The Limits of Evolution/Preface to the Second Edition

by George Holmes Howison

PREFACE TO THE SECOND EDITION

The differences of the present edition from the previous one in no wise affect the substance of the views advanced. There are, indeed, both alterations and additions; but the former are merely verbal, confined to correcting misprints and amending slips of expression that involved some inconsistency or ambiguity, while the latter are all intended either to clear up misunderstandings on the part of reviewers, or to further elucidate the new view and its consequences, or else to answer objections made by some of my critics.

One prominent occasion of the additions, I may frankly say, was found in an occurrence which, if left without some emphatic public notice and explanatory cautions, could not fail to be seriously misleading. I refer to the appearance of a later volume, also bearing the title Personal Idealism,^[1] yet presenting views very diverse from those covered by that expression in the present book. Throughout the many years that I have held the metaphysical theory here presented, I have called it by the name of Personal Idealism; and when, three years ago, I published these essays, I placed this name in their title-page and explained it at length in the Preface; I had also several times used the name, with the same explained meaning, in the volume called The Conception of God, published four years earlier in coöperation with Professors Royce, Le Conte, and Mezes. But some fifteen months after the publication of the present book, a group of Oxford writers issued a joint collection of Essays, on the fundamental problems of philosophy, and chose for it the same title, notwithstanding the fact that, as I have just said, their philosophical view is opposed to mine; indeed, on vital questions, almost diametrically opposed. So there are now going by the name of Personal Idealism two theories, quite divergent upon most of the prime philosophical issues, with little in common but the affirmation of a fundamental pluralism in the world of ultimate reality, and with profoundly different conceptions as to what that pluralism means. Such a confusion in the use of a prominent term is an unfortunate obstacle in the way of the very readers whom we all wish to enlighten and convince. Warning against it would accordingly seem in the highest degree pertinent, and to come with an especial justice from the writer who was first to employ the name, and whose view has therefore the priority of right to it. On this account I ask the attention of readers to the Appendices, which serve to put my view in the clearest light, and especially to Appendix C, in which the main differences between my own theory and that of the Oxford Essayists are pointed out, and the objections stated to which I think the Oxford view is exposed.

Of my reviewers I have surely no complaint to make but that of a pretty general failure to take in the full and exact meaning of the theory I present. This failure, I fear, is owing, at least in part, to the dismembered form in which the view is set forth — that of separate essays, occupied with topics not obviously connected, and addressed to readers generally cultivated rather than to philosophical experts. Accordingly, in the various Appendices I have aimed to correct these misapprehensions and to reply to objections which, almost without exception, are founded on misunderstandings. There are, in particular, two lines of objection upon which I feel it important to advert here in some detail.

The first is that which comes from confounding Personal with Subjective Idealism. I think I have the right to say that I have taken all pains to prevent the misapprehension upon which this confusion rests; but unfortunately to little purpose, it would seem, for most of my reviewers. Of course, the theory of Personal Idealism, in common with every other that detects the fallacy latent in the Natural Dualism of uncritical common-sense, has to face the wonder-waking question. What in truth does objectivity then mean, since “existence,” per se and apart from being apprehended by intelligence, is not really thinkable? — what is it for a judgment, whether perceptive or reflective, to be “objective”? Thus an essential part of the theory is its new doctrine of the nature of objectiveness. This it finds in the essentially social character of that self-defining consciousness in which it fixes the real existence of each personal being: each is by its own self-certitude self-correlated with others, so that its reality carries theirs; and this society of primarily objective beings imparts a secondary objective character to all the judgments that are organic in each and thence indicative of community to all. It is this sociality of the primordial logic of self-consciousness, this intrinsic reference to other minds, that my reviewers, — and perhaps other readers, — preoccupied with the other assertion essential to Personal Idealism, — the necessary self-recognition of every person, — have quite commonly overlooked; just as Descartes overlooked it, in seizing upon the great “first certainty” with which he broke out the pathway of modern philosophy; just as all his successors prior to Kant, save only Spinoza and Leibnitz, continued to overlook it; and just as Kant himself came to the conviction that it must be disregarded, so far as concerned any knowable objective, and consequently felt obliged to declare that the objective character of a cognition lay simply in its necessity,^[2] — a doctrine which, for the next obvious move, forced philosophy upon the awkward alternative of either (1) admitting this "necessity" to be merely the dominating proclivity of the isolated self, and so, as Hume had contended, merely a subjective necessity, or else (2) returning, though by the route of an idealistic cosmology, essentially to the view of Spinoza, translating the “necessity” into necessitation, operated upon (and in) each self, as a mode of the One Thinking Reality, by the all-inclusive and all-pervasive Absolute Self.

This latter branch of the alternative, Kant, as we all know, deliberately rejected, because he so clearly and correctly discerned its fatal inconsistency with personal autonomy, and thence with moral responsibility; and he chose, rather, to refer our consciousness of duty — that is, of devout obligation to other minds as the only strict Ends — to our good-faith, our pure fealty, toward a bare ideal. Consequently he limited the field of our knowledge to the connecting judgments that link our sense-presentations into permanently identical objects in a permanent cosmic whole; that is, to physical things, and their physical laws, alone. But in so doing he failed to notice what Hume, had the Scottish sceptic lived to read him, could justly have told him reduced all knowledge to an isolated self-knowledge merely, and thus stripped science of the very quality of truth, — which required an objective meaning; a meaning, that is, referred quite beyond any single self, and, indeed, to a world of total and absolute reality. When our assurance of such an absolutely real world is rested simply on our fealty to its idea, the world of supposed science must also, in its turn, become but a world of pure faith — of sheer belief. So futile does our inmost mind declare the endeavour to maintain a judgment of worth for what we cannot crown with the judgment of reality.

Thus, since the counter-attempts of Kant’s great idealist successors, following the second branch of the alternative and culminating in the Absolutism of Hegel, philosophy is manifestly at fault before the much profounder dilemma of either winning an objectivity for physical and metaphysical judgment at the cost of casting out from the moral judgment the very principle of autonomy which Kant had triumphantly shown to be its quickening essence, or of resting this autonomy, with Kant, on subjective fealty alone, in the delusion that it is independent of knowledge, and that knowledge can be satisfied by a world of “phenomena” necessarily subject to it, while yet that world itself is only “necessary” in the sense of flowing spontaneously from the nature of each isolated self.

Now it is to the surmounting of this gravest of all dilemmas that the theory of Personal Idealism, as I intend it, is directly addressed. It proceeds by pointing out that the meaning of objectivity, while indeed to be sought in conscious and intelligent being alone, as taught by all idealism, must be found neither (1) in the self-consciousness of the solitary and disjunct self, which in disregarding necessary reference to others reduces morality to simple self-realisation and introversive self-respect, nor (2) in the all-inclusive self-consciousness of the One Absolute Mind, in which each “finite” self, as one essential mode thereof, participates in such degree and with such “task” as the One assigns to it by his eternal Will or predestinating and exclusively selecting “Love,” but (3) in an absolutely primordial altruism couched in the very logic of the fundamental act of self-definition by any mind, whereby its awareness of itself, demonstrated by Descartes to be the condition of any and all other knowledge whatever, — the condition necessary, no doubt, but not therefore sufficient, — is seen to involve, as the complemental condition making tip sufficiency, its awareness of a whole society of minds, the genus against which it spontaneously defines itself, per differentiam, as individual. Thus the world of minds, as the sole world of Ends presupposed in all moral responsibility, the world of ultimate and standard Objects, becomes at one and the same stroke the warranting foundation of knowledge and of good-will alike: to refuse good-will is to violate the primary principle of each mind's own existence, and is therefore to convict oneself, in one and the same act, of irrationality and folly as well as of indifference or of ill-will. In this light, duty is seen to be the freedom of autonomy, instead of simply the freedom of sharing in a good lot, — freedom in a world of utter reality, where nothing is predestined otherwise than by the self's own thinking, so that each self thinks every other as an essential complement of himself, and sees that he cannot realise himself except as he realises all the others. In fine, the principle of self-recognition, as a condition of any and all knowledge, not only turns out to be the first principle of morality, but the first principle of morality becomes at once the first principle of knowledge and itself an act of knowledge, not simply a sentiment of obligation. Objective knowledge and the intelligibly objective certainty of the moral judgment get vindicated at once and together. To think objectively, to know, is tacitly to refer the “necessity” of one’s judgment to the universal society of minds as a standard, is to discern oneself as typical of a kind, and thus attain the certitude that the judgment is truly universal, because spontaneous in the nature of each as involving the nature of all.

Why this view of what constitutes objectivity, inwoven as it is in the very tissue of Personal Idealism, and reiterated time and again in my pages, in all sorts of contexts, should have escaped the notice of so many readers, is, I confess, a genuine puzzle to me. Over and over, it turns up in these essays that a person means a being who thus recognises others and relates himself to them, and that the Personal System, while rigorously idealistic, making all existence root in the existence of minds, is still always a Social Idealism, so that the objective judgment is always the judgment that carries the weight of the social logic, and the final test of any and every truth, though never so often discovered in the private chamber of the single spirit, is that it conforms to this principle of universal social recognition. And yet, also over and over, the new theory has been dealt with as if it were only a fresh form of isolated subjectivism.

On careful reflexion, I incline to think this must be owing, in part, to defective exposition of my own; and I now suspect it is my scant and quite insufficient treatment of the peculiar nature of Space, as involved in my general doctrine, that is responsible for this frequent failure of readers to catch the objective character of the theory. In the system of Personal Idealism, of course. Space is the principle a priori whereby each conscious self that has the phase of intelligent being which we call experience, comes into actual sensuous commerce with other selves of that species, or, in short, shares with them in a real located and physical world. As such, it is discriminated from Time, the principle a priori that coördinates the private experiences of each self into a succession possibly necessary and predictable. Its nature, as thus a public principle in contrast to a private one, is in fact founded in the twofold aspect, self-referring and other-referring, essential to any individual self-consciousness; and the development of this doctrine of the origin of the space-consciousness, clearing up, as it would, the puzzle left over by Kant, — whether and why there are two elemental Sense-Forms, and no more, — would of course form a very important part of the systematic discussion of the new theory. In the first edition, however, the doctrine was merely referred to in passing;^[3] and even in the present edition I must content myself with barely touching upon it as I have now done, and directing the reader’s attention to the passage in Appendix D^[4] where I have dealt with it briefly in replying to one of the points of my reviewer in the New York Tribune. I have now also inserted in the original Preface^[5] a clause of preparatory reference to the subject. On account of the room required, any adequate treatment of this question must be left over to the systematic exposition of Personal Idealism which I still hope to accomplish.

The second line of objection charges me with failing to furnish proofs of propositions fundamental to my theory. This, too, I am sure, is based on misapprehension as to what the essential proofs are, — the proofs really required and actually offered. For instance, to designate one case of several, the far from hostile reviewer in the number of Nature for August 1, 1901, makes the mistake of supposing that my problem in Essay VII is the demonstration of human freedom, and that the proof offered is the indispensableness of freedom to moral responsibility. This quite misses the governing aim of that essay, which is to exhibit the capabilities of Personal Idealism for solving, by a transcending conception, the pseudo-antinomy set up by the monistic Absolutism of Hegel and his later followers, on the one hand, and the pluralistic Fortuitism of Peirce and James and most of the Oxford Essayists,^[6] on the other. The point that absorbed the attention of my Nature reviewer is thus only a subordinate step in my procedure: there, I am simply showing what genuine freedom must really mean; pointing out that the freedom necessary and sufficient for moral responsibility, — such responsibility and such freedom, of course, standing or falling together, — though it excludes predestination, cannot and must not be identified with empty indeterminism, but must be construed as self-determination; and that determinism, on the other hand, need not be taken to mean predestination, but has its conception satisfied rather by definiteness simply, as against the bare indefinite or indeterminate, which is in truth only another name for the unreal, the non-existent. In short, my object in that passage, quite preparatory, is to state in the sharpest way the question of the possible harmonisation of freedom and determinism, and to show that this is clearly possible if (but only if) the two are read off, respectively, as the obverse and the reverse of the conception Self-determination, reduced to identity with Self-definition; by this path I pass to the conception of a pluralistic and libertarian rationalism, as transcending the monistic and necessarian rationalism of Hegel’s school, and of a pluralism rationally organised by the self-definition of each mind in it, as transcending the irrational pluralism — confessed to repose at bottom on chance and unintelligibility — which is all that is attainable on the “radical empiricism” of Professor James and his associates. The freedom that consists in self-definition, I next proceed to show, implies the supertemporal (that is, the “eternal”) coexistence of all minds, each a centre of origination for the definite connexions of the parts of its experience, — provided it involves experience in its self-definition, as we human beings do. Thus far, I am only dealing with the conception of such a world of genuine free-agents, spontaneously harmonised by a generic rationality, and showing what it could do for the opening of the “no thoroughfares” come upon in the course of our past philosophical struggles, provided the reality of it could only be made out. The graver question, whether any such veritably self-defining being really exists, whether there is a real world of free-agents, and whether we belong in it, has not, to this point, been reached; it only comes up later in the essay, in the context of defending the conception of Personal Idealism, the supposed world of coeternal free-agents, against the accusations of atheism and of polytheism. There, at length, the bare conception of true freedom, as involving the coeternity of all minds with each other and with God, is carried over into reality by means of a clarified and reformed statement of Descartes’s proof that any mind is necessarily certain of its own existence; personal existence, in its “distinct” idea (to use Cartesian language), being shown to imply the contrasted and complemental existence of others, and, further, the existence of God, as the ultimate standard involved in the entire round of self-definition by self-correlation.

In fact, my point is that the entire proof of our being free lies in showing that, mortals though we are, and subject in one aspect of our existence to the broken and tentative cognition called experience, we still do originate judgments, and judgments that are necessarily true, holding in perpetumn; we do cognise principles a priori, that is, spontaneously, and not because we are so “framed” by some other being, or so impelled “from elsewhere,” that we cannot do otherwise. Thus the entire warranty for Personal Idealism comes down, finally, to the affirmative settlement of the bottom question in epistemology: Do we, or do we not, set forth truths a priori? — and, at the foundation, what truths? If we do, and if at the basis of all of them lies the act of self-definition by self-correlation with others, then we are indeed free, our being is rationally self-active, and the entire system of Personal Idealism follows, in this high rational sense of the expression. If we do not, or if we only have necessary cognitions in the sense of tendencies “implanted” in us “from elsewhere,” necessitated tendencies to judgment, which we merely follow as they coerce us, and if we can only “guess” or “have faith” that we are real and in real relation to others, then we are not free, and no genuinely idealistic system exists at all. The reader who cares enough to look as he should, will see that the scheme of proof for all my cardinal propositions consists in my reconsidering the whole question of a priori knowing, and vindicating its affirmative, in the light of all the objections really made to it since the enduring argument of Kant in its favour.

It is possible that this charge of omitting essential proofs was suggested by a somewhat incautious sentence in the original Preface, which I have now taken care to correct by a needed addition.^[7] This read, “Proofs of this or that part of it [the new pluralistic theory of ultimate reality] are attempted in each paper, but no establishment of the system as such.” From this it was an easy, if inaccurate and unwarrantable inference, that only certain principles in the system were brought to scrutiny in the essays, while the rest were merely asserted for the sake of orienting the reader as to where he would find himself in the world of metaphysics if he once took Personal Idealism for granted. But such was far from being my meaning. Systematic exposition the essays undoubtedly do not contain; for that would imply that I took up the system as a whole, that I began at its beginning, and went on, through all the intervening and successive steps, to the final result, having nothing directly in view but the orderly establishment of the logical whole that the system constitutes; and this, of course, I was not doing: I was occupied, rather, in exhibiting the Rational Pluralism in the light of its bearings upon the deeper human problems. But adequate exposition, in the sense of thorough proof of every essential principle, as well as clear enunciation of it, I certainly intended they should contain; and I am firmly persuaded that they do. I presumed that I should gain a wider and a more interested attention by the method of separate essays on questions that have always deeply engaged the most thoughtful; and I took it for granted — with good reason, as I still believe — that I should thus establish a favourable presumption, to say no more, in behalf of a theory that could show itself capable of casting a new and clarifying light upon our oldest and obscurest puzzles. But it could cast no lasting or solving light unless its sources were shown to be real, and this showing I still suppose the essays actually accomplish.

It will be pertinent to point out here, that, of the ten propositions in which I state the theory in outline,^[8] all but the first and second are simply the elucidating consequences, or corollaries, of those two; if those are established, then all the others follow. What the advocate of Personal Idealism has to prove, then, is the pair of complementary principles contained in Proposition I, and the principle contained in Proposition II as to the nature of Space and Time and of the relation, transcending both, between minds themselves. The achievement of this task depends on attaining to the true distinction, the real relation, between the two orders of existence which to ordinary and uncritical reflexion — usual common-sense — appear as two substances, so called, or species of substance, and are named “mind” and “matter.” What is to be shown is, that this common-sense contrast, read off as a hard-and-fast dualism, is not intelligibly interpretable except as the distinction between two aspects of one and the same total nature in the beings that possess it — the distinction, namely, between the whole and its dependent part; between the primitive, or unconditioned, or, more accurately, the self-defining, and the derivative, or conditioned, which is defined and determined by the first; or, again, if one chooses to say so, between the originating and the originated, the immutably causative and the causedly mutable; that is to say, finally, between (1) minds, actively thinking constitutors of experience and the objects in it, and (2) mere things, the passively constituted parts in experience. Plainly, then, the required proofs can only be brought by exhibiting minds, through the study of them in our human selves as types, in the actual exercise of spontaneous constitutive judgment, — framing a world of things perceivable, according to conceptions that derive in the last resort from concepts a priori; that is, from combinative and constitutive acts of cognition, that are strictly spontaneous with and in us, or with and in any beings that are like us.

Thus, once more, the whole proof comes down to showing (1) that the doctrine of cognition a priori is true and real, and (2) that the absolutely fundamental cognition of this sort is the self-defining consciousness of each mind that it exists just by being self-aware, and, in that very fact, aware of its correlation with a system of other minds. The steps in exhibiting these two main members of the system of a priori knowledge, the reader will come upon, more or less, in every one of the essays; but if he require a more specific direction, he may turn especially to pp. 19-21, 32 cf. 18, 46 seq., 300 seq., 306 seq., for the first; and, for the second, to pp. 173-175, 310-312, 351-354, and 359. However, these are, so to speak, only samples.

For the rest, to take a due notice of the critic who has brought forward, out of an evidently wide philosophical reading, and with the strongest emphasis, this charge of omitting vital proofs, I may refer again to Appendix D,^[9] as containing, in my reply to him, an additional showing of the fact that the establishment of a priori knowledge, and of what this at bottom consists in, supplies the entire proof required for the system of Rational Pluralism, or, as I still prefer to name it. Personal Idealism. For the removal, or at any rate the easing, of subtler and deeper-reaching difficulties which the system involves, I will refer to Appendix E, where I reply to Mr. McTaggart, to whom I am indebted for the most penetrating appreciation, and the most searching criticisms, that the book has received.

With the foregoing cautions, and the various other aids to a right understanding furnished in the present edition, I shall now leave these essays to their fate. But I must not close without expressing my obligations to the editor of Mind, the editor of Kantstudien, the editor of the International Journal of Ethics, and the editor-in-chief of the New York Daily Tribune, for their kind permission to use the various material now printed in the Appendices.

University of California,

Berkeley, July, 1904.

Notes

1. Personal Idealism: Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford. Edited by Henry Sturt. London: Macmillan & Co., 1902.
2. See the various forms of his “Deduction” of the categories, passim, as presented in the first and second editions of the Critique, and in his Reflexions, edited by Benno Erdmann.
3. See pp. xiii and xxii, and cf. p. 352, note, and p. 353.
4. See p. 418, below.
5. See p. xxiii, above.
6. Though the official manifesto of these Oxford writers had not then appeared, I was familiar with their views through personal intercourse as well as acquaintance with certain of their previous publications, and I had them constantly in mind.
7. See p. xxvii.
8. See pp. xii-xviii, above.
9. See p. 414 seq., below.