be, to begin with, doubt as to the nature of the minor, a doubt which the emerging admission or the emerging fact settles. Even our old friend All men are mortal therefore Socrates is mortal can be viewed as having some significance if we suppose that Socrates, like Paul and Barnabas at Lystra, or like Captain Cook in the Southern Pacific, had been taken for a god. Some emerging fact, his own admission, it may be, or the drawing of his blood, betrays his humanity, and, to the observer who has the knowledge in his mind that all men are mortal, makes it certain, now for the first time, that he does not stand above the possibility of death. Lotze raises for us the image of Thought, as in the Kantian view, "standing fronting the impressions as they arrive with a bundle of logical forms in its hand uncertain which form can be fitted to which impression". There is a truth that vaguely corresponds to this fantastic conception. It is this, that our innumerable general concepts stored in memory in the shape of the words and sentences of ordinary speech, may be said to stand fronting the impressions as they arrive ready to subsume them, to assimilate them, to convert them into thoughts. In Germany, since Herbart's time, a process of the sort has been spoken of as "apperception ". The known, as Avenarius expresses it, is always apperceiving the unknown. The conception appears to have been suggested by physiology. As the organs and tissues of our bodies assimilate the substances of the outward world, and, as these substances, in their turn, once they are assimilated, become organs and tissues, and assimilate yet other substances, so our minds assimilate impressions which, in their turn, become parts of our minds and again assist in the assimilation of other impressions. If we endeavour to conceive of the mere passage before our minds of the continuum of impressions without any antecedent general knowledge in the shape of inherited language ready to subsume and assimilate it, I think we shall be driven to the conclusion that consciousness, as we know it, would not, in such circumstances, emerge. It is quite possible to distinguish consciousness plus memory from consciousness without it. In the adjustment of our muscles that we make in walking, riding, or swimming there must be some momentary consciousness that accompanies the making of them. Time was, indeed, in riding and swimming at any rate, when the adjustments that we now make "unconsciously" as we express it, were made quite consciously, in obedience, perhaps, to instructions. Long since, however, it has become habit with us to make them while our whole attention has been concentrated on some other matter. If a mental state, even the very next moment after its occurrence, leaves no trace in memory, it may be said in a sense indeed to have existed, but it does not exist for reflection. It is not objectified. In those circumstances, introspection can tell us nothing about it. Clear consciousness seems to accompany feeling and thought only when feeling and thought have been reduced to linguistic expression. It is only in making the facts about mental states communicable to others that we make them knowable to ourselves. Developed knowledge thus in such a case, or indeed in any case, must be regarded as never being the work of the individual mind alone, but rather as always and necessarily consisting in the co-ordination of the results accomplished by the workings of the common mind through untold ages with the present impression on the individual mind. Such a mode of viewing the subject brings home to us vividly the conception of our participation in the operations of some wider mind than our own; and is calculated to arouse the reflection that our relation to that mind is closely analogous to the relation borne by the cells of our bodies to the organism as a whole. What I am mainly concerned to emphasise at present, however, is the duality that is discernible whenever such thoughts as those of truth, knowledge and reality present themselves. In my recent paper I had occasion to refer to Dr. Ward's view that the one sun which is the common object of ten men looking at it, since it is not the peculiar object of any one of the ten comes to be considered as independent of them all collectively, and of consciousness generally, but that this conception of the independent existence of the external object is the "fallacy of naïve realism". The view runs closely parallel to that of a philosopher who is in many respects at the opposite pole of thought from Dr. Ward, Prof. Mach. Prof. Külpe of Bonn, in his little book on The Philosophy of the Present in Germany,1 cites Mach as the leading exponent of the new Positivism. "All science," he says, "according to Mach is a portrayal of facts in thought. By facts he (Mach) understands states of consciousness. "2 The Por Translated from the fifth German edition by Maud Lyall Patrick and G. W. T. Patrick. 2 Eng. tr., p. 36. trayal theory is thus a valiant attempt to express and explain everything both in the inward and outward worlds in terms of these states of consciousness. That Esse and Percipi are one and the same is with Mach a doctrine that is worked for all that it is worth. He will have no supplementing of consciousness by thought. "The task of philosophy," in his view, "consists wholly in the exposition of these elements (the states of consciousness) and their mutual relations". The theory limits us "to the occasional sensations given in consciousness and their interconnexions". Some features of Prof. Külpe's criticism of this theory are of interest. In arguing that sensation alone cannot give us all that we call knowledge he remarks that "Without the guidance of thought and intelligent preparation every experiment would be meaningless ".4 Mere sensations per se cannot be the vehicles of those changes in our experience which we know to be independent of us".5 If, with Dr. Ward, we reject the independent existence of the external object as "a fallacy of naïve realism," or, with Prof. Mach, as "a metaphysical speculation," we have then plainly to face the problem of accounting somehow for the fact that the information which it is possible for sense to give us can be, and very frequently is, of a character that absolutely compels concurrence in its validity on the part of innumerable individuals at once. Let us suppose that half a dozen of us look at the barometer, and that we all find that it reads at this moment 29.8, and let us then think away completely the existence of the external object. There is now nothing whatever there but the visual sensations which have formed the basis of the reading, nothing, that is to say, but these sensations and the amazing fact of their precise concurrence for each and all of us. How are we to account for that? If its familiarly accepted cause is once completely thought away we will surely feel ourselves driven to search for a substitute. Can any substitute suggest itself, unless indeed it may be Berkeley's theory of the continual activity of God in producing parallel illusions in all our minds at once, or else the existence of some primæval arrangement akin to the pre-established harmony of Leibnitz; and will any one seriously maintain in these days, that such hypotheses are in truth more acceptable than the popular view of the independent existence of the external object? When we inquire In this respect Mach appears to have modified his position in a recent work, Erkentniss und Irrthum. 2 The italics are Prof. Külpe's. + Ibid., p. 43. 3 * Eng. tr., p. 38. 5 Ibid., p. 45. into the grounds of universally accepted beliefs we seldom fail to find that naïve realism can give an excellent account of itself. There is some one who is abler than Napoleon, who is subtler than Talleyrand, it is tout le monde. We find then that the undeniable fact of the compelled concurrence of innumerable individuals, of all mankind in fact, as regards certain of the information furnished by our senses seems to be the main ground of the unquestioning acceptance by common sense of the belief in the external world. The recognition of this concurrence again is of course possible only through intercourse, and we are thus led afresh to the conclusion that it is intercourse which ultimately furnishes us with this, the most elementary of all our knowledge. How does it do it? The type of reasoning on which such knowledge is based appears to be the argument back from effect to cause. The compelled concurrence is the effect, and our minds, co-operating with other minds, may be said in a sense to set up the external world as the cause of this phenomenon. This procedure is, of course, further supported by the fact that the knowledge which compels concurrence is also that which is found to be valid as the basis of predictions of the future course of events. Taken altogether we have to ask ourselves the question; Is the procedure legitimate? For the average man we know, of course, that criticism endeavours in vain to invalidate it. Is, however, the average man's reasoning philosophically sustainable? The answer to that question has a bearing on issues that are of even greater interest to mankind than the question of the existence of the external world. In getting the length of even asking this question we have, of course, left far behind us the doctrine of the identity of Esse and Percipi, of mere sentience on the one hand and of being and reality on the other. The answer to our question is bound up with the answer to this further question: Can the causal inference, apart from immediate sentience, ever give us the knowledge of unseen and of otherwise incognisable existence. In other words: If fire is found to have melted wax in our absence, are we justified, on that ground, in thinking of the fire and the wax as realities? If causality consisted, as the Humist formula has it, in the invariable conjunction of two facts, and in that only, we should certainly be at a loss to apply it to the circumstances in hand. Two facts in such cases as the present are not given us, but one only. The famous formula, however, we soon find, will not fit the circumstances of any case. 1 If the notion of Cause and Effect contained in the last analysis nothing else but the thought of invariable conjunction how could the fact of invariable conjunction be continually used to prove causality. We should then be using invariable conjunction merely to prove invariable conjunction. Again, the question must surely present itself: How is it that if the meaning of cause and effect is nothing but invariable conjunction, we can use the words "cause and "effect" intelligently long before we know anything about invariable conjunctions. If a child is asked why he is crying and answers that it is because another child has struck him, can anything be more absurd than to imagine that what is running in his mind is anything about the invariable conjunction between blows and tears, a conjunction which, for that matter as invariable, does not exist. If, however, the Humist formula will not work, is it possible to find one that is more in harmony with the facts of life? Let us suppose that the rotundity of the earth were still unknown, but that it had been observed by navigators that, in whatever part of the world they were, the masts and sails of an approaching vessel appeared first and the hull last, and that the converse happened when the vessel receded. We should then have a conjunction of the most rigid invariability, but still no causality disclosed. When, however, we subsequently discovered that the earth was a sphere we would feel that we now, for the first time, understood the reason of the observed uniformity, that we were at last in possession of the true cause. It must surely strike any one at a glance that there is here, between the subordinate law and the true cause the relation that there is between the glimpse of a part and the perception of the whole. Have we then, we may ask, in the conception of whole and part and the relation between the two something that throws light on the nature of the relation between cause and effect? We may look at the question in this way. If any one without a theory to support were asked what meaning he attached to the word "Cause" he would be very likely to answer that which does something'. There is a shade of difference in meaning, however, between 'doing' and 'causing' which is not to be neglected. The two words are naturally and continually applied to the self-same fact, but in different circumstances and from a different point of view. I move your ink bottle while you are out of the room. That, from 1 The following seven paragraphs are in the main summarised from an article of my own on " The Humist Doctrine of Causation," in the Philosophical Review of March, 1896. |