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V.-MONISM

IN THE LIGHT OF RECENT
DEVELOPMENTS IN PHILOSOPHY.

By C. E. M. JOAD.

I.

MONISM Seems to have gone out of fashion. Certainly, since Mr. Bradley published Truth and Reality, the Absolute has not loomed so large as heretofore in philosophical discussion. Under the influence of M. Bergson and the "New Realists," the centre of philosophical interest seems rather to have moved away from and beyond that question which fifteen years ago occupied the chief place on the stage, the question of the contending merits of monism and pluralism, a question which seems not so much to have received final adjudication in favour of one side or the other, as to have lost interest and faded into the background. When I say "lost interest," I am referring only to the peculiar form in which the controversy then presented itself. The fundamental points in dispute are still in dispute; and the new realists wage war on monism in all its forms. Only the clear-cutness of the old issue seems to have become blurred, and in particular monism in the old sense of the word seems to have lost in repute. It is the object of this essay to sketch some of the chief lines of argument which in quite recent years have led to what I might call the deposition of monism from its enthronement on the philosophical chair, and to consider the chief alternative suggested.

The lines of attack which occur to one as having most endangered the monistic stronghold in recent times, are those initiated by William James and the pragmatists, and by Mr. Russell and the new realists. The character of the

former is familiar, and may be treated briefly. The latter is to my mind more significant, and has not yet received the full attention it deserves.

When I said that monism had lost in repute, I did not, of course, mean to imply that its influence is not extensive. On the contrary, it is paramount in Oxford and may still be termed the orthodox philosophy in the Scotch Universities. It does appear, however, that a real contrast is presented between the position of monism to-day and that in vogue a dozen years ago, such as is indicated by the following quotation from an article of Sir Henry Jones, cited by William James, as evidence of the existence of foemen worthy of his steel. "It is hardly to be denied that the power exercised by Bentham and the Utilitarian School has, for better or for worse, passed into the hands of the Idealists. 'The Rhine has flowed into the Thames' is a warning note rung out by Mr. Hobhouse. Carlyle introduced it, bringing it as far as Chelsea. Then Jowett, Thomas Hill Green, and William Wallace, Lewis Nettleship, Arnold Toynbee, and David Ritchie, to mention only those teachers whose voices now are silent, guided its waters into those upper reaches known locally as the Isis. John and Edward Caird brought them up the Clyde, Hutchinson Stirling up the Firth of Forth. They have passed up the Mersey, Severn, Dee, and Don. They pollute the Bay of St. Andrews and swell the waters of the Cam and have somehow crept overland into Birmingham. The stream of German idealism has been diffused over the academical world of Great Britain. The disaster is universal."

Such was the weight of authority William James set himself to challenge. The monistic doctrine as he conceived it was grounded on a combination of four main presuppositions. I call them presuppositions because, although they are cardinal points in the finished structure, they indicate at the same time the lines of reasoning which originally led men to a belief in

the Absolute and the points of vantage from which its ascent appears least difficult. They are: (1) That things cannot interact if they are in any sense separate; (2) That knowledge is impossible between two things which are in any sense separate and that in consequence there is no independence of being apart from being known; (3) A belief that truth is coherent; and (4) the belief that mind can only cognise the mental and, therefore, that the Real is mental.

(1) is Lotze's famous proof of monism. To act, says Lotze, is to exert an influence. If, therefore, A and B are two objects, A's interaction with B becomes the influence exercised by A over B. This involves the influence on B of the influence exercised by A over B, which involves the further influence of the influence of the influence of A over B, and so on ad infinitum. So that if A and B were really separate to begin with, an infinite regress of influences looms between them before any change in B can take place. Therefore, they were not separate to begin with. Further, the fact that the chain of influences exercised by A hits upon B, and not upon C, involves the supposition that B was somehow more fitted to receive them than C. This fitness is interpreted as some kind of kinship with A; and the fact that the influences produce a change in B implies a response on B's part which can be interpreted as sensitiveness to the influences of A. Instead, therefore, of B isolated and different from A, we now have B exhibiting kinship to A and sensitiveness to its influences in advance, before interaction can be supposed possible. Original connection is thus inferred.

(2) This is one of Professor Royce's proofs that the only alternative to the complete disunion of things, between which knowledge is impossible, is their complete union in the One. (I am here giving only the general drift of the argument. The illustrations are not Professor Royce's.) Knowledge, he argues, is impossible if things are separate. For consider the sentence, The cat smells fish." If the cat and the fish are G

originally independent, the smelling by the cat constitutes a connection between them. A third connection between this connection and the fish is thereby involved, and we have an infinite regress as before. Further, if the fish and the cat existed entirely independently and without foreknowledge of each other, it would never be possible for the cat to transcend the space of pure otherness between them and come at the fish. If each being is isolated to begin with, each is shut up entirely in its own isolation and is unable to pass beyond it in the sense that having knowledge of something else requires. Some intimacy must already exist between them in virtue of which the cat can know the fish, and this intimacy is due to the fact that they both partake of and are known by a higher mind.

(3) The view that Truth is coherent. This involves a rather different question. It is sufficient to say here that the view that the criterion of truth is constituted by its coherence with the general mass of our other knowledge, involves the conclusion that all knowledge is a single whole, and that truth is not attainable short of that whole.

(4) The belief that Mind can only cognise the mental and, therefore, that the Real is mental, seems to me to rest upon three distinct lines of argument, though they are not always distinguished as such in monistic writings. First, there are two considerations affecting the nature of intelligibility. (a) It is thought that a thing to be intelligible must be concrete. This position is the exact antithesis of Plato's. For the question as to whether we speak of the elon as concrete or abstract (and they are spoken of in both terms) is purely a matter of words. The elon are not, at any rate, concrete in the sense in which monistic idealists interpret concrete. They are mathematical truths, scientific laws, moral axioms, and so forth, which are regarded as abstractions by the idealist-universal abstractions, that is, formed from observation of their instances. As such they point forward to these instances, and are felt to be not

quite real or intelligible without them. (b) To be intelligible a thing must be self-sufficient. In this connection it is to

be noted that the ordinary objects of sense are not intelligible. For the reasons given by Plato, and again by Berkeley, they are to be judged misleading, if taken by themselves, giving rise to changing and contradictory self-data, and pointing to other things beyond themselves. Thus, no water is so hot that it does not suggest to the mind hotter water, and no sky so blue that it does not admit the possibility of greater blueness. Thus, things of sense, though concrete, are not sufficient: they point forward. The kind of entity on the other hand which does begin to be intelligible is a piece of music. A piece of music is concrete, and it is a self-sufficient whole. It is a unity admitting diversity. Yet even this is not intelligible through and through. It appears to be divisible into distinct parts, and isolated notes with relations one to another. It is true that these notes are not in isolation what they were in the completed whole: they have lost significance: it is doubtful, indeed, whether thus isolated they can be considered the same notes at all, so that it is doubtful whether the analysing process could ever legitimately have been made. But it is undeniable that this process of separating up into notes can, in point of fact, be applied, and thus leads to confusion. Similarly, consciousness is a self-sufficient concrete unity admitting of diversity, and though apparently possessing parts in the same irritating way as the piece of music, it must be adjudged, at any rate, to be more intelligible than anything which is entirely non-mental. From this it is but a step to saying that only the mental is really intelligible. (c) Thirdly, a familiar theory of perception tells us that we know directly only our own sensations. Given the psychological atomism of Locke and Berkeley for our basis, we soon dispose of Locke's illogical "substance," and are left with only the mental as a possible object of knowledge. Not only is there no need then to drag in an alien matter, but it cannot, we are told,

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