrase, ' indefinite variation.'

We have seen that, as a method of investigating the
facts, this phrase is thoroughly defensible ; but then in that
shape it does not really touch the question of teleology at
all. For if the variations are only called indefinite in order
to determine the working of Natural Selection, then the
possibility of their purposive occurrence is not thereby
excluded.

On the other hand, let us take the phrase as a
description of an actual fact. If there are an indefinite
number of variations, and if they tend in an indefinite
number of directions, it follows that the variations in any

1 Origin of Species, \. p. 97.

ISO HUMANISM

VIII

one direction will not be more than an infinitesimal portion
of the whole. It is not necessary, therefore, to adduce
any special cause for those particular variations ; they
need not be regarded as due to anything more than
chance, that is, to causes which do not in any intelligent
way discriminate in their favour. That advantageous
variations should occasionally occur is no more remark
able, or in need of explanation, than that by throwing
dice long enough we should occasionally throw sixes.
If, then, indefinite variation be an actual fact, no special
intelligence need be assumed to account even for the
most abnormal variation. In other words, a principle has
been adopted which rules out the hypothesis of intelligent
direction a priori, if we forget or fail to perceive that
indefinite variation is a methodological assumption. And
being a priori, the principle would rule out the hypothesis
whatsoever the facts were, and however much they might
suggest the action of intelligence. Intelligence is non
suited by the way in which the question is put, and
irrespective of the facts of the case.

Yet all this is due to nothing more mysterious than
an application of the calculus of probabilities, for, as all
who are even slightly familiar with this calculus are
aware, even the most improbable result may be expected
to occur if a sufficiency of cases be given. It is highly
improbable, for example, that any one should, by fair
dealing, acquire a hand containing thirteen trumps at
whist. But if he had played some 640,000,000,000
hands, he might fairly expect to hold all the trumps on
one occasion. Everything that happens may be due to
chance, and no matter how improbabilities are multiplied,
we never altogether eliminate the infinitesimal probability
that everything is due to chance. Supposing we were
to try to persuade an obstinate materialist that our
conduct was dictated by a purpose and due to intelligence,
and was not the action of an automatic mechanism which
had by some strange chance put on a delusive appearance
of purposiveness. However intelligently we acted, we
could not convince our adversary, if he were permitted

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 151

to regard our action as one out of a series of actions
displaying no intelligence. He would cheerfully admit
that the action seemed intelligent, and by itself would
justify the inference to a real intelligence behind it. But
he would urge, if I take it as the one intelligent action
out of an indefinite number of unintelligent actions, there
is nothing in it that need cause surprise or calls for the
assumption of real intelligence. We might try to convince
him by multiplying the symptoms of intelligence, but in
vain. For, though he would admit the growing improb
ability of such a continuous series of apparently purposive
actions, he could still expand the context of non-purposive
actions rapidly enough to maintain his theory of their
chance origination.1

If, therefore, an indefinite number of non- adaptive
variations be really granted, no adaptations, however
numerous and complete, can ever prove an intelligent
cause of variation. Even if all the known facts testified
aloud to the operation of an adapting intelligence, the
Darwinian assumption might still be used to disprove all
teleology, if unbounded license were given for the invention
of hypothetical variations ! Now, of course it is not
contended that variations as known are all obviously
adaptive ; it is claimed rather that we do not know
enough about them to say what their actual character
is. But it must most strenuously be asserted that the
Darwinian theory cannot be quoted as destructive of the
action of purposive intelligence in organic evolution until
the occurrence of indefinite variation has been raised from
the position of a methodological device to that of an
incontestable fact.

Even then it may be doubted whether the fortuit
ous character of the facts could ever be rendered incon
testable. To defy refutation by the facts the teleologist
has merely to adopt a device analogous to that of his
opponent. Just as the latter could always assume a
non-teleological extension of what seemed a teleological
ordering, so the former can always assume a secret

1 Cp. pp. 71-2.

i$2 HUMANISM

VIII

teleology within the seeming chance. This he can do in
several ways ; most thoroughly by assuming that the
order purposed exactly coincided with the results of a
fortuitous distribution, and was intended so to do. This
ingenuity, however, would somewhat overreach itself. It
would have to conceive the intelligence immanent in the
world's order as one aiming at concealment. For our
only method of discriminating between the results of
' design ' and ' chance ' is to observe a deviation from the
fortuitous distribution (which betrays no preference for
any particular result) in the direction of what may be
conceived as a more valuable result. Hence in the case
supposed, the deviation being nil, we should have no
reason to suspect the presence of intelligence. And
generally, one would have to hold that a supposition
which rendered the results of ' design ' and ' chance '
undistinguishable abolished also the difference between
the two conceptions ; a world governed by such an
intelligence would be no better than one wholly due to
' chance.' * By supposing, therefore, that the ' design '
makes no difference, the teleologist would defeat his
purpose.

But he can assume the intelligent deviation to be of
whatever magnitude the facts demand, and by assuming
it to be small enough he can suppose a purposively
guided order which mimics chance, just as the anti-
teleologist could explain ' design ' as a mimicry by chance.
And so he can conceive a (really) teleological order in-
finitesimally different from one merely fortuitous, and the
mere tabulation of statistics will never decide its actual
character. The mere record of the throws will never tell
us that once in a hundred throws the dice came up sixes
by intelligent design (of a nefarious kind). And yet that
single throw might have sufficed to win the game ! Now
in the history of Organic Evolution the really valuable
events which help on progress are certainly of the
extremest rarity. It is only once in an aeon that

1 Cp. James, Varieties of Religious Experience, pp. 443-7, and Philosophical
Conceptions and Practical Results, pp. 9-11.

viii DARWINISM AND DESIGN 153

an ' accidental ' variation distinguishes itself from a
myriad others by lifting organic structure permanently
on to a higher plane. It is only once in centuries that a
genius is born who does the same for social progress :
the great events in history are utterly unique, and turn
the course of things so thoroughly that they need never
be repeated. But all uniqueness makes a mock of Science,
which ' explains ' by rinding uniformities.

Hence the teleological and the anti-teleological interpre
tation of events will never decide their conflict by appealing
to the facts : for in the facts each finds what it wills and
comes prepared to see. And yet the facts will not wholly
bear out either, so long as they present traces of what we
can describe as disorder in the one case, or order in the
other. The decision therefore needs an act of choice ; it
eminently calls for the exercise of our ' will to believe ' ;
it rests, like all the ultimate assumptions of our knowledge,
upon an act of faith.

VII. The position, then, is this: i. If we take the
Darwinian assumptions as methodological, they are
perfectly legitimate, most fruitful and valuable, and
establish the fundamental biological law of Natural
Selection. But there is no conflict with the belief in
teleology, and the Argument from Design remains un
impaired.

2. If we take the Darwinian assumption as representing
a fact, it is certainly destructive of all teleology. But the
fact is not established and is open to grave doubts on
scientific grounds, while its destruction of the teleological
argument is simply a foregone conclusion a priori.

3. If, while admitting that indefinite variation has not
been shown to exist, we yet contend that it is the sole
working assumption by which the facts can be investigated,
and that the possibility of a purposive guidance must be
rigidly excluded from Science, we simply beg the question.
For certainly, if all the evidence is to be interpreted in
accordance with such canons, no evidence for teleology
can ever be found. One need not object to people
wearing blue spectacles if they like — they are in fact

154 HUMANISM vm

often useful, if not ornamental — but it is ludicrous to
maintain that everything is blue because we insist on
looking through the spectacles.

This ought to constitute a sufficiently explicit answer
to the question, Is Darwinism, properly understood,
necessarily hostile to teleology ? Not only have we been
able to answer that question by an emphatic negative,
but we have uncovered the source of the misunderstanding
which led to the question. We might go on to raise
rather the opposite question, and ask, Does Darwinism
in any way tend to strengthen the Argument from Design
and the belief in teleology ? That would, perhaps, be
asking too much; its services in this respect seem to be
mostly of an indirect sort. It is often invigorating to be
attacked, especially when the assult can be successfully
repulsed, and perhaps in this sense the Argument from
Design is the stronger for having been impugned in the
name of Darwinism.

More can perhaps be extracted from another point
brought out by Darwinism — viz. from the fact that
Natural Selection is a universal law of life operating
indifferently, whether there is stagnation, degeneration, or
progression. From this it may be inferred that the
ghastly law of struggle for existence, the cruel necessity
which engages every living thing in almost unceasing
warfare, while not itself the cause of progression, is yet
capable of being rendered subservient to the cause of
progression. The progress, the adaptations, actually found,
are certainly not due to Natural Selection : yet neither
does Natural Selection form an obstacle to their occurrence.
Nay, we may conjecture that the power which makes for
progress, a power which we may divine to work for
nobler ends, is lord also of Natural Selection, and can
render it a pliable instrument of its purpose, a sanction to
enforce the law of progress, a goad to urge on laggards.

What that power may be Darwinism cannot directly
tell us. Before we could ascribe to it a pronouncedly
teleological character, we should have to measure our
strength against a number of possible factors in Organic

vin DARWINISM AND DESIGN 155

Evolution as 'mechanical' as Darwinism. But I believe it
could be shown that all these mechanical laws of Evolu
tion, from Spencer's law of differentiation downwards, fail
just where Darwinism pure and simple failed — viz. in
accounting for the historical fact of progress. Either,
therefore, we should have to admit that an as yet unformu-
lated mechanical law of Evolution accounted for progres
sion, or that it was due to an agency of a different order,
to the guidance of an intelligent and purposive activity.
It may be suggested, however, that a critical examination
of the current mechanical theories of Evolution must
distinctly strengthen the belief that there has been opera
tive in the history of life an intelligent force to which we
must ascribe the progression and direction of the process
of Evolution. And inasmuch as Darwinism occupies a
leading place among these mechanical theories, its exam
ination will greatly conduce to that result.

We have discussed so far only mechanical theories of
Evolution. But in itself Evolution is not necessarily
bound to be mechanical ; it is perfectly possible to regard
it as the gradual working out of a divine purpose. And
once we adopt the evolutionist standpoint, it is clear that
the Argument from Design is materially and perceptibly
strengthened, (i) Positively, because Evolutionism lets
us as it were behind the scenes and shows us how means
are adapted to ends in the gradual process of Evolution.
This renders easier and more comprehensible the belief
underlying all teleology in a power that intelligently
adapts means to ends. (2) Negatively, Evolutionism
greatly weakens the objection to the teleological argument
based on the imperfection of existing adaptations. We
are no longer compelled to proclaim everything already
perfect ; it suffices that we can find nourishment for the
faith that everything is being made perfect.

If, then, Evolutionism strengthens the Argument from
Design, the latter indirectly owes a debt of gratitude to
the theories which have facilitated the adoption of the
Evolutionist standpoint. And among these Darwinism
stands pre-eminent. Evolutionism was as old as one of

156 HUMANISM

VIII

the earliest of Greek philosophies ; l but it was not until
Darwinism made it a household word that it could force
its way into the consciousness of men at large. And as
a philosopher who regards Evolutionism in some form as
affording the most hopeful method of approaching the
mystery of existence, I am inclined to hold that when
historical perspective has cleared away the molehills we
have made into mountains, it will be here that will be
found Darwin's most momentous and enduring service to
knowledge and to mankind.

1 That of Anaximander : see Mind I p. 129.

IX
THE PLACE OF PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY1

ARGUMENT

To prove that Pessimism is an ultimate attitude of -will.

(i) It is not merely disappointed hedonism. (2) It may result from the
breakdown of any ideal of value. Now any system of values may be
judged (a) adequate, (b) inadequate, (c) inapplicable, to Life. Similarly in
judgments of Fact, reality is judged (a) knowable (b) unknowable,
(c) inexhaustible. But the ' critical ' solutions (c) reduce themselves to (b).
All our modes of Valuation stand and fall together, and ' Truth ' is
among them. Hence Optimism and Pessimism become ultimate alterna
tives. Still Pessimism is secondary. Practical value of this issue.

THE aim of this essay is to show that logically
Pessimism should be taken in a far wider and more
fundamental sense than is commonly assigned to it, and
that when this is done, it forms an attitude towards the
ultimate questions of philosophy which is not susceptible
of being resolved into any other, and cannot be refuted,
but only accepted or rejected. It forms one of those
ultimate alternatives the choice between which, rests
essentially upon an act of will.

In attempting to establish this view, it will be
convenient to start by determining what we are to under
stand by the term Pessimism. It has been customary
to subordinate the treatment of the subject too much to
the particular views of representative pessimist writers,
and to pay too little regard to the logical connexion of
the pessimist positions. Hence, a belief has become
current that Pessimism might be summed up in the
assertion that life was not worth living, because in it the

1 Reprinted (with- a few additions) from the International Journal of Ethics,
for Oct. 1897.

157

158 HUMANISM ,x

pains predominated over the pleasures, and the whole
question was thus reduced to one of the possibility and
result of the hedonistic calculus. Now, it is true that
the doctrines of Schopenhauer and von Hartmann lend
themselves to such a narrowing of the issue, but I believe
that it is possible to demonstrate the essential shallowness
and logical inadequacy of a transition which is psycho
logically so easy as to have been made almost universally.
In the argument that life is not worth living because it
involves an excess of pain, the second clause states a
reason for the first, and, if it is proved, the conclusion
clearly follows. What has not been observed, however,
is that even if it should not be proved, the conclusion may
yet be true, because it may rest on other reasons. To
argue that because one ground for a conclusion is unsound,
the conclusion itself cannot be established, would evidently
be nothing else than the familiar logical fallacy of denying
the antecedent — until it has been shown that no other
grounds are possible. But this is not the case here.
The condemnation of life, which Pessimism essays to
pronounce, does not necessarily rest on a single basis : it
forms an attitude of thought which has been linked with
the assertion of the predominance of pain by a mere
accident of historical development. It is quite possible to
condemn life on various grounds without holding it to be
predominantly painful. It is possible to condemn it, not
because it has too little pleasure, but because it has too
little of the other ends which are recognized as good in
themselves, because it has too little virtue or knowledge
or beauty or duration. Life may shock us into a denial
of its value also by its moral, its aesthetic, its intellectual
deficiencies : it may seem so brief, so nauseatingly petty
and contemptible that the game is not worth the candle.
In all such cases the Pessimism cuts itself adrift from its
supposed hedonist basis ; and, even where the hedonist
standard is retained, it need not be of an egoistic
character. It may be sympathy with the misery of
others that tempts us like the Buddha, like the Preacher
in Thomson's City of Dreadful Night, to condemn life.

ix PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY 159

Again, it is possible to argue, more subtly, that the
unhappiness is the effect rather than the cause of the
worthlessness of life. It is " not that life is valueless
because it is unhappy, but that it is unhappy because it is
valueless." l

But what enables man thus to apply to life the
standards by which it is itself condemned ? Nothing
surely but the fact that he is capable of framing an ideal
of worth, an ideal of something worth striving for and of
holding it up to reality as a mirror in which to behold its
deficiencies. It is because we systematize our valuations
and so form ideal standards which alone bestow true
value upon life, that we can condemn it because it
nowhere allows us to attain perfect happiness or full
knowledge or complete goodness or aesthetic harmony.

Now it is evident that the deficiencies in life which
the formation of these ideals enables us to detect will act
as a potent stimulus to progress so long as the deficiencies
seem comparatively small and the ideals appear attainable ;
if, however, we allow our ideals to outgrow our means of
reaching them, the chasm between them and the actual
will become too deep to be bridged by hope ; we shall
despair of attaining our heart's desire and bitterly condemn
the inadequacy of the actual. Thus Pessimism will ever
hover like a dark cloud over the path of progress, ready to
oppress with gloom alike the cowardice that despairs and
the temerity that outstrips, prematurely and recklessly, the
limitations of the practicable. It is a natural and almost
inevitable phase in spiritual development, which results
whenever any object of desire is found to be unattainable,
and it has no exclusive affinity for the details of a petti
fogging calculation of probable pleasures and pains. The
sole reason why the question of Pessimism has mostly
been debated on a hedonistic basis is because Happiness
is the one ideal which is universally comprehended, which
allures by its elusive glitter even the coarsest and most
commonplace of men.

Having thus freed Pessimism from its entanglement in

1 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 99.

160 HUMANISM

IX

hedonistic disputes, we may proceed to determine its
deepest nature. This nature would seem to consist in
the denial of the value of life, in whatever terms and by
whatever standards it may be formulated. If Pessimism
springs from the experience of pain, it will deny the value
of life because happiness is unattainable ; if from moral
indignation, because goodness is unattainable ; if from
aesthetic disgust, because beauty is unattainable ; if from
scepticism, because knowledge is unattainable. But in
each case the value of life will be denied. It makes no
difference to Pessimism whether a man despair because
the world is so miserable, or so bad, or so hideous, or so
inscrutable.

It follows from this that Pessimism is essentially a
certain definite attitude towards the great and well-
recognized class of judgments which are known as judg
ments of Value ( Werturtcile). Now, judgments of Value
are possible about everything that is experienced, and are
usually contrasted with judgments of Fact in that they do
not inquire what a thing zs, but what it is worth. And,
like the primary judgments of Fact, alike whether they are
ethical, aesthetical, or merely emotional or affective, they
are primarily relative, — i.e. they assert that something has
value for this purpose or that, for this aspect or that, of
human nature. But just as the logical judgments must
ultimately be accommodated in a coherent system of Truth,
so the judgments of Value must ultimately all be referred
to some supremely valuable end of action, or Summum
Bonum. It will be possible then to estimate life as a
Whole by this supreme standard of Value, and to discuss
whether it satisfies it or not. If, as the outcome of such
discussion, it shall appear that no coherent system can
be framed, and that our valuations fail, their failure
will create the situation on which Pessimism forms the
emotional reaction.

Now as the result of such discussion, only three alter
natives seem thinkable :

I. We may conclude that Life is adequate to the
attainment of the supreme end of action, and that,

ix PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY 161

consequently, it has value and is worth living. This is
the position taken by every form of Optimism.

II. We may decide that Life is inadequate to meet
the requirements of the standard applied to it ; that,
consequently, it has no value, and so is not worth living.
This is the conclusion implied in every form of
Pessimism.

III. We may object on principle to the attempt to
answer the question, and contend that it should not be
raised, arguing, e.g., that it does not follow from the fact
that the value of everything in life may be determined,
that we can determine the value of life as a whole.
This may be called the agnostic or — with a reference to
the Kantian denial of metaphysics and its analogous
answer to the ultimate question of knowledge — the
critical answer.

It is worth pointing out that these three modes of
treating the ultimate question of Value correspond exactly
to the ultimate modes of answering the question as
to the ultimate Fact. We answer the final problem of
theoretic knowledge also in three ways: (i) We may
declare that existence is ultimately knowable, and explain
its nature in more or less tentative systems of constructive
metaphysics. (2) We may deny that in the end any
thing can be known. This is the sceptical attitude.
(3) We may protest that human knowledge is not com
petent to solve its ultimate problems, and has no right
to raise the question. This is the attitude of a ' Criticism '
which shrouds the ultimate metaphysical truth in the
unfathomable obscurity of the Thing-in-itself, and yet
Tantalus-like, is ever tormented by the phantom of a
satisfaction which it believes to be hopelessly beyond its
reach.

Whichever kind of ultimate question, then, we raise,
whether that of the nature of ultimate facts or that of
their valuation, three alternatives seem possible. But we
can hardly avoid asking further whether they are all
equally tenable. That is a difficult question which I
cannot here discuss exhaustively. The proper academic

M

162 HUMANISM

IX

thing to do would be, I suppose, either to evade an
answer altogether or to decide in favour of the third
alternative, — which is nearly as unsatisfactory as no
answer at all, — and to finish up with a learned sneer at
those who venture on ' dogmatic ' conclusions. But,
for once, I should like to dare to be dogmatic — at least
to some extent — and to indicate some reasons at least for
eliminating that third alternative.

For it seems to me that it reduces itself to the second,
that the emotional value of ' no answer ' is equivalent
to an answer in the negative. Nor can I see why, if
judgments of Value are rightly and properly made, they
should not be applicable to the scheme of things as a
whole. Certainly we make this assumption in the case
of the judgments of intellectual Value, — i.e. in determin
ing the value of our judgments of Fact. We assume that
because judgments of relative truth and falsity are made,
the former can ultimately be fitted into a coherent and
congruous system of Truth. That is, we recognize that
in the end Truth too is Value?- and decline to predicate
the ' truth ' of any ' fact ' which seems discordant with
our system. Indeed it is by such a reference to logical
values that we discriminate among the ' facts ' which
claim reality, and grant or refuse their application.

But if we are entitled to hold that there is Truth, and
not merely judgments relatively true, — in other words,
that is, that our logical valuations may be combined into a
system, and that the ideal of Truth is applicable to Reality
and controls it, — why should we not be equally entitled
to affirm similar validity for the ideals of Goodness and
Happiness ? 2 If Experience as a whole can be judged
true or false, coherent or incoherent, why should it not
be judged as a whole good or bad ? At all events, it
cannot be taken for granted, without attempt at argument,
that human judgments of 'good' and 'bad' mean
nothing to the whole, while (equally human) judgments
of ' true ' and ' false ' may be appealed to to extract its
inmost mysteries.3

1 Cp. pp. 54-5. 2 Cp. pp. 345-6. 3 Cp. pp. 9- ic,

ix PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY 163

Moreover, the attempt to draw such a distinction
would seem to break down even on the theoretic side.
Granted that our theoretical account of the world had
denied to all the judgments of Value, except those
which use the predicates of ' true ' and ' false,' all
ultimate significance, yet the fact would remain that
such judgments were made and formed an integral part
of life. They would remain, therefore, as an inexplicable
factor in the world. And the more we realized the
importance of this factor and the manner in which it
permeates all our activities and directs even the intellect
when it is seeking to deny it, the more doubtful should
we become whether we had explained anything while
this was left inexplicable. That is, we should inevitably
be impelled towards scepticism on the theoretic side, and
the practical reflex of scepticism is, as I have elsewhere
shown, nothing else than Pessimism.1

It remains to ask whether the problems of Value or of
Fact are more ultimate, and whether ultimately the one
may not be subordinated to the other. I believe that
they may and must, and that the antithesis between
them is ultimately pernicious because all values are facts
and all facts are values, i.e. products of one or other of our
modes of valuation.2

But once more I can only very briefly indicate the
ground for this conclusion. I shall here confine myself
to observing that mere intellection is impotent (77 Sidvoia
avrrj ovOev /ai>et), that the human mind is essentially
purposive, that in its activity the judgments and ideals
of Value supply the motive power to the judgments of
Fact, and that, in the absence of anything valuable to
be reached by them, no reason can be assigned why such
judgments should be made. Hence if judgments of Fact,
in spite of their illusory logical independence, seem
psychologically to be rendered possible by and rest on

1 Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. iii. and iv.

2 The issue raised by Pragmatism here may be stated as being whether logical
valuations alone shall be allowed to constitute ' facts,' or whether this privilege
may not, under the proper conditions, be extended to the rest. And however the
question is decided, it is obvious that the conception of ' Truth ' needs further
scrutiny and can no longer be naively taken for granted.

164 HUMANISM ix

judgments of Value, does not the question — What is life
worth ?— become the most ultimate of all ? Thus, with
respect to this question, Optimism and Pessimism seem
to supply the sole alternatives ; nor does it seem feasible
still further to reduce their multiplicity to unity by
alleging any formal ground for subordinating Pessimism
to Optimism. For, as we have seen, the same ideals
which, while they are regarded as attainable, confer Value
upon existence, once they are despaired of, plunge us
into irremediable Pessimism. The most that can be said
is that just as in logical judgments negation results from
the failure of an affirmation, just as scepticism springs
from a painfully achieved distrust of knowledge, so
Pessimism is always secondary, and results from the
breakdown of some optimistic scheme of Value. But
even so it would seem to follow that Pessimism must be
theoretically possible so long as such a scheme of Value
can be felt to be inadequate and rejected ; that is, so
long as there persists a breach between the ideal and the
actual.

What, then, is the practical conclusion to which the

argument conducts us ? It has vindicated for the

question of Pessimism a position of paramount theoretic

importance which would entail a far more serious

treatment than is generally accorded to it in the teaching

of Philosophy. And in view of the vast accumulations

of unco-ordinated and uncorrelated knowledge which

Philosophy has in these days to think over and digest, in

order that mankind may not utterly lose its bearings in

the cosmos, philosophers may well shrink from taking up

the burden of a problem of such magnitude and difficulty

as that of Pessimism. But even if Philosophy could

renounce its task of giving a rational account of every

phase of experience, we might yet hesitate to hold that its

acceptance of this problem would be pure loss, or in the

end would prove detrimental to its true interests. To

assume responsibility is potentially to acquire power, and

no question is better calculated than this of Pessimism to

make Philosophy a power in human life, for none can

ix PESSIMISM IN PHILOSOPHY 165

bring it into closer contact with the actual problems of
men's lives. And does not the whole history of its past
show that Philosophy has never been more flourishing and
influential than in periods when it has seemed to make
some response to the outcry of the human soul, to the
question — What shall I do to be saved ? If, then,
Philosophy takes courage to do its duty, if it addresses
itself to the question of the Value of Life and grapples
with the Demon of Despair that besets the souls of many,
who shall say that there is not still in store for it a career
of unprecedented splendour among the forces that may
mould the destinies of man ?

•" -

vY

CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES
/V

ARGUMENT
/

M. the real hero of Faust, but his character concealed behind his 'masks.'
He is really a philosophic pessimist who knows his opposition to be
futile. His pessimism compared with Faust's. How he has grown
cheerful and an intellectualist. The meaning of Gretchen's criticism.
M. as the Schalk. Not seriously concerned to win Faust's soul.
Absurdity of the vulgar interpretation. M. as Faust's redeemer. But
he has recourse to miracle ; which spoils the argument from Faust's
redemption. The possibility of redeeming M.

IT has often been remarked that the Devil tends to
become the real hero of any work of art into which he
enters. However that may be, he is certainly the hero
of the greatest poem in modern literature, of Goethe's
Faust, Properly to appreciate Mephistopheles, it is
fortunately not necessary to depreciate the other chief
characters of the drama, to minimize Gretchen as an
episode which usually comes earlier in the history of a
German student, and to disparage Faust as an effete
pedant, who, even when saved by the might of the Devil
and the gracious permission of the Deity, remains to the
end essentially commonplace and thoroughly deserving of
eternal reunion with so excellent a Hausfrau as Gretchen
would doubtless have developed into.

But there certainly is a touch of paradox about the
assertion that Mephistopheles is the real hero of Faust,
and so it becomes necessary to clear away the prejudices
that have obscured his character. We must try to
understand Mephistopheles himself, to understand, that is,
why he has become a rebel against the divine order, to

166

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 167

reconstruct his history, to conjecture how he became the
Devil he is, to perceive wherein his devilry consists.
What we need is, in short, a sympathetic study of his
personality and point of view, which, without daubing
him with luminous paint in the hope of representing him
as an angel of light, shall do justice to the interest of
his character and function, and to the brilliance of his
achievements. Indeed, we may even generalize and say
that a sympathetic appreciation of the Devil is always
an essential of every real Theodicy, of every vindication
of the Divine Justice which scorns to stultify itself by
effecting an illusory reconciliation of God and the Devil
by means of their common absorption in the Absolute,
and to reduce them, along with everything else, to vapid
' aspects ' of that all-embracing but neutral unity.

Let us examine therefore the fascinating personality
of Mephistopheles, whom every man and most women
(other than a sweet innocent like Gretchen) must surely
have preferred to Dr. juris Faustus, and with whom the
more experienced Helen of Part II. has clearly to the
discerning eye a secret understanding.

The chief difficulty in understanding Mephistopheles
arises from his fondness for disguises. He is always
masquerading. He masquerades as the dutiful attendant
in the courts of Heaven, whose antics almost wrest a smile
of approval from the gravity of God ; 1 he masquerades
as an unattached poodle in search of a master,2 as a
travelling scholar,3 as a nobleman in gorgeous robes of
gold and crimson,4 as a capped and gowned professor,0
as a limping charlatan,6 as a king of beasts,7 a ratcatcher,8
a magician,9 a financier,10 a showman,11 a prompter,12
a doctor,13 a Phorkyad,14 a duenna,15 a strategist,16 a
minister,17 and a fool.18 And he knows his weakness and
several times alludes to it, e.g. —

1 Prologue in Heaven.
2 Scene ii.
3 Study, Scene iii.
4 Scene iv.
5 Ibid.
6 Cellar, Scene vi.

7 Witches' Kitchen, Scene vi.
8 Street, Scene xix.
9 Part II. Act. I.
10 Ibid, Scene iv.
11 Ibid. Scene vi.
12 Ibid. Scene vii.

13 Act II. Scene i.

14 Ibid. Scene iii.
18 Act III.
16 Act IV. Scene ii.
17 Act V. Scene iii.
18 Act V. Scene vi.

i68 HUMANISM x

Komm, gib mir deinen Rock und Miitze,
Die Maske muss mir kostlich stehn.

and again —

Mein Maskchen da weissagt geheimen Sinn ;
Sie fiihlt, dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie,
Vielleicht sogar der Teufel, bin.

But after all the subtlest of his disguises, his most habitual
mask, is one which deceives all the other characters in
Faust, except t/ie Lord, and has, so far as I know, utterly
deceived all Goethe's readers except myself. I mean his
disguise as a mediaeval devil. That of course is his great
part, and he plays it very well, with an exquisitely
humorous perception of its absurdity. For of course he
knows quite well that he is nothing of the sort. Indeed,
he is often telling us so, either because he wearies of the
grotesqueness of the disguise imposed on him by universal
prejudice, or because he knows that he will warn in vain
a besotted audience which insists that he shall appear in
horns and hoofs and full regimentals as a devil.

And yet the success of this mask constitutes the real
tragedy of his situation. To have to play the part of an
obscene and silly mediaeval fiend, even in jest, renders him
ridiculous. It impedes the expression of his genius, it
obscures the spiritual grandeur of his attitude, and in
the end conducts him to what seems a most grotesque
conclusion. For, like Job, he is ignominiously smitten
with boils, and leaves the scene as the vanquished victim
of an overpowering literary tradition.

To appreciate therefore the real subtlety and depth of
his spirit we must strip off this mask also and recognize
his real genius. For Mephisto is a genius, as even
Gretchen, a highly prejudiced witness, must admit.

And what is rare in a genius, he is also a wit and a
philosopher, of the profoundest, and this combination
renders the Faust the finest study of philosophic Pessimism
in any language. Not one of the professed pessimists,
not even the Buddha, not even Schopenhauer, not even
James Thomson, has succeeded in expressing the dire
philosophy of negation more effectively and consistently

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 169

than the poet in his sketch of Mephistophelianism. Clear,
candid, and consistent, Mephistopheles records his incisive
and uncompromising protest against the whole order of
the world, and scorns to practise any concealment of his
meaning. If his doctrine has escaped detection, it has
been by reason of his Bismarckian frankness in divulging
it. One can only suppose that people have been too
much distracted by the show of his diabolism to perceive
this, too greatly fascinated by the horns and hoofs of his
ruminant mask to recognize beneath his pranks the
corroding wit, the Galgenhumor, of a despairing sage.

Yet from the first his words were plain. In his very
first interview with Faust he reveals himself —

Ich bin der Geist, der stets verneint,

Und das mit Recht ; denn alles, was entsteht,

1st wert, dass es zu Grunde geht ;

Drum besser war's, dass nichts entstiinde.

And similarly in the Prologue in Heaven he had
protested against the misery and futility of existence,
and when the Lord asked him whether he would ever
come only to bring accusations against his creation and
to disapprove of everything —

Kommst du nur immer anzuklagen ?
1st auf der Erde ewig dir nichts recht ?

he at once replies —

Nein, Herr ! ich find' es dort, wie immer, herzlich schlecht.

It is this conviction of the intrinsic worthlessness of
existence that turns him into an agency of destruction.
Not-being is preferable to Being, and so it is good to
destroy. But it is unnecessary to hate : Mephisto,
though as a good pessimist he heartily wishes our extinc
tion, is not the enemy of mankind. Nay, he even pities
the wretches whose torment is his function, and sickens
of his job —

Die Menschen dauern mich in ihren Jammertagen,
Ich mag sogar die Armen selbst nicht plagen.

i;o HUMANISM x

Mephisto then is perfectly clear about his position.
And he also sees its hopelessness. He is too complete a
pessimist to suppose that his protest can be of avail.
He is well aware that he cannot destroy the world he
condemns, either wholesale or in detail.

Und freilich 1st damit nicht viel getan.
Was sich dem Nichts entgegen stellt
Das Etwas, diese plumpe Welt,
So viel als ich schon unternommen,
Ich wusste nicht ihr beizukommen.

If he evades therefore Faust's retort

So setzest du der ewig regen,
Der heilsam schafifenden Gewalt
Die kalte Teufelsfaust entgegen,
Die sich vergebens ttickisch ballt !
Was anders suche zu beginnen,
Des Chaos wunderlicher Sohn !

it is not that he is under any illusion. He, the Lord,
and Faust all agree that his work for evil is futile and
productive of good. He has therefore every right to
announce himself as

Ein Teil von jener Kraft,

Die stets das Bose will und stets das Gute schafft.

Nor does he deny the Lord's description of his beneficent
and stimulating, but from his own point of view futile,
activity —

Des Menschen Tatigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen,

Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh' ;

Drum geb' ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu,

Der reizt und wirkt und muss, als Teufel, schaffen.

It is instructive to compare this pessimism with that
to which Faust had succumbed at the beginning of the
action, and to see how much deeper it cuts. Faust's
discontent with the cosmic scheme is quite a petty,
personal, and superficial affair. In Faust's first soliloquy
the jaded old professor, who has exhausted all the know
ledge of his age and finally himself, has, naturally enough,
discovered that all is vanity. His lowered vitality can

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 171

no longer sustain even the ideal to which he had
sacrificed his life. So he despairs even of knowledge.
As a last wild attempt he tries the short cut of magic.
But the spirit world does not open out its splendours
to the invocations of lassitude and fear. Faust shows
himself deficient in the daring needed to meet the Earth-
spirit as an equal, and so he is repulsed. Then in
humiliation and disgust he turns to question the worth
of life — in the characteristic phrases of a bookworm !

Soil ich vielleicht in tausend Biichern lesen,
Dass iiberall die Menschen sich gequalt,
Dass hie und da ein Gliicklicher gewesen ?

He makes a first, and therefore ineffectual, attempt to
poison himself, but (a true German !) is restrained by
sentimental reminiscences of the faith of his childhood.
This scene alone would be enough to prove that he has
in no wise overcome the love of life. He does well,
therefore, to confess —

Zwei Seelen wohnen, ach, in meiner Brust !

whereof the one clings closely to his earthly life. It is
hard to suppose that his life is in serious danger ; so
feeble an attempt at suicide is not the symptom of a
serious pessimism.

In his second interview with Mephisto, Faust is more
impressive. His tedium vitae rises to the superb de
nunciation of life which begins

In jedem Kleide werd' ich wohl die Pein
Des engen Erdenlebens fiihlen,

and culminates in the comprehensive curse which ends

Fluch sei der Hoffnung ! Fluch dem Glauben !
Und Fluch vor alien der Geduld !

This forms the high-water mark of Faustian pessimism.
But even here the skilled psychologist will note an
undertone of nervous irritation and impatience which
stamps it as a passing ebullition, provoked, perhaps, by
the stimulating presence of Mephisto.

172 HUMANISM x

It is clear, then, that in point of profundity Faust's
pessimism cannot vie with that of Mephistopheles ; you
might string together the woes of a dozen Fausts and yet
fail to fathom the clarified depths of Mephisto's world-
negating indignation. And Mephisto's pessimism is not
merely profound ; it is also individual. It is neither the
regulation abstraction of the text-books, nor derived from
any bookish source whatever. It takes its peculiar colour
ing from his personal character.

Mephistopheles is essentially a cheerful pessimist.
Cheerful pessimism sounds paradoxical, and I hardly
think that an abstract logic, scorning the lessons of
psychology, would credit its existence. But if we
consider the point psychologically it will seem natural
enough. It is only in its primary form that pessimism
is incompatible with cheerfulness ; the lapse of time
here, too, may work the strangest transformations. Now
Mephistopheles is very old ; indeed, it is mainly his preter
natural age that renders him a supernatural being. His
pessimism, therefore, is likewise very old ; it has confronted
the inane spectacle of life's nothingness for aeons. If there
fore we would understand him, we must seize this clue :

Bedenkt der Teufel, der ist alt,
So werdet alt ihn zu verstehn.

Now in ordinary life the pessimist rarely grows old
enough to grow cheerful. Pessimism is not a creed
conducive to longevity. But even within the narrow
limits of ordinary life it seems hardly possible that
pessimistic emotion should long retain the intensity of
its first outburst. Here, as elsewhere, time must surely
dull the sharpness of the initial agony. If we can
endure to live on at all we must always somehow
adapt ourselves to life. Passionate pain must smoulder
down into settled sentiment, which becomes less emo
tional and more intellectual as it grows older. Now
Mephistopheles has long survived the discovery of the
vanity of life. For untold ages he has lived with, and
despite, this thought, as a critical spectator of all life's

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 173

futile cruelties. And so he has grown accustomed to its
presence —

O glaube mir, der manche tausend Jahre

An dieser harten Speise kaut.

His wounds are scarred over, though their memory
remains. Is it not natural then that he should long have
ceased to feel the misery of life, and long have replaced
it by a merely intellectual conviction, which would scarce
impede the pleasurable exercise of his faculties ? We are
often told that with a hard heart and a good digestion a
man can stand much : how much more a demon who
could certainly dispense with a heart, and probably with
a digestion ? And so he is not personally miserable.
The note of personal suffering mingles no longer with his
indictment of the world : nay, he may even feel relief at
having cast off all personal responsibility for the senseless
spectacle. Well may he be serene, and even gay — his
pessimism, like his witches' elixir, is very old and
defecated —

Das auch nicht mehr im mindsten stinkt.

In a word, Mephisto has become a thorough intellectualist,
and complete intellectualism is perhaps the most diabolical
thing we can conceive. For to evil-doing, as to all other
carnal pleasures, cometh satiety at the last. Moreover
our possibilities are limited. But not so to evil think
ing : to the idle curiosity of intellectual contemplation
nothing is good, nothing evil, nothing sacred, nothing
shocking, but everything is food for a reflection, cold and
unending and unsparing. It peeps and pries upon a
mother's grave ; it is equally at home in Heaven and in
Hell. Once therefore it has judged and passed its
condemnation, there is no obvious reason why any
recrudescence of feeling should lead it to reverse its
verdict.

It is this intellectualism which Gretchen has detected
in Mephisto, and which forms the really valid ground
for her otherwise thoroughly feminine dislike. Not
that of course we should be justified in taking Mephisto

174 HUMANISM x

altogether at her valuation. Indeed, there is a pre
posterous incongruity in the thought of judging the
cosmic spirit of negation by the feminine intuitions of a
little grisette, who is madly in love and furiously jealous
of the ascendency which a more powerful mind has over
her lover. We must allow a large discount for a woman's
instinctive mischief-making when she intervenes between
man and man.

Es tut mir lang schon weh,

Das ich dich in der Gesellschaft seh'.

Gretchen fears and hates him because she suspects in
him, and rightly, a danger to her love, an obstacle to a
mesalliance which would have domesticated Faust and
unfitted him for further ventures. And so she insinuates
all she can, and has apparently succeeded in getting her
view accepted by the public.

Wo er nur mag zu uns treten,

Mein' ich sogar, ich liebte dich nicht mehr

is her last and unfairest appeal.

That too is an old, old story, as old as the way of a
man with a maid.

Still in a way Gretchen is right — despite the defects
of her grammar —

Man sieht, dass er an nichts keinen Anteil nimmt ;
Es steht ihm an der Stirn geschrieben,
Dass er nicht mag eine Seele lieben.

Only that is Mephisto's intellectualism. He himself sees
clearly that the struggle is for the control of Faust,
and that if the liaison with Gretchen is to come to a
respectable conclusion there is an end of his designs on
Faust (or rather of the Lord's designs whereof he is the
instrument). And so he takes ruthlessly effective steps
to bring about a separation. Gretchen is an obstacle in
his path, and so she is removed. But he never expresses
the least hatred for her : the expression of her hate he
interprets as a tribute to his intellectual eminence, and
takes quite coolly —

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 175

Sie fuhlt, dass ich ganz sicher ein Genie,
Vielleicht sogar der Teufel, bin.

The paradox of Mephisto's combination of cheerfulness
with pessimism is thus explained by the recognition of
his age and intellectualism. But these very features seem
to render more urgent another difficulty. Mephistopheles
is far too clear-sighted not to see that all his efforts are
futile, that he is ever being overruled by a higher power
and turned into another's agent.

Why then does he persist in his activity ?

The readiest reply to this would doubtless be — Why
should he not ? If all things are futile, why one thing
more than any other ? To a thorough pessimist what
does it matter what he does ?

In general this reply is sound enough, but I hardly
think that it explains the peculiar features of this case.
I should incline rather to question whether after all it is
so sure that Mephistopheles does persist in efforts whose
futility he recognizes. The answer will depend on how
seriously you take him.

If you take him quite seriously, you must certainly
answer — Yes. He professes to the end to busy himself
with Faust's damnation. But are you intended, or even
entitled, to take him seriously ? It seems to me that we
have the highest authority for holding that Mephisto is
not serious. The Lord himself tells us that Mephisto is
the Schalk, the imp or merry-andrew, among fiends —

Von alien Geistern, die verneinen,

1st mir der Schalk am wenigsten zur Last.

And throughout the play he acts up to this character.
Hatred, gloom, and gravity are foreign to his nature. It
was by eschewing these that he escaped from the miseries
of his pessimism. He no longer despairs of life, because
he has trained himself to laugh at it, forming thus the
counterpart of the Lord, der sick das Lachen abgewohnt,
who has seen the high seriousness of all things. So
Mephistopheles laughs at a world he cannot alter, or
abolish. His satisfaction comes from satirizing all the

176 HUMANISM x

world, from the unimpeded exercise of his sarcastic wit.
He mocks at God, men and angels, nay, even at professors !
Nor does his mockery spare himself. He is as ready to
make a fool of himself as of any one. But withal he is
always good-tempered and good-humoured : not even
Faust's very trying temper ever leads him on to lose
his own.

Is it at all likely then, that he should be grimly in
earnest about his diabolic mission ? Is it his serious
ambition to capture the soul of Faust ?

Why then should he, in the very act of engaging in his
wager with the Lord, ostentatiously proclaim that he cares
nought for the dead ?

Fur einen Leichnam bin ich nicht zu Haus.

A remark by the way, the truth of which is fully attested
by his preference of earth to hell as a place of residence.
Or, again, does he seriously believe that a contract signed
with blood is needed ? Why, then, does he turn the whole
thing into farce ? Once more, does he really want Faust's
services in hell ? What for ? What possible use could
he have for a more than middle-aged German professor ?
And would a serious-minded and conscientious devil allow
himself to be cheated of his prey, by a sheer lapse of
attention ? And why finally, if he desired to see Faust
damned, did he not leave him severely alone? Had he
done so, would not Faust eventually have committed
suicide, and so have inevitably fallen into his domain ?

Surely these questions answer themselves. The vulgar
interpretation of Mephistopheles is absurd. The truth is
that Mephistopheles is never serious. He knows that the
whole conception of a soul -hunting devil is a mediaeval
anachronism. He knows also that he can do nothing,
that however reluctant, his freedom is but semblance, that
he is a helpless instrument in the hands of a God who
tells him outright Du darfst nur fret erscheinen. And so
being deprived of every other satisfaction, he derides the
cosmic order which constrains him. Wherefore he plays
the fool throughout. He is bent on amusing himself \

CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 177

not on ruining Faust, or capturing souls by methods
whose crudity would shame a Hottentot magician. Had
he been serious, would he ever have dreamt of accepting
the impossible bet which the Lord proposes ? —
Zieh' diesen Geist von seinem Urquell ab.

Would he have assented to the preposterous conditions
Faust imposes on him ? For Faust — so little does he
know wherein to seek satisfaction of soul — proposes to
consider himself damned when he shall consider himself
satisfied, and demand the continuation of the present

moment :

Werd' ich zum Augenblicke sagen,
Verweile doch, du bist so schon !

is to be the signal for his damnation \

The absurdity of this is plain : A man who is capable
of declaring himself satisfied is not damned : he is happy —
or a liar. And if Heaven be the satisfaction of desire, he
has ipso facto attained Heaven. It was philosophically
impossible, therefore, that the story should end in anything
but the salvation of Faust.1

Thus it is that the encounter with Mephisto sets Faust's
feet upon the pathway of salvation. Mephistopheles is
Faust's real redeemer. He it is who rescues Faust from
the fatal listlessness into which he had fallen and revives
his interest in life. Faust is never nearer damnation than
before Mephistopheles appears. Not that, as we saw, he
was really likely to commit suicide just yet. He would
doubtless have pursued his theoretical study of the subject
a little further first, and perhaps, e.g. have tried to read
through the Sacred Books of the East. But the inanity of
his life would have continued to prey upon him, and after
a few more fits of depression and a few more attempts, he
might have succeeded. For, as he justly says, he was at
a critical time of life ; too old to amuse himself, too young
to refrain from yearning and trying —

1 Unless, indeed (as Vischer, the witty author of the Third Part of Faust,
suggested), Faust's severest trials only begin after he has got to Heaven, and has
to act as pedagogue to the ' blessed boys ' (selige Knaben] mentioned in the final
scene.

N

178 HUMANISM x

Ich bin zu alt um nur zu spielen,
Zu Jung um ohne Wunsch zu sein.

Then Mephistopheles enters his life and revives his
interest in it, by telling him about the worlds unrealized
which cannot be read up in books. Before they start
together Faust has recovered the use of the imperative,
and demands to be initiated into every form of human
experience. Mephisto laughs at the psychological im
possibility involved, and has difficulty in dissuading
Faust from reverting to his old hankering after the
infinite. But he slowly makes a man of him. Faust
scorns the animal pleasures of the coarsest debauchery.
He escapes lightly from the snares of the affections
in the brief tragedy of Gretchen, which scars his soul
with mingled memories of ecstasy and guilt. He pays
his homage to the aesthetic ideal by his descent into
the fairyland of Art. But even Helen cannot paralyse a
spirit l so astutely guided : he returns, to be initiated into
the realities of politics. Thus in the end Mephistopheles
bridges for him the gulf 'twixt word and deed which he
had once imagined could be traversed by a trick of
mistranslation.2 And so Faust finds his real life's work
in action. It is working and ruling that mature him and
make him ripe for the life eternal. But to what, I should
like to know, does he owe this whole career, if not to the
unwearying aid of Mephistopheles ? How else could the
philosopher have become king, the obscure pedant a
prince of the Empire ?

Not that on this account we need ascribe to Mephisto
any special merit, or suppose that his motives will bear
scrutiny. Mephisto knows no doubt that he is redeeming
Faust ; but he does not help him in order to save him,
any more than he attends him, in order to tempt him.
The truth is that tempting is not seriously in his line :
amusing is, and indeed I suspect that if the tradition be
true that cards are a diabolic invention, it may well have

1 Wen Helena paralysirt,
Der kommt so leicht nicht zu Verstande.
2 Cp. Scene in the Study.

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 179

been to Mephisto that we owe them, but rather to his
ingenuity in amusing himself than to his desire to
ruin others. He seems to make his one solitary
attempt at tempting in the excursion into Auerbach's
cellar, but even there a doubt remains. If Mephisto
meant it as a serious temptation to drunkenness, how
are we to explain the incorrigible frivolity with which
he sacrifices all prospect of success by playing pranks
upon the worthy topers ? Does he not here, as always,
prejudice his alleged design by a reckless pursuit of the
moment's joke ? And after that Mephisto only obeys
orders, and finds the ways and means for the whims of
Faust.1 His position is indeed sufficiently abject. He
is ruled by Faust, and overruled by the Lord, and
perfectly aware of it. But he manages none the less
to get some fun out of his servitude, and is never in
better form than when, quite gratuitously and without
the least advantage to his supposed design, he is taking
Faust's pupils for him and playing the professor. And
after all, as he knows that in any case he can accomplish
nothing, he does not greatly care what he does. Never
theless, it is somewhat curious that he does not play the
fool still more extensively, stays so long with Faust, and
abstains from wrecking the joint enterprises in which they
were engaged. I can only suppose that he must have
found Faust personally amusing, and that his restless
striving was interesting to a mind which could never
delude itself into thinking any end worth the attaining.

Nevertheless, it is very remarkable that even Mephisto-
pheles cannot save Faust without a miracle. That is the
great flaw, psychologically speaking, in the poem. The
Faust we meet at first has sunk to such a state that
a moral miracle alone can save him. He has almost,
if not wholly, lost the taste for life, the faith in life, and
the vitality to respond to the new vistas which Mephisto's
art displays. To offer such a man all the delights of

1 It is true that, as in tradition bound, he takes Faust with him to the
Walpurgisnacht. But was not Faust by this time wearying of Gretchen and
ready to desert her ? So Mephisto points out with calm scorn in repelling Faust's
coarse reproaches (scene in the Field).

i8o HUMANISM x

earth is as futile as to crown a dyspeptic king of
Cocagne, or to equip a blind man with the ring of Gyges.
He is too old to enjoy, too young to be indifferent.

At his first interview Mephistopheles attempts to
reawaken Faust's love of life by conjuring up seductive
dreams. But at their second meeting Faust receives him
with imprecations on life. This convinces Mephistopheles
that a miracle is necessary. Faust must be rejuvenated.
By drinking the witch's potion he rids himself of the
infirmities which thirty years of study have heaped upon
his body and his spirit. This is the turning-point of the
plot. Without this renewal of youth could Faust have
captivated Gretchen or eloped with Argive Helen ? And
what savant of fifty-five would not trust himself, even
without the devil's aid, to achieve great things, nay, perhaps,
to realize the Platonic dream of the domination of the wise,
if he could suddenly find himself restored to the vigour
of five and twenty ?

But such a miracle must hopelessly break up the
natural course of psychological development, and so
Goethe's Faust does not answer the practical question which
Pessimism forces on our notice, the question, namely —
What to do with those for whom life has lost its savour ?
I must confess that so far as human sight as yet extends
this problem seems insoluble. Perhaps a good rest, a dip
in Lethe, and the resumption of a more attractive life
might be therapeutic agents of sufficient power, and
something of the sort may possibly yet be found to be
among the resources of Providence.

But how about Mephisto's own salvation ? His case is
very different, and it has to be considered, without the
poet's aid,1 merely by a study of his character. We must
note first that his pessimism is not of Faust's type ; his
vitality is not exhausted, nor has he wearied of the world
or of himself. He is still willing to be amused, and is
certainly amusing. So far therefore from sinking into

1 In private conversation Goethe seems however to have realized that the
spiritual problem he had chosen required to be completed by the salvation of
Mephistopheles. Only he did not think his contemporaries were enlightened
enough to tolerate this notion.

x CONCERNING MEPHISTOPHELES 181

the inaction of despair, he is the stimulus to progress in
a world which, but for him, would grow inert. Says
the Lord

Des Menschen Tatigkeit kann allzuleicht erschlaffen ;

Er liebt sich bald die unbedingte Ruh' ;

Drum geb' ich gern ihm den Gesellen zu,

Der reizt und wirkt, und muss, als Teufel, schaffen.

There is activity enough about Mephisto and to spare;
but it is of the wrong kind. It is frivolous, for all the
pessimism out of which it grew. It has no serious
purpose of its own, and now aims only at an intellectual
play with a scheme of things it confronts without
approving. And this is just the reason why it is impotent,
why it becomes subservient to an alien end. Aiming at
nothing, Mephistopheles, the unbelieving scoffer, cannot
but become a servant of the Lord. But he is a bad servant
and an unwilling, and remains a blot upon a universe
which condones such service, and so reveals its imperfection
and its impotence. Impotent though he seems, his mere
existence indicates the limitation of what we fondly
deemed Omnipotence.

The redemption, therefore, of Mephisto is the postulate
of a complete Theodicy, on grounds both metaphysical
and moral. Our moral sensibility demands that there
shall be no hopeless evil. And our reason enforces this
demand by showing that we cannot call good a world of
which any part is evil, without destroying the whole
meaning of good. For metaphysics the ultimate solidarity
of things is such as to demand universal salvation. No'
universe is perfect in which any part is imperfect ; forj
the suffering of any part that is imperfect must produce a \
sympathetic tremor in the whole. But these are topics I
which perhaps transcend the bounds of literary criticism ; '"•
though they might well provide food for thought for the i
theologians who have prided themselves on the popularity ,
of their hells, and for the philosophers who have too easily \
proved the perfection of the world by excluding from its ]
notion all that makes ' perfection ' worth the having.1

1 cp. P. 3.

182 HUMANISM x

" It is clear, then, that Mephisto must be saved. But he
I can be saved only by working on his actual character.
• He must be led to remould himself. He must be driven
f out of his idle intellectualism, out of his critical role of an
unconcerned spectator of all time and all existence, includ
ing his own actions. It is here that the real difficulty lies.
If he were merely inert, he could, like man, be forced into
action. But he is active enough ; only he feels no
responsibility for his actions, which he regards as dis
passionately as the operations of natural forces.

The only chance therefore would seem to be to get
him to take up his personal responsibility, to reverse the
policy which has driven him into his attitude of passive
and futile, but unanswerable, protest. He must no longer
be overruled in every action ; he must no longer feel
that

Du darfst auch da nur frei erscheinen,

that his spontaneous agency is mere illusion. Give him
real freedom to choose alternatives, real power to try his
hand at shaping a world that will realize his ideals, and
he may then convince himself, that it is better to help on
the Divine purpose than to thwart it. Whether he will or
not remains uncertain, as in the case of every one of us ;
but it is from this contingency alone that the real interest
and tragic significance of the cosmic drama spring. This
much at least seems clear, that a theodicy which strives
to oppress opposition by omnipotence must overreach
itself: sheer force can overcome Mephisto as little as
Prometheus.

XI
ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES1

ARGUMENT

I. Mr. F. H. Bradley's antithesis of 'Appearance' and ' Reality' as a catchword.

II. His criterion of the ' non-contradiction ' of ultimate reality. But
(i) the criterion not ultimate, and used too recklessly. It is applied to
merely verbal difficulties. It is meaningless to call an unknowable
Absolute real, and this explains nothing about appearances. Nothing
even apparently real can be really contradictory. Non-contradiction is only
a special form of Harmony, and the rejection of contradiction is only a
form of the struggle towards satisfaction. Other modes of reaching
harmony. Harmony a postulate. (2) The criterion stultifies itself by
condemning everything, nor is it saved by the doctrine of ' Degrees.'

III. A valid doctrine of the relation of appearance to reality must
eschew the transcendence which renders Mr. Bradley's Absolute futile.
Necessity of retaining a grasp on reality throughout. The growth of
reality: (i) the reality of immediate experience our starting-point and
end. (2) ' Higher realities' inferred to explain it, but remain secondary.
Their variety and relativity to purpose and need of a final synthesis in
(3) ultimate reality. IV. As to this, five principles to be laid down : (i)
Ultimate Reality must be made a real explanation. (2) ' Appearances '
must be really preserved. (3) Primary reality of immediate experience

,• to be recognized. The reality even of dreams. The reality of the higher
world of Religion. How Idealism makes a difference. (4) The greater
efficiency of the higher reality. (5) Why Ultimate Reality must be
absolutely satisfactory. Because otherwise it would not be regarded as
ultimate. Why truth cannot be evil. If it were, its pursuit would
cease. Only complete satisfaction would bring finality of knowledge,
and that only if not merely conceived, but actually experienced. The
' beatific vision ' as the ideal of knowledge.

THE ambition of this paper is not, as might perhaps
wrongly be conjectured from a hasty perusal of its title,

1 This essay appeared in Mind for July 1903 (N.S. No. 47). The chief
additions are in IV. (3), (4), and (5). The constructive problem it deals with
is that indicated at the end of Axioms as Postulates (Personal Idealism, p. 133).

183

1 84 HUMANISM xr

to provide an Outline of Cosmetic Philosophy, and still
less to carry owls to Athens by exhorting philosophers
to an observation of social proprieties they have rarely
shown any tendency to set aside. Its aim is rather to
examine the nature and scope of the familiar antithesis
between ' appearance ' and ' reality,' the vogue of which
I cannot but regard as the chief constructive result of
the work of the greatest of English sceptics, Mr. F. H.
Bradley. In Oxford, at all events, this antithesis has
been an immense success. It is ever hovering on the
tongue alike of tutor and of tiro in philosophical
discussion, and provides them with a universal solution
for the most refractory of facts. It seems to have
become the magic master-key which opens — and closes
— every door, the all -accommodating receptacle into
which every mystery may be made to enter and to
disappear ; in short, it is just now the greatest of the
catchwords wherewith we conjure reason into topsy
turvydom and common sense out of its senses. If its
Olympian author ever deigned to look upon the struggles
and contentions of lesser and lower mortals, he would
doubtless be vastly amused to see what an Alpha and
Omega of Philosophy had sprung invulnerable from his
subtle brain. But being myself immersed in the struggle
of teaching and having a certain responsibility in seeing
to it that what is called thought involves thinking and
affords proper training in mental precision and clearness,
I find that this antithesis has become to me a consider
able nuisance, and also, it must be confessed, a bit of a
bore. I propose, therefore, to probe into it a little, and
to examine its pretensions, with a view to seeing whether
the relation of ' appearance ' to ' reality ' cannot be put
on a different and, to me, more satisfactory footing.

II

I must begin however by raising a very general, and,
I think, very fundamental, objection to Mr. Bradley's
method of constructing the wonderful edifice of his

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 185

metaphysics. I venture to assert with the utmost
trepidation, and at the risk of being crushed, like Mr.
Bradley's other critics, by a sarcastic footnote to his
next article, that in putting forward his fundamental
assumption that ' ultimate Reality ' is such that it does
not contradict itself, and in erecting this into an absolute
criterion, he builds in part on an unsound foundation
which has not reached the bottom rock, in part on an
airy pinnacle, a sort of what in Alpine parlance is called
a gendarme, which will not bear the weight of the
mountains of paradox which are subsequently heaped
upon it.

(i) By the first charge what I mean to convey is
that the ultimateness of Mr. Bradley's absolute criterion
has been taken for granted far too easily. But before
adducing reasons for this contention, I must disavow
every intention of impugning the validity of the Principle
of Contradiction as such. I accept it fully and without
reserve ; nay more, I use it every day of my life. But
my intellectual conscience impels me to ask — As what
must I accept it ? And in what sense ? To these
questions Mr. Bradley's criterion of non- contradiction
appears to supply no obvious answer. It is enunciated
quite abstractly, and it is not clear to me that, as stated,
it has a sense adequate to bear the metaphysical structure
put upon it, or indeed any sense at all.1

The meaning of Mr. Bradley's ' absolute criterion ' (as
of everything else) must therefore be sought in its
applications. But Mr. Bradley's applications seem to
warrant the utmost suspicion, if not of the principle
in the abstract, yet of the sense in which it is actually
used. A principle which asserts itself alone contra
mundum, and convicts the whole universe of self-con
tradiction may surely give pause to the most reckless.
There is no need, therefore, to question the principle in

1 As Mr. Alfred Sidgwick well says, " every fact that changes its character in
the least degree proves to us daily that the ' Laws of Thought,' those pillars of
elementary logic, are too ideal and abstract to be interpreted as referring to the
actual things or particular cases that names are supposed to denote." — Distinction
and the Criticism of Beliefs, p. 21. Cp. my Formal Logic, ch. x.

186 HUMANISM

XI

the abstract : in the abstract it may mean anything or
nothing. But in the particular way in which Mr. Bradley
proceeds to use it, it is open to much exception, and I
find myself unable to admit its claim to ultimateness,
while it is obvious that Mr. Bradley has for once simply
taken over his allegation from the classical (and intel-
lectualist) tradition of Herbart and Hegel. I shall
discuss however only the former point, as it is clear that
if the Principle of the impossibility of self-contradiction
in the Real can be shown not to be ultimate, it will
follow that Mr. Bradley was wrong in taking it to be such.

My first question must be to inquire what shall be
held to constitute such self-contradiction as will render a
supposed reality amenable to the jurisdiction of the
absolute criterion ? Mr. Bradley appears to hold that
any quibble will suffice to bring an aspirant to reality
before the revolutionary tribunal of his incorruptible
philosophy, and that an unguarded phrase, such as
ordinary language can scarcely abstain from, is evidence
enough for ordering off to instant execution the wretched
' appearance ' which had dared to simulate ' reality.' But
surely justice should require some more decisive proof of
iniquity than the fact that something which claims to be
real can be formulated in what appear to be contradictory
terms ? For may it not be the contradiction rather than
the reality which is ' appearance ' ? Yet such apparent
contradiction is all that Mr. Bradley's negative dialectics
seem in the great majority of instances to prove. It is a
result which does not astonish me, but seems to be of
little value. In words everything can be made to look
contradictory, and Mr. Bradley has but completed the
work of Gorgias and Zeno, with his own peculiar brilliance
and incisiveness. But I do not see that this necessarily
proves more than that language has not yet been rendered
wholly adequate to the description of reality.

And it ought not to be necessary to remind serious
thinkers that to dazzle the spectators by a display of
dialectical fireworks is not to explain the universe. The
most illusory of seeming realities is worthy, not merely of

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 187

being ridden down and ' riddled with contradictions ' and
left for dead upon the field, but also of being understood.
And I am at a loss to see how to call it self-contradictory
and then forthwith to invoke a self-subsistent, in
accessible Absolute, which includes all appearances and
transcends all apprehension and inexplicably atones for
the incurable defects of our actual experience, is to explain
it, or anything else whatsoever.

As against such cavalier methods I should protest that
only propositions are properly contradictory, that only a
reasoning being can contradict itself, and that it is an
abuse of language to describe our use of incompatible
statements about the same reality as an inherent con
tradiction in the reality itself. Indeed, I should combat
Mr. Bradley's contention that everything sooner or later
turns out to be self-contradictory with the axiom that
nothing which exists, in however despicable a sense, can
really be contradictory. The very fact of its existence
shows that the 'contradictions,' which our thought dis
covers in it, are in some way illusory, that the reality
' somehow ' (to use Mr. Bradley's favourite word in this
connexion) overpowers, swallows, reconciles, transcends, and
harmonizes them.1 If therefore it appears ' contradictory,'
the fault is ours. It is, in Herbart's language, a zufallige
AnsicJit. It can be purged of its apparent contradiction,
and it is our duty to effect this and to interpret it into a
harmony with itself which our mind can grasp. Only
of course I can see that this purification may require
something more than a dialectical juggle with terms : we
may need a real discovery, we may have to make a real
advance, before the refractory ore of ' appearance ' will
yield us the pure gold of ' reality.'

I have intentionally used a word which seems to me
to give the clue out of the labyrinth into which Mr.
Bradley has beguiled the fair maid, Philosophy. The
conception of Harmony seems to me to be one legitimately
applicable to ultimate reality and to contain a meaning

1 Unless indeed the internal conflict which is described as a ' contradiction '
be the essential nature of all reality as such — as some extreme pessimists have
contended.

i88 HUMANISM xi

which I vainly look for in that of ' contradiction.' It
forms a postulate higher and more ultimate than that of
non-contradiction, which indeed seems to be only a special
case thereof, viz. that of a harmony among the contents
of our thought. The contradictory involves a jar or
discord in the mind, which most people in their normal
condition feel to be unpleasant (when they perceive it),
and this is the first and immediate reason why we avoid
contradictions and reject the contradictory. The second
reason is that our Thinking rests on the Principle of
Contradiction, and that if we admitted the contradictory,
we should have (if we were consistent) to give up thinking.
But thinking is too inveterate a habit (at least in some of
us), and on the whole too useful, to permit of the serious
adoption of this alternative.

_Thus the struggle to avoid and remove contradictions
appears as an integral part of the great cosmic striving
towards satisfaction, harmony, and equilibrium, in which
even the inanimate appears more suo to participate.1 In
this struggle the intellectual machinery which works by
the Principle of Contradiction plays an important part,
and we should fare but ill without its aid.

But it is not our sole resource. An apparent contra
diction can be cleared out of the road to harmony by
other means than a course of dialectics terminating in a
flight to an asylum ignorantiae, miscalled the Absolute,
(i) I would venture therefore to remind Mr. Bradley of
many excellent things he has himself said about the
jmmediacy of feeling. (2) It would seem that in certain
modes of aesthetic contemplation the so-called self-con
tradictions of the discursive reason may vanish into a
self-evident harmony. (3) It is well known that our
immediate experience enables us to accept without scruple
or discomfort, as given and ultimate fact, what philo
sophers have vainly essayed for centuries to construe to
thought. The fact of change is perhaps the most flagrant
example. But in the last resort our own existence,
and that of the world, is similarly inconceivable and

1 See p. 214.

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 189

underivable for a philosophy which makes a point of
honour of systematically denying the factual, and labours
vainly to reduce all immediate ' acquaintance with ' to
discursive ' knowledge about.' And lastly, (4) if the
worst should come to the worst, the solution ambulando
—which in this instance we may translate ' by going on '
— is always open to a philosophy which has not wantonly
insisted on closing the last door to hope by assuming the
unreality of ' time ' (i.e. of the experience-process).1

For these reasons then I am forced to conclude that
Mr. Bradley, in appealing to the principle that the Real
is not self-contradictory, has not succeeded in expressing
it in its complete and ultimate form. His ' absolute
criterion ' is not the whole truth, but a part of the greater
principle of Harmony. And inasmuch as our experience
is plainly not as yet harmonious, it is clear that the
principle is a Postulate. We must conceive the Real
to be harmonious, not because we have any formal and
a priori assurance of the fact, but because we desire it to
be so and are willing to try whether it cannot become so.

(2) My second charge can be dealt with more sum
marily. It concerns the immense disproportion between
the foundation of Mr. Bradley's system and the super
structure he has built upon it. Mr. Bradley argues from
his absolute criterion to the conclusion that everything
which is ordinarily esteemed real, everything which any
one can know or care about, is pervaded with unreality,
is ' mere appearance ' in a greater or less degree of
degradation.2 In this Mr. Bradley appears to carry the
policy of ' thorough ' to an excess which renders his whole

1 Cp. p. 109.

2 I cannot here criticize this ' doctrine of degrees ' as fully as it deserves. It
appears to be the only obstacle to our accounting Mr. Bradley's philosophy the
purest scepticism (or rather nihilism), but I cannot but regard it as thoroughly
indefensible, and even unintelligible. For, as Capt. H. V. Knox has pointed out
to me, it seems impossible even to state it without recurring to a number of the
lower categories which Mr. Bradley had previously invalidated. Otherwise the
consideration of the different atnounts of rearrangement required for the ' con
version ' of ' appearances ' into the Absolute, of the greater or less internals
separating them from it, of the varying lengths of time needed to see through an
appearance, would seem to be simply irrelevant, and unable to establish the
distinctions of kind among appearances which are aimed at. Yet strangely
enough, Time, Space, and Quantity have themselves been written down as ' mere

190 HUMANISM

XI

method unendurable. If only he had exempted a few
trifles, like religion and morality, from this reduction to
illusion, we might have tolerated his onslaughts on the
abstractions of metaphysics ; as it is, there is nothing that
can withstand the onset of his awful Absolute.

Now if anything of the sort had happened to a
philosophic argument of my own, I should have been
appalled. I should have felt that something had gone
wrong, that some secret source of error must have sprung
up somewhere, or that I must somehow have misunder
stood my principle. If the result of my intellectual
manipulations of the world had been to convict it of
radical absurdity, I should have regarded this as a
reflection, not on the universe, but on the method I had
used. I should have felt I had failed intellectually,
and must try again in another way.1 I should never
have dared to condemn the universe in reliance on so
tenuous an argument from so narrow a basis. In the
last resort I might even have doubted the validity of my
principle. I should certainly have doubted its application.
Mr. Bradley, apparently, is exempt from any such scruples,
but, at the risk of making a deplorable exhibition of the
crassest 'common-sense,' I must submit that a system
which culminates in so huge a paradox thereby discredits
its foundations. And so Mr. Bradley 's final Ascension
from the sphere of Appearances and Reception into the
bosom of the Absolute reminds me of nothing so much
as of the fabled ' rope-trick ' of the Indian jugglers.

Ill

Only a strong conviction of its necessity, together
with a habit of outspokenness learnt from Mr. Bradley's

appearances' (Appear, and Real. pp. 362, 364, 369. etc., first ed. ), and Mr.
Bradley makes no attempt to show how the reality of appearances can be re
habilitated by a reversion to points of view which themselves are appearances.
It is as though to atone for his haste in calling all men liars, the psalmist had
proceeded to accept the testimony of the most egregious liars to the veracity 01
the rest.

1 Mr. Bradley's critical canon is apparently the reverse of this. E.g. in dis
cussing the sense in which the self is real, he argues that " if none defensible can
be found, such a failure, I must insist, ought to end the question." — App. and
Real. p. 76.

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 191

own example, could have embarked me on so painful a
criticism of the cardinal doctrine of Appearance and
Reality. Before proceeding from it to the easier and
more congenial task of expounding what I conceive to
be the real relation of these conceptions, I must however
add a word on a point already hinted at, viz., that Mr.
Bradley has not really extricated us from that slough of
agnosticism, to which their more porcine instincts are ever
drawing back even philosophers to wallow. Indeed, his
facetious remark about Spencer's Unknowable,1 that it
is taken for God " simply and solely because we do not
know what the devil it can be," might, with quite as much
propriety, be applied to his own Absolute. For though
he has reserved for it the title of Sole and Supreme
Reality, it is only used to cast an indelible slur on all
human reality and knowledge. It absorbs,' ' transcends,'
' transmutes,' etc., all our knowledge and experience. It is
therefore quite as unknowable as Spencer's monstrosity,
and adds insult to injury by dubbing us and our concerns
' mere appearances.' And after all the scorn we have seen
poured on the futility of an unknowable reality as the
explanation of anything, it passes my comprehension how
these consequences of his doctrine should have escaped
the notice, I do not say of his disciples, but of Mr.
Bradley's own acuteness.

It is useless however to speculate how far Mr. Bradley
knows himself to be a sceptic, until he chooses to confess,
and we had better concern ourselves with the true
relation of reality to appearance. Mr. Bradley's funda
mental error seems to be his ^copto-pos, the separation
he has effected between them by violently disrupting
their continuity. Once we do this, we are lost. The
' reality ' we have severed from its ' appearances ' can
never be regained, and we remain, as Mr. Bradley holds,
enmeshed in a web of appearances, and impotent to attain
a knowledge or experience of Reality. But all this
appears to be the consequence of a gratuitous error of
judgment. We should never have admitted that in

1 App. and Real. p. 128, footnote.

192 HUMANISM

XI

grasping a higher reality we were abandoning the reality
of the lower. In the ascent to Truth we can never lose
touch with a continuous reality. I should liken the
advance of knowledge to a severe rock-climb on which we
must secure our handhold and our foothold at every step.
Rightly used, the rope of metaphysical speculation is an
added safeguard which unites the workers at their different
posts ; it must not be made into an instrument to juggle
with. Mr. Bradley, on the other hand, seems to tell us
that we can never reach the summit of our ambitions
unless we can throw our rope up into the air and climb
up after it into the hypercosmic void.

' We must begin therefore with reality as well as end
with it, and cling to it all the way as closely as we can.
We must not argue, ' if appearance, not reality,' but
' though appearance, yet reality.' Unless we do this any
ultimate Reality we may vainly imagine will effect no
contact with our knowledge and our life, but float off into
the Empyrean beyond our ken.

Now the only reality we can start with is our own
personal, immediate experience. We may lay it down
therefore that all immediate experience is as such real,
and that no ultimate reality can be reached except from
this basis and upon the stimulation of such immediate
experience. From this we start ; to this, sooner or
later, we must in some way return, under penalty of
finding all our explanations shattered, like bubbles, into
emptiness.

In other words, the distinction of 'appearance and
reality ' is not one which transcends our experience, but
one which arises in it. It does not constitute a relation
between our world and another, nor tempt us to an im-
• possible excursion into a realm inexorably reserved for the
supreme delectation of the Absolute. It always remains
relative to our knowledge of our world.1 And it in no
wise warrants any disparagement of ' mere appearances.'
The most transparent of appearances, so long as it exists

1 If I am quibbled with I will even say that for me it remains relative to
my knowledge of my world. And I will deny that this means solipsism.

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 193

at all, retains its modicum of reality, and remains, from
one important point of view, fundamentally real.

For let us consider how we proceed to ascertain the
higher realities which are rashly thought to abrogate the
lower. We start, indubitably, with an immediate ex
perience of some sort. But we do not rest therein. If
we could, there would be no further question. Our
immediate experience would suffice ; it would be the sole
and complete reality. Appearances would be the reality
and reality would truly appear. In heaven, no doubt,
such would be the case. But our case, as yet, is different :
our experience is woefully discordant and inadequate. In
other words, our experience is not that of a perfect world.
We are neither disposed, therefore, nor able, to accept it
as it appears to be. Its surface-value will not enable us
to meet our obligations : we are compelled therefore to
discount our immediate experience, to treat it as an
appearance of something ulterior which will supplement
its deficiency. We move on, therefore, from our starting-
point, taking our immediate experience as the symbol
which transmits to us the glad tidings of a higher reality,
whereof it partly manifests the nature.

The ' realities ' of ordinary life and science, such as the
1 external ' world and the existence of other persons, are all
of this secondary order : they rest upon inferences from
our immediate experience which have been found to
work.1 They are thus pragmatically true, and the
process of reaching them is everywhere the same :
we experiment with notions which are suggested to
our intelligence by our immediate experience, until we
hit upon one which seems to be serviceable for some
purpose which engrosses us. We then declare real the
conception which serves our purpose, nay more real,
because more potent, than the immediate experience for
the satisfaction of our desire. Only, as life is complex,

1 Of course I do not deny, and indeed in a different context I should
even insist, that the assumption of these higher realities alters our immediate
experience for us. That indeed is the chief proof of their value : assumptions
which make no difference are otiose and so invalid. And we should hardly get
where we want, if we could not each day start a little higher up,

O

i94 HUMANISM xi

its sciences are many and its purposes are various ; so
there will be a multitude of such higher realities con
flicting with each other and competing for our allegiance.
And, superficially, they will look very different. Never
theless, the ultimate realities of the physicist, whether
they be atoms or ions or vortex-rings or electrons, have
reached their proud position by no other process than
that by which the savage has devised the crudities of his
Happy Hunting Grounds or the old-fashioned theologian
the atrocities of his Hell. They remain on the same
plane of interpretation, and all alike are attempts, more
or less successful, to supplement some unsatisfactory
feature or other in our primary experience.

It is easy to see how from this point we may reach
the conception of an Ultimate Reality. The ' higher
realities ' are conceived differently for the purposes of
our various sciences and various pursuits, and so there
will arise a need for an adjustment of their rival claims,
and a question as to which (if any) of them is to be
accepted as the final reality. Is the 'real world,' e.g., the
cosmic conception postulated by geometry, or by physics,
or by psychology, or by ethics ? Is it a whirl of self-
moving ' matter,' or a chaos of mental processes, or must
we assume a Prime Mover and a Self? Again, it is
obvious that a higher reality may afford very imperfect
satisfaction from some points of view and may have to
be transcended by one still higher, and that this process
cannot cease until we arrive at the conception of an
Ultimate Reality capable of including and harmonizing
all the lower realities. And this, of course, would con
tain the final explanation of our whole experience, the
final solution of our every perplexity.

IV

Thus the struggle to attain a glimpse of such an
Ultimate Reality forms the perennial content of the
drama of Philosophy. But that struggle is foredoomed

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 195

to failure, unless we can manage to avoid certain pitfalls
and to hold fast to certain guiding principles.

(1) The Ultimate Reality must be made into a real
explanation. It must never therefore be allowed to become
transcendent, and to sever its connexion with the world
of ' appearances ' which it was devised to explain. There
must always be preserved a pathway leading up to it
from the lowest ' appearances ' and down to them from
the Throne of Thrones, in order that the angels of the
Lord may travel thereon. If this be neglected, the
ultimate reality will become unknowable, incapable of
explaining the appearances, and therefore invalid.1

(2) The ' appearances ' must be really preserved.
They must not be stripped of their reality or neglected
as mere appearances, merely because we fancy that we
have seen in them glimpses of something higher. So
long as they exist at all, they are real. The world
really is coloured, and noisy, and hard, and painful, and
spacious, and fleeting, notwithstanding the objections ot
our wiseacres, and there is excellent sense even in
maintaining that the earth is flat (some of it) and that
the sun does rise and set. Even a nightmare does
not become less real and oppressive because you have
survived, and traced it to too generous an indulgence in
lobster salad.

For (3) it must never be forgotten that the immediate
experience is after all in a way more real, i.e. more directly
real, than the ' higher realities ' which are said to ' explain '
it. For the latter are inferred and postulated simply and
solely for the purpose of ' explaining ' the former, and
their reality consequently rests for us upon that of the
former. Or in so far as the higher realities are more than
inferences, they become such by entering into immediate
experience and transfiguring it.2

The dependence of all ulterior reality upon immediate

1 It is clear that this objection alone would justify the rejection of Mr.
Bradley "s Absolute. But, so far as I can understand it, it seems to be constitu
tionally incapable of complying with any of the conditions I am laying down.

2 The simplest example of this is the way in which the results of thought
attain immediacy in perception.

196 HUMANISM xi

experience is easy to illustrate. I sit in my armchair
and read, what I will call one of the more severely
scholastic works on philosophy. There appears to me my
friend Jones who has come to tell me that my friend
Smith has been arrested on a charge of bigamy and wants
me to bail him out. I have no reason to doubt the
veracity of Jones or the reality of the situation. I feel
therefore the urgent necessity for instant action, and,
hastening to the rescue, I — awake with a start ! It was
all a dream, you will say. On the contrary, I reply, it
was all a reality. While I lived through it, the experience
was as vivid and real as anything I ever experienced.
It is so still : the thought of Smith's bigamy — he happens
to be the primmest of old bachelors — still affords me
uncontrollable amusement. It is true that I have now
modified my opinion as to the order of ' reality ' to which
the experience belonged. I had thought that it belonged
to our common waking world ; I now regard it as belong
ing to a more beautiful dream-world of my own.1 We
see, therefore, how the ' higher ' reality depends on the
immediate. The reality of Smith's excessive susceptibility,
of Jones's visit, and of the bigamy itself, rested upon and
was relative to that of my dream-experience. When my
experience changed, I was no longer entitled to infer the
existence of my previous realities in the world of my
waking life.2

The application of this principle is quite general. A
change in any particular ' appearance ' may entirely in
validate the argument for the ' reality ' which served to
explain it in its previous condition ; its annihilation
would destroy the ground for the assumption of this
reality ; and the annihilation of all appearances would
obviously destroy all the reasons for assuming any
reality.3 The principle is one of considerable speculative
importance, for it enables us to conceive how we should

1 And possibly also of Jones, if (as sometimes happens) he also dreamt the
story he told me.

2 Cp. pp. 18, 32, 43, 369.

3 Hence we may say that Mr. Bradley' s maltreatment of ' appearances '
destroys all ' reality. '

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 197

think the reality of a ' lower ' to be related to that of a
' higher ' world of experience, if and when we experienced
such a transition from one to the other. And to Religion,
of course, this is a point of capital importance. For
unless we can conceive how the higher or ' spiritual '
world can transcend and absorb, without negating, the
lower or ' material ' world, the postulates of the religious
consciousness must continue to seem idle fairy tales to
the austere reason of the systematic thinker.

Moreover this dependence of derivative realities on
primary experience has a most important bearing on the
philosophic status of Idealism. At present Idealism
remains in the position of an unprofitable paradox,
because none of those who have professed a theoretic
belief in it have cared or dared to act upon their theory.
And so the argument for it is among those which, in
Hume's phrase, admit of no answer and carry no con
viction ; and yet, strangely enough, idealist philosophers,
so far from being disconcerted by it, seem to be rather
proud of this fact. Why else should they perpetually
be apologizing for what they conceive to be the paradox
of their doctrine, and explaining that it really leaves the
empirical reality of things entirely untouched ? Idealism,
they say, opens no royal roads to higher realms : it
makes no practical difference to the reality of anything,
save, perhaps, that it enables the philosopher to recoil
at will upon a point of view not understanded of the
vulgar.

To all of which, as humanists, we must reply, that this
defence but aggravates the charge. It proves Idealism to
be either worthless or pernicious : the latter, if its sole
function is to gratify a philosophic pride ; the former, if
it really makes no difference. And while a temporary
air of paradox is not unbecoming to the youth of a novel
view, it is the plain duty of every doctrine that seriously
pretends to maintain itself as truth before the public to
turn itself into an accepted truism as quickly as it can.
If therefore Idealism really means anything, it must enable
the idealist to regard reality differently from tlie realist,

198 HUMANISM xi

and to act differently in virtue of his truer insight. To
say that Idealism makes no difference is thus to pronounce
its utter condemnation. It is to admit that it is the same
thing as Realism, variously named, i.e. to render it a
useless subtlety. And must we not as pragmatists
concede, that if it were really useless^ it would incon-
testably be false ? *

To be true at all, therefore, Idealism must make a
difference, but what shall we say it is ? It seems to me
that if Idealism is right in its fundamental contention that
existence is experience, and if we really try to live up to
this insight, the difference which it ought to make is quite
clearly this : that while the idealist does not deny the relative
reality and pragmatic value of his actual experience, he
does not feel bound to commit himself in his inmost soul
to the assertion also of its absolute reality. That is, he
will make a certain inward reservation as to the ultimate
reality of an imperfect world ; he will hold himself free
to contemplate with a certain irony the brute facts of an
experience he cannot wholly master, free also to uphold
in their despite the ultimate validity of the ideals his
spirit craves ; in short, he will possess a reserve of
strength not open to his rivals, wherewith to meet the
buffetings of circumstance. Practically also he will be
more alert to seize upon whatever chances offer to effect
improvements in an actual order he does not hold to be
definitive ; he will hold himself prepared to advance to
worlds of a higher and more harmonious order,2 and to
welcome whatever indications of their possibility may
float within his ken. The vision of the realist, on the
other hand, conceiving himself to be cognizant of a final,
rigid, and independent reality, should be undeviatingly
fixed upon and bounded by the ' brute ' facts of his actual
experience ; this he must regard as final, and he will thus
debar himself from all experiments that might extend its
borders or transform the context, and so the texture, of
his universe. As for the soi-disant idealists who can
draw no inference from their creed, we must contend that

1 Cp. pp. 38-40. 2 Cp. pp. 18, 22, 368.

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 199

they have really failed to grasp its meaning, and are
unworthy of the name they have assumed. For the bow
of Odysseus belongs to him alone who can bend it, and,
if need be, use it upon the enemies of truth.

(4) The reality of the ' higher reality ' must be made to
depend throughout on its efficiency. This follows implicitly
from what we have already established. Immediate
experience forms the touchstone whereby we test the
value of our inferred realities, and if they can contribute
nothing valuable to its elucidation, their assumption is
nothing but vanity and vexation of spirit. For what
started the whole cognitive process was just the felt un-
satisfactoriness of our immediate experience; our inferences
must approve themselves as specifics against this disease,
by their ability to supplement the actual, by the power
they give us to transform our experiences. The trans
mutation of appearances therefore must not be represented
as an inscrutable privilege of the Absolute ; it must be
made a weapon mortal hands can actually wield. This
in fact is what we are continually doing ; it is the whole
aim of our conceptual manipulation of experience. If to
' think ' it left ' reality ' the same, we should not waste
our lives upon what is to most a painful and irksome
business ; but in point of fact our thought ministers to
our perceptions and so alleviates the burden of life. The
results of our past thought enter into and transform our
immediate perceptions and render them more adequate as
guides to action. And this is what we want our thought
to do and why we value it. Intellectualist prejudice
indeed has interpreted this process into an excuse for
'analysing' perception into ' thought '; it is better regarded
as a proof of the practical value of thought and of the
teleological character of conception.

What will in the last resort decide, therefore, whether
an inferred reality really exists or is merely a figment of
the imagination, is the way it works, and the power which
its aid confers. The assumption, e.g., of the earth's
rotundity is ' true,' and preferable to the ' flat-earth ' theory,
because on the whole it works better and accounts better for

200 HUMANISM

XI

the course of our experience. Similarly, if I am comparing
the merits of the scientific theory that the transmission of
light is effected by the vibrations of a hypothetical reality
called the ' ether ' with those of a more poetic theory that
it is due to the flapping of equally hypothetical cherubs'
wings, my decision will certainly be affected by the
consideration that I can probably discover regular ways of
manipulating the ether, but can hardly hope to control the
movements of the cherubs.

An assumed reality, then, approves itself to be true in
proportion as it shows itself capable of rendering our life
more harmonious ; it exposes itself to rejection as false
in proportion as it either fails to affect our experiences, or
exercises a detrimental effect upon them. Knowledge is
power, because we decline to recognize as knowledge what
ever does not satisfy our lust for power.

It follows (5) that Ultimate Reality must be absolutely
satisfactory. For that is the condition of our accepting
it as such. So long as the most ultimate reality we have
reached in thought or deed falls short in any respect of
giving complete satisfaction, the struggle to harmonize
experience must go on, lead to fresh efforts, and inspire
the suspicion that something must exist to dissolve away
our faintest discords. We cannot acquiesce therefore in
what we have found. Or rather our acquiescence in it
would at most betray the exhaustion of despair. To this we
might be reduced for a season, but the hope would always
rise anew that somehow there was something better, truer
and more real lurking behind the apparent ultimates of
our knowledge. For illustration I need merely appeal to
the well-known fact that an ' other ' world is always
conceived as a ' better ' world. The absolutely satisfactory
alone would rise superior to such doubts. It would be
psycJiologically impossible to suspect it of bearing hidden
horrors in its breast. The thought is no doubt abstractly
conceivable, but a human mind could hardly be found
seriously to entertain it. Similarly we might play with
the idea of a progress in knowledge which should not
only fail to be a progress in harmony, but should reveal

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 201

fresh horrors at every step, until by the time absolute
truth had been reached the cumulative cruelty of what
we were forced to recognize as ultimate reality surpassed
our most hideous imaginings as far as our knowledge
surpassed that of a Bushman. Now I do not for a
moment suppose that common sense can be terrified with
such suggestions into regarding them as more than the
nightmares of a mind distraught, and I venture to think
that a pragmatist philosophy can show that common sense
is right. For there is a serious fallacy in the notion that
the pursuit of Truth could reveal a chamber of horrors
in the innermost shrine, and that we could all be forced
to acknowledge and adore an ultimate reality in this
monstrous guise. If this were truth, we should decline
to believe it, and to accept it as true. We should insist
that there must be some escape from the Minotaur, some
way out of the Labyrinth in which our knowledge had
involved our life. And even if we could be forced to
the admission that the pursuit of truth necessarily and
inevitably brought us face to face with some unbearable
atrocity — an undertaking which seems so far to have over
taxed even Mr. Bradley's ingenuity — a simple expedient
would remain. As soon as the pursuit' of truth was
generally recognized to be practically noxious, we should
simply give it up. If its misguided votaries morbidly
persisted in their diabolical pursuit of ' truth regardless of
the consequences,' they would be stamped out, as the
Indian Government has stamped out the Thugs. Nor is
this mere imagining. The thing has happened over and
over again. All through the Middle Ages most branches
of knowledge were under black suspicion as hostile to
human welfare. They languished accordingly, and some
of them, such as, e.g., Psychical Research, are still under
a cloud. It is hardly necessary to allude to Comte's
drastic proposals for the State regulation of science, and
every teacher knows that the Civil Service Commissioners
in the last resort prescribe what shall be taught (and how)
throughout the land. In short the fact is patent to all
who will open their eyes that in a thousand ways society

202 HUMANISM xi

is ever controlling, repressing, or encouraging, the cognitive
activities of its members.1

And not only would this be done, but it would be an
entirely reasonable thing to do in the case supposed. If
the pursuit of knowledge really aggravated, instead of
relieving, the burden of life, it would be irrational. If
every step we took beyond ' appearances ' were but an
augmentation of the disharmony in our experience, there
would be no gain in taking it. The alleged knowledge
would be worse than useless, and we should fare better
without it. We should have to train ourselves therefore
to make the most of appearances, to make no effort to
get behind them. And natural selection would see to it
that those did not survive who remained addicted to a
futile and noxious pursuit. This then would be the worst
that could happen ; the frivolity and thoughtlessness of
the day-fly might pay better than the deadly earnest of
the sage. But the day-fly would have become incapable
of assenting to the extravagances of ultra-pessimism,
simply because it would not think of what was coming.

From the worst possibility let us turn to the best.
The best that has been mentioned is that by Faith and
daring we should find an experience that would conduct
us to the fortunate thought of an ultimate reality capable
of completely harmonizing our experience. And a merely
intellectualist philosophy would have no reason, I presume,
to ask for more than this. But just as before we conceived
the principle of non- contradiction to be a form of the
wider principle of harmony, so now we can hardly rest
content with a reality which is merely conceived as the
ground of complete satisfaction. For so long as it remains
a mere conception, it must remain doubtful whether it
could be realized in actual fact. To remove this doubt,
therefore, our ultimate reality would have actually to
establish the perfect harmony. By this achievement alone,
i.e. by returning to our immediate experience and trans
muting it into a form in which doubt would have become
impossible, would it finally put an end to every doubt of

1 Cp. pp. 58-60 and 342-4.

xi ON PRESERVING APPEARANCES 203

its own ultimateness. But by this same achievement it
would have dissolved our original problem. The antithesis
of ' appearance ' and ' reality ' would have vanished.
Ultimate reality having become immediate experience
the two would coincide, and we should have entered into
the fruition of their union.

And so should we not finally catch a glimpse of an
ideal which, in its own way, theology has dreamt of as
' the Beatific Vision ' ? The ideal of knowledge, as of
the life to which it ministers, would not be an infinitely
complex system of relations about which one might argue
without end, but the vision, or immediate perception, of a
reality which had absorbed all truth and so had become,
as it were, intellectually transparent, and in which the
whole meaning of the cosmic scheme was summed up
and luminously comprehended — not only understood, but
seen to be very good, and more than this, to be supremely
beautiful. In other words, the bliss which Aristotle tried
so hard to attribute to a Deity scornful of all communion
with a suffering universe, could never be derived from a
discursive ' thinking upon thought ' ; l it would have to
take the form of an aesthetic contemplation of the perfect
and all-embracing harmony.2

1 Not that Aristotle's j'i^tris is really discursive. His thought (though not
always his language) has really quite outgrown the Platonic antithesis of sensation
and thought.

2 For suggestions as to how this Beatific Vision can be conceived as attainable,
see the next essay.

XII
ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE1

ARGUMENT

Need for a reconstruction of the conception of Substance by means of the
Aristotelian conception of 'Evtpyeia.

I. Its historical antecedents. The antithesis of the Process and Per
manence view of existence, Eleaticism — Heracliteanism — Platonism.
Aristotle s criticism of Plato's ofoia as mere potentiality— his advance in
forming the conception of eWpyeta.

II. Aristotle's statement of his doctrine. 'E^/ryaa as Substance— not a
form of Kbijffu but vice versa. When perfected it no longer implies

motion' or 'change.' Hence the Divine activity is continuous and
eternal and fvtpyeia d/a^o-fas.

III. Its consequences. Perfect happiness— the transition from Time to
Eternity — 'Evtyyeia aKivqula^ a scientific conception of ' Heaven.'

IV. The paradoxes of the doctrine. How can there be activity, life, or
consciousness without change ?

V. Their explanation. The difficulty not in the facts but in the arbi
trary interpretation we have put upon them. Thus (l) the equilibrium
of motions is conceivable as the perfection, not as the cessation, of
'motion,' (2) perfect metabolism would transcend change, and (3) so
would a perfect consciousness.

VI. Advantages of so conceiving Activity. Rejection of 'Becoming '
and 'Rest' as ideals. Conceivableness of 'Heaven' and 'Eternity.'
Avoidance of the ' Dissipation of Energy.' Spencer's see-saw as to
the interpretation of ' equilibration.'

VII. The old theory of Substance worthless. If ' Substance ' is conceived
as the substratum of change it becomes unknowable and explains nothing.
Berkeley detected this in the case of material, Hume in that of
spiritual ' substance.' Psychology has recently found it out in the case of
the ' Soul ' and physics in that of ' matter.' ' Energy ' as the only physical
reality. Lotze's criticism and reconstruction of substantiality.

VIII. The Activity without motion as the ultimate ideal of Being.
Activity the sole substance — how it produces the illusion of a substratum
in which reality is never found. It is in proportion as the real actualizes
its possibilities in a harmonious form that it assumes the features of
an ultimate ideal. The value of such an ideal.

1 The greater part of this appeared in Mind, N.S. 36, Oct. 1900, under the
title of The Conception of "Evtpyeia. 'AKivrjo-las. But it has been revised and con
siderably expanded.

204

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 205

MY aim in this essay is to throw out some suggestions for
a reconstruction of the conception of Substance which the
work of the sciences so sorely needs, but to which modern
philosophy, although Hume had cleared the ground by
showing the worthlessness of the old notion of substance,1
has as yet contributed little of a really constructive char
acter.2 This aim I hope to achieve by going back to
Aristotle and extricating from an unmerited obscurity the
Aristotelian ideal of Being, which seems to me to have
formulated the only useful and tenable conception of Sub
stantiality nearly 2300 years ago. I am aware that this
sounds incredible, and would be so, if that conception had
ever been properly understood. But this has never been
the case ; for reasons arising partly from the facility with
which appearances generate the vulgar notion of Substance
as the unchanging substratum of change, but also not
unconnected with the brevity of Aristotle's extant utter
ances on the subject. The worst of packing truth in a
nutshell is that, so bestowed, it cannot safely navigate the
stream of time and will at best float down it without notice.
My first task, therefore, will be to expound more fully
the Aristotelian conception of Energeia, to show how it
culminates in an activity which transcends change and
motion (evepjeia a/ai/T/o-ia?), and to remove the paradoxes
which this seems superficially to involve. I can then
proceed to show that this conception completely supersedes
the vulgar notion of Substance, that it alone is of service
in the sciences and competent to satisfy the intellectual
and emotional demands we must make upon our conception
of ultimate Being, and thereby not only removes a number
of misconceptions which have been a constant source of
trouble in science and philosophy, but goes far to relieve
philosophy from the opprobrium of terminating in incon
ceivable mysteries.

1 I refer of course to his criticism of the Self in the Treatise,

2 For, of course, the Kantian assertion that Substance is an a priori ' category '
by which we recognize the permanent in change is unprofitable verbalism. It
explains neither the formation of the notion, i.e. how we come by this ideal, nor
its meaning^ i.e. what in concrete fact it is to persist through change, nor its
application, i.e. how we discern ' substances ' and discriminate them from things
which only seem so.

206 HUMANISM

XII

I propose to trace, therefore, (i) the historical ante
cedents of Aristotle's doctrine, (2) his own statements of
it, (3) its consequences, (4) the objections to it, (5) the
answers to these, (6) its advantages over rival theories of
substance, (7) the worthlessness of the latter, and finally
(8) the value of the Aristotelian conception as an ultimate
ideal.

The history of thought, like that of politics, has largely
been the history of great antitheses which have kept up
their secular conflict from age to age. In the course of
that history it may often have seemed that the one side
of such an antithesis had finally triumphed over the other,
but in the next generation it has often appeared that its
rival had rallied its forces and restated Its position to such
effect that the preponderance of opinion has once more
swung back to its side. Perhaps the most important
metaphysically of these antitheses is that which has at
different times been formulated as that between Tevea-is
and Ov<r[a, 'Evepyeia and f/E^9, Becoming and Being,
Change and Immutability, Process and Permanence, and
it will be necessary to cast a rapid retrospect over its
varying fortunes in order to appreciate the full significance
of Aristotle's doctrine.

It will suffice for this purpose to start with the
metaphysic of the Eleatics, taking it as the extremest,
crudest, most abstract, and therefore most impressive,
representative of what we may call, for purposes of reference,
the permanence-view of the ultimate nature of existence.
In the Eleatics the affirmation of Being took the form
of a rigid immutable "Qv, whose uncompromising unity
reduced all motion, change and plurality to an inexplicable
illusion, and remorselessly crushed out the whole signifi
cance of human life. This uncanny Monism was defended
with a dialectical ability which has never since been
equalled, and Zeno's proofs of the impossibility of motion
are still full of instruction for philosophers of all schools.

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 207

But in the philosophy of Herakleitos Nemesis overtakes
the Eleatics. Herakleitos affirms against them the ultimate
reality of Becoming, the unlimited all-pervading Process,
which unremittingly surges in the circling road, the 0805
avw KCLTW, wherein all things stream away (irdvra pel ical
ovSev /jievei). In spite of the somewhat sinister denial of
permanence implied in this addition, Heracliteanism may
well have seemed to restore to the universe the life which
Eleaticism had made impossible.

But in Plato the pendulum swings back again to
the side of ovaia. Rightly or wrongly, he detected in
Heracliteanism consequences which seemed to him fatal
to the possibility of knowledge, and instead of seeking
to determine the actual limits of the Flux and betaking
himself to the practical methods science has since elaborated
in order to know it, he preferred to reject Heracliteanism
and to propound a revised, and greatly improved, Eleati
cism. He points out our need of a TTOV crro>, which is
not swept away in the Flux, of a fixed standard whereby
to measure and render knowable the flow of Becoming,
and in his theory of Ideas he conceived himself to have
supplied this demand. In it plurality is, in a manner,
recognized in the plurality of the Ideas, united though
they are in the Idea of the Good, while the phenomenal
world is admitted not to be wholly illusory, being p^era^v
rov OVTOS KCU ^ OJ/T05, intermediate between the Ideas
and the principle of impermanence, the mystery of which
Plato seems to have thought he could resolve by calling
it the ' Non-Existent.'

In the end, however, the Idea remains the only true
reality, and the Idea as such is unchanging Being, out
of Space and Time. Hence to call anything, e.g.,
Pleasure, a ' Becoming ' (yeveo-i<i) is ipso facto to cast
a slur upon its reality and to disqualify it for the position
of the Chief Good which must be, he thinks, an abiding
' ousia.'

In Aristotle the tables are once more turned. To
Aristotle the real world, i.e. the world whereof we desire
an explanation, is after all the world of change in which

208 HUMANISM

XII

we move and live, rather than the system of immutable
and timeless ' laws ' which we devise for its explanation.
Hence Plato's changeless ' ousiai ' seem to him too distant
and divorced to explain the world. A conception of
Substance which is to explain the facts of the world must
not subsist in an impassible immutability in the super-
celestial seclusion of a transcendent TOTTO? vorjros : if
Substance meant no more than this, it would be a mere
potentiality (SiWyu-i?). If ovala, therefore, is not immanent
and does not assert itself in the world of phenomena, but
remains an inert and secluded Svvafjus, it is lifeless and
worthless. For the potentiality owes its visibility, its
value, nay, its very existence, to the glow shed upon it
by the actual exercise of function (energeia}. Hence the
' universal ' (/ca06\ov), if it is to be truly valuable either
for science or for practice, must be in the world and
pervade it ; or, in his technical phrase, must display itself
in actuality (evepyeia) by the way it actually works. Not
that Aristotle denies the validity of the considerations
which led Plato to frame his conception of ovala ; he
denies only its adequacy. In his anxiety to escape out
of the Heraclitean flux Plato had overshot the mark :
he had committed himself to a conception of Being too
rigid and remote to explain the Becoming of phenomena.
The highest conception must be 'Rvepyeia and not Awa/u?,
the actual functioning of a substance whose real nature
is only so revealed.

This too is the ultimate reason why, in his Ethics,
Aristotle denies that aperr) is the Good, and contends that
the Good, RvSai/Aovia, must be the exercise of the e£t<?
(Svz/a/u?), evepyeta tear dpertjv, A merely statical treat
ment of the truly valuable will not suffice : the Good is
not merely dyadrj (f>v<Tis, it is dyadrj (frvais in exercise, and
a disposition (e£t?) is only valuable as the basis and
potentiality of an evepyeia. In this way the whole of
Aristotle's philosophy, both in its constructive and in its
critical aspects as a reply to Plato, may be enunciated in
the one word, ' Energeia' It has indeed always been
more or less recognized that into this technical term

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 209

Aristotle has packed all that was most distinctive, most
original, most fundamental, and most profound in his
philosophy. Now in philosophy all real originality is
constructive — for you cannot pull down without a standing
ground whence to effect the operation — and all real con-
structiveness is also critical, for, as the earliest Pharaohs
already knew, the most effective and unanswerable way
of abolishing your rival's constructions is to use them up
in your own. Hence it is that Aristotle's conception of
Energeia constitutes both his really effective criticism of
Plato, a criticism whose massive weight is far more
crushing than the querulous and dialectical quibbling
which he so often seems to substitute for serious apprecia
tion of his master's work, and also the really decisive step
in his advance beyond Plato. But the step was such a
great one, and advances into regions so remote from our
habitual modes of thinking, that not even the lapse of
twenty centuries has rendered it easy to follow in his
footsteps.

II

It follows from his rehabilitation of the Process-view
of the world that Aristotle has (a] to establish the
superiority of his conception of evepyeia over the Platonic
conception of ova-La, (b} that he has to distinguish it from
the conception of Kivr)<ns or yevecris, which had succumbed
to the Platonic criticism.

The first point is of course easy enough to establish.
It suffices to point out that a substance apart from its
activity is an abstraction, or, in Aristotle's words, that the
actuality is naturally prior to the potentiality, that to be
is to be active} This simple truth, that a substantiality
which does nothing is nothing, is now of course familiar
enough, and perhaps best known in the Herbartian
formula, ' without causality no substantiality,' though it
lies at the roots also of Hume's criticism of substantiality.
But the very fact that it has so often to be reaffirmed

1 Cp. esp. Eth. Nic. ix. 7. 4 (1168 a 6) tffjj.€v d' tvepyeiq..

P

210 HUMANISM

XII

shows the strength of the natural prejudices against which
it has had to contend.

The same remark applies with tenfold force to the
second point, viz. the difficulty of grasping the constructive
aspect of the conception of Energeia. It has not ceased
to appear paradoxical to us because of our inveterate, but
quite illogical, habit of regarding a ' function ' (eVepyeta) as
a sort of ' process ' (ye^ec™?), or even — when we try to be
particularly ' scientific ' — as ultimately reducible to a sort
of ' motion.' In other words, we ordinarily subsume
Aristotle's evepyeia under the conception of what he would
have called Kivrjcn^. And if we do this, his notion of an
activity without motion (evepyeia afcwrjo-ias) must seem
the very height of paradox, a paradox whereof the edge
has not been blunted by the progress of two thousand years.

But the fault is ours ; we have unwittingly employed
conceptions which are the precise opposite of the device
whereby Aristotle turned the flank of the Platonic criticism
of Becoming and established his own conception of 'Evepyeia.
In superseding by it the Platonic ovtria he could not, of
course, merely revert to the earlier conceptions of ' be
coming' and 'motion' whose logical annihilation Plato
had effected. He was bound to provide something new
in his conception of Energeia, and to distinguish it from
both its precursors. And he does it. He does not fall
into the trap to which we succumb when we regard a
' function ' (evepyeia) as a sort of ' process ' (yeveais'), or,
materialistically, try to reduce all things to ' matter ' in
' motion.' He does the very opposite. Instead of classify
ing -evepyeia under fclvrja-is, he simply makes evep<yeia
the wider and supremer notion, and subsumes /civrjo-is
under it as a peculiar species, viz. an imperfect evepjeca.1

1 Cp. e.g. Physics, iii. 2, 201 b 31, rj icivrjffis frtpyeia ^v TIJ elvat doKei
dreXrjj 5^, viii. 5, 257 b 8, 1-ffTiv T\ Klvr)ais tvre\£xfM KIVTJTOV dreXijs. De
Anima, ii. 5, 417 a 16, HffTiv i] Klvijcrts frtpyfid TIS, dreX^s JJL£VTOI : iii. 2,
431 a 5, (/xitcercu rb fj£v alcO^rbv £K 5vva.fj.ei 6vTos TOV alffOijriKou frepyelq.
TTOIOVV ' oil yap 7rd<rx« ovd' dXXotoCrat (sc. rb ala-6-r}TiK6i>), dib &\\o fldos
TOVTO KiPTjtrfajj • r) yap Ktvrjffis areXovs tvtpytia, fjv • r; d' aTrXws tvtpyfia ertpa
T) TOV T€re\ffffJ^vov. Metaph. 0, 6, 1048 b 29 jraaa yap Klvrjais dreX^y.

Cp. also Eth. Nic. x. 3, 1174 a 19, where it is explained that iiSovri is not
Klvrpis, because it does not need perfecting (being indeed what itself perfects
Ivepyeia), while Kifrjffis does.

ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 211

that is, arises from the longing of the
imperfect for the perfect, of the 'matter' (vX-^) for the
' form ' (6*809) ; it is simply the process whereby it reaches
whatever degree of perfection the inherent limitations of
its nature concede to it.

'Efe/>76ia, on the other hand, does not essentially or
necessarily imply motion or change. In fact in the
typical case, the perfect exercise of function by the
senses, there is neither ' motion ' (/aV^o-t?) nor ' change '
(aA,A,ot&)<7i9) nor ' passivity ' (jrdwxeiv) ; the appropriate
stimulus rouses the organ to activity and the organ
functions naturally in grasping it ; * when this process is
free from friction (' impediment ') perception is perfect and
accompanied by pleasure (f)§ovrf).

Man, unfortunately, only catches brief glimpses of this
happy state of things : our activity cannot be sustained,
because, owing to the defectiveness (irovripia or <£ai;XoT?79)
of a composite nature adulterated with ' matter ' (vXij), we
grow weary and allow our attention to wander and cannot
be continuously active (crwe^ctk evepyetv}.2 But God is
not so hampered ; his is a pure and perfect nature ; he is
pure Form, unimpeded by Matter, and always completely
and actually all that he can be. Hence the divine
eVeyem is kept up inexhaustibly,3 and ever generates the
supreme pleasure, simple and incorruptible, of self-
contemplation (1/6770-49 7/0770-60)9), which constitutes the
divine happiness. It follows, as a matter of course, that
this evep<yeia is above and beyond Kivrjcrts ; it is lv£pyeia
d/civrja-Las or rjpe^ia. Hence in a famous passage — whose
fame is yet unequal to its merits 4 — we are told that " if
the nature of anything were simple, the same action
would ever be sweetest to it. And this is the reason
why God always enjoys a single and simple pleasure ; for
there is not only an activity of motion, but also one void
of motion, and pleasure is rather in constancy 5 than in

1 Eth. Nic. x. 4. 5, 1174 b 14. * Ibid. x. 4. g, 1175 a 4.

3 This is true also of the heavenly bodies, by reason of their more perfect OXfj.
Cp. Metaph. 1050 b 22.

4 Eth. Nic. vii. 14. 8 (1154 b 25-31).

5 rjpf/j.la cannot be translated ' rest ' without misleading. For ' rest ' to us =
non-activity, which to Aristotle is tantamount to non-existence, He uses the

212 HUMANISM

XII

motion. And change of all things is sweet, as the poet
hath it, because of a certain defect." ]

The immense significance of this passage has been
strangely overlooked and the commentators say singularly
little about it. Thus, of the two latest editors of the
Ethics, Prof. Stewart accuses Aristotle of waxing poetical,
while Prof. Burnet finds nothing to say about it at all ;
and as this has occurred after I had vainly attempted to
call attention to it,2 I think I may assume that still
further comment is needed to help modern minds to
grasp the beauty and importance of Aristotle's thought.

Ill

It follows from the above that the perfect or divine
life is one of unceasing and unchanging activity, which is
also an eternal consciousness of supreme happiness. And
yet nothing happens in it. It is eternal, not in the illusory
sense in which geometrical triangles and epistemological
monstrosities (like e.g. Green's Eternal Self -Consciousness}
are put out of Time by a trick of abstraction, but because
it can be shown to have a positive nature, which precludes
the conditions which engender time-consciousness. For,
as Aristotle was well aware, (objective) Time is a creature
of Motion ; it depends on the motions whereby alone it
can be measured ; it is the ' number ' of motion (/az^crea)?
apt6/ji6<i). If then tcivrja-is arises out of the imperfection
of an eVepyeta, the perfecting of an evep<yeia will necessarily
involve the disappearance of Time, together with that of
Motion. Or, as I have elsewhere expressed it,3 Time is
the measure of the impermanence of the imperfect, and
the perfecting of the time-consciousness would carry us
out of Time into Eternity. In other words, the conception
of 'Rvepyeia 'A/a^tna? is a scientific formulation of the

word in order to express the steady and effortless maintenance of a perfect
equilibrium. Cp. An. Post. ii. 19, where the same word is used to describe the
emergence of the logical universal, i.e. of the constancy of meaning, out of the
flux of psychological ' ideas.' : Cp. also Metaph. A. 7, 1072 b 16.

2 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 443, new ed. p. 424. 3 Ibid. ch. ix. § n.

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 213

popular theological conceptions of Heaven and Eternity.
We have merely to add that this motionless functioning
is suffused with a glow of aesthetic delight, to get a
complete conceptual interpretation of what theology has
called the Beatific Vision.

IV

But of course all this sounds unfamiliar and fantastical
and is not quite easy to grasp — if it had been, the notions
of Heaven and Eternity would hardly have become
targets for so much cheap scorn. And it is needless also
to deny that there seems to be a paradox here which
demands a defence.

The paradox is that it has been implied that there
can be activity, life, and consciousness without change,
imperfection, or decay. This seems an utter paradox
because in our actual experience consciousness is a
succession of mental states or processes, because life is
sustained by a continual metabolism, and activities are
recognized only by the changes which they exhibit. We
are therefore accustomed to regard a changeless activity
as equivalent to rest, i.e. as cessation of activity, as death.

About these facts, of course, there is no dispute. All
motions are measured by the unequal rates of change, and
when bodies maintain the same position relatively to each
other, they are taken to be at rest. Similarly, it is not
to be denied that vital function consumes living tissue,
and no one would dream of disputing that consciousness
is a continuous flow of experiences.

The only question is as to what inferences we are
entitled to draw from these facts, and by what conceptions
we are to interpret a transcending of change such as is
conceivable, though not imaginable.

Accordingly I propose to show: (i) That we are not
entitled to infer from the facts the impossibility of an
evepyeia dicwqcrta*; ; (2) that it is by this conception
rather than by that of ' rest ' that the ultimate ideal of

M

2i4 HUMANISM xn

existence should be interpreted. I shall consider the
conceptions of Motion, Life, and Consciousness in turn.

(a) It has long been admitted that Motion tends to
equilibrium, and that in a perfect equilibrium there would
be no (perceptible) motion and no available energy.

Under the name of the dissipation of energy this fact
of its equilibration has become notorious. It is the great
bugbear of physics which has given rise to the gloomiest
vaticinations concerning the inevitable decadence and
ultimate doom of the universe.1

This whole difficulty arises out of our habit of con
templating equilibration as cessation of Motion or ' Rest.'
An equilibrated universe cannot change and its latent
energy cannot be used to change it. Ergo such a universe
is ' played out.'

But why should we not regard this situation as a case
of ^vepjeia 'Atciwrja-ias, as a perfecting of Motion until it
has everywhere become perfectly regular, steady, smooth
and frictionless ? Logically, in fact, this seems a far
preferable alternative.

"Suppose, e.g. an equilibrium of temperature. If two
bodies are at equal temperatures, does that mean that
they have ceased to have temperature? Have they
ceased to radiate out heat, or (to put it in terms of the
current theory about heat) to exhibit the molecular

1 Strictly the ' degradation ' or ' dissipation ' of energy is said to apply only to
finite portions of the universe, and consolation is sometimes sought in the thought
that the universe is possibly infinite, and that in an infinite anything may happen.
Now it is true that the doctrine of the dissipation of energy ceases to apply to an
infinite universe, but the reason is merely that in view of an actual infinity, all
propositions become unmeaning. And an infinite universe or whole involves a
contradiction in terms, and is a pseudo-conception which can be reached only by
a confusion of thought. (Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. ix. §§ 2-9.-) Emotionally
too the worthy people who regard infinity as something delightful and magnificent
seem to have not the faintest notion of what an infinite universe would really be like.
What it means is that in no conceivable way, from no conceivable point of view,
would it exhibit any finality or security of any kind. It would be what Prof.
James calls a nulliverse, an indefinite plurality of things, which could never be
got together into a unity, an amorphous heap whose conduct would be utterly
incalculable.

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 215

vibrations which appear to our temperature-sense as heat ?
Surely not : it means that each body receives as much
' heat ' as it radiates, that the ' molecular motions '
proceed with entire regularity and constant velocities.
But if so, is it not a condition of Activity (ev&pyeia), not
of Rest ?

(<5») In the case of Life it is much easier to conceive
perfection as a changeless activity, because we are more
inclined to regard life as depending on a harmony
of changes rather than on their mutability, on the mere
instability of organic processes. Thus if with Spencer we
conceive life as an adjustment of internal to external
relations ('mutual adjustment' would be better!), it is
evident that the success of life will depend on the degree
of correspondence, however attained, between the organism
and its environment. Perfect correspondence therefore
would be perfect life, and might be conceived as arising
by a gradual perfecting of the correspondence until the
organism either adapted itself completely to an unchanging
environment or instantaneously and pari passu to a
changing one, in such wise that the moment of non-
adaptation (if any) was too brief to come into consciousness.
In either case the relation of the organism to its
environment would be unchangingly the same. It would
persist therefore in being what it was, in expressing its
nature in its activities, without alteration or decay, gaining
nothing and losing nothing, because of the perfect
equipoise of waste and repair.

That such an equilibrium is not unthinkable may
be illustrated also by the conceptions of a balance of
income and expenditure, of the ' stationary state ' of
economics and of perfect justice as a social harmony in
which each maintains his own position in society without
aggression on others. Surely in none of these cases could
it be asserted that there was a cessation of social or
industrial relations. Once more, does not the apparent
paradox arise merely out of the habit of interpreting
evepyeia aKivrjalas as a cessation of activity ?

Yet it is this latter view which is really unthinkable,

216 HUMANISM xn

as may be illustrated by taking a hypothetical case, that
of an adaptation or harmony on the verge of the per
fection, the possibility of which is in dispute.

It must be admitted that in the stage immediately
preceding perfect adaptation the organism is very much
alive, and moreover carries on its life with a minimum of
friction and a maximum of success. In such a life
difficulties would exist only to be overcome, and no
process of adapting would be more than momentary.

Now suppose it to become instantaneous. We are
required to believe that in the very instant when the last
trace of maladaptation is eliminated, life suddenly and
inexplicably ceases, and the organism, which but the
moment before had been rejoicing in its might, is, with
scarce a noticeable change, suddenly smitten with meta
physical annihilation !

Is not this incredible ? Could a catastrophe like this
be paralleled by anything in nature or literature except
the tragic fate which overwhelmed Lewis Carroll's Baker
" in the midst of his laughter and glee," when the Snark
he had so successfully chased turned out to be a Boojum,
and he " softly and silently vanished away " ? And so,
does not the principle of continuity compel us to think
the aicwrjcria of perfect adaptation, to which all /a^cret?
point, as life and activity (^w^ teal evepyeia), as Aristotle has
contended.

(c] To Consciousness it seems at first harder to apply
this same interpretation. For what most impresses us
about consciousness is the flux of Becoming, which is the
world's aspiration to Being. Consciousness flows with a
fluidity which is quite incapable of precise, and almost
of intelligible, statement. It is a perpetual transition
from object to object, not one of which it can retain for a
fraction of a second, and in which nothing ever occurs
twice. To suggest, then, that it may persist, in an
eternal fixation of unchanging objects, would seem to be
the very acme of insanity.

Nevertheless, the Aristotelian theory here also has no
quarrel with the facts : it only contends for their better

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 217

and more logical interpretation. To infer from the facts
the ' relativity ' of all consciousness and Hobbes' dictum
sentire semper idem et nil sentire ad idem recidunt, appears
to it either a truism or an error, and in no wise decisive.1
It is a truism, if it asserts that sensation in time involves
change, and that all our experience is in time. It is an
error, if it is taken as the starting-point of an argument
which either proposes to conduct us out of consciousness
and to represent it as an unmeaning accident in a scheme
of things which when perfectly equilibrated would tran
scend it, or even to bind us Ixion-like on an unresting
wheel of change.

For the facts are susceptible of a better interpretation.
May we not regard the flow of appearances as a defect,
not as a merit, of consciousness, engendered as an
adaptive response to the vicissitudes of a defective world ?
May not impermanence in consciousness (as elsewhere)
mark the Trovrjpta of a ^ucrt? impotent to function without
ceasing (crfi/e^w? evepyelv) ?

At all events it seems to be the case that (i) we strive
to prolong and retain pleasant states and objects of
consciousness ; (2) the fluttering of attention is protective,
and necessary to survival under conditions which render it
unsafe to become too much absorbed by the object of our
attention (or attentions), lest something to which we have
failed to attend should absorb us in a too literal sense ;
(3) even where practical exigencies do not compel us, we
have to shift the objects of our attention because they are
never found to be wholly satisfactory. May it not be
argued also that the unsatisfactoriness is the cause of the
impermanence, and not vice versa ? But could we once
attain an object of contemplation which was wholly
satisfying, should we not seek to retain it in consciousness
for ever? If he had achieved the Best (TO apiarrov), could
any one be mad enough to wish to change it, for the worse?
if he had passed the gates of heaven, could he lust again
for the impurities of earth ?

Surely it follows, as Plato saw, from the very notion of

1 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii. § 5.

218 HUMANISM xn

the Good that it must be a permanent possession ; it
follows also, as Aristotle saw, that if we are to be conscious
of it at all (and if not, how can it be a good ?), it must be
as an evepyeia aKivrja-ias. I suspect, therefore, that the
objection to evepyeia cucwrjffias is at bottom one to the
whole notion of an attainable Good. But whether the
advocates of this objection are nai'vely optimistic enough
to imagine that an unattainable ideal, recognized as such,
continues to be an ideal a rational being can aim at, or
whether they are pessimistic enough to renounce all ideals
altogether, it is their notion and not that of evepyeia which
involves a fundamental paradox.

But, as before, let us test the rival interpretations
by examining consciousness in the moment immediately
preceding its hypothetical fixation. It would have to
be reached, of course, by a progressive development of
consciousness in fulness and intensity and power of atten
tion, and by the gradual suppression of all interruptions and
discords. There can be no doubt, therefore, that it would
be consciousness of a very high order, i.e. a contemplation,
most pleasant and unimpeded, of whatsoever most delights
the soul. If now we eliminate the last faint source of
trouble and unrest and disturbance, the last distraction
which prevented us from concentrating our attention wholly
upon what most it loves to dwell upon, why should con
sciousness go out rather than go on ? Will it not become
rather absolutely constant and continuous, and remain con
scious sensu eminentiorit

VI

An ' Activity void of Motion ' then is conceivable, if
only we will make an effort to see through the confusions
of our vulgar view. Nay, in the end it would seem that it
alone was conceivable as the ideal of Being.

For of the alternatives none are ultimately thinkable.
The conception of Becoming, as philosophers have been
driven to recognize from Parmenides to Hegel, is infected
with insoluble contradictions, which disappear only if we

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 219

follow Aristotle in conceiving it as essentially imperfect, as
evepyeLa dreXrfc. To do this renders it intelligible, for we
can then regard all the processes we actually observe as
pointing forward to an ideal of a perfectly and equably
self-sustaining activity, to attain which would relieve them
of their contradictions.

The ideal of Rest, on the other hand, is wholly illusory :
there is no rest anywhere attainable for the virtuous any
more than for the wicked. It is non-existent as a fact,
and it is non-existence as a conception. For if anything
could really cease to be active, it would pro tanto cease to
be.1 The only Weltanschauung therefore which could
appropriately take up the ideal of Rest would be one like
Mainlander's, which regards the world's history as the long
protracted agony of the Absolute's suicide.

Compared with these, the advantages of the conception
of 'Rvepyeia 'A.KiVT)<rta<s are manifest.

It enables us to give a scientific interpretation of the
religious conception of Heaven and to differentiate it from
that of Nirvana ( = • bliss conceived as rest '). It involves
a positive conception of Eternity and explains the transition
from ' Time ' to Eternity.

We avoid, moreover, sundry difficulties. We may, e.g.t
dismiss the apprehension that an equilibration of cosmic
energy must be regarded as the final destruction of cosmic
activity. We may thus avoid henceforth Spencer's strange
see-saw in regarding equilibration now as universal death,
now as perfect life, according as physical or biological
analogies come uppermost in his mind.

The chapter on this subject in First Principles is most
instructive. It affords an admirable example of the con
fusion engendered by a lack of the conception of evepyeia
aicivr)<r£a<jt and so it may be useful to trace Spencer's
utterances in detail. It will be seen that he keeps on
contradicting himself as to the character of equilibration
on alternate pages, and speaks with a double voice
throughout.

(a) By the first voice it is conceived as death or

1 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii. § 6.

220 HUMANISM

XII

cessation of activity. Thus § 173: "there finally results
that complete equilibration we call death" § 176: "the
final question of Evolution is ... incidental to the
universal process of equilibration ; and if equilibration
must end in complete rest . . . and if the solar system is
slowly dissipating its forces . . . are we not manifestly
progressing towards omnipresent death ? " He answers
that even though the " proximate end of all the trans
formations we have traced is a state of quiescence" an
" ulterior process may reverse these changes and initiate
a new life" (Hence, too, the see-saw of Evolution and
Dissolution is deduced in ch. xxiii.) Again in § 182 he
asks, " Does Evolution as a whole, like Evolution in detail,
advance towards complete quiescence ? Is that motionless
state called death, which ends Evolution in organic bodies,
typical of the universal death in which Evolution at large
must end?". . . "If, pushing to its extreme the argument
that Evolution must come to a close in complete equili
bration or rest, the reader suggests that, for aught which
appears to the contrary, the Universal Death thus implied
will continue indefinitely, it is legitimate to point out "
that we may " infer a subsequent Universal Life " if we
suppose equilibration to be again upset, or (more properly)
unattainable. In short, equilibration = ' death.'

(b} The above seems unequivocal enough until we
listen to the second voice, which exactly inverts the
valuation of equilibration and non- equilibration, and
implies the equation, ' equilibration = life.' E.g. § 173
(init.\ death is explained as due to a failure of equili
bration. § 1 7 3 (s-fy, the life of a species depends on an
equilibration between the forces that tend to increase and
to destroy it. § 174, an equilibration or correspondence
between idea and fact is the end of mental evolution,
and " equilibration can end only when each relation of
things has generated in us a relation of thought "...
and then " experience will cease to produce any further
mental evolution — there will have been reached a perfect
correspondence between ideas and facts ; and the intel
lectual adaptation of man to his circumstances will be

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 221

complete." So, of moral and emotional adaptation —
" the limit towards which emotional adaptation perpetually
tends ... is a combination of desires that corresponds to
all the different orders of activity which the circumstances
of life call for "... and this "progressive adaptation ceases
only with the establishment of a complete equilibration
between constitution and conditions." Again, § 174
(X/".), " Thus the ultimate state ... is one in which the
kinds and quantities of mental energy generated . . . are
equivalent to, or in equilibrium with, the various orders
... of surrounding forces which antagonize such motions."
§ 175, Equilibrium is held up as the economic ideal from
which the fluctuations of over- and under-production
depart. It is the all-inclusive ne plus ultra of the adapta
tion of " man's nature and the conditions of his existence."
It is also the social ideal, and limits the process towards
heterogeneity — " the ultimate abolition of all limits to the
freedom of each, save those imposed by the like freedom
of all, must result from the complete equilibration between
man's desires and the conduct necessitated by surrounding
conditions." And compare lastly the sublime conclusion of
the chapter (§ 1 76), in which equilibrium, guaranteed by the
Persistence of Force, secures to us the prospect of perfect
happiness by affording " a basis for the inference that there
is a gradual advance towards harmony between man's
mental nature and the conditions of his existence," and
" we are finally bidden to believe that Evolution can end
only in the establishment of the greatest perfection and
most complete happiness " !

The italics, of course, are mine throughout. As for
the contradiction, it is striking, but easily explicable.
The suppressed middle term, which connects the two
conflicting views of the value of perfect equilibration, is
the absence of motion or change. This being a charac
teristic both of ' death ' and of complete adaptation, the
interpretation wavers in the most tantalizing way. But
no one who has grasped the doctrine of Energeia can
doubt that ' equilibration ' must be conceived as Life and
as the perfection of Activity.

222 HUMANISM xii

VII

And now what shall we say of Substance ? Is it not
plain that we have acquired of it a conception which will
help it out of the mire in which it has floundered over
long ? A brief reminder of the history of the conception
may suffice to make this clear, and perhaps impress on us
the tragic slowness with which truth prevails. As its
very name implies, it has been usual to regard ' substance '
as a permanent substratum which persists through change
and constitutes the real ' essence ' or ' being ' of a thing,
that which makes it what it is. It is the thing itself or
' in itself,' the hidden core of its intrinsic nature which is
the real source of its behaviour, however thickly it may
seem to be overlaid with variable states, the ' accidents '
which the exigencies of its interaction with other things
may impose upon it. And there can be no doubt that
the behaviour of things renders this thought extremely
plausible. For some features in the behaviour of things
are so much more persistent and characteristic than others
that we cannot but esteem them differently. The dis
tinction, therefore, of the perdurable ' substance ' and the
fleeting ' accidents ' is natural, and, in the first instance,
of great practical value. But as formulated in the con
ception of Substance, the distinction overshoots the mark.
It fails to express the very difference it was intended to
bring out, and when it is thought out, it lapses into
impotent absurdity.

For the distinction was not really meant to be one
between what was accessible and inaccessible to observa
tion, nor is a hard and fast line to be drawn between
* essential ' and ' accidental ' attributes. So soon as we
inquire, therefore, what is the nature of Substance as it
really is in itself and apart from its accidents, the futility
of our conception is revealed. It appears that, strictly
speaking, all we know about a thing is its ' accidents/ and
that we cannot comprehend how even its most essential
properties ' inhere in ' its substance. The substance thus

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 223

becomes either a needless nullity or an unknowable, an
inscrutable substratum which is conceived to underlie
everything, but explains nothing, just because it is un
knowable and can neither be experienced nor examined.
In this form, therefore, the conception of Substance has
no value for any purpose whatsoever, either philosophic
or scientific.

But philosophers have been slow to find this out,
though it is a melancholy satisfaction that, even so, they
have anticipated the scientists. Berkeley, arguing from
the current notion of Substance, had the genius to per
ceive that ' material substance ' was a philosophic super
fluity. Hume promptly extended this argument to the
destruction of ' spiritual substance.' He pointed out that
apart from its states there was no self or soul. So he
resolved the self into the sequence of its states of con
sciousness.1

Both Berkeley and Hume were fully justified in their
criticism. How right they were the sciences proceeded
to discover on their own account. In the last thirty years
it has become quite a commonplace in psychology to
proclaim ' soul-substance ' useless, and to conceive the
mind as consisting of a ' stream of consciousness.' And
at the present moment physicists seem to be finally
making up their minds that the ' matter ' which had
lingered on in physics as the substrate of physical pheno
mena is mere ' scaffolding,' and that all scientific facts
can really be more simply and conveniently conceived as
transformations of ' energy.' Now it would not yet be
true to say that the conception of ' Energy ' in modern
science coincides with the ancient conception of Energeia.'
But they agree in rejecting the old notion of ' substance '
as a substratum. It is clear, moreover, that they are
akin in spirit, and that in the hands of a master like
Prof. Ostwald 2 the conception of ' energy ' is rapidly

1 J. S. Mill similarly sees that Substance is only postulated as a support for
phenomena, and that if we think away the support and suppose the phenomena
to remain without any agency but an internal law, every consequence, for the sake
of which Substance was assumed, will follow without Substance. — Exam, of
Hamilton, p. 252.

2 See his admirable treatise on Naturphilosophie.

224 HUMANISM xn

approximating to that of ' Energeia.' Indeed the chief
difference at present is that whereas ' Energeia ' avowedly
and consciously stands for a theory of substance, ' Energy '
still seems to crave for a backbone of substantiality.
Thus the scientific auguries seem favourable to a reform
of the conception, while an inveterate error may well be
judged to be decrepit when its patrons discover it to be
of no avail.

Alike in philosophic and in scientific circles then, it
seems to be pretty generally agreed that the old view of
Substance is worthless. It lingers on chiefly because
reconstruction has not kept pace with criticism. And
yet Lotze's criticism of Substantiality brings him (un
consciously it would seem) very close to the Aristotelian
conception. After pointing out the uselessness of the
substratum view he declares l that " it is not in virtue of
a substance contained in them that things are, they are
when they are able to produce the appearance of their
being such a substance." It is thus out of the behaviour
of a thing that we construct its ' essence,' and this should
properly be regarded, not as an intrinsic power but rather
an immanent and individual law which maintains its
identity and guides its varying reactions in its dealings
with the other members of the cosmos. Lotze's con
struction is excellent so far as it goes, but still entangled
in polemic against the catchwords which it is striving to
supersede. And so he hardly makes plain what is this
' individual law,' and how the illusion of an underlying
substance is produced. It is better, therefore, to start at
once from Aristotle on the straight road to truth, than
to attain it after devious wanderings among the paths of
error.

VIII

The Aristotelian conception of Energeia is our best
starting - point because it affords no foothold for an
unknowable substratum. Indeed of such a view of

1 Metaphysics, § 37.

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 225

substance it is the final refutation. For it a substratum
could only be the potentiality of an actuality which was
the true substance, and so far from explaining the latter
would need it for its own explanation. As evepyeia is
prior to Svvapis, so is the behaviour of a thing to the
' substance ' conceived to render that behaviour possible.1
The truth therefore is that the activity is the substance : a
thing is only in so far as active. So it is the activity
which makes both the ' essence ' and the ' accidents,' both
of which are as it were ' precipitated ' from the same
process of active functioning. The ' essence ' is merely such
aspects of the whole behaviour as are selected from among
the rest by reason either of their relative permanence or
of their importance for our purposes.2 And so we may
define the ' substratum ' which we have feigned as the
hidden source of substantiality as being nothing but
an attempt to express the thought of a permanent
possibility of activity. But true reality does not reside
among the tangled roots of things. We have no need
to dig down vainly to a ' subject,' which ' is ' not thought
or will or feeling, but only ' has ' them, in derision, in
order to discover our true self. To find true ' Being '
we must look upwards to the Ideal, not downwards to the
unknowable. Our true self is not what underlies thought,
will and feeling, but what combines them in a perfect
harmony.3 Reality is not what transcends experience
but what perfects it.

Let us once conceive, therefore, a ' Being ' which has

1 This principle really involves the rejection of several popular superstitions in
philosophy. For instance, the so-called ' a priori element in knowledge ' stands
in the relation of duvapis to actual knowledge, and, so far from explaining it,
needs to have its assumption justified by its convenience for the purposes of actual
knowing. Similarly, the ultimate reason why we may not argue monistically from
the actual plurality of things to the higher reality of an all-including world-ground
is that the plurality is actual (tvepydq.), while the unity is only implicit (5vvd.fj.ei),
and rests on our experience of the former. It is, therefore, of secondary reality
and value. Cp. p. 67.

2 These two criteria are, of course, convergent. For a permanent aspect is
naturally one which it is important for us to take into account, while an
important aspect is naturally one which we try to render permanent. J. S. Mill
(Examination of Hamilton, p. 239) recognizes the first only when he says that
the sensations answering to the Secondary Qualities are only occasional, those
answering to the Primary, constant.

3 Cp. Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 140.

Q

226 HUMANISM

XII

realized all its potentialities, and our difficulties disappear.
For we shall then have transcended the conditions which
engender the illusion of an inscrutable background of
* substance.' At present our existence seems immersed
in a sea of possibilities which are the objects of our
unceasing hopes and fears : nothing is ever quite all that
it is capable of being ; nothing can ever wholly realize
itself in any single moment. Hence the potential every
where extends beyond the actual, and the shadow of an
incalculable and inexplicable Thing-in-itself is cast over
the whole of experience and obstructs the portal that
should lead from knowledge to reality. At present, then,
we must admit that nothing is ever all it might be. If,
however, we imagined any being overcoming this defect
and attaining to a complete and harmonious self-expression
in its activities, how could it any longer even suggest a
shadowy region of possibilities bound up with its actual
self and inhering behind the scenes in a substratum which
is the substance both of the actual and of the potential ?
In the coincidence of the actual and the potential which
the realization of the latter would involve, there would
vanish our antitheses of ' essence ' and ' accident,' of
' ideal ' and ' real,' of ' appearance ' and ' reality.' For the
< appearance ' would have become the ' reality/ and the
real would have fully appeared.

Such is the ideal of ' Being ' Aristotle has attributed
to the divine perfection, such the full import of his
fvepyeia aKivr)a-ia<;. Nor is there any reason for confining
this perfection to the Deity : we can quite well conceive
a cosmos composed of beings whose activities had thus
transcended change. Indeed, I cannot see how in the
end perfection is conceivable in any cheaper way : it is
only in a universe made up of a finite number of con
stituents, each of which is individually perfect, that
perfection can be predicated of the whole, and that the
perfection of any part can be secured against the irruption
of intrusive discords. Whether of course there is any
possibility of actually realizing any such ideal is quite
another question, and no one could be more keenly

xii ACTIVITY AND SUBSTANCE 227

conscious than myself of the bitter contrast between such
dreams of metaphysics and the stern facts of our daily
life. But once upon a time our fairest facts, our most
uncontroverted truths, were but the visions of a dream,
divined by a prescience that slowly hardened into
science ; 1 and so perchance even dreams like these may
come true, or rather may be made to come true, if we try.
It is, moreover, certain that if we dismiss such thoughts as
idle dreams, dreams they will remain, and no end will ever
come to the conflict and the friction that wear out our
world ; whereas, if we consent to look for possibilities of
harmony, our willingness may be the first condition of
success. And even for the proximate purposes of
ordinary life, there is perhaps some practical value in the
contemplation of a metaphysical ideal which can stimulate
us to be active, and to develop all our powers to the
utmost, while at the same time warning us that such
self-realization must assume the form, not of a hideous,
barbarous, and neurotic restlessness, nor of an infinite (and
therefore futile) struggle, but of an activity which,
transcending change and time, preserves itself in an
harmonious equipoise.

1 See Axioms as Postulates, passim.

XIII
HUMISM AND HUMANISM

ARGUMENT

I. Humanism resembles Humism in being an anti - apriorist, pragmatist
empiricism ; but II. differs in being neither scepticism nor intellectualism.
Nor does it surrender to Hume's criticism of Causation and Activity.
III. Cleverness of Hume's criticism of the Volitional theory of Causa
tion. IV. Its unsoundness and inconclusiveness. V. Inability of
Rationalism to refute Hume : Voluntarism as the alternative.

THE human mind, by nature, abhors novelties far more
than a vacuum, and when they are forced upon it by the
course of its experience, its natural instinct is to close its
eyes to their existence or to explain them away. Now
this is as easy as it is natural. For nothing is absolutely
new. Everything, therefore, can always be conceived as
an old thing in a new guise, and, with a little stretching
of the one and carving of the other, be classified under
the existing rubrics. In this way we are enabled to
blind ourselves to the vicissitudes of science and to retain
our comfortable belief in the uniformity of nature.

But though it is practically certain that, so soon as
it is seriously attempted, accommodation will always be
found (or made) for novelties within the fabric of any
science, their classification at first is somewhat uncertain
and goes frequently astray. It behoves, therefore, those
who are interested in them to see to it that they are
classified correctly.

Hence it will be useful and enlightening to discuss the
attempt to classify the new Humanism as an extended

1 Republished with a few additions from the Proceedings of the Aristotelian
Society, 1907.

228

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 229

form of Humism. As in all such cases, there is some
logical foundation, as well as much psychological excuse,
for the attempt to apperceive the new in terms of the old.
It contains some truth, and is partly right. But it is also
largely wrong.

To consider this classification in its former aspect
first ; it is obvious that Humism and Humanism are both
empiricisms of a pronounced type, and that this constitutes
an important resemblance between them. Again, there
seems at any rate to be a certain likeness in their attitude
towards the metaphysics of the period. The fascinating
style and the more than Socratic irony of Hume do indeed
render it difficult to determine the exact motives of his
philosophizing. But we shall not, probably, go far wrong,
if we suppose that his opposition to dogmatism, alike
whether it took the form of religious bigotry or of
philosophic narrow-mindedness, gave zest to his interest
in philosophy. Hume seems to take an impish delight in
upsetting religious and philosophic orthodoxies, and his
own doctrines seem rather to be selected with this purpose
than held with any absolute assurance of their intrinsic
worth. Hume is quite willing to admit their defects :
after they have served their purpose and done their
emancipating work, he is quite ready to disavow his
instruments and to affect an attitude of gentlemanly
unconcern about the abstruse inanities of theologians and
metaphysicians. This temper, indeed, would appear to be
the essence of his ' scepticism.' Psychologically regarded,
it does not lie in his doctrine, but in his attitude towards
theoretic difficulties.

Now, superficially regarded, the Humanist attitude
may seem quite similar. It is somewhat lacking in
that reverence for academic dogmas, technicalities and
shibboleths, which it is often supposed to be desirable
and possible to inculcate into the young. It is certainly
critical of very deep-rooted assumptions which have
hitherto passed current without challenge. It is singu
larly modest in the claims it makes for its own principles.
It makes no attempt to represent them as ' absolute '

230 HUMANISM xin

truths, but puts them forward tentatively as practically
efficient working principles, which are worthy of being
tried but susceptible, nevertheless, of unceasing improve
ment. And to a dogmatic metaphysician this hardly
seems to be claiming truth for them at all. He finds
it easy, therefore, and natural to treat Humanism as a
mode of scepticism, and as involving a denial of truth
altogether. Then again the humaneness and urbanity of
allowing every one a vote in the making of truth, of
allowing every mode of experience and of aspiration to
count for what it may turn out to be worth, seem
monstrous laxity, which must be fatal to the discipline
of the intellectual world, and can proceed from nothing
but infamous indifference to the sanctity of truth.
Thus Humanism, to dogmatically biassed eyes, not only
seems to introduce universal suffrage into the philosophic
world, but to enable Plato's ' democratic man ' to usurp
the throne of the Philosopher-King.

So, however strenuously Humanists may disclaim evil
designs, there is one belief which they can hardly hope to
eradicate all at once, viz. the hoary tradition that universal
experience shows that relativism and ' subjectivism ' must
end in scepticism and anarchism.

Such are, I believe, the feelings and reasonings of
those who, without being hopelessly committed to some
self-contradictory and untenable form of intellectualism,
look upon the new philosophy with suspicion, and conceive
it as a revival of Humism. And yet, now that we have
indulged their misgivings to this extent, we may fairly
call upon them to notice in their turn the important and
deep-seated differences, both in attitude and in doctrine,
which exist between the theories they are seeking to
classify together, (i) For one thing, the Humanists are
not distinguished amateurs, concerning themselves with
philosophy only to clear out of the way an obstacle to

xui HUMISM AND HUMANISM 231

worldly wisdom, but hard-working professionals, them
selves leading the academic life, and exposed to all the
rigours of the academic atmosphere. (2) They do not
themselves draw the sceptical conclusions attributed to
them, but protest that their doctrines mean a rescue
and a reform and an advance of philosophy. (3) Such
a reform, they declare, is rendered necessary by the
deplorable state to which metaphysics has been reduced
by the collapse of idealism into scepticism, while an
advance is no less urgently required if philosophy is to
keep pace with the developments of the sciences, particu
larly of psychology and biology. As regards doctrine,
again, the differences are at least as well marked as the
resemblances. For though both Humanism and Humism
may be classified as empiricisms, there is evidently ample
room for divergence within empiricism.

It is not too much to say that the philosophic
character of an empiricism depends entirely on how it con
ceives ' experience.' Now Humanism manifestly conceives
'experience' very differently from Humism. (i) It does
not accept Hume's psychology with its associationism and
its sensationalism. Its voluntaristic is essentially different
from his sensationalistic empiricism, and by comparison
with the latter may even be called a sort of apriorism.
For a postulate, however much it may have been suggested
by experience, is still an anticipation of nature, which we
bring to the facts. It has to be assumed before it can be
' proved.' Even though it was meant for application to
experience, it was assumed because it was desired, even
though it serves as a guide in experimentation and a
major premiss in argumentation, it is clearly prior to the
experience we try to organize thereby. It becomes, there
fore, from one point of view, a merely verbal question
how the Humanist voluntarism should be classified, and
if the form of intellectualism against which it had to
contend had been sensationalistic instead of rationalistic,
it would doubtless have laid more stress on the very real
affinities of the postulate with the a priori.

In fact its epistemological achievement may be said to

232 HUMANISM

XIII

have destroyed the old antithesis between ' empiricism '
and ' apriorism ' by rendering both terms ambiguous, and
propounding a middle way which forms a third alternative
to the epistemological dilemma. Of the dogma ' all know
ledge comes from experience ' it inquires, ' aye, but from
a passive experience or an active ? ' Of the dogma ' all
knowledge implies an a priori] it inquires ' but how a
priori^ Is it prior as a mere fact of our (present) mental
constitution, and so powerless to guarantee its own future
continuance, or as an intelligent act of faith ? ' Clearly,
then, a voluntarist a priori, adopted upon the bare sug
gestion of experience for its methodological value, and
established by its continued working, does not fit into the
old classification at all.

(2) Humanism does not accept Hume's criticism of
causation and his denial of activity, as all intellectualisms
are (more or less unwillingly) compelled to do. (3) It
is not naturalistic ; because it regards the mechanical
conception of nature as itself a construction for human
purposes, which is valuable and valid because, and in so
far as, it subserves these purposes. (4) It is not deter
ministic, as rationalisms are logically bound to be, but
libertarian.

Thus it agrees with Hume only (i) in the belief that
the course of events has something to teach us, and brings
real enlightenment, because it cannot be predicted with
absolute certainty, i.e. in a common empiricism ; it agrees

(2) that no apriorism can ever give the guarantee it aims
at, and assure us of the future, because any ' necessity of
thought ' may change if human nature changes ; it agrees

(3) in a common pragmatism, i.e. in their agreement that
practical efficiency of a conception is relevant to its truth,
and may be pleaded in answer to apparent theoretical
defects. But even here the differences are very marked.
Hume's pragmatism hardly seems to be sincere ; it is
always suspiciously suggestive of a blind to disguise his
scepticism. Again, Hume's appeal to the pragmatic
principle is quite arbitrary and capricious : he uses it to
save the face of common sense and (perhaps) of science,

xni HUMISM AND HUMANISM 233

but not to rehabilitate philosophy or religion. Lastly, he
neither generalizes the principle nor claims for it any
theoretic validity : i.e. for Hume, as for the rationalist,
and as for Kant, there is still an implicit dualism between
theory and practice, and a sort of ' independence ' of the
former, even though this redounds only to its own
confusion.

II

On the whole, therefore, it can hardly be contended
that the classification of Humanism as Humism is either
a very exact or a very fruitful way of assimilating the
new to the old. Nay, we may go farther and maintain
that upon some of the most important points of philosophi
cal debate there is a profound antithesis between Humism
and Humanism, and a very marked congruity between
the former and Rationalism. To illustrate by three
typical cases: (i) Rationalism and Humism are both
intellectualism ; Humanism is not ; (2) both deny the
conception of Activity, which Humanism emphasizes and
exploits ; (3) Rationalism has in consequence to accept
Hume's criticism of Causation, whereas Humanism is
enabled to reject it.

The first of these points is really so obvious that a
simple statement would suffice for it, if it did not lead to
far-reaching consequences which have not yet been
observed. As it is, it may be well to point out that, from
a voluntarist standpoint, the differences in intellectualisms
are quite secondary. Rationalism and Sensationalism
can always strike up an alliance against Voluntarism
which is cemented by their common appeal to a dark,
dumb, irrational, and inexplicable background of ' feeling.'1
In the shadow of vague terms, whose inveterate ambiguity
extends back to the days of Plato,2 all voluntary action

1 Mr. Sturt (Idola Theatri, ch. v. and ix. ) has done good service by point
ing out how essentially this conduces to the " passivism " of a rationalistic
intellectualism like Mr. F. H. Bradley's.

2 Who in the Theaetetus (1568) includes pleasure, pain, and, desire in the list
of ai

234 HUMANISM xm

may be reduced to ' feeling,' which can be equated with
' sensation,' which, again, can be taken as purely cognitive,
whenever it is convenient, until every trace of man's free
and self-directive activity is wiped out from the philosophic
picture. Hence, both intellectualisms can agree on the
essential points that (i) intellection is the only philo
sophically valuable human function ; that (2) nothing but
intellection is necessary to cognition ; that (3) the purer
the intellection, the less alloyed with whatever other
elements are reluctantly admitted into our nature, the
truer and more trustworthy its results ; that (4) cognition
means rendering the mind passively receptive of an already
determined, rigid and independent object, variously
denominated ' reality ' or ' truth ' ; that (5) in consequence
of all these considerations, anything in the nature of
human activity or initiative can only (if it exists) exercise
a malign and disturbing influence on our cognitive pro
cedure, and must therefore be abstracted from in scientific
theory, and repressed in practice.

Humanism, on the contrary, maintains (i) that intellec
tion is not the only valuable function in human life, nor
the source of its value ; (2) that not merely does ' intellec
tion ' not suffice to explain cognition, but that it does not
even explain itself, for the reason that real knowing is
never a ' purely intellectual ' process, but essentially pre
supposes such non-intellectual aspects as desire, interest,
and purpose, which enter into and control all cognitions ;
that (3) it is frequently not true to say that the ' purer '
the intellection, the more valuable the results ; that (4) in
consequence cognition, whether perceptual or conceptual,
is never a merely passive recognition of an already made
object, but always an interaction with a reality which is
still capable of being moulded to some extent by our
action ; (5) that human activity, therefore, is nothing
science need be ashamed of or metaphysics frown upon,
but is rather the fountain-head of philosophic understand
ing, which can neither be ignored nor repressed. It will
subsequently appear that this difference of attitude
towards human activity, which is deducible from the

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 235

general standpoint of intellectualism, foreshadows the
welcome it has accorded to Hume's attack upon the con
ception of activity.

Ill

Hume's criticism of the conception of power or activity
is quite as clever, and quite as paradoxical as his criticism
of the conception of cause. It is even more essential to
his naturalism and more radically destructive in its
philosophic effects. Yet, strange to say, it has provoked
no remonstrance. The champions of the a priori make
no fuss about it, the bodyguard of the Pure Reason raise
no hue and cry : it is silently and tamely acquiesced in.
It is never denounced in lectures as one of the twin pillars
of Hume's all-corrupting scepticism ; its consequences are
never dwelt on ; it is never criticized ! This extraordinary
state of things seems to be due simply to the domination
of intellectualism, which has neither the interest nor the
ability to contest the assumptions lurking in Hume's
ingenious argument.

The argument itself does not occur in the body of the
Treatise of Human Nature}- In writing the Treatise,
Hume appears to have been chiefly concerned to puzzle
the philosophers ; so he deals chiefly with the opinions
of the learned. Now as these were then, much as now,
still under the spell of the intellectualist tradition traceable
to Plato, Hume took no notice of the common-sense
explanation of the source of the notion of power or agency.
He conceives himself to be contending throughout against
a metaphysical a priori knowledge of causation by means
of which effects could be predicted with certainty prior to
all experience. His problem is to find a connexion such
that " from a simple view of the one " we can " pronounce
that it must be followed by the other." 2 It is to such

1 It is astounding, but characteristic, that, in view of this, the preface to
T. H. Green's edition of Hume should contain the assertion that the ' ' only essential
difference" between the Treatise and the Enquiry is " in the way of omissions"
made in the latter.

2 Treatise, ed. Selby-Bigge, p. 161.

236 HUMANISM xm

philosophic accounts of causation that he addresses his
triumphant challenges, when he " desires to have pointed
out to him " the impression from which the idea of
necessary connexion could possibly be derived.

But after publishing the first volume of the Treatise,
Hume was bound to come across remonstrances based on
a primitively human view of causation which may fairly be
called the original philosophy of mankind. This is the
volitional theory of causation, which models itself on the
voluntary control of the bodily organs and accepts the
immediately experienced sequence of volition and motion
as all we need know of the ' inner nature ' of causation.
Upon this view the ' impression ' which gives rise to the
idea of causal efficacy would be simply the every-day
experience of voluntary motion, and this simple answer to
Hume's theory would be easily and obviously fatal to his
whole position.

Hume, therefore, was bound, if possible, to invalidate
this theory, and nothing testifies more strikingly to his
supreme cleverness than the way in which he meets this
difficulty. He promptly inserted in the Appendix to the
Treatise a short passage, in which he points out, very
lucidly and consistently, that there is no reason why the
sequence of volition and motion should be treated (by
him) differently from any other, or regarded as more
intelligible.1 But how seriously he took this volitional
theory is attested by the elaborate refutation bestowed on
it in the Enquiry?

Its gist may be summed up as follows: (i) Hume
starts, as in the Appendix, from his own analysis of
causation as an established truth, and points out that
the supposed immediate experience of causal agency is
nothing more than a regular sequence, which must
accordingly engender the ' custom ' or expectation which
is the causal nexus.

(2) He clearly states his presupposition that real

1 Green and Grose barely mention the fact in their edition, but make no
comment.

2 §§ 51-53 and note to § 6o-

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 237

knowledge of causal efficacy must be prior to experience :
" were the power or energy of any cause discoverable by
the mind, we could foresee the effect even without ex
perience." *

(3) He argues specifically that the feeling of power
which accompanies voluntary motion is illusory, because
(a) the union of soul and body and the operation of the
one on the other is avowedly a mystery ; because ($)
voluntary control varies greatly with the various organs.
Why, on this theory, " has the will an influence over the
tongue and fingers and not over the heart or liver ? "
Again, a man suddenly paralysed is as conscious as ever
of a power to command his limbs, though the usual
motions no longer ensue. As, however, consciousness
never deceives (a comically scholastic maxim !) it never
really testifies to any real power. " We learn the in
fluence of our will from experience alone." (c) Volitions
are not the immediate antecedents of voluntary motions.
There are a number of intermediary processes in the
brain and the nerves and the muscles, of which we
are not conscious. Ergo, the original power felt, the
' sentiment ' or ' impression ' or ' sensation ' of m'sus, or
endeavour, is no proof of a power to move the limbs.

Hume proceeds to argue similarly that neither the
felt effort in overcoming the resistance of bodies, nor the
voluntary control of our conscious states, can have given
rise to the idea of power ; but the latter of these need
not be considered by us, as primitive reasoners cannot
certainly be credited with introspectiveness enough to
have observed it.

IV

The extreme brilliance of this argument is undeniable,
but this hardly explains the acceptance it has won from
philosophers of all schools, as different as Reid, Hamilton,

1 Ed. Selby-Bigge, p. 63; cp. also p. 78, note: "These sensations" (of
effort) "which are merely animal, and from which we can a priori draw no
inference, we are apt to transfer to inanimate objects."

238 HUMANISM

XIII

Mill, and Kant1 It is difficult not to believe that its
success was largely due also to their intellectualist pre
judices and their unawareness of its real scope. For in
itself Hume's argument, though brilliant, is by no means
invulnerable. Indeed, with a little care, we may detect
in its proof several flaws and gaps.

Hume's analysis of the way ' causes ' are imputed by
us does not go nearly deep enough.

1 I ) He had no right whatever to start with ' events '
and their ' sequences,' and to assume that the problem
was how to connect them. Human activity penetrates
more deeply into the making of objects of knowledge
than either Hume or Kant suspected. It not only
turns ' sequences ' into ' consequences,' but singles out
' sequences ' and ' events ' by selection of the relevant, in
a way that is always risky, and must always seem
' arbitrary ' to an intellectualism which is looking for a
fool-proof method of absolute cogency. Hume's em
piricism takes over uncriticized the pragmatic realities of
common sense, which has analysed experience into a
coming and going of things and persons in space and
time, and tries to distinguish them still further into a
series of ' impressions ' of which each is to be a ' distinct
existence.' But to a more radical empiricism ' experience '
presents itself as a continuous flow, out of which ' events/
' effects ' and ' sequences ' have to be singled out by
strenuous efforts, and the causal principle is an instru
ment of analysis. The determinate ' sequences,' therefore,
for which ' causal connexions ' have to be discovered are
themselves creations of human attention and interest, and
do not exist as such, apart from our volitional activity.
Hence they cannot validly produce a basis for a denial
of that activity.2

(2) It seems to be profoundly vitiated by a confusion
between the historical origin and the logical validity of

1 Cp. J. S. Mill, Logic, III. 5, § n. Mill, like Hume, assumes that the
volitional theory cannot be true, if it is not certain ' previous to trial. '

2 Cp. Formal Logic, ch. xx. § 3. It is clear that in correcting this funda
mental error of Hume's we dispose also of all the philosophies which have
assumed with him that the task of philosophy is to find principles of synthesis.
Kant's whole problem, e.g. disappears altogether.

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 239

the volitional theory of causation. Hume argues, very
plausibly, that the theory is not valid, and infers that it
could not have served as the prototype of our causal
notions. But this is clearly an ignoratio elencki. Obviously
it is no answer to an account of the origination of a belief
to show that the belief arrived at is wrong. Still less is it
this to show that a further belief derived from this erroneous
belief is also wrong. For our truest and most valuable
beliefs have frequently originated in what are now despised
as childish errors. The confusion grows worse when we
observe that Hume professedly was not inquiring into the
validity but into the origin of the belief in causal efficacy.
His explanation thereof rested on the psychological im
possibility of suggesting any other source for it but uni
formity plus expectation ; not on the logical defects of
the proposed alternatives. Hence he involves himself in
verbal contradictions which are almost comical. On the
same page he declares x both that " every idea is copied
from some preceding impression or sentiment, . . . there
is nothing that produces any impression, nor consequently
can suggest any idea of power " and also that we have a
" sentiment of a nisus or endeavour " and "feel a customary
connexion between ideas " and transfer these " feelings "

o

(or " sensations ") to objects.

Whether, therefore, the volitional theory be right or
not, Hume's case, as presented by himself, is fatally
damaged by the mere suggestion that the immediate
experience of voluntary motion was the source whence
men first derived their notion of causal efficacy. That
historically this was the origin of the belief is nowadays
beyond doubt, nor does Hume really deny it. Men and
the higher animals all begin their intellectual careers as
animists, and animism means that all motion is interpreted
on the analogy of voluntary agency, which is a familiar
experience to us all long before it is analysed, reflected
on or explained away. If, however, Hume had explicitly
admitted this as the historical origin of the idea of
causation, he would have found himself compelled to face

1 Ed. Selby-Bigge, p. 78.

240 HUMANISM

XIII

the voluntaristic and humanistic interpretation of experi
ence as a whole, and would have found a way to his
own associationism blocked or lengthened.

(3) The argument that the volition-motion sequence
is like any other, and explicable in the same way, is.
valid enough if Hume's assumption is granted. But if
it is not, it is simply a petitio. And voluntarists are in
no wise bound to grant it.1 They may reasonably reply :
— ' You must not calmly beg the question of the nature
of sequences in a sense favourable to yourself. The real
question is which sequences are to be chosen as clues to
the interpretation of the rest. As to this we and you
differ. We start ab intra from the sequences which we
most directly experience, and, treating them as typical,
logically arrive at the conceptions of causal efficacy and
necessary connexion. We admit, of course, that our
method is sheer " anthropomorphism." But then we are
Humanists, and know it. You on the other hand only
cripple yourself by trying to ignore the human character
of your intelligence, and refusing to acknowledge the
validity of your immediate experience. You insist on
starting ab extra from the sequences which you observe
in the outer world. You assume, that is, that you can
know no more about yourself than about any one else.
And lo, you have no difficulty in showing that you can
know as little about yourself as about any one else !
But what have you gained ? You have only rendered all
the happenings in the world opaque to your intelligence.
And what have you proved ? Only that the facts are
obligingly ambiguous enough to submit to either inter
pretation. This we do not dream of denying, and we
think your interpretation very clever. But it is quite
arbitrary, wrongheaded and superfluous. Moreover, it is
vain, because it has not refuted ours, on the advantages
of which we forbear to enlarge.'

(4) The assumption that knowing a cause supplies
also a priori knowledge of the effect may have been
made by rationalists who (more or less inconsistently)

1 Cp. Studies in Humanism, p. 230.

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 241

held also the volitional view of causation. If so, Hume's
reply that the limits of our voluntary control of bodies
have to be ascertained from experience is so far valid.
But it clearly is not self-evident that if volition is the
true type of causation this must be known to us before
experience. And so Hume's argument does not touch
voluntarists who are also empiricists. For these will
naturally disclaim any a priori knowledge of causes and
regard it as the most natural interpretation of experience
to suppose that the consciousness of power is not only
the source of the notion, but also good evidence in its
favour until there is reason to reject it. They will simply
say — ' what causes are, and wherein and to what extent
we are causes, and what effects we can produce, all this
we learn only from experience. And why on earth
should we not? Why should we not all, from the baby
to the paralytic, have to find out the limitations of our
powers from experience ? Surely you would not have us
assume that we must be born with a complete a priori
idea of power and a similar knowledge of all that we are
and can ? Such an assumption would be enough to make
nonsense, not only of our theory, but of any theory on
any subject whatsoever ! '

(5) The most solid part of Hume's argument, how
ever, is that which disputes the value of the psychological
consciousness of agency on physiological grounds, and
thus leads on to the epiphenomenal view of mind and the
reduction of conscious beings to automata. Indeed it is
difficult to see what reply was open to voluntarists at the
time. At present, however, thanks to the development of
evolutionary and genetic views of life, adequate replies are
easily forthcoming.

For example, we may say that the general principle
underlying the gradations and variations of voluntary
control of different parts of the body is the welfare and
efficiency of the organism as a whole. Also that it is in
general beneficial to concentrate consciousness (which
is connected with what are physiologically the most
expensive functions of the higher brain centres) upon

R

242 HUMANISM xm

those functions which have to be performed in a variable
manner, and consequently need the aid of reflection.
Functions, on the other hand, which are regular and can
be performed in the same way, can be allowed to become
automatic, and even unconscious, at least under normal
circumstances. It will then appear that these biological
principles amply explain " why the will has influence
over the tongue and fingers, and not over the heart
and liver." l The functions of the one must be
conscious, those of the other are better carried on by
mechanisms.

The same principles suffice to deal also with the lapsed
intermediaries between the volition and the motion, which
now escape our consciousness. Historically all these
intermediate processes may be regarded as mechanisms
which have been developed for the better performance of
the motions or the better husbanding or directing of the
consciousness. They have, therefore, no interest for
themselves, and there is no reason why their normal
functioning should be conscious.2 Primitive organisms,
however, manage to perform all the vital functions, for
which we now have specialized organs, without such
mechanisms. We must suppose, therefore, that in their
case there are no intermediaries involved in voluntary
motion, and that so the testimony of consciousness was
once literally accurate. It is substantially accurate also in
the higher organisms. For if it is generally true that
function moulds structure, and if all structures are acquired,
then the organism is made by the mode of life it has
chosen, and as a whole, with all its mechanisms, it is best
regarded as an embodied will.

As for the failures of voluntary control which are due
to morbid degenerations in the organs, how can they
prove voluntary control to be unreal ? Surely the

1 The existence of individual variations in the extent of this voluntary control
is a strong confirmation of this explanation. There are well-attested cases on
record where even the beating of the heart could be arrested at will, and it is well
known that some people can wag their ears, while others have this power only
over their tongue.

2 In most of these cases, however, the withdrawal of consciousness is not
absolute. For disturbances of normal functioning are usually felt as pains.

\
xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 243

breakdown of a machine does not prove that it was not
constructed by intelligence ? It proves only that the
intelligence was not unlimited.

On the whole, therefore, Hume cannot be said to have
refuted the volitional theory of causation. It yields an
answer to Hume which is much simpler, directer, completer,
more congruous with common sense and better supported
by historical and anthropological evidence than any other.
Why, then, has no rationalist even attempted to answer
Hume along these lines ? Why do they all continue to
torment themselves, and to excruciate their readers,
by devising devious, obscure, ambiguous, far-fetched,
complicated theories to vindicate so simple and successful
a human practice as that of postulating causes ex analogia
kominis, the more so that the ' answers ' they achieve
always fail to answer the essential point,1 or at best
wander away into metaphysical principles so remote from
our experience that they cannot even be applied to it,
and so answer neither Hume's nor any other question,
and in no wise vindicate our actual human practice ?
One can hardly believe that the reason was wholly an
instinctive hatred of Humanism, a reluctance to recognize
man as a measure of things, and human activity as a real
force and a real clue to the nature of the world.

The reason in part cannot but have been a failure to
realize the full significance of Hume's results. For this
is far more than the refutation of an ' uncritical ' theory of
causation, far more than the substitution for it of Hume's
own theory, far more even than the establishment of a
naturalistic and mechanical treatment of the human mind.
That a thorough-going Naturalism follows logically and at
once from Hume's proof that the conception of human
agency rests upon an illusion, is indeed a matter of course.

1 In Kant's case I take this to be the question why in the end the data given
to the mind should be, and ever continue to be, such that the mind can construct
a cosmic order out of them.

244 HUMANISM

XIII

But for this very reason too much importance should not
be attached to it. It follows indeed that it is a sad waste
of energy for psychologists and epistemologists, who have
in principle assented to Hume's assumptions, subsequently
to contend for the recognition of mental activity in any
shape or form. For even though mental activity were (as
I believe it to be) the most real and essential and all-
pervasive and ineradicable fact in our nature, and implicit
even in the very theories which seek to set it aside, it
would yet be vain to try to extort a recognition of
its existence from the Humian assumptions, or to
describe it in naturalistic terms. How can any one, e.g.
confute a polemic which begs the point at issue with the
superb audacity of Hume's argument in the Appendix to
the Treatise ? l First he professes a desire to find a
' perception ' on which the causal connexion could be
based; then he assumes (i) that "if perceptions are
distinct existences, they form a whole only by being
connected together " ; (2) that " no connexions among
distinct existences are ever discoverable by human under
standing." Whence it would clearly follow that, even if
we had a ' perception ' of causal connexion, it could not,
ex hypothesi^ serve as a principle of connexion, by the very
fact of its being a ' perception,' and so doomed to remain
a distinct and disconnected existence ! 2

Thus the very attempt to prove the existence of
activity to those who insist on taking up a point of view
from which it cannot be seen, is a mistake. The true
retort to their attitude is to show that it is arbitrary, and
does not go deep enough, and that better alternatives
exist. Mr. Bradley, however, is quite right from his own
point of view, as an intellectualist, as a logician, and as a
pupil of Hume, to wage war upon the concept of Activity :
he is wrong only in imagining that a conception which
has been expunged from psychology and expelled from

1 P. 635, ed. Selby-Bigge.

2 It is not so clear why " the connexion or determination of the thought to pass
from one object to another" which "we only feel" should not yield the
' ' internal impression " required ; but Hume's large and loose way of equating
' impression,' ' sensation,' and ' perception,' greatly helps him in ruling out this
possibility.

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 245

science can be restored by metaphysics without a mon
strous paradox.

But, after all, Naturalism in psychology is a small and
comparatively harmless affair. It has its uses, and as a
temporary expedient may even be salutary for the restricted
purpose of a special science. There is nothing, therefore,
in its use that need alarm philosophy. It can always be
regarded as methodological, and need not be taken as
true beyond the point at which it ceases to be useful.
If the Humian denial of Activity merely meant Naturalism,
philosophy could well survive the demonstration.

There are, however, other consequences implicit in
Hume's denial which might well appal all but the ex-
tremest sceptics, or rather nihilists. If we have the
courage to work out the implications of Hume's philo
sophy completely, it will be seen to come to much more
than a revised notion of causation, or than scepticism
about some ' axioms ' of science. What it comes to is an
utter cancellation of all ideas of agency, activity, cause,
power, efficacy, force, energy, not only in us, but through
out the Universe. All these terms, it should be noted,
are not merely inexact adumbrations of more efficient
truths, unsuited for the clear thinking of the sciences ;
they are essentially illusory and unmeaning, and to be
wiped out of the vocabulary of those who would see
reality as it truly is. The whole world would thus be
reduced to a mere sequence of events, to a flow of
uncomprehended happenings within us and without us, of
which we should be the impotent spectators, inscrutably
endowed with a consciousness which might be written off
the ledger of the Universe without affecting its sum total
in the least degree. To ask — what makes the Flow
flow ? — is futile ; to control it, is impossible ; to observe
it, is vain ; all we can do (if we can do aught) is to let
ourselves drift > and to cultivate as much equanimity or
indifference as we can muster towards what is fated to
befall us. In short, the systems of all the sciences are
shattered, and the world, whether psychical or physical,
relapses into Chaos.

246 HUMANISM xm

For it would be a great delusion to imagine that the
conceptions of the physical sciences can escape from the
general debacle of the products of the human intelligence.
Their fundamental conceptions, when they are analysed,
always, sooner or later, imply ineradicable references to
human experiences which have been declared illusory.
Thus ' matter ' ultimately refers to our feelings of resistance.
So does ' force.' ' Motion ' involves ' place,' and place
human experience of the difference between ' here ' and
' there ' and of ' voluntary ' change of place, in default of
which we should have no ground for ascribing the changing
appearances to the motion of unchanging bodies in space
rather than to alterations in the appearances themselves.
' Energy ' involves both the ' motion ' and the ' work '
experience. And so forth. The physical realities,
therefore, being dependent on what have become psychical
illusions, are themselves rendered illusory. In no place
and in no sense have we a right to use any of the tabooed
illusions.

The only mystery which apparently remains over is
one which the theory disdains to notice, viz. how all
these incriminated terms have come into being at all, and
why, if they signify nothing and are not true, they are so
useful and indispensable. Can it be that some demon,
more humorous than Hume himself, is compelling us to
believe, or at least to behave as if we believed, what we
know is not true ? This difficulty, however, may be
respectfully left for intellectualism to contemplate with
care. Our Humanism, by the simple expedient of
starting from our immediate experience, and declining to
admit that it is deceptive and invalid, merely because
Hume has exercised his ingenuity to make it appear so,
dissolves the whole mirage of Humian magic.1

If only rationalists would follow our example, what a
relief it would be to students of philosophy ! For what
ever the more than Spartan fortitude with which we
endure the difficulties of our subject, do we not all suffer
from the paradoxes which its concessions to Hume have

See James on 'The Experience of Activity,' in A Pluralistic Universe.

xin HUMISM AND HUMANISM 247

imposed on rationalistic philosophy ? Should we not
confess in our candid moments that it would be a relief
to get rid of the paradox, for example, that in the whole
universe there either is no agency or activity at all, or
that such agency resides solely in the whole to the
exclusion of its parts ?

What again of the Kantian ' answer to Hume ' ?
What a giant paradox it is ! How strange that the slur
of subjectivity which Hume has cast upon our notion of
causation should be held to be removed by extending its
scope ! And all in vain, because after all the mind does
not ' create ' the world it makes, and remains dependent
on experience for the means to discriminate between a
' casual ' and a ' causal,' an ' objective ' and a ' subjective '
sequence. Why then does it not find its material
refractory ? How does it know that it will not become
so in the future ? Perhaps it may. But if so, are we
not back in complete empiricism, and might not the
whole a priori machinery just as well be flung upon the
scrap-heap? It is, however, nowadays being pretty
widely recognized that Kant's answer to Hume is no real
answer at all ; but the reason why Kant could not
excogitate any real answer is capable of being elucidated.
It becomes, at any rate, much clearer when we perceive
that having missed the only real answer, viz. the volitional,
he had to have recourse to the paradox of ascribing to a
being who has been deprived of all agency, power and
initiative, the power of enacting rules a priori to which
the course of events must conform ! But is it not clearly
impossible to combine the Kantian assertion of the
reality of mental activity with an acceptance of the
Humian denial of all human activity?

It would seem then that in this case, as in that of the
Humian psychology, Kantian Rationalism is unable to
shake off a humiliating dependence upon an insidious
doctrine which has managed to beguile it into positions
whence an effective rejoinder is no longer possible. It
would be interesting to trace out in detail the final fiasco
of rationalistic intellectualisms in their controversies with

248 HUMANISM xm

sensationalism, starting from Plato's Theaetetus ; but this
would be to re-write the history of philosophy with a proper
attention to the existence of voluntary activity. Enough,
at any rate, has been said to show, not only that the
affiliation of Humanism to Humism is extremely mis
leading, but also to suggest, perhaps, that in reality the
boot is on the other leg, and that it is intellectualism
alone which is groaning or grovelling in the grip of
Hume.

XIV

SOLIPSISM1

ARGUMENT

The argument from action to belief proves the sincerity of Humanist dis
claimers of solipsism. But there are transitions to solipsism from (i)
absolute, (2) subjective idealism, (3) Aristotelianism, (4) most modern
philosophies, even (5) the 'New Realisms.' These become crypto-
solipsistic, becauset hey ignore the processes by which the knower arrives
at ' objects ' and compares them with his former objects and those of
others, and overlook the selectiveness of thought and the existence of
error. (6) The interdependence of subject and object also leads to
solipsism.

The Humanist rejection of solipsism and its pragmatic confirmation.
It is not theoretically cogent, but the appeal of solipsism to the analogy
of dream life is false. The dreamer and the maker of dreams. The
pragmatic refutation of all practicable solipsism.

" SOLIPSISM is the most detestable form of wickedness
that ever entered into the mind of a philosopher." This
pronouncement, the solipsissima verba of an intelligent
undergraduate, once occurred in an Oxford examination
paper. It should afford philosophers much food for
reflection. At first sight it seems to evince only an in
sufficient apprehension of the philosophic mind's capacity
for crime. There is a not ignoble apologia for the
Speculative Life in the suggestion that if philosophers
were not allowed to indulge in it they might be com
mitting murders instead of paralogisms. Even so the

1 When one considers what an appalling amount of time and energy is
annually consumed in Examinations, and how little any of the parties to them
have to show for it, it is surprising that they are so rarely utilized for the purpose
of gauging the trend of current thought upon the subjects examined on. That
they can be made to afford instruction to others than the examiners will, I
hope, be a conclusion distinctly suggested by the present article, which is largely
inspired by the answers to a question set in 1908 in the Oxford School of Literae
Hiimaniores, and is reprinted from Mind, No. 70.

249

250 HUMANISM xiv

Philosopher- Villain has been, as Plato himself has testi
fied,1 a good deal commoner than the Philosopher-King.
Possibly however the writer was desirous only of
complimenting his tutor (who was one .of the examiners)
and of taking an optimistic view of his character. But
supposing him to have been sincere, why should he have
regarded so practically innocuous a thing as Solipsism as
an offence, and have classified it as a form of wicked
ness, however mild ? And what did he mean by
Solipsism ?

These questions are worthy of investigation, and I
feel myself peculiarly fitted for the task. For though
not myself a solipsist, I have been repeatedly mistaken
for one. I may be presumed therefore to hold views
sufficiently akin to Solipsism to appreciate it fairly, and
yet to be interested in distinguishing myself from it.

Inherently of course Solipsism is an absurd predicate
to fasten on to a Humanist philosophy. Humanism is
essentially social, and therefore pluralistic. But for this
very reason it cannot treat the problem of Solipsism with
that curious mixture of hauteur and frivolity to which
monistic philosophies are driven. It may honestly admit
and sympathetically examine the case for Solipsism, and
gather therefrom much instruction about the processes by
which individual valuations acquire social currency. A
monistic philosophy on the other hand is always haunted
by the dread that if the One which alone truly is should
turn out to be in any real sense spiritual, it may be
. driven to admit that Solipsism is the ultimate truth. It
is tempted, therefore, to hedge, and to obscure its logical
implications, and to fix a gulf between the theoretic
meaning of its principles and its practical consequences.

A Humanist can afford to be more candid — because
no logical necessity impels him. He is quite free in the
matter. If he wanted to be a solipsist he could be. If
he were, he need not hesitate to say so. He would be
afraid of no one, for he would see that there was no one
to be afraid of. But if he did not want to be a solipsist,

1 Republic, 487 D.

xiv SOLIPSISM 251

and denied that he was, this assurance should suffice,
because it would yield a trustworthy guarantee. And if
it could be observed that in his actions he did not ignore
the existence of- others, but recognized them as beings
with thoughts, wills and tempers of their own, for which
he was both unable and unwilling to undertake the
responsibility, the guarantee would be complete.

For it is a unique peculiarity of a Humanist's philo- \
sophy that in it it is possible to argue back from a
behaviour to the belief that underlies it. He holds that
the reality of a belief depends on, and is tested by, its
applicability. His beliefs therefore must be acted on, and
he cannot afford the luxury of theoretic beliefs, which
cannot be acted on in practice. If he acts on a belief,
he must hold it true ; if he does not act on it, he
does not truly believe it. In all other philosophies the
' highest ' truths may be unpractical and inapplicable to
life, while the beliefs implied in action may be secretly
despised as ' practical makeshifts.' Hence arise endless
possibilities of nonsense, ambiguity and misconstruction,
not to say disingenuousness. For if what is believed
to be the highest ' truth ' should be nonsensical verbiage,
it cannot be detected by the test of practice, which can
eliminate only errors that are acted on. Errors that
remain purely ' theoretical ' cannot be got rid of, because
they cannot be tested in the only final way. It cannot,
therefore, be inferred that if such a philosopher behaves
as if his fellow-men were other than himself, or he himself
were other than God, he really believes this. He may
only be pretending, or finding it necessary to convey a
false impression for practical purposes, because in his
philosophy there is no necessary connexion between
theory and practice. Now in practice no one actually
behaves as if he not only owned the world, but also
was the world ; but whereas in the humanist's case
it is possible to infer from his actions that he does
not believe that he is the world, in the case of other
philosophers it is not. Humanism, therefore, may safely
be believed when it disavows Solipsism ; other philosophies

252 HUMANISM xiv

may be Solipsisms at heart, though they do not avow this
in their behaviour.

But what is Solipsism ? It may best be defined
perhaps as the doctrine that all existence is experience,
and that there is only one experient. The Solipsist
thinks that he is the one.

Now if this is thought out, it will be seen that very
many sorts of philosophers are ultimately solipsists or
as good as solipsists. When they do not themselves see
this, they may fitly be called crypto-solipsists. Crypto-
solipsism may also be ascribed to any view which needs
Solipsism for its logical completion, and so the various
sorts of Solipsism add up to a formidable total.

1. That the 'absolute idealist' is a solipsist need only
be barely stated. For the matter has been threshed out
elsewhere.1 He is a solipsist because he believes that the
Absolute is the sole experient, and that he is himself the
incarnate Absolute. A good many absolute idealists,
moreover, see this, and are proud of being the Absolute.2
But it is needless to linger over this distressing sort of
philosophic megalomania, as its nature is so clear.

2. ' Subjective idealists ' are classed as solipsists,
almost by acclamation ; and yet this attribution seems
in their case far more disputable. For a good many of
them are also charged with pluralism, and it is hard to
see how one can be both a pluralist and a solipsist.
Why moreover should not Berkeley's pluralistic universe
of ' Spirits ' be taken by us as seriously as it was intended ?
It may have been a mistaken compliment to the Deity
to impose on him the duty of lurking behind every
particle of ' matter,' but this is no reason for denying
the communion of spiritual beings. The only difficulty
Berkeley's system here presents is that of explaining how
the individual comes to suspect a transcendent cause

1 Cp. Studies in Humanism, Essay x.

2 We learn however from one answer that when the writer (under ether)
dreamt that he was the Absolute 'and that in fact Solipsism was true,' he felt
' very lonely and miserable.' Could one be sure of this, it would avenge on the
Absolute its callous indifference towards the sufferings of the world.

xiv SOLIPSISM 253

beyond the flow of appearances ; but this difficulty is
common to nearly all philosophies, so that we should be
ill-advised to press the point.

3. Aristotle on the other hand is clearly a crypto-
solipsist, and if Aristotelians took their master seriously
and tried to live up to his precepts, they should all be
solipsists. For though at first sight Aristotle seems a
perfect type of common-place realism, he has a queer
streak of romance at the bottom of his mind, which
nearly always in the end transfigures his conclusions.
And so it ought not to surprise us that he has put
up Solipsism as his supreme ideal. He makes his
God into an incorrigible solipsist. For he is completely
wrapped up in the contemplation of his own experience
(1/0770-69 vorja-ews), in the ecstatic enjoyment of his own
eternal perfection. God thinks only of himself, not of
the world ; avrov apa voei, Aristotle gleefully declares,
and the rest of the world does not exist for him. Unlike
Olympian Zeus, he is non-social, and leads a /3to? yitoi/am;?,
like a beast. Nevertheless Aristotle thinks we ought to
imitate and emulate his God ; he insists that such imita
tion is not futile flattery, but the best and highest thing
we can do. Thus the Theoretic Life and the injunction
O'TT&X? fjia\icrra adavari^eiv mean — 'be as solipsistic as
you can, as your imperfect v\t] will allow.' The con
cluding romance of the Nicomachean Ethics^ therefore,
means that Solipsism is the highest truth.

4. If it is permissible to consult the opinions of the
young and to accept them as omens of the future, we
shall have to say that most of the historically famous
philosophies are logically solipsisms, or at least will
hereafter be treated as such. For the answers to the
' Greats ' question mentioned at the outset unequivocally
teach that the ranks of the Solipsists include Berkeley
(without a scruple), Hume (despite his annihilation of
the self), Locke (despite his belief in external reality),
Descartes (because he is supposed to have started that
pernicious falling away from Aristotle which is called

1 Book x, ch. 7 and 8.

254 HUMANISM

XIV

modern philosophy), Fichte and Lotze (because they were
German idealists), all personal idealists, pragmatists and
humanists en bloc and as a matter of course, and last, but
not least, Dr. Rashdall, who was even said to be ' the
typical solipsist.' Evidently, if these voces populi are to be
believed, the solipsists are a very formidable band, both
here and in Hades. On the other hand some may
perversely think that these dicta are not so much con
tributions to the history of philosophy as reflections upon
the way this subject is taught in Oxford.

5. Still Solipsism is strangely insinuating, beyond
doubt, and, especially when disguised as Crypto-Solipsism,
worms its way into the most unlikely places. It has for
example a curious affinity for the New Realism. To
illustrate this it will happily not be necessary to examine
all the New Realisms seriatim ; for their name is legion,
and they agree in little but this that none of them can
find any obvious escape from the old difficulties of the
Old Realism. It will suffice therefore if we try to under
stand the reason of this affinity, and then trace its working
in two or three of the most notable brands of New
Realism.

To attribute solipsistic leanings to New Realisms seems
at first a paradox which is not adequately vindicated by
the common experience of the meeting of extremes.
But there are in this case real logical grounds for the
coincidence. The New Realist gets so absorbed in his
object that he entirely neglects his subject, and so is not
on his guard against his own subjectivity. Hence his
account of the Real becomes de facto his own private
view of it, which cannot be accommodated to any one
else's and is at bottom a fabrication of his own idio
syncrasy. Thus Solipsism finds it easy to enter into New
Realisms and to possess them in at least four distinct ways.

(i) New Realisms are mostly uncritical because they
are so unpsychological. Despising the study of the
history and pedigree of mind, the New Realist accepts as
real whatever he thinks he perceives, without inquiring as
to how he came to perceive it. Consequently he is hardly

xiv SOLIPSISM 255

conscious that he is not infallible, but is frequently forced
to correct his first perceptions by subsequent experiences.
His trust in the perception of the moment blinds him to
the need of withholding his assent from his ' objects,' of
recognizing how his ' ideas ' pervade them, and of amend
ing both by long and painful testing. He falls a prey
to the ' intuitions ' of the moment, and never inquires how
' true ' intuitions are discriminated from ' false.'

(2) In consequence of never comparing his perceptions
at different times with each other, he never asks himself
how his perceptions accord with those of others. Hence
he fails to notice the social and human character of truth,
and to discover that the most imperative reason for
assuming the existence of subjective ' ideas ' lies in the
necessity of a social compromise. When A and B perceive
reality differently, it is easier, humaner and better to
ascribe to both an ' idea ' of reality than to assert the
unreality of one of these perceptions and to leave them to
fight out which one it is. Reality is thus cleared of a
contradiction which can be treated as ' merely subjective.'
New Realism on the other hand, after ruling out the
problems of intersubjective adjustment as psychological
irrelevance, unwittingly bases its analysis on the single
case of a knower knowing his world, without regard to
the worlds of others. And this procedure is naturally
and essentially solipsistic.

(3) Even this case of a single mind at a given moment
it cannot analyse effectively for lack of psychological
interest. Hence it fails to perceive the all-pervading
selectiveness of all thought, and to reflect on the important
fact that whatever is perceived has been conditioned by
the direction of attention upon it, and preferred to some
thing else that might have been perceived if the attention
had been directed otherwise. About the totality of reality
an infinity of truths may be enunciated or perceived ;
hence the one which is enunciated or perceived is necessarily
the outcome of an enormous amount of selection. And
it is obvious that the ground of this selection cannot
lie in the reality as such, but must proceed from the

256 HUMANISM xiv

interests of the selecter. The facet of reality which is
affirmed cannot have been selected by itself. For alike
in active and in passive experiencing reality is always
present as a whole. Hence the mere perceiving of any
particular reality already implies an immense adjustment
or cutting down of reality to subjective interests, which if
unchecked may easily develop into Solipsism.

(4) Being of a trustful and dogmatic character, the
New Realism does not expect to be deceived and misled
into error. It is consequently ill-equipped to deal with
the deceitfulness of nature in a world in which everything
genuine is mimicked, protectively or aggressively, and even
a childlike faith in absolute truth is no guarantee of in
fallibility. Hence so long as the New Realist refuses to
be critical and to study this whole apparatus of deception,
he will accept all its results as real just as they appear to
him, and once more glides into an unwitting Solipsism.

But it is high time to illustrate these generalities by
their application to three selected cases of New Realism.
All of these appear to be psychogenetically joint products
of incapacity to reply to Mr. G. E. Moore's ' refutation of
Idealism,' and of unwillingness to carry Kantian principles
out completely into a consistent account of mental activity,
for fear of lapsing into ' subjectivism ' ; but as two of
these have not yet appeared in the philosophic arena,
they must be described anonymously as secret doctrines
endemic in two of our leading colleges.

(a) The first of them is the more lively, or less stable,
form, and varies perceptibly from year to year. It is
convinced that the troubles of dogmatic philosophy began
when Locke introduced ' ideas ' into it, and that if ideas
are abolished all will be well. It has no ideas, therefore,
in its theory of knowledge. It starts from a definition of
knowledge as an immediate apprehension of what is. It
perceives realities, and not ' copies ' of them. There is,
therefore, no ' gap ' between subject and object, and no
need to interpose ideas between the mind and reality and
to puzzle oneself vainly about their ' correspondence.'
The mind is caught fast in the embrace of that which is,

xiv SOLIPSISM 257

and nothing can divorce them. By thus shutting out
' ideas ' it hopes to leave no loophole for the demon of
subjectivity to enter in.

The theory has its difficulties, doubtless, especially
when asked to explain the nature of error, but on the
whole it is very reminiscent of Aristotle and seems very
sensible. It reproduces, almost completely, the view
of reality initially taken by an unsophisticated human
mind.

And yet its weak point lies just here. It is good for
a human mind. But not for more. So soon as the
problem is complicated by the introduction of a second
mind, its solution ceases to satisfy. For the second
mind also perceives reality quite as spontaneously, con
fidently, intuitively. Only it does not perceive quite
like the first Each naturally maintains that it perceives
rightly, and the other wrongly. The result is a row. To
allay this disturbance, and to render social life possible,
therefore, a compromise has to be affected between the
conflicting claims of divergent minds. Common sense
rules that to avoid quarrels neither shall be deemed to
be in direct contact with the object as it really is. For
if both had an immediate and inerrant apprehension of
what is, the actual divergence between its results would
plainly be impossible. But both are supposed to recognize
one and the same object in their own subjective way.
The common world of reality is variously reflected in
the various individuals that cognize it. Thus to avoid
greater evils a subjective factor is introduced into all
knowing ; the ' ideas ' of various minds are interpolated
between the mind and the realities it tries to know, but
can never apprehend immediately. All perception of
reality thus becomes representative, and is subject to
subjective distortion, and how far this may go can never
be determined a priori.

Hinc illae lacrimae ; hence the long agony of the theory
of knowledge, from Descartes to Kant and from Kant to
Humanism. For the whole problem of what it means for
two minds to know the same thing, and of how it can be

s

258 HUMANISM xiv

called the same if they know it differently, rushes back
upon us.

For Humanism indeed the coast remains clear and the
answer simple. It merely bids us complete the work of
Kant (most infelicitously called by him Copernican) by
describing the psychical functioning to which our data are
conformed in their integrity, i.e. without mutilating,
depersonalizing and sublimating them by fictions of a
Bewusstsein ilberhaupt. The ' subjectivity ' which was
thought to vitiate cognition and refused to be eliminated,
is a blessing not a curse ; for it is really that which gives
the needful cue to the ' objective ' ordering of the initial
mess of crude experience. It is the importance of some
of its contents for the purposes of human life which
confers upon them a superior reality ; it is the usefulness
of some ideas which leads to their (intersubjective) re
cognition as ' true ' and objectively valid, and effectively
discriminates them from the vagrant fancies that are
rejected as worthless and therefore remain ' merely sub
jective.' For a mind, however, which has become replete
with fixed ideas that the thinker's personality must at all
costs be ignored, that the study of psychical fact is
incompatible with that of physical order, that the genesis
of knowledge has no relation to its nature, and that once
science condescends to take note of the individual it is for
ever debarred from noticing anything else, this Humanist
way of producing ' objectivity ' will seem to demand far
too radical a rethinking of old prejudices. It will be
rejected doubtless ; but what will be done about the
problem ?

It may be suggested to the New Realist that the
simplest way of maintaining his original position and
escaping from the difficulties of this whole criticism is to
turn solipsist. He cannot find room for the objects of
other minds, but he can get rid of the other minds. If
he will systematically refuse to recognize the other minds
that seem to disagree with him, he avoids the complication
which such recognition inevitably introduces. He is left
alone with his objects, and no one can question the right-

xiv SOLIPSISM 259

ness of his perceptions. In words perhaps this position
may be thought to fall short of Solipsism, because there
are still realities for him to perceive. But he has
become the autocratic judge of this whole reality ; and
this is in substance Solipsism. He is the only mind in the
world, of which he is the sole experient. Oto?

($) The second type of New Realism seems less
extreme, and one might prognosticate for it a longer life.
It makes attempts to account for the existence and correc
tion of error, and for the growth and improvement of
knowledge. To do so it has to admit the presence of
a subjective contribution in our perceptions of reality ;
but it regards this as the source only of error and
' opinion.' Between ' opinion ' and ' knowledge ' it fixes
a great gulf, like Plato in the Republic. Knowledge is
of the object, and though it involves a relation of the
mind, it must not be supposed to alter the nature of its
terms. Hence the object in the cognitive relation is just
as it was (or would be) in itself, and nothing about it is
dependent on the mind's knowing it. This last corollary
is of course somewhat difficult to defend, when it
is questioned. So is the gulf between opinion and
Knowledge. It might prove hard to adduce an un
equivocal example of ' Knowledge/ and to show that
what is so called is ever more than ' opinion,' and, of
course, if no Knowledge can be found, its total effect is
sceptical. Again the theory is hard put to it to assign
a tolerable position to a good many facts, e.g. those of
colour-perception.

But it is when confronted with the facts of error and
difference of opinion that this New Realism most clearly
seems to falter. When A and B both claim to apprehend
reality, but differ irreconcilably as to what reality is, it is
at a loss to decide which of them is right. And yet the
need for such decisions cannot lightly be denied. For
such differences are deep-seated and persistent. Two
men may even agree entirely as to the facts, so far as

1 Odyssey, x. 495.

260 HUMANISM

XIV

human science can express them ; yet they may still be
worlds apart in their attitude towards them. What the
one hails with joy, the other may recoil from with abhor
rence. For example, one may worship the syllogism, and
another despise it, though both may agree upon the
perfection of its form. One man may shrink from
immortality, another from extinction. To one the belief
that all is one may be an inspiring gospel, to another the
paralysis of all effort and the grave of all interest in life.
Does it not seem piteously inadequate, then, to decree all
such differences out of existence by calling them differ
ences of opinion, proving only that there is no Knowledge
of the matters they concern ? Moreover it is vain ; for
men differ as to the truth about all things (even about
mathematics so soon as one gets beyond the merest
verbal trifling),1 and differ most signally about the matters
of the highest import, such as God, Freedom and Im
mortality, and the meaning and value of life. This New
Realism, therefore, has either to confine itself to the
abstract enunciation of the veriest platitudes, such as
that everything either is or is not, though no one can
tell which, or to exclude from the realm of knowledge
proper everything that is really important and therefore
in dispute, and to assume an agnostic attitude on such
questions as, e.g., whether God exists and the like.

Hence once more a great temptation comes upon the
New Realist. He could treat the whole body of his own
opinions as ' Knowledge,' if only he could suppress the
pestilent opinions that conflict with his. This be could
do in two ways, either practically or theoretically. Of
these the practical way would doubtless be preferable in
itself, were it not impracticable ; however much he may
desire to produce unanimity by the old effective methods,
ruthless persecution for the sake of establishing a philo-

1 Nay, Prof. Poincare" has recently declared (1912) that the difference between
the pragmatist, and the ' Cantorian ' attitude in mathematics is theoretically in
soluble, because it proceeds from a difference in mental type. As, however, it is
part of the pragmatists' case that such differences exist, and can only be evaluated
practically, this is in effect a verdict in their favour. Cp. Studies in Humanism,
ch. xii. § 10.

XIV

SOLIPSISM 261

sophic theory of knowledge would not be tolerated in
these days.

In theory, however, Solipsism grants him the means to
achieve his end. If he can persuade himself that he
alone experiences, he can hold that whatever he feels
certain of is Knowledge, and the ' opinions ' of others
need no longer contradict his. He can treat them as
illusory equally with themselves, and he will consistently
ignore the opinions and cut their authors.

The difference between this type of New Realism and
the first will be plainly this, that whereas Solipsism was
a necessity for the truth of the theory in the first case, in
the second it is only a convenience.

(c] A third crypto-solipsistic form of New Realism has
been promulgated by Prof. S. Alexander in his pre
sidential address to the Aristotelian Society (1908).
Like so many realists, he has assumed the chief crux,
viz. that perception is unequivocally of the object, and
that the object is not mental but physical. It is assumed
also that perception makes no difference to the object,
and that therefore a hundred persons may all see the
same tree. So far this is only nai've Realism, and not
obviously untenable. But what are we to think of the
further doctrine that the memory also of the tree is a
physical object ? Do the hundred persons have the same
memory-object, or does each have his own, and are there
as many objects as there are memories ? If so, the one
perceived tree has magically blossomed into a hundred
remembered ones, and these must all be related to the
tree and to each other. And what of the changes
memory-objects undergo ? Are they too all ' physical '
and not mental ? The only way to reduce this plethoric
wealth of ' physical objects ' to something like a manage
able compass would seem to be that of Solipsism, and
this might also relieve the theory of the embarrassments
in which its obvious and avowed inability to account for
error at present involves it.

6. One more example of a constructively solipsistic
doctrine may complete our survey. The doctrine that

262 HUMANISM

XIV

Subject and Object are mutually interdependent is crypto-
solipsistic. It begins, tamely enough, by holding that the
Object must exist for a Subject, and no subject can exist
without objects. This doctrine, in its proper meaning, is
a purely verbal truth, an affair of definitions, stating the
meaning of the words ' subject ' and ' object.' But in
Oxford it is, for some inscrutable reason, still regarded as
important ; and strangely enough is credited to ' idealism,'
instead of being classed as thoroughgoing relativism.

At any rate the doctrine becomes either Solipsism or
nonsense so soon as an attempt is made to apply it. If
it seriously means to affirm that the existence of the
Object is conditional upon that of the Subject, it implies
that whenever a subject dies the world of objects must be
annihilated with it. But this is clearly not what happens
to our common world whenever one of us dies. It
follows therefore either that the death of a subject is
inconceivable and impossible, or that what died was not a
subject, or that the common world is not an object, or
that what was annihilated was not the common world
and so that the latter is not dependent on its relation to
a subject. But the first of these alternatives seems
contrary to fact, while the last is contrary to the theory ;
the others render it irrelevant to the problem of know
ledge. For what we wanted to know was what happened
to the ' objective ' world when a ' subject ' died, on the
' idealistic ' assumption that a ' subject ' is implied in the
persistence of every ' object.' Clearly if this is so, the per
sistence of the Object after the death of a subject shows
that the Subject which sustained it does not die when one
of us dies (alike whether that death means our extinction
or our transfer to a different world). We, therefore, and
our world are not Subject and Object in the sense re
quired by the theory. The Subject is not one of us, but
must be a category, or a Cosmic Ego, or what not. But
if so, how is it, and its Object, relevant to the nature of
our knowledge ? There is on the one hand the deathless
Subject of an indestructible world, and on the other we,
who are not subjects in this sense, perceiving objects

xiv SOLIPSISM 263

after our kind ; and between the two there is no real
connexion. The Subject, doubtless, may continue to
perceive the changeless world which forms its Object
throughout all the mischances of our mortal life ; but we
never perceived that world, and to our questions about
the relation of our world to our minds we get no answer.
The whole doctrine has thus become an irrelevant
speculation concerning a Subject and an Object about
which we only know that they are not human, nor
humanly knowable ; it leaves unexplained and un
intelligible the position of the pseudo - subjects and
pseudo-objects which surround us.

Once more the only way of really making the theory
mean anything and of really correlating subject and
object is to construe it solipsistically. The consistent
idealist must hold that since with the Subject there would
pass away the Object, it is only if, and so long as, he is a
subject that a world of objects can endure.

It is possible that by this time the force of the argu
ment may be producing an impression that for company's
sake every philosopher, who cannot bear to stand alone
and to lead the /3ib<? ^ovwr^, had better own to
Solipsism. But such intimidation will not daunt the
Humanist nor cause him to desist from his endeavour (i)
to refute Solipsism and (2) to solve the solipsistic puzzle.

(i) The Humanist's refutation of Solipsism is simple
and sufficient. He is not a solipsist, because he chooses
to believe in the existence of others. He believes this
not so much for the sentimental reason that he does not
want to be alone in the universe, but because he does not
want to regard himself as the author of his whole experi
ence. He will not take the responsibility of being all
there is in a world such as is now provided. He does
not desire to be any or all of the other minds, nor the
totality of reality. He sees that he cannot be the
Absolute without being also the Devil (and an insane
Devil at that !), and so he prefers to be neither Absolute
nor Devil.

264 HUMANISM Xiv

Now this position seems eminently reasonable, but if
any one declines to accept it, the Humanist cannot compel
dissentients to adopt it. He cannot compel them not to
be solipsists, if they prefer to regard him and everything
else as just creatures of their disordered imaginations ;
nor does it follow from the nature of his theory that he
should have this power. Whereas to a solipsist it must
appear extremely puzzling, as well as annoying, that he
should not be able to avoid contradiction and resistance
at the hands of what ex hypotliesi are his own creatures.

The Humanist refutation of Solipsism, then, begins
frankly with a postulate. Into the origin of this postulate
it is no more necessary to inquire here than in other cases.
For it seems unmeaning to discuss the antecedent reason
ableness of a thing not yet in existence. The human
reason must have something to reflect on before it can
discuss the value of anything. A postulate, therefore,
has to be made before it can be justified. The 'origin,'
therefore, of our fundamental postulates can only be
deduced in a ' mythical ' form. But we are not really
concerned with it. Whether it was an inspiration or a
random guess, the postulate that there are others has
come into existence. Once made, it has of course been
tested by its working. And it will hardly be disputed
that it has worked very well. It is therefore accounted
reasonable and true by the generality of mankind, who
are not philosophers. And a Humanist philosopher at
any rate is not easily persuaded that in so vital a point
the experience of mankind is wrong. He will therefore
claim the right to hold the postulate true, because, and so
long as, it works.

It will be noticed that the refutation of Solipsism by
the success of this postulate is thoroughly pragmatic. It
is neither a priori nor absolute. It does not rest on
presuppositions about the possibilities of all experience.
It does not profess to show that Solipsism is unthinkable.
It is willing to allow that Solipsists may exist, and even
flourish. It is willing to listen to what they have to say
for themselves. It makes no higher claim for its own

xiv SOLIPSISM 265

postulate than that it seems to provide a congenial and
adequate way of handling the facts of human experience.
If that experience should alter, it admits that it might be
necessary to revise our postulates. But while it endures
as it is, a successful postulate is as true and as reasonable
as truth can be.

But does not this concede too much and admit that a
reasonable Solipsism also may be possible ? To deny
this possibility a priori would be to deny that there may
be legitimate differences of opinion, conditioned by the
deep-seated differences of human personalities. It would
imply a relapse into that absolutistic intolerance, which
has provoked so many inhuman attempts to reduce all
thought to the level of a mechanical uniformity, and
renders the pretensions of metaphysical system-mongers
so ludicrous a series of failures. It does not follow then
from the fact that Solipsism may reasonably be denied
that it may not reasonably be upheld. This latter con
tention therefore demands distinct examination.

(2) If the belief in other minds is a postulate, any one
may, if he chooses, try to dispense with it. But he still
remains under the obligation of devising an alternative
scheme for the conduct of his life. Let him, therefore,
try. His position is that his whole experience is like a
dream, and he interprets his waking experience by his
dream experience, instead of vice versa, like the generality
of men. He believes that he makes his dream and all
the creatures in it, and this belief he extends to all the
incidents of his life.

There seems to be nothing theoretically absurd or
untenable about such Solipsism : it may even claim the
merit of greater consistency as compared with the vulgar
view that interprets solipsistically dreams alone.1 But
the solipsist would have of course to adapt his theory
somehow to his practice. He must not for example be
led to imagine that because life was a dream of his, he
could know beforehand how the dream was going. For
if he imagined this, events would soon refute his theory.

1 Cp. Studies in Humanism, ch. xx. §§ 16-18.

266 HUMANISM

XIV

In other words his Solipsism would have to be empirical^
and not a priori, precisely as is our ordinary solipsistic
interpretation of dreams.

A Solipsism so conceived would seem to be harmless.
It would make no practical difference. Our solipsist
would have to recognize in the persons and objects of his
' dream ' quite as much ' independence ' and ability to
resist the control of his will as the most benighted
pluralist. He would have to treat them as other than
his dreaming self. We all usually pay this amount of
respect to the creatures of our dreams. If the solipsistic
theory of their nature is to be retained, it is on condition
that it remains a mere theory which is not allowed to
affect conduct. Should it be allowed to do so, it would
of course spell disaster, and would refute itself in the one
really final way, viz. by the elimination of its holder.

Nevertheless it is a point deserving of consideration
whether theoretic exception should not be taken to an
assumption which Solipsism shares with Common Sense.
Both assume it as self-evident that the solipsistic inter
pretation of dream life is valid, i.e. that the self that has
the dream is identical with the self that makes the dream.
This, however, may be disputed. The dreamer is the
victim, and not the maker, of the dream which surprises
and torments him. Hence every dreamer, and every
solipsist, is not really one but two. The strange possi
bilities of such an inherent duality in the 'self are
vividly illustrated by the famous ' Beauchamp ' case so
graphically recorded by Dr. Morton Prince,1 in which,
apparently, the ' maker of dreams ' obtained control of
the body. If then after the fashion of Miss ' Beauchamp '
every solipsist is accompanied by his ' Sally,' it might
become a subtle question whether the dreamer or the
maker of dreams was really entitled to be a solipsist, and
how sincerely the former could really take a solipsistic view
of his complex personality. But it will probably be vain
to raise this point ; metaphysicians have always been too
neglectful of ordinary people's dreams to be critical of

1 The Dissociation of a Personality (1906).

xiv SOLIPSISM 267

their own ; and besides the subject is too recent, too
sensational, and above all too psychological, to appeal to
them.

For a philosophy, however, which is content to stop
short at the theoretic level there is no other way of
refuting the Solipsism which we have described. But
for a philosophy which insists that theoretic doctrines
must be capable of application to practice the last word
is not yet said. It will fasten on the very feature in this
Solipsism which exempted it from theoretic refutation,
and justify thereby its final condemnation. A Solipsism,
it will say, which must in practice recognize other minds
and acts as if they were real and makes no practical
difference in the solipsist's behaviour, does not logically
differ from the view it simulates in practice.

On pragmatic principles this objection seems sound and
insuperable. If a solipsism admits that it must in practice
behave as if other beings were real, then it has plainly
passed into its other, and can no longer boast of a separate
existence : it has suffered the same fate as an offensive
ghost which, according to Plutarch, once made itself a
nuisance in the Plataean territory. When it declined to
yield to entreaty or exorcism, the Plataeans simply caused
an image of it to be placed over the spot it haunted, and
then, though no doubt it continued to occupy the same
space, it was no longer a supernatural, but merely an
aesthetic, eyesore — a. hideous statue being something
wholly natural. To any solipsism, on the other hand,
which will not in practice admit the existence of other
minds, the sufficient reply is that it is impracticable. And
the fact that neither of these retorts constitutes a con
clusive refutation of Solipsism in the eyes of philosophies
which have assumed a different conception of the relation
of theory to practice, leaves Solipsism a thorn in the flesh
(or perhaps a squib in the vitals) only of those other
philosophies.

XV
INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION1

ARGUMENT

The claim to infallibility is logically involved in the belief in absolute truth,
and is held by the Pope in a less extreme form than by the philosopher.
It legitimates intolerance and leads to persecution and social discord.
Common sense evades its practical absurdities by assuming that no
human truth is ever absolute. But this leads to scepticism.

It is better, therefore, to drop the absolutist assumption altogether, and
to humanize truth, making it mean the best view devised up to date. This
legitimates and promotes toleration and social harmony. But it shocks
all dogmatists. And so the Roman Church will probably suppress
Modernism, and refuse to give up its dogma-enacting powers, baleful as
they have proved even to itself.

A DETACHED spectator of the follies of mankind could
not but be profoundly impressed by the widespread
interest which has been aroused throughout the world by
the Pope's Encyclical against what is called Modernism.
In many quarters the Papal condemnation is regarded as
a sort of Congo atrocity in the spiritual world. But no
reason is given why Protestants and Agnostics, Jews and
Infidels, should interfere, even in thought, with the way
in which internal discipline is administered in a Church
which has always proclaimed its resolution to prescribe
with authority and to enforce unquestioning obedience.
Why should sympathy be lavished on persons who are
oppressed because they refuse to liberate themselves by
leaving an institution which excommunicates them ? In
these days when no Church is strong enough to persecute
effectively, and it has become quite an arguable position
that the best way of furthering the spiritual development

1 This paper appeared in the Hibbert Journal for October 1908. For further
light on the genesis of intolerance cp. my Formal Logic, ch. xxv.

268

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 269

of mankind would be to break up all ecclesiastical
institutions, why should Roman ways of enforcing discipline
be denounced with indignation ? Why should not those
who do not relish them be left to make their choice
between submission and departure ? They have been
surreptitiously trying to combine the advantages of an
ancient and highly picturesque community with those of
an unrestricted freedom of individual thought ; they have
been detected and sharply called to order. Why then
should they be pitied and paradoxically helped from
outside to stay inside by people who would gladly welcome
them if they would come out ?

In other quarters the Pope's procedure meets with
strong approval, and rationalist philosophers may be
heard condemning Modernism as fervently as Pragmatism.
The perplexities of the controversy, moreover, are only
deepened when one observes how curiously vague and
general are the Modernist's replies to the Papal accusa
tions. It is all very well to denounce the obscurantism
of the Vatican and to prophesy the disastrous failure of
the Papal policy ; but it would have been more to the
purpose to show how any other course would have been
consistent with Papal authority.

Thus the whole situation forcibly suggests a suspicion
that the facts have not been fully put before the public.
Modernism is clearly suspected of being something far
more dangerous and subversive than the Pope's examples
prove ; and both its allies and its enemies appear to think
that there is more at issue than merely the domestic
question of what latitude of thought the Roman Church
can tolerate.

A belief that this is truly so, that this suspicion is
amply justified, that the issue is really one of vital im
portance to the whole human race, and that this can be,
and ought to be, made clear, is the raison d'etre of this
essay.

What is really at stake and what really arouses so
much interest is the old conflict between the claim to
infallibility and the right to persecute on the one side,

270 HUMANISM xv

and the freedom of thought and the duty of toleration on
the other. This it is that evokes so much feeling on both
sides, when it is (more or less clearly) perceived ; and
rightly, for the question is plainly one of universal import
and worth fighting over. It should, however, have been
explained that the decision of this question does not
rest with popes and theologians, but with philosophers
and scientists : for it depends ultimately on the view that
is taken of Truth.

Very few have understood the claim to infallibility.
Nearly all would scout the idea that we may all be
infallible, even the silliest of us, if we will only equip
ourselves with a suitable view of Truth. In non-Catholic
countries it is commonly supposed that the infallibility of
the Pope is the acme of theological extravagance, and
that the Vatican Council of 1870 irretrievably stultified
Romanism for ever in the eyes of reason by its enunciation
of this monstrous dogma. In point of fact, infallibility is
an essential postulate implicit in all rationalistic philosophy,
and the dogma of the Roman Church is merely the
religious formulation of a belief which it shares with
nearly all its critics. The infallibility of the Pope differs
from that of the philosopher and the common man only
in being limited, relatively reasonable and couched in
singularly guarded and moderate terms. For the Pope,
when he claims to be infallible, does not believe himself
to be infallible on all and sundry subjects, but only when
speaking on matters of religious faith, and that solemnly
and in his capacity as head of an infallible Church. And
he takes great care not to say when he is speaking in this
capacity, so that practically the dogma is comparatively
innocuous. Whereas the common man claims infallibility
for every thought that may chance to come into his head
at any time, whether or not it agrees with what he said
a moment ago. He attributes, moreover, to every one
else a similar endowment with infallibility, regardless of
the consequences.

It is true, no doubt, that the man in the street is
unaware of the monstrous claim he makes. But this

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 271

does not alter the facts that both he and the Pope believe
themselves to hold the same theory of Truth, and that
this theory implies a claim to infallibility. The sole
difference is that whereas the Pope draws its consequences
consistently, cautiously, and with moderation, the man in
the street does so inconsistently, wildly, and extra
vagantly. And then the latter turns upon the former
and roundly accuses him of demanding what is repugnant
to reason !

Yet the Pope and the man in the street both profess
belief in the existence of absolute truth. Both also
believe in their own capacity to enunciate it. But an
absolute truth is one which could not under any circum
stances become false. Whoever enunciates it, therefore,
could not (so far) possibly be wrong-. But what is this
but to claim infallibility ?

As ordinarily assumed, however, this claim is wildly
absurd. For when men fail to agree in enunciating
absolute truths, each has as good a right to think himself
infallible as the other. Every man, therefore, who in good
faith makes a statement he believes to be true, and believes
that truth is absolute, must claim infallible truth for his
statement, and infallibility pro tanto for himself, its maker.
He becomes a little pope in posse in his own eyes. And
he must insist on enforcing his rights. All must agree
with him. The facts that his pronouncements do not
meet with universal acceptance, and indeed that no two
men ever quite agree, cannot affect the theoretic validity of
his claim. Nor can it be impugned by the fact that
others put forward conflicting claims with equal assurance.
Each must abide by his own vision of absolute truth.
Whoever does not see the same as he does must be
either a fool or a knave : a fool if he cannot see it, a
knave if he will not admit that he sees it. He must be
made to see it, therefore, by fair means or foul. The
social consequences may be imagined. There must be
war unceasing and unsparing upon earth, until one and
the same Truth, immutable, infallible, and absolute, is
established upon it, and is seen and accepted by all without

272 HUMANISM

XV

exception. Thus persecution becomes a duty and tolerance
a crime.

Common Sense, of course, would be the first to shrink
with horror from the consequences of its own doctrine.
For, unlike philosophy, it will never press logic to
absurdity. It will decline, therefore, to take the claim
to infallibility with such tragic earnestness in practice. It
will much prefer to point out that while no doubt it is
imperative to believe that absolute truth exists, it would
be decidedly presumptuous to suppose that any one had
got it. In fact there is no very urgent necessity to regard
absolute truth as anything but an ideal. In practice no
one can really work with it. Not only does it lead to
endless quarrels when different men all claim to be
absolutely right, but even the same man entangles himself
by enunciating incompatible truths with equal absoluteness
at different times. And so it will finally be suggested that
perhaps this inconvenient infallibility had better be dropped,
and even smile approval on a paradoxical philosopher who,
perceiving the awkwardness of the situation, comes forward
with proposals to attenuate its virulence by contending
that though every judgment any one makes is necessarily
infallible for the time being, yet there is nothing in this
to prevent any one from superseding and annulling his
infallible judgment by another equally infallible, and as
shortlived, the moment after.1

It is clear, however, that reluctance to follow out the
logical consequences of an unpalatable doctrine is not
strictly the right way to atone for its initial ferocity.
It is far more consistent to interpret absolute truth
absolutistically than to draw its fangs in such a lax and
easy-going democratic way. It will never do to let
common sense steer us straight into scepticism, by sur
rendering the belief that some one must have absolute
truth. If, we should argue, absolute truth exists, it is
clear, no doubt, that the common man has not got it.

1 Such is actually the purport of Mr. F. H. Bradley's doctrine of the in
fallibility of the last judgment (cf. Mind, N.S. , No. 66, and my comments in No.
67- PP- 373-6).

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 273

But some one must have it, else it would not exist, and
then there would be no truth at all. Even if it is among
the prerogatives of deity, it is reasonable to suppose that
it has been deposited with some human representative.
Let us search the world, therefore, for one whom we can
regard as such a depositary of absolute truth, and submit
to his authority. And whom shall we find to satisfy
these conditions better than the Pope ? His infallibility
is infinitely more credible than that of the man in the
street.

Such a train of thought must surely appeal very
powerfully to all who feel a spiritual craving to submit
themselves to authority, who long to shuffle off the
responsibility for their acts, and to find some one who
will guide and direct them. And their name is legion.
If, therefore, there were no Pope, he would have to be
invented for such souls. His Holiness need not fear that
his faithful will desert him. There is no reason to think
that the anima naturalitcr Vaticana is becoming extinct.
He must, however, eschew the restriction of his claim to
faith and morals. The absolutistic view of truth logically
demands that truth be fully unified. A plurality of
authority implies a plurality of truth ; and this is inadmis
sible. The Pope, therefore, must be the infallible
authority in art, politics, and science, as well as in
religion. There is, moreover, a practical reason for this
arrangement. If there is no single infallibility to cover
the whole realm of thought, if there are a number of
authorities all claiming to speak infallibly in the name
of their respective sciences, it is impossible to avoid con
flicts and collisions between them ; and this must dis
credit, weaken, and perhaps destroy, the whole principle
of authority as such.

Before, however, this unification of authorities is finally
achieved, it is easy to predict that a prolonged period of
painful contention must ensue. The world at present
contains a great number of conflicting authorities, of
which it is by no means clear that the Roman Church
is the strongest and best fitted to survive ; it contains also

T

274 HUMANISM

XV

many recalcitrants against all authority, and an appreciable
number of philosophers who, though they insist on the
absolute authority of ' Reason,' will admit no reason but
their own. It seems improbable, therefore, that this
doctrine of the infallibility of those who speak in the
name of absolute truth will make for social peace and
quiet. For all parties are in duty bound by their
allegiance to absolute truth to wage war unflinchingly
upon all views but their own, and wherever they can to
oppress, suppress, and persecute by all means in their
power. History, therefore, will repeat itself. Its blood
stained pages tell too eloquently how thoroughly man
has tried to live up to his supposed obligations, and the
psychological intolerance which has become so natural
in man shows how deeply the corollaries of his belief in
the absoluteness of truth have sunk into his soul.

Is it not possible, therefore, to pay too high a price
even for absolute truth ? In modern times there is
probably a growing number of men to whom the price
to be paid will seem excessive and such consequences
seem repulsive. It is time, therefore, that for their benefit
we considered the alternative which, apprehended with
various degrees of clearness, underlies the modern revolt
against mere authority, the Modernist attitude towards
religion, and the extensive sympathy therewith.

Let us return to the practical but illogical compromise
whereby Common Sense robbed the intolerant belief in
the absoluteness of Truth of all its terrors. A single
step beyond it in the same direction will take us into a
new world, a very paradise of freedom. Common Sense
was willing to admit that in point of fact absolute truth
was not in any man's possession, and that however
confident men might feel about the truth they had, they
were often, if not always, victims of an illusion, and
might as well allow for this possibility in their behaviour
towards their fellows. For its immediate purpose of
mitigating the acerbity of absolutist theory and securing
social intercourse this compromise is plainly adequate.
It works well enough in practice. Theoretically, however,

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 275

it is more than dubious. It is most unpleasantly and
directly suggestive of sceptical inferences. If it is held
that most men most of the time are deluded when they
suppose themselves to be enunciating absolute truth, if it
is impossible to show that any one ever succeeds in
enunciating such a thing, what does the doctrine of
absolute truth become but a subtle and insidious means of
discrediting all human truths ? Is not this the explana
tion of that paradox of philosophic history, viz. that
consistent rationalism always in the end collapses into
scepticism ?

It is clear then that absolute truth is not really an
operative idea. It is an ideal that ever recedes into the
distance when we try to grasp it. Men are not really
infallible, and cannot treat each other as such. The truths
they actually deal in are not absolute. The common-sense
belief that they are is really an ill-considered prejudice.

Let us candidly confess, therefore, that not only do
we not have absolute truth, but that what we have is
enough to content us. Let us boldly say that we do not
need absolute truth, that it is a superfluity and an encum
brance, and get rid of it in theory as well as in practice.
Let us frame a new conception of Truth. Let us strip
her aegis of the rigours and terrors that compelled
reluctant assent but rendered her unapproachable in her
warlike armour, and teach her to dwell peaceably in our
midst, to speak our language, and to interest herself in
our life. Let us, in a word, humanize Truth, instead of
idolizing her as a goddess who is more than half a
demon. Let us define the true no longer as what is
cogent and compulsory and irresistible, but as what is
attractive and valuable and satisfying. Let Truth mean
whatever can satisfy our cognitive cravings, whatever can
answer a logical problem. And let it mean our best
answer for the time being. Let it be conceived, that is,
as essentially progressive and improvable, and therefore
as superseded by new truth and turning into ' error ' so
soon as something superior to the old dawns upon any
human soul.

276 HUMANISM Xv

Thus Truth will no longer shine upon us from afar
with the dim glimmer of an infinitely distant nebula. It
will no longer dazzle us with the delusive flashes of a
will-o'-the-wisp that is really ' error.' It will be a torch
kindled by human will and wielded by human hands (or
rather a succession of such torches, each rekindled as the
last expires), always lighting the way for man as he passes
onwards. The objects it illumines will come into its
sphere as man's life requires them ; they will drop back
into the limbo of the useless, out of which they were
drawn, as they are used up or improved upon.

From such a reconstitution of the idea of Truth it is
clear that man must gain immensely. And, apart from
the glamour of words, even Truth will lose nothing.
Even its ' absoluteness ' is not wholly lost. It is only
avowed to be what it is — an ideal, the culmination of
Truth's working value, the perfect satisfaction of every
cognitive ambition. As such it may still yield the remote
and emotional consolation which was all it could afford
before, when the illusions of verbiage were purged away.
The human truth which alone we have and alone we
need, on the other hand, will be a very real and potent
influence. It must enormously enlarge the liberty of
thought. It must enormously enhance humaneness of
discussion. It must utterly explode the foundations of
dogmatism and intolerance.

For nothing at first can be ' true ' but what can
commend itself to some one and satisfy some spiritual
need. Conversely, whatever can do this can claim
' truth ' ; it has a claim to be heard and tested, even
though it be merely the fleeting inspiration of a moment.
Every man has a vote in the making of truth ; any man's
truth may be elected, any man's vote may decide the
election. But no man has a right to use force ; no man
has a right to impose his convictions on any other :
superior attractiveness alone effects conversions in the
conflict of opinions. Nor has any one a right to argue
that because he is right every one else must be wrong :
Truth is plural, and can adjust herself, like a rainbow.

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 277

to every man's sight and point of view. Hence an
indefinite variety of truths may be valid relatively to a
variety of differently constituted and situated persons.
Toleration mounts the throne left vacant by Infallibility.

But what a blasphemous travesty of Truth, what a
hideous anarchy it must all seem to absolutists, dogmatists,
pedants, authoritarians of all sorts ! How it must seem
to them to shiver into atoms the whole edifice of Truth
and the foundations of all intellectual order ! No wonder
they must support Rome against the inroads of such
modernity ! No wonder they are almost speechless with
horror and incoherent with indignation ! For the mirage
of an absolute Truth in the skies is dissolved beyond
recall, and its worshippers are left desolate. To them it
seemed the real thing. It never was the real thing, and
they have lost nothing but an illusion. But they do not,
and perhaps will not, see this. All that was of real value
remains. The terrestrial realities remain of which the
celestial phantasmagoria was the reflection. There
remains the practical necessity of living together and
agreeing upon the conditions of a common life. Man
remains with his gregarious nature, his lack of originality,
his respect for tradition, his easy acquiescence in the
habitual, his dislike of innovation, his preference for order
and system, his eagerness to think the world a cosmos —
in short, with all the forces that weld society together.

More than enough remains, therefore, for the compact
ing of our intellectual order. The ' real ' and ' objective '
becomes that which it is socially convenient to recognize,
in a rich variety of senses. ' Objective truth ' will be that
which all or most can agree on, and fits in best with the
course of their experience. It articulates itself into
systems of truths which are more substantial, more useful,
and probably more durable, than the transcendent vision
which was sacrificed. Certainly these systems are at
present plural, not because Truth cannot be conceived as
one — for the plural truths can easily be conceived as con
verging towards a single consummation — but because men
do not, in fact, agree. Whether they can agree remains

278 HUMANISM xv

to be seen ; they have every motive to agree, and have
lost the strong stimulus they had to insist obstinately on
their individual infallibility. But, on the other hand, the
notion of agreement has itself become less exacting : men
can ' agree to differ ' ; they can maintain all individual
views which do not clash with those of others or lead to
social discord. In short, the existing situation will be
altered only by the infusion of a more tolerant temper
into all opinions.

But has not all this carried us far away from the
Modernist movement in the Church of Rome ? Not at
all ; it has brought us to its core. Modernism, in its
philosophic forms,1 is essentially the recognition by certain
more enlightened or sensitive clerics of the intellectual
forces which are drawing men in religion, as in science
and philosophy, towards the humanistic conception of
Truth which we have sketched. They have perceived at
last what the lives of laymen have always dumbly attested,
that religion is not primarily a matter of theology but of
religious experience, and is nowhere reducible to a rigid
chain of incontrovertible syllogisms. They have therefore
abandoned the intellectualistic travesties of religion, which
kill its spirit to embalm its letter, and offer long strings of
pseudo-rational propositions as a satisfaction to a reason
which easily detects their imposture and is itself seeking
for something more nutritious than pure intellect. But
such dogmas, as M. Leroy has shown, are utter failures as
purely intellectual propositions : they neither can nor do
compel assent ; as such, they can neither be defended nor
even made to mean anything that matters. So to under
stand the meaning of dogmas and the nature of religious
beliefs is a fatal mistake. They are not really intellectual
products at all, and therefore cannot be attacked (or
defended) as such. No religion really rests on the

1 Its historical criticisms of ecclesiastical tradition are quite a different affair.
Here the trouble arises out of the attempt to reduce religious truth to historical,
and history to science. But historical truth differs fundamentally from scientific
in that the evidence on which it rests cannot be multiplied at pleasure. And to
assume that religious truth rests solely on historical testimony is to beg some vital
questions.

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 279

impersonal support of pure reason ; nor can it be kept
from moving with the times by chains of rusty syllogisms.
For the truth is that dogmas are essentially secondary
expressions of the vital value of a religion, the by-products
of a spiritual life that was never nourished on pure
intellect. They are, as it were, the lifeless fossils of a
living faith, and remain unmeaning marvels unless they
are re-enveloped in the life which grew them. That life,
moreover, is primarily an individual attitude of soul :
however closely it is wrapped in a spiritual environment,
each soul must nourish itself and grow in its own con
genial fashion.

The chief paradox of the situation is that these facts
of the spiritual life should have been so intensely perceived
in the Roman Church. For at first sight they look such
a supreme vindication of Protestantism, such a sanctioning
by psychologic science of the evangelical or mystic. But
it must never be forgotten that, like all science, psychology
is catholic and impartial. Every religion may be vindi
cated by the psychologic tests in so far as it is genuine,
i.e. really nourishes the spiritual life. It speaks well for
the intelligence of the Catholic Modernists that they
should have discovered this. But they had discovered
also that the idea of a Church, of an historical association
with a corporate confidence in the truth of its position,
has very great religious value. They were probably not
wrong in thinking that the Roman Church could flourish
exceedingly on Modernist lines.

But will it ever prefer to do so ? It is very hard to
say. It must be a very hard question to decide for the
astute directors of Papal policy. Superficially, no doubt
the present indications are that this bold and novel policy
will not be adopted. Ancient institutions, whether they
are called Churches, bureaucracies, or universities, never
do adopt a bold and novel policy : they are always under
the control of men too old to run the risk of such a policy.
Modernism, therefore, will be crushed, and Medievalism
will prevail ; a mechanical uniformity will be enforced,
even at the cost of schism. But appearances are no-

280 HUMANISM xv

where more deceptive than in matters ecclesiastical, and
history does not confirm the view that the Pope always
knows his own business best. It is quite conceivable
that in due course, when the more cautious sympathizers
with modern thought have risen by dint of years to
the higher posts in the hierarchy, and the pressure of
circumstances has convinced the less fanatical conservatives
that something must be done, some successor of Pius X.
will be moved to issue another Encyclical which, after
splitting a vast number of hairs to prove that what is
now sanctioned is not identical with what was condemned
before, will define the sense in which a Modernist attitude
may be permitted, and concede the substance of what has
lately been denied.

There would be both psychological and historical
warrant for this prophecy. The opposition to any novelty
of thought is always largely a matter of individual
psychology. The human mind becomes less open to
new impressions as it grows older, and in all institutions
the high authorities are always old, and often stupidly
conservative. Progressiveness and open-mindedness are
tender plants which must be carefully cultivated, and
often forced. Historical analogy points to the same
conclusion. The making of dogmas usually ends by
making orthodoxy a razor-edge between two opposite
heresies which have been successively condemned. It
is formulated so as to conceal the facts that when new
ideas arose the old men in authority conservatively
condemned them, and that when, nevertheless, they
triumphed, words had to be found that would not break
too abruptly with the old traditions.

Such, however, are what may be regarded as the
normal psychological and political obstacles to the
progress of human thought, and they are in no wise
peculiar to the Roman Church. What complicates the
situation in her case is that there are other serious
objections to innovation which render her the least likely
of the Churches to modernize her basis. By so doing
she could probably purchase an ignoble peace and

xv INFALLIBILITY AND TOLERATION 281

enduring prosperity, but only at the cost of two things
which have hitherto been very dear to her. In the
first place, she would have to renounce the right to
persecute. Truly a trivial matter this, it may be thought,
seeing that it cannot nowadays be exercised. But it is
one thing to suspend it in practice and for prudential
reasons, and quite another to give it up in theory and
on principle. Principles which cannot be carried into
practice often grow all the dearer for their pathetic
impotence, as is proved by intellectualist philosophies.
Moreover, to renounce this right would not only break
with much historical tradition, but would also sacrifice
the ambition of recovering the lost power of the Church.

Secondly, the right of making dogmas (of the old
quasi-rational sort) would have to be abandoned. The
Church would have to follow the example set by Science
and, more recently, by philosophy. Science for some
time past has been too busy and too rapidly progressive
to find it worth while to formulate into fixed dogmas
her working theories, which, in the words of Sir J. J.
Thomson, form "a policy and not a creed." It has
grown accustomed to use them merely for what they
are worth, and so long as they are worth it. In philosophy
the discovery of the proper attitude towards dogmas has
been of slower growth, though philosophic Humanism is
quite clear as to their value and the mischief they have
wrought.

But religion hitherto has always stood for the eternal
fixity of dogma, once it has been defined. In most
Churches, indeed, this power of making dogma has long
been in abeyance. They have been too tightly wedged
into an antiquated creed which none of its members could
construe literally, or tied to some paralysing political
concordat, or too loosely organized to act corporately.
But this inability has usually been construed as a
disability, and the power of making dogma has seemed
a mark of the superior progressiveness and unity of
Rome. Acceptance of Modernism, however, would mean
the sacrifice of this flattering prerogative.

282 HUMANISM xv

Here again, however, it might be argued that the
apparent loss would be a real gain. For the making
of dogma is always a perilous business. In making
dogmas it is hard to avoid making heretics. And the
more heretics a Church makes the less ' catholic ' does
it become. It is extraordinary what losses the Roman
Church has incurred by her indulgence in the dogma-
making instinct. Was a disagreement about the cal
culating of that most inconveniently migratory festival,
Easter, worth the bisection and permanent weakening
of Christendom ? Was the defining of the Trinity and
the Incarnation — in terms which however satisfactory
they seemed to the ' orthodoxy ' of the time have long
changed their meaning so as to have become unintelligible
— worth the loss of Africa and Asia to Mohammedanism,
and the destruction of the best of the Northerners, the
Arian Goths ? The world in all probability would long
ago have been Christian, the Roman Church would have
been truly ' catholic,' but for the disastrous practice of
defining dogmas, and the intolerance of which this was
the cause and the effect. Will history repeat itself?
Will dogma be made though the angels weep ? Will
Rome decide in accordance with her past traditions, yfotf
dogma, ruat coelum ? It will be immensely hard to break
with them, and the traditional policy will necessarily
have immense strength. But who can say? Not even
Pius X. But the situation is very interesting, though
decidedly more comfortable for those who can watch from
without the distractions of an embarrassed Church.

XVI
FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY1

ARGUMENT

I. Does Determinism blot out the criminal's responsibility for his crimes ?

And would he fare better at the hands of Science, if he were
treated as irresponsible ? If he cannot help offending, can society help
punishing ? Belief in social reform presupposes an alternative and better
course of events. Is, then, a belief in ' Freedom ' irrational, and should
Determinism make no difference to practice ?

II. The scientific value of Determinism as a methodological postulate. ' Law '

as the instrument of prediction. But this ignores novelty, and our
postulate's confirmation is only empirical. The value of Determinism
diminished by our ignorance, and largely sentimental. The caricaturing
of Libertarianism. ' Free ' choice not motiveless. Freedom demanded
and explained by the moral struggle, and so thinkable and possible.
The clash of rival postulates leaves us free to choose between them.
Does this prove ' Freedom ' ?

IF the Social Revolution should ever pass from the
region of vague sentiment into that of crude and cruel
fact, there is at least one class of learned men whose
extinction may be prophesied with as great confidence as
that of priests and kings. When the amiable exhortation
of the French revolutionist has been acted on, and the
neck of the last king has been constricted with the
entrails of the last priest, the last millionaire will no
doubt have been smothered with the unsaleable remainders
of the last professor of philosophy.

Such at any rate is the estimate of the value of
philosophy Mr. Robert Blatchford's pamphlet, Not Guilty,
A Defence of the Bottom Dog, very distinctly manages to

1 This essay appeared in the Oxford and Cambridge Review for November 1907.

283

284 HUMANISM xvi

convey. It is an appeal on behalf, not merely of the
downtrodden and unsuccessful, but also of the degraded
and criminal classes, and an indictment of what is, or
passes for, 'justice,' human and divine. He defends his
clients on the ground, mainly, that they are the helpless
victims of heredity and environment, whose brute instincts
have been further brutalized by the horrible conditions
under which they have been nurtured. And he denies in
toto the right of society to condemn and to punish those
who could not have been other than they are.

In other words, Mr. Blatchford (and with him pre
sumably the whole party of militant Socialism) is
essentially concerned with the old philosophic theme of
Freedom and Responsibility, complicated though it is no
doubt for modern minds with the problems of atavism,
heredity and variation. But he scorns to seek the aid of
technical philosophy. He is weary of the learned who
darken counsel with technical verbiage. He has no use
for useless learning, for " the tangle of Gordian knots tied
and twisted by twenty centuries full of wordy but un
successful philosophers" (p. 169), nor can he understand
(p. 1 6) why "the world is paying millions of money and
bestowing honours and rewards in profusion upon the
learned and wise and spiritual leaders who teach it to
believe such illogical nonsense " as a man's responsibility
for his acts. He prefers instead to argue the whole
matter out again for himself, to reiterate the old fallacies,
to repeat the old inconsequences, to be stopped at the old
deadlocks.

Mr. Blatchford would possibly be surprised to find
how much precedent there is for all his positions, if he
had the curiosity and leisure to trace them back to their
origins. Even his condemnation of the futility of philo
sophy is no new thing, and is mild compared with the
things which philosophers have been in the habit of
saying of each other. The opinion which the greatest
philosophers have entertained of the efforts of their
colleagues has usually been a low one. Herakleitos, the
great Ephesian, used all his predecessors as illustrations

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 285

of his maxim that much learning did not teach intelli
gence. And the philosopher- pedant has never been
denounced more brilliantly and incisively than by Plato.

As for the use of Determinism as an excuse for the
bad man, it has been one of the earliest inferences to be
drawn from moral philosophy. No sooner had Socrates
put forward the suggestion that virtue was (a sort of)
knowledge, and thereby laid the foundation of a scientific
study of morals, than this dictum was improved into a
reductio ad absurdum of morality. It was at once pointed
out that if virtue was knowledge, then vice must be
ignorance, and that no one was vicious willingly, any
more than ignorant. Vice, therefore, was involuntary,
and no one should be blamed for being vicious. The
retort, fixed for us in the Ethics of Aristotle (iii. 5. 17),
that by the same reasoning virtue might be proved
involuntary, could not arrest the controversy : it had
merely to be accepted (as it promptly was by the Stoics)
to bring upon the scene full-blown Determinism, and to
inflict upon ethics a perennial problem which the majority
of philosophers at the present day probably regard as
insoluble, to wit that of reconciling the strict determination
of every event with the moral demand that it shall,
nevertheless, be possible to break the chain of circum
stance in order to choose the right.

Clearly, therefore, Mr. Blatchford's contentions have
abundant plausibility as well as many precedents. There
is much excuse also for the lapses of his logic. The
spectacle of human folly, crime, and misery is so harrowing
that only the coolest intellects can bear coldly to criticize
and carefully to examine proposals that promise a whole
sale alleviation of the burden of man. And yet unless
Mr. Blatchford's clarion is merely to create confusion and
dissension in the ranks of the army with which man is
battling with his secular foes, these are just the points to
be scrutinized. The chief source of human suffering is
not social. It is not a consequence of man's imperfect
control of his own nature, nor of the imperfect develop
ment of his social sympathies and the resulting inhumanity

286 HUMANISM xvi

to his kind. It springs from our inadequate control of
the forces of nature, and can be relieved only by the
gradual growth of the knowledge which is power. If the
Socialists could prevail upon the nations of the earth
to abandon the folly of their internecine strife, to put
down their monstrous armaments, and to devote a tithe
of ' their annual cost to scientific research, they would
achieve more for the advancement of humanity, and
even for their own aims, in twenty years, than they
are likely to accomplish by centuries of merely political
agitation.

But, even in dealing with those evils which are either
social in their nature or capable of being mitigated by
social expedients, we must be cautious. We must beware
of letting our sentiment run away with our logic, and
of adopting a philosophy which would ultimately stultify
and sterilize all efforts at reform. We must not, therefore,
allow our sympathy for the weak to unman us. We
must not allow our pity for the degraded to drag us down.
In making allowances for the victims of unfavourable
circumstances we must seek to brace, and not to relax,
their powers of resistance. We must, therefore, preach
Freedom to them and not Fatalism, Effort and not
Acquiescence. Still less must we ourselves begin by
acknowledging the omnipotence of Fate. We must not
despair of victory. We must vindicate the power of our
persistent efforts to reshape the world within us and
without us. In other words, we must uphold the reality
of Human Freedom.

It is not, therefore, from any lack of sympathy with
the humanitarian aspects of Mr. Blatchford's argument
that it seems to us open to criticism. What we desire to
attack is the logical inconsequence of his position. What
we desire to show is that Robert Blatchford the Determinist
cuts the throat of Robert Blatchford the social reformer.
And what we desire to establish is that, whatever politics
we favour, any advocacy of practical interference with the
existing order of nature, nay our whole rational life,
presupposes and implies the reality of our Freedom and

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 287

the rejection of Determinism. But, of course, it is one
thing to exhibit the practical importance and necessity of
Freedom and another to establish its theoretical validity
as a philosophic interpretation of the facts of life, and in
this larger undertaking we shall have to encounter the
arguments of many of the philosophers of the past and
nearly of all the present.

We may, however, at once proclaim that there is an
enormous logical gap between Mr. Blatchford's theoretical
position, and the practical consequences he seeks to draw
from it. If we grant the former, we not merely need not,
but cannot, assent to the latter. If we contend for the
latter, we must begin by ignoring the former.

If it is true that " no man is answerable for his own
acts," because he has had " no part in the creation of his
own nature " (p. I o), if it is true that " law is based upon
the false idea that men know what is right and what is
wrong, and have power to choose the right," whereas
really men are not good or bad, but merely weak or
strong, fortunate or unfortunate (p. 19), if it is true that
wrong-doers are " ignorant " or " diseased " or " insane " or
" mentally deformed," and hark back " atavistically " to
the savage and the beast, if it is true that our social
conditions are bad, and acting on bad natures, create
much vice and crime, if it is true that our "justice" is
imperfect and ineffectual, and that our " punishments "
largely fail either to reform the criminal or to protect
society — if all this is true, does it follow that " all praise
and blame are undeserved," and that no one ought to be
punished (p. 203) ? And does it follow that Mr. Blatch
ford's client, the " Bottom Dog," would fare better if he
were transferred from the jurisdiction of morals to the
tender mercies of Science, and were " entitled to be
j.udged by the standard we apply to beasts " (p. 207) ?

Mr. Blatchford is very confident : he defies us (p. 209)
to deny one statement he has made, " to break one link
of the steel chain of logic I have riveted upon our meta
physicians, our moralists, our kings, our judges and our
gods," and tells us that " if all those (inferences) are not

288 HUMANISM

XVI

true, this book is not worth the paper it is printed on "
(p. 203).

Well, let us see. Let us appraise the value of human
beings according to the new ideals, with the coldly com
mercial and unsentimental eye of natural science, regarding
no man as an end in himself and every one merely as an
instrument to social well-being, and let us see where the
" Bottom Dog " will come out.

The answer is not hard to get. For Sir Francis Galton
has studied the social value of the different types of human
being. He has calculated that the average value to the
community of an Essex labourer's baby at birth is about
£$, i.e. that moderate sum would be the 'present value'
of the surplus of his production over his consumption
of wealth during an average life. A baby genius (or
even talent) would, of course, be worth buying up at many
thousands of pounds by an intelligent society, and the new
science of Eugenics has for its ultimate aim an increase in
the natural supply of such valuable infants. A baby
criminal, on the other hand, or idiot, or lunatic, or weakling,
or wastrel, clearly possesses only negative value for social
purposes. Such creatures are a dead loss to the com
munity, which has to keep up prisons, asylums and hospitals
for their sakes, and to employ judges, doctors, clergymen
and policemen to cope with them. Not only do they fail
to enrich the community by useful work, but they are a
heavy burden upon it, and probably have to be supported
for the greater part of their lives at the public expense.
Clearly, therefore, society would be better without them,
and if Science could prevent their birth, it would
unquestionably do so ; if it could detect them after
birth, it would extinguish them as speedily as possible.
No sentiment of pity or prejudice about justice and right
would impede its mercilessly reasonable calculations.
The darker the colours in which the wretchedness of the
" Bottom Dog " is painted the more urgent would become
the case for his scientific and systematic suppression.

But would this conclusion commend itself either to
Mr. Blatchford or to his client ? Yet he comes very

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 289

near to confessing that such, on scientific principles,
would be the right and rational way of dealing with the
criminal. If the criminal is a recrudescence of the beast
in man, and comparable to a tiger or a shark (p. 2 1 3),
why on earth should he not be treated as such ? Surely
Mr. Blatchford would not preserve him from extermination
merely in order that he might provide sport for our
judges and our police? In one passage (p. 215) Mr.
Blatchford admits that " although the prisoner ought not
to be punished, it is imperative that he be restrained.'
Quite a sensible conclusion, no doubt ; but as an argu
ment for leniency how verbal and how feeble ! Mr.
Blatchford can, of course, insist on reserving the word
"punishment" for the retribution inflicted on misdeeds,
and deny the application of the name to the treatment
which aims at the protection of society and the reclama
tion of the offender. But would not such a defence
savour of the hair-splitting of the philosophers whom
Mr. Blatchford so despises ? Besides, has he a right to
ignore the facts that the actual treatment of anti-social
conduct is largely inspired by the preventive, and even
by the reformatory, views of " punishment," and that even
a spice of vindictiveness, if there is fore-knowledge that
the commission of a crime will lead to social execration,
may act as a powerful deterrent from crime.

If, moreover, it is admitted to be " imperative " to
" restrain " offenders, surely the cheaper and more effective
the means the better. Science could certainly suggest
modes of prevention far more efficacious than the punish
ments now in vogue, while at the same time cheaper and
socially more advantageous. But it is probable that they
would strike us all as strange and cruel. For example, it
would be cheaper to brand or to mutilate than to imprison,
and far more terrifying to vivisect than to hang. More
over, in cases where even this deterrent failed, society
might console itself with the thought that it would reap
great benefits from the advance of knowledge derivable
from scientific executions. In the present state of moral
sentiment, while the criminal is regarded as a responsible

U

29o HUMANISM xvi

person who can to some extent control his actions, there
is little or no prospect of any such scientific revision of
punishments. But on what grounds could Mr. Blatchford
object to schemes of this kind ? Surely by appealing
from current morality to Science he has precipitated his
protege" from the frying-pan into the fire.

But even this is not all. Mr. Blatchford has fallen
into what is logically a still graver inconsequence. He
has so far argued — and we, to humour him, have joined
with him — quite in the ordinary common-sense way, as
if the mode and amount of the punishment of offenders
were an open question and dependent on the arbitrament
of society. But this wliole mode of reasoning involves the
assumption of human freedom and a denial of Determinism !
He and we have both assumed that even though the
criminal could not but commit his crime, yet society at
least was free to punish him, or to pardon, or to send
him to a hospital. But if Determinism is the true philo
sophy, this assumption is utter nonsense, and an alternative
to the punishment is just as unthinkable as to the crime.
Society can no more help itself than the criminal.
Whatever is and happens, must be and happen. Nothing
could possibly be otherwise. The murderer must commit
his crime, the police must catch him, the jury must convict,
the judge must condemn to death, the executioner must
hang, Mr. Blatchford must take society to task and scold
it and denounce its institutions, and fail to carry convic
tion ; he must contradict himself and use just the bad
arguments he does — and all this must have been pre
destined from all eternity !

It is astonishing that so good a reasoner as Mr.
Blatchford should not have perceived the incongruity ;
but like most Determinists he has tacitly assumed freedom
enough to grease the wheels of justice and to retain a
meaning in responsibility.

Hence it is by no momentary lapse that he falls into
an affirmation of Free Will. He is forced repeatedly to
use arguments which are nonsense unless Freedom is
real, because his whole case requires him to use them.

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 291

He could not be a social reformer without them. How
else could he argue that the social order can and should
be changed, or assert that disease may be prevented
(P- 9)> or Sa7 that we ought not to blame or punish (pp.
J9» 99> etc.), or declare (p. 236) "man cannot be blamed :
society cannot be blamed. But both can be altered:
by environment," or bring forward any measures for the
altering and improvement of the social order ? For all
these things imply that at least two courses of events
are possible — possible really and not merely to our
ignorance — and that it depends on human choice and
action which of them is to be realized. But in a fully
determined world whence are they to come ? It is vain
to suggest that somewhere or other there may be " a man
with reason and knowledge and inclination for the task of
improving society or the individual by teaching one or both."

If such a being exists, he will be one of the determined
forces of the universe, and as powerless as any of the rest
to alter its predestined course. The universe is destined
to be saved or to be damned — we do not know which.
And if we did know, it would not matter, seeing that we
could not act otherwise than we do. That, inexorably, is
the implication of Determinism. If we wish, then, to
think the world as alterable for the better, as capable of
varying its course, we must introduce some free agency
into it to infuse some indetermination into it. A very
little will suffice. A very little freedom will falsify the
doctrine that everything is foredoomed in one single and
inevitable way, and that nothing can change its character.
Once there are real alternatives, and real choices, and
real freedom in the world, man can master his fate and
remould himself.

This is the ennobling faith which every reformer must
hold ; but it is not Determinism. It is utterly incompatible
with Determinism of any sort or kind ; and if Mr. Blatch-
ford wishes to be consistent, he must choose between it
and Determinism. His choice will be a free and most
momentous one, but this need not prevent him from
weighing the alternatives which are put before him.

292 HUMANISM xvi

If he chooses Determinism, he renounces the attempt
to ' alter ' society and to guide its fated course. But he
may think that he has saved himself and the world from
the taint of irrationality which the belief in Freedom
would set upon it. But this surely would be a delusion.
If it is impossible and irrational to choose, then his very
choice of Determinism commits him to at least one
irrational act of choice. If he replies that this seeming
' choice ' too was determined, and that he could not have
chosen otherwise, then the belief that he did really choose
at least was an illusion.

Moreover, he will find that although he, by some
fortunate necessity, was impelled to think (what he
believes to be) the truth, others are by that same necessity
constrained to remain deluded and to believe in a
freedom which is irrational and impossible. Thus, one
way the world has of exhibiting its rationality to
a Determinist is to engender necessary errors and
delusions !

Again, in spite of his enlightenment, he will find it
just as impossible as heretofore to avoid relapsing into
forms of speech and modes of thought which have mean
ing only if the freedom they imply is not an illusion.
To be consistent, Determinism should erase from language
all such terms as ' can/ ' may,' ' ought,' ' should,' ' need
not,' ' if/ ' either . . . or/ ' perhaps/ Nor is this a mere
question of words ; when we use them, we really mean
them and really imagine, however mistakenly, that we
are speaking of real possibilities and alternatives. But
this is all wrong, if Determinism is right. We should
cleanse our minds of the attitudes of thought which
correspond to all this Libertarian language. Doubts,
hypotheses, possibilities, choices and alternatives should
be as impossible in thought as they are in reality. If,
however, as is probable, Mr. Blatchford also should
despair of clearing his mind of these delusions, must
he not resign himself to regard a universe which oj
necessity engenders and harbours them as truly expressive
of the nature of things ? But why in this case should

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 293

a universe which fosters such illusions strike him as
particularly hopeful or rational ?

If on the other hand he chooses to believe in Freedom
and prefers a world in which there can be real alternatives,
he will choose a world which can (perhaps) be altered
and improved. In such a world, of course, the desire
for reform can be rational, and the ordinary assumptions
of his words and thoughts and acts will not be stultified.

But he will not, even so, escape from the charge of
irrationality. For the first move of the Determinist will
be to bring this indictment against the ' free ' universe.
Such a universe cannot, he contends, be fully determined ;
and if there is to be detected anywhere within it the
slightest trace of indetermination, its rationality is com
promised beyond redemption. If, he declares, there is
anything anywhere of which the behaviour is undeter
mined, to however small an extent, the rational order
of the world is irretrievably ruined. Everything must
be absolutely fixed ; or else everything must get so loose
as to dissolve itself in chaos. The menace is so terrible,
the danger is so imminent, that it would seem to need
the recklessness of a sceptic to reply that since the
irrationality of the universe was manifest in either case,
he at least considered himself free to choose whichever
form thereof best pleased him ; while it would require an
unusual amount of philosophic courage to resist intimida-
ation and to dare to question the conclusiveness of the
deterministic plea.

Here then we come to the great antithesis of Freedom
and Determinism, which may well claim to be the ' blue-
ribbon ' problem of philosophy. Its claim to this proud
position rests in the first place on the fact that it is one
of the few philosophic problems which are capable of
interesting the ordinary man. Every one is capable of
feeling its central difficulty, the conflict and compulsion
of motives and the apparently ' free ' decision of the ' will.'
Every one also can perplex himself with the apparently
unanswerable arguments for Determinism. And so,
secondly, the problem seems a typical example of the

294 HUMANISM xvi

inherent debility of human reason, which here is driven
to assert the impossibility of what seems plain fact, and
involves itself in irrationality, whichever of the alternatives
it chooses.

This, however, is by no means wholly displeasing to
the ordinary man, who readily reconciles himself to a
situation which puzzles the professors of philosophy. He
can the better enjoy this speculative deadlock, that it
causes hardly any practical inconvenience. For in prac
tice we all agree to use language which (as we saw)
implies the reality of possibilities, alternatives and free
choices. The Determinist no doubt uses (or should
use) all this phraseology with a mental reservation. He
believes it to be an illusory consequence of our mortal
ignorance, and consoles himself with the thought that if
he knew everything, all this evidence of Freedom would
disappear. But this pious hope cannot be said to make
any practical difference. As an agent he must, in the
actual state of his knowledge, behave as if there were real
freedom in the world.

Hence it has been, very plausibly, contended that the
whole question is devoid of practical importance. If,
whatever the speculative position we may prefer, whether
we are Libertarians, Determinists or Sceptics, we are all
bound in our action to assume that some acts are free
and some alternatives real, while others are determined
and calculable, what need is there to solve the theoretic
problem ? Has it not practically solved itself? What
difference does it make which theory is true, if they all
lead to the same behaviour ? Nay, upon the latest and
most approved principles of ' pragmatic ' logic, must we
not hold that theories which lead to the same results in
practice are not really different at all, but only verbally
various ways of saying the same thing ?

This attractive way, however, of cutting the Gordian
knot appears to rest upon a misconception. The believer
in Freedom at least cannot admit that his belief makes
no difference to his acts, nor believe that the Determinist's
belief has no influence on his behaviour. He must point

295

out that if it is true that the alternative theories make no
practical difference the reason is that one of them, viz. the
Determinist, cannot be acted on, and that therefore the
pragmatic test cannot be applied to it. If and so long
as the Determinist acts as if he were free and able to
choose between alternative possibilities, the theory his
acts imply cannot be discriminated by its results from
that implied in the Libertarian's acts. But so soon as
the Determinist feels that he has no choice, and acts on
his belief, the Libertarian holds it will make a distinct
difference in his action. He will subject himself to all
the paralysing influences of Fatalism. He will abandon
the attempt to control his impulses. He will relax his
efforts to overcome the ' natural ' tendencies of his char
acter, and to resist the pressure of his environment. And
if one considers what the natural tendencies of the average
man at present are, it does not seem probable that the
effect of such self-indulgence will in the main be good
and elevating or even conducive to the survival of
Determinists. Thus the preaching of Determinism may
do much harm, by relaxing the fibres of men's moral
nature and by tempting them to let themselves drift upon
a current of lazy habit, which they take to be the irresist
ible stream of Fate. No doubt in practice a consistent
Determinist will hardly be found. But this is not to
show that Determinism is harmless, nor is it an argument
in its favour : and even temporary fits of ' slackness ' may
be morally disastrous.

Of course no harm will come of a merely theoretic
Determinism. To be refuted by its results a theory
must be acted on. Until it is acted on, its truth remains
in suspense, as a claim which has not been tested, or as a
plaything of idle speculation. And to show that it cannot
be acted on is to show, not that Determinism is harmless,
but that it is meaningless.

It would be too much, however, to expect Determinists
to assent to this conclusion. For it follows logically from
their assumption that no moral revolution will result from
the adoption of Determinism, because no man is free to

296 HUMANISM

XVI

adopt it, or not, as he pleases. Whatever view any one
adopts, he was fated to adopt. Whatever the moral
degeneration or dissolution the future may have in store
for us, it was preformed and predestined by the immutable
order of the universe. Hence it must seem idle to a
Determinist to deprecate or to deplore what no skill or
thought could have averted. It is silly to resent the
inevitable, and this does not become less silly if we
perceive also that our very resentment was inevitable
too.

We come, therefore, finally upon one of the most
remarkable peculiarities of the ' Free-Will ' controversy,
namely the fact that an argument which is valid and
cogent for those who have adopted one set of assumptions
has no cogency at all for those who have adopted the
other. Superficially this seems a paradox which lends
itself to sceptical conclusions : and these have accordingly
been drawn by most of the philosophers who observed this
singularity. But this is really a mistake : the true signi
ficance of the fact is quite different. In the end it turns
out to be a legitimate consequence of the reality of choices.
It merely means that, when we have chosen, we can abide
(up to a certain point) by the consequences of our choice,
and keep at bay the interpretations which would stultify
it. Hence we must expect to find that in a sense a con
sistent Determinism cannot strictly be refuted, refuted
that is by the purely, or merely, intellectual considerations
which it would itself accept as a conclusive refutation.
But we shall also find that the demand for such refutation
is itself an error, and that the possibility of a wilful (and
not necessitated) Determinism is quite consistent with the
reality of our Freedom. We shall also strive to vindicate
the plain man's faith in Freedom by explaining what is
the real nature of our Freedom, and by showing how it
may be conceived as a rational doctrine.

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 297

II

We have shown so far not only that it is grossly in
consistent in a Determinist to propose to reform the world,
but also that he could not act, either rationally or at all,
except on the assumption of Freedom. But we made no
attempt to explain either the truth contained in Deter
minism and the reason of its plausibility, or the real
nature of Freedom, nor did we try to answer the case
against Freedom as it is commonly presented. The whole
question, consequently, seems to have been left in a
thoroughly inconclusive and unsatisfactory condition.

We may now begin by considering the truth in
Determinism. Why is it that we all so frequently assume
that the future is fixed, that events can be calculated
beforehand, and that predictions can be made which will <
come true ? Why is it that so many philosophers go
further still and assume that all events are in this way
fully determined, and regard the idea that any event
should still be indeterminate, uncertain, incalculable or as
they technically say ' contingent,' as fatal to science and
as the very height of irrationality and absurdity ?

The answer to this question will easily be found by
any one who has trained himself to note that the ' truths '
we assume are always relative to some purpose in
which we are interested, and are not asserted aimlessly
and at random. Now mankind has always been intensely
interested in forecasting the future — for the best and most
cogent of reasons. For had we been unable to devise
methods of prediction, we should have remained the
helpless sports of circumstance. It is very unlikely that
we could have survived, and it is certain that we could
not have prepared for and controlled the course of
experience, even to the extent we now can. Hence
foreknowledge of the future is man's capital achievement,
an achievement of the greatest practical and vital value.
Man is distinctively the animal that ' looks before and
after,' that observes the present, and studies the past, in

298 HUMANISM

XVI

order to control the future. Naturally enough, his intelli
gence has been adjusted to and moulded upon this vital
necessity. And not only his intelligence, but his whole
nature. He has grown a strong intellectual and emotional
bias towards any idea that helps him to achieve his
purpose. He is willing and eager to hail it as ' true.'
Hence there has arisen a desire for prediction, a passion for
certainty, which in some selected spirits (philosophers to
wit) may be over-developed and rise to quite unreasonable
and self-defeating heights.

But how was this desire to foretell, and so to control,
the future, to find its satisfaction ? Well, mankind did
not know ; but mankind was willing to try. It tried in
all sorts of ways, and very queer and superstitious most
of them now seem to us. What oracle have human faith
and human craving left unconsulted, what mode of divina
tion have they failed to think of, from what mode of
propitiation have they shrunk, to what mode of magic
have they scrupled to immolate their dearest and their
best ? A potent array of institutions and observances, a
long list of pseudo-sciences, an astounding record of
irrational absurdities and atrocities, attest the reality and
persistence of the human desire to lift the veil of the
future. For this purpose the noblest of the ancients did
not disdain, as augurs to watch the flight of birds, as
haruspices to inspect the sacrificial entrails ; they were
proud to keep the Sybil's prophetic books or to trick the
fates and to pamper the prescience of the sacred chickens
with cunningly diluted gruel. No sooner had man looked
at the stars than the thought at once occurred to him
that these wonders of the sky must be fraught with signi
ficance for his terrestrial fortunes. And so he proceeded
to conceive the marvels of their rhythmic motions as
instruments of calculation, until the wisest of the ancients
did not deem it a waste of time to observe the con
junctions of planets that determined the fates of men, or
the portents of flimsy comets that were supposed to take
a keen interest in the fortunes of the solar system. Modern
astronomy is as much indebted to astrology for its birth

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 299

as to the practical necessity of determining the length
of the year and so the recurrence of the seasons and the
right time for the exercise of agricultural foresight. Most
of the ancient modes of divination, such as chiromancy,
geomancy, catoptromancy, rhabdomancy, sortilege and
incubation, have become merely learned names to most of
us. But their equivalents still survive, sustained by their
occasional success in satisfying human desires. The law,
even now, does not think it derogatory to its majesty to
persecute the poor palmists and fortune-tellers who try to
make a precarious living out of the curiosity of those who
despair of calculating their personal future by more
scientific means. And whenever a gathering of under
graduates has inspirited a table to turn, it is always asked
to indicate what horse is going to win whatever is the
next important race.

But it must not be thought that the history of human
credulity is merely a sickening and abject record of
human folly, which has no value for Science. For out of
all this mass of wild experimenting experience has
selected what was workable. By outcasting superstitions
Science segregates itself. Magic is the mother of Science,
much as Error is of Truth ; it is inferior to its offspring,
not in its conception or its pedigree, but in its efficiency.
Science is a system of magic formulas, which after many
trials and with many tribulations man has made. But
the formulas (or ' laws ') of Science really and habitually
work, and so verify themselves and are accepted as true :
those of its unsuccessful and discarded rivals are only
occasionally supported by a ' coincidence ' or by the
psychic tendency of many beliefs to verify themselves.

A scientific formula which does not work is impossible
by definition. For if a formula fails to work when
applied to the phenomena it was devised to control, it is
condemned as false, and we seek to supersede it with a
better. Nevertheless the fundamental ideas of Science
are the same as those of pseudo-science or of magic.
They are all ineradicably and intensely human, as
befits the descendants of the human passion to control

300 HUMANISM xvi

experience. Astrology, for example, rests on the same
assumption as the most scientific Determinism, and only
carries it one step further. It represents as calculable fact
what Science as yet is content to treat as an unattained
ideal, and so far from being intrinsically absurd the claim
of astrology should be what every man of science must in
theory aspire to. For if it is true, as Science assumes,
that the universe is a fully determined and connected
system, it ought theoretically to be possible to start in it
from any changes which occur at any point, and, if we
know them well enough to trace out their connexions, to
calculate out the determinate alterations they must entail
at any other point. Why not, therefore, observe the
wanderings of the planets, and predict thereby whether
our neighbour's dog is destined to recover from the
mange ? Nothing can be so lofty as to tear itself away
from the causal connexion wherewith Science grasps it,
nothing so mean as to escape from its clutches. Scientific
' law ' cares for the least as for the greatest.

The conception then of ' law ' has proved our magic
passport to the order of nature. It has worked so well
that many of us have quite forgotten its homely and
human origin, and abstracting it from its context, have
grown to regard it with superstitious reverence. It is
often looked upon as a magical and a priori thing, which
has no origin in the experience it controls and no
dependence on the nature which ' obeys ' it. We even
hope by thus exalting it to extract from it a guarantee
that the course of nature, which has heretofore behaved
conformably with our idea of ' law,' will for ever continue
to show itself thus amenable to our needs. But we may
postulate and proclaim a priori necessities of thought as
much as ever we please ; we cannot prove that it is an a
priori necessity of thought that the course of nature
should for ever conform to our a priori necessities of
thought. And even if it were, it would not set at rest
the question as to what can guarantee a complete harmony
between our thought and things.

But of all such a priori thinking our wishes are the

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 301

fathers. The truth is much simpler and more prosaic.
We have found that by assuming all events to be
determined by ' laws ' which (by a process of continuous
approximation) we can ' discover ' and formulate, we can
reduce chaos to cosmos, and control our lives. But Law
means Determinism. It means that there are series of
events such that, once we know their law, we can start
from A and predict B, and then C, and then D, and so
on for ever, in an absolutely certain sequence. If we
choose to believe that anything was able and likely to
follow upon anything else, the conception of law would
be abrogated. But if we choose to believe in law, we
believe that the course of events is in principle calculable
and predictable. And if we ' discover ' enough ' laws,'
i.e. hit upon formulas which work, we can, more or less
approximately, forecast what is going to happen and take
measures accordingly.

This then is the true reason why we all have a bias
towards Determinism, in so far as we sanction and pursue
the aim of Science. We will to believe in law, and law
involves determination, so that Determinism seems to
become the price of prediction. So whenever we want to
forecast the future, we turn Determinists, and calculate
as though the future were already determined. We must
do this, or give up the attempt at prediction. In so far
as a thing is ' free ' to act thus or otherwise, its action
is unpredictable. This then is the meaning of call
ing Determinism the universal postulate of Science
as such.

But are the postulates of Science true ? Of this
nothing can assure us but experience, and experience
pursued to the point at which nothing new can happen
any longer. In our experience this is not (yet ?) true.
Novelties are still intruding on us daily. And so in
point of fact our scientific guesses are often wrong in
detail, and deficient in exactitude. In all the sciences
' laws of nature ' are being rejected, re-enacted, revised
and re-modelled daily. They are 'true' only in so far
as they work, and are able to anticipate results which

302 HUMANISM

XVI

experience confirms. There is no more mystical nor
higher test of their truth.

Nor does the general postulate that there are specific
laws really rest upon any other ground. It too is held to
be true, because it works. And no cunning of philo
sophic system-building can really safeguard it any other or
any a priori truth. Our postulate might cease to work at
any point or time. However dear and indispensable it
had been to us, however deeply we had grafted it upon
the roots of our being, however strenuously we might
protest against a failure that would put us to intellectual
confusion, we should have to submit to the rulings of
experience and to recognize the de facto limitations of
our principle. In point of fact our intellectual debacle
would not be quite so terrible as is often represented.
If our postulate ceased to be usefully applicable to our
experience, we should say that it had only seemed to be
true, but was not, and search for some more tenable
assumption. Or again it might work for some things
and not for others. There is nothing inconceivable in a
universe only partly ' subject to law.' It would be incon
venient, no doubt, especially if we were uncertain about
the limits of its law-abidingness, and we should therefore
admit the existence of this defect only in the last
extremity. Some heroic souls might even persist to the
last in their faith that the whole must be subject to law,
though no mortal vision could ever detect its laws. But
the majority of men would judge it better to get half a
loaf than no bread, and would content themselves with
believing the world as calculable as they could practically
make it, and would not declare the world irrational and
Science vain, merely because they could not calculate
everything.

If then the world, or any part of it, happened to be
' free ' and therefore incalculable, we should so far find it
inconvenient. But the inconvenience need not be con
siderable, if in point of fact the sphere of Freedom is
restricted and its amount is not great. Hence the in
convenience of abandoning a complete Determinism may

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 303

easily be less than that of believing our direct experience
of Freedom, our immediate consciousness of the reality
of choices, to be quite illusory. For, as we saw in
the first part, Determinism also, by implying this con
sequence, administers a severe shock to our faith in the
rationality of existence.

In point of fact and as things stand, the inconvenience
of the belief in Freedom is wholly sentimental from the
standpoint of the Determinist, and wholly imaginary
from that of the Libertarian. For all practical purposes
the belief in Freedom does not cause the slightest
inconvenience. For owing to the limitations of our
actual knowledge, there is always a great multitude of
events which we consider to be theoretically calculable,
but either cannot calculate at all in practice, or can
calculate only so roughly as to leave extensive scope
for what might be ' free ' variations. If, therefore, some
of these events were really incalculable, it would make no
practical, but only a sentimental, difference to us. For,
alike whether we thought them true or not, we should
of course continue to treat as calculable all of them we
wanted to calculate, and so should score as many successes
as heretofore.

Secondly, and this is a still more important mitigation
of the alleged inconvenience, we often as it is find our
selves in the position of having to deal with what we
believe to be fully determined events, but with a know
ledge of their nature so imperfect that we cannot but
distrust the accuracy of our forecasts. But we do not on
this account despair of calculating. For it is often
possible, nevertheless, to calculate within what limits the
actual result is likely to lie, or again to work out the
alternatives which the defects of our knowledge leave
open. In both these cases, therefore, all that is affected
is, not the deterministic method of calculation, but only
the confidence with which we regard its results.

If now we abstain from conceiving Freedom (wrongly)
as an agency which is by nature infinite and unlimited,
either in its power of breaking down habit and upsetting

304 HUMANISM xvi

expectation, or of suggesting alternatives, what reason is
there why the admission of a certain flavour of Freedom,
of a certain degree of indetermination, should seriously
interfere with our actual practices of calculation ? Con
sider e.g. the case of human action. There is no practical
difference in the way we regard it, despite the tremendous
contrast of our theories. As it is, both Determinists and
Libertarians are fully aware that they hardly ever know
the character and circumstances of their fellow-men well
enough to make sure of foreseeing their exact behaviour.
Both agree also that it would be preposterous on this
account to regard human actions as utterly incalculable.
Both parties are agreed that whether there is freedom in
human action or not, human action is more or less
calculable ; both parties hold that it presents to our
knowledge a finite number of alternatives and a limited
extent of possibilities. And both parties are fully
entitled by their theories to come to this practical agree
ment. Which is of course the reason why both parties
can live together sensibly in society.

The Libertarian, however, would be disposed to declare
the whole inconvenience an imaginary bugbear of the
opposing theory. For he would deny the necessity of
conceiving ' free ' acts as quite incalculable. He would
claim that his theory also was fully competent to satisfy
the practical and the scientific demands for a foreseeing
of events, even though it was bound to reject the meta
physical theory into which they had been perverted.

For why after all, he might urge, should Freedom be
conceived as an infinite and uncontrollable force which is
radically disruptive of all rationality and order in the
universe ? Because certain philosophers desire to conceive
iit so for controversial purposes? Because Determinists
cannot bear to be deprived of a bogey which forms their
sole argument against Freedom ? Why should what he
believes to be the truth be sacrificed to the interests of a
philosophic party ? How thoroughly characteristic of a
certain type of philosopher ! Your philosopher is a most
exacting creature. If you give him an inch, he at once

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 305

takes an ell, and claims the all. He must have all or
nothing. He will not compromise with the clearest facts.
If the facts confute his favourite theory, he denounces the
' scepticism ' of their upholders. So here. A world that
is not absolutely determined, he is determined to treat
as a chaos. Nothing like our actual world can satisfy
any of his demands. For he is never satisfied to use a
principle just for what it is worth and in cases where
experience shows it to be applicable. He is always
wanting to make it absolute, and to apply it to the
universe without reservation and discretion, dogmatically
and a priori. And it is little enough he knows about
the universe ! His ' metaphysical ' knowledge is a gigantic
bluff. For it is one of his oddities that the less he knows,
the more confident he grows. If, for example, there is
the least ground in his experience for holding that the
world is (in some one) sense one, his imagination will
forthwith proclaim it as a universal and necessary truth
that the universe is one also in innumerable other senses
and is under an a priori pledge to behave itself according
to his desires and expectations also in a multitude of
other respects, which he has not inquired into and about
which he knows nothing ! Those, of course, who love
the philosophic type of mind will understand engaging
little idiosyncrasies such as these, and make allowance
for them. But to the plain man's common sense they
must often prove perplexing and alarming.

In this case, moreover, the metaphysician's ' logical '
temper works very unjustly. He refuses to regard the
forecasting of human action as a matter of practical con
venience and its principle as a matter of scientific method.
He insists on taking it as something absolute and meta
physical, as an indefeasible revelation of the ultimate
nature of things. So he is not only driven to misconceive
its meaning and to exaggerate its scope, but is blinded
to obvious facts which every one else has no difficulty in
seeing, and beguiled into a most outrageous and in
defensible travesty of the indeterminist position.

During the last thirty years quite a number of dis-

x

XVI

306 HUMANISM

tinguished British philosophers have set out to discuss
the question of Freedom. Most of them have confused
the issue by playing upon the different senses of the
word. Not a few of them have attempted to hoodwink
the public by assurances that ' self-determination ' was
the only kind of Freedom thinkable or ethically needed.
But every one of them has propounded the same caricature
of the freedom of indetermination. And not one of them
has made the slightest attempt to show that the doctrine
they denounced was actually held by any Libertarian,
or formed a logical deduction from which no Libertarian
could escape.1

Now the caricature of Freedom which is in vogue for
controversial purposes is, briefly, this : If you allege that
there can be anything, however slightly, undetermined
about any action, you allege the reality of motiveless
choice. But this, so far from safeguarding responsibility,
really renders responsibility impossible. For you allege
that there is nothing in the agent's character or circum
stances to determine his act in one way or the other.
But if any choice is motiveless, all choice is motiveless.
Any one, therefore, may do anything. The Pope is as
likely to advocate atheism in his next Encyclical and to
make a Cardinal of Mr. Blatchford as to condemn
' modernism ' and the writings of M. Loisy ; the Tsar is as
likely to declare for the Social Revolution as for further
repression, and to become a Jew as to rebuild his navy.
Thus all reasonable expectation is defeated ; all continuity
of character is destroyed, and with it all responsibility,
which rests on the connexion between action and char
acter. In short the inevitable conclusion is that a world,
into which the least taint of Freedom enters, lapses into
chaos.

Now though common sense might find it pretty hard
to dissect this sort of argument and to refute its premisses,
it has little hesitation in declaring that its conclusions are

1 Henry Sidgwick forms an honourable exception to whom these remarks do
not apply. The discussion in his Methods of Ethics is scrupulously fair, and
excellent so far as it goes.

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 307

absurd. Nobody has ever believed that in declaring in
favour of ' free-will ' he was committing himself to any
such consequences. Nobody, therefore, could possibly be
a Libertarian, if this were what Libertarianism meant.
Probably, therefore, the Determinists have merely cari
catured their opponents' position.

Investigation speedily raises this probability to a
certainty. The grotesque cockshy which serves as the
type of Libertarianism for the purpose of deterministic
refutations is an absurd exaggeration of certain of its
implications. But it is probably prompted, not so much
by conscious unfairness as by an unconscious bias. It is
derived ultimately from an unwillingness to take from
experience our notions, either of the nature or of the
range, of our Freedom. For if philosophers had only
been willing to admit that alike what our freedom was,
how much of it we had, how powerful it was, how far it
baffled expectation, how far it loosened the joints of the
universe, were all questions to be decided by empirical
observation, they could hardly have helped seeing that
their proof of the impossibility of Freedom was fallacious,
and that Freedom, so far from being a puzzle leading to
terrible consequences, was involved in every unbiassed
description of the act of choice.

-The central fallacy in the Determinist argument lies in
the assumption that if a choice is real, it is necessarily
motiveless. This assumption, however, rests on a confu
sion between three distinct conceptions — choice, absence of
motive, and indetermination. Choice (in the Libertarian
sense) implies indetermination, but not absence of motive.
A choice is necessarily between alternatives, but these
would not be such if they did not appeal to the chooser
and influence his character. It is a choice, therefore,
between alternative goods, and these goods are motives to
action which cannot all be realized together. Choice,
therefore, implies motives, but if it is a real choice, it is
really ' free ' to choose between them. Motiveless choice,
therefore, is an implicit contradiction. Now all the
terrible consequences of Libertarianism as depicted by the

308 HUMANISM

XVI

Determinist, follow not from the choice, but from its
assumed lack of motive. They are repudiated, therefore,
in repudiating the latter.

Again, it is an error to conceive indetermination as
absence of motive. Lack of decision is not the same as
lack of motive. What is indeterminate in the act con
templated as ' free/ is precisely what is determined by the
choice between the motives. The act, therefore, is in
determinate until we choose, and determine it. The
indetermination is real, but it is determinable, and so
terminable.

Now that such is the nature of the indetermination in
acts of ' free ' choice is precisely what introspection reveals.
We never feel that we have to choose out of an infinite
expanse of possibilities. The alternatives, which appeal
to us and are real for us, are never numerous. Our
character, our circumstances, our history, our habits, our
ideals and notions of what is ' good/ do by far the greater
part of the selection and immensely narrow down the
field of abstract possibility. This is a simple fact of
direct observation. But it is no less obvious that though
all these forces determine by far the greater part, say
nine-tenths, of our conduct, and form a fairly rigid frame
work which our ' freedom ' presupposes and with which,
and upon which, it operates, yet they nevertheless do not
determine everything, but allow scope for apparently
' free ' choices, which are accompanied by a heightened
and peculiar sense of power and responsibility. Why,
then, should we refuse to acknowledge this fact ? Why
should we not admit it as evidence that the choices, which
seem real and feel real, are real ?

Certainly the ' convenience ' of conceiving events as
determined affords no cogent reason for blinding ourselves
to the facts. We have seen that there are limits to the
convenience of methodological fictions. Nor does the
difficulty lie in the conception of our nature which we
have to entertain, if we would think it capable of
Freedom.

For we have merely to think our nature as partly

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 309

plastic, and such that all its reactions have not yet grown
rigid. We know that habits grow upon us, and that
when they are firmly fixed, they irresistibly control our
conduct. But while they are growing, may there not be
a stage in which our response is still variable and really
indeterminate, however determinate it may grow after
wards ? And why regard this as ' irrational ' ? Is it not
the essential function of ' reason ' to keep habits plastic in
their responses to the requirements of life ? Do we not
know that, if anything can raise us out of the rut of
hampering habit, it is ' reason ' ? Is not ' reason ' con
tinually breaking up the habits which have grown too
rigid for our good, restoring the plasticity of youth, and
clearing the ground for fresh growth. This, if we look
not to the abstract word, but to what it really does, is the
true meaning of ' reason.'

This, moreover, is why the experience of Freedom is
so closely bound up with the moral struggle. For at first
the old habits and desires, which have become ' bad,' will
frequently prevail over ' reason ' ; in the end they will be
transformed into new habits which are ' good.' But while
the process lasts, there will be a plastic stage in which
action will be variable and indeterminate.

Clearly, therefore, Freedom is a concomitant of mental
and moral growth, a consequence of an incomplete and
therefore plastic nature. The alternatives, moreover, be
tween which we ' freely ' choose, will be the outcome of
that nature. Both will always spring from that nature,
and remain connected with it by psychological lines of
descent which our logic can retrace. Our choices, there
fore, will be real for our natures under our circumstances.
Whichever alternative our act selects, will seem continuous
with what we were and did before. It will not appear
upon the scene as an unforeseen irruption from nowhere.
It will seem to us a probable and reasonable thing to
have done. It will astonish no one who knows, or thinks
he knows, us. But we should not have judged otherwise
the alternative which was rejected. Had it been enacted,
our friends would still have said they quite expected it.

310 HUMANISM xvi

Before the event, therefore, either event seems equally
probable. After the event, both still seem intelligible,
though (according to the Determinist) only that which
actually occurred was ever possible. But is it not absurd
to say of such a doctrine that it destroys the continuity
of character and the rationality of the universe ? Has
it not rather succeeded in satisfying the demand for a
calculable order of events by representing Freedom as a
choice between alternatives all of which are calculable,
and in a manner rational ?

It would seem, therefore, that the conception of Free
dom, just as the plain man experiences and understands
it, is quite rational and philosophic, and that it can be
' refuted ' only by being travestied. But can we assume
the offensive in our turn and refute Determinism ?

The difficulty of this undertaking is due to a very
simple cause. We have seen that the truth underlying
metaphysical Determinism is its usefulness when conceived
as a method of Science. It follows from this use that
every fact presented by every science is capable of being con
ceived deterministically. Consequently we never seem to
get at any facts which can be used against the deterministic
view. Even our ' freely chosen ' alternative may be repre
sented as the only one which could have been chosen.
Hence a direct disproof of Determinism seems impossible.

Our attack, therefore, must be more subtly planned.
We may ask why does any one choose to be a Deter
minist ? Now any one regarding Determinism merely as
a postulate of Science has, of course, a cogent answer.
If we desire to know and to predict and to prepare, we
have no other choice. We must adopt the assumption
which enables us to attain our end. So far from ques
tioning this assumption the Libertarian must try to show
that his own position is not incompatible with it.

He may, however, draw attention to the voluntary
character of this fundamental postulate. Apparently, he
may infer, the power of choice and the desire to attain
ends are superior even to this great principle. For they
select and constitute it. We can choose to adopt the

xvi FREEDOM AND RESPONSIBILITY 311

Determinist principle. We do choose to adopt it,
because we prefer it to its alternative and it yields us
what we want, viz. the power to control events. Now
perhaps it may be denied that this refutes Determinism,
because even though our choice seems free, it may really
be determined. But still the fact shows that our human
contribution to our conception of reality cannot be quite
a negligible quantity and not worth mentioning. Is it
not strange that the helpless victims of Fate should play
such a leading part in the making of that Fate ?

A still more curious fact for Determinism to consider
is that though the whole world may be thought of as
determined, it is just as easy and just as reasonable to
think of it as pervaded by a streak of Freedom. The
Libertarian view, as we have described it, is just as
possible and as rational as the Determinist ; i.e. it is
just as capable of interpreting the facts. If one or the
other is to be preferred, it must be by an act of choice.
But this choice cannot be determined by logical considera
tions. For as a purely logical theory either will work.
Our choice, therefore, must be a logically undetermined,
i.e. a free, one between theories whose intellectual appeal
seems equal, because both yield consistent interpretations
which cover the whole field of nature.

Even, therefore, if a Determinist should never choose
again, must he not exercise his freedom at least once
in adopting his theory ? Must he not prove its truth
and make the interpretation which supplies his evidence,
by a fiat of his will ? But is not a Determinism which
depends for its establishment on a free choice a self-
contradiction of Determinism ? We can be Determinists
only because we are determined to deny our freedom.
And because we are free, we are free to do even this !

In any case is it not a humiliation for Determinism
to have to recognize a free choice underlying its whole
fabric ? For it has defined such choices as irrational.
To a Libertarian on the other hand the situation seems
quite reasonable. He has not defined choice as irrational
as such, and has no prejudice against a ' free ' one.

312 HUMANISM xvi

Nothing could be more natural to him than that the
affirmation and the denial of Freedom should both be free
choices. As William James aptly says, " Freedom ought
to be freely espoused by men who can equally well turn
their backs upon it."

Nor is the philosophic situation we have reached a
paradox. It is quite in accord with the results of
examining other fundamental questions. It is becoming
clearer and clearer that ultimately our convictions every
where rest upon acts of faith and of choice, which make
demands upon the moral virtue of courage, and must
precede what is called the 'proof of their truth. The
fact that we must believe that we are free to some extent
and that our consciousness of choice is not delusive, and
so must choose Freedom rather than Necessity, does not
stand alone. We must, for example, have faith also and
must choose to believe that the world is orderly rather
than chaotic, in order to acquire the notion of the
uniformity of nature ; i.e. we must choose Science rather
than impotence. We must choose to believe that our
experience is real and no dream, and that its incidents
are not the figments of a nightmare ; i.e. we must choose
a society rather than a solipsism. And lastly, we must
choose to believe that the struggle of life is worth living
and worth trying, and not worthless ; i.e. we must choose
a sort of optimism and not a pessimism.

In none of these cases, perhaps, can our position be
established coercively against the contrary bias. For in
all of them we have to make our venture and to choose
our side, before we get the evidence which verifies and
confirms our choice.

But what finer proof could there be of the fact that
the functions of our intellect are intimately bound up
with those of our will and our moral qualities, and that
our ' reason ' is designed to co-operate with our feelings
and our instincts, and not to hold stupidly aloof and to
criticize without understanding the dumb faiths of the
living creeds which guide man's responses to the require
ments of life ?

XVII
THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY1

ARGUMENT

Is man really distinguished above other animals by his preoccupation with
death ? If he is, he will show a concern about his future life of which
there are few traces. Naturally, because hating to think of death, we
avoid thinking of a future life. The practical inconvenience of the
thought, and its relegation to the realm of ' faith. ' Is Spiritism an
exception ? Yes, but that is why it fails to become popular. Other
religious doctrines held in a peculiar manner, and called up or dismissed
according to the sentiment of the moment. Why, then, has an entirely
contrary impression prevailed? (i) the indifference of the mass versus
the vocal few ; (2) the memory of bygone interest. The possibility of
testing the issue and discovering the facts by the questionnaire of the
American Branch of the Psychical Research Society. Social taboos as
bars to inquiry. The world not unknowable. The old fear of know
ledge. Magic and Science. The need of social support in discovery.

IT is a venerable commonplace that among the melan
choly prerogatives which distinguish man from the other

1 This essay appeared in the Fortnightly Review for September 1901. It
was intended to draw attention to the inquiry mentioned on pp. 328-330. Some
3000 answers were obtained, and, so far as they bear on the question which
directly concerns the Society for Psychical Research, viz. to what extent is there
a desire to know ? — they have been discussed by me in a report in Part 49 of
the Proceedings of the S. P. R. The whole material, however, is so extensive
and psychologically so valuable as to need fuller treatment — when some one
finds time to do it.

I may here avail myself of the occasion of expressing my conviction that
there exist a number of questions concerning the psychological foundations of
ethics, aesthetics, and logic which urgently need study by statistical methods.
We have always to find out how men actually do feel and think before we can
safely generalize or systematize as to what they ought to feel and think. Now at
present the actual facts are very imperfectly known, even in the case which
has received most attention, — that of the religious consciousness. As a rule
writers have been content to go for their facts to their own preconceptions or to
the analysis of their own individual consciousness. At most, they have noted, in
a cursory and reluctant way, the more obvious varieties of sentiment whose
existence was forced upon them by their notoriety. But there is no guarantee
that all the relevant types of sentiment are even known to science ; we have
certainly no data for gauging their relative frequency. A question like this, e.g.

313

314 HUMANISM

XVII

animals and bestow a deeper significance on human life
is the fact that man alone is aware of the doom that
terminates his earthly existence, and on this account
lives a more spiritual life, in the ineffable consciousness
of the ' sword of Damokles ' which overshadows him and
weights his lightest action with gigantic import. Nay,
more ; stimulated by the ineluctable necessity of facing
death, and of living so as to face it with fortitude,
man has not abandoned himself to nerveless inaction, to
pusillanimous despair ; he has conceived the thought, he
has cherished the hope, he has embraced the belief, of a
life beyond the grave, and opened his soul to the religions
which baulk the king of terrors of his victims and defraud
him of his victory. Thus, the fear of death has been
redeemed and ennobled by the consoling belief in immor
tality, a belief from which none are base enough to
withhold their moral homage, even though the debility
of mortal knowledge may debar a few from a full
acceptance of its promise. Such are the themes of
endless dithyrambs, of inexhaustible eloquence on the
part of our poets and preachers, such the constituents of
a volume of uncontested literary tradition which the
hardiest sceptic could scarcely dare to question.

And yet to one regarding human action in the merely
inquisitive temper of psychologic science this mass of
literary conventions is by no means above suspicion.
If we look closely, is it so certain that it fully represents

What percentage of human beings use respectively aesthetical, emotional,
prudential, and strictly ethical modes of valuation in their judgments concerning
the actions commonly classed as ' moral ' ?— is at present simply unanswerable.
But it ought to be capable of being answered, if not with mathematical exactness,
yet with practically sufficient accuracy. And until we can answer it ethics will
never be a science, and moralists will continue to beat the air and to tilt at
windmills. I should propose, therefore, as a counsel of perfection, to be adopted
on that happy day (now, I trust, approaching) when philosophers will no longer
content themselves with idle speculation, but will speculate only to interpret and
investigate the facts which form the final test of speculation, that societies be
formed for the study of the psychological facts of actual human sentiment in
these regions. Such societies would have to formulate their questions in a
simple, interesting, and concrete way, to circulate them and to tabulate the
answers. Such methods would, I believe, prove more fruitful than the laborious
mimicry of physiology which at present passes for experimental psychology,
though they need not conflict with the latter, and indeed might incidentally
suggest to it some experiments really worth making.

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 315

the actual sentiments and accords with the actions of
men ? Is the assumption either of a universal conscious
ness of death or of a universal desire for immortality
really so irrefragable ? Certainly the evidence in its
favour is far scantier and more ambiguous than we were
inclined to suppose, and there are ugly facts which seem
to put a different complexion on the matter. The
ordinary conduct of men affords but little support for
the notion that their life is a constant meditation upon
death, tempered by the joyful anticipation of immortality.
A visitor from Mars, dispassionately inquiring into human
conduct and motive, might find it hard to detect more
foreknowledge of death in men than in animals. From
the palace to the hovel, from the laboratory to the
oratory, he would find men everywhere pursuing ends of
the earth, earthly, living for the present, or if circumstances
forced them to take thought for the morrow, concerning
themselves only with their immediate future in this
world ; while of the ' other- worldliness,' so often preached
and preached against in the literature, he would hardly
find a trace. To find it a dominating, or even an
important, influence in human psychology he would have
to seek it, not in the churches or the universities, and still
less amid the bustle of active life, but in the asylums in
which are secluded the unhappy victims of religious
mania or melancholy, in whom an insane logic has
overpowered the healthy indifference to death and its
consequences, which characterizes the make-up of the
normal mind. And this impression would be enhanced
rather than erased if our Martian critic at last succeeded
in observing the tremendous shock which the ordinary
man receives when he for the first time truly realizes that
his days are numbered. For such effects would seem to
testify to the success with which the thought of death has
until then been kept out of consciousness.

Of course the fact that men habitually live in the
present, hating to think of the future, and detesting any
thing that reminds them of death, has not, in another
connexion, escaped the sagacity of moralists and

316 HUMANISM

XVII

preachers. Many of their happiest efforts are concerned
with castigating this particular form of human weakness
and exhibiting its insensate folly. And in so doing our
teachers have been no doubt abundantly justified. Only
it appears to have escaped their notice that this count of
their indictment against human nature accords none too
well with their doctrine that death and immortality are
absorbing objects of meditation. If it be true that we
are culpably careless of the future, recklessly bent on
suppressing all thought of death, it can hardly be that
we live oppressed by the shadow of death, and consumed
with desire for the consolations of a future life.

For if there is something wrong about the tradition as
to the psychological importance of the thought of death,
a similar error will probably be found to pervade also the
traditional estimate of the importance of immortality.
Unless men think constantly of death, they have no
occasion to think of a future life. And as a matter of
fact there seems to be the same dearth of tangible and
indisputable evidence to attest the existence of a wide
spread preoccupation with the possibility of a future life.

Subjects which arouse wide and deep human interest
will not down : from their deep-seated springs they
bubble up through the crust of convention and inundate
the arid surface of human life. They are constantly talked
about, they fill the columns of the newspapers, they demand
and obtain State support, they are lectured upon at the
universities, they are cultivated by societies of enthusiasts,
they are fostered by abundant supplies of the sinews of
war. But of any symptom of the kind, to bear out the
doctrine that men are keenly desirous of establishing
their immortality, or even interested in the question at
all, our Martian philosopher would detect little or nothing.
It is a subject hardly ever mentioned in conversation, and
indeed one which it would be bad form to allude to
seriously. Ghost stories, usually of a palpably absurd
and apocryphal kind, find admission into the newspapers
only towards the end of the silly season, when the giant
gooseberry has ceased to grow and the sea-serpent to

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 317

agitate its cumbrous coils. No State has ever appointed a
Royal Commission to inquire into the alarming allega
tion that its citizens are immortal, and cannot, if the worst
comes to the worst, be finally disposed of by the hangman ;
no Legislature has ever contained a member 'faddy' enough
to hold that the decision of this question had an important
bearing on the greatest happiness of the greatest number,
and to demand from the supreme official of a State
Church a report on the prospective condition of the masses
in the future life, and suggestions aiming at its amelioration.
At no university are there any researches conducted with
a view to a scientific solution of the problem ; at most of
the seats of learning, indeed, the attempt to do so would,
in spite of our boasted freedom of research, be extremely
hazardous, while a scientist who came forward with
evidence tending to discredit and disprove the detested
doctrine would be received with impunity and applause.

But, it will be objected, are you not overlooking
the churches, and are they not conspicuous enough in
advocating ' the hope of immortality ' to the very verge
of nausea ? Precisely so, I would reply, the churches
have their own peculiar methods of handling the subject,
and men have their own peculiar methods of treating
matters of religious faith. That is why the religious
dogma of immortality cannot without reserve be adduced
as evidence of a spontaneous human interest in the alleged
fact. What the dogma means and what it proves may be
considered later ; at present it need only be urged that
to be interested in immortality as a matter of religious
faith, is not necessarily, nor usually, to be interested in it
as a matter of scientific fact, or to think about it as a
factor in ordinary life.

If you set aside the testimony of the churches, what
of the Society for Psychical Research ? Is it not a
society, and learned, and devoted to the scientific elucida
tion of this very problem ? And does not its existence
dispose of the reproach that men do nothing to investigate
the supreme mysteries of their existence ?

Now it would ill become one who has been a patient

3i8 HUMANISM

XVII

member of this much-enduring society for eighteen years
(ever since it flashed across him that the subject had
never been investigated) to depreciate its importance and
its value ; but when this eminently respectable body is
expected to atone for the apathy of a whole world, and
put forward as conclusive proof of the existence of
universal interest in a future life and as the exemplar and
high-water mark of scientific research into its possibility,
it is hard to refrain from the exclamation Parturiunt
monies ! For what is the Psychical Research Society that
for its sake judgment should not be passed upon the world?
In the first place its officials would probably protest
vehemently, and not without reason, against the assump
tion that its only, or even its chief, object was to conduct
a scientific investigation into the question of a future life.
In the second place its membership, after twenty years of
strenuous and not unfruitful labour, remains stationary at
less than 1500. In the third place its subscription is a
guinea, and its gross income seems to be less than ^2000.
Can any one who reflects what these figures mean cling
to the preposterous delusion that men are actively desirous
of finding out about their future ? In the whole wide
world, it seems, there are almost 1500 persons taking an
annual guinea's worth of scientific interest in finding out
whether they have anything to look forward to after
death, and if so what; nearly 1500 persons who are
willing to pay for the possibility of this knowledge as
much as for a box seat at a theatre ! And observe that
we are assuming what is very improbable, viz. that all the
members are really interested and regular subscribers.
Again, the total sum contributed to Psychical Research is
well under ^2000 ! It would be hard to mention a human
fad or hobby, however trivial and despicable, which cannot
make a better showing, to which there are not devoted
more money, more time, more zeal, than to what is
supposed to be the most important of all questions. If
people really thought so, why don't they subscribe to
have the matter properly investigated, and why should it
be easier to raise the funds for a hospital for leprous cats

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 319

than for a laboratory in which to test the prima facie
evidence for human immortality ?

Surely the paradox of such a state of affairs would be
a sheer impossibility, if there really existed any desire for
probing into the mystery of death. Is it not obvious on
the face of it then, if there exists a desire for a future life
in any sense, it is not a desire for scientific knowledge
thereof, but a feeling of a very peculiar character which
well merits further analysis? It is an attempt at such an
analysis that I shall venture to contribute to the study of
human psychology.

There is clearly some grave error in the plea embodied
in the literary tradition we began by stating. But I am
very far from thinking that it is mere cant and sheer
humbug, or consciously deceptive. I hope to show rather
that it springs in good faith from a natural illusion, and
even that, in a manner, while distorting, it reflects a real
truth about human feeling. And in explaining away this
misleading tradition, I hope at the same time to divest of
its paradoxical appearance the suggestion that the vast
majority of men either do not desire a future life at all, or
only do so in such a curious and limited way that this desire
is a negligible quantity in the estimation of their actions.

I shall most fitly begin by suggesting an explanation
of the phenomenon that de facto so little account is taken
of the inevitableness of death. That this must be the
case is a result which follows from the general principle
that our attitude towards all the aspects of life, must be
such as will enable us to act vigorously and efficiently.
Applied to the prospect of death, this principle renders
it certain that the thought of death cannot be allowed
to paralyse action, that means must be discovered for
carrying on the business of life in death's despite. Of
such means two are most prominent, the suppression of
the thought of death by a resolute and systematic
determination not to entertain it, and a religious rein-
terpretation which so transfigures it that it no longer forms
an impediment to action. Of these the latter is clearly
the more truly logical and satisfactory, but as a matter

320 HUMANISM

XVII

of fact men mostly prefer (and probably always have
preferred) the former alternative, and for ever strive to
thrust the unwelcome thought into the background of
consciousness. This is why all but the most inevitable
mention of it is tabooed in polite society. The method
on the whole is a social success, though it probably breaks
down at least once in the final crisis of every one's life.

The next step in our investigation will be to consider
how our attitude towards death affects the ' desire for a
future life.' Now we know that most of the religions have
insisted on the fact of immortality and made it man's
great consolation in view of the prospect of death. Or,
at least, that is what the religious doctrines appear to aim
at. But it also seems probable that the great majority
of men, instead of thinking of death tempered with
immortality, prefer not to think of death at all. Hence
it is natural that what is associated with the thought of
something so distasteful should itself become distasteful.
Need we look further for the reason why the prospect of
a future life is, by the generality of men, regarded without
enthusiasm and, as far as may be, ignored ? Nor is it
strictly accurate to say that this attitude has passed quite
unobserved in the literature. Plato, who, in spite of efforts
of modern commentators to prove the contrary, was of all
thinkers perhaps the most seriously interested in the
question of immortality and the most resolutely bent on
moralizing the doctrine and rendering it effective, exactly
hits off the great underlying mass of human feeling in
the description he gives of the psychological history of
Kephalos, the good old man who has learnt wisdom from
the experience of a long life. In the Republic ( 3 3 i ) he
is represented as confessing that, throughout youth and
manhood, he paid no heed to the legends about Hades,
laughing them to scorn, but now that he had come to
realize that his days were drawing to a close, he was
tormented by the fear lest there should after all be some
foundation for the belief in a future life.1 Very much

1 I find that Mr. Norman Pearson has taken much the same view as I have of
man's actual feelings, in the Nineteenth Century for August 1883.

xvii THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 321

the same feeling peeps out through the conventional
phraseology in the story of the old gentleman who, being
a churchwarden of (in his own opinion) the most immacu
late orthodoxy, was asked by Frederic Myers what he
supposed would happen to him after death. After much
hesitation he reluctantly admitted that he supposed he
would enter into eternal bliss, but he did wish Mr. Myers
would not bring up such depressing topics.

The old gentleman was quite right ; a future life, no
matter how gorgeously it is depicted, is, and must be, a
depressing subject for people of his sort, comfortable, pro
sperous, and self-satisfied. For they feel that before they
can make their triumphal entry into Heaven they have to
make their exit from a world in which they are far more
thoroughly at home than in any heaven they have ever
heard of. Hence the difficulty about the rich man's
entering the Kingdom of Heaven is not on the celestial
side alone. The rich man, for his part, is not in a
hurry to get there. And inasmuch as people of this kind
set the tone in society, it is no wonder that scientific
investigation of immortality is not encouraged. People
do not want to hear about it, and above all they do not
want to know about it.

For if once they knew, it would be most inconvenient.
They would have to act on their knowledge, and that
might upset the habits of a lifetime. And the older one
gets the less one likes that. What the decision was
would not so much matter ; whether science decided for
immortality or for annihilation, the blissful ignorance that
enabled one to ignore the subject in ordinary life would
be gone for ever. Hence an uncertainty to which we have
grown adapted is instinctively or deliberately preferred to
a knowledge that would involve the readjustment of
ingrained habits.

It is curious to trace how the various religions, one
after the other, effect their submission to this imperious
demand of humanity. On the face of it, of course, they
start pledged to uphold the entirely contrary thesis that
life should include a proper meditation of death and

Y

322 HUMANISM xvn

immortality, and seem to constitute an imposing mass of
testimony for the contention that the future life is one of
our chief interests. But in practice their doctrines are
satisfactorily accommodated to the temper of humanity.
The religions renounce the attempt of maintaining im
mortality as a matter of fact, and of adducing tangible
evidence in its favour. The doctrine becomes a dogma
which has to be accepted by faith, and the obligation of
raising it to positive knowledge is implicitly or expressly
disavowed.

To illustrate : the Resurrection of Our Lord need not
and ought not to have become a ' matter of faith ' in any
other sense than the death of Queen Anne, or any other
event in history. The circumstances attending that event
were not originally matters of faith at all : to the Apostles
and other witnesses they were matters of direct experience.
There was a time therefore when the exact course of
events might have been ascertained, conceivably even to
the satisfaction of persons like the critical experts of
the Psychical Society. And so they would never have
become matters of faith, if contemporaries in general had
supported a Society for Psychical Research and been
keenly observant and vigilantly interested in supernormal
happenings : for they would then have done their duty by
posterity and compiled records which would have left as
little doubt about the facts and involved as little special
strain upon our faculty of faith as any other of the events
that fall without our direct experience. Thus it is the
negligence of the past which imposes on us the burden
of ' faith.' Now that such a very simple and obvious
reflection should have an air of unfamiliarity is surely
signal proof of how habitual has become our distortion of
the original sense of religious propositions, of how far we
have drifted from a treatment of them as plain statements
of fact. But for this we should regard the evidential
defects of our records as appropriate occasions, not for
affirmations of a faith which glories in its heroism, but for
expressions of regret similar to those which other gaps in
our records of the past evoke.

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 323

The only exception to this peculiar way of transmuting
the purport of the religious doctrine of immortality seems to
be exhibited by Spiritism, which for this very reason is
inexpressibly shocking to what one may call the religious
sense of decency. For Spiritism is a religion whose sole
essential dogma seems to be the assertion of the possibility
of (in a manner) unifying this world with the next by
communicating with the departed, and whose sole essential
rite is the practice of such communication. This is what
renders the psychology of Spiritism so interesting and
worthy of analysis. In the first place it should be noted
that it is not a scientific movement (in spite of a few
notable exceptions), but a religion, nay, in all probability,
the most ancient of all religions. And yet as a religion
Spiritism has been and is a failure, and it may be suggested
that the reason is just that it does treat the future life as a
hard (and somewhat crude) fact. This is the source both
of its strength and of its weakness. Of its strength, because
no other doctrine can minister with such directness to the
bereaved human heart, no other consolation can vie with
its proffer of visible and tangible tokens that love outlasts
death and that the separation death inflicts is not utter
and insuperable. And so long as this craving for a sign
possesses our souls, Spiritism will continue to win adherents,
who embrace it, not in a calm temper of scientific research,
but in an emotional convulsion, and, it may be, with a
pathetic eagerness to deceive themselves.

But such agonies cannot be permanent. The wave of
feeling subsides, and with it passes the attractiveness of
Spiritism. Its weakness is that it appeals to emotions
which cannot permanently occupy the mind, and it is a
weakness far more fatal than the objections currently
urged against it, its ' vulgarity,' its frauds, etc. Vulgarity,
fraud, nay, sheer absurdity, have never been insuperable
obstacles to the success of a religious movement which
was in other respects congenial to human nature, and there
was no reason a priori why Spiritism should have proved
less successful than, e.g. ' Christian Science.'

A typical illustration of the psychology of Spiritism is

324 HUMANISM Xvn

afforded by the history of a friend of mine, who, having
lost his wife, long derived much consolation from the
belief that he was, by ' automatic writing,' receiving
communications from her spirit. His spiritist enthusiasm
was, however, seriously checked when he discovered
that his ' spirit guide ' did not take at all kindly to
his growing interest in a young lady ' in the flesh.'
He has now married again, and is quite convinced
that the automatic messages, which once seemed so
expressive of his first wife's personality, were merely the
productions of his own ' subconsciousness.' In time he
will doubtless chime in with the current doctrine that there
is something intrinsically ' degrading ' in the notion that our
departed dear ones can still communicate with us, continue
to be interested in us, and are watching us all the time.

It is the notion of this espionnage which is intolerable
and constitutes the unpardonable offence of Spiritism, in
the self-centred eyes of those who have never stopped to
reflect what intolerably dreary and irritating functions
they would assign to the departed.

It seems pretty clear then that the anomalous case
of Spiritism does not upset the results we have already
arrived at : it forms a temporary anodyne for over
wrought feelings ; it cannot give permanent satisfaction,
because it arouses the opposition of feelings which in the
long run are more powerful. And in any case its interest
in the future life is emotional and not scientific.

The other religions are more artful. They advocate
the belief in immortality indeed, but with a significant
distinction. The future life is a vision that floats before the
eye of faith, not a brutal fact to be thrust upon a reluctant
attention. The world can stomach a future life so dis
creetly formulated. Indeed, it rather likes the notion.
There are times when we are out of sorts and the spectre
of death will not down, and blank annihilation stares us
in the face, and then it is a great comfort to turn to some
religious tradition of another and a better life. We may
even go so far as to consider heavens and hells agreeable
topics for an occasional sermon, or like to use them.

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 325

metaphorically, to strengthen our assertions. But all this
in no wise implies that they are taken as facts and must
be acted on as such. On the contrary, it is just because
the religious doctrines of immortality are not taken as
facts that they are accepted. For we are accustomed to
accept matters of faith only at a large discount from their
face value, and their acceptance scarcely affects the value
of the hard-money facts of everyday life. Hence the
religious doctrines with respect to the future life form a
sort of paper currency, inconvertible with fact, which suits
people and circulates the better because of its very badness.
Their function is to conjure up pleasing and consoling
visions whenever we are in a mood for them, to provide a
brighter background for life than sheer extinction ; but they
are never allowed to grow insistent enough seriously to
affect action. They are entertained in a complacent spirit
of half belief, but no sensible man (and the mass of man
kind are always appallingly sensible with respect to
whatever does not tempt them !) allows himself to be
distracted in his business and upset in his calculations by
such shadowy possibilities. Consequently their practical
effect is small and utterly out of proportion to their
pretensions. The human spirit accepts them indeed in
a religious — I had almost said a ' Pickwickian ' — sense,
and uses whatever elements in them minister to its
needs : it rejects the indigestible remainder.

And here one cannot help thinking the churches make a
grave mistake. They do not seem to realize that the
cultivated minds of the present day have come to include
in the indigestible remainder the greater part of what
has hitherto been regarded as most distinctive dogma.
Fortunately or unfortunately, neither Heaven nor Hell
retains its efficacy, even for the purposes above described.
Men no longer dream themselves in Heaven nor dread
themselves in Hell. This puts the churches into the
humiliating position of offering men the reward of a
heaven which hardly any one desires, and of threatening
them with the penalties of a hell which ' every one believes
to be reserved for people a great deal worse than them-

326 HUMANISM xvn

selves.' Myers's churchwarden, who has already been
quoted, may have reached an unsurpassable pinnacle of
impeccable orthodoxy, but as an illustration of celestial
attraction he is a failure. Similarly, when I expressed
these opinions concerning the attractiveness of the notion
of Heaven in the Spectator^ I elicited no contradiction,
but only a number of anecdotes bearing out my conten
tion. As for Hell, I never met but one man who
professed to believe that he himself was destined to
eternal damnation, but as he made this avowal with a
smiling countenance, and without the least effort to alter
his ways, his testimony must be received with caution.
In view of this disappointing situation (for surely the fear
of Hell, at least, was among the more effective, if also
among the cruder, of the argumentative incentives to
virtue), it might be well if the churches admitted some
what greater latitude into their ' myths ' of the future life
(if ' myths ' are all we are to be allowed to have) ; both
the thought of spirit -communication and that of re
incarnation appear to possess powers of consolation (in
certain moods) that might advantageously be utilized.

It seems probable, therefore, that so far from modifying
the impression produced by men's manifest indifference to
and dislike for any scientific investigation of the question
of their immortality, their attitude towards the religious
doctrines only confirms our conclusions. The religious
dogmas are accepted because they are what men desire,
and so far as they are this : they yield a vague, remote
guarantee against annihilation, which may be summoned
up or dismissed at pleasure, and does not involve any
immediate practical consequences. What is also very
convenient, this policy enables men to avoid a scientific
decision of the question and to give to every attempt
thereat an air of religious impropriety : thus there is
avoided all occasion for any practical readjustment, any
rearrangement of life, which grows progressively more
irksome and difficult as age advances. But inasmuch as
influence increases with age, and our ' great authorities '

1 November 24, 1900.

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 327

are all old, it is easily seen that the weight of all religious
and scientific authority must be naturally opposed to any
divergence from the established tradition. For the only
sort of future life which would have any attraction for the
old would be one in which they could go on very much
as on earth. But I very much doubt whether, even then,
they would care to pass through the ordeal of death in
order to secure it.

It remains to account for the fact that the literary
tradition has taken such a very different view of human
psychology. Why has everybody always conspired to
write as though the question of immortality were of the
most tremendous importance and absorbing interest, if de
facto the great majority of men have always avoided it as
much as ever they could ? I believe the answer to be
exceedingly simple. The makers of the literary tradition
have expressed what seemed true to them at the time of
writing, what was true for them ; and yet the mass of
men were always indifferent or hostile.1 Of course, how
ever, the dumb, recalcitrant masses gave no sign of their
dissent from a doctrine they were trying to dismiss from
their minds, and hence the writers had it all their own
way. In other words, the fallacy in the argument that
all men naturally crave for immortality is identical with
that in the proof of the efficacy of prayer by means of
the votive offerings in the temple of Poseidon. Just as
those who prayed and perished were not in a position
to make offerings, so those who are not interested in a
subject do not write books about it.

1 I should very much doubt whether the ' ages of faith ' were a real exception.
No doubt it was, in those days, possible to get great and striking effects out of
people by playing on their fears of Hell. But these effects were possible just
because people were still more systematically averse from thinking on the subject,
and still more contentedly ignorant and uncritical. Hence the crudest and most
atrocious threats would be sufficient to drive men frantic in extremis, and the
ruffianly baron, who had lived more brutally than any beast, would eagerly sign
away the whole of the fruits of his lifelong rapine in order ' to make his peace
with God. ' I believe there is more real religion in the world at present than ever
before, i.e. more lives conducted with a sense of constant communion with higher
powers, as well as far more of the reasoned faith which only superficially resembles
the unthinking acceptance of dogmas felt to be unintelligible, that so often usurps
the name of faith. But just because we are more religious, we are less prone to
an uncritical acceptance of whatever monstrosity comes to us in the disguise of
faith.

328 HUMANISM

XVII

Moreover in this case the illusion is greatly heightened
by a very general psychological fact which at first sight
seems to support the literary view. For it is probable
that at one time or other (mostly in youth) nearly
every one is in trouble about his soul and takes a keen
interest in the question of a future life. But as a
rule, the interest is short-lived and soon dies out, or
rather, is trampled out by the social disapproval of the
pretension to be more troubled about such matters than
one's elders and betters. But the memory of this interest
persists and wins from every one an easy, though nominal,
assent to the assertions of those who expatiate on the
importance of the question. The truth is that many have
felt the importance of the subject, but that at any given
moment only an infinitesimal fraction actually feel it, so
that there is never any effective demand for its investiga
tion. Even in the elect ranks of the Society for Psychical
Research it is probable that the same law has been at
work, and that the reason for the apathy of most of its
members is that they have long lost the keenness of
interest which originally nerved them to the prodigious
effort of joining the Society.

It may be thought that the novel interpretation of
human action and feeling which we have been considering
is thus as fully established as it can be by argument. But
in a matter of this sort one ought not to content oneself
with argument while proof is attainable. And fortunately
in this case the actual facts can be ascertained so soon as
a sufficient number of persons desire to ascertain them.

The American Branch of the Society for Psychical
Research has, under the auspices of Dr. Richard Hodgson,
issued a circular, or questionnaire, designed to test and to
bring out the feelings with which the prospect of a future
life is actually regarded. It runs thus : —

There is a widespread literary tradition that men naturally
desire a future life. From this assumed fact it has been variously
argued that (i) such a universal desire cannot be destined to
disappointment, and (2) it must vitiate convictions and engender
illusory evidence in its own support.

But there is some reason to suppose, both from the ordinary

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 329

conduct of men and from sporadic declarations of individuals, that
this tradition is very far from accurately representing the facts, and
that these are actually more various and complicated. Moreover,
it should not be forgotten that in India the literary tradition seems
to be exactly reversed, and it is assumed that men naturally crave
for extinction or absorption in the Absolute.

It becomes a question, therefore, what the actual sentiments of
men are, and what, consequently, is the actual bias with which they
are likely to receive the doctrines and the evidence that bear on
the subject.

Both these questions are capable of being determined with
sufficient precision by instituting a statistical inquiry over a
sufficiently wide field — collecting answers until it becomes evident
that the percentages of the various types of answer have become
constant.

To determine the nature of men's actual sentiments and actual
bias should be a matter of great interest, not only to the S.P.R.
and psychologists generally, but also to every religious organization.
For both the scientific labours of the former and the moral exhorta
tions of the latter are likely to be in some degree, at least, ineffectual,
so long as they are conducted in ignorance, and so in disregard, of
what men really want. It is only when the facts have been
ascertained that they can be argued from for the various purposes
of the scientist, the philosopher and the theologian.

First of all, therefore, it is necessary to discover the nature of
human sentiment ; and to obtain it in its purity, it is desirable to
exclude, as far as possible, all extraneous influences, whether of a
religious or of a scientific kind. It is, of course, recognized that
these may and often do influence sentiment, that they may engender
or check it, and also that there may be a marked divergence
between conviction or belief and sentiment. But as it is primarily
the nature of the sentiment which has to be determined, these other
considerations should be excluded as far as possible.

Hence the subjoined questions should be understood as directly
referring only to the personal preferences, sentiments, or desires of
those who answer them, quite irrespective of their religious faith or
reasoned convictions, the influence of which, where it exists, may
be recorded in answer to Question III.

N.B, — All names will be regarded as strictly confidential.

QUESTIONS

I. Would you prefer (a) to live after ' death ' or (b} not ?
II. (a) If I. («), do you desire a future life whatever the conditions

may be ?

(b} If not, what would have to be its character to make the
prospect seem tolerable ? Would you, e.g., be content
with a life more or less like your present life ?

330 HUMANISM xvn

(c) Can you say what elements in life (if any) are felt by you
to call for its perpetuity ?

III. Can you state why you feel in this way, as regards Questions I.

and II.?

IV. Do you NOW feel the question of a future life to be of urgent

importance to your mental comfort ?
V. Have your feelings on Questions I. II. and IV. undergone

change ? If so, when and in what ways ?

VI. (a) Would you like to know for certain about the future life, or
(b) would you prefer to leave it a matter of faith ?

It will be evident, I think, to any one who reads this
questionnaire that if a sufficiently extensive collection of
answers can be made to be representative of the senti
ments of the educated classes in America and England,
the views expressed in this article will be thoroughly
tested, and the question of the actual nature of human
sentiment can no longer remain obscure. And in
addition a great mass of psychological material will have
been accumulated, the critical sifting of which cannot
fail to throw much light upon a number of most important
questions of a religious, philosophical, and moral character.
The results would be sure to be important and almost
sure to be surprising. For unless the argument of this
paper has been wholly mistaken, they would diverge very
widely from the literary tradition.

Personally I shall be greatly surprised if the returns
do not show that active and intense preoccupation with
the question of a future life is an exceedingly rare state
of mind. And yet if I should be wrong in this estimate,
I should not be disappointed. For if it should turn out
that real and extensive interest in the question actually
exists, I should feel that the chief, and hitherto insuperable,
obstacle in the way of actual scientific investigation of
the question of fact was at length giving way.

I refer to the social taboo of any serious inquiry to
which at present the scattered individuals who at any
given time ' desire to know ' are compelled to submit.
This taboo seems to rest its appeal on the highest and
most respectable motives, religious and scientific. It is
enunciated with an air of the profoundest wisdom and

xvn THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 331

couches its warnings in the solemn voice of immemorial
experience. Yet I feel sure that the census of senti
ments will not have to proceed far to make it clear
that the traditional attitude of society rests neither upon
reason nor upon religion, but really upon a blind feeling
or instinct, against the domination of which all self-
respecting persons will revolt as soon as they recognize
its existence in themselves and in others.

It will consequently become possible for the few who
desire to know the truth, and are prepared to take the
steps ordinarily adopted in complicated scientific investiga
tions, to treat the social taboo with the proper disrespect
and to pursue their course without being thwarted by the
many who do not desire to know and have hitherto held
it to be their duty to prevent any one from finding out.

The present situation is indeed not far short of farcical,
or rather would be entirely so, but for the pathos of the
self-delusion which it implies, and the torture which it
inflicts on its victims. We profess to believe that a
knowledge of the fate which awaits each one of us in
the comparatively near future would be, of all knowledge,
the most precious. We lament, with many marks of
sincerity, that the inscrutable wisdom of higher powers
has inexorably precluded us from the attainment of this
knowledge. We confess to have experienced, perhaps
more than once, unspeakable agonies when we were
forced to face death in our own persons or in those of
our dear ones. Yet what do we do to extricate ourselves
from this tragic situation ?

We tell ghost stories ! This we have done for at
least ten thousand years, and the supply is as plentiful as
ever. It is also, scientifically, as unsatisfactory as ever,
for the social atmosphere still renders a serious testing
of this material practically impossible. Is it not absurd
therefore that we can neither stop retailing them, nor
make a real effort to discover of what facts they are the
adumbration ?

The answer is simple. Ghost stories are what, on the
whole, we desire them to be : they fulfil their function

332 HUMANISM xvn

best by remaining as they are. They were never intended
to be verified or investigated, and if they could be made
scientifically valuable they would cease to be so emotion
ally, and would no longer serve to surround terrestrial
existence with the foil which enhances its brilliancy. And
instead of being the victims of an unkind fate which baffles
our desire to know, we are ourselves the agency which
keeps us ignorant.

It is as little true here as in any other matters of
scientific inquiry that we are confronted with an inscrutable
universe whose nature we ' were never intended to discover.'
It is true, here as elsewhere, that society entertains a
fierce fear of knowledge, a savage suspicion that to eat
of the fruits of the tree of knowledge is a sin deserving
of death, which thousands of years of contrary experience
have done but little to eradicate. Social control of the
scientific instinct, the ' desire to know,' is as real, and
almost as stringent, as formerly,1 even though in respect
to a few favoured subjects of research, which are supposed
to lead to materially useful results, it has been sufficiently
relaxed to enable them to rise above the dense atmosphere
of social intolerance which is continually being exhaled
by our constitutional indolence and dislike of any re
adjustment of our habits and actions.

But in all other subjects the social atmosphere makes
all the difference between success and failure, as the
individual consciously or unconsciously breathes in its
subtle influence. We fancy ourselves exceedingly en
lightened and tolerant because we have (though only
for a couple of hundred years) given up the sport of
witch-baiting, and no longer regard all forms of scientific
curiosity as ' black magic ' to be checked by summary
and premature cremation. But, even as there are many
ways of killing a dog other than hanging him, so there
are many subtler and more effective ways of producing
conformity to social sentiment other than overt persecu
tion, and the social factor in the discovery and recognition
of truth remains of paramount importance. Truths which

1 Cp. pp. 58-60.

xvu THE DESIRE FOR IMMORTALITY 333

lie in directions socially disapproved can either not be
discovered at all, or when discovered remain a dead letter.
As a rule indeed the absence of social hostility is not
enough, but more or less active co-operation is necessary.
The notion that a lonely thinker can spontaneously set to
work upon some subject of inquiry which interests him,
make discoveries of far-reaching import, and get them
accepted and acclaimed by an admiring world is surely
an illusion which the history of science should be sufficient
to dispel. The lonely thinker has need of libraries,
laboratories, and leisure, and without the consent of
society he cannot get them. Single-handed and single-
minded against the world he can do nothing : strive and
labour as he may, he must sooner or later succumb to
the overwhelming pressure of his environment.

And in no region of possible knowledge is the power
of the social atmosphere more obvious, or the need for
social co-operation greater, than in everything that con
cerns the ' mystery ' of death. And nowhere else has
individual curiosity been more brutally crushed out.
Whoever conceives a desire to know the truth about the
future life engages in a struggle with social forces which
is almost sure to end in tragedy. To begin with he is
deluged with assurances that what he desires to know
cannot be known, and stuffed with pseudo-proofs, scientific,
philosophic, and religious, to persuade him to drop the
subject. If these do not satisfy him and he persists, he
is next told that his desire is ' bad form,' that he must
not appear odd, or make himself ridiculous by prying
into matters which the wisdom of the ancients has from
time immemorial decided to lie beyond mortal ken.
' My boy,' his parent or guardian will finally say to him,
if he is unusually sympathetic and candid, ' I can well
remember the time when I, too, felt about it just as you
do now, and would have given worlds to know. So I
read a number of books on the subject, and even went to
a seance or two. But I got very little out of it, and when
I found that I was thrown into the company of all sorts
of queer persons and things, and heard that my friends

334 HUMANISM xvn

were beginning to express serious concern for my sanity,
and that I was endangering my professional reputation,
I very wisely dropped the matter. Be sensible, therefore,
and take my word for it, we are not meant to know about
these things. Suppress your morbid craving for truth.
You will soon get over it, and think as every one else does.'
As a piece of wordly wisdom this advice is unex
ceptionable, and not to be disregarded by any who
would avoid the madhouse or the workhouse. But
scientifically regarded, it is somewhat lacking in con-
clusiveness. A question which, on account of the
resistance of social sentiment, it has never yet been
possible to investigate with the dispassionate, and yet
persistent, curiosity of science, can hardly be said to be
settled. And if it should turn out as one of the results
of the inquiry described above that on the one hand social
sentiment has the character I have supposed, and on the
other that a small (or even a considerable) number of
persons are desirous of a real investigation, the latter
would have a chance, slender perhaps, but at all events
such as they have never had before, of combining to effect
their object. The Society for Psychical Research, in
particular, would, have to change its tactics. Instead of
pouring out volume after volume of minutely and dully
accurate reports of sittings with its Mrs. Pipers and Mrs.
Thompsons, which the world ignores until the lapse of
time, by removing the first-hand witnesses beyond the
reach of cross-examination, has rendered its evidence as
inconclusive as the testimony which in the past has failed
to move the world, it would have to address itself, in the
first instance, to modifying the existing sentiment of
society. And whether it succeeded or not, it might at
least induce us to be more honest with ourselves, and to
cease from our insincere lamentings over the impossibility
of a knowledge than which the gods could bestow no

o o

more embarrassing gift upon the generality of men.

XVIII

THE ETHICAL SIGNIFICANCE OF
IMMORTALITY1

ARGUMENT

I. Is Immortality an Ethical Postulate ? Yes, if it can be shown to be implied

in the validity of our ethical valuation of the world. Objections : (a) a
pure morality needs no reference to another world. But there is moral
waste if goodness of character perishes, and ultimate moral failure when
physical life becomes impossible on earth ; (b} it is immoral to relegate
the sanctions of morality to another world. Not if future happiness and
misery are conceived as the intrinsic consequences of moral goodness and
badness ; (c} we cannot live for two worlds at once. Depends on how they
are conceived. The thought of a future life morally bracing, and, like
all forethought about the future, a mark of superior mental development.

II. What is the value of an Ethical Postulate ? The postulate is not emotional
but rational, and affirms the validity of our moral judgments. It is part
of a system of postulates which all proceed similarly. Moreover, the
ideals we postulate are coincident and bound up together. Ultimately
Truth, Goodness, Happiness and Beauty must all be postulated or
rejected together. The alleged superior validity of the ideal of Truth
explained.

An ethical postulate, however, does not prescribe any special mode of its
realization, for which we must look to scientific experience. There are
also other questions which may modify, though they cannot subvert, our
ethical demand.

WE are so accustomed in these days to hear the world-old
traditions of the human race denied or ignored simply
because they are old that the antique flavour inevitably
attaching to any argument about Immortality almost
suffices to secure its condemnation unheard. Yet such
scornful treatment of authority is not justified by the
present state of our knowledge. On the contrary, the
antiquity and wide prevalence of an idea in themselves
constitute a prima facie claim upon the attention of the

] First published in the New World for September 1897.
335

336 HUMANISM

XVIII

unprejudiced. Even on our most modern principles of
evolutionist explanation, it means that the idea is some
how a response to a widely felt and persistent element in
our experience. Its very antiquity, therefore, gives it
an authority which may not be lightly set aside.

Still I do not wish to argue this question of Immortality
on the basis of authority. There is another side also
to the influence of authority, when that authority is old.
It is probable in such cases that the idea supported by
authority will be disfigured by the dust of ages, overgrown
by all sorts of parasitic fungi of fancy, and rendered
ridiculous by the incrustations of fossil formulas, until its
best friends hardly know it and it becomes intellectually
contemptible, morally outrageous and aesthetically re
pulsive to its foes. As something of this sort has probably
happened to the idea of immortality, it will be the plan
of this paper to argue the question on the sole ground
of reason ; its only stipulation being that the appeal be
really made to the light of reason, shining without let or
hindrance, and so far as possible, freed from all coloured
spectacles of religious or scientific orthodoxy that might
check its transmission.

The subject of Immortality is, however, too extensive
for me to attempt to discuss it as a whole, and my
efforts will be confined to a single aspect of it — the
ethical. That is, I shall not try to determine whether
there is immortality as a fact, but only whether the
science of ethics needs this conception for its own
perfection. Putting the question more technically, I
propose to consider two things. First : Is Immortality
an ethical postulate ? Must a moral being, i.e. a
being that can be judged good or evil, as such be
deemed immortal ? Secondly : If so, what does an
ethical postulate prove ? What is its general significance
or logical status in the world of thought ? The first of
these questions is exclusively ethical. The second enters
upon the realm of metaphysics, and may be expected to
involve so much subtler and more difficult considerations
that I would gladly evade it altogether if possible. But,

xvm ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 337

unfortunately, to enforce the due respect for an ethical
postulate, the case must be carried to the supreme court
of metaphysics. Moreover, it is only the discussion of
its metaphysical value that gives the ethical argument any
direct bearing on the question, not here to be discussed
as such, whether there is immortality as a matter of fact.

Let us take up, then, the first question, whether
immortality is an ethical postulate. What can be urged
in favour of this view ? The argument for it is exceedingly
simple : it consists in showing that without immortality it
is not possible to think the world as a harmonious whole,
as a moral cosmos. To show this, one has not to appeal
to anything more recondite than the fact that in our present
phase of existence the moral life cannot be lived out to
its completion, that it is not permitted to display its full
fruitage of consequences for good and for evil. When
ever Might triumphs over Right ; whenever the evildoers
succeed and the righteous perish ; whenever goodness is
trampled under foot and wickedness is exalted to high
places ; nay, whenever the moral development of character
is cut short and rendered vain by death, — we are brought
face to face with facts which constitute an indictment of
cosmic justice, which are inconsistent with the conception
of the world as a moral order. Unless, therefore, we can
vindicate this order by explaining away the facts that
would otherwise destroy it, we have to abandon the
ethical judgment of the world of our experience as good
or bad ; we have to admit that the ideal of goodness is
an illusion of which the scheme of things recks not at all.

But if we refuse to do this (and whether we are not
bound to refuse to abandon our ideals at the first show of
opposition will presently be considered), how shall the
ethical harmony be restored if not by the supposition of
a prolongation and perfection of the moral life in the
future ? Only so can character be made of real signifi-

z

338 HUMANISM xvm

cance in the scheme of things ; only so is it something
worth possessing, an investment more permanent and
more decisive of our weal and woe than all the outward
goods men set their hearts upon, rather than a transitory
bubble to whose splendour it matters not one whit whether
it be pure translucence refracting the radiance of the
sunlight, or the iridescent film that coats decay.

The ethical argument for immortality, then, is simply
this, that, if death ends all, the moral life cannot be lived
out, moral perfection is impossible, and the universe can
not be regarded as at heart ethical. But in spite of
its simplicity this argument has been misunderstood in
a variety of ways. Let us briefly consider the chief of
these.

It is objected by well-meaning people, who rather
pride themselves on their advocacy of a purer and higher
morality, that the ethical sphere does not need supple
menting by a future life. They grow indignant at the
thought that ' the good men do is buried in their graves,'
and does not survive to inspire and direct succeeding
generations. They bid us therefore fight the good fight
disinterestedly and without selfish reward, in order that
our grandchildren, if we have any, may enjoy the fruits
of our self-denial, and that the world may be the better
for our efforts.

To this the reply is twofold. It is idle to say that
Goodness is not wasted because the results of actions
reverberate throughout the ages. The good men do may
persist and work well or ill, but the good men are surely
perishes. The human character itself passes away, and
its effects are transmitted only through the characters of
others. The character itself is an indefeasible and
inalienable possession of the owner, and by no flight of
the imagination can it be transferred to others. Whatever
worth, therefore, we assign to character, that worth is lost
to the world if immortality be denied. And, moreover, it
is only in their effect upon his own character that a man's
actions can be surely classified as good or bad. What
the effect of actions will be on others, now or subsequently

xvm ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 339

no one can foretell : the real objection to doing too much
for posterity is, not that ' posterity has done nothing for
us,' but the uncertainty as to what the effect on posterity
will be. For that depends largely on the character of
others, and quisque suos patimur Manes. Each can
assume full responsibility for his own actions and his own
character alone ; the rest lies largely on the lap of the
gods. If, then, you deny the persistence of character, you
have denied the real basis of the moral order.

But, secondly, supposing even that humanity profited by
our efforts, how far would this go towards re-establishing
the moral order of the world ? If the immortality of the
individual be an illusion, surely that of the race is a
transparent absurdity. If there is certainty about any
prediction of science, it is surely, as I have elsewhere put
it, this, that our racial destiny is " to shiver and to starve
to death in ever-deepening gloom." ] The prospective
fortunes of the race, then, do not redeem the moral
character of the universe. If the view of mechanical
science be the whole truth about the universe, the race is
of just as little account as the individual ; suns and stars
and the hosts of heaven will roll on in their orbits just as
steadily and unfeelingly whether we prosper or perish,
struggle on or resign ourselves to despair. Cosmically,
the earth and all it bears on its surface is of infinitesimal
importance : what does it matter then whether any one
brood of mites that crawls upon it is better or worse than
its successors, any more than whether it laboriously grubs
up a few atoms of a shining yellow or of a shining white
metal and fights about the ratio ? No ; the worthy
people who think that George Eliot's ' choir invisible ' can
make a noise to compete with the whirl of worlds
decidedly delude themselves, and ' an immortality of
influence ' is no adequate ethical substitute for personal
immortality.

A second objection does not pretend to improve on
the ethic of immortality, but criticizes it by descanting on
the turpitude of basing morality on ' fears of Hell and

1 Riddles of the Sphinx, p. 105, new ed. p. 104.

340 HUMANISM xvm

hopes of Paradise.' This objection also is urged by many
worthy persons ; and I have known some who have been
sustained through life by the pride they took in showing
that they could be just as moral without knowing why, as
they were when they thought their eternal salvation
depended on their conduct. But theoretically this objection
surely rests on a misconception. The rewards and
punishments for conduct are not to be looked upon as
motives to conduct, but as the natural results of conduct,
inevitable in a morally ordered universe. In an ethical
universe, Goodness cannot be associated with persistent
misery, because that would be an outrage upon the moral
order ; Badness must ultimately involve unhappiness, be
cause only such retribution will reaffirm the outraged
supremacy of the moral order. Rewards and punishments,
then, are but incidents in that completion of the moral
life for the sake of which immortality was postulated ;
they are not in themselves the sole motives for leading
such a life. The very suggestion that they may be
supposed to be, on whatever side it is urged, shows an
imperfect appreciation of the nature of the moral life,
indicative of a coarser moral fibre and of a lower stage
of ethical development.

But we need not on this account entirely condemn
this mode of regarding immortality. Fears and hopes of
what may happen hereafter may not be the highest
motives to morality ; they may enforce as an external
sanction what should be an intrinsic conviction ; but they
are not therefore valueless. For, if they are effective,
they at least accustom men to right conduct,1 and thus
form the basis of sound habit, which is the actual founda
tion of all conduct in any case, and the necessary
prerequisite for sound reflection upon conduct and the
attainment of any higher view of morality. Our moral
enthusiasm, therefore, need no more frown upon these
lower motives than it need disband the police on the
ground that a truly moral community should not need
policing.

1 Cp. pp. 33-5.

xvm ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 341

Still more radical than the objections we have con
sidered is a third objection which denounces the essential
immorality of looking to a future life at all in connexion
with our conduct here. The habit of contemplating a
future life, it is urged, engenders a pernicious ' other-
worldliness ' most detrimental to proper behaviour in this
world. We cannot live for two worlds at once. The
future life dwarfs the present ; the supposed significance
of the eternal life hereafter destroys the real significance
of our life here and now.

Again, I think the objection labours under a mis
conception. It holds good only against a conception of
immortality which, like the Buddhist Nirvana, for example,
conflicts and competes with the ethical view of this world :
We cannot ' live for two worlds at once,' only if the
principles of conduct required in them are fundamentally
different. If extinction is the end to which we should
aspire hereafter, then certainly it would be folly to prepare
for it by a strenuous life on earth. The objection is
irrelevant to an immortality which is postulated as the
completion of mundane morality, which is not so much
other- worldliness as better -worldliness, suggested by the
ethical defects of our actual experience. In reality such
a view indefinitely deepens the significance of the present
life. Think what is involved in the assertion that char
acter is permanent and indestructible, and passes not
from us however the fashion of our outward life may
change ! Think of it, that we can never escape from
ourselves, from the effect of our deeds on our character,
and that every deed leaves its mark upon the soul, a mark
which may be modified and counterbalanced, but can never
be undone to all eternity ! Will not the effect of such a
belief be to make us realize the solemnity of life as we never
did before, to nerve us to that unremitting self-improvement
without which there is no approximating to the moral
ideal ? Instead of losing its significance, does not every
act of life become fraught with infinite significance ?
Instead of becoming careless about ourselves, will it not,
then, become worth our while to bestow upon our own

342 HUMANISM xvm

character-building a care that would otherwise have been
disproportionate? For, as most of them are thoroughly
aware, ordinary people are quite good enough for ordinary
purposes. Why, then, should they strive laboriously to
change and remould themselves, and fall, perchance, into
the exaggerated virtue of Jane Austen Beecher Stowe de
Rouse, who was " good beyond all earthly need " ? Is it
not much more convenient to stay as one is, and to reply
to the ambitions of an unquiet conscience as the General
of the Jesuits replied to the Pope who wished to reform
them, Sint ut sunt aut non sint, — ' Let them be as they
are or not be at all ' ? Is it not always inconvenient to
think of the future, and is not the future life altogether
too big a thing to think of? And is not this, and not
any logical or scientific difficulties which the thought
involves, the real reason why men seek to banish it
from their consciousness, — why it is hardly ever more
than a half belief in most men's minds ? Human inertia,
all that keeps us commonplace and sordid, unheroic
and unaspiring is, and always has been, dead against
it. And that is why moral reformers have always in
sisted on it. For their function is to overcome moral
inertia.

It is, however, some consolation to think that the past
course of Evolution seemingly sanctions the belief of
those who would have us take account of a future which
extends into another life. Certainly the expansion of the
future, of which our action takes account, is one of the
most marked characteristics of a progressive civilization.
The animal looks into the future not at all, and the
savage but little ; but, as civilization grows, the future
consequences of action become more and more important,
and are prepared for more and more. When we have
dared to forecast the future of the race when our coal
supply shall be exhausted ; when we have looked un
flinchingly upon that unimaginably distant period when
the sun's light shall fail, — shall we shrink from rising to
the contemplation of a future that extends immeasurably
further ?

xviii ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 343

II

By thus replying to these three objections I hope to
have sufficiently established the first part of my thesis, —
that immortality is in truth an ethical postulate. But
the second part still remains to be answered, namely, the
question, What is an ethical postulate really worth ?
What is its value metaphysically ? Is it more than an
impulse of ethical emotion which shrinks into nothingness
under the calm gaze of scientific truth ? Does it amount
to demonstration ?

One often hears it said that immortality is an emo
tional postulate, unreasoning if not unreasonable ; and
that hackneyed phrase, ' the hope of immortality/ bears
involuntary witness to the fact that the argument is not
supposed to amount to demonstration. Now this is just
the mental attitude towards the subject which I deprecate
and wish to controvert. The people who cherish the
hope of immortality I regard as people who, for the reasons
given above, sometimes hope there is no immortality, or at
least have not much faith in their own argument. It is
more especially for the benefit of such weak-kneed
brethren that I would maintain the following doctrine : —

The ethical postulate of immortality is not an emo
tional postulate, but as rational as any postulate, and
has as good a claim for recognition in our ultimate
metaphysic. Or, if they still prefer to regard it as emo
tional, and quote Von Hartmann's remark on the subject
that metaphysical truths cannot be based on emotional
postulates, I shall reply that, ultimately, truths will no
where be found to rest on any other grounds.

(1) Hence immortality, as an ethical postulate, is of
the same nature as certain other postulates without which
we cannot harmonize our experience.

(2) It is bound up with those other postulates.

(3) Its assumption is justified in precisely the same
way as that of the other postulates.

(4) If they cannot accept this as demonstration they
will get no better anywhere in the world.

344 HUMANISM

XVIII

(i) Taking these points in order, let us ask what is
the nature of an ethical postulate. It is nothing but the
affirmation of the cosmic significance of the ideal of Good
ness, of our ethical valuation of things. It claims that the
universe is not merely a fact, but has a certain value which
we call ethical. It is at bottom a moral universe, and
potentially resolves itself into an ethical harmony. Now
the logical method by which this argument proceeds is
this : Given a part, to find the whole ; given a few
fragmentary data, to construct therefrom an ideal which
may validly be used to interpret the data. It is the
same method which is used by the palaeontologist when,
from a tooth or a bone, he reconstructs some long-extinct
form of life. The question, then, resolves itself into this :
Have we the right to assume that our ethical data cohere
and may be fitted together into an ethical ideal ?

And (2), in sustaining this procedure the ethical con
sciousness does not stand alone. Its claim is supported
by our procedure elsewhere. All the ideals of ultimate
value are constituted in the same manner. How do we
make good the claim that anything in the universe is
beautiful ? We assume that our judgments concerning
beauty are not devoid of significance, but may be har
monized in an ideal of Beauty to which the nature of
things is somehow akin. How do we make good the
claim that happiness is possible ? We believe in the
prophetic significance of the pleasurable states of con
sciousness in our experience, and out of them frame the
ideal of Happiness which we assume reality may realize.

Lastly, how do we make good the claim that the
world is knowable ? We assume that its facts somehow
cohere, and may be arranged in an orderly system of
Truth or Knowledge. In other words, we try to look
upon reality as realizing our ideals of Knowledge, Beauty,
Goodness and Happiness, and thereby constitute it a
cosmos, knowable, beautiful, ethical and delightful. But
in each case we are checked by the same obstacles.
The ideals certainly do not float on the surface of life.
They are not congruous with the raw facts of experience.

xvm ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 345

They have to be sought with infinite pains, and ere we
have dragged them forth and proved them valid, lo, death
comes and, ruthlessly impartial, cuts short the careers of
the man of science and of the man of pleasure. Life is
imperfect and fragmentary all round, — not only in the
eyes of ethics. Emotionally, intellectually and aestheti
cally, life as it stands is no less inadequate than ethically.
The ideals of Happiness, Knowledge and Beauty postulate
realization no less and in no other way than Goodness ;
the murky atmosphere of earth, poisoned by the breath
of death, no less derides their possibility. What we ask,
then, for one we ask for all, and we ask it in obedience
to the same law of our being, — that life must show itself
congruous with the ideals from which it draws its value.

And (3), these ideals are not only cognate, but
coincident ; we cannot in the last resort affirm one while
denying the rest ; nothing short of a complete harmony
can wholly satisfy us. Truth, Goodness, Happiness and
Beauty are all indispensable factors in Perfection, the
varying facets which the one ideal reveals to our various
modes of striving.1

This is generally denied only by the votaries of the
ideal of Truth, and so it will perhaps suffice if I content
myself with pointing out to them how untenable is their
position. We have all heard some postulate of human
feeling met with the cold sneer of a short-sighted science
and the query, Why should the universe take account of
goodness and its completion ? Well, I contend that if
this sneer is worth anything it must be extended so as to
include all human activity, that we might with equal
cogency go on to ask, Why, then, should the universe
take account of Knowledge and its establishment, or of
Happiness and its attainment? We have, I claim, no
logical ground for supposing the world to be knowable,
and yet utterly disregardful of Happiness and Goodness.
For a world supposed to be wholly knowable, i.e. wholly
harmonious with our intellectual demands, while remaining
wholly discordant with our emotional nature, would ipso

1 See Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xii. § 9.

346 HUMANISM xvm

facto include an intellectually insoluble puzzle which would
render it fundamentally unknowable. Nay, more, is not
the supposition directly self- contradictory ? Does not
a knowable world satisfy at least one of our emotional
demands, — the desire for Knowledge? It cannot be
then, as alleged, utterly out of relation to our emotional
nature. But if it can satisfy one such postulate, why not
the rest ?

The ideals, then, stand and fall together. They are
rooted in the unity of the human soul, in the final soli
darity of life's endeavours. And when the supreme need
arises, the outcry of the soul can summon to its aid all
the powers that minister unto its being ; it wields a spell
that reaches from the iciest altitudes of scientific abstraction
to the warmest pulsations of concrete emotion, and from
the most ethereal fancy of the purest intellect to the
blindest impulse of agonizing passion ; it can extort from
every element of our nature the confession of its solidarity
with the rest of life, and set it in array on that dread
battlefield whereon the Gods contend against the Giants
— of Doubt, Disorder, and Despair.

For it is because of this solidarity of the ideals that
the denial of them confronts us with the gravest issues.
They all assert, in varying form but with unvarying
intent, the same great principle — the conformity of the
world with the capacity of our nature. And unfamiliar
as some of the applications of this principle may be to
our ordinary habits of thinking, we have to remember
that the principle itself can hardly be impugned. For
inasmuch as in the end our ' world ' is human experience,
and a world which we neither did nor could experience
would not be one we need argue or trouble about, this
principle really amounts to an assertion of the intrinsic
coherence and potential harmony of the whole of
experience. Without it where should we be? What
would our attitude have to be towards a world in which
the ultimate significance of our ideals was denied, that is,
a world which was no world, a world in which nothing
really meant anything, nothing was really good or

xviii ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 347

beautiful or true, and in which the hope of happiness was
nothing but illusion ? To say that the prospect of such
a world would reduce us to the most despairing depths of
the most abject Pessimism hardly depicts the full horror of
the situation : it would be a world of which the hopelessness
would disarm even the suicide's hand. For, in a world
which had really renounced its allegiance to the ideal, all
action would be paralysed by the conviction that nothing
we desired could ever be attained, because the existent was
irreconcilably alienated from the desirable. The foundations
of the cosmos would be shattered, and we should have to
realize that nothing is worth doing because nothing has
any worth, because human valuations have no significance
in establishing the nature of things. We should be
plunged, in other words, in that unfathomable abyss
where Scepticism fraternizes with Pessimism, and they
hug their miseries in chaos undisguised.

(4) We can reject, then, the principle on which the
ethical postulate of immortality rests only at the cost of
entire Scepticism and utter Pessimism. By those not
prepared to pay that price the principle must be accepted,
like the other assumptions that render the world a fit
sphere for the satisfaction of other human activities.
Take, for instance, the assumption that the world is a
knowable cosmos. Is this proved ? Certainly not ; nor
can it be until everything is known : until then it always
remains possible that the world may not turn out really
knowable at the last. Can we avoid assuming it ?
Certainly not ; without it we could not take a single step
towards any science or practice. We simply must assume
that the world is an intelligible world, if we are to live in
it. As a matter of fact we do assume it, all except a few
who bury their dissent in the seclusion of the madhouse.
Is the assumption confirmed ? Yes, in the only way in
which such fundamental assumptions ever are confirmed :
the further we trust it the more we know, the more
confident in it we grow.

The assumption of a moral cosmos is made and
confirmed in the same way. We cannot prove it to be

348 HUMANISM xvm

correct so long as the world is not morally perfect ; we
cannot wholly exorcize the recurrent dread that, after all,
the moral order may of a sudden lapse into chaos before
our eyes : but we cannot organize our moral experience
without this assumption, and in the course of moral
development our confidence in it grows.

But, it may be said, if there is no essential difference
between the assumption of a moral and that of an
intellectual order in our experience, how is it that the
former appears so much less certain than the latter ?
Why are we so much more confident that the world is
subject to natural than to mpral law ? Why are moral
so much more commoner and more successful than
intellectual sceptics ? These facts are not to be disputed,
but perhaps they can be explained. Undoubtedly the
moral order is not so strong as the scientific, and its
principles have not such a hold on human nature. The
rebels against the moral order are not all in prison ; our
rascals largely run about unhanged. ' Moral insanity ' is
pleaded in mitigation of the punishment which it should
render inexorable. But the difference is due simply to
the different amounts of experience behind the two
assumptions. Historically man was a knowing being
long before he was an ethical being. He had lived long,
as Aristotle said, before he had lived well ; both in time
and in urgency, perceptual adaptation to the physical
order took precedence over ethical adaptation to the
social order. Man had to assume, therefore, the principles
that constituted the world a knowable cosmos long before
he needed to assume a moral order. Hence the beliefs in
the uniformity and calculability of Nature and the like
have a much greater and more unequivocal mass of racial
experience and hereditary instinct behind them than any
moral instinct we have yet acquired. But this does not
show that the nature of the several assumptions is not
essentially the same.

If the argument of this paper has commended itself so
far, there will probably be little difficulty in granting the
last point, that the demonstration of Immortality proffered

xvm ETHICS AND IMMORTALITY 349

by the ethical argument is as complete as any that can
be devised. But, to enforce the point, allusion may be
made to the fact that demonstration is in its very nature
what the logicians call hypothetical. It proceeds in the
form, If A is, then B must be. But how are we to know
that A is ? The premiss has to be assumed or conceded
in every demonstration. The utmost we can do is to rest
our demonstration on an assumption so fundamental that
none will dare to question it ; and this we here seem to
have accomplished. For what could be more fundamental
than the assumption on which the ethical argument rests
— that the elements of our experience admit of being
harmonized, that the world is truly a cosmosl If this be
not absolute certainty, it is at least certainty such that,
while no assertion of any special science is less hypothetical,
none rests upon an equally indispensable assumption.

On the whole, then, the ethical argument for im
mortality seems logically as sound and metaphysically as
legitimate as any argument can well be ; but it will not
be amiss to allude in closing to two points about which
nothing has so far been said. The first is the fact that,
when immortality has been shown to be an ethical
postulate, nothing has been decided as to the content of
that idea. All we know is that immortality must be of
such a sort as to be capable of being an ethical postulate.
And it is quite possible that the science of ethics would
on this ground find much to protest against in many of
the traditional forms of the belief in immortality, while it
would find little to object to in others which are less
familiar. It is difficult, for instance, to see how eternal
damnation could be regarded as an ethical postulate,
while some appropriate modification of the Hindu notion
of karma might seem ethically welcome. But though
ethics could thus prohibit certain ethically outrageous
beliefs in immortality, it cannot aspire positively to
determine the way in which its postulate is to be realized.
That problem lies beyond its scope, and has to be
determined, if at all, by considerations of a scientific and
metaphysical character. Hence the moral argument for

350 HUMANISM xvm

immortality is in a manner incomplete : first, because a
moral postulate cannot as such inform us as to the
method of its realization ; and secondly, because, disguise
it as we may, our faith in a cosmic order which includes
the moral remains still capable of further confirmation.
For, however firm our trust in the rationality of life, few
would contend that the discovery of scientific facts
consonant with our ethical demands would add nothing
to the assurance of their faith.

And so, lastly, a word must be said on the subject of
these scientific and metaphysical arguments about im
mortality which were excluded as irrelevant to the ethical
aspect of the question, in order to bring out the important
fact that, however they may be supposed to result, the
ethical argument maintains its independent validity. So
far as I can see, these further arguments may result in
three different ways. They may confirm the ethical
argument — in which case our confidence in immortality
will be strengthened. They may balance each other — in
which case they will leave the field open for the ethical
argument. Or, in the worst event, they may prepon-
deratingly conflict with it. But, even so, it would not
follow that they were right and the ethical argument was
wrong, at least until the plea for the essential solidarity
of the ultimate postulates had been invalidated. A world
in which the ethical ideal is abrogated and annulled
cannot be a harmonious world ; and if it be not
harmonious throughout, we can feel no confidence that it
is harmonious in any part. In other words, so long as
we trust in the ultimate presupposition of all knowledge
and all action, we could never quite trust the non-ethical
arguments that are supposed to plunge us in perplexity.

XIX

PHILOSOPHY AND THE SCIENTIFIC
INVESTIGATION OF A FUTURE LIFE1

ARGUMENT

The use of Philosophy in scientific inquiry — the general logical criticism of
fundamental postulates and working methods. This is most necessary
and helpful in a new science, and safest in one which, like ' Psychical
Research,' has not yet obtained professional endowment. Special
interest of a discussion of the assumptions made in a scientific inquiry
into the possibility of a future life, (i) The general scientific assumption
of 'law,' i.e. knowableness. (2) The axiom of proceeding from the
known to the unknown. This life must give the clue to our interpreta
tion of an ' other ' life, which could not be wholly ' other ' without
paralysing thought. Misconceptions on this score explain (a) the prac
tical weakness of the 'belief in a future life ; (t>) the prejudice against
an anthropomorphic future life ; and (c) against the spiritist hypothesis.
Assuming, therefore, that as a working theory personal survival is con
ceivable, how can it be verified? The future life must be conceived (i)
as natural ; (2) as psychically continuous with the present, in spite of the
difficulty of obtaining proofs of identity ; (3) as only dissociated from our
world by secondary processes traceable in our normal psychology. Result
that a future life scientifically provable would necessarily seem humdrum
and unsensational.

II. The philosophic basis of the conception of a future life. Philosophies which
reject it a priori are gratuitous. For an idealistic experientialism the
conception has no difficulty. How we pass into another world. How,
why, and to what extent, are dream worlds ' unreal ' ? ' Death ' as
' awakening ' to a more real world. Philosophers on death. Four
paradoxes about death. Their explanation by idealism. The construc
tion and dissolution of the common world of waking life. The ambiguity
of death. Does it leave the chances equal ? Impossibility of disproving
a future life wholly severed from the present. Possibility of empirical
evidence that the severance is not complete. Philosophy clears away
prejudices that obstruct investigation, but leaves discovery to science.

THE philosopher, as the genius of Plato long ago perceived,2
is a very strange being. He is in the world, but not of

1 An expanded form of a paper originally read before the Society for Psychical
Research, and published in its Proceedings, Part 36, February 1900.

2 Republic, 490.

351

352 HUMANISM Xix

it, residing mainly in a ' Cloud-cuckoodom ' of his own
invention, which seems to have no relation to the actual
facts of life, and makes no difference to anything or any
body but the philosopher himself. Its sole function seems
to be to make the philosopher himself feel happy and
superior to everybody who does not understand his
philosophy enough to enter into it, that is, to everybody
else in the world.

But even so the philosopher is not happy in his
paradise — of sages. He is terribly worried by all the
other philosophers, each of whom is quite as cantanker
ous and cranky as himself, and wants to carry him
off into his own private Nephelococcygia. And as he
will not, and indeed cannot, enter into it, they all get
very angry. They get so angry that they cannot even
laugh at each other. But when they get a little calmer
(not that there is really such -a thing as calm among
philosophers any more than among cirrus clouds — only
they live so far aloof and aloft that people cannot see
how they behave) they fall to criticizing. And so when
one of them has built himself a nice new Nephelococcygia
high up in the clouds, the rest all try to pull to pieces
the abode of his soul, and bombard him with buzzing
chimeras bottled in vacuum tubes and riddle him with
sesquipedalian technicalities. In this they are usually
successful, for, though so perverse, they are immensely
clever, and their critical acumen is as wonderful as their
unconsciousness of their own absurdity. And so, one after
the other, each loses his scalp, and is buried in the ruins
of his system.

Or rather he is not; for the burial customs of philosophers
are as strange as the rest of their behaviour, and unlike
those of any other tribe of men. Among the Scientists,
for instance, there are also savage wars, and they practise
vivisection. But the Scientists are not head-hunters. They
forget the errors of their vanquished warriors and bury their
remains, preserving only the memory of the work they
did for Science. And thus do they keep clean the face
of Science, and every morning wash away every blood-

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 353

stain and every speck of error in the waters of Lethe, so
that the many may believe that Science is infallible and
its history is one unbroken progress ; which is both more
Christian and more worldly-wise.

But not so the philosophers. They still believe in the
discipline of dirt, and keep the face of the fair goddess
they profess to worship like unto the face of Glaucus the
sea-god,1 and the thicker grow the incrustations of historic
error the better they are pleased. For they are simply
devoted to the memory of ancient errors. They venerate
them and collect them and dry them (in their histories of
philosophy), and label them and exhibit them in glass
cases with the scalps of their authors. They compile
whole museums of such antiquities, and get themselves
appointed the curators thereof. One of our universities is
popularly believed to have appointed about two dozen
such curators of the relics of the great fight between
Aristocles, the son of Ariston, and Aristoteles, the son
of Nicomachus. And the cause thereof was not Argive
Helen, if you please, but the transcendence of the universal!
Verily philosophic immortality is as terrible a thing and
as hard to bear as that of Tithonus !

Such, I cannot help suspecting, are the real sentiments
of intelligent men of the world concerning philosophers,
though only a philosopher could be rude enough to set
them down in black and white. But calumny, like murder,
will out, and only so can it be met. And so those who,
like Plato, have had the deepest faith in the value of
philosophy have ever also been the readiest to admit and
to confront the allegations of detractors.

And yet, at bottom, this was never quite an easy thing
to do. The weaknesses of philosophy are manifest ; its
obscurity, its flimsiness, its intense individuality,2 its re
moteness and uselessness for the ordinary purposes of life,
cannot but catch the public eye. Its virtues (if any) are
hidden out of sight. It seems safer, therefore, on the
whole, for the sage to flaunt his shame and to assume its

1 Cp. Plato, Republic, 611 D
2 For the explanation of which see Personal Idealism, pp. 50-51.

2 A

354 HUMANISM

XIX

burden ; boldly to disavow all purpose to better or instruct
the world, cynically to confess that whether or not his
astounding feats of conceptual prestidigitation can entertain
the gaping crowd, they do at least amuse himself, honestly
to disclaim the search for some more subtle service spring
ing from his exercises. It may have happened here and
there that the prescience of some wild and philosophic
guess outstripped the plodding march of science. It may
have happened now and then that in some reflective soul
the conduct of life has been improved by study of its
theory. But over most men habit bears such sway that
this would be a marvel, and such precarious incidents are
not enough to prove the useful nature of philosophy.

And yet if it were permitted to appeal to the philo
sophic heresy which just now is stirring up in all the
bottled chimeras a buzzing fit to burst their vacuum tubes,
if we might argue as pragmatists, it would seem obvious
that even philosophy must have some use. For if it had
not, society would scarce continue the endowment of
philosophy, whose professors might thereupon find them
selves reduced to breaking stones instead of systems. It
is quite true that there is always a flavour of impertinence
about the intervention of a philosopher in a subject of
scientific research. For he cannot, as such, be trusted to
make original contributions to the facts, and when he
makes an attempt to criticize the contributions of others,
it is quite true that he is terribly prone to do so from the
a priori basis of some far-fetched cosmic theory which
nobody else in the world besides himself believes in or
even understands, and so achieves a comic rather than
a cosmic interest. If, again, he contents himself with
ponderously pondering on the accepted facts of a science
he becomes a bore, consuming time and getting in the
way of more practical workers.

It must be admitted, therefore, that the usefulness of a
philosopher is very limited. It is undeniable only in
cases where he is needed to clear out of the way other
philosophers who have become obstreperous and ob
structive ; but such occasions do not occur frequently,

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 355

and no really vigorous movement pays much heed to
what philosophers are saying.

Nevertheless philosophy seems to me to have also
a more important function, which may enable it to be
scientifically suggestive and serviceable, at all events at a
certain stage in the development of a science.

The function in question is that of discussing the
working methods of a science, of exhibiting their full
scope and logical implications and connexions, and
considering the merits of the alternative ways of treating
the subject. Such a critical methodology of a science is
necessarily dull, but, perhaps, on that account, all the
better adapted for philosophic discourse. And in view
of the intellectual myopia which scientific specialism
engenders, there are, perhaps, few things more salutary,
as an unpleasant medicine is salutary, than for a science
to become conscious of the working assumptions, or
methodological postulates, on which it proceeds.

In the case of Psychical Research, in particular, the
discussion of such methodological assumptions seems to
be more novel, easier and more useful than in disciplines
which have already reached a more assured position among
the sciences. It is likely to be more novel, because of the
novelty of the whole subject. It is likely to be easier to
dissect out and contemplate in abstraction the methodo
logical assumptions of an inchoate and infant science,
because its organism is not so strongly knit and the flesh
of fact does not so closely shroud the bone of method
by which it is supported ; it is still in a low stage of
organization in which the whole may be taken to pieces
and put together without much injury to the vitality of
its parts. An advanced science, on the other hand, is far
more difficult to handle : it imposes on the philosophic
critic by its very mass of coherent and consistent in
terpretation ; it appeals to him by its noble record of
service to the human race ; it crushes him by the sheer
weight of immemorial authority. In it facts and theories
have long been welded together into so indissoluble a
union that the former can no longer be questioned, while

356 HUMANISM xix

the latter have for the most part risen to the dignity of
indispensable ' necessary truths ' implied in the very
nature of the human mind and underlying the whole
structure of human knowledge.1 We gain little help
therefore from the assumptions of sciences like mathematics
and mechanics in considering what assumptions should be
made in a new subject like Psychical Research ; we learn
little about the making of a science from sciences which
can neither be unmade nor remade, and in whose case it
requires a considerable effort of philosophic thought to
realize the methodological character of their fundamental
postulates. More might perhaps be learnt from the
assumptions of parvenu sciences which have but recently
obtained full recognition, but for the fact that a critical
dissection of their methods is decidedly dangerous. For
the ' arbor scientiae ' seems in their case to have developed
a symbiotic arrangement greatly resembling that whereby
certain trees protect themselves ; just as any attack on
the latter is ferociously resented by a host of ants which
the tree provides with food and shelter, so any interference
with such a science is sure to draw down upon the mildest
critic the onslaught of an infuriated professor who lives
upon the science. In Psychical Research, on the other
hand, no such danger is to be apprehended ; we have not
yet developed any professionals whose mission it is, as
William James has wittily remarked,2 to kill out the
layman's general interest in the subject, and hence the
philosopher may proceed at his leisure to observe how the
science is made and to try instructive experiments with
its working methods, without fear of offending vested
interests.

Again, a philosophic discussion of possible methods is
likely to be more useful in Psychical Research because
such methods are still plastic cartilage, as it were, which
has not yet grown into rigid bone, and may be moulded
into a variety of forms. Hence by reflecting betimes
upon the advantages of alternative methods, the phil
osopher may flatter himself that he can be of real service

1 See Axioms as Postulates. 2 Human Immortality, init.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 357

in guiding the course of investigation, or at least in
helping it to avoid certain pitfalls. Not, of course, that
even here he would be wise to presume to lay down the
law a priori as to the actual working and merits of the
various methods ; he should content himself with ex
pounding the logical characteristics which sound methods
in Psychical Research must possess, and explaining why
exactly they must possess them.

I do not propose, however, on this occasion to discuss
the methodological value of the assumptions made in
Psychical Research generally, but only in so far as they
affect the question of a future life. The reasons for this
are obvious. The possibility of a future life provides much
of the motive force in such inquiries. Most of the active
members of the Society are probably interested in this
question, and whether they desire or fear a future life,
they agree in wanting to know what chance or danger
there is of it. It is true that the S.P.R. is unique in
aiming to solve this problem in a scientific way, but
though we are scientific, we may yet be honest — in
avowing the existence of a practical motive. If attacked
on this score, let us meet our critics with the doctrine
that in this respect at least we are not unique, inasmuch
as in the end all true science is inspired by practical
motives, and that it is the fear, no less than the hope,
of a future life that renders its possibility so urgent a
subject for scientific consideration. Moreover, just now
the evidence in connexion with Mrs. Piper's trances
seems to have brought this possibility well above the
horizon of the S.P.R., while at the same time much
confusion and prejudice still seem to prevail about it
which philosophic criticism may help to dissipate. For
a comprehensive statement of the new evidence and new
interpretations of old evidence which render it the
bounden duty of the philosopher to readjust himself and
his formulas to the growth of knowledge, I can now
(1903) point to Frederic Myers' valuable work on Human
Personality and its Survival of Bodily Death.

I may begin by passing over with a merely formal

358 HUMANISM xix

mention the assumptions which are required for every
scientific investigation. As a matter of course we must
assume that the phenomena under investigation are
knowable and rational in the sense of being amenable
to determinable laws. The need for this assumption is so
plain that a priori attacks on Psychical Research on the
score of undermining the fundamental principle of all
scientific research can hardly be put down to anything but
voluntary or involuntary ignorance of the grossest kind.

Next we must enunciate a methodological axiom
with which at first sight few will be disposed to quarrel,
viz. that we must proceed to the unknown from what
is known to us. The remark is Aristotle's,1 and I may
be suspected of quoting it merely because Oxonians can
but rarely resist a temptation of quoting Aristotle. But
in reality it is not such a truism as it appears, at least in
the meaning I propose to put upon it. It means in this
connexion that, both psychologically and logically, we
must interpret any supposed future life by the knowledge
we have acquired of our present life. It is a methodo
logical necessity, in other words, that we must project this
world into the next, if ever we purpose scientifically to
know it. Our assumption may be wrong in the sense
that it may be wrecked on barrier reefs of impenetrable
fact — possibly it will be — but, right or wrong, we can
work with no other at the outset. As we go on we shall
no doubt detect the initial crudities of our assumptions,
and correct them as our knowledge grows. But what
ever differences we may discover between the two worlds
must rest upon the postulate of a fundamental identity,
in default of which our reason would be merely paralysed.
From a complete otherness of the other world nothing
would follow ; a future life in which everything was
utterly different would mean nothing to us, and in
proportion as the difference grows the practical efficacy
and theoretical knowableness of the conception diminish.

Now this, I venture to think, is a philosophic result of
no small practical importance.

1 Eth. Nic. \. 3. 5.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 359

(1) It goes a long way towards explaining the
anomaly of the feebleness of most people's religious
beliefs about the future life. For the heavens and hells
of the various religions, in spite of their pretensions to
evoke forces which should utterly dwarf the threescore
years and ten of our mortal life, are found in practice to
constitute motives so weak that they are continually
routed and set aside by the trivial temptations of the
moment. The reason is that they have ordinarily been
conceived as differing too radically from the known
conditions of life to excite the same serious belief, to
require the same matter-of-fact forethought as, e.g., next
year's crops or to-morrow's money market. And so the
belief in a future life, even where it has not been
degraded into a merely verbal assent to a traditional
formula, has commonly lacked that intimacy of associa
tion with the ordinary concerns of life which is needed to
render it psychologically efficacious as a stimulus to
action.

(2) Again, it turns out that the spiritists were by no
means wrong in principle when they proceeded to
construe the future life, of which they believed themselves
to possess cogent evidence, very much on the lines of
our earthly life. Their constructions may in detail be
as crude and absurd as their adversaries allege — I am
neither familiar enough with the literature to discuss this
point nor convinced that they are — but it is a mistaken
prejudice to reject such accounts a priori as too trivial or
undignified to be ascribed to the inhabitants of another
world. Owing, no doubt, to the unduly tragic view we
have come to take of death, the prejudice that the decease
of Brown, Jones, and Robinson must instantly transmute
them into beings of superhuman powers and tastes, and
transport them into regions where they are initiated into
the uttermost ecstasies and agonies of the scheme of
things, has become inveterate. Indeed, I have often been
amused to see how strongly this notion influences people
who are really entire disbelievers in the possibility of any-
future life ; while scorning everything ' supernatural,'

360 HUMANISM xix

they reject the spiritist's version thereof as not super
natural enough^ because they are quite sure that if there
were a future life at all, it would have to be as full of
angels and demons as what they would call ' the tradi
tional mythologies.' In a more respectable form the
same feeling shows itself in the large number of persons
who refuse to accept the evidence, e.g. in the Piper case,
because they think they would not like the sort of life to
which it seems to point. This may seem a somewhat
nai've ignoratio elencki, but the psychical researcher can
hardly afford to smile at it, for he is continually having it
impressed upon him how very serious are the obstacles
which prejudices of this sort form to the discovery and
recognition of the facts, and how manifestly the ' will to
believe ' is the ratio cognoscendi of truth. Hence a sys
tematic challenge of the whole assumption that another
world must be as different as is conceivable (or rather
inconceivable) from this, is needed to clear the atmosphere.

And inasmuch as the groundlessness of a false
assumption is never revealed more clearly than by a
request for the reasons on which it rests, I should like,
for my own part, to add to the general challenge a
particular request, asking philosophers to show cause
why a hypothetical ' other ' world must necessarily be
conceived as out of time and out of space. The con
viction that this must be so underlies, I am sure, much
of the high philosophic scorn of empirical spiritism and
popular theology, but I do not think it would be easy to
support it by a valid and cogent philosophic argument.
For so long as temporality and spatiality form indispens
able characteristics of the only real world we experience,
the presumption surely is that they will pervade also any
other, until at least a definite method has been suggested
whereby they may be transcended.1

(3) Thirdly, it must be recognized that the methodo
logical principle of interpreting the unknown by the
known tells strongly in favour of the simpler, and prim a

1 So far as time is concerned the conception of frtpyfia aKivrjeias would seem
to involve this. Cp. p. 212.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 361

facie easier, theory of the agency of personal spirits as
against the more complex and unfamiliar notions of an
impersonal clairvoyance, or subliminal consciousness, or
non-human modes of cognition by gods, devils, or cosmic
principles of a more or less unknowable kind. I am
very far from thinking that we should in such matters
hastily commit ourselves to the interpretation which
prima facie seems the most plausible, or, indeed, to any
definitive theory whatsoever, and I should be sorry to see
the ingenious attempts to provide a non-spiritistic ex
planation of the phenomena in question prematurely
abandoned — if only on account of their excellence as
mental gymnastics — but I cannot admit that such
attempts are one whit less anthropomorphic in principle
than the ' spiritist ' hypothesis (they only stray further
from their human model), while I cannot help admitting
that methodologically they are more cumbrous and so
considerably inferior. The spirit hypothesis has the
same kind of initial advantage over its rivals as the
' solid ' atom has in physics over the ' vortex ring ' or
the ' ether stress.' And while our knowledge remains in
its rudiments this advantage is considerable, though, as
the parallel shows, it may easily become problematical.

Admitting, therefore, that as a working theory the
hypothesis of the persistence after death of what we call
the human personality possesses considerable advantages
over rival theories, let us inquire further by what methods,
resting on what postulates, that theory may be verified.

(i) We may rule out once more the notion that such a
future life is essentially supernatural in character. This
notion has been a favourite with believers, but it is easily
turned into a terrible weapon in the hands of their ad
versaries. For the supernatural is, as such, conceived to
be insusceptible of investigation, and belief in it must be
mere faith, exposed to every doubt and jeer, if, indeed, it
can be even that, seeing that a real faith must be
nourished by at least partial and prospective verification in
fact. Hence the answer to this notion is simply this : that
if the future life be really ' supernatural ' in the sense of

362 HUMANISM xix

having no connexion of any sort with nature, there could
not possibly be any evidence of it, and it would have to
be for us non-existent ; while if there be evidence of it,
this would ipso facto include it in the widest conception
of nature, and render the nature of the connexion between
this world and the next a legitimate subject for scientific
research. If, therefore, the connexion be rare and
precarious, the reason cannot possibly be that from time
to time some audacious spirit has impiously achieved the
impossible by breaking through the natural order ; it
must lie in the peculiarities of the natural order itself.
Or, to sum up in a single phrase a discussion which
would long have become needless but for the persistence
of attempts to dispose of an inconvenient investigation
into facts by logical quibbles about words, if 'super-
nature ' is to be retained, it must not be in the sense
of something alien and hostile to ' nature,' but strictly
as meaning a higher department or aspect of nature
itself.

(2) We must suppose a certain continuity of psycho
logical constitution in the human spirit throughout every
phase of its existence. Without this we should not know
ourselves again after death. This does not imply that
death may not be a great event, involving a great gain
(or loss) in the intensity and extent of consciousness and
memory ; it asserts only that if we are to have know
ledge of a future life at all, we must assume that the
general characteristics of mental life will persist. With
out this, too, there could be no proof of ' spirit-identity '
to others : without ' spirit-identity ' there could be no
proof of a future life. Unfortunately, however, this
assumption of ours would lead us to expect that the
proof of ' spirit-identity ' would be difficult. For it is
psychologically far more probable that the moral
character and the feelings would traverse the shock and
change of death unshaken, than that little bits of
knowledge about terrestrial affairs would persist in equal
measure. Yet it is these latter that afford the best tests
of ' spirit-identity,' and it is suggestive that whereas at

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 363

first Mrs. Piper's ' G.P.' communications abounded in
such tests, they have gradually grown rare.

(3) As we must try to explain all the facts by prin
ciples already known to be valid, we must account for the
remarkable dissociation between this world and the next
by the principle of psychological continuity. That such
dissociation must exist will hardly be denied by any one
who has realized how very rare an experience a ' ghost '
is, even with the most expert of ghost seers and in its
most favoured haunts. But it would seem that if the
departed still retained their personality and psychical
continuity, ' ghosts ' ought to be more plentiful than
blackberries, and unhedged by that divinity which makes
people so reluctant to make a clean breast of their ghost
stories. Prima facie, therefore, it requires explanation
that in spite of psychic continuity so much dissociation
should prevail.

Nevertheless it may, I think, be shown that the
assumption of psychical continuity would be quite com
patible with the prevalence of an almost complete
dissociation between this world and the next. For any
great event tends to dissociate us from our past, and this
would apply a fortiori to an event like death, which ex
hypothesi launches us into a new world. A new world,
moreover, would engross us not only by its novelty, but
also by the practical need of accommodating ourselves
to new conditions of existence. Hence the psychological
conditions for great concern about the world we had left
behind us would hardly be present. This argument,
moreover, could be considerably strengthened by psycho
logical observations with regard to the interest which is
taken in the affairs of our world by the aged. For it
would be unlikely that an interest which had already
grown faint should effectively maintain itself amid the
distractions of a new life.

And even if the desire to communicate were felt, it
could hardly be assumed that the knowledge and power
to do so would at once be at the disposal of the new
comer, who, for aught we know, might find that, as

364 HUMANISM

XIX

upon his entry upon this scene, a period of helplessness
and dependence analogous to infancy had to be passed
through.

It would seem probable, therefore, that to render
communication effective, quite as systematic and sustained
an effort would be needed on the other side as is being
made by the S.P.R. on this, while the self-regarding
motives for making it would be indefinitely less potent.
For while each of us ought to have l the strongest personal
interest in determining what his prospects may be after
death, no such case could be made out for a retrospective
interest of the departed in our world. And in their
world the prevalent social sentiment, might esteem it
better to leave us in our present doubt and discourage
attempts to pry into the possibilities of communication
with another world. That would only be to suppose that
their social sentiment is the same as ours. Only it would
in their case be more reasonable. For why should they
incommode themselves to impart to us a knowledge which
each one of us is bound to gather for himself within a
few years more? And this suggestion will appear the
more probable when we remember that, according to the
principle of psychic continuity, the same people will be
making the same sentiment in both cases. Nevertheless,
it is conceivable that some day a fortunate coincidence
of the efforts of an infinitesimal minority on both sides
should succeed in establishing spirit-identity and forcing
upon the reluctant masses of men the scientific fact of a
future life which they did not in the least desire to have
so established. Even then, however, we should still be
very far from any definite and detailed knowledge of the
nature of the future life in itself, the difficulties of trans
mitting which would increase enormously in proportion
as the dissociation between the two spheres of existence
became greater.

Thus the general upshot of our discussion so far would
be that a future life which was accessible to scientific

1 I emphasize the 'ought,' for, as a matter of empirical fact, the present
number of those who are scientifically interested in the question to the extent of
a guinea per annum appears to be about 1400 !

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 365

methods of proof would necessarily appear to be of a
somewhat homely and humdrum character, displeasing to
spiritual sensationalists. Broadly speaking, our conceptions
of it would rest on the assumption of social and psychic
continuity, and they would tend to suppose that the
reward and punishment of the soul consisted mainly in
its continuing to be itself, with the intrinsic consequences
of its true nature revealed more and more clearly to itself
and others. Hence there would be but little scope
for epic flights of a lurid imagination, and those who
hanker after the ecstasies of the blessed and the torments
of the damned would have to go, as before, to the
preachers and the poets. We may, however, trust these
latter to work up a more copious material into pictures
quite as edifying and thrilling as those of Homer, Dante,
and Milton.

II

I have assumed hitherto, without a hint of doubt, the
general possibility of the conception of a future life.
But, after all, this also is an assumption, of a very vital
character, and one which has been strongly impugned on
a priori grounds. I shall devote, therefore, my concluding
remarks to disposing of such philosophic attempts at an
a priori suppression of the question and to stating some
of the philosophic considerations which lead me to think
the conception of a future life a valid and non-contra
dictory one, whether or not we are able or anxious to
find empirical evidence of its actual existence. On the
first point I may be brief: I should not deny that it is
possible to devise metaphysical systems which will render
the persistence of the individual consciousness improbable
and even impossible, and which consequently close the
question to all who conscientiously adopt them. Person
ally, I believe those systems to be demonstrably wrong,
but it is enough for our purpose that they should be
gratuitous, and that we may, at least equally well, adopt
metaphysical views which leave the question open, or

366 HUMANISM xix

even lead us to regard a future life as a priori probable
enough, and needing only verification a posteriori.

Hence, speaking for myself — and in so personal a
matter it is best to speak for oneself if one wants to speak
to the point — I cannot at all appreciate the enormous
antecedent difficulty which so many philosophers profess
to feel about the conception of a future life. Even its
most difficult implications, like, e.g. the transition from
one world to another, seem to become quite easy, if we
start from the proper philosophic basis. Let us, for
instance, assume — as I think we must do in any case —
the philosophic position of an idealistic experientialism.
I use this .clumsy phrase to designate the view that ' the
world ' is primarily ' my experience,' plus (secondarily) the
supplementings of that experience which its nature renders
it necessary to assume, such as, e.g., other persons and a
'real' material world. In that case the world, in which
we suppose ourselves to be, is, and always remains, relative
to the experience which we seek to interpret by it, and
if that experience were to change, so necessarily would
our ' real ' world. Its reality was guaranteed to it, so
long as it did its work and explained our experience ; it
is abrogated so soon as it ceases to do so.1 Hence we
may conceive ourselves as passing through any number
of worlds, separated from each other by (partial) dis
continuities in our experience, each of which would be
perfectly real while it lasted, and yet would have to be
declared unreal from a higher and clearer point of view.

Nor would this conception remain an empty form,
which we could not find anything in our experience to
illustrate. I venture to affirm that we are all of us per
fectly familiar with what it feels like to pass from one
world into another. When we fall asleep and dream, we
pass into a new world, with space, time, persons, and
laws (uniformities) like our own. But though these
fundamental features persist in principle, they are not the
same space, etc.,2 and have no very obvious connexion
with the corresponding characteristics of our waking life.

1 Cp. p 193. 2 Cp. 32.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 367

It is true that the reality of each dream-world is very
precarious : it is dissolved by every clumsy interruption
from a more ' real ' world, in the ex post facto judgment
of which the dream-world is fleeting, chaotic, and un
manageable.1 But the philosophic critic cannot thus
presume the theoretical correctness of our ordinary judg
ment. To him all modes of experience are, in the first
instance, real.2 He can find no standing ground outside
experience whence to judge it.

All our distinctions, then, between the ' real ' and
' unreal ' are intrinsic : it is the dream-world's character
itself that leads us to condemn it.3 And if in our
dreams we found ourselves transported into worlds
more coherent, more intelligible, more beautiful and
more delightful than that of daily life, should we not
gladly attribute to them a superior reality, and, like
Mohammed, hold that in our sleep our souls had been
snatched up to heaven and privileged to commune with
the gods ? 4 The fact, indeed, that such experiences have
played a signal part in the lives of nearly all the world's
greatest heroes, and thereby left an indelible mark upon
its history, should make us chary of dogmatic denials of
the value of such ' dream-worlds.' But as a rule we do
deny without a scruple, and, reasoning as pragmatists, do
ruthlessly reject them for yielding nothing that sense can
use and sanity can tolerate. Hence the consensus of
common sense declares dream experiences to be unreal —
though, it may be noted, it has taken men a long time to
arrive at this conclusion and to disabuse themselves of
the notion that after all there must be a literally veridical
and inspired meaning in all their experiences. What
has not been realized with equal clearness — probably
because the observation seemed to have no direct practical
bearing — is that the existence of unreal worlds of dream-
experience casts an indelible slur on the claim of our
present waking life to absolute reality.5 What has
happened once may happen again, and when we wake to

1 Cp. p. 113 note. 2 Cp. p. 192. 3 Cp. p. 195.

4 Cp. pp. 22, 32. 5 Cp. p. 198.

368 HUMANISM xix

another world our terrestrial life may appear as grotesque
a parody, as misleading a distortion, of true reality as the
most preposterous of dreams.

Nay more ; even in this life we cannot call it an illicit
and unthinkable ambition to discover modes of rising from
our waking world to one of a higher order, whose superior
reality would demand acknowledgment from all so soon
as either its experience had become communicable to an
appreciable fraction of society, or it had proved to be of
use for the purposes of ' waking ' life.1 Philosophy could
not indeed provide the Columbus of such idealist discovery.
But it might sanction his assumption of such risks. Just
as an enlightened physics might have contended, long before
Magellan, that the earth was circumnavigable if it could
find the daring soul to sail right round it, so philosophy
may declare that if the whole world be experience, new
worlds may be found by psychical transformation as
probably and validly as by physical transportation. And
it must decline to treat the fact that the other worlds
we know are apparently less real than that of waking life 2
as being a conclusive proof that more real worlds are
nowhere to be found.

Thus the passage from world to world is familiar
enough to our experience. But, as experienced by us in
sleep, it is not irrevocable. We return, that is, to the
same waking world. And that makes a difference
between sleep and its twin brother death. For from
death we are bidden to believe that there is no return.
Still we must not exaggerate the difference ; for to our
dream-worlds also we do not (usually) return.

Hence this return, which is regarded as an awakening
of the soul from the point of view of the subject of the
experience, is at the same time the dissolution of his dream
world and life. The severance of his relations with the
world of his former experience, therefore, has a double

1 Cp. p. 41.

2 A remark subject always to certain reservations on the score of the subjective
worlds of the mystics and founders of religions. Common sense hardly realizes
how its principles here cut away the foundations of all the religions which, never
theless, it imagines itself to value and believe. Cp. p. 114 note.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 369

aspect. On the one hand, his ' dream ' passes away as he
passes into a region of higher reality ; on the other, he passes
away out of the dream-world that imposed itself upon
him into his ' waking ' life.1 For we have seen that even
dreams are not entirely unreal. Even at their lowest, the
features they present refer to the truth, and foreshadow
the reality, of a superior world : they are to some extent
veridical. Hence we must contemplate the situation also
from the point of view of the beings who interacted with
the ' dreamer ' in the ' dream ' life and world. For them, his
awakening means his withdrawal from their world. When
Alice awakes, she of course declares Looking- Glass Land
to have been a dream, and its inhabitants to have been the
creatures of her fancy. But while she was with them they
were vividly real. And Alice, after all, herself was not quite
satisfied with this vulgar explanation. It will be remem
bered that she suspected the black kitten of having trans
formed herself into the Red Queen of Looking-Glass Land.
And this would raise an interesting question : if we should
chance to survive death, should we merely declare earth-
life to have been unreal, or should we not rather trace in
its happenings some subtle presage of a fuller truth ?

It seems quite worth while, therefore, to look at the
situation from the point of view of Looking-Glass Land, to
whose denizens it would appear quite different. Tweedle-
dee, no very cogent reasoner, perhaps, but a thorough
going idealistic monist in his argument, asseverated that
the dream was not Alice's at all, but the Red King's, and
that if and when he left off dreaming her, the phenomenon
called Alice would simply disappear. His notion as to
the manner of her disappearance was that she would " go
out bang! — just like a candle," but herein he may have
been mistaken. Still he has at least suggested to us that
when one of us withdraws from a world, the world may
misinterpret his action as his death.

Now death is a topic on which philosophers have been
astonishingly commonplace. The reason of this cannot
have been that it was not a splendid topic for reflection,

1 Cp. p. 39.

2 B

370 HUMANISM xix

nor yet that their doctrines were not capable of throwing
light upon its nature. Perhaps they have lived in as great
terror of it as more ordinary mortals, and so lacked the
courage to think about it at all. At all events I can
readily believe, from a study of their doctrines, that
Spinoza was quite right in maintaining that there is no
subject concerning which the sage thinks less than about
death.1 Which, nevertheless, is a great pity. For the
sage is surely wrong. There is no subject concerning
which he, if he is an idealist and has tJie courage of his
opinions, OUGHT to think more, and OUGHT to have more
interesting things to say.

In partial proof of which let me attempt to arouse him
to reflection by propounding some old ^paradoxes about
death which will, I think, be germane to our subject.

(1) No man ever yet perished without annihilating also
the world in which he lived.

(2) No man ever yet saw another die ; but if he had, he
would have witnessed his own annihilation.

(3) The world is the greatest of all conventions ; but all
are unconventional enough to leave it.

(4) To die is to cut off our connexion with our friends ;
but do they cut us, or we them, or both, or neither ?

Now these paradoxes contain nothing but necessary
inferences from the idealistic view of the world, if it is
applied practically to the phenomenon of ' death,' and no
philosopher who really and seriously accepts that view
should have the slightest difficulty with them. But for
the sake of the others I feel that it may be better to add
a short commentary. " No man ever yet perished without
annihilating also the world in which he lived," i.e. the world
of his experience, or as we may perhaps say with still more
accuracy, the objective world, in so far as it was assumed
to explain his experience. Moreover, " no man ever yet
saw another die, but if he had he would have witnessed
his own annihilation " : inasmuch as he could never see
the other's self and so a fortiori could not observe its de-

1 Eth. iv. Prop. 67.
2 Cp. S. P.R. Journal for March 1898, vol. viii. p. 204.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 371

struction ; what he saw was the ' death ' of a ' body ' which
was merely a phenomenon in his own world of experience.
But \t,per impossible, he could have witnessed the destruc
tion of the subject of a world of experience, his own destruc
tion, as a phenomenon in such a world, would have been
included in the catastrophe. Thus both these paradoxes
are designed to bring out the essential and incurable
philosophic ambiguity of ' death.' * Death is not the
same thing for him who experiences and for him who
witnesses it. It forms the limiting case which involves
the breakdown of the great social convention, whereby we
postulate (for practical purposes) a common world which
is experienced by us all. (No. 3.) Even during life that
convention is maintained only at the cost of excluding
from ' reality ' all such experiences as are personal, or
divergent, or incapable of forming a basis for common
action. At death it breaks down altogether, and the long-
suppressed divergence between the world of ' my ' experi
ence and the ' objective ' world, which is nobody's experi
ence but is supposed to account for everybody's, dominates
the situation.2

When a man dies his relation to the common world

1 Cp. also Riddles of the Sphinx, ch. xi. § 8.

2 This is the simplest description of the actual situation and begs the fewest
questions. The monistic metaphysicians who arrogate to themselves exclusive
rights to an idealism which they cannot use, and which dies away in their hands
either into naturalism or into platitude, prefer to distort it by postulating as its
explanation a ' divine ' consciousness which somehow embraces or contains all the
subject-consciousnesses of our fellows, and thereby (sic) guarantees the absolute
commonness of the ' common ' world which is really the ' object ' of the divine
consciousness. But the expedient proves utterly futile. For (i) the conception
of one consciousness (divine or diabolical) including another has never yet been
shown to be capable of anything like intelligible statement (cp. Dr. Rashdall in
Personal Idealism, pp. 382-4). The only clue in experience to anything of the
sort is to be found in the highly suggestive, but quite inadequately studied, facts of
' multiplex personality,' and it seems extremely doubtful whether even these would
lead to the desired conclusion. The metaphysicians in question, moreover, are
about the last people in the world to concern themselves with empirical phenomena
of this sort. (2) The divine world-image, so far from explaining the plurality of
our individual world-images, only adds one to their number. It remains involved
in the old Platonic difficulty of the transcendent universal. Or, if it is taken as
really immanent, it becomes merely a hypocritical description of the ' harmony ' of
the individual images, and lapses into atheism. And (3) in many cases the
' harmony' is very imperfect, and there is not, strictly, a ' common ' world at all.
That is, the communion is neither pre-existent nor absolute. It is an achievement,
reached by infinite labours and unending struggles, to a limited degree, for a
limited period. We do not, as a matter of fact, experience our common ' objects '

372 HUMANISM xix

apparently ceases, and so " to die is to cut off our
connexion with our friends ; but do they cut us, or we
them, or both, or neither ? " But for what reason we cannot
say. It may be that the deceased has ceased to be ; it
may also be that he has ceased to interact with us — until
we also have followed his example. Similarly, when we
witness a death, all that we can safely and scientifically
say is that a peculiar feature in our experience which
impelled us to assume a self-conscious spirit, analogous to
our own, in order to account for the behaviour of the
complex of phenomena we called the body of our fellow-
man, has undergone a change such that the behaviour of
his ' body ' no longer warrants the inference of the
presence of his ' spirit.' Again, the reason may be either
that the spirit is destroyed, or that it has ceased to animate
the ' body.' Thus it would seem as though all that could
be affirmed for certain about death was that it was a
disruption of the common world in which spirits acted
together ; what else or what more it was would remain
in doubt — the spirit may have perished or it may just
have ' passed away.'

alike. Hence the infinite diversity of individual judgments and valuations. But
if this were all, there would be no possibility of what Professor Ward has well
called ' intersubjective intercourse. ' So we have managed to some extent to act
concordantly with regard to the ' objects' of our most pressing practical concerns.
You and I, e.g. , are said to perceive a ' common ' red, when we classify colours
alike. But whether your experience in perceiving ' red ' is the same as mine, it
is meaningless to ask (p. 31). For the ' common red ' means merely such practical
agreement. And when we go on to ask what is 'beautiful,' and 'good,' and 'right,'
and ' pleasant,' we soon discover how narrow are the limits of such practical agree
ment, and are forced to realize that to a large extent we still literally live in different
worlds. And, as noted above, ' death ' seems to terminate the common world in
time as completely as individuality limits its extent. (4) The Absolute or ' universal
consciousness ' on scrutiny turns out to be neither divine nor conscious. Or rather
the connotation both of ' God ' and of ' consciousness ' has to be radically changed
to accommodate it. An all-containing consciousness cannot be a moral being. It
is the Devil just as much as God, and indeed the ' Absolute' must be defined in
Hegelian terms as the synthesis of God and the Devil. And however much it
may ' contain ' consciousness it is hard to see how it can be itself conscious.
Indeed in the end it seems describable in negatives alone, and by contrast with
the contents of our experience ; it ' has ' all things, but is not any of the things it
' has. ' For the whole cannot be anything that we predicate of its parts.

In short it seems impossible really to think out the conception of a single
subject of all experience except upon solipsistic lines. If one consents to solipsism
it is easy enough, but not a bit more satisfactory. For solipsism is just the view
we are driven out of by the considerations which induce us to construct a common
world.

xix PHILOSOPHY AND A FUTURE LIFE 373

Thus, so far as philosophy can determine, it would
seem as if the chances of destruction and survival were
exactly equal, and that we were doomed to doubt for ever.
Nevertheless, considerations may be adduced which must
add decisively to the weight of the latter alternative.
For it should be noted that the two alternatives are not
equally well situated with respect to empirical evidence.
No conceivable empirical evidence can suffice to establish
the destruction of the soul at death, because none can
even be relevant to the real issue as it presents itself from
our philosophic point of view. For it can only concern
appearances in the common world of the survivors, it can
only prove that the rupture of connexion with it at death
is utter and entire. But that is not enough. Even if a
ghost returned to announce to us the complete extinction
of the soul at death, we could not credit so Hibernian an
assertion. A scientific proof therefore, of the annihilation
of the soul is rigorously impossible. On the other hand,
there is no such intrinsic impossibility about a scientific
proof of the persistence of consciousness through death;
there is, in fact, no particular difficulty about conceiving
empirical evidence sufficient to establish this doctrine
with as high a degree of certainty as we have for any
of our beliefs as to matters of fact. The whole diffi
culty consists in getting the evidence. If we had
succeeded, the theoretic readjustment of our opinions
would be easy ; all we should need to do would be to
modify our original assumption that death meant an
absolute rupture of relations, an utter dissolution of the
common world. We should have to say instead, that
death altered the mode of communication of spirit with
spirit, rendering it different and difficult, without in
terrupting it altogether. But, properly interpreted and
manipulated, the common world would persist through
death. What exactly would be the nature of the
common world, thus extended to include a life after death,
philosophy could not, of course, forecast ; that would
remain a question for positive research to determine.

Here then we reach the limits of philosophic specula-

374 HUMANISM xix

tion. When the philosopher has shown that no a priori
impossibilities block the pathway of discovery, and no
authentic fact can be too anomalous for explanation,
when he has cleared men's eyes of the prejudices which
obstruct a clear prevision of the goal and has aroused a
sufficient will to know, a sufficient conviction that it is well
to look before we plunge, and to try to see whither we
go before we go, he must modestly stand aside, and
leave the empirical explorer into the puzzling mazes of
psychical science to cut down the barbed-wire entangle
ments of hostile human prejudice, and step by step to
fight his way through the thickets of complex and
perplexing fact. And so the glory of discovery will not
be his, but will reward the scientist who has borne the
labour and danger of the day of battle. And yet the
discoverer will owe perhaps the faith which sustained his
courage and endurance in no small measure to the
apparently unmoved spectator who watched the struggle
from afar, and this faith may justify the thinker also
when he is called upon to render an account of the use to
which he has put his powers.

INDEX

Absolute, an: abstraction, xxii ; no
starting-point, xxiii ; the death of
morals, 2 ; its transcendence of
distinctions, 3 ; triviality of its con
templation, 4 ; its monotony, 14, and
irredeemable perfection, 14 ; as un
knowable and a useless theory, 41,
and hence to be called false, 59 ; as
explaining objectivity, 60, 371-2 ;
Lotze's theory of, 62-84 ; suppresses
difficulties ex officio, 108 ; an inter
pretation of reality, 119-20 ; a mis
conception, 126 ; unites God and the
devil, 167, 263, 372 ; Bradley's, 187-
191 ; as asylum ignorantiae, 188 ;
transmutes appearances, 189, 199 ;
unknowable, 191 ; inaccessible, 192 ;
solipsistic, 252 ; neither divine nor
conscious, 372

Absolute Idea, 96, 102-3

Absolutism, xxviii

Abstraction, the kingdom of, xxii ; from
time and individuality, 98-9 ; its value,
100-102 ; its Ideological subordina
tion, 104; as instrument, 120; mathe
matical, why judged real, 120 ; as
method of simplification, 145-8 ;
produces timelessness, 212

Accidents not distinct from 'essence,'
222

Activity, purposive, condition of know
ledge, 12, 234, 238 ; speculative, 25-6 ;
of intelligence, 130; of Mephisto, 180,
and substance, 204-27 ; transcend
ing change, 205 ; of divine life, 212 ;
motion as, 214 ; is substance, 225 ;
Hume's criticism of, 235-48

Actuality, 67, 208, 224, 226

Adaptation, argument from, to an
adapter, 131 ; its imperfection, 131 ;
shown by Darwin to be conceivable
without adapter, 132 ; origin of, 142;
growth of, 142 ; novelty of, 143 ;
not due to natural selection, 154 ;
instantaneous in perfect life, 215-16

Alexander, S., 261

Alice, 369

Analysis, of cause, 238 ; of ' complex '

and ' simple,' 56
Anaximander, 156
Animism, 239
Annihilation of soul incapable of proof,

373

Anthropomorphism, xxi, 13, 240, 361
Antinomies, 108-9
Appearance and Reality, 3, 101, 226 ;

antithesis of, 183-203
Apriorism, 231-3
Aristotle, 19-40, 67, 203, 205-27

passim, 253, 257, 285, 353, 358
Arnold, Matthew, 2
Ascham, J?. , 34
Associationism, 240
Astrology, 298, 300
Attention, why volatile, 217
Authority, 273 ; argument from, 335,

and old age, 326
Automata, 133-4
Axioms as Postulates, ix, xi ; notes\^,

44, 50, 92, 94, 95, 129, 183, 227,

355

Balfour, Arthur, xii, 6

Barbarism, and Humanism, xxvi

Bateson, W., 135

Beatific Vision, 203, 212

Beauty, ideal of, 344-5

Becoming, 107, 118, 207, 208, 210,

216-17
Being, and nothing, xxii ; Aristotle's

ideal of, 205, 226 ; unchanging, 207,

216-17 I as perfect harmony, 225
Belief, and action, 251
Berkeley, 126, 223
Bias, 298, 301, 307, 312
Blatchford, K., 28j-ji2 fassi m
Bradley, F. H., 3, 38, 96, 101, 108,

183-201 passim, 244, 272 n.
Buddha, 158, 168
Burnet, /., 212

Calculus of probabilities, 126, 150

375

376

HUMANISM

Calinon, 86, 89

Carroll, Lewis, 53, 216

Causation, 64; as analysis, 238; Hume's
criticism of, 232-3, 235-6 ; immanent
— not more intelligible than transient,
68-9 ; volitional theory of, 235-48

Cave-dwellers, 21, 23, 41, 43

Chance, as originating world, 72 ; as
excluding intelligence, 150

Change, and identity, 69 ; problem of,
73, 101 ; endangers adaptation, 143 ;
as fact, 1 88 ; as defect, 211

Choice, as real, 303 ; not motiveless,
306-11

Coexistence and interaction, 65

Cognition as moral act, 15 ; not intellec
tion, 233-4 ; not passive, 236

Coherence a psychological fact, 52-3 ;
feelings of, 52 ; not always logical,
53 ; due to interest, 53 ; use as test
of reality, 119

Colour-blindness, 116

Commensurability, Lotze's argument
from, 70

Common sense, xxi, xxiii, xxv, 6, 190,
232, 235, 257, 272, 305-6

Common world, result of effort, 31, 371

Comte, 201

Conduct, controls theory, 4 ; thought a
mode of, 4 ; survival value of, 133 ;
rewards and punishments as results
of, 340

Consciousness, as accident, 130 ; eco
nomy of, 241-2 ; perfection of, 216-
218 ; one, as subject of world, 371-2

Contradiction, principle of, 185-6, 188

Cope, E. D., 135

-Correspondence, of subject and object,
256

Criteria of reality, 114-8, 121; absolute,
185, 189

Crypto-solipsism, 254, 262

Damnation, of Faust impossible, 177 ;

eternal, not an ethical postulate, 349
Dante, 365

Darwin, C., 128-56 passim
Darwinism, 71 ; its implicit atheism, 72,

and design, 128-56
Death, foreknowledge of, 314 ; not

thought about, 315-21 ; as withdrawal

from common world of waking life,

369-74 ; idealist paradoxes about,

370; ambiguity of, 371
Degeneration, 139, 140
Delbaeuf, 86, 90

Demonstration, hypothetical, 349
Descartes, 253, 257
Design, 128-56 ; argument from, its

theological value, 130 ; its weak

nesses, 131 ; attacked by Darwin,
132 ; ultimately strengthened by evolu
tionism, 154-6

Desire to know, 234, 330-4

Determinism, as postulate, 15, 301, and
Monism, 49, and responsibility, 283-
312

Dewey, J. , ix, xiii

Dialectic, Hegel's, 95, 97, 103

Dogma, 278-82

Dogmatism, 229

Dreams and superior reality, 22, 32,
282 ; as individual truths, 60 ; their
alleged incoherence and unreality,
114 «. , 119 ; private worlds of, 196 ;
of metaphysics, 226, and the transi
tion to other worlds, 366, 369 ; in
relation to solipsism, 285-6, 312 ; in
ferior reality of dream worlds, 367-8

Economic man, 146-8

Eleaticism, 206-7

Elimination of unfitter, 132

Eliot, George, 339

Empiricism, 229, 231-2; radical, 237, q.v.

End, affair of finite individuals, 105 ; or
good, 160

Energeia, Aristotelian conception of
substance, 204-27 ; as life and per
fection of activity, 221, and energy,
223

Energy, 246, dissipation of, 214, and
' energeia,' 223

Epistemological question, prior to onto-
logical, 9 ; but conditioned by ethical,
10, and ontological, 114

Equilibration, as 'death,1 219-20; as
life, 220-21

Equilibrium, 188, 214-21

Error, 251, 257, 259, 261, 275, 292,
299

Ethical theory dependent on practice,

33-5

Ethics and Pragmatism, xvii, and psy
chological facts of conduct, 313

Eugenics, 288

Evil, 78-80

Evolution, its essence, 108 ; factors of
organic, 134, 136 ; not explained by
Darwinism, 138-43 ; facts of, do
not exclude intelligence, 149-50;
mechanical views of, 155

Evolutionism, 108, 129, 144 ; its an
tiquity, 155

Experience, ambiguous, 231 /.

Experientialism, idealistic, 366

Fact, as value, 10, 55 ; its recognition
provisional, 12, and truth, 46 ;
valued as ' true, ' 57 ; cannot decide

INDEX

377

between teleological and antiteleo-
logical interpretation, 153; judgments
of, 161 ; are values, 163

Faith and reason, xvii, 7 ; its venture,
16, 79-80 ; Dr. McTaggart's, in the
unknown synthesis, 96 ; extralogical,
97 ; ultimate appeal to, 99 ; needed
for ultimate assumptions, 153, 312 ;
need for, due to past negligence, 322 ;
' ages of faith ' not really religious,
327; in ' supernatural,' 361-2

Falsehood, and uselessness, 37, 40 ;
practically untenable, 38

Feeling, 233

Fichte, 254

Fiction, 10, n n., 146, 147, 308

Formal Logic, ix, x ; notes, 2, 125,
185, 238, 268

Freedom, 15, 77, 176, 182, 283-312 ;
and habit, 303 ; and indetermination,
306 ; inconvenience of, 302-3

Future life, why a 'matter of faith,'
324 ; scientific investigation of,
351-74 ; too much to think of, 342 ;
interest in, 357 ; cannot be wholly
different, 358 ; unduly tragic view of,
359 ; a priori objections to, 365 ;
possibility of empirical proof, 373

Gallon, Sir F., 288

Geometry, Euclidean and non-Euclidean,
85-94; its certainty, 91 ; real validity,
91 ; necessity and universality, and
' a-priority,' 92

Ghost, of Banquo, 116 ; rarity of, 363

God, not the Unity of Things, 76 ; not
the Absolute, 77 ; nor author of evil,
80-8 1 ; vagueness of the current con
ception, 8 1 ; a priori proofs of,
worthless because too wide, 82 ;
must be given an a posteriori re
ference, 83-4 ; thought of, does not
constitute human reality, 121 ; as
author of adaptation, 131 ; united
with the devil in the Absolute, 167,
372 ; Aristotle's, 203, 211, 253 ; per
fection of, 226 ; not the one subject,

37i

Goethe, 166, 180

Good, conditions true and real, 9 ;
supreme power of, 12 ; idea of, 41,
207 ; of organism determines racial
conduct, 133 ; the, 208 ; must be
attainable, 217

Goodness, ultimately harmonious with
truth, 24, 28, and truth, 62 ; as
ideal, 162 ; its apparent waste, 338 ;
a matter of character, 339, and
happiness, 340

Gorgias, 186

Green, T. H., 112, 212, 235 n., 236)1.
Gymnosophistic, 35

Hallucination, individual, 115; col
lective, 116 ; how distinguished from
reality, 119

Hamilton, Sir W., 237

Happiness, as ideal, 159 ; its validity,
162, 344, 345

Harmony, and individuality, xxvi, in
cludes system, 50 ; the real as, 119 ;
includes non-contradiction, 187 ; a
postulate, 189 ; result of growing
knowledge, 200 ; perfect, 203 ;
ethical, postulates a future life, 337,
344 ; of experience potential, 346 ;
must be universal, 349

Hartmann, E. von, 158

Heaven, conception of, 177, 212-3,
336-7. 36S : its inefficacy, 325, 359

Hedonism, and pessimism, 158-9

Hegel, xxvii, 54, 97, 186, 218

Hegelism, 99

Helmholtz, 131

Herakleitos, 39, 42, 207, 284

Herbart, 85, 186, 187

Historical method, 107

Hobbes, 216

Hodgson, ft., 328

Homer, 365

Howison, G. H., xiii

Humanism, xx-xxix ; its naming, ix,
xx ; relation to anthropomorphism,
xxi ; to Protagoras's dictum, x, xxi ; to
common sense, xxi, xxv ; as a
method, xxii-xxvi ; relation to radical
empiricism and pluralism, xxiv ; to
Humism, 225-48 ; to personal ideal
ism and pragmatism, xxv ; to scepti
cism, 230 ; to solipsism, 251, 263-7 ;
antithesis to barbarism, xxvi, and
scholasticism, xxvii, and naturalism
and absolutism, xxviii, 13, 197

Hume, 197, 205, 209, 223, 228-48
passim, 253

Hyperaesthesia, 115-6

' Idea," 256-7

'Idealism' and reality, 110-26; 'ab
solute,' 252 ; epistemological and
metaphysical, 112 ; a paradox be
cause not acted on, 197-8 ; false,
198, 262 ; subjective, 252

Idealistic, art of passing into superior
worlds, 1 8 ; experientialism, 366

Ideals, denial of, leads to pessimism,
159 ; freedom to realize, 182 ; of
knowledge, 203.; not to be abandoned,
342 ; their claims, 343-4 ; of activity
and rest, 218

378

HUMANISM

Immediacy of experience, 101

Immediate experience, xxii, real, 192 ;
not sufficient, 193 ; of cause, 239-
240 ; superior reality of, 195 ; return
to, 202

Immortality, desire for, 313-34 ', ethical
significance of the idea, Jjj-jo ; hope
°f- 3J7' 343' an(3 fear of death, 314 ;
not taken as fact, 325 ; scientific in
vestigation of disliked, 326

Imperfection, 102, 109; of life, 345

Indetermination of Real, xxiv, i2,3O7/. ;
implied in Pragmatism, 15

Individual, is real, 122, 123 ; not
compounded of universals, 123, 126

Individuality, of philosophy, xxvi, 265,
353 ; of experience, 31 ; abstracted
from, 98 ; real, 102 ; extralogical,i23;
degrees of, 124 ; in process, 124 ; in
exhaustible, 126 ; limits extent of
common world, 372

Infallibility, 268-82

Infinity, as metaphysical ideal, 214

Intellection, not knowing, 234

Intellectual insight, dependent on
action, 34

Intellectualism, xvii, 6, 230, 248 ; of
Hume, 233-4 ; of Mephisto, 173,
181 ; kinds of, 233-4

Intelligence, divine, human or animal
in evolution, 129 ; as otiose, 130 ;
animal, as source of adaptation, 131 ;
divine, in conflict with benevolence
and superfluous, 132 ; not necessary
for natural selection, 133 ; question
of its efficacy, 134-5 ; non-suited,

I5Q-51

Intolerance, 274, 276, 282
Interaction, develops both subject and

object, 113 ; necessary to coexistence

implied in existence of world and

primary fact, 65-6
Interest, xvi, 51, 53 ; in future life, 328,

330 ; in ' future ' life greater than in

past, 364
Intuition, 285
Irrationalism, 5

fames, W., vii, xii, xiii, xx, xxi, xxiv,
5,7, 15, 27, 52, 117, 119, 152, 246 «.,
312, 356

Kant, xxvi, 7, 9, 29, 85, 92, 94, 205 n.,
233, 238, 243 n., 247, 257, 258

Karma, 349

Kidd, B., 6

Knowledge, its unity, 23 ; its useful
ness, 23 ; useless, relatively so or
indirectly useful or apparently so,
40 ; about, vs. ' acquaintance with,'

189, why power, 200 ; as opposed to
opinion, 259-60 ; as ideal, 344 ; as
postulate, 348
Knox, H. V., 189

Lamarckian factors in evolution, 136

Law, 300-302

Lechalas, 86

Leroy, £., 278

Lie, 47

Life, as equilibrium, 214-6

Locke, 253

Logic, reform of, ix, x, xiv, xvii ; ab
stract, xvi ; relation to psychology,
x, xvii ; should not abstract from in
terest, 52 ; nor exclude psychology,
x, 53 ; of Darwinism, 144

Loisy, 306

Lotze, 7, 10, 62-84 passim^ 224, 254

MacTaggart, J. £., xiii, 95-109 passim

Magic, 298-9

Mainlander, 219

Man, as the measure, xxi ; maker of
science, xxiv ; starting-point, xxi-xxii

Measure, man as the, xxi, xxiv

Mechanism, its value, 242

Metageometry, 86, 89, 93

Metaphysics, an immoralist, 4 ; its
foundations in ethics, 10 ; quasi-
ethical, 13 ; abstract, 99, 105, 107 ;
subordinate to concrete fact, 102 ;
ultimately ethical, 105, 107, and
epistemology, 112 ; critical denial
of, 161

Methodological assumption, of Darwin,
146 ; of Law, 104, 297-312 ; in psy
chical research, 355-65

Methodology, 355

Mill, J. S,, 223 n. , 225, 238

Milton, 365

Mimicry, 48, 152

Mind! 116 n., 156 n.

'Modernism,' 268-84

Mohammed, 367

Monads, 124

Monism, Lotze's proof of, 63 ; not im
plied in mere existence of a world,
66 ; the One not substantial, 67 ; its
besetting sin, 75 ; religiously worth
less, 77 ; Eleatic, 206 ; idealistic,

369. 371

Moore, A. W., 7, 56
Moore, G. £., 256
Moral Order, 181, 254-63
Motion, 246; as imperfect energeia, 210,.

and time, 212 ; equilibration of,

213-4

Multiple Personality, 266
Myers, F. W. H., 321, 325, 357

INDEX

379

Natural Selection, 8 ; sifts mechani
cally, 133-46, 149, 153-4; as
universal condition of life, 135-44 ;
does not exclude special creation,
141 ; not a moral guide, 143

Naturalism, xxv, xxviii, 235, 243-5

Nature, not indifferent, 13, and super-
nature, 362 ; its ' uniformity ' why
assumed, 300-302, 348

Necessary matter, 37

Necessity, and need, 36, 37 ; feeling of,
52; of controlling phenomena, 119,
300-301

Nephelococcygia, 352

Nirvana, 219, 341

Nordau, M., 139

Normative sciences, rest on fact of
valuation, 55

Novelty, 228, 280, 301

Objectivity of perceptions useful and

Ideological, 31 ; of truth, 55, 57,

60, 258 ; of world, 371
Omnipotence, of natural selection, 134,

136 ; its limitation, 181 ; cannot

overcome Mephisto, 182
Omniscience, 118, 121, 126
Ontological question, conditioned by

epistemological, 9
' Opinion,' 259-60
Optimism, 161, 164, 312
Ostwald, W., xvii, 223
Other-\vorldliness, 315, 341

Parmenides, 218
Pearson, N. , 320
Peirce, C. S., 27
Perfection, must be universal, 181 ; its

metaphysical character, 226-7 ; moral,

requires future life, 338
Persecution, 269, 281-2
Personal Idealism, xxv
' Personal Idealism,' xi, xii, xxi, 52 «.,

353 «•

Pessimism, why not judged true, 50 ;
of divorcing truth from goodness, 62,
and scepticism, 74, 163-4, 347 ; its
difficulty, 79-80, 157-65 ; its defini
tion and philosophic importance,
172-3 ; Mephisto's, 168-70 ; Faust's,
170-72, and distaste for life, 180 ; as
denial of the validity of ideal postu
lates, 312, 347

Philosophers, eccentricity of, 350-3;
use of, 353-5, 374

Piper, Mrs., 334, 357, 360, 363

Pius X. , 280, 282

Plato, ix, xxi, 12, 19-43 passim, 85, 97,
203. 207-10, 217, 230, 233, 235, 248,
250, 259, 285, 320, 351, 353

Plato or Protagoras f ix

Pluralism, relation to Humanism, xxiv,
xxv ; to solipsism, 251 ; in logic, 49 ;
admits unity of universe, how, 66

Plutarch, 267

Poincare, H. , 86, 90, 260 n.

Postulates, in logic, xv-xvi, 15, 33, 50 ;
as a priori, 231 ; Darwin's, 132 ; of
law, 300-302, 310 ; of universal salva
tion, 181 ; harmony, a, 188-9; of
higher realities, 195 ; of religion, 197;
once dreams, 226 ; immortality an
ethical, 334-50 ; emotional and ration
al, 342 ; origin of, 264-5 '< solidarity
of ultimate, 350 ; methodological,
355 ; of continuity of ' other ' world
with this, 358 ; of survival of person
ality, 361-4

Potentiality, 67, 208, 224-6

Power, Hume's criticism of, 235 f.

Practical value, a determinant of truth,
4 ; reason has, 7 ; a test of superior
reality, 23 ; of criteria of reality, 117

Pragmatism, logic of, ix, xi, 294, central
thought of, xiii; effect on logic, ix, xiii-
xvii ; in science, xvii ; in ethics, xviii,
and religion, xviii-xix, and Human
ism, xxv ; as logical method, xxv ; to
be reached how, 5-8 ; definitions of,
8 ; a travesty of, n ; a tonic, 13,
and perfection, 15, and indetermina-
tion, 15, and moral responsibility, 15;
and the Pope, 269/1 ; as a theory of
the relation of knowledge and action,
27~43 > as a principle of selection,
58 ; anticipated, 105 ; and methodo
logical assumptions, 147; and logical
valuation, 163 ; asserts value of
philosophy, 354 ; denies value of
dreams, 367

Prince, M., 266

Pringle-Pattison, A. S., 77, 112

Progression, problem of, 140, 142, 144,

153. 154

Protagoras, ix, x, xxi, 31
Psychic continuity, 362-3 ; dissociation,

363

Psychical Research, 355-8, 360; Society
for, 41, 313, 317-8, 322, 328, 334, 351,
356-7, 364 ; prejudice against, 201

Psychology, relation to logic, x, xvii, 50 ;
to philosophy, 231 ; Ideological, its
influence on logic, 8 ; of Hume,
247 ; of truth, 51-61 ; physiological,
314 ; of spiritism, 323

Punishment, 289-90

Pure Reason, xvi, xvii, 235, 279 ; a
figment, 6 ; impossible, 7 ; logica
fiction, 10

Pythagoras, 85

38o

HUMANISM

Radical Empiricism, how related to
Humanism, xxiv-xxv, 237 ; to Hum-
ism, 238

Rashdall, H., 254, 371

Rationalism, 232-3, 247, 274

Rationality, of real, 117; as test of
reality, 118

Real, depends on good, 9 ; its
alleged rigidity, n ; its nature deter-
minable not determinate, 12 ; in
determinate before trial, 12 ; relative
to purpose, 12 ; not to be abstracted
from good, 12 ; relation to Becoming,
107 ; primarily everything, 113 ; in
dividual, 122, 125

Realism, n, 197, 253; new, 254-61

Reality, must be knowable, 9 ; ' as it is
in itself unknowable, 10 ; varying
accounts of, relative to purpose, n ;
objective, 32 ; not separable from
thought, 46 ; variously constructed
by human efforts, 49 ; its time-aspect
abstracted from, 98 ; more than
rationality, 106 ; may change in time,
109, and 'idealism,' 110-26; truth
valid of, 162, and appearance, 183-
203 ; higher, continuous with lower,
192 ; to start with immediate experi
ence, 192 ; higher, secondary, 193,
195; of primary experience, 113, 195 ;
altered by thought, 195, 199 ; what
perfects experience, 225 ; meaning of,
for idealistic experientialism, 366 ;
absolute, of waking world doubted,

367

Reason, antithesis to faith, xviii ; how
related to faith, 7 ; to habit, 309 ; a
weapon in the struggle for exist
ence, 7

Referendum, 115

Reid, T., 237

Reincarnation, 241

Religion, xviii-xix, 196, 278, 321, 324,
327, 368

Renouvier, C. , 86

Rest, ideal of, 218-9

Riddles of the Sphinx, notes xxi, 2,
54, 67, 159, 163, 212, 214, 217, 219,
225, 339, 345- 37i

Risk, of novelty, 279, of Pragmatism,
14, of selection, 238

Ritchie, D. G., 1 10-27 passim

Scepticism, of Bradley, 189, 191, of
Hume, 229-30, 232 ; and Pessimism,
74, 163, 164, 347; moral and intellec
tual, 348

Scholasticism, and Humanism, xxvii

Schopenhauer, 158, 168

Schurman, J. G., 135

Science, method of, compared with that
of religion, xix ; of magic, 299 ; de
pends on abstraction, 100, 102 ; its
use of abstraction, 103 ; subordinate
to practical ends, 105 ; of ends, the
highest, 105 ; mocked by the unique,
153 ; not interested in historic errors,
353 ; infant, parvenu, and advanced,
356

Selection, 255, 306 ; its danger, 14 ; by
attention, 53 ; of subjective valua
tions, 58

Self- evidence, 36 ; aesthetic, 50 ; of
world's existence, 67

Sensationalism, 233, 248

Sidgwick, A., xiv, 185

Sidgwick, H. , 306 n.

Sigwart, C. , xiv

Social control, of truth, 58, 98, 333-4;
of interest in immortality, 328-30 ;
of desire to know, 201, 332

Socrates, 285

Solidarity, demands universal salvation,
181 ; of ideals, 346 ; of ultimate
postulates, 350

Solipsism, 112, 249-67, 312, 373

Space, 33, 85-94 ; four -dimensional,
spherical, pseudo- spherical, 87 ; its
homogeneity, 89 ; perceptual and
conceptual, 89-90 ; its ambiguity,
93; real, 120; in an 'other' world,
32, 360 ; persistence of, in dream
worlds, 366

Spencer, H., 155, 191, 215, 219-21

Spinoza, 97, 370

Spirit identity, 362-4

Spiritism, 323-4, 359-61

Spiritual beings detached from the Ab
solute by Lotze, 75

Stewart, J, A., 212

Struggle for existence, Darwin's postu
late, 132 ; for bare life, 142

Studies in Humanism, ix ; notes 8, 12,
240, 252, 260, 265

Sturt, //., 233

Subject, dependent on object, 260-1

'Subjectivism,' 230, 256

Substance, Lotze's theory of, 67 ; rests
on individual real, 123 ; Aristotelian
theory of, 204-27 ; soul - substance
useless, 223 ; as individual law, 224

Substratum, view of substance, 205,
222 - 3 ; permanent possibility of
activity, 225

Supernatural, 361-2

Survival-value of conduct, 133 ; of in
telligence, 134

System, as definition of truth, 47,51,
277 ; refusal to call true what does
not fit into, 162

INDEX

Taylor, A. £., 4

Teleology, 71, 129, 133, 137, 143, 148,
149, 152-5

Theages, 27

Theodicy, 167, 181, 182

Thompson, Mrs., 334

Thomson, J. , 158

Thomson, Sir J. J., 281

Thought, pure, does not account for
actual thinking, xvi ; as acts, 15,
52 ; purposive, 8, 52, 53, selec
tive, 255 ; not to be separated from
reality, 46; no pure, xiv, 51, 52;
movement of, due to psychological
interest, 51 ; transcended by reality,
114, 120, 121, 122-3 I and its ' other,'
125, and sensation, 203

Time, and succession, 94 ; process, reality
and value of, 95-109 ; its alleged un
reality, 189; its passage into eternity,
212 ; in ' other ' worlds, 360 ; persists
in dream worlds, 366

True, what works in practice, 7, 36 ;
depends on good, 9 ; true for our
needs, 30-1 ; is useful, 37 ; as what
fits into a system, 46 ; not use
less, 58

Truth, 44-61 ; eternal, xvi ; not infal
lible, xxi ; 'absolute,' 271-8; does
not exist apart from human agency,
10, 275, 282 ; for the sake of, 24 ;
its claims, 26, and goodness, 28 ;
and history, 278 ; of sense-percep
tion relative to us, 33 ; eternal, of
mathematics, 33 ; apart from use
remains potential, 36 ; definition
of, as agreement of thought with
reality, 46,; as systematic coher
ence, 46 ; consistency a mark of, 47 ;
variously to be constructed by human
effort, 49 ; psychological terms in its
definition, 51 ; immediate apprehen
sion of, 52 ; a form of value, 54, 162 ;
a means of prediction, 297-8 ; as
individual valuation, 55, 58 ; as
valuation of fact, 57, 162 ; formal
and material, 57, 98; plural, 273, 276;
relative to purpose, 296 ; a social
product, 58, and goodness, 62 ; of
abstraction, 98, 100 ; a claim, 98 ;
eternity due to abstraction, 99 ;
methodological, 104 ; as ideal, 162 ;
cannot be noxious, 201

Tweedledee, 369

Ultimate question for philosophy, 10
Ultimate reality, worlds of, 32 ;
realizes ideals, 120; non- contra
dictory, 185 ; harmonious, 187, 199 ;
continuouswith immediate experience,

192, 195 ; conception of, how reached,
194 ; must be satisfactory, 200 ;
must establish harmony, 202 ; must
become immediate experience, 203

Ultra-Darwinians, 134, 137

Unity of the universe, not to be hypos-
tasized, 67 ; not proved by Lotze, 72 ;
neither personal nor moral, 79

Universal laws, shorthand for habitual
interactions, 125

Usefulness of knowledge, 23, 28, 42 ;
determines social recognition, 59

Useless persons allowed to pursue use
less knowledge, 60 ; useless is false,
37-8, 40

Validity, if unrealizable not valid, xvii ;
timeless, 98 ; as practical working, 98

Valuation, pervades experience, 8, 10 ;
truth, 8, 6 1 ; knowledge a form of,
10 ; of indetermination, 15 ; of truth,
50; as 'true' and 'false,' 55; diffi
culty of sustaining it in society, 58 ;
systematized in ideals, 159 ; nature
of ethical, not accurately known, 313 ;
ethical, affirms ideal of goodness, 344;
doubt of significance of human, 347

Value, source of validity, xvii ; essential
to 'truth' of a 'system,' 50; truth
as, 55 ; no fact without, 55 ; of prac
tically important, 117; of life denied,
160 ; judgments of, and of fact, 160 ;
truth as, 162 ; are facts, 163 ; failure
of scheme of, 164; inferior value of
dream worlds, 367

Variability, Darwin's postulate, 132, 139

Variation, 132, 134, 145 ; accidental,
132, 135, 146 ; causes of, 137 ; dis
continuity of, 136 ; indefinite, 135,
146, 148, 151, 153 ; origin of, 135,
142 ; purposive direction of, 137 ;
facts of, 148-9

Verification in science and religion, xix

Virtue, as knowledge, 285

Vischer, F. T., 177 n.

Voluntarism, 8, 231, 233

Wallace, A. R., 144

Ward, J., xii, 372

Will to believe, xii, xx, 5, 153 ; to
know, ii, 16, 312, 321

Wisdom, speculative and practical, 24-6,
28 ; opposition between them, 29-30

Worlds, of higher reality, 18, 32, 193-8,
368 ; of relative reality, 366 ; of in
ferior reality, 367-8

Wundt, xiv

Zeno, 22, 186, 206
Zollner, 118

Printed by R. & R. CLARK, LIMITED, Edinburgh.

L

•-

University of Toronto
Library

DO NOT

REMOVE

THE

CARD

FROM

THIS

POCKET

Acme Library Card Pocket

Under Pat. "Ref. Index File"
Made by LIBRARY BUREAU