The World and the Individual, Second Series/Lecture 4

by Josiah Royce

LECTURE IV

PHYSICAL AND SOCIAL REALITY

We have now learned something concerning the general Forms in which we conceive the facts that we acknowledge as real. No psychological account of the genesis of these forms in the history of the individual mind has been attempted. We have considered only the logical significance of certain fundamental motives that guide us, from moment to moment, and from stage to stage of our intellectual development, in the interpretation of our world and of our relations to this world.

These motives are twofold: (1) The motives that lead us to the concepts of one type of Serial Order, of Law, and of the World of Description; (2) The motives that lead us to conceive Reality as a Well-Ordered Series, and as a realm of Appreciation, that is of values, of Selfhood, of life other than the life that is directly revealed to us, by our present conscious purposes, and so as a realm of various Selves. These twofold motives correspond to our own twofold limitations as finite beings. For we know, just now, neither the whole of what this will of ours, in its present dissatisfaction, really intends and means, nor do we know how this will is expressed in the facts of universal experience. The World of Description, as a conceived objective order, is the result of our attempting, through a process of serial discrimination, to make good the second of these aspects of our ignorance. The World of Appreciation we learn to recognize by coming to a better definition of what it is that our will even now seeks. For then we learn that our present will demands for its full expression, not merely contents or facts that are yet to be discriminated, but other wills than this present conscious will of ours, other purposes than we as yet observe within the limits of this instant’s consciousness. Our reaction in presence of the world can become definite and rational, and in accordance with the Ought, only when we acknowledge, not merely data other than those now consciously present, but lives, selves, other than our own finite selfhood. Hence the World of Description, taken by itself, is never the whole truth. It needs to be interpreted in terms of the World of Appreciation.

What the criticism of fundamental categories has enabled us to see in general, is concretely exemplified by our knowledge of the Physical World and of Human Society. We proceed accordingly to apply our general theory to these special cases. We shall find motives that lead us to interpret the physical world as a World of Description, where, as we then conceive, series of phenomena are linked according to rigidly invariable laws. These laws enable us indeed to see how the One and the Many are in certain ways related, but do not appear as expressions of Purpose. On the contrary, the Social World, the realm of our human fellow-beings, is for us all primarily a World of Appreciation, that is, a world where other wills than our own present conscious will seem to be expressing themselves, in accordance with their own choices. Hence our customary interpretation of the world as known to men is profoundly dualistic. On the one hand we find in experience motives that seem to lead to Materialism. For Materialism is due simply to a one-sided emphasis laid upon certain aspects of the World of Description. On the other hand we are driven, by equally obvious empirical considerations, to interpret the social world as a realm of conscious voluntary processes, which occur because somebody finds it worth while that they should occur. Our ordinary common-sense view of things sets these two doctrines about the knowable world side by side, and in general despairs of seeing any comprehensible link between the two orders, viz. between the mental and the material, the social and the physical, the necessary and the free, the describable and the spiritual. Our own general criticism of the categories has prepared us, however, to understand, in terms of our Idealism, both the contrast and the unity of these two realms. In the present and in the subsequent lecture, I propose therefore to undertake a discussion of the concept of Nature, and to show its relation to our concept of Mind. We shall have to explain, in the first place, what are the main motives for our acknowledgment of the existence of the physical world; and secondly, we shall have to set forth in some detail the relations between our idealistic Theory of Being on the one hand and the empirical facts that men acknowledge on the other hand, in dealing with one another and with Nature.

I

No precise definition of the scope covered by the term Nature can be given in advance of a Theory of Nature. It is easy to say that, by Nature, we mean the portion of the universe that our senses make known to us and that our special empirical sciences study. But the region of Being marked out by such a definition is no very precise one. What our senses make known to us means little enough until the data of sense have been organized through our conduct, and interpreted in the light of theory. Nature has therefore always been conceived by men very largely in supersensuous terms, from the days of magic lore down to the latest geological or physical or biological theories. And what our empirical sciences actually study is, according to all our beliefs about Nature, the mere fringe of a world that exists, but that we have not yet learned how to study with success. Nature is also often contrasted with Mind; but for the psychologist mental processes are a portion of the natural processes; while, for our own idealistic view, all Nature is an expression of Mind. In our own phraseology as used in these lectures, Nature has so far been contrasted several times with Man. But we of course all recognize a sense in which Man is to be conceived as a part of Nature; while on the other hand, nothing is clearer than that, for us, all our beliefs about Nature are determined by conditions which belong, in one aspect, to the mind of Man. A confessedly vague way of stating the definition of the term is to say that by Nature we mean a realm external to our own private experience, and yet this side, so to speak, of the ultimate Reality, — a realm, as it were, between the divine, viewed as the Absolute, and the knowing finite human Subject. But all of these expressions, while they are indeed in their various ways valid, indicate a problem rather than define its precise limits.

More to the point, at this stage of our inquiry, than a formally precise definition of Nature, is a consideration of the motives which lead us to acknowledge as real the facts that we all call physical, — viz. to acknowledge the existence of matter, the laws of natural processes, and the dependence of our own mental life upon these processes. To this aspect of the problem of Nature we accordingly at once proceed.

After all that we have now seen regarding the nature of human knowledge, it would be vain to assert that we perceive directly, through our senses, the existence of that which we call matter. The senses never show us, by themselves, the true Being of anything whatever. All truth is the object of acknowledgment, and not merely of immediate experience. Moreover, what has Being is, in itself, something Individual. And the senses never show us individuality, but only the presence of sense-qualities, — colors, sounds, odors, touch, impressions, and the like. On the other hand it is perfectly indubitable that the senses show, now to one and now to another of us men, all the data that, after comparing our various human experiences, we interpret as the signs of the existence of matter. The question is, however, this: In what way do we come by this interpretation?

We cannot say, at this point, that some innate conviction, some first and fundamental axiom, or some opaque “law” of the intellect mysteriously requires us to believe that matter is real. This we cannot now assert, just because our Idealism knows nothing whatever about a collection of principles called fundamental or innate assurances. Nor yet can we here, appealing to our more thoughtful and scientifically organized experience, assert that even the success of science, by itself, sufficiently warrants us in attributing to matter a valid Being, which, just because it is independent of our caprices, must remain valid in a realm wholly beyond that of the minds of men. For we know, from our former criticisms of Critical Rationalism, that a merely valid Being, taken by itself, is not yet a real Being. And the philosophical inquiry into the reality that lies at the basis of our experience of Nature, is only begun when we point out that, for our experience, the laws of Nature are valid. For the question at once arises, in what form of life, in what expression of the Absolute, in what Being of our own fourth or idealistic type, are our valid laws of Nature founded?

It follows that for us, at this stage, when once we raise the question regarding the Reality of Nature, the most ordinary conventional answers will in no sense serve.

We must undertake the whole problem afresh. As we do so, we next meet an account of the foundations of our belief in the external and natural world which is so frequently defended, and so familiar, that we cannot here pass it over in silence. It involves looking deeper into the nature of our idea of Being, than those look who simply say that we directly perceive by our senses the external existence of natural objects. And while it indeed appeals to a certain axiom, namely, to the supposed axiom of causality, it is usually more critical in its statement than are most of the views that make the whole issue depend upon irreducible innate convictions. And, furthermore, it has been urged by many noted thinkers who otherwise are of the most various philosophical tendency.

According to this view, we come by our belief in the physical world simply upon the ground of the Resistance which the solid material objects offer to our touch, to our movement, and especially to our muscular sense, and upon the basis of the various other ways in which Nature sets limits to our activity. And we reason from such experiences of resistance and of limitation to the external existence of things, upon the ground that there must indeed be a cause for every effect, and therefore, in this case, a cause which resists and sets limits to our will. As this cause is not found within ourselves, we assume it as external.

No theory of our belief in an external world seems to have had better fortune than this one in popular philosophy, or even in more serious metaphysical inquiry. And yet I regard it as precisely such a mingling of true and of false analysis as is especially adapted hopelessly to confuse our whole view of nature.

This view, as I hold, is indeed sound in laying stress upon a deep connection between our observation of the significant inner life of our own will, and our assurance that the universe in which we live has true Being. But, as I have maintained in developing our Fourth Conception of Being, while our finitude always shows us that we have not won the whole of Being, it is the fulfilment, the always relative and imperfect fulfilment, — but still the fulfilment of our internal meanings, and not the opaque resistance which the world offers to these meanings, which both defines our warrant for finding that the universe has Being, and gives us, in the form of the Internal Meaning of our Ideas, our only and our valid means for defining wherein that Being consists. Our limitations do, indeed, send us beyond themselves for the truth. But the proof that a real world is here about us, is never the mere opaqueness of fact, the blind presence of something which besets and hinders us ; but rather it is the relative transparency of our inner life, the observed manifestation of meaning in our experience, which constantly tells us that we are in an universe where, in view of our present incompleteness, rational truth beyond us is to be found. What is, is the completion of our incompleteness, and not any fate that merely overcomes us. This we have fully illustrated in the foregoing discussion of the Categories.

Furthermore, the view that we here criticise makes the whole case depend upon an appeal to the principle of causation. The resistance that my will meets, needs explanation. It is explained by the hypothesis of a material cause which resists us. But hereupon I respond to the defender of this theory, What is, then, your principle of causation? Is it not this, namely: that whatever happens needs, from your point of view, to be explained, and finds, as a fact, its explanation in its relation to other facts? And if this be your belief, as it doubtless is, is not your principle of causation for you a principle somehow first known to govern the real world which your experience of resistance is said to make manifest to your senses, before you can use the principle to prove the existence of matter? But if this be true, is not your principle of causation, your assurance that the real world is one where facts stand in rational relations, and where what happens is explicable, already presupposed not only as valid, but as valid for a real world beyond you, from the very outset of your whole inquiry? Is there not here, then, a belief deeper than your mere experience that your will is at any time resisted? For unless you had this principle of causation in your possession, and unless you first believed the principle to be applicable to a realm beyond your private experience, your will would be resisted in vain, so far as your power to learn about a real world would then go. For you would then learn nothing thereby but the blind fact that you felt limitations, as an infant feels them when he hungers. But if you already possess your principle, and believe it applicable to Reality in general, then indeed you can apply it to explain, after a fashion, any fact that you please. Already, however, in assuming that you are somehow able to know that the principle of causation applies to a realm beyond your own present will, you have found out, apart from all experience of resistance, that there is the real external world within which the principle of causation is valid. And, in that case, you have not discovered the reality of the physical world through the fact that it resists your will, but have presumed, in advance of all feeling of resistance, that there is a real world, beyond yourself, whose facts, whatever they are, are linked by a law of causation to your own experience. For surely you do not mean that the principle of causation itself, by resisting your will, forces you to believe in its reality as the cause of such resistance.

If you look closer you soon see, however, as to our belief in causation, that somehow or other it helps us more clearly to grasp the internal sense, the observed inner significance, of some of our conscious states, to observe what we call their causal connections. In observing these connections, so far as they fall within our own range of experience, we there find somehow our own rational Will better expressed, or embodied, than it would be without this idea, and thereby we better win our own inner clearness. In assuming, now, that some such connection as this has validity beyond us, in a realm external to ourselves, we have begun by defining this outer realm, not as a realm that primarily resists or thwarts our Will, but as a realm that first of all embodies one of our own deepest and most rational purposes. If the external world, said to be material, is, as this view holds, above all causal, and is such as to explain the particular facts which are found in our experience, then, that world is above all a real embodiment of the very purpose which, in us, appears as our purpose of explanation.

Properly examined, then, the view here in question becomes only a form of Idealism, — a sort of primary assurance that the nature of things is rational, and fulfils our purposes. And so the problem about our belief in the existence of Nature must be solved in explicit relation to our Fourth Conception of Being. If we are to understand what we mean by Material Nature, and why we believe it to be real, we must ask, What internal meaning of ours seeks and demands an embodiment such that, to our minds, only outer Nature can furnish this embodiment? But so far, indeed, we have not seen what grounds distinguish our belief in matter from our belief in any other sort of Reality. What we are seeking, however, is an account of how our belief in the material world, as distinct from any other realm of acknowledged facts, is to be explained and defended.

Moreover, as has occasionally been pointed out, in the course of various recent discussions of this view, the natural truths which are of the most theoretical importance to us, are often truths that result from an indirect interpretation of facts with which the sense of resistance in any direct muscular sense has very little to do. Do the geometrical laws force themselves upon us by resisting our will (except, to be sure, our will exhaustively to know them)? The heavens have long been a type of the apparently everlasting character of Nature. When did the stars show themselves to be real by resisting our will, except indeed by arousing questions that we cannot at present answer?

II

In proceeding to suggest what I regard as a more adequate account of the warrant for our belief in the physical world, I must call attention to a plain fact which, as I conceive, has far too often been wholly neglected in the discussion of this subject. Our belief in the reality of Nature, when Nature is taken to mean the realm of physical phenomena known to common sense and to science, is inseparably bound up with our belief in the existence of our fellow-men. The one belief cannot be understood apart from the other. Whatever the deeper reality behind Nature may turn out to be, — our Nature, the realm of matter and of laws with which our science and our popular opinions have to do, is a realm which we conceive as known or as knowable to various men, in precisely the same general sense in which we regard it as known or as knowable to our private selves. Take away the social factor in our present view of Nature, and you would alter the most essential of the characters possessed, for us, by that physical realm in which we all believe.

How significant this aspect of our belief in Nature is, you may see if you will look a little more closely at the facts. There is much, indeed, in the realm of Reality in general, apart from Nature, which a man need not view as accessible to all men, in so far as they are men. As a matter of religious faith, one might well believe, for instance, that upon a given occasion God had revealed his will to a single prophet, or other inspired person, and that this revelation not only remained, but had to remain, by God's will, a secret quite inaccessible to all other men. In the reality of the revelation in question one might nevertheless believe, simply because, by hypothesis, God would be conceived, by a believer in such a revelation, as a real person, and the prophet as also a real person. And whatever occurs to one person, as a fact of his inner life, and whatever passes between two persons, may remain a secret inaccessible to all other persons, in so far as these persons are finite individuals. Or again, I now believe in your mind as a reality, external to mine; yet I also view your mental life as, in its own direct presence to you, something inaccessible to all human beings besides yourself. But while Reality as such does not imply that what is real is directly accessible, in its details, to the private and finite experience of any or of all men, it is different with the sort of reality which we ascribe to what we usually regard as the material world.

Suppose that I told you that I was well acquainted with the existence and the properties of a material object which I had now and here before me. Suppose that I assured you that I could see, touch, weigh, and otherwise test the reality of this material object, but that I was quite sure that neither you nor any other man could conceivably see it or touch it, or otherwise get the least experience of its presence. Suppose, as a fact, that nobody else ever did verify my report; but that I continued to insist upon the reality, observable for me, of my material object. What would you say of that object of mine? The answer is plain. You would say that my object might indeed be real, but was real solely as a physical phenomenon, to wit, as a collection of states in my mind, in other words, as a certain fixed hallucination of mine. And now I, myself, if indeed I remained sane while I asserted all this, should not hesitate to agree with you, just as surely as I retained my present definition of my material world. For by my material world, I certainly mean a collection of actual and possible experiences of mine such that you too can agree with me about the presence and the describable characters of these experiences, precisely in so far as you have equal opportunities with me to verify their presence and to test with me their peculiar type of Being. The fact that we men find Nature here, implies for us, then, that we are so constituted as to find the same sort of natural phenomena. The realm of the physical phenomena, whatever inner Being may be behind it, is, for us, primarily this common realm of human experience. Upon this consideration the very definition of what we call Nature depends.

It is, of course, true that any one of us, when alone, supposes himself to be still in the presence of Nature. It is also true that this supposition would lose its present meaning just as soon as we supposed not only that we were alone with Nature, but that, even if our fellows had the same opportunities as ourselves, they would still be wholly unable to verify our observations. A nature that is not only by accident observable just now to me alone, but that also is such that nobody else amongst all men besides myself can observe it, becomes, at once, to my mind, either one of two things, viz. either something that is explicitly my own dream, or fancy, or hallucination, or other mental state, or else something that I should view, if I continued to believe in it, as a reality belonging to a realm of spirits, whom I might then suppose to exist apart from men. In either case, such fact, observable by me alone, is no longer to be conceived as belonging to the well-known material world of common sense and of science.

III

Our belief in Man, then, is logically prior to our interpretation of Nature. And any theory of Nature must undertake to explain, not merely how these data of sense appear to any one of us in this order, and subject to these valid laws, but how all men come to possess this Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/194 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/195 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/196 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/197 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/198 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/199 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/200 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/201 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/202 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/203 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/204 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/205 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/206 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/207 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/208 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/209 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/210 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/211 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/212 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/213 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/214 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/215 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/216 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/217 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/218 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/219 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/220 Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/221 speculations. The concept of the unvarying character of the laws of Nature, freed at length from its practical motives, became universal, and has inflicted itself as a dogma upon more recent thought. Yet its origin was social.

VII

The value of this dogma, as of all the concepts of the World of Description, is relative. It reveals no absolute truth. From our own point of view, there can indeed be no doubt that our experience of the objects of Nature does prove to us that there exists, in the universe, a vast realm of fact other than what human minds consciously find present within their own circles of individual or private apprehension. And so, for us, Nature is indeed a part of Reality, and the social tests do indeed prove that this is true. But when we ask what reality Nature possesses, we must beware of letting our social interests, and the general motives that lead us to conceive the World of Description, blind us to the true principles upon which an interpretation of experience should be founded. The sharp contrast between Matter and Mind, the sharp dualism between the World of Description and the World of Appreciation, — we have seen from what motives in our own lives all such contrasts result. We shall no longer take this dualism too seriously. We have seen its relative justification, and its limitations.

In any case, in viewing Nature as a realm of law, we must distinguish between what our common experience permits us to verify, in the way of our own conceptual constructions of Nature, and what our experience of Nature warrants us in asserting as the truth regarding a realm external to man’s consciousness. It is with our more modern sciences as it was with early industrial arts. If an industrial art succeeds, that is because Nature actually furnishes us with empirical materials that are plastic for the purposes of this art. We have, however, no right to assert, upon that account, that all natural phenomena, viewed in themselves, and apart from man, already must be so constituted a priori as to be adaptable to the purposes of our human art. The primitive artists who produced the pottery of our American Pueblo Indians, were skilful in finding out just the right sort of clay for their purposes. But had they formed a theory that Nature is in itself essentially a storehouse of good potter’s clay, they would have generalized quite as ill as did primitive Animism when it conceived all Nature as alive in the same sense in which our capricious wills are alive, and are in us subject to our moods and to our senses.

Now, as I have said, our science is a sort of theoretical extension of our industrial art. What the arts do with their tools, the student of science does with his conceptions. That is, he wins over the phenomena of our experience to the service of our human purposes. He does this by processes of selection, of construction, and of an endless process of trial and error. A conception used by any empirical science is an ideal tool, or a sort of mechanical contrivance. Using it, we work over the data of our common experience until these data Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/224 cation, of description, of experiment, and of prediction, which are as material in their embodiment as the works of an industrial art. While science deals with natural facts in a far more universal way than does any industrial art, its purposes are no less human than are those of its fellow. Both coöperate to the end of man’s mastery over Nature. Both succeed by selection from the mass of materials offered, by rearrangement of what is found, and by skill in adjustment.

And, therefore, both give us much the same sort of right to speculate as to Nature’s inner constitution. Both involve the same sort of relatively narrow clearness as to just our human place in the mists of finite experience. Both indicate a truth that is in some sense valid beyond ourselves. Both have essentially the same kind of limitation when we undertake to view them as revelations of what that truth in itself is and implies.

But we have long since given up assuming that the success of our industrial art is, by itself, any sufficient revelation of the innermost nature of things. It does not now occur to us to say that Nature exists, apart from man, as a mere storehouse of materials for the contrivances of our industrial art, — for example, as a collection of banks of good clay for the potters, or (to use the example that Hegel cited) as a storehouse of good corks for our bottles. A certain simple-minded teleology used indeed often to view Nature in very much this trivial way. The coal measures were especially prepared for man’s use. The metals were preordained for his forges and furnaces, for his machines, and for his ornaments and his money. The animals grew to Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/226 materials. A rigid selection, a long search, and a deliberate rearrangement of the facts offered to us by raw experience, wins, in the one case as in the other, not with any a priori certainty, but at times, and to a limited extent, and by virtue of our skill and patience. Nature, as we empirically know it, just as truly seems to resist our efforts to explain the phenomena, as in certain regions it permits us to win. When we win, when we explain and predict, doubtless that is indeed because external Nature is in itself such as to permit us to do so. But the same Nature permits us to find the clay and the coals and the metals.

Neither by our empirical science nor by our art do we then directly discover anything but this: Namely, that our human Internal Meanings do indeed possess some reference to a vast finite realm beyond ourselves, within which we men find our place. Out of this realm we ourselves have proceeded through the processes of evolution. Into this realm, at death, we seem to return. This realm is called Nature. It doubtless has its own meaning. This meaning is doubtless in itself deeply linked to ours. And this meaning is such as to permit us with varying, but on the whole, with vastly increasing success, both to develope our human arts, and to work out the relatively successful, but also distinctly human and social, descriptions and predictions of our science. Both our art and our sciences are due, however, quite as much to our conflict with the facts that our experience directly furnishes, as to any essential plasticity of these facts, either to the practical purposes of our art, or to the ideal purposes of our science. Nature permits us to mine metals and to Page:The World and the Individual, Second Series (1901).djvu/228 of our experience. It is our interest in social organization that has given us both industrial art and empirical science. As industrial art regards its facts as mere contrivances that have no life of their own, but that merely express their human artificer’s intents, so a philosophy of Nature, founded solely upon our special sciences, tends to treat the facts of Nature (regarded in the light of our cunningly contrived conceptions) as having no inner meaning, and as being mere embodiments of our formulas. Both doctrines are perfectly justified as expressions of the perspective view of Nature which we men naturally take. Neither view can stand against any deeper reason that we may have for interpreting our experiences of Nature as a hint of a vaster realm of life and of meaning of which we men form a part, and of which the final unity is in God’s life.