The Realm of Ends or Pluralism and Theism/Lecture 1

by James Ward

PART I.

PLURALISM.

—

LECTURE I.

INTRODUCTORY.

Mr Bradley concludes his metaphysical essay entitled Appearance and Reality with the admission that science is a poor thing if measured by the wealth of the real universe: he finds that “in the end Reality is inscrutable,” and is confirmed in “the irresistible impression that all is beyond us.” Everyone must acknowledge this to be a more honest conclusion than the pretended demonstrations of many philosophers. Nobody now-a-days — save here and there a man of science off his beat, like Haeckel for example — has the hardihood to rush into print with a final explanation of the Universe. Still without perpetrating this folly can we not attempt to advance, to get more insight than at present we have? Surely this is possible, for though ignorance be inevitable, no specific errors are necessary.

But we must have some method: in particular we must be clear where we start from. It is a favourite phrase now widely current that the universe has many aspects, and such a conception has the merit of making us vividly realise a source of error too often overlooked in the past — I mean confusion of standpoints. Precise orientation of these various aspects of the world is one of the first duties of philosophy, and the ascertainment of the supreme and ultimate standpoint is perhaps its chief concern. Now of these various aspects the two most sharply contrasted are those which lead us to speak of the world of mechanism and the world of morals, the subject-matter of the natural sciences on the one hand, and that of the moral sciences including history on the other. The one Kant was wont to call the Realm of Nature, the other the Realm of Ends; assigning to the former as its characteristic mark the notion of ‘empirical necessity,’ to the latter that of ‘practical freedom.’

It would be superfluous to spend time in picturing out this contrast in detail:^[1] we have only to think of comparing some classical work of science — say Newton’s Principia — with one of history — as, for example, his contemporary Clarendon’s Great Rebellion — to realise impressively the complete diversity of the two realms. Regarding the scientific ideal of Nature as a rounded whole, we may safely say that the world of science and the world of history have little or nothing in common: their terminology, their categories, their problems are wholly different; and so too are the philosophical questions to which they severally and immediately give rise. The one never reaches the individual and concrete, the other never leaves them; for the one spontaneity and initiative are impossible, for the other inertia and rigorous concatenation; to the one the notions of end and value are fruitless, nay meaningless, for the other they are of paramount importance. And yet the two cannot be separated, for Nature not only provides the scenery and properties of history but the actors themselves seem to have sprung from its soil, to owe their position largely to its cooperation, and to come into touch with each other solely through its means. After all, these so-called realms are but ‘aspects’ of one world; and it is precisely this fact that makes their seeming contrariety and incompatibility a problem for philosophy: where and how are we to find the final unification or mediation of the two? It will be one step towards a solution if we can determine which aspect is the more fundamental. It hardly needs to be said that since the dawn of speculation the claims of both aspects have had, as indeed they still have, their advocates. Those who assign the priority to Nature we call Naturalists: those who contend for the priority of free agents we may call Spiritualists. In a previous course of Gifford Lectures^[2] which I had the honour to deliver in Aberdeen ten years ago, I endeavoured to show the superiority of the spiritualistic position. The main lines of the argument can be very briefly indicated and I trust it will seem to you fitting that I should recapitulate them by way of introduction to the further inquiry into the nature of the spiritualistic realm and to the discussion of some of its problems, which I propose in the present course to attempt.

Reviewing the progress of the natural sciences since the times of Galileo and Descartes we may note two characteristics. First, in so far as the qualitative variety and the complexity of concrete things are considered, we find several distinct sciences each with its own special concepts and methods, though all are more or less inductive and experimental. But all qualities and complexities whatever that natural objects present, and all the changes that they undergo, appear to involve quantitative constants and configurations admitting of more or less precise determination and measurement. As soon indeed as the movements of sensible bodies were found to admit of exact description by the science of mechanics the hypothesis at once presented itself that, as Newton expressed it, “the other phenomena of nature might be deduced from mechanical principles.” And, as we all know, the hypothesis has been amply justified, though not indeed absolutely verified in every detail; mechanical explanation has therefore long been accepted as the ne plus ultra of what a scientific explanation can be. So much is this the case indeed that even the intractable problem of life is still generally regarded as only an outstanding difficulty and not as a veritable exception to the universality of mechanical laws.

We come now to the second characteristic. For long this mechanical theory was held to furnish us with the knowledge of the empirical reality which our sensible experience was supposed only obscurely to symbolise: it bore, in fact, the name of Natural Philosophy. But as its purely formal character became more apparent, and mathematical equations enabled it to dispense with the real categories of substance and cause, physicists themselves were the first to perceive and to proclaim that this mechanical theory was after all but an abstract and ideal scheme — a pure science, which can only be actually ‘applied,’ as we say, with the help of the calculus of probabilities. And what diversity and irregularity the seeming simplicity and uniformity of large numbers may cover human statistics sufficiently show. In place then of the concrete world of sense symbolising this abstract scheme, it has now become clear that it is the abstract scheme itself which symbolises the concrete world from which it set out. It also indeed reveals the law and order that there prevail; but what the concrete world really is and what is the source of the law and order that it manifests are questions still wholly on our hands. But to call such descriptive scheme pure or rational science is to emphasize its source in mind; and when this intelligible scheme of our devising, with which the scientific inquirer greets Nature, is confirmed by Nature’s response, are we not justified in concluding that Nature is intelligent or that there is intelligence behind it?

When however the physical realists — those I mean who regard the mechanical theory not as an abstract summary of Nature’s routine but as presenting fully-orbed reality — when these realists are called upon to explain the relation of this mechanism to mind they become involved in hopeless inconsistencies. The mechanism is by definition an absolutely closed system, determinate in all its movements down to the minutest detail. Not merely does it brook no interference, but interference is strictly speaking inconceivable: the semblance of such could only mean the presence of further mechanism hitherto concealed. Mind then is to be interpreted as an impotent and shadowy concomitant of brain, which is itself but a part of this mechanism inextricably linked in with the rest: we are conscious to be sure, but only conscious automata. This would seem to be the one possible conclusion from the naturalistic premises, if any conclusion were possible at all. But it also becomes a complete refutation of them the moment we raise an obvious question which Naturalism, owing to its absorption in the material aspect, has entirely overlooked: the question, I mean, How from the standpoint of consciousness is any knowledge of this independent mechanical system to be accounted for? Or, what comes to the same thing, how from the naturalistic standpoint can it be known that consciousness is concomitant with certain mechanical motions? Agreeably to its contention for the priority of its own standpoint, Naturalism terms the contents of its world phenomenal, and those of consciousness merely epiphenomenal. But now the tangible, visible, sonorous world, the world of external perception — from which the naturalist starts and to which in all his observations and experiments he appeals to verify the applicability of his theory — this world belongs entirely to the epiphenomenal series. So too does every concept in his theory as such; so that his appeal to experience to validate it is but an admission of its connexion with the perceptual, the so-called epiphenomenal. In short, awaken the naturalist from his mathematical ecstasy and the ‘epi’ at once drops away from our phenomena, while his phenomena — since he regards them as independent existences — turn out not to be phenomena at all. On the other hand, if we leave him where we found him, oblivious of the essential implications of experience, and contemplating per impossibile a closed system of mass-points in motion, then assuredly the notion that these have dependent, epiphenomenal, concomitants or ‘collateral products’ will never dawn upon him, or even admit of statement without contradiction. But a workable interpretation of experience compels us not only to reject this distinction of material phenomena and mental epiphenoniena, but to reject also the tacit assumption that our percepts are merely subjective modifications. This whole distinction of phenomenon and epiphenomenon is but the old story of the Cartesian dualism over again. But after puzzling the world for nearly three centuries, it seems — at least as a philosophical tenet — in a fair way to disappear. Make two mutually exclusive halves out of the one concrete world: in the one you will find only your own so-called subjective states and have to become a solipsist; in the other the organisms you would find there you could call only automata at the best.

This brings us to another inconsistency in which Naturalism is involved; for, even if conscious, the automata as part of the continuous mechanism are, as already said, powerless to withstand or to control it: consciousness is only comparable to a shadow that incidentally in some mysterious way accompanies their working. To be sure we seem active, ever striving for ends, and the historical world would become meaningless if we were not. We do not infer this activity: it is prima facie an ultimate and constitutive fact of our daily experience and of its historical development. None the less we are asked to believe that it is false, because otherwise the mechanical theory cannot be upheld. Granting then for the moment that our sense of activity is illusory, we have at least in turn the right to ask how the illusion can have arisen. Pure mechanical science recognises neither activity nor passivity, but only mass that is inert and motions that are reversible. But inertia is a negative term and becomes meaningless if we have no experience of activity. Such activity, however, as the historical world implies could not be found in the physical world unless that showed signs of being intelligently directed: but then such evidence could only be appreciated by beings who were themselves active. Moreover that evidence would be fatal to the mechanical theory itself — for a mechanism admitting of direction could not be a closed system — and so with the fall of the theory would fall also the objections to our common-sense conviction that were based upon it.

All this however is negative argument; but positive arguments are not wanting. For instance, we say that ‘knowledge is power,’ and so ‘to be forewarned is to be forearmed.’ In proof we can point to instances innumerable in which the very knowledge of what in ‘the natural course of things’ will inevitably happen is the sure means of falsifying such a forecast. To take the very simplest illustration: lifeless masses do not get out of one another’s way as masses under living guidance almost invariably do. Were it otherwise, the actual course of things would be vastly more calculable but would cease altogether to be intelligible. Solely because, though inviolable, what we significantly call the ‘laws’ of Nature can yet be turned to account, do they deserve the name of laws; and what limits our power is not their inflexibility but our own ignorance. Or again, compare living organisms and their processes, on the one hand, with inanimate objects and the changes that they undergo, on the other. We note at once an ever-increasing complexity as we rise in the scale of life, from the amoeba say to ourselves; and also in our artificial products as we rise in the scale of civilisation, say from the African kraal to the European city. The steady downward trend, the katabolic, levelling tendencies attributed to unchecked mechanism we find not merely suspended but reversed wherever there is life and mind. The notions of form, adaptation and control here force themselves upon our notice in contrast to matter and its blind, purposeless collisions. Undeterred by this amazing contrast, however, those who uphold the theory that Nature is really a closed mechanism must, and do, refuse to draw any line: living and lifeless, artificial and natural, are distinctions of no account from the point of view of the mechanical whole: life and mind are the concomitants of certain of its workings but the determinants of none. Still the prevision just now referred to and this sharp contrast are there, and have to be accounted for somehow: to allow that they exactly tally with the presence of lite and mind and advance continuously as these advance is but to state the problem, not to solve it. To be content with this is as veritable a specimen of what Germans call ‘beer philosophy’ as the profound remark that great rivers run through populous towns.

In the first place a series of coincidences so vast cannot be casual and disconnected; and yet if the mechanism on the one side is a closed system, the living experience on the other cannot be even its ‘collateral product,’ as we have already seen. The hopeless impasse of dualism again confronts our naturalist, and he is fain to appeal to metaphysics; but the appeal he trusts is harmless, since he only asks for an Unknowable Reality to unite his mechanical phenomena with the psychical epiphenomena that run parallel with them. It is needless to enlarge on the absurdity of such metaphysics: that has been effectively exposed more than once already.^[3] It is enough to note that all this agnostic monism comes to is the admission that there is a connexion and the confession — perhaps I should rather say, the contention — that this connexion is inexplicable. But what precisely is this connexion as a fact, and why is it inexplicable? We must turn to experience for an answer. There we find not indeed a dualism of material phenomena and mental phenomena, but a duality of object presented and subject affected, of subject striving and object attained: an interaction that is only inexplicable because for every finite experience it is ultimate — is its basal fact.

With this fact of the duality in unity of experience before us we are at the historical standpoint, the standpoint of the concrete and individual. Tracing the gradual development of experience we can see how the distinction between the real and the phenomenal arose, how with the advance of intersubjective intercourse and the growth of language the so-called trans-subjective objects, objects that, so to say, were common property, ceased to be regarded as property — or relative to experiencing subjects — at all, while the objects of immediate experience were regarded as the peculium of the individual and so as not objects at all: in other words, we can see how the psychology of dualism came to shut itself in and the physics of dualism to shut itself out, by sundering the one world of experience into two halves, an internal and an external, both abstractions and so both devoid of reality. In particular such epistemological reflexion at once discloses the abstract character of the entire mechanical scheme, to which I have already referred.

Again, the light which experience on its practical side throws on the whole process and progress of knowledge is of fundamental importance. We are not simply cognitive beings: moreover, knowledge does not evolve itself, as it were by some purely immanent process, while we merely look on. Even if it may be so unfolded when acquired, its acquisition is only secured piecemeal, by arduous effort, and many misadventures. All this implies motives, implies ends to be attained : we seek knowledge primarily because it proves an aid to more and fuller life. Apart from this its quest would be unintelligible: this brings it within the scope of the realm of ends. Finally, if we consider the main structure of knowledge, we find that its fundamental principles of unity, causality and regularity are derived from this standpoint: in other words, the main structure of our concept of Nature is entirely anthropomorphic. The unity of Nature is the ideal counterpart of the actual unity of each individual experience, where synthesis ever precedes analysis, and things are only distinguished relatively to each other so long as they are apperceived together by the one subject. The category of causality we owe to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and especially with each other, and we attribute it analogically to what we then call the interaction of natural agents. Then as to the regularity of Nature or the universal reign of law, this never has been, and never can be, empirically established, nor does its denial involve any contradiction: that is to say, it is neither demonstrable nor axiomatic. It is a postulate that has its root in our primitive credulity. Were this anticipatio mentis never confirmed, knowledge would be impossible; but confirmed as it is continually in our earliest experience we thus advance to an interpretatio naturae as an orderly and intelligible system, a cosmos that evinces directly or indirectly the all-pervading presence of mind.

To sum up in words that I have lately used elsewhere: — “We are active beings and somehow control the movements of the bodies we are said to animate. No facts are more immediately certain than these, and there is nothing in our actual experience that conflicts with them. From these facts we advance to the abstract concepts on the strength of which Naturalism, by a grievous misapprehension of its own standpoint, attempts to question them. Stationed at the very outskirts of the knowable and intent only on the quantitative aspects of things — like those fabulous beings of geometrical romance, the inhabitants of Flatland — it finds impassable barriers which have no existence in the fuller dimensions of concrete experience. But we, orientating from this more central position, may retort upon Naturalism with the words of Goethe,

Das Unzulängliche

Hier wird’s Ereigniss:

Das Unbeschreibliche

Hier wird’s gethan.

Having satisfied ourselves, then, that mechanism is not the secret of the universe; that, if it is to have any meaning, it must subserve some end; and finding generally that increased knowledge of Nature’s laws means increased control of Nature’s processes, we accept the facts of experience in which subject and object interact, rather than the conclusions of dualism, that mind and matter are for us two alien worlds and all knowledge of Nature an inexplicable mystery”^[4] — we accept the spiritualistic standpoint and its Realm of Ends as the more fundamental.

I have called this position spiritualistic monism to distinguish it from materialistic monism, which we may disregard as obsolete, and from neutral or agnostic monism, which we may fairly treat as an inept and ineffectual attempt to get round the deadlock of dualism. But if this position be indeed the more fundamental, it ought to be possible, it may be urged, to see directly from this standpoint how the appearance of mechanism arises, or at least to make some progress towards accounting for it in terms of life and mind. Unquestionably it ought: and in fact, as we shall presently see, attempts have been specially numerous of late to meet this demand in a more or less scientific fashion. Meanwhile we may remind those who demand of us an explanation of the appearance of mechanism, that, if the term be strictly taken, there need for spiritualism be no such appearance at all. The more completely we can interpret the world as a realm of ends the more completely the tables are turned upon naturalism. As this contends, in the words of Huxley, “for the gradual banishment from all regions of human thought of what we call spirit and spontaneity,”^[5] so that, for the gradual banishment of what we call inert stuff and directionless energy.

To see how the case stands let us recall the contrast between science and history just now referred to. The first effect of this contrast was the extragavant commonplace that history as unscientific had no interest for the philosopher. The final result may be the other extreme, that science as general and abstract has no interest for the philosopher; since he is concerned only with reality, and that is concrete and individual out and out. At any rate the thought of the last century made a very decided advance in this direction: in the course of it what were formerly called the descriptive or natural history sciences culminated in the philosophy of evolution, while abstract physics is lapsing, as we have seen, from its old supremacy as the mechanical philosophy to the rank of a merely descriptive scheme.^[6] As compared with the nineteenth century the eighteenth — though it produced great historians — was a century devoid of historic sense. Its speculations concerning the origin of society, of language, of religion, show this. And, as the most recent historian of scientific thought has pointed out, the work of Laplace shows this too. Both his Mécanique céleste, “dealing with the sfeneral laws of motion and of lifeless masses,” and his Théorie de la Probabilité, “dealing with the arithmetical properties of large numbers of units, leave out of consideration that hidden and mysterious phenomenon [fact] to which alone is attached . . . all that commands interest in the created world — the existence of individuality.”^[7] And yet it was in the latter of these works that Laplace, brushing aside freewill as a palpable illusion, proclaimed the implicit omniscience of the mechanical theory in a passage that I took for the text of my former lectures.^[8] In like manner the belief in fixed and immutable species prevented Laplace’s great contemporary, Cuvier, from appreciating the genetic view of nature, where the supreme importance of the individual first appears as — to quote an expression of Hegel’s — ‘involving the species and genus in itself,’ where variation and heredity become the central problems of biology and where the classifications of system-makers cease to be of value save as a preliminary clue. I have mentioned Hegel, and — whatever may be thought of other sides of his philosophy — its value in this connexion can hardly be overestimated. “If the historical literature of our time,” said Zeller, “no longer contents itself with eruditely unravelling or critically sifting traditions, piecing together and pragmatically elucidating particular facts, but seeks first and foremost to understand the fundamental continuity of events, to comprehend broadly the development of history and the spiritual principles that control it, this advance is due not least to the influences that Hegel’s Philosophy of History has exercised.”^[9] Now for Hegel human history meant struggle for rational freedom, as for Darwin natural history meant struggle for existence: both are teleological concepts, both imply individual agents and unique events, for both the physical world is provisionally a means to ends. The historical method, then, we may say, is altogether the product of the nineteenth century and there we find it claiming “to have invaded and transformed all departments of thought.” “A belief in this method,” said Sidgwick in the course of a polemic against it, “is the most widely and strongly entertained philosophical conviction at the present day.”^[10]

Even the negative side of this transformation, the waning of scientific realism, is largely due to the growing conviction of the central importance of the concrete and historical. It is not merely the truth that laws imply agents, nor again the truth that scientific laws are only abstract formulae — what here becomes apparent is that scientific generalisations are an economic device necessitated by our limitations. But it is to Ernest Mach, a physicist who has turned philosopher, that we owe the most impressive presentation of this truth. “In reality,” he says, “the law always contains less than the fact itself, because it does not reproduce the fact as a whole, but only that aspect of it which is important to us, the rest being either intentionally or from necessity omitted.”^[11] If we were capable of that intellectual intuition of which some philosophers have dreamt, there would be no enforced omissions, no intractable residuum, no sundering of ‘that’ and ‘what’ in our knowledge; history would not be left outside science, but rather science be taken up into history. We should not start with the abstract and general, unable to reach the concrete and individual, but being fully acquainted with every individual we should be relieved of the incommensurability of fact and law. Omniscience of this sort would surely bring us nearer to reality than the omniscience of Laplace’s imaginary spirit with its completed world-formula. Order there would needs be in such a world, if it is to be a world at all. But In a realm of ends the order and meaning would be primarily the outcome of the purposes of the active beings composing it; only to discursive intellects such as ours could this order emanating from individual agents appear as a warp and woof of external law shaping some primordial stuff. As naturalism claims to approximate to a complete formulation of this phenomenal order, so spiritualism may claim to approximate to an interpretation of the underlying reality; but it will have this advantage, that while it may be possible, setting out from mind, to account for mechanism it is impossible, setting out from mechanism, to account for mind.

Such an approximation to a spiritualistic interpretation we actually have in the history of the living world. Here we are ever in the presence of individual things, from which science indeed sets out, but to which it can never return, individuals marked down by dates and places and actually designated or admitting of designation by proper names,^[12] individuals who have no ‘doubles,’ whose like all in all we never shall meet again. The events with which we have here to deal are the unique acts and deeds that have their origin in individual centres of experience, not events that seem to occur uniformly as resultants of universal and unvarying law. Further, it is not the intrinsic nature of objects but their value for the particular individual that immediately determines each one's attitude towards them; and as the individuals vary so do their interests and pursuits. But quidquid petitur petitur sub specie boni: the idea of the good, as Plato long ago taught, is here the supreme category.^[13] If however there were as many goods as there are individuals and all were disparate and independent, this would not help us much. But the individuals of history are none of them isolated, for though no two be altogether alike no two are altogether different. So community and co-operation become actual goods, struggle a possible evil calling for readjustment, and the harmonious realisation of individual ends the ideal consummation, the “one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves.”

Meanwhile the course of history shows us the gradual building-up of society and civilisation and therewith the attainment at each advance of ends that were inconceivable at an earlier stage. But these ever-widening social groups and ends of ever-increasing scope are still in every case individual and concrete. The subordinate individuals or the particular aims which the wider embrace are still to be regarded as members or constituents of an articulate whole and not as instances of a general class, in which the content diminishes as the extent increases;^[14] for in these historical wholes, we must again insist, there is never complete homogeneity of parts. On the contrary, the higher, over-individual ends, as they are sometimes called, — politics, industry, science, literature, art — imply a differentiation among men that in spite of its significance would defy classification. The more organized the community the more diverse the individuals it includes, and the more man appears as the historical animal. At the same time the realisation of these ends invests him, so to say, with a new environment, a metamorphosis of nature, an artificial, humanly created, medium, which throws the immediate environment of the naked and resourceless troglodyte more and more into the background. Entre l’homme et la Nature, said Comte, il faut l’humanité.

Still, it will be objected, beyond humanity and history, beyond, if you will, the whole realm of sentient life. Nature is there all the while, and there as no mere background but as the basis of the whole, the fundamental plasma which can only be shaped because it is itself determinate and orderly. Granting this we may yet urge that there is nothing in Nature, when we try to envisage it as a whole, that is incompatible with a spiritualistic interpretation. In the historical world we place determinate agents first, and the order and development which we observe we trace to their action and interaction. It has never been shown that we need, nor made clear that we can, interpret Nature otherwise.

One problem of supreme importance to such an interpretation does however arise, and this problem the objection we are considering directly suggests. We have only to an insignificant extent shaped Nature, we have not made it; we are not even settlers from a foreign clime but aborigines seemingly sprung from the soil. But the principle of continuity is supposed to turn the edge of this objection, and to this principle panpsychism appeals, though it does not rest on that alone. “Nature never makes leaps,” said Leibniz. Every organism has its peculiar environment, the simpler the one is the simpler the other will be. Recent knowledge has shown the range of life to extend far into the region of what was once regarded as the inanimate, purely physical world, and it has further shown the lowest known organisms to be highly complex and extremely varied. But there is nothing to suggest that we have reached the limits of life: all we can say is that our senses and the artificial aids and methods of research at present available do not enable us to discriminate between yet simpler forms of life and their environment; not that these do not exist. There is then, it is contended, no warrant for the assumption of a completely inanimate environment at all: we ought rather with Spinoza to conclude that “all individual things are animated, albeit in diverse degrees.”^[15] We ought so to conclude too, because — continuity apart — what can neither do nor suffer, what is nothing for itself, is truly nothing at all; for — again as Spinoza maintained — every individual thing, so far as in it lies, endeavours to persist in its own being.^[16] On this, the panpsychist view. Nature thus resolves into a plurality of conative individuals; and the range and complexity of the . correspondence between a given individual and its environment marks the stage to which it has advanced in its interaction with the rest. But to cite Spinoza is to give point to the difficulty that has still to be met.

Will a plurality of interacting subjects account for itself and for the unity which interaction implies? This is the question which in the following lectures we shall have carefully to discuss. Suppose we decide this question in the negative, that will not affect the main issue as between spiritualism and naturalism: for such ground of the world of living and acting things would — if we should be led to assume it — surely be itself living and acting. In any case then we have a realm of ends, the only question is: — what is its constitution, how is its harmony secured; is it, so to say, a more or less orderly democracy, is it a limited monarchy, or is it possibly an absolute one?

This is none other than the old and formidable problem of the One and the Many; and this, it has been said, will be the philosophical problem of the twentieth century. Certainly there are few questions more to the fore at the present time. It is fitting- then that with this we should begin. But with such a problem much depends on the side from which we begin and the method that we adopt. The great idealistic systems of the nineteenth century began with the One as absolute and adopted what may be generally described as a speculative or a priori method. Of the greatest of these systems, that of Hegel, even its most sympathetic critics have allowed that, however perfect its ideal may be in itself, its attainment is, and must ever remain, humanly impossible. And this verdict, I do not think it audacious to say, is easy to justify: it simply amounts to protesting that we can never transcend ourselves. The first requisite of philosophy is organic coherence: it cannot, so to say, have two independent growing points, and so long as experience is the one there can be no finality about philosophy. As experience advances its meaning will unfold itself to reflexion more and more: so further progress makes further regress possible and what is last in the order of experience brings us nearer to what is first in the order of knowledge. On experience as it develops the ideal of the pure reason may rise to perish never, but it was certainly not discernible at first; and if present now, its full meaning is ineffable still. The superlative, the absolute, the infinite are limiting notions, and for aught we know are notions only: ideals of the reason they may be, but then reason itself is an ideal. There seems no end to the process of rationalising experience, but — as I said at the outset — at least there may be progress, and our confidence, that, as Hegel maintained, the real is rational and the rational real may deepen as we proceed. But we must start where we are and continue as we have begun, letting knowledge grow from more to more. To say this is to imply that those idealists who have attempted to begin with the Absolute have not really done so. That they have not has been amply proved by their critics and admitted by their apologists. But at any rate in the flights of pure thought up to the Absolute the atmosphere of empirical fact by which it is sustained is too diffused to be detected, and when that summit is reached the particular, the many, of actual experience tend to disappear or to be explained away. Thus their “alleged independence” — in which we empirically believe — Mr Bradley declares “is no fact, but a theoretical construction; and so far as it has a meaning, that meaning contradicts itself, and issues in chaos. . . . The plurality then sinks to become merely an integral aspect in a single substantial unity, and the reals [the many] have vanished.”^[17] Nevertheless the inevitable reaction, which the impossibility of philosophical finality involves, has already set in: indeed Mr Bradley prophesied as much: “Monadism,” he says, “on the whole will increase and will add to the difficulties which already exists.”^[18] Whether the second half of his forecast will turn out to be as true as the first remains to be seen. At any rate the plurality of the realm of ends is what is most patent to us at the outset: if the difficulties of Pluralism point the way to Singularism^[19] they will at least serve to make the character of the One clearer than any ‘cheap and easy monism’ evolved at a dialectical show — such as Mr Bradley in a famous passage has himself described^[20] — can ever do. It will be well too as regards method to let the spirit of the time lead us; turning aside from what has been described as “Naturalism’s desert on the one hand and the barren summit of the Absolute on the other,” to follow the historical method as far as possible in tracing the gradual evolution of ideas, but trusting to speculative methods only in the endeavour to divine the most satisfactory solution of the problems to which they gave rise.

In the next lecture then we must try to ascertain the genesis of the ideas which lead to the problem of the One and the Many, and then we may proceed to examine the solution which those who are called Pluralists or Personal Idealists uphold.

Notes

1. Cf. my article: ‘Mechanism and Morals,’ Hibbert Jl, Vol. iv. 1905, pp. 79 ff.
2. Naturalism and Agnosticism, 3rd ed., 1906.
3. Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, pp. 127 ff.
4. Philosophical Orientation and Scientific Standpoints, Berkeley, California, 1904.
5. Collected Essays, Eversley edn, Vol. i. p. 154.
6. Cf. Boltzmann, quoted in Naturalism and Agnosticism, Vol. I. p. 166.
7. J. T. Merz, A History of European Thought in the Nineteenth Century, Vol. i. 1896, p. 124.
8. It was reserved for Clerk Maxwell to point out clearly the inevitable limitation of the Laplacean data. Cf. his Life by Campbell and Garnett as quoted by Merz, op. cit. Vol. n. 1902, p. 559.
9. Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie, p. 824.
10. ‘The Historical Method,’ Mind, 1886, p. 203.
11. Mach, ‘The Economical Nature of Physics,’ Popular Scientific Lectures, p. 193. This necessary limitation of discursive thought has led to two distinct but more or less complementary attitudes towards concrete reality. Elated by the power and precision that generalisation secures, science was encouraged on the one hand to hope that by extending its network of general relations it would at length completely encompass the individual, on the other to despise the particular as mere ‘stuff’ of no account save as it was formed by participation in general ideas. It was mainly the former tendency that led to the philosophic indifference to mere history and experience as unscientific that characterizes Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes for example. The latter tendency shows itself in Schopenhauer’s singularly inconsistent contention that history is a mere hurly-burly (Wirrwarr), only the accidental form of the appearance of the idea.
12. To which therefore no concept is adequate.
13. Rep. vi. 505 a.
14. Cf. Rickert, Die Grenzen der naturwissenschaftlichen Begriffsbildung, 1902, p. 394.
15. Ethics, ii. 13, Schol.
16. Ethics, iii. 6.
17. Appearance and Reality, 2nd edn, p. 143.
18. Op. cit. p. 118, fin.
19. This term, first used by Külpe as the correlative of Pluralism (Einleitung in die Philosophie, §14), may not be happy; but it is after all better than Henism; and it is not misleading as Monism according to present usage, i.e. with a qualitative as well as a quantitative sense, certainly is. Wolf, who invented the term, used it, as I have done, only in the qualitative sense as applicable either to materialism or to spiritualism.
20. Principles of Logic, p. 533.