THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Some Cardinal Points in Knowledge
By
Skaclworth H. Hodgson
Fellow of the Academy
[From the Proceedings of the British Academy, Vol. V]
London
Published for the British Academy
By Henry Frowde, Oxford University Press
Amen Corner, E.G.
Price Two Shillings net
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE
BY SHADWORTH H. HODGSON
FELLOW OF THE ACADEMY
Read January 18, 1911
SUMMARY OF CONTENTS
I. THE common-sense view of the Universe, which we may call experience in a loose sense, is that experience which it is the first business of philosophy simply to analyse, without making any assumptions to begin with, not even that of a Conscious Being, or Subject of the Experience (paragraphs 1-3 inclusive).
II. The ultimate data of experience are empirical percepts, which are never perfectly simple, and the first, lowest, and simplest which we have, are objectified contents of consciousness (pars. 4-9).
III. After analysing a supposed instance of a short series of such simplest empirical percepts, a point is insisted on, which is perhaps the most important in all philosophical analysis, viz. the twofold movement of one and the same present experience in two opposite directions of time at once, backwards into the past as a knowing, and forwards into the future as an existent ; which latter distinction is the immediate consequence of that twofold movement (pars. 10-18).
IV. Consciousness as a knowing is the sole evidence we have for anything whatever, including itself as an existent. The nature or kind of the specific qualities of its ultimate data is incapable of being accounted for. But we cannot avoid inquiring into their genesis as ejcistentfi (pars. 11-23).
V. Our knowledge of the Reality of Matter is derived from the exercise of sight and touch together. But our knowledge of the nature of Matter itself is due to touch (involving sense of stress) only. Touch is the only sense which has a replica of itself, at once
v B 1
2 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
as its object and (since the replica is separable from the original perception of it) as a real condition of the occurrence of new sensations of the same kind. Moreover, it is evident from the physical sciences, that the replica is capable of many analyses quite different from those sensations which give us our immediate knowledge of it, though always into constituents which derive their whole meaning from touch and stress sensations (pars. 24-32). [There follow here some remarks on Pragmatism, a doctrine very much in vogue at the present time (pars. 33-S).]
VI. We locate, in thought, consciousness within the organism, because it is within the organism that we cannot but locate its proximate real conditions as an existent (pars. 39-49).
VII. The elements which are inseparable from one another in all human empirical experience may be grouped under two heads, formal and material, the formal being those 'of time-duration and space- extension, and the material some mode or modes of feeling. But we cannot avoid conceiving the possibility of an indefinite variety of modes of consciousness other than our own, of which we can form no positive idea whatever (par. 50).
VIII. The Emotions are those modes of feeling, the existence of which is immediately conditioned upon intra-cerebral activities, just as that of sensations is upon stimuli received by the peripheral termi- nations of the neuro-cerebral system. Their specific qualities in point of kind are as incapable of being thought to be caused or con- ditioned, as those of sensation are. They have thus an equal title with the sensations, and with the formal co-elements of time and space, which are common to both, to rank as ultimate sources of man's whole knowledge of Being and Existence, of the Universe and of Reality. We cannot avoid understanding the terms Being and Existence to mean that which, at the least, is knowable by some con- sciousness or other (pars. 51-5).
IX. Emotions are the motives (including in that term the unper- ceived activity of their proximate real conditions) of all Desire, Volition, Thought, and Conscious Action. When consciously adopted they are known as Final Causes (pars. 56-9).
X. Theology differs from Philosophy in having a special object of inquiry, viz. the Power which upholds the Totality of Being — not that Totality itself. It differs from Religion in not being emo- tional, but theoretical only (pars. 60-1).
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 3
XI. Four sources of Religion, deeply rooted in human nature, are then enumerated, with some consequences which they seem to neces- sitate (pars. 62-6).
XII. Speculative knowledge begins with empirical perceptions and ends with empirical ideas. Plato was the first to grapple with the question of Becoming, yCyvtvOai, in his dialogue the Parmenidex, which has sometimes been said to contain his Epistemology. His relation to Parmenides the Eleatic (pars. 67-72).
XIII. Meaning of the term understanding. Thought being founded on attention, which is an act of arrest, we see how the Eleatic proofs of the impossibility of motion are to be dealt with. Yet it is to Parmenides the Eleatic that we must accord the honour of being the first to distinguish Philosophy from Science, by his doctrine of The Two Roads — that of Truth, and that of Opinion (pars. 73-7).
XIV. The arrest in attention, with which thought begins, is an arrest of something belonging to consciousness as a knowing; by that same consciousness as an existent, which itself continues to deal with the arrested idea. We can no more transcend the idea of Reality as something knowable by consciousness, than we can limit by thought the Totality of the Real which is its object thought of (pars. 78-81).
B 1—2
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE
1. When Philosophy begins to exist, there is a vast mass of experience already acquired, including both fact and fancy, into which it has to inquire. We have in this mass of experience the common-sense view of things ; language has grown up pari passu with the acquisition of it, and with the acquisition of the conceptions by means of which it groups and endeavours to understand its phe- nomena. Both the common-sense view of things and the investigation of that view, which is philosophy, have the nature of the Universe as their object of pursuit, though philosophy far more definitely and self-consciously than common-sense, namely, to understand the Uni- verse so far as possible, or, if and where it is not possible, to understand what and where is the reason for its being withdrawn from our understanding. The fact, which I take to be indisputable, that language has grown up pari passu with the common-sense view of things, is significant; its meaning is that philosophy has to deal with language precisely as it deals with common-sense ideas, which language represents.
2. It should be noted that common-sense itself warrants its being made the object inquired into by philosophy, on the practical maxim of testing beliefs and avoiding illusions, by examining from all sides ; or, in other words, philosophy has the warrant of common-sense for existing, and for distinguishing itself as a mode of thought in some way specifically different from common-sense. It would not be common-sense, but prejudice, which should refuse to give that warrant to philosophy. But common-sense does more than this. It also to some extent prescribes the method of philosophical inquiry into the nature of the Universe, and of itself as common-sense knowledge of it. For it demands that we should proceed without making any assumptions, that is, that we should ask what it is we have got as our object of inquiry, viz. our common-sense experience, before asking how it comes to be in our experience, how it comes to be an object having a whatness. To inquire first into its genesis would be
6 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
to make the a priori assumption that we already know what genesis is. And it is plain to common-sense that it is impossible to ask what the genesis of anything is without having something, some experience, however small or confused, concerning which the question of genesis can be put. In philosophy, therefore, the question What is always prior to the question How comes.
3. Essentially there are only two lines possible for it, that of the a priori-st and that of the experientialist. And it is clear, I think, from what precedes, that the knowing of objects, the subjective aspect of objects, or briefly our consciousness or awareness of things, is the first essential characteristic of the field of philosophy ; consciousness is the sole evidence we have of or for anything whatever, itself included. Consequently philosophy must proceed by analysis of that evidence, i. e. of consciousness ; and also all assumptions not forced upon us by experience of them as ultimate, immediate, and unavoid- able data, or given facts of experience, must be avoided, even such apparently necessary ideas as that of a conscious being or agent — Mind, Soul, Self, or Ego — who has the experience; an assumption which is made, for instance, by Ferrier, in the First Proposition of his Institutes of Metaphysic, and which he lays at the basis of his philosophical system. There is a wide difference between immediate and ultimate perceptions which cannot be demonstrated, solely because they are immediate and ultimate, or in other words because they cannot be doubted, and objects of belief which may be held with unwavering tenacity, although they are not and perhaps cannot be demonstrated. The former class are facts, the latter are beliefs only. Facts are not to be confused with beliefs simply because they are like them in being indemonstrable.
4. The first and least thing in consciousness is a content of conscious- ness, what we afterwards call an object of consciousness, an empirical percept. It is not at first distinguished from the process of perceiving it, nor perceived as the conclusion or accompaniment of that process. When we call it an object, we must be on our guard against taking the process perceiving it as what we afterwards call its subjectivity or subjective aspect. To do so would be to make the tacit assumption of a Perceiving Subject, for making which, as an initial assumption, there is no warrant in experience. Empirical percepts are the first things in knowledge. He who, in philosophy, bases himself on the psychological assumption of a conscious Subject, as in drawing the distinction between Subject and Object as an initial distinction, is like a man who in astronomy should base himself on the geocentric theory of the visible universe.
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 7
5. But the process perceiving such an empirical percept is also subsequently distinguished from the content perceived, which is called its object, and, as so distinguished, is thereby itself objectified, i.e. made an object of a subsequent perception. The original process of perceiving a content, as distinguished from the content of which it is originally an undistinguished part, is now perceived as itself an object, and in that character is consciousness, not as a knowing of contents or of objects, but simply as an existent, an existing process of knowing. At the same time, what it is as an existent, what it is as a process, can be known only from the contents, its own contents, which it objectifies. Among these objects is itself as an existent process; it also is know-able only by being objectified, just as all other contents of consciousness are. The process as well as its contents, the contents of the process, is objectified in being known as a process — a process having and objectifying contents.
6. Henceforward, i. e. when in philosophy we take consciousness with both its constituents — process and contents — included, though now distinguished from one another, we are precluded from taking the process as the subjectivity of the objectified contents, if we were ever tempted to do so ; for it is itself objectified along with and equally with its contents. Consciousness with its process and contents included is our sole evidence for everything we can possibly think of, although it is itself of necessity thought of as an existent process, and that too a self-objectifying process. Henceforward therefore, in philosophy, the objectified contents of consciousness (process and contents included) become for us the subjective aspect, or subjectivity, of whatever we can think of or imagine as Being or Existing, inde- pendently of, or not included in, our own existent consciousness. And the question is raised, Is there such a thing as Being or Existing which is non-consciousness ? Is not such an idea a mere futility and will-o'-the-wisp ?
7. The reply which I should make to this question, relying solely on what has been already said in this paper, a reply which leaves the complete answer open to further evidence, but at the same time precludes the a priori adoption either of Idealism or Transcen- dentalism, is as follows. Our notion of Being or Existing, the very meaning of those words, is derived from the objectified content of consciousness — the subjectivity, or subjective aspect, or evidence, of everything whatever. We cannot perceive, think of, or imagine Being or Existence except by perceiving, thinking of, or imagining them. Consequently the fact of being perceived, imagined, or thought of, is our ultimate meaning, and indispensable meaning, of
8 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH AC ADEM Y
the words Being and Existence. But this does not imply that what is our sole evidence of being, existence, or in one word reality, is com- mensurate with the reality which it informs us of. The whole nature of perceived contents or objects is not exhausted by our perceiving or objectifying those contents. Whether it is or is not is open to evidence which our own consciousness, which raises the question, must afford. It is only in the case of consciousness itself, as a process distinguished but not separated from its own immediate objects, that perceiving and being perceived are identical. It is here that my distinction between consciousness as an existent and consciousness as a knowing is of service, enabling us to avoid the puzzles so frequently involved in premature assertion. There is no reason why we should attribute consciousness as an existent, and therefore also as a knowing, to all objects which we perceive or think of, simply because our con- sciousness objectifies them, just as in existing it objectifies itself. From the fact that all consciousness is objectification it does not follow that everything objectified is consciousness. Consciousness is the only evidence of fact, true — but this does not mean that the evidence alone, and not the fact, exists. Consciousness (as we shall see) is not all that exists ; it is the sine qua non of our idea of existence. In short, consciousness is revelation. Proof of what it is there is none ; proof that it exists is given only by its existing. At the same time the relativity of Being or Existing to consciousness, the meaning' of those terms for us, is preserved. We still find that objectivity or perceivability is their meaning in general terms, not another sort of Being or Existence, at the back of, or underlying, or causing the phenomenal sort to which we are restricted — a trans- cendental sort. We cannot think of Being or Existence except as relative or phenomenal, that is, by thinking of it. Similarly our own Subjectivity, which must be, and in fact is, objectified in thinking of it, must be taken and understood as the generalized character of perceiving, thinking of, or imagining objects ; that is, as an attribute common to all Subjects (supposing the notion of Subjects established), not as a transcendental attribute of a non-phenomenal sort.
8. Such notions as these — a non -phenomenal Being or Existence, and a non-phenomenal Subject or Subjectivity — are themselves derived solely from certain interpretations which we put upon the phenomena of our own consciousness, our own experience, and which are fallaciously derived therefrom. The true interpretation to be put on those phe- nomena is, not that Being or existence is per se, or a parte rei, either consciousness or else unknowable (which latter is a contradiction in terms), but that our human modes of knowing are limited. But how
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 9
and why this is the true interpretation can be seen only from further examination of the phenomena themselves. There is something in our experience which compels us to look for an explanation of every fact, and yet of this fact — of experiencing itself — no explanation can be given which does not itself contain another instance of the fact to be explained.
9. Again, in knowing, the discrete presupposes the continuous ; the continuous does not presuppose the discrete. The abstract pre- supposes the concrete ; the concrete does not presuppose the abstract. Part presupposes whole ; whole does not presuppose part. Subject pre- supposes object ; object does not presuppose Subject. Yet in each of these pairs, and more might be added, each member of them appears to presuppose the other, being alike in this respect. How and why is this ? The appearance comes from the fact that we understand the given only when we have to some extent analysed it, and made each member throw light, by contrast, upon the other : we understand the continuous only by contrast with the discrete, the concrete only by contrast with the abstract, wholes only by contrast with their parts, objects only by contrast with their Subjects. Now if abstract thinking, abstract thought, alone was the giver of our ultimate data of consciousness, oppositions of this sort would be our ultimate data in experience, and the appearance of each member of a pair being alike in presupposing the other, would be the truth, a true appearance, a fact ; the Not-being, the Nothing, of Hegel's first pair of opposites would be as much the presupposition of Being as Being is of Not- being. But then this idea, that abstract thought is the giver of the ultimate data of consciousness, is a pure assumption, and one which is refuted by all actual and unavoidable experience. How is this ? The ultimate data of consciousness are all empirical. Take the simplest and lowest moment of consciousness you can imagine or think of — a simple feeling of pleasure, for instance, or of pain, or of any sensation, or of any so-called inner feeling or affection, or of any thought or judgement — it is what we call empirical, it is not perfectly simple, it has at any rate distinguishable but non-separable elements, it has some duration as well as some specific quality ; its felt specific quality has some duration without which it would not exist either as a feeling or as a thought. To imagine it existing for no duration is to imagine it not-existing, non-existent. The fact to which I may give the general name, the distinction of inseparables in all experience, is, I believe, the most important and fundamental fact in philosophy, and insistence on it the most characteristic feature of metaphysical method, precluding the understanding of single names
10 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
as expressive of single, simple, and separable contents of conscious- ness. The two opposite time-directions in consciousness, presently to be spoken of, are an instance of this distinction. I may add that the fundamental character of the distinction in philosophy, because found as a fact in all perception, was clearly enunciated in my Time and Space, 1865 (e. g. Part I, ch. ii, § 11, pp. 4-5-7), and all my subse- quent work in philosophy has, I think, tended unequivocally to support the validity of that judgement. There are in fact no such things as atoms in consciousness.
10. Now what is it that we do in actually experiencing, in being conscious or aware of a content or contents, in being aware of it or them, apart or abstracting from any particular quality or property which may be theirs ; for some such quality or property all alike possess ? Do we find anything in them which is common to all contents alike and involved in all alike, whatever their specific differences may be ? So taken, what we find is this, that we have in consciousness a sequence of empirical moments of consciousness, a sequence of what perhaps may best be called presentations, no matter what other characteristics they may contain, quite apart from any idea or knowledge of their being presented to us from outside objects arid coming in the guise of sensations, or from within the mind or from within the brain, and so coming in the guise of representations, ideas, or thoughts, or desires, or feelings of any kind. Whatever their specific nature, they are actually present moments of conscious- ness. Let us take them as a sequence of single sensations, abstracting from their co-existing context if any, and call them o, 6, c, d. Of these, a is a presentation which becomes vivid, then becomes less vivid, and before it has ceased being in consciousness is followed by 6, which in its turn becomes vivid, then becomes less vivid, and again is followed before ceasing to exist by c, and c again in like manner by d. I take a short series in order to be able to treat the whole, the four presentations it consists of, as one presentation, notwithstanding that each of its three earlier members has changed its character, in respect of vividness, when d is present, and d itself is also undergoing the same change. The member called d in fact retains, in what we may call retentive (not recalling) memory, itself being still vivid, an awareness of the three earlier presentations, a, 6, and c, having risen into vividness and then ceased to be vivid, whereby it includes a memory of them as part and parcel of its own awareness, so long as it continues to be an actually present member of the series.
11. In the next place let it be observed that this whole presentation as it is in the supposed last member of it, d, is entirely independent of
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 11
any act of thought. We here and now are using thought to analyse it, and we are using terms acquired by means of thought to describe it, but the presentation itself shows no trace of thought, or of having been produced by thinking. No effort, no purpose, no act of con- ceiving or judging, is included in it. If such acts were to occur in a presentation they would be a specific modification of any such simple presentation as that which we have figured, and would pre- suppose some such presentation as their own material and field of operation.
12. In the next place be it noted — and this perhaps is the most important feature of all — that a sequence such as that now described seems in its changes to move at once in two opposite directions of time, from present to past and from past to present. For the presentation which we have called d is an awareness at once of the c, the 6, and the a, as memories which recede from itself as a vivid presentation, c standing nearest, and a farthest from itself, while at the same time it is aware of these same members having occurred, that is, of having been vivid presentations, in the opposite order of sequence, the con- trary direction of time, the a having occurred before the 6. the b before the c, and the c before itself the d. In d itself also the same two contrary movements, co-existing with each other, are experienced by it as it recedes, so that they must be thought of (subsequently) as co-existing in every strictly present portion of consciousness. In brief, d is an awareness of the whole content of the series as a change from present to past, and of the occurrence of the series as a change from past to present.
13. Be it noted also that there is, in such simple presentations as the one just figured, no idea or suggestion whatever of time future. Time is not originally experienced as divided into past, present, and future. The idea of future time, or of the future as continuous with the present and the past, requires some further modification of expe- rience not included in the simplest cases of it. But time past and time present, both of them being found, by analysis, as contained in the simplest empirical members of consciousness, are found as essential elements of those members which are the ultimate data of our experience.
14. How then are we to figure to ourselves, how understand the experience which seems at first sight so paradoxical ? I mean the change, that is, the movement in point of time, of one and the same presentation, one and the same empirical member of consciousness, in two opposite time-directions at once. I think we must deal with it as follows — we must distinguish between the karefact of being conscious
12 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
or aware of anything, that is, of the occurrence of empirical members of consciousness, and the what of those members, or the content apart from the fact of their occurrence or of their being perceived. Their content is in fact the sole evidence we have for anything whatever, including the occurrence of the members of consciousness themselves. So that the term, content of consciousness, is co-extensive with the term consciousness itself, while at the same time it characterizes consciousness as a knowing, in contradistinction from the occurrence of those members of it, of which occurrence as a fact it is the evidence. The bare fact of the occurrence of such members, on the other hand, is the bare fact that some content or other is perceived, that they come into being as consciousness ; that is, they are consciousness as an existent. In this latter character they must be held to have some real conditions of existence, conditions which the ultimate elements of consciousness as a Jcnozving cannot be conceived as even capable of having, since they are themselves the source of our notion of conditions, as of all other notions or ideas whatever. There are thus two orders of sequence in consciousness, the order of knowledge (by which is not meant the logical order of understanding things), and the order of existence. Consciousness must be thought of as existing, in dependence upon some real condition or conditions of its existence, before it can be thought of as a knowing, and must exist as a knowing before it can contain the thought of itself as an existent. The two contrary time-directions in consciousness belong, not to consciousness imagined as an unchanging entity, a conscious agent or faculty, but to consciousness experienced as a process-content — all process in time involving some change and differentiation of its proceeding content, and thereby, in the case of consciousness, admitting its differentiation into opposite aspects, objective and subjective, and into opposite directions of its sequences, without losing its own continuity, both aspects and both sequences being alike objects of consciousness as a knowing, which is our sole evidence for the existence, as well as for the content or whatness, of anything whatever, real conditions of existence included. Observe, moreover, that the change of an imme- diate presentation into a memory which is its representation is essential to every empirical present moment of consciousness or experience, and that every such moment is both a process itself and must be thought of as part of a larger process, whether this latter is a process of consciousness only or of objects of consciousness also, with which it is continuous. But the two opposite time- directions spoken of are co-existent in every empirical present moment of consciousness, and this very co-existence it is which, since they
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 13
co-exist and do not divide it, enables us to understand its special and unique nature as consciousness, a nature which differentiates it from everything else that the Universe may contain. This special nature is, if we may so speak, a certain donbleness, whereby it has its own content, its own specific feelings or qualities, as its own immediate objects. It is awareness of its own contents as representations, while those contents are themselves an awareness as presentations ; though if (per impossibile) it were not a process, we should never be able to perceive this its special and unique nature by distinguishing, as we now do, its contents from its awareness of them. But as it is, the receding time-direction of contents which we are aware of occupies of necessity the same portion of time as the advancing time-direction of our awareness of them occupies, and that in every empirical present moment of consciousness.
15. To realize the difference between the orders of existence and of knowledge, and of the opposite directions in which one and the same consciousness, one and the same experience, seems to be moving, take any moment, a point of time, in any ordinary experience as we have it at the present day, with our ideas of future as well as past and present time already familiar; adopt that point as your point of view, and ask what that experience is, as seen from it. You will then, I think, find, since it is a present moment of that experience from which yon suppose yourself to be looking, that on one side you have an unknown and at present non-existent future, into which vour experience seems to be advancing, while on the other side your experience has taken the form of memory, a more or less correct representation of a past, which, though it has once existed, is existent no longer. Your experience as it advances into the future is ex- perience as an existent, and as it, in so advancing, changes into memory, becomes representation of a past, a lengthening and receding chain of representation, which is experience as a knowing.
16. Returning now with this analytical key in our hands to the case of presentation with which we began, we can see that what we called the empirical member d of consciousness, in the sequence a, b, c, d, is an empirical present member, in which the two orders of knowledge and of existence coincide ; but this is now thought of as part of an ever-changing process-content, admitting whatever differentiations may have the warrant of experience, which process- content is no longer thought of as an unchanging entity, obviously chargeable with self-contradiction if thought of as moving in two contrary time-directions at once. For observe, what is of the greatest importance, the time-duration which is common to both the orders,
14- PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
or in which they coincide, is not itself perceived as moving or changing. Having of itself no content whatever, but being merely an essential co-element in the empirical members of consciousness, it must be thought of as time-duration simply, not as changing or flowing at all, however equably ; not as static or at rest, nor as dynamic or in motion ; not as distinguished into past, present, and future, or even into past and present only. All these distinctions belong, not to time-duration per se or in the abstract, but only as it is found in the empirical data into which it enters as an essential and inseparable constituent or element, empirical data which, though analysable into distinguishable elements, are the ultimate data of experience. The different specific feelings or sensations, which are its co-element in the ultimate empirical data, are the element which introduces, or which originally enables the introduction of any dis- tinction whatever into time-duration per se. In a least empirical present member, say for instance any one of our o, b, c, d series, imagining it for that purpose as reduced to a minimum, no change or motion would be perceivable by our sensitivity ; duration (but no change) would be sensibly perceived in it. But this does not mean that it is perceived as static or at rest. It is given to perception, but of course not thought of, as what we subsequently call a continuum. But then no single empirical least member of experience (supposing it possible) would be enough of itself, taken singly or in isolation, to constitute any experience that we can think of. In experience, such least empirical members always occur in sequences such as compose our a, b, c, d series, and in some context of simultaneously occurring members. We distinguish their minimal character only by thought, and as so distinguished they stand to the experiences, which they then seem to compose, in a relation very similar to that in which their own constituent elements, the formal and the material, stand towards them.
17. It is the stream of empirical experience alone which, when mathematically divided, or held to be divisible, by thought,— divisions the thought of which is originally made possible by differences perceived in the material or sensation co-element of consciousness, — can be held to flow equably; which it does by virtue of its mathematical divisibility into ideally equal portions. In that sense, Time-duration, in Newton's phrase, aequabiliter Jluit. And in fact we have — in the distinction between the two orders of knowledge and of existence — the justification, the origin in experience, of the great distinction of Method, the distinction between the Nature and the Genesis of everything, a distinction insisted on by Plato in several
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 15
places. It is the nature of consciousness to be a knowing ; it is the genesis of consciousness that, in Man at any rate, is known, because discovered, to be dependent on real conditions of existence. And it is the analysis of the nature of consciousness which enables and compels us to draw this distinction, as well as that between the two orders, of knowledge and of existence, themselves. Man's conscious- ness has not to provide for its own genesis ; it is not known a priori as creative; it has only to provide, in its metaphysical department, for understanding, so far as it can, its own nature and genesis, these conceptions having been arrived at by experience. In its nature, philosophy is a knowing. That knowing and existing should follow opposite time-directions is no contradiction, even if they coincide- in occupying the same empirical portions of time-duration, in which no time-direction, and therefore no difference of time-directions, is perceivable. We now see that, when we think of an empirical present member of the stream of consciousness as moving from past to present, we are thinking of it as an existent, and when we think of it as moving from present to past we are thinking of it as a knowing. The perception or thought of it as an existent is the subjective aspect of it as an existent ; the perception or thought of it as a knowing is the perception or thought of it as the evidence, and the sole evidence, that is, the subjective aspect, of anything and everything whatever.
18. Moreover, we must think of any empirical and actual present member as belonging to consciousness as an existent, and therefore to the order of existence of consciousness ; it is actual only as so belonging. But then also, being thereby generalized, it has no special content attached to it or included in it, except its actuality, any more than the bare generalized fact of the existence of consciousness has. It is, so to speak, a movable and moving present. It moves forwards in time over all the contents which it leaves behind it as it were, contents which have once been present members themselves, as the a, b, and c of our instance, when they have become memories to d. And to think of the actually present member as moving forwards is, eo ipso, to think of those memories as moving backwards from it, that is, as receding farther and farther into the past. I say eo ipso because it is only the receding order of knowledge which enables us to think of a forward-moving consciousness at all. The memory order is prior to the existence-order, in order of knowledge. As an existent, consciousness objectifies its own content as a knowing, and the content of one actually present member becomes, as it recedes into memory, the object of the next actually present member as it
16 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
advances into what, at a later stage of experience than that which we have now been examining, we call the Future.
19. But when we say that consciousness objectifies its own content, as the rules of grammar compel us to do, we must remember that the whole agency, effectiveness, or power, the doing involved or intended in the use of the verb active, belongs to the real condition of the process, to that which (whatever it may turn out to be) brings consciousness as a knowing into existence, and makes an existent of it. And it is the fact of the occurrence, the arising, of feelings, sensations, or ideas, as conscious states, that we have now to consider, as for instance, of the a, 6, f, d of the series we have already had before us. The occurrence of particular conscious states in such series as we have described is something that plainly requires accounting for, and accordingly we look for something which we call the real condition or conditions on which it depends. It is not the nature or whatness of the specific qualities of the simplest data of consciousness, or of consciousness itself abstracting from the particular instances of it, into which we are then inquiring. These are incapable of being thought of as conditioned; no efficient agent or agency without specific qualities of its own, which must be thought of either as, or as objects of, modes of consciousness, being conceivable. But what the real conditioning of the occurrence of conscious states, that is, of their existence, which is also indirectly (owing to the nature of consciousness) the real conditioning of consciousness as a knowing, accounts for or would account for, supposing it to be ascertained, is its arising, its genesis, its continuance, but not primarily or directly its nature as a knowing. When it arises or comes into existence, it comes in shape of empirical perceptual members of a process, members which are our ultimate data of knowledge, and the nature of which, and even the nature of their connexion with their real conditions of existence, must if possible be learnt from their analysis, or by way of inference therefrom, since their actual arising as perceivings, or production as states of consciousness by what we afterwards call their proximate real condition, cannot be itself objectified as a content of consciousness at the very instant of its producing them. We cannot perceive a perceiving, till the process is perceived to which it belongs.
20. What then do we know, what are we compelled to infer, concerning the arising of consciousness as an existent, in dependence upon its real conditions, from the objectified content of consciousness as a knowing, which is the sole evidence we have for anything whatever? Consciousness is plainly a very different thing for us,
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 17
according as it is thought of as a knowing or as an existent. As an existent it is a more or less permanent object among other objects, intermittent in its objectification, as for instance when interrupted by sleep, but capable of contents in immense variety, among which are the premisses from which its own identity, notwithstanding its inter- mittence, as an existent is inferred. As a knowing it is that stream of contents which comes before us portion by portion, in a way which we may call its own self-objectification as a stream ; into which stream attention, thought, desire, and indeed a vast variety of other modes of consciousness may enter, quite different from such simple members as those contemplated in our selected instance. Now what is it that guarantees the greater or less permanence as an existent of this stream of knowing, every portion of which is transitory, arising once and then passing away, apparently never to return ? Whatever it may be, it is this which is meant when we speak of the real condition or conditions of consciousness.
21. And here the inferential character of our knowledge of the real conditions and conditioning of consciousness should be explicitly recognized. We can perceive consciousness per se, that is, without at the same time perceiving that it is consciousness which we perceive ; we are then simply objectifying a content ; but we cannot perceive the perceiving process apart from a content, or the perceiver apart from his perceiving process with its content ; that is, we cannot perceive either the perceiver or his perceiving per se^ because perceiving is objectifying, and to perceive either the pure Subject, or the pure process of perceiving, would be to make objects of them in the very act of perceiving them, so that the idea of doing so involves a con- tradiction in terms. I mean that it is self-contradictory to distinguish a perceiver or a perceiving from their contents or objects, and to imagine them perceivable in that abstract shape, or as so distinguished. It would be a case of what is commonly called making entities of abstractions.
22. Consequently when we think or speak of the pure Subject, or of pure Subjectivity, we must not imagine that we are thinking of, or expressing in those terms, any immediate perception or knowledge of a Self, or an Ego, a Soul, or a Mind, and so on ; what we are objectifying, when so thinking, is our own thought of consciousness in the abstract, or as contradistinguished from objects and objectivity. This of course does not mean that the contents of such terms are unreal ; but they are real only in the concrete, and as distinguished in the concrete by our thought of what the concrete involves as
its essential elements or characters. As so involved they depend for v B 2
18 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
their existence, as consciousness itself does, upon some real condition or conditions of existence. If among these conditions any should be found which can only, or preferably, be denoted by such terms as Self, Ego, Soul, Mind, and so on, it can only be so because some positive knowledge of those conditions will have been acquired, a positive knowledge very different from the knowledge of them as pure abstractions, which those terms may, as we have just seen, be also employed to express. They must, in consequence of any positive knowledge of them, be treated as concrete realities, and not as abstractions. As real conditions they must be known as concrete realities, and not as abstract elements of that which they are held to condition. And this, I think, explains and justifies the reason why we have to dismiss, as noted above, that first distinction which, at the outset of philosophizing, we might be inclined to draw, between the objectified content of consciousness as the objectivity, and the mere process of perceiving as the subjectivity of experience, and have to replace it, as was also noted, by distinguishing, also within con- sciousness itself, the content of consciousness as a knowing, which is its subjectivity, from its own objective aspect as a known, that is to say, from the perceived fact of its coming into existence as consciousness.
23. Consciousness as an existent, then, is a real conditionate of some real condition or conditions which we must think of as not- consciousness, whatever it or they may turn out to be. But we know consciousness as an existent, that is, we know the fact of its existence, solely through its own content as a knowing. And we do not in the first instance perceive its existential character, or distinguish it as an existent from itself as a knowing. It gives us therefore no knowledge of locality, or of its own location within the body, which is afterwards perceived as the constant central object of its own panorama. Neither the abstract fact of being conscious, nor any of the simplest and lowest empirical perceptions, give us any knowledge of spatial ex- tension, or even of place in a time-series of experiences, though it may possibly, and I think truly, be argued, that the merely abstract fact of being conscious, that is, consciousness being taken without any specific content being thought of, involves some time- duration, without which this abstract fact itself would be impossible. However this may be, it is clear that the distinct perception, both of time-duration and of place in any time-series of experiences, belongs to the content of consciousness as a knowing, just as much as our perception of the body and of spatial extension does. The time-duration involved in the abstract fact of consciousness is common to it with that involved in the special content of any and every particular actual
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 19
awareness or moment of concrete consciousness ; they both occupy one and the same portion of time-duration ; and this fact constitutes the immediacy of that special and particular content of consciousness, or in other words is our knowledge of it as an existent percept.
24. Now it is only from the two senses of sight and touch (the latter intensified, it may be, by the muscular sensations combined with it) that we obtain the first rudiments, the first basis, of our knowledge of the Avorld of Space. And that they are exercised together is a plain fact of experience, resting on no assumption, and requiring no previous knowledge of what the terms, senses, exercising, and together, mean. Before analysing any sensation, or any immediate experience whatever, I have, of necessity, to use the name for it as designative only, that is, as merely indicating what it is that I am intending to analyse. Grammatical language, which is formed subsequently to the first formation of some theory or other concerning such immediate experiences as those now in question, leaves no other course open to me ; since the name, taken by itself, contains no distinction between the experience per se and the theoretical construction to which it belongs, and to the formation of which it has contributed. In short, language represents and expresses that common-sense view of things which I take to be the analymndum of philosophy ; and these remarks may serve to elucidate the method which I follow throughout this inquiry, as well as in the case of those sensations, the visual and the tactual, which are just now under consideration. But to proceed. — Organic sensations of all kinds, with their pleasures and pains, do not of themselves alone impart any knowledge of the organic body, or of a spatial world. The same is true of emotional feelings of all kinds, with their pleasures and pains. And the same is also true of the senses of taste, smell, and sound, with their specific pleasures and pains. But visual sensations give us the perception of space-extension in two dimensions of space, namely, length and breadth ; and tactual sensations (especially when intensified by muscular) give us the perception of space-extension in three dimensions, length, breadth, and depth, that is, of what we call solid bodies, in the cases when these, one or more, come into contact with that one of them, our own organism, which is the constant central object of our own panorama, and which is itself perceived as a solid body solely by means of these same tactual and muscular sensations.
25. Now the perception and the idea of Matter as a real existent, of our own organism as a material body, of the location of our
consciousness within that body, and of the conditioning of our con-
B2 — 2
20 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
sciousness by material objects, the existence of which is independent of the existence of the consciousness which they condition, — these are perceptions and ideas which (though of course not originally capable of being stated in such terms as I have used in describing them) are formed very early in the life both of individuals and of the race. They are in fact part and parcel of that common-sense knowledge which, as noted at the outset, is the analysandum of philosophy. They are part and parcel of that common-sense knowledge of adults at the present day, just as much as in the earliest stages of human history. When we begin to analyse them philosophically at the present day, that is to say, in reliance upon the results reached by previous philosophical investigations, we find ourselves met by certain time-honoured problems, first and foremost of which is the Reality of Matter, and then connected with it the Location of Consciousness within the organism, and the Real Conditioning of consciousness by the interaction of material objects organic and inorganic. On these three questions I propose, with your permission, to offer some brief remarks, from my own point of view as already set forth in the present paper.
26. And first as to the Reality of Matter. When we distinguish consciousness from its own particular contents or objects, that is, from those contents or objects which constitute it a knowing as well as an existent, then it seems to us, since we are then objectifying our own thought of it, to be perceiving its own body from outside, just as it perceives other solid bodies which are outside its own body. It is in fact by inference that we, subsequently to the simplest perceptions, locate our consciousness within, and not without, its own body, the central object of its own panorama. Tactual sensations, intensified it may be by muscular, are the only sensations, — touch, with the sense of effort which comes from muscular tension, is the only sense, — to which we owe our positive knowledge of a reality which is not-consciousness, and which possesses an efficiency of its own independent of that consciousness which is a knowledge of it, and of the existence of which it is a real condition. It is only through the sense of touch and muscular effort that we know the nature and are aware of the existence of solid material objects. Why ? Because these are the only sensations, or feelings of any kind, which have a replica of themselves as their immediately per- ceived object, and that a replica which has, what they have not, efficiency as a real condition, or real conditions, inasmuch as they are at once the object and the real condition of those sensations of which they are the replica. How is this ?
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 21
27. Briefly stated, the answer is as follows. These sensations, as experienced for instance in grasping and feeling one hand with the other, or in grasping and feeling any small solid object, occupy the same portion of space, at and for the same portion of time- duration, as their replica, the solid object, occupies ; while this same object, the replica, is known as different from, and not wholly identical with, but independent of, those sensations of which it is the replica, by two facts — first of its being capable of an entirely different analysis from theirs, and secondly of its producing their occurrence as sensations in consciousness. The identity of the replica, in point of quality and contour, with the sensations which are the immediate perception of it is shown by the sameness of the space and the time occupied by both, I mean, during the time of their actual presen- tation ; its difference from those sensations is shown by its operation in conditioning their occurrence, and its analysis into physical parts and forces, or modes of motion, in addition to its analysis as a percept into modes of consciousness. These latter of course are consciousness ; the replica is non-consciousness ; but both alike occupy one and the same portion of three-dimensional space for one and the same portion of time, namely, the time of their actual presentation in experience. (The term replica, applied as here to tangible objects, will be found in my Metaphysic of Experience, book i, chap, viii, § 4 : Analytical discrimination of real Conditions from real Existents, near the end, at p. 405 of vol. i.)
28. This presentation therefore, the presentation in actual ex- perience of solid objects by the sense of Touch, including muscular sensation or sense of effort, which we may call stress, is the point at which we have immediate evidence of the reality of an external world, a world of non-consciousness, since it is the point at which that world and our consciousness coincide, the point at which a portion of that world is experienced as actually operative and efficient, by its producing or conditioning the actual occurrence of those sensations, of which it is also the object. It is as their object that we can characterize it as their replica. As sensations they are themselves objective to consciousness, which is a self-objectifying process. But in that same conscious process, of which they are a part, they are also themselves perceived as having an object which is a replica of themselves in point of quality, while it is also independent of them, and prior to them, in point of existence, inasmuch as it is upon its existence that their occurrence in consciousness depends. For let one solid object come into visually perceived contact with our organism, which is another solid object, and new tactual sensations,
22 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
not before existing, come into consciousness as actually presented experiences.
29. Observe, moreover, that it is from these sensations of touch and stress that all the ideas, terms, and hypotheses of physical science derive their meaning. (See on this point Professor Stout's paper, Primary and Secondary Qualities, in the Proceedings of the Aris- totelian Society, vol. iv, N. S., for 1903-4.) However different may be the analysis of their replica as a solid physical object from that of the sensations which are our knowledge of it, we cannot but imagine the objects arrived at by that analysis, for the purpose of understanding them, as objects of tactual and muscular sensitivity, though of a sensitivity indefinitely exceeding ours in range, delicacy, and acuteness. The whole meaning of the terms denoting and describing them is derived from our own tactual and muscular sensitivity. Atoms (and their components, if any) or molecules of Matter, and the forces or modes of motion combining or separating them mechanically, fusing or dissolving their fusion chemically, or organizing them vitally, as for instance in protoplasm, or in the germ-plasm, ids, biophors, and determinants of Professor Weismann's theory ; air and the waves of air transmitting sound ; ether and the waves of ether transmitting light ; electrons and the electric and magnetic forces which govern their structure and their motions, and, so to speak, organize that continuous something which is often held to make space itself a plenum ; — all these alike, as objects, are con- ceived as objects of possible sensations of touch and stress, and not of any other sense. The sense of hearing does not hear the air or the waves of air transmitting sound ; what it hears is sound. Seeing does not see the ether or the waves of ether transmitting light or its variously coloured modes ; what it sees is light and colour. The sensation of touch with its combined stress alone has as its immediate object a replica of itself, which is at once its object and the real condition producing, or contributing to produce, the sensation of it.
30. Nevertheless it may well be doubted whether the sense of touch with stress would alone suffice, or have sufficed, to give us a perception of solid bodies, or of an extended material world of space, without the co-operation, so to speak, of the sense of sight. These two senses are normally, as a fact, exercised together. We experience the sen- sations of the two senses simultaneously. In many cases we see and we touch one and the same object at one and the same time ; that is to say, the object of both kinds of sensation, in those cases, occupies one and the same portion of time, the time of its presentation, its solidity being given us by touch with stress, its contour by the dis-
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 23
tinctive colouring due to sight. This it is which enables us to identify it, — say a small object of touch, — with itself, after its removal from immediate contact with our own body ; or, as in one of the cases instanced above, to identify our own hands grasping one another, each with itself, and both as parts of our own body, which is thus perceived as the central object of our own panorama. And the same is true of objects and events on a larger scale ; we can touch and see a balloon or aeroplane before it rises from the earth, we can follow it by sight throughout its whole aerial voyage, and finally see and touch it again on its return to its starting-point. The identity of the object of the two experiences of touch is assured solely by the continuity of the intervening visual experience.
31. But now as to the reality of the Matter thus perceived. The meaning of the term Reality in its fullest sense is originally, or in the first instance, given to human beings by that experience of Matter and of an external material world, which is most probably due to the simultaneous exercise of their two senses of sight and touch with stress, in the manner which has just been sketched. It means, the term reality in its fullest sense means, the combination of objectivity to consciousness, that is, of perceivability, with efficiency or agency, the power of being what we may properly call a real condition of the genesis of something or other, or of a change in something or other, that is, of an event. The latter part of this definition is Plato's. It is put into the mouth of the Eleatic Stranger in his Sophist, 247 D-E, and 248. Perceivability alone, or by itself, is reality in a very true sense ; a state of consciousness is an object of consciousness, and is real while it is being perceived. But it is only when a perceived or per- ceivable object is also endowed with efficiency or agency, that it becomes real in the full sense, and that the fullest sense in which we can understand the term. The etymology of the term from the Latin res, a thing, seems to bear this out. Whatever ideas, or feelings, or hypotheses, whatever objects of consciousness, we may see reason to include under the term real, and to consider as realities in the full sense, the meaning of the term remains the same, and is in no wise altered or added to thereby. It still means perceivability combined with efficiency. It cannot include an Absolute, or a Tran- scendent, or a Thing-in-itself, or anything thought of as in its own nature non-perceivable. Nor have we any a priori idea or cognition or category of what Reality in its own nature is or must be, or ought to be, if it is true reality, or of what anything must be if it is truly real. Our idea of it, our whole knowledge of it, is derived from experience in the way already sketched.
24 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
32. True, we distinguish the being or the existence of an object, the Ens or the Existent perceived, from the consciousness actually perceiving it, which is its subjective aspect, and regard it when so distinguished as non-consciousness ; for even a state of consciousness, when once objectified and forgotten, is an experience belonging to the past, wholly unalterable, and remains a living state of conscious- ness no more. But the fact that we so distinguish the Ens or the Existent perceived from the consciousness actually perceiving it, and regard it in that respect as non-consciousness, does not show, either that it is non-objective to consciousness, or that a state of conscious- ness, when objectified, has not formed part of a living conciousness in and during the process of its objectification, or that the general terms Being and Existence do not cover and include countless Beings and Existents of which we, as human beings, can form no positive idea whatever. Those general terms, and all that they cover, belong to human consciousness, but they cover vast regions of Being and of Existence which are utterly inaccessible to any positive imagination or thought of ours. They cover whatever the terms Infinity and Eternity cover, with all their possible, though to us unknowable, kinds and modes of being and existence. And in fact we may come to know much, both of those unalterable states of consciousness which, after objectification, have become ' portions and parcels of the dreadful past ', and of those independent objects, real in the full sense, which we at any given time set down simply as real existents, the nature of which we have, at that time, perforce to leave un- explored.
33. And here perhaps some remarks will be in place concerning that new Philosophy just now in vogue called Pragmatism, since it seems partly, if not principally, to rest on a confusion between the two things just distinguished, which are very different from one another. I mean the reality of our perception or cognition of any object and the exhaustive character of that perception or cognition, its adequacy or inadequacy to give us a complete or perfect know- ledge of the object perceived or cognized. When I perceive or cognize any object, the truth of that perception or cognition consists in its being a correct knowing of its object as a real being, or existent. or fact, or event. As, for instance, in my perception of a small solid object which I grasp, and perceive as occupying the same space, at the same time, as my perception of it. In this case I can and do compare, in representation immediately subsequent to the experience, the perception with the thing perceived ; I distinguish the two, and yet I perceive their identity in space and time, and owing to that
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 25
identity I know that the one is a correct knowing of the other, or in other words, that it is a true knowledge of fact. Truth is a word of Knowing; Fact is a word of Being. But it is obvious that this knowledge, though true, does not tell me all about the object known, all that is to be known either of its nature or its genesis. All I can say and must say about it is, that whatever else it may some day be known to fo, whatever else may belong to its real nature or genesis, the knowledge of that nature or genesis will only be true knowledge in virtue of its being a correct presentation or representation of the facts of that nature or genesis. Its truth will consist in that correctness.
34. But, say the Pragmatists. a complete and perfect knowledge of reality is wholly and for ever unattainable by man ; in every case that we can think of, the real being or fact is known and knowable only by and through what it appears to him to be ; as his knowledge of it increases, his conception of it changes, one conception of it disappearing and another taking its place, only to be itself in its turn disproved and replaced by another. A complete and perfect knowledge of reality being thus impossible for man, truth must mean for him, or as they put it must practically mean, whatever conception or idea satisfies his mind at a given time, or is found serviceable as a working hypothesis leading to further knowledge, or is a basis on which practically he is prepared to act. According to this doctrine, then, if truth is a knowledge of reality, truth is a knowledge of the unknowable, since only the unknowable is real. But the doctrine is fallacious, and for this reason, namely, because it tacitly substitutes for the idea of Reality, as the object known by truth, the idea of Totality or Completeness of the Real. It takes a perfect and com- plete knowledge of the Real Universe to be the meaning of the word truth, instead of taking that word to mean a particular attribute without which no knowledge would be a true knowledge, or as we commonly say, a truth. (See Mr. F. C. S. Schiller's Humanism; Macmillan, 1903, pp. 45-54, in the third Essay of that vol., entitled Truth.} Or again, to take the matter from another side, it holds that, because it is impossible to verify the subjective aspect as a whole, it is therefore impossible to give a cognitive, as distinct from a practical, meaning or definition of Truth, within the totality of the subjective aspect. Unless and until we arrive at a knowledge of the Totality of the Universe, it holds that we have no true knowledge of the Real. Consequently it abandons the usually accepted definition of truth, ' a correct representation of fact,1 and substitutes for it a definition meaning the power an idea has of being serviceable, or
26 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
satisfying at any given time our desire for knowledge. — But granting that a correct representation of fact will do this also, it does not for all that enter into the definition of truth. Totality is by no means essential to Truth. It belongs as an idea, not to knowledge simply, but to some department or system of knowledge, such as philosophy or mathematics. For instance, say I am walking with a friend, and we see at a distance something which he takes for a milestone and I take for a pump. On going nearer it turns out to be a pump. My idea of it as a pump was therefore a true idea, and it is not made untrue by our ignorance whether matter after all is not matter but mind-stuff. Nor can it be shown to be untrue, in the sense we both meant it, except by showing that its object, whether a milestone or not, was something else which was not a pump. Thus in adopting the usually accepted definition of truth philosophy stands on the same ground as common-sense, which in my opinion, if common- sense is its analysandum, is a point of the greatest importance. But it must be remembered that, in judging whether a proposed idea of a doubtful matter is or is not to be accepted as true, criteria distinguish- able from that idea are required, criteria drawn from actual experience or from previously ascertained truths based on experience, and not from any a priori idea of what the Totality of the Universe must necessarily be.
35. The theory is mischievous also as well as fallacious ; mischievous because, being put forward as a philosophy, it would shift philosophy from a cognitive to a practical basis, would make practical considera- tions decisive of theoretical questions. True, all thinking is practical action; we think for the purpose of satisfying some desire ; in theoretical matters, that purpose is knowledge of reality, be that reality of what nature it may, whether physical, psychical, or logical, — the laws by which thought itself moves. Whatever conclusion we come to, sup- posing we come to any, satisfies for the time our desire for knowledge, the motive of our thinking activity. But this satisfaction is not what the truth of the conclusion consists in. So far as it satisfies us, it satisfies us because it is true or an approximation to truth ; it is not true or an approximation to truth because it satisfies us. No ; it satisfies us practically so far as it is what we desire to attain by thought, namely, a knowledge of reality.
36. If it is argued on the other hand, that the motive, the end in view, the reAos, of all conscious voluntary action is the satisfaction of desire, and therefore that thought, being a mode of conscious voluntary action, must be merely instrumental or subsidiary, a means to the attainment of that end, the answer is, that it is so only when we
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 27
regard thought as practical action only, and disregard its nature as that mode of practical action the differentia of which is to aim at acquiring a true knowledge of reality or fact. The end or motive of that special kind of action, that end which is its specific difference as thought, is not satisfaction but truth, and the various conclusions or stages, at which we arrive in pursuit of that end, are subsidiary as means to the attainment, not of a greater satisfaction, but of a greater degree of truth as a knowledge of reality. The satisfaction which accompanies this pursuit makes no part of its differentia as the pursuit of truth. And, moreover, the conclusions at which we may arrive from time to time in pursuing it may be themselves either satisfactory or unsatis- factory, without making the smallest difference in the validity of the thinking process by which they are arrived at. The special satisfaction which accompanies it is due entirely to its being a process the special purpose of which is to attain a true knowledge of reality or fact. Thinking aims not at satisfaction but at truth. The contrary opinion is an exemplification of the remark — Dolus latet in generalibus. Satis- faction is general to the special satisfaction accompanying the endeavour to attain a correct knowledge of fact.
37. Since writing the four foregoing paragraphs (barring a sentence or two), I have read the preface to Professor William James's recently published volume, The Meaning of Truth, a Sequel to Pragmatism, 1909, Professor James being one of the originators and arch-champions of the new theory of Pragmatism. He begins that preface by a quotation from his own former work Pragmatism, which shows him absolutely blind to the difference which I have just endeavoured to signalize. He sees no difference between defining truth as the 'agree- ment of certain of our ideas with reality ', a definition which he says ' both pragmatists and intellectualists accept as a matter of course ', and defining it as verification. ' Truth ', he says, * happens to an idea. It becomes true, is made true by events. Its verity is in fact an event, a process, the process, namely, of its verifying itself, its verifica- tion ' (italics in the original). He must therefore, since he also accepts the older definition, see no difference between the agreement of certain of our ideas with reality and the ascertainment of that agreement by subsequent verification. And this makes it easy for him, in defining truth, either to substitute the ascertainment of the agreement for the agreement itself, the verification of a true idea for the truth of that idea to fact, as he does in saying that it is ' all that truth is known as ', or to fall back on the older definition, as he must be doing when he says, again quoting from himself, 'But "verifiability ", I add, is as good as verification/ For how otherwise than by reliance
28 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
on the older definition can an idea be as good as true, previously to that verification in which, as he alleges, its truth consists ? Before you can verify an idea or a statement, the idea or the statement must exist. Its verification alone, therefore, is not 'all that truth is known as'; there is the idea or the statement itself, prior to its verification. My quotations are all taken from the two first pages of Professor James's preface. I have had of necessity to abridge and condense his argument very con- siderably, but I believe I have in no way misrepresented its meaning. Those pages seem to me to place the logic of the new Pragmatism in a strong and by no means favourable light, though Professor James never writes without instructing as well as charming his readers.
38. Perhaps as an adherent of the older definition of truth, after criticizing, however briefly the idea that truth consists in verification, I ought to give some brief statement, from the older point of view, of what I conceive to be the real relation between them. To me, then, it seems that the idea of verification depends upon the idea of truth (i.e. the agreement of an idea with fact), and not vice versa the idea of truth upon that of verification. Verification of a perception or of an idea is necessarily subsequent to the perception or idea verified. It is a reflection upon them which recognizes their truth, and classifies them as true. But to do this, there must be some marks, some features, in the perceptions or ideas reflected on, by which the verifying reflection is guided in recognizing and classifying them as true. Verification, being a reflective judgement on perceptions or ideas, and not being omnipotent omniscience, cannot make, it can only find, truth in them. And to do this there must be some features in the perceptions or ideas judged, which are the criteria for its judge- ments, the foundation on which its own truth stands. Now there are certain ultimate data in experience which are the basis of verification, data which are true previous to verification, previous to any general idea of truth. Such data are found in consciousness only. They are awarenesses which taken singly are, each of them, a knowing as well as a known, that is to say, are a process which is a knowledge of fact. The often repeated perceptions of sameness and difference of quality in the contents of all empirical percepts, of compatibilities and in- compatibilities between them, and of the universality and constancy of the time and space relations, whether of sequence or co-existence, within them and between them, compel us to regard the universe as a systematic whole, existing and working in uniform ways which we call laws ; and this conception it is, a conception founded on repeated perceptions of fact, which enables us to verify (or otherwise) the truth to fact of any given perception or idea, in all cases where the supposed
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 29
verification is anything more than a mere repetition of the perception or idea to be verified. Experience means positively known fact. If it is trying to an experientialist to hear the right identified with the expedient, as it is by utilitarians in matters of practice, it is doubly trying to hear the true identified with it, as explicitly it is by Professor James, at the third page of the Preface already cited, in matters of knowledge.1
39. I fear I may have dwelt far too long on this controversial topic of Pragmatism. I return to the main current of my paper. — We have seen, or at least I hope I have made it evident, that tangible objects alone, among all that are known to us by the senses, give us our first idea of Reality in the full sense, though of course not known or imagined to be the only objects which may be covered by the general term real in the same full sense and for the same or similar reasons. These tangible objects include, for each one of us, his own tangible body and limbs on one side, and tangible objects external to his body and limbs on the other, this broad distinction being due to the fact that the object which an individual calls his own body is a constant object in his waking consciousness, and the only particular object which is strictly constant in the same sense in his whole spatial panorama. The difference is exemplified by the two instances taken above, the grasping of one hand by the other, and the grasping of some small solid object, which may be seen as separate when no longer actually grasped.
40. We have seen also that all these tangible objects bear a double character — as known they consist of perceptions of touch and stress, which are states of consciousness ; as known to exist, even when they are not actually perceived, they are real conditions of the occurrence or arising of new perceptions of touch and stress, from which fact in often repeated experiences we infer, that objects which are a replica of perceptions of touch and stress were also the real condition as well as the object of the states of consciousness originally perceiving them. We thus, in drawing this inference, separate in thought the real object which is real in the full sense, i.e. as real condition as well as object, from the tactual sensations which gave us our first knowledge of it, from which it was in its first origin undistinguished, and which, as sensations simply, are real existents, not in the full sense, but only as being objectified in consciousness, and making part of its stream of process-contents. We have also seen that these objects, real in the full sense, are objects of surface perceptions enclosing portions of
1 The foregoing criticism was penned long before the lamented death of the genial, accomplished, and much beloved Professor William James.
30 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
space of three dimensions, the inside core of which is not perceived in perceiving them ; but that they are always perceived, as it were, from the outside ; and this is true even in the case of our own body, the constant object of our whole panorama, as for instance in grasping one hand with the other.
41. Yet we do undoubtedly locate in thought our own conscious- ness within, and not without, our own body, notwithstanding that we never seem to perceive the body immediately from within, either by touch or sight or any other sense, though it is true we may appear to do so in the case of organic sensations, when once we have formed the idea of our body, and have also, by thought, located our con- sciousness within it. The twofold question is therefore unavoidably suggested, how this location of consciousness within the body is brought about, what is the process, and what the validity of the inference, whereby, first we attribute any location at all to our own consciousness, and then, secondly, determine the seat of it within, and not somewhere outside, our own body.
42. And first as to the first question. Both questions, it must be observed, concern actual consciousness as an existent. Except as an existent it is not perceived as located anywhere, or as having any need or carrying with it any suggestion of location. Sight and touch, exercised together, give us our first idea of a spatial world, and location is an idea belonging to space, an idea presupposing that of space. Even place in order of time, the order in which perceptions arise and pass away in time, is only understood as a reality by means of ideas derived from space. But consciousness, which as an existent consists of a series of states or process-contents arising and passing away in time-duration, and the existence of which is therefore known only as the fact of its objectifying its own process-content — this simply existent consciousness must also, as an existent, so soon as we include spatial perceptions in its process-content (and of course their exclusion is supposed solely for the purpose of our present analysis), have some place among those perceptions, or as we commonly say in the spatial world, — a world perceived only in and by the content of consciousness as a knowing. The reason plainly is that, Space being thought of as all-embracing Extension, all distinctions within it, when it is taken as extension simply, however these distinctions may be introduced, are distinctions of location, giving rise to differences of position or direction, as exemplified for instance in the three sides of a triangle, which have location in relation to one another. What- ever particular object, therefore, we think of as belonging to a spatial world, we think of as one object among others, or as an object
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 31
having an environment of other objects in space; even though, like a mathematical point, or like our own series of states of consciousness, when taken not as & knowing but as an existent (which is the case we are now considering), neither these states nor the series they compose are thought of as themselves occupying any extension whatever. And this, I think, is the answer to the first of our two questions, how we come to ascribe location at all to consciousness.
43. As to the second question, namely, how we come to determine the seat of consciousness within, and not somewhere outside, our own body, the answer briefly stated is this. We place it, by inference, within that object which contains what we afterwards call the proximate real conditions of its arising, that is, within the body which is the only constant particular object of its panorama. But let us see more definitely how this location by inference is effected. In the first place, consciousness is conceived as a single thing, since the fact of being conscious is continuous in time whenever there is any objectification of a content, its continuity being involved in that objectification, but itself being distinguished from, all its particular contents, save only that of its time-duration, and thought of as independent of any and every such particular content. From all particular contents, save that of time-duration, we abstract and distinguish the simple fact of consciousness, or of being conscious of some content or other, as an existent. Its name as such an existent is the Ego. In short, the fact of consciousness being an objectifying process is the content which it objectifies and names Ego, apart from any other content which may become its object. It is the content of an abstract but very real perception, the abstrac- tion being performed by analysis. And when we think or speak of the Self or Ego as the immediately known percipient and agent in experience — which we all alike do and must do in common-sense thought and speech — we do so only by tacitly ascribing to it as consciousness the agency which in fact belongs to its immediate or proximate real condition or conditions, an ascription which is rendered possible and facile only by the circumstance that we never immediately perceive the conditioning process in any mode of con- sciousness or conscious action.
44. Consciousness as a known existent consists therefore of two aspects inseparable from each other, objective and subjective, its own content, as the fact of perceiving, being the object perceived by it in retrospection, all consciousness being retrospective in order of time. We do not perceive the fact of perceiving (as distinct from the content which, in perceiving, it objectifies) in the moment of
32 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
perceiving; in that moment we are objectifying a content, but we are not also perceiving that we are objectifying it. This perception comes subsequently, in consequence of the arising, continuing, and passing away of contents of consciousness having been experienced in retrospection, by means of what we properly call retentive memory, as for instance in the case of the successive percepts a, b, c, d, spoken of above. This notion of the retrospective nature of all consciousness, in the simplest cases as well as in the more complex case of apper- ception, is, if I may be allowed the remark, the key notion of my Metaphysic of Experience, the notion which seems to myself to render that work a very decided advance upon my previous work, The Philosophy of Refaction, though in that work and works still earlier I had seen the retrospective character of consciousness, as when, in my Time and Space, I compared consciousness to a man walking backwards, who sees only the ground he has just passed over, not the ground he is passing over while seeing the former. (Part I, chap, iii, § 21, pp. 190-2 of work cited.)
45. The two inseparable aspects, objective and subjective, of consciousness as a known existent have an analogue in the case of solid material bodies, which, as I have tried to show above, are originally perceived without being distinguished from the sensations of touch with stress, of which they are the replica, this latter dis- tinction becoming possible only by virtue of their being perceived as separable in space and time from the sensations of which originally they are the replica, and in this separable character being real conditions as well as objects of those sensations. Solid material bodies have in fact a double aspect, objective and subjective; sensations of touch with stress being their subjective aspect, while their objective aspect consists in their existential character as solid material bodies capable, in action and reaction upon one another, of being real conditions, not only of changes in one another as material objects, but also of the occurrence or genesis of states or process-contents of consciousness as existents, in the order of existence or history. It is this double character of real material objects, first as separably existing objects, secondly as real conditions of the genesis of other existents or of changes in them, that seems to me analogous to the double aspect of consciousness itself as a known existent, though of course not to be confused with it. The insepara- bility of two complementary characters is the circumstance which is common to both, and in which their analogy consists.
46. Now the facts included and described by the term retentive memory are the experience which in the last resort guarantees or
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 33
is the evidence of the stream of consciousness as an existent. And this experience must have some real condition or conditions of existing, over and above and other than those real conditions, perceived as surface perceptions of material bodies, which bring about the arising or occurrence of new sensations or perceptions, new experiences which, arising as presentations, are immediately taken up into and make part of the stream of consciousness, and begin from the first moment of their arising or presentation to form part, as representations, of the experience known as retentive memory. The reason for this statement is, that they do not account for the reten- tiveness. Moreover, the organic body itself is perceived as a single permanent structure, and as the one constant object in a panorama of objects, solely by virtue of presentations becoming representations in retentive memory, and thereby entering as parts into the con- tinuous stream of consciousness.
47. Consequently the real condition or conditions of this continuity of the stream of consciousness, or in other words of this retentiveness of presentations in the form of representations by memory, as dis- tinguished from the presentations of material objects which are surface perceptions, and the objects of which appear also (owing to a temporary continuity or contact) as real conditions of the arising of new sensations, must themselves be thought of as forming a continuity in whatever material object is thought of as the real condition of the continuity of the dependent stream. But this continuity of the real condition of the stream can be conceived only as existing within, and forming part of, that single constant object which each individual names his own body. For to conceive it elsewhere than exclusively within that single constant object is to conceive it non-continuous. To this real agent and agency, then, within his own body he attributes the immediate or, as we may better call it, the proximate conditioning of his own consciousness, both of its continuity as a stream and of the occurrence or genesis of new states of consciousness, which as they occur are taken up into the continuous stream. It is somewhere within the body, somewhere within the unseen core of it, that the immediate con- ditions and conditioning of consciousness as a continuous stream must be placed ; and we consequently locate that stream, locate the Ego, locate consciousness as an existent, where by inference we locate those real conditions upon which we conceive it as immediately or proximately dependent. And this is the answer which I should give to the second of the two questions proposed above.
48. It now only remains to remark, that conceiving the neuro- cerebral system as the proximate real condition of consciousness as an
v B 3
34 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
existent throws back some additional light upon a cardinal fact previously dwelt on, I mean the movements in two contrary time- directions, observable in actual presentative experiences, movements occupying one and the same portion of time-duration. For it it the series of changes in the comparatively permanent neuro-cerebral system which moves forwards into the future, and carries with it as its conditionate, not only every present moment of consciousness as it arises, but also those portions of it which are retained as represen- tations, and are revocable as memories, in a series moving backwards from the ever new present moment, and that without restricting the content of consciousness as a knowing to be a knowledge of tangible objects only, although it is only as a replica of perceptions of touch with stress that changes in the neuro-cerebral system can themselves be conceived. It is thus the content of consciousness that moves backwards, its existence that moves forwards, in time. Every em- pirical moment of consciousness both conjoins and separates these opposite aspects of it.
49. The neuro-cerebral system, which by its peripheral termina- tions is in contact both with the organism and with the world external to the organism, would, I believe, completely satisfy the requirements above stated for being the real condition or conditions of the genesis of human consciousness as an existent, and for its con- tinuity as a stream. Whether over and above this we should intro- duce the conception of an immaterial agent, some
' Animula vagula, blandula, Hospes comesque corporis,'
as the true proximate real condition of consciousness as an existent, is a question I do not feel called upon to discuss. Indeed, I think that it would be futile to do so, until some definite and positive idea of such an agent should have been put forward. In any case the neuro-cerebral system within the organic body must be taken as a reality by any scientific system of Psychology, which I take to be the positive science treating of the genesis, history, development, and combination of parts and processes of consciousness as an existent, the nature of the specific qualities of its states or process-contents being taken as ultimate data wholly incapable of being accounted for by any real condition or conditions whatever, and presupposed in forming the conception either of cause or real condition, a fact which I have repeatedly pointed out elsewhere, as well as in the present paper. And I think it is a fact of cardinal importance in philosophy.
50. The variety of specific qualities of consciousness which are
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 35
ultimate data in human experience far exceeds man's power of dis- tinguishing, naming, or enumerating them. They may be grouped under the two heads of formal and material co-elements of experience, the formal being those of time-duration and spatial extension, and the material being again classifiable under the heads of sensation (whether organic or specific), emotion, passion, conscious action or sense of effort, and modes of pleasure or of pain which combine with elements belonging to any of the foregoing groups. But besides this vast and innumerable variety of specific qualities, formal and material, of human consciousness, we can imagine the possibility of there being indefinitely many and great varieties of specific qualities of conscious- ness belonging to conscious beings other than human, of whose nature, or of the specific qualities of whose consciousness, we can form no positive idea whatever, no such positive idea, for instance, as we can form of the consciousness of known members of the animal king- dom. And we not only can but must imagine this possibility. For while to us it is not more than a possibility, inasmuch as we can form no positive idea of those conscious beings, or of their specific modes of consciousness, we are equally incapable of conceiving that the existence of some such conscious beings is impossible. There is in fact nothing in human consciousness which enables us to conceive modes of consciousness, or kinds of conscious beings, as limited in number, but on the contrary the ideas of infinity and eternity are essentially and inseparably involved in human consciousness, while the specific material qualities of feeling belonging to it we conceive to be those which the nature of its proximate real condition or condi- tions permits to arise or continue as parts of its stream. The real existence of worlds beyond worlds of conscious beings, and modes of consciousness other than human, is therefore a belief which is almost forced upon us when we reflect on the nature of our own experience of this world of ours, notwithstanding that, in endeavouring to frame a conception of such a world or worlds, we cannot go beyond the general conception of existence, as whatever is objective to conscious- ness, and consequently that no such specifically imagined world can be conceived as other than a possibility by us. Neither its reality nor its unreality can by us be asserted as a positively known fact.
II.
51. It would be a mutilation even of so professedly imperfect a paper as the present, if I were to bring it to a conclusion without making some remarks on the emotional nature of man, the great
u3— 2
36 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
comparative development of which, in combination with that of his cognitive powers, gives him his specific title to rank above the other tribes of conscious beings who are denizens along with him of the planet Earth. The Emotions are those modes of feeling, the existence of which is immediately conditioned upon intra-cerebral activities and combinations of activity, just as the existence of sensations is con- ditioned upon stimuli received by the peripheral terminations of the neuro-cerebral system. Their specific qualities as modes or as forms of feeling, meaning thereby their abstract nature or ivhatness, are ultimate data of experience which are as incapable of being thought to be caused or conditioned as the specific qualities of sensation are. But whereas the specific qualities of sensation have some mode or modes of time-duration, and in certain cases some mode or modes of spatial extension also, as their formal co-element, the specific qualities of emotion have as their formal co-element some ideas, thoughts, or conceptions, which in the last resort are themselves formed, by intra- cerebral action, from time and space relations. Briefly they may be described as the material, or feeling, co-element in ideas. But the nature of their specific qualities does not depend upon the ideas, conceptions, or thoughts which are their formal co-elements, any more than that of the specific qualities of sensation depends upon the time-duration or space-extension which they occupy or include as their formal co-element. In both cases alike it is the material co-element, the feeling co-element, that is the ultimate basis, the primal given source, of whatever knowledge we possess, of whatever belief we can entertain, concerning what this Universe is in which we live, and concerning what we ourselves are who seem to have our portion therein.
52. The emotions as the feeling element in ideas have an equal title with the sensations, and with the formal co- elements of time and space which are common to both, to rank as ultimate and originating sources of man's whole knowledge of Being and Existence, of the Universe and Reality. It is to the process-content of his consciousness that his notion of there being a Universe at all, that anything whatever Exists, that Anything is contrasted with Nothing, is due. His notion of his own Self, of himself as a conscious Subject, or as a conscious Agent, is derived from the same process-content. This notion is not, like those data which have been mentioned, an ultimate datum or originating source of his knowledge. He does not begin his knowledge with the perception or idea of himself as perceiver, or recipient of feelings, or included as an essential constituent in them, as he begins it with some specific mode or modes of feeling,
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 37
whether pleasurable or painful, heat or cold, joy or grief, and so on ; in saying which it may be noted that joy seems to be the proper name for emotional pleasure, grief for emotional pain. The distinc- tion between Subject and Object is not an ultimate datum in consciousness.
53. True, we cannot but think that there is or has been a content of consciousness before that content is objectified, this conception being forced upon us by the fact that^ all, even the least, states of actual consciousness are empirical, that is, involve at the least a process in time, the inchoate stages of which can be thought of only as content not yet objectified. And we think of this as a content of consciousness, though previous to objectification, because it is only by experience of empirical data already objectified that we arrive at the conception of it, while there is nothing in that experience, when tested subsequently by analysis, which enables us to conceive it as different in kind (though different in degree) either from the empirical data analysed or from those elements of it which the analysis dis- covers. The duration, the extension, the intensity of a feeling, in an empirical percept, may severally or in coalition be too small or slight to be perceptible by human sensitivity. Still we think, and cannot but think, of every such part or element as sharing in the nature of the whole to which they belong, the empirical percept itself, notwith- standing that severally, or as less than the whole, they are imper- ceptible. And, in the process of experiencing, the moment at which the degree at which they become perceptible by human sensitivity is reached, that moment is the moment of their objectification, also called the moment of their crossing the threshold of consciousness, below or previous to which degree or moment we perforce think of them as content in process of becoming consciousness, in dependence of course on the operation of the real conditions of its genesis. By this I do not mean that we must have formed the notion of cause or real condition previously to thinking of a non-objectified content as being nevertheless a content of consciousness. I imagine its history differently. I think that it is only when we have arrived at the stage of anticipating, in thought, the occurrence of an experience, that is, of an objectification, and finding our anticipation fulfilled by its occurrence, that we can draw the distinction between an objectified and a non-objectified content, and yet think of this latter content as a content of consciousness, although or while it is not objectified, but only inchoate, or in process of becoming an objectification. This thought of it however, in application to any or all perceptions simply in their empirical character, is probably suggested, and is certainly
38 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
supported, by its analogy to the phenomena of fulfilled anticipation in ordinary experience.
54. But to suppose that we begin our conscious life by classifying the objectified content or contents of an empirical perception under the head either of what is subjectively or what is objectively given, or the fact of perceiving them under the head either of its being or of its coming to be, is to make the pure assumption that we have the ideas of Being or of Existence previously to, and independently of, those empirically' given perceptions — an assumption in fact essen- tially the same as Kant's, that we are noumenal Entities endowed with a priori forms and categories of consciousness ; — an assumption after- wards developed by Hegel into that of Thought being the Creator of Being and of Nothing-at-all, by its own inherent power of Distin- guishing ; the truth being (as I at least cannot but think) that these ideas, like all others, are derived from empirically given perceptions, and are not the originators of the classification.
55. Our whole knowledge, then, of Being or of Existence, both of ichat it is and that it is, has its source in the nature of those ultimate specific qualities of consciousness, formal and material, which have been enumerated. And this I hold to be one of the most fundamental and important truths in the whole domain of knowledge. It may be said to be the special basis upon which any system of Experientialism must rest. Man's whole thought and consciousness are accordingly anthropomorphic, and cannot possibly be otherwise, though of course he can and does frame the idea that there may be other thoughts, other modes of consciousness, not anthropomorphic, other conscious beings than man ; that idea itself being an anthropomorphic idea. Human consciousness gives us our sole intimation that there is such a thing as Being, without limiting, or rather while showing its utter incapacity to limit, the Beings, or modes, or attributes of the Beings, which the general term Being of necessity covers. Our idea of it is anthropomorphic because we cannot even conceive it except as con- forming to whatever we may hold to be its essential characteristic or characteristics, since otherwise the term Being would be wholly meaningless to us. In short, we can generalize the idea of human consciousness, but we do not thereby escape, nor can we escape, from the idea of Being as that which, at the least, is knowable by some consciousness or other. The term Experience, on the other hand, is a term of subjectivity, of knowledge, of consciousness. Immediate certainty is what it is employed to express. But in all experience, in all consciousness which is thus immediate and certain, there is implicitly contained the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity, between
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 39
the knowing and the known, between the subjective and objective aspects of experience itself — distinctions very different from that between Subject and Object, which is a distinction involving the isolation of Subjects from their own Objects, and from one another, an isolation which, being introduced as it is by pure assumption as the first step in philosophy, it will be found difficult if not impossible to remove by reasoning — reasoning which may then be itself no more than the illusory imagination of a single Subject.
56. Recurring now (after these somewhat, I fear, too lengthy remarks) to the emotional co-element in ideas, it is, I think, to be accepted as a fact, that these emotional modes of feeling give us as deep and true an insight into the nature of Real Being as is given by the sensational co-element in sensations, or the formal co-elements, time and space, which are common to both. This of course does not mean that the emotional co-element in ideas guarantees the truth or validity of the ideas in which they are from time to time co-elements. The cognitive co-element in ideas is subject to perpetual change and development, as we know from the fact that new knowledge is per- petually being gained, that ideas once held to be true are being perpetually discarded as partly or even wholly erroneous. It is doubtless also true that with the changes in ideas their emotional co-element in some measure changes also ; but this does not alter the fact that the specific quality of all emotions, as distinguished from their occurrence, is incapable of being conceived as caused or condi- tioned by anything. The variety of kinds of emotion, of their sub- kinds, and of the combinations of these with one another is enormous . They have to a great extent been distinguished, named, and classified. I cannot here attempt their enumeration. Far more still remains to be done. Their modifications apparently far exceed our powers of definite distinction in thought, and still more of naming and describing. They differ also as between different individuals, and it is probable that the immense variety of characters and types of character among men depends chiefly on the great differences in the strength with which the different emotions and groups of emotion preponderate in different individuals, and on the variety of the modes in which their emotions interact and combine with one another ; — of course always in dependence on the brain structure and the brain activity, which are their real condition as states of consciousness.
57. Another point relating to the intensity of feeling is remarkable. The intensity of emotional (as well as sensational) feeling, its various degrees, and the various degrees of comparative value, goodness and badness, pleasure and pain, and their modes, of which it is capable —
40 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
all this entirely escapes the power of definite distinction, and expres- sion by names or words of language alone. We distinguish two great divisions of intensity in emotions by classing high degrees of them as passions, just as we have names for certain emotions ; but this is a descriptive process ; the names describe but do not express for the speaker, or convey to the hearer, the intensity of the feeling named. To do this, even partially and inadequately, the aid of Song, or of Rhetoric, or of Poetry must be sought. The secret of Music, its charm as a Fine Art, is that it awakens the emotional element in consciousness without any other imagery than that of the retained combination and succession of its sounds ; in doing which it makes great use of imitation of the inarticulate cries which are the involun- tary utterances prompted by various intensities both of sensations and of various emotions and passions. The secret and charm of Poetry as a Fine Art is that, by means of the rhythm, the stresses, and the cadences, which it introduces into the articulate language which it uses, it combines musical tone which awakens emotion with trains of images, ideas, and thoughts which have an intellectual significance.
58. It is in emotional feeling that the connexion between knowing and consciously acting is to be traced. Emotions and Passions are the motives of choice and volition. But of course, in calling these states of consciousness motives, we must remember that we are in- cluding in them the agency which in reality belongs to the unperceived activity of their immediate real conditions, of which activity they are the only evidence, and the different modes of which (at least at the present stage f physiological knowledge) we can distinguish and specify only by means of them ; just as in the case of the Self or Ego spoken of above, in which the agency involved in the genesis of consciousness itself is combined with consciousness in the idea of a single unanalysed Conscious Being. This must be remembered whenever conscious motives, purposes, or acts are spoken of, as for instance when it was said above (par. 56) that differences in character depend chiefly upon differences in the strength of emotions, or of the groups into which they may be distributed. Emotions, taken simply as modes of consciousness, are themselves included in any meaning we can give to the term character. Consciously entertained Desires, then, anticipating a future state of consciousness which at the present is only imagined, whether it be to escape from some evil or to attain to some good, are the evidence for that kind of action in the conscious being which, when determined either by a judgement of comparative values, or by a preponderating intensity of one feeling over another,
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 41
is characterized as an act of Will. If it is determined by a judgement, we characterize it also as ideological. The anticipated End or reAos is then the determining motive of the choice or act of volition, is what we call its Final Cause. No other kind of efficiency or agency in the conscious being is required to account for acts of choice than is required for other intra-cerebral operations which are not teleological. The difference is simply this, that two distinct stages are included in teleological acts ; there is first the present anticipation of an uncertain future state of consciousness, and then secondly there is the judgement of the comparative values of the possible alternatives to that state. There is no need to suppose any other kind of efficiency in the conscious being, peculiar to his teleological acts, or due to the operation of Final Causes upon him. There is no need, for instance, to suppose the existence of an agent or agency which, though consisting of nothing but consciousness, may yet be imagined capable of influencing, and being influenced by, its own ideas. We need not hypostasize con- sciousness, nor need we hypostasize any faculty of consciousness, as an entity, calling it, say, the Will, in order to account for the special nature of teleological acts. The very meaning of the determination of choice by judgement is, that the anticipated alternative which is judged to be best thereby becomes Ipso facto the strongest motive.
59. Just as Plato's distinction between Being and Becoming, owta and yeVeo-t?, sweeps exhaustively the whole region of Being in the largest sense of the term, so Aristotle's luminous distinction of the Four Causes — the Material, the Formal, the Efficient, and the Final- sweeps exhaustively the whole region of Genesis or Becoming. But we must remember that, in modern positive and scientific thought, it is the efficient cause only that is the object of discovery, including in the search for it all inquiries into the form and the matter of pheno- mena, considering these also as possible co-operative causes, and thereby enlarging Aristotle's efficient cause at the expense of two others of his four. The object of discovery is now described usually by the figurative phrase Law or Laws of Nature, meaning thereby Uniformity, whether static or kinetic, that is, whether of structure or of process. The figurative term law has done incalculable mischief in making freedom an almost insoluble problem; so far from being governed by previously fixed edicts, all natural agencies are more strictly, in acting, makers of the laws by which they are said to be governed. The uniformity is inseparable from the action. But in all Genesis, change is the fundamental fact ; in Genesis, structure presupposes process, the static presupposes the kinetic. Moreover, Uniformity itself, whether static or kinetic, presupposes Difference;
42 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
the term has meaning only as uniformity in some respects of objects which are different in other respects ; and that which is Variety in the static, or in structure, is Variation in the kinetic, or in process. This I take to be the meaning and the justification of the flux, the irdvTa pet, of Heracleitus ; to all process it is essential, process cannot be thought of without it. Variation therefore may rightly be assumed as a fact universally found, by all experience, in all physical substances, and in that general character may be made one of the data or pre- misses in any inquiry into their history, as for instance was done by Darwin in his theory of natural selection of favourable variations as the chief agency in determining the origination of new species of organic beings. The general fact of variation, in the case of any par- ticular physical substance, becomes and is identical with the variability of that particular substance. We know that it will vary, without necessarily knowing what any of its variations will be. Every one of these will have its own determining causes or conditions, internal or external, and to discover these at all the stages in the genesis of a species, from the first to the last, would be not the first but the last step, in fact the completion of our knowledge of the origination of that species of physical substance. If, then, by the term causation at the present day it is efficient causation only, in the above enlarged sense, that is intended, we see that no one can now speak without confusion of Final Causes, unless he is prepared to show that some states of consciousness, as distinguished from their own immediate real condition or conditions, react upon and are productive of change in the activity of those real conditions, and mediately thereby in other parts of the organism to which they belong.
60. Conscious choice, when determined by judgement, which is the normal case, is always upward and onward looking ; the desire chosen is that which at the time is judged to be best. Among these desires, the desire for knowledge of fact, whatever the fact may be, whether welcome or unwelcome to ourselves on other grounds, is a constantly present desire, and one which is capable also of the greatest strength. It is not the same thing as the desire for useful knowledge, or know- ledge of means of attaining other purposes than that of increasing the knowledge itself. It may be said to be the special motive of Philosophy, the desire for knowing all that can possibly be known of the Universe or Totality of Being. Nothing short of this totality, however its nature may be conceived or imagined, or wherever its limits may be drawn, from time to time, as knowledge advances from generation to generation, is an object capable of satisfying this desire. The desire is deeply rooted in the nature of man, and will doubtless continue to
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 43
operate in him as a motive so long as he continues to be an upward and onward looking conscious being. It is here, that is, in taking this view of the Universe or Totality of Being, that Philosophy coincides with Theology. The Power in the Universe, upholding, governing, and accounting for the existence of all things, Almighty Power — the idea of power being an idea unanalysable by us — this is what is meant by Divinity in the least and lowest sense which is essential to that idea. Now philosophy and theology doubtless do coincide at this point, and in this idea. But though the idea itself is thus common to both pursuits, it is not reached by both in the same way, nor does it hold the same position or perform the same function in both alike. So that it would be a fatal mistake, fatal to both pursuits, to identify them completely on that account, as many persons do, and to consider that they are but one pursuit, though called by different names, and consequently that you can lay the foundations of your philosophy in theological ideas. To do this would be in fact to base philosophy on assumptions, the one thing which is destructive from the first of its nature and value as philosophy. Theology in fact treats the great Object of its pursuit, the Divine Being, as a particular object, and thereby becomes itself a particular science ; it is not an inquiry into the nature and validity of knowledge in general. And as to what philosophy is, it must, I think, be admitted that no method of pur- suing knowledge can possibly override it, since none can be conceived more comprehensive or all embracing than that which is based on pure analysis, without assumptions, of the subjective side or aspect of phenomena, that is, of the content of knowing as distinguished from being, including even the existence of the content, that is, of the knowing itself.
61. But while, for these reasons, Theology differs so widely from Philosophy, it differs still more widely from Religion, notwithstanding that here also the identification of the two is very far from uncommon. Theology is some system of ideas or conceptions in which the state of our constantly changing philosophical knowledge enables us from time to time to clothe, as it were, and fix by investing with a certain definiteness, that particular group of needs, desires, and emotions, deeply rooted in the nature of man, which are the essential and permanent constituent of Religion. It is of the essence of Religion to be emotional. No system of ideas or conceptions which does not serve as the embodiment or vehicle of emotions, which are felt and judged to be of the highest worth, in fact of supreme moral excellence and value, deserves the title of Theology. For the whole moral nature of man, including all its judgements of the relative value of feelings,
44- PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
its approvals and disapprovals of them, and of the volitional acts of choice which they prompt — to which whole nature the religious emotions and acts prompted by them belong — must be presupposed in any inquiry into the special characteristics which entitle any emotion or group of emotions to be distinguished as religious, and make them the originators and foundation of Religion.
62. What, then, must we conceive of the nature of the religious emotions, and what are those ideas which, without being a systematic theology, are essential to their entertainment and conscious realization by individuals? I can do no more than barely enumerate them — barely enumerate what appear to me to be the sources of religion, all of them deeply rooted in human nature. It is impossible, and indeed would be undesirable in a paper like the present, to attempt more. 1 state them therefore not as ascertained fact, but only as the result of my own speculation on this intricate topic. And of course here also, as throughout this paper, I must be understood to be speaking analytically of the matters dealt with, as we know them in our own experience and philosophical thought at the present day, and not as attempting to give an account of the stages whereby that experience and that thought have been attained, either in the history of man- kind, in advancing from primitive, perhaps even pre-human, to modern times, or in that of the individual in advancing from birth to death. The sources I speak of seem to me to be four : —
1. The distinction of Being and Doing on the one hand from
Feeling and Judging on the other, in consciousness alone.
2. The idea of the Infinity and Eternity of the Universe, and
of the vast regions inaccessible to human positive know- ledge.
3. Man's need of Sympathy, moral and intellectual, and his
desire for it. This is the specially emotional source of religion, this the moral emotion which is specially religious.
4. The felt inadequacy of all human sympathy to satisfy this
desire, owing to the total incommunicability of every individual's consciousness as it is in him to every other individual.
63. Consequently, springing from these sources, the Postulate of an Omniscient Being who knows every inmost thought, feeling, desire, and choice — this Postulate is the first article of a religious Faith. It is a Postulate in the strict sense of the term, a practical and funda- mental demand, not like the so-called Postulates of Logic, the
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 45
fundamental law of Thought — Identity, Contradiction, and Excluded Middle — which are more properly to be called Axioms than Postulates, since the term Axiom has come to signify something not demanded but found as an ultimate and universal fact in the thinking process.1 And we are enabled to make the postulate of Omniscience, giving it a rational meaning, by conceiving it as the consciousness that inseparably accompanies eternal and infinite Power, the efficient agency in the eternal and infinite Universe, throughout all its regions seen and unseen, and reaching to its minutest processes and changes as well as to its largest, so as to share (so to speak) the eternity and infinity of that Power. Not that we thereby gain any insight into the nature of power> which still remains, as before, the general term under which we gather up the facts of existence and continuance, of change and process, as realities or facts simply. But we can and we do conceive the possibility that every one of these facts should have a consciousness of itself, attaching to it in such a way that, in it, being and knowing, though distinct, are inseparable and co-eternal. Yet in whatever way we may conceive Omniscience as possible, the reality of it which we postulate is still a matter of Faith, not of Knowledge. The fact that we conceive it as infinite and eternal, that is, as sharing the infinity and eternity of the divine power and of the universe which it sustains, shows that we conceive it, equally with them, as far exceeding any positive knowledge which is possible to us as human beings. Whatever is thought of as infinite or eternal is thought of as something the totality of which thereby escapes circumscription or limitation by conceptual thought.
64. At the same time we conceive the Omniscience which we postulate as sympathetic with our own moral nature. That sympathy with our own otherwise incommunicable feelings is, in fact, our special motive in postulating it. And in this it is postulated as sympathetic with our own moral judgements as well as feelings, with our judge- ments of the relative value of our own feelings, and with our own approvals and disapprovals of our own acts. Nor is it possible to desire such sympathy from any Being whose nature we should conceive as morally lower than our own. Moreover, owing to its inseparability from the infinite and eternal Universe and the Power which sustains it, no judgements of the relative value of feelings, or approvals and disapprovals of acts of choice, can be conceived as possible which can override, in point of validity and truth, those which we conceive, from our human point of view, as passed and entertained by
1 I have not always taken this view of the right name for the ' Postulates of Logic'.
46 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
Omniscience. They have, in our conception, a morally binding power which is the same in kind as that of our own Conscience, while we attribute to them, as passed and entertained by Omniscience, an ultimate and irreversible validity and truth. The ultimate validity, truth, and morally binding power of the judgements of our own Conscience are thus conceived as based upon their harmony with the laws of nature, which are the laws of Omniscient Power. Our own felt and welcomed relation to this Omniscient Power, a relation postulated by us because it alone gives us the sympathy which we need, this alone is religious Faith ; nothing else has any claim to be entitled Religion.
65. Now we cannot construct a theory of that which is shown, by the analysis of our consciousness, to be conceivable only as escaping conception, because infinite and eternal ; to say nothing of the fact that we can and do conceive the possibility of there being, in reality, other modes of consciousness than ours, and other worlds besides that material world of sun and stars and planets which is revealed to our senses, a world which we must then think of as but a part of a far greater and more comprehensive totality. But while this totality thus of necessity escapes our positive knowledge, it is not beyond the purview of religious Faith, which is based upon a desire ineradicable in human nature, and (prompted by this desire) upon the postulate of an omniscient and almighty power. We have no knowledge, as distinguished from faith, of the nature of the Divine Being. At the same time we have no ideas or conceptions but such as are derived from human experience, by which to represent and think of that nature, and of the relation of the Divine Being to ourselves ; so that we have to recognize that the Divine Being is far more and (in that more) far other than it is possible for us, as human beings, to conceive or imagine.
66. When we come, in speculation, to the end of our positively conceivable ideas, as, e.g. in the case of our trying to conceive a beginning or an ending of the Universe, we tend to mark that stop to our ideas by some self-contradictory, and on that account strictly inconceivable idea, as for instance the idea of Chance, or Chaos, or spontaneous generation of something ex nihilo, or of a Creator whose own Being we endeavour to conceive by the self-contradictory idea of Causa Sui. Ideas such as these are nugatory, not because they are ideals which are taken to be realizable only at infinity, but because they are self-contradictory, Chance and Chaos, for instance, being terms predicated of a real universe, notwithstanding that the idea of all real being, of all existence and becoming, involves the idea of some
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 47
correspondence of parts, of some order, some regularity, essentially attaching to it. Such supposed ideas as these, being strictly incon- ceivable, because self-contradictory, give us no positive knowledge what- ever of the Universe, though appearing as if they might possibly do so. They simply indicate that we have reached a limit in that positive knowledge. True, this latter characteristic of marking a limit is one which they share with such general ideas as those of Force, Energy, Power, Agency, Efficiency, which of themselves tell us nothing of how or why existents exist, events occur. They are not ideas of abstract but hypostasized entities ; they are ideas of the abstract but very real fact in concrete experiences that existents do exist, events do occur, whatever may be the kind of their being or the mode of their occur- rence. Consequently these ideas also (though not self-contradictory) mark limits in our knowledge; but these limits are limits in our analysis of positively known existents and events; which limiting ideas we therefore have to accept as final results of philosophical as well as scientific inquiry.
67. Speculative knowledge begins with empirical perceptions and ends with empirical ideas. The Universe is the object of an empirical idea. We cannot construct that object in thought, because we cannot limit or circumscribe in thought that which we must think of as infinite and eternal. Something has been already said in this paper of the term empirical, but it will perhaps not be out of place to add some few remarks on it in conclusion. It was described above as the objectified content of a process, and a certain complexity was pointed out as essential to it. This description may now be characterized somewhat more minutely by saying, that the term empirical expresses the fact that the perceptions and retained ideas representing percep- tions, which are the data of experience, occupy some duration of time (though it may be brief), or some duration of time and some extension of space together (though it may be small), so that some specific feeling combined with some duration, or duration and extension together, constitute a perceptual datum of experience. It is its composite character that is its empirical character. Now, in the case of the supposed minima of perception — the least possible empirical perceptions — no difference within them of former and latter in time is perceived, and likewise no difference in position of parts of space within them. The difference has to be inferred, because it escapes the acuteness of our perceptive powers; but inferred it must be. For no other fact is compatible with the fact of empirical perception on the larger scale, that is, as actually given in the varied process- content of experience, which is the analysandum of philosophy.
48 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
What we find as belonging to these facts we have to think of as belonging to them throughout all their parts, even when these are thought of as so minute as to escape the distinguishing capacity of perception ; and it must be noted that it is only by thought that the minima perceptibilia themselves are distinguished ; as minima they are not data of experience ; consciousness is not given to us in minima ready marked out as such in perception ; nor yet is experience given in originally separate empirical units, in such units as we have selected by analysis out of our analysandum, e. g. the a, b, c, d of the present paper, as the simplest kind of facts empirically known to us, and therefore the best to take first in proceeding to analyse it ; but wherever there is extension, or duration, there also is divisibility by thought. These perceptions we may divide, in thought, by introducing mathematical points, and may picture these points by so-called minima perceptibilia ; but mathematical points, being dividings only, are not perceptible by sense. Nor are those minima perceptibilia by which we picture them, e.g. the dots on paper picturing mathe- matical points, perceivable separately as ultimate percepts, but only as parts of larger percepts ; the dots are not perceivable without a background or context of some sort or other, on which and as parts of which they appear and are distinguished.
68. Now mathematical divisions, points in duration, points, lines, and surfaces in extension, are no perceivable break or solution in the continuity of the abstract but inseparable perceptual continua — duration and extension — into which they are introduced by thought. Still less are they solutions of the continuity of any strictly homo- geneous content of those continua. These homogeneous continua are data of perception, or of representations imagined as perceptual, not data of thought. Change or motion in any such continuous homogeneous content of duration or extension, which is the lowest and simplest shape either change or motion can assume, and therefore that which is most essential to them, and also that in which they may escape the highest degree of acuteness of human perceptivity, shares the continuity of that homogeneous content into which divisions may be introduced by thought, without any break in its continuity being introduced thereby. Divisions introduced by thought presuppose continua given in perception ; to think of a continuum is to think of something which is divisible by thought, without solution of its continuity as a percept. Change and Motion therefore, when thought of in their lowest and therefore most essential shape, let us say, for argument's sake, as a passing from a this to a that over a mathematical division introduced by thought, must be thought of as continuous
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 49
transitions unbroken by the mathematical division, which thinking introduces into perceptual continua for the purpose of understanding perceptual data, continuity among them. Transition or passing per sc, or in the abstract, is no more perceptible than is a mathematical point or division in duration or extension, the number 1, for instance, in arithmetic. When changes or motions or units are empirically given in perception, it is because there is some heterogeneity, some difference in kind, in the content to which they belong, enabling the this and the that of the transition (or the unit and its context) to be dis- tinguished as different, independently of any mathematical division (or act of counting in arithmetic). Purely mathematical divisions make no difference to the continuity of the content into which they are introduced by thought, nor do they effect any arrest or stoppage of continuous transitions (changes or motions) in perceptual continua.
69. Plato was the first, so far as I am aware, to signalize this nature of change and motion, calling it TO efa£$ittjs, in his wonderful dialogue, the Parmenides where he not only reveals to us the laws of pure, that is, purely logical thought, apart from any particular mode of it, such, for instance, as the mathematical, but also, by distinguishing the logical concept unity from existent unity as its object thought of, lays the logical basis for a consistent theory of a World of Changing Realities at once phenomenal and real, without identifying, as Parmenides the Eleatic philosopher had done, the concept unity with the existent permanent and eternal Universe, or contrasting the two, taken together and undiscriminated, with ever changing phenomena, which the Eleatic philosopher held to be illu- sory and unreal, because transitory, and not real like the one eternal Universe. See for TO ifcatyvTjs the concluding portion of the second division of the argument of the Second Part of the Parmenides^ pp. 155 E to 157 B, and perhaps more particularly the words aAV ij
ami] (pixris CLTOTTOS rts fyK.a6r)Tai /xera^v TTJS KLvrfcrefas TC KCU fv xpovu ovbevl ovcra, KOL ets ravrriv 8rj KOL CK ravrrj? TO TC /ifTa/3aAA.ei firl TO lorayai KCU TO eoro? e?rt TO Kivdcr6ai (Parni., p. 156 D, E).
70. Plato in this Second Part of the dialogue Parmenides again makes Parmenides himself the chief speaker, expounding and develop- ing his own strictly philosophical theory, the ' Road of Truth "" (the significance of which expressions will be touched on presently), expanding it in fact into a theory justifying the application of logical thought to the whole phenomenal Universe. It deals only with the purely logical part of the Platonic Theory of Knowledge ; it is Plato^s development of the Eleatic philosophy. It is Parmenides
v B 4
50 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
that gave Plato the most powerful mental stimulus. Parmenides rather than Socrates was Plato's chief ' Father ' in philosophy, though the Socratic influence was also of cardinal importance. The whole argument of this expansion turns upon the distinction between the whatness or meaning expressed by single terms and the thatness or existence of those whatnesses. Plato never accounts for the existence of that distinction, nor yet for difference, or genesis, or change, or motion, or any of their derivatives (though in the case of one derivative which I shall presently notice he seems to me to make a strenuous attempt to do so) ; — all he says is — it is only by drawing these primary distinctions and those which are deducible from them that we can understand the phenomenal universe. (Perhaps I may be allowed to say here that all serious students of the Parmenides will find Professor Henry Jackson's articles on the Philebus and the Parmenides, in vols. x and xi of the Journal of Philology, London and Cambridge, 1882, most valuable aids in understanding it. These articles are the two first of a series entitled Plato's Later Theory of Ideas contributed by him to that Journal. But in saying this I by no means intend to imply complete agreement with Prof. Jackson's interpretation of the Second Part of the Parmenides. To the two articles just mentioned should be added the third article in the series, that on the Timaeus, in vol. xiii, and the fifth, on the Sophist, in vol. xiv, of the Journal.)
71. Thus the Second Part of the Parmenides is Plato's chief
attempt to grapple with the ambiguities involved in the apparently
simple terms ova-ia, clvai, ov, /^?) ov, and OVK ov, — ambiguities the full
significance and deceptiveness of which it may be said to have
discovered in and by the act of grappling with them in this and
other Dialogues, as for instance in the Sophist. For, along with
all their apparent simplicity and real ambiguity, they are the terms
which we employ and cannot avoid employing, tacitly or openly,
in every act of thought. We have the is of the copula connecting
subject with predicate in an act of judgement, as in 'red is a colour',
and we have the is of existence where it is predicate also, as in
'red exists', i.e. 'red is existent'. Similarly with owia, which
includes both being as a fact, and the whatness of any being, which,
if defined or definable, we call its essence, that is, the characteristics
which are essential to its being what it is. It is, moreover, quite
possible that there should be some whatnesses which are perfectly
well known to us, and the names of which convey a well-known
meaning, and yet are wholly undefinable, being ultimates in thought,
and therefore, as such whatnesses, have no predicates, not even that
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 51
of their own meaning as distinguished from the whatnesses them- selves. Such an ultimate in thought is the whatness (or meaning) of the term One, as handled by Parmenides in the Dialogue. In the first part of the eight divisions into which the Second Part of the Dialogue falls (pp. 137C-142B), he shows that the term One, so understood, has literally no predicates, not even that of ov<ria. It is like the subject A, of the first so-called Postulate of Logic, A is A, but without its predicated A. It is rather an act of counting than of thought. In the second division (pp. 142B-157B) he makes the supposition, that the One of the first division has Being in the sense of Existence, or becomes (for our thought) Existent. That composite Unit, so to speak, both exists and is one. Although it is One, it yet contains difference within itself; its components are different, erepa, from each other. And this is true of all its parts, rSAAa TOV Ifo'y, as parts of a whole, supposing such parts to exist, since every one of them must contain the same difference of com- ponents that the One contains. It is by this line of thought that the Parmenidean Unit Universe is argued to contain plurality, and to have predicates which are not only different from one another, but also in many cases contraries of one another, contraries which become, as we should now say, contradictories, if predicated of one and the same unit, at one and the same time, and in one and the same respect. His definition of elv at — /xe0e£is owt'as juera -^povov TOV Trapo'iroy, — will be found at p. 151 E, and that of yiyvf(r6ai, — HfTaXanpavfiv ova-Las, — at p. 156 A, in this second division. It should be noted that he brings in time, ^povos, into his definition of clvai, and consequently has to assume it as necessary to the under- standing of yiyvwddL, which he shows to be a process in time. The one case, spoken of in the preceding paragraph, in which he seems to make a strenuous attempt to account for the existence of one of his derivative facts, is that of the existence of r&AAa TOV hos, which at the beginning of division 3, at p. 157 C sqq., he seeks to show is deducible from the fact of difference between its components o> and ov, these latter of course being inseparable by hypothesis. The plurality of parts, r&AAa TOV ei/o's, all severally containing the same difference of components as the %v oy, is another matter. Yet this is what he attempts to deduce from that hypothesis. And this attempt it is, in which 1 cannot think he is successful, since it brings him into contradiction with his own argument in division 2, where raAAa TOV eroy were frankly accepted as parts, /iJpta, belonging to the fv ov. But now, in division 3, p. 157 C, we are told that raAAa TOV Iro? are different from it solely in virtue of their having parts, /io'pia, without
B 4—2
52 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
which differentia they would not be aAXa, but identical with cv. The fv which is 6V, or which exists, is perfectly simple, incapable of having parts. As we should now say, its simplicity is its nature, its oio-ta in the sense of essence, and this simplicity it carries with it into the existence which the hypothesis affirms of it. Plato must therefore, in my opinion, look elsewhere than to the mere meaning of £v for the existence of raAXa, or that plurality of existent parts which experience shows that the %v ov contains, though, supposing the genesis of the parts to be given, it is very true that they will one and all contain that difference of components which the ei> ov itself contains.
72. It would be out of place in a paper like the present to follow the argument through all the eight divisions of which it consists, the four last of which are based on the hypotheses either of the non- meaning or of the non-existence of One (Iv), that is, upon the contra- dictories of the hypotheses either of its meaning or of its existence, which are the bases of the argument in the four first divisions. I will confine myself to saying that the conclusions reached both on the affirmative hypotheses and on the negatives, which are their con- tradictories, are in perfect harmony with each other, namely, that if One does not in any sense exist, nothing whatever exists, while it would also seem that, whether One exist, or not, both One itself and all other things whatever, in all possible relations, both exist and do not exist, both are and are not manifested as phenomena, <£aiverai rt KOI ov QatvcTcu, p. 166 C, which is the concluding sentence of the Dialogue. It seems, therefore, that the real existence of a permanent Universe, consisting of parts which though transitory are also real, is rendered intelligible by the affirmative hypotheses. Nor is there any suggestion of a transcendent reality in contrast with the phenomenal, as in Kant. And the apparently open contradictions which this last sentence contains must be thought of as resolved by the aroiros TIS Averts, TO e^at^vrjs, spoken of in the concluding part of the second division (pp. 155 E-157 B), which is the conception by means of which Becoming or Genesis is rendered intelligible. In fact, we seem to have in this concluding sentence Plato's mode of saying, that after all there are sense, opinion, thought, &c., &c., the phenomena of consciousness, whatever their nature may be.
I venture with great diffidence, considering the difficulty of this much controverted subject, to append here a summary (involving paraphrase) of the principal argument of the Second Part of the Parmenides as I apprehend it. I take that Second Part to begin with some introductory remarks, Ti ovv TroiTjaets fyiXovofyias ire'pi ; KtX. at p. 135 C down to p. 137 C, the principal argument occupying the
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 53
rest of the Dialogue. This argument falls into two Divisions, the first positive, the second negative, ending with the word %i at p. 166 C.
First Division, positive.
I. 137 C)
to \ If unity is unity — It has no predicates. 142 B I
II. 142 B
to 157 B
IV.
155 E
to 157 B
III. 157 B
V.
VI.
If unity has being --It has all (and contrary) predi- cates.
Concluding passage of II clearly discriminated from what precedes by the words en br] TO rpirov Aeyco/ier, 155 E to 157 B -- How Change in the widest sense, including genesis and predication, is possible ; — TO the instant of Chane in time-duration.1
160 B
to 163 B
163 B
to
If unity has being — Other things have all (and con- trary) predicates.
If unity is unity — Other things have no predicates.
Second Division, negative.
If unity is not unity — It has all (and contrary) predi- cates.
to L If unity has not being — It has no predicates. 164 B I
VII. 164 B ) If unity is not unity — Other things are illusory
to Phenomena, appearing to possess all (and contrary)
165 E j predicates.
VIII. 165 E )
to
166 C
If unity has not being — Other things have no pre- dicates, and do not appear as Phenomena at all.
1 In Dr. Thomas Maguire's edition of the Parmenides, 1882, I am spoken of as follows, in a note at p. 88, on this which I have called the ' concluding passage of II ' : ' Shad worth Hodgson seems to suppose that Plato held that the point [which cuts time in two] possessed duration.' No reference is given to any writing of mine, though the writer was certainly acquainted with my Time and Space, as another note in his volume shows. I certainly never entertained such an opinion, either as to the fact, or as to Plato. True, the thinking of a division of time has duration, hut the division thought of per se is thought of as durationless, and why ? Simply because, in thinking of it per se, we abstract from the continuous duration which it divides. This was my opinion
54 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
There the dialogue ends. Now by accepting the four affirmative hypotheses, and denying their contradictories, the four negative hypotheses, — which four in each case are only two, since two are merely repetitions ; — that is, by affirming that
(1) unity is unity, i.e., means unity and nothing else, and
(2) unity is combined with being,
we get a clear and consistent view of the World of %v KOI -rroAAa, without anything per se, or a parte rei, unknowable in it, or any wholly non-existent illusions; indeed, if anything could be wholly illusory, it would be the cv, the unity which was unity only. In short, we are here presented with a World of Changing Realities, some more durable than others, but the whole of which, that is, the World which they compose, is everlasting. Plato must mean to deny the four negative hypotheses, because, if they were accepted, instead of the four corresponding affirmatives, the result, so far from being a method leading to knowledge, would be a wholly unthinkable Chaos. This then is, in my opinion, what Plato intended to estab- lish by the argument in the Second Part of the Dialogue, in substitu- tion for the incomplete doctrine of the real Parmenides, the Eleatic philosopher, who had left his statement of the case open to many unsolved objections. At the same time, it cannot be called an Epistemology, it is not complete as a theory of knowledge. It is nothing more than just the basis of a Methodology, showing the validity and the universal applicability of logical thought to any and every kind of subject-matter ; but this or some equivalent basis of the same kind is one of the most indispensable requirements of Philosophy. And for my part I have little doubt that Plato him- self finds this basis in the STOTTO? TIS <£wns, TO f^atyvtis, of p. 156 D-E, and that what he describes in those terms is the logical, or mathe- matical division of time-duration in the act of thinking. — Still less does this Second Part deal with any particular theory, such as Plato's own theory of the part played by Ideas, in Nature or in Philosophy, but, the earlier form of that theory having been frankly surrendered, though not without suggesting another, in the First Part of the Dialogue, as I think Prof. Jackson has very clearly shown, it leaves the theory of Ideas to be developed, if at all, in subsequent or possibly contemporaneously written Dialogues. The unapproachable merit, the pre-eminence, of Plato in Philosophy seems to me to consist, by no means in his theory of Ideas, but in his power of bringing to
when I wrote that former work, just as it is now in writing the present paper. See my Time and Space, Part I, ch. ii, § 16, and Part II, ch. vii, div. 1, §§ 41 to 44, inclusive.
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 55
light the subtlest facts of experience, owing to his constantly speaking from close observation of the operations of his own consciousness.
73. What then is the effect of the introduction of purely mathe- matical divisions by thought into perceptually given continua ? How do they conduce to understanding the facts "of change or of motion in their lowest and most essential shape ? Plainly we must ask what is meant by understanding, understanding anything whatever. Under- standing I take to be a process of thought, a thinking, which in its lowest and most essential shape assimilates its object-matter to some perceptually given object taken as already known. And we say that we understand anything into which we are inquiring when, and just so far as, we either perceive its likeness to some ultimate empirically given datum of perception, or deduce it inferentially from such ultimate data. Now in the case before us, — the facts of change and motion in their lowest and most essential shape, — this assimilation (to be followed by inference) is effected by introducing, into the duration and extension of homogeneous contents, distinctions similar to those which are empirically given in the heterogeneous contents of ultimate perceptual data. We understand the this and the that on opposite sides of a mathematical division solely by assimilating them, though introduced by thought, to the contents different in kind from one another which are simultaneously perceived in an empirical heterogeneous perceptual object. In short, the thinking of the real nature of Change or of Motion bears witness to the ultimate character of perceptual and empirical data in knowledge.
74. But we are not yet at the end of our embarrassments. We have still to consider how the foregoing remarks apply to the case of minima perceptibilia, themselves (in that character) a product of thought, and to the idea of Changing or Becoming in its simplest shape, that is, of a real former and latter in time-duration, in cases where no such difference is empirically perceived. It is here that Zeno's famous paradoxes aimed against the possibility of Motion have their stronghold ; the reason being that, while minima percepti- bilia seem both to be indisputably real and to owe that reality solely to thought, they yet have no change or motion perceptible within them. Of these two, change is the simplest and most fundamental, motion the more complex, being change in time and space together. Change may be found in time alone, and it is here that the real crux of the controversy lies. The question is this, Are minima perceptibilia, are mathematical infinitesimals, the products solely of thought ? It seems to me indisputable that they are not. Both of them are pro- ducts of divisory acts of thought, but in both cases continua must
56 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
be given in perception or perceptual ideas, before division of them in thought can take place. A division presupposes a continuum to be divided ; a continuum does not presuppose a division. It is only by hypostasizing divisory acts of thought that you can change them, in imagination, either into minima perceptibilia themselves, or into mathematical infinitesimals, which again are themselves continua; unless, indeed, by a still further stretch of imaginative fiction, you suppose them to create the continua which they then proceed to divide. In short, there are, in abstract Time, no time-atoms, but only thought- divisions of Time. Now since thought begins with an act of attention, that is, an arresting, in thought, of the content to which it attends, if you hypostasize those acts, whether as creative or as divisive of continua, whatever they give you as their product is necessarily some- thing in a state of Rest, not of change or of motion. So that, if thought alone gives you Reality, all that is real is at rest; while change and motion are an illusory appearance. Such at least I appre- hend to be the original Eleatic doctrine, and it is plainly incapable of furnishing any scientific or philosophical theory of a world which it regards as consisting of illusory phenomena.
75. Professor Burnet in his valuable and most instructive work Early Greek Philosophy maintains, along with other writers whom he names, that Zeno's arguments against the possibility of motion were directed against the Pythagoreans. ' The system of Parmenides (he says) made all motion impossible, and his successors had been driven to abandon the monistic hypothesis in order to avoid this very conse- quence. Zeno does not bring any fresh proofs of the impossibility of motion ; all he does is to show that a pluralist theory, such as the Pythagorean, is just as unable to explain it as was that of Parmenides.' (Work cited, p. 366, and see also pp. 357, 362, 369, &c., of the same second edition, 1908.) This, I think, may very well be the case. At least it would harmonize very well with my own view of the Eleatic doctrine. But I would remark that if Pythagoreanism, as well as the doctrine of Parmenides, was precluded from accounting for the appa- rent change and motion of the world as actually experienced, that is, for the Heracliteant/?M.r of all things therein, it would be for precisely the same reason, namely, that both doctrines alike set up certain thought-concepts, supposed to be products of pure thought, as rival realities to perceptual data conceptualized by thought — thus making realities of the concepts and illusions of the data. Moreover, both doctrines belong to the same kind of thought, namely, the mathe- matical. Unity and units are mathematical ideas. Zeno's arguments against the possibility of motion show that no thought-unit of spatial
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 57
length however small, if taken as a reality, can ever be traversed and left behind by another thought-unit of it taken as a reality, because the process taken as a reality would require an infinitely long time- duration for its performance, space-continua being divisible ad infini- tum ; that is to say, the traversing could never be really performed, and even if, per impossible, we should suppose it performed, it would thereby have destroyed the continuum which was its own pre- supposition and condition of existence. Consequently phenomenal motion becomes an illusion if purely mathematical units are realities. 76. What we find of the utmost value in Parmenides is something which in my opinion marks him as the originator of the strictly philosophical line of thought as distinguished from the scientific. I mean his insistence on the distinction between the two roads, of truth and of opinion, the former leading to a real knowledge of Being, the latter to an apparent knowledge of Not-Being. But why and how is this important ? Because it embodies the first clear perception of the subjective aspect, or our knowledge of things, as the special field of philosophy. All consciousness, he says, has a positive content, has Being of some sort or other as its object ; and pure Nothing, if (per impossibile) we could think it per se, would be Not-being, a contradiction in terms :
Oure yap &v yuou/s TO yf JATJ tov (ov yap e<£iKroV)
OVTC $pao-eus. (vv. 39-40.)
(I quote from the Fragmenta Philosophorum Grcccorum. Ed. F. G. A. Mullachius. Parisiis. A. Firmin Didot. Vol. I. 1860. pp. 114- 130. Parmenides.) We have here the first dawn of the philosophical distinction between the subjective and the objective aspects of experi- ence, which is a fact otherwise expressible by saying that all Being- is relative to Knowing, or again, that consciousness is the only evidence we have or can have of anything whatever. I hold Parmenides, there- fore, to be the first founder of Philosophy as distinct from Science. I understand his two roads, the road of Truth and the road of Opinion, to mean — the former philosophical, the latter scientific Thought, the former leading to universal and necessary ideas of the One eternal and unchanging Universe, including all its phenomenal varieties, the latter to theories of these same phenomenal varieties which are one and all impermanent and transitory. No one at the present day can endorse precisely this distinction between philosophy and science. Nevertheless the fact that it was drawn at all, based as it was upon the observed universal and irrefragable fact that con- sciousness is our sole evidence for anything whatever, is the most
58 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
important, because the originating fact, in the history of Philosophy. This is very far from being Professor Burnet's view. Yet Parmenides was no Idealist. His doctrine, as Professor Burnet has shown, launched scientific thought upon the track of strictly physical speculation. His own thought of the One Real Universe is materialistic. In the first part of his poem, the ' Road of Truth \ he argues for it as being an immense but still limited Sphere (vv. 102-105), that is, as we should say, finite in point of Space, while at the same time it is unlimited in point of Time-duration, endless both a parte ante and a parte post, or as we should say, eternal, having no genesis, no destruction :
KCU o\(6pos T?;Ae /laA.' €TT\dy)(dr]<Ta.v, aTraicre 8e mart? aXrjdris. (vv. 83-4.)
But this eternity he also conceives as embracing all particular things, which are conceived as belonging, all of them, to an eternal Now , —
vvv eoTtf 6/j.ov -nav
fv £vve\es. (vv. 61-2.)
Such, however imperfect, is the first, strictly speaking, philosophical conception of the Universe ever framed by man, at least in the Western world. And it is this subjective and strictly philosophical line of thought which Plato follows in his Dialogue Parmenides, in the Second Part of which he represents Parmenides as himself enforcing and dialectically developing his own Eleatic doctrine.
77. The only logically valid way of dealing with minima percepti- bilia within which no change or motion is perceptible, and which therefore are not perceived as a process or a becoming what they are, or as having a former and a latter within them, while they are still in the inchoate stage of becoming what they are as minima perceptibilia, is in my opinion the following. We must analyse them as we find them, namely, as products of thought in its endeavour to understand the given stream of empirical perceptions. We shall then find, if what I have said above of the meaning of understanding holds good, that it is only by assimilating them in thought to process-contents of the varied empirically given stream of consciousness that we can under- stand them as parts of that varied stream (without falling into self- contradictory ideas in doing so), and therefore by attributing to them continuous change and transition, even though those changes and tran- sitions are not perceivable by human sensitivity. They are not made into unchanging atoms by being thought of as minima perceptibilia. It is merely the limit of human sensitivity that is marked by thinking of them as minima. They could only be conceived as indivisible units
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 59
excluding change, if they were conceived as ultimate data given by thought, and not as products of thought applied to interpret per- ceptually given data.
78. What, then, supposing this to be so, are we to think of that arrest or stoppage which, though introduced by thought, is yet apparently introduced as an essential attribute of the objects thought of? Here again I think that my distinction between consciousness as an existent and the same consciousness as a knowing will be found capable of throwing light and clearing up much confusion. Thought as an existent is itself a process. Neither the perception nor the idea of Rest is a datum of consciousness at once ultimate and universal. But the very first step in all thinking, as distinguished from perceiving, is an act of arrest ; it is an arrest by attention of the ever-changing process given in perception. This, however, is no real arrest of the stream of consciousness, no arrest of consciousness as an existent. It is an arrest of some member of the consciousness as a knowing, of some object in that apparently backward-flowing stream of conscious- ness, by a member arising in the same stream as an existent, flowing apparently forwards into the future. It is the retention, in retentive memory, of the representation of a perception or idea, so as still to make part of the present and future stream of consciousness, although that perception or idea has or may have ceased to exist as it was when it first occurred. It is only as so retained that it appears to be static, at rest, or unchanging. We arrest it by attention for the purpose of knowing more about it than the first perception tells us ; and this is the first step in our endeavouring to understand as well as perceive it. We then endeavour to give it some place in a numerical series, and some definition in a logical series. But consciousness is not made what it is by these purposive acts of thought. Nor have we to say what it is in its inchoate stage, when we conceive it as not yet being, but only as becoming consciousness, since we have nothing but empirical perceptions from which to derive an idea of what it is, while its genesis as an existent is being conditioned.
79. It is as an existent that consciousness arises, becomes, ylyverai. But since it is consciousness that is spoken of, this arising, becoming, genesis, can only be inferred from what it is when it has become, that is, from its objectified content as a knowing. The Laws of Nature also, so to call them, including the most general of all, the Uniformity of Nature both static and kinetic, belong to consciousness as a knowing, and are applied to the explanation or understanding of Nature — the Nature of everything, consciousness included — as existent. There are just two facts, or sets of facts, which escape all possibility of
60 PROCEEDINGS OF THE BRITISH ACADEMY
human explanation or understanding, namely, the fact of Existence itself, the efficiency which makes the Laws by which it is said to be governed, and the specific natures or qualities of the feelings and forms which constitute man's consciousness as a knowing.
80. All we can say, then, of any inchoate state of consciousness prior to the moment of its objectification, or crossing the threshold of consciousness, is that it is either something that takes place in the proximate real conditions of that objectification, or else, if we take it, by abstraction, as belonging to the objectification, but therein separately and apart from its context and thus below the minimum of perceivability, it is some increase in the intensity or the distinct- ness, or both, of the empirical state of consciousness objectified. Thought of in this latter way, minima perceptibilia may possibly seem to bear a relation to the process of perceiving analogous to that which its inseparable elements, formal and material, bear to an empirical percept when formed, namely, in being imperceptible in separation from the whole which they form ; though in their case the imperceptibility is due solely to their minuteness as separable parts, not elements, of the perceptive process. The parts of a con- tinuum, even when not separately perceivable, must be conceived, when thought of as parts, to be essential to its continuity, with which they cannot be thought of as interfering.
81. It seems, then, that there is nothing in experience to show either the impossibility of Change or of Motion, or the priority of Rest to either of them in the real Universe. If we attempt to characterize the Universe of Being or Existence as the content or object of Omniscience, and regard it in that respect as constituting for Omniscience an eternal Now, an idea originating, I believe, with Parmenides, — this is not to retain the idea of time present as ex- planatory ; it is to retain the idea of time-duration as a continuum, when thought of in abstraction from its content, and so taking it to abolish the distinctions of past, present, and future within it. We are then simply thinking of time-duration as sharing the eternity of Omniscience, the eternity of the Universe, and using the idea of time present, or a Now, to characterize the immediacy and certainty of Omniscience, that is to say, the identity of truth (subjective aspect) and fact (objective aspect), both of which aspects we then think of as the inseparable attributes of a Being at once omniscient and omni- potent. We as human beings must conceive or endeavour to con- ceive that omniscient consciousness as a single empirical idea of infinite complexity, embracing contents of infinite variety, and among them the distinctions of past, present, and future time, as contained
SOME CARDINAL POINTS IN KNOWLEDGE 61
within what is to us the infinite and eternal Universe. Our human consciousness begins with empirical perceptions, and we can to some extent analyse the knowledge which we derive by thought from empirical data. It is from those data that our idea of Reality is derived. Consequently the idea of Reality or Real Being, as the object of an empirical idea, is an idea which, being Avhat we are, we find it as impossible to transcend, as we find it impossible to limit or circumscribe by thought the Totality of its object.
Oxford
Printed by Horace Hart, at the University Press
•
.
!
.
II
.
•
.