Contemporary Idealism In America

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CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM
IN AMERICA

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

MIW YORK BOSTON CHICAGO DALLAS
ATLANTA SAN FRANCISCO

MACMILLAN & CO., LIMITED

LONDON BOMBAY CALCUTTA
MELBOURNE

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
OP CANADA. LIMITED

TORONTO

CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM
IN AMERICA

CONTRIBUTORS

George Herbert Palmer R. F. Alfred Hoernlt

Charles M. Bakewell Joseph A. Leighton

Wilbur M. Urban John E. Eoodin

Edgar S. Erightman Charles W. Hendel

G. Watts Cunningham Radoslav A. Tsanqff

William E. Hocking

Edited by
CLIFFORD BARRETT

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY

Sfan fork

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY
1932

COPYRIGHT, 1932,
BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED NO P\RT OF THIS BOOK MAY BE
REPRODUCED IN ANY FORM WITHOUT PERMISSION IN WRITING
FROM THE PUBLISHER, EXCtPT BY A REVIEWER WHO WISHES

TO QUOTE BRIEF PASSAGES IN CONNECTION WITH A REVIEW
WRITTEN FOR INCLUSION IN MAGAZINE OR NEWSPAPER

Set up and printed
Published October, 1932.

SET UP AND PRINTED BY T. MOREY Ot SON
IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

To the memory of
JOSIAH ROYCE

who proclaimed the dignity
of the human spirit

PREFACE

The philosopher is first and above all else, an inquirer.
In each age, the representatives of historical attitudes are
confronted with new data, if not with new problems. The
richest legacy bequeathed by the classic philosopher to his
successors is not a doctrine to be proclaimed, but a method
and spirit for furthering the enlargement of human under-
standing. In general it may be said that the modern idealist
is the disciple of Plato and of Kant, but this does not mean
that he would merely reiterate their conclusions. While
knowledge remains incomplete, and the conquest of mind
continues, new issues will require new interpretations, and
new ideas will be gained at the cost of old.

Scientific investigation as well as realistic and pragmatic
criticism have shown inadequacies in certain conclusions of
the older idealists. In so doing they have proven valuable
friends, making clear the points at which further analysis
is needed and at which the light of recent thought may make
possible more satisfactory interpretation. Idealism, with its
profound trust in the supremacy of reason over the irra-
tional, must greet with utmost cordiality, any alteration of
doctrinal statement which arises from deepened insight.
But in view of more recent inquiry and criticism, what
precisely is the position of the idealist? In the thought of
critics, and to some degree of friends, the answer very often
appears to be a confused one.

In the following discussions, it is the purpose of the writers
to consider problems of fundamental human interest, in the
light of contemporary thought and in the spirit of idealistic
interpretation. In the attitude which these interpretations
express, they are united, but no claim of unanimity is made
for all of the specific conclusions reached. Idealism is re-
garded as a philosophical attitude, primarily, and not a
rigid dogma. The writers present no doctrinal creed, and

vii

viii PREFACE

attach no claim of finality to their conclusions. To hold views
concerning what is ultimate and absolute in the universal or-
der is one thing, but to suppose that one's views regarding
these things are either ultimate or absolute is a very different
thing, yet the two have often been strangely confused by
the critics of Idealism. Confidence in the ultimacy of value
and rationality in the universe inspires enthusiasm in the
prospect of what has and what may be achieved by human
thought, but also, it inspires a sincere modesty in the philoso-
pher who considers the fragmentariness of his own insight.
The editor desires gratefully to acknowledge indebted-
ness to the writers of the following pages. Their generous co-
operation and cordial interest have been given unsparingly,
rendering the task of preparation in the fullest sense a mu-
tual one. In addition to those whose contributions appear,
the association and valuable assistance of the late Mary
Whiton Calkins, Professor in Wellesley College, and of the
late Charles Andrew Armstrong Bennett, Professor in Yale
University, are remembered with deep appreciation. The
true philosopher's concern that inquiry shall be carried for-
ward as earnestly and fruitfully from other points of view as
from his own, has been demonstrated again in the generous
encouragement and assistance of Provost Ernest Carroll
Moore of the University of California at Los Angeles. The
wise counsel and constant support of Dean Charles Henry
Rieber of the same university, place upon us a debt which is
very gratefully acknowledged. Professor Robert Scoon of
Princeton University has contributed highly valuable sugges-
tions and criticism. For courteous permission to quote from
publications, the authors are grateful to Philosophy^ The
Journal of Philosophy , The Open Court Publishing Company,
the Harvard University Press, and The Macmillan Company.
It is remembered with appreciation that, in formulating
plans for the volume, large profit was derived from the wise
advice and interest of Professor Archibald Bowman of the
University of Glasgow, and of Professor John Henry Muir-
head of the University of Birmingham.

CLIFFORD BARRETT

CONTENTS

CHAPTER PAGE

I. IN DEDICATION: JOSIAH ROYCE i

By George Herbert Palmer, Harvard University.

II. INTRODUCTION 11

By Clifford Barrett, Princeton University.

III. CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION . 23

By Charles M. Bakewell, Yale University.

IV. THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE AND

OTHERS 43

By William Ernest Hocking, Harvard University.

V. ON THE MEANING SITUATION .... 67
By G. Watts Cunningham, Cornell University.

VI. THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT: IDEALISM AND THE

PHILOSOPHY OF VALUE 101

By Wilbur M. Urban, Yale University.

VII. THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE . 131

By Joseph Alexander Leighton, Ohio State University.

nil. THE FINITE SELF 169

By Edgar Sheffield Brightman, Boston University.

IX. GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE .... 197
By John Elof Boodin, University of California at Los Angeles.

X. THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE .... 217
By Radoslav A. Tsanoff, Rice Institute.

XI. THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION .... 237
By Charles W. Hendel, Jr., McGill University.

XII. THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM IN THE UNITED

STATES 297

By R. F. Alfred Hoernle, University of Witwatcrsrand.

IX

I

In Dedication:
JOSIAH ROYCE

GEORGE HERBERT PALMER
Harvard University

JOSIAH ROYCE 1

George Herbert Palmer

Josiah Royce was one of the glories of three universities
California, Johns Hopkins, Harvard. His thought is already
absorbed into the mind of the race. To depict the great
philosopher in due proportions is the work of another time,
place, and writer. The present paper has a narrower and
more personal aim. We teachers work in a way unlike the
members of other professions. We constitute a family,
which meets each week, and feels its mutual dependence; our
successes and failures are interlocked, ourselves enriched by
the supplemental traits of one another. When one of us dies,
his colleagues mourn more for their own than for the public
loss, each sharing with each such bits of remembrance as
illustrate the beauty and excellence of the absent friend. In
the history of Harvard I would record in a fragmentary and
intimate way the affection which thirty-four years bred in
me for Royce. He was a picturesque figure, a prodigious
scholar, a stimulating teacher, a heroic character, a playful
and widely loved friend.

His appearance was strange. His short stocky figure
was surmounted by a gigantic round head well sunk in his
shoulders. The top of it was sprinkled with red hair, while
the strongly freckled face seemed to himself and to every
stranger unparalleled in homeliness. The resemblance with-
out and within to Socrates was striking. But no one who
knew him well could wish a line of that face changed. Every
inch of it expressed wisdom, modesty, humor. In our hearts
we called it beautiful, though those who knew him less could
go no further than "distinguished" or "original." His
clothes, of no particular fashion, seemed to have as little to

1 Through the courtesy of Professor Morison, Professor Palmer arranged for the printing of
this paper here as well as in The Development of Harvard University, Harvard University Press.

3

4 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

do with him as matter with mind. His slowly sauntering gait
was characteristic. And if you were short of time, it was
not safe to ask him a question, however simple; for you re-
ceived a lecture from which you at least gathered that truth
was never fragmentary but had meaning only through its
place in the system of the universe.

Early he was remarkable. We know the poverty and isola-
tion of his boyhood years, and have heard that he moved
through those hardships with the same unflinching cheerful-
ness with which in later years he met public attack, domestic
affliction, and failing health. Such hardships would have
quenched a less resolute spirit. His parents, of slender means,
lived in an obscure valley of California in 1855, a time
when that state was more cut off from the rest of the world
than any other of our Union has ever been. Things of the
mind were little regarded by the seekers for gold. The
State University did not begin instruction at Berkeley till
1873, but it had Royce already among its students, he tak-
ing his bachelor's degree in 1875. Tuition was free, but for
"a timid and ineffective boy," as he afterwards called him-
self, discomforts abounded. "My comrades," he writes,
"very generally found me disagreeably striking in my ap-
pearance, by reason of the fact that I was countrified, quaint,
and unable to play boys' games." To such exuberant and
unimaginative youths Royce's perpetual inclination to ask
questions and accumulate knowledge seemed as queer as
his appearance; but undisturbed, he gathered needed in-
struction in social customs from those who laughed, moral
and mental stimulus from the books of Mill and Spencer,
and still more from two great teachers, Edward Rowland
Sill, the lucid poet and Professor of English, and Joseph Le
Conte, the philosophic geologist. His graduation thesis, on
the theology of Aeschylus' Prometheus, was so remarkable
that it was printed by the University, and it prompted a
group of gentlemen to offer the means for his further study
in Germany, a welcome aid afterwards scrupulously repaid.
At several German universities he received profound influ-
ences from Kant and his Romantic followers, from Schopen-

JOSIAH ROYCE 5

hauer, from Lotze. Acquaintance with Hegel came many
years later. Just as his resources were coming to an end,
Johns Hopkins University was founded, and offered Royce
one of its four earliest fellowships. He returned to this
country and took his doctor's degree at Baltimore in 1878,
immediately afterwards accepting an instructorship in rhet-
oric and logic at the University of California.

Those who know only his later writings may wonder at
this appointment. One does not easily imagine Royce cor-
recting compositions. The style we think of as his was not
neat and exemplary. Its sentences were usually long and
tangled, with a good deal of repetition, and little assistive
rhythm. Condensed, brilliant, epigrammatic writing was
never his. He needed considerable sea room. His papers
seem composed rather for the clarification of his own mind
than for that of his reader. In short, his style was rich rather
than formal, that of one on whom thoughts were ever crowd-
ing, and to whom beauty of phrasing made but a slight
appeal. A peculiarly genuine style it was, therefore, con-
vinced and convincing. No one can submit himself to its
massive flow without feeling that he is under the guidance
of a master competent, candid, large-thoughted, as large
in heart as in brain.

Now it is interesting to see that this volume and rush of
style came to Royce through the deepening experience of
life. In the beginning his sentences were brief and conform-
able to pattern. In his third year of teaching he printed a
small Primer of Logical Analysis for the Use of Composition
Students. It is admirably written, academic in its clearness,
conciseness, and attention to the user's needs. I name it
to mark the contrast between Royce's early and later styles.
But it well illustrates something still more important, which
I may call the tenacity of his intellectual growth. He was
ever changing, ever constant. In this his first book he
treats of a subject on which his thoughts were largely en-
gaged at the time of his death. But how differently the
subject was conceived! That was always his mode of prog-
ress. He carried his past with him, not dropping early

6 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

conceptions, but evolving them continually into richer sig-
nificance. Few minds were more progressive; few more
steadfast.

Royce's departure from California gives us our first view
of that easy courage which was one of his central traits. The
year 1882-83 William James was to spend abroad. He and
I reported to President Eliot that we wished Royce to take
his place. We had hardly more knowledge of him than a few
published papers afforded. As the appointment was only
temporary, President Eliot consented, and we f invited Royce,
offering a thousand dollars for salary and nothing after-
wards. James was to return at the close of the year. A poor
man, and with a wife and baby, Royce resigned a permanent
position and brought his family across the continent. When
in later life I asked him how he had dared, he said that risks
of this sort were inevitable for one who would go on to power,
and were safer the earlier in life they came. In that first
year he showed his quality so fully that I offered to provide
him a second opportunity by taking the sabbatical absence
which had been for some time due me. After two years the
entire University was convinced that he could not be spared.
He became an Instructor for a third year and in 1885 an
Assistant Professor.

But something happened in that third year which showed
the moral sensitiveness and heroism of the man. Knowing
Royce's slender means, President Eliot suggested to Augus-
tus Lowell that Royce be offered a course of Lowell Lec-
tures, with a fee of a thousand dollars. Royce was sum-
moned to a conference. I met him as he returned. He had
refused. Mr. Lowell, probably feeling some misgivings over
the strange youth, had told him that the founder's will con-
tained a statement of religious belief to which it was neces-
sary each lecturer should assent. To this Royce demurred.
He could accept no creed as a condition of receiving money,
nor could he be sure that his own understanding of these
doctrines was in accord with that of the founder. Uncom-
plainingly he returned to poverty, and I do not think ever
mentioned the matter to half a dozen persons. We who

JOSIAH ROYCE 7

knew persuaded him to give to the University in public lec-
tures the material he had intended for the Lowell Institute.
This was the origin of his Religious Aspect of Philosophy pub-
lished in 1885, a book whose freshness, force, and devout
spirit gave him a commanding position throughout the
country.

Then followed a period of enormous productivity. Ben-
jamin Rand enumerates twenty-three volumes and ninety-
four articles written by Royce, and his oral product was
hardly less astonishing. For college work he taught more
hours than any other member of his department, saying he
preferred to do so because in contact with the minds of
others he could best formulate his own. Every year he gave
numerous lectures, often whole courses, at other colleges
and cities. At Aberdeen he gave the Gifford Lectures, at
Manchester College, Oxford, the Hibbert Lectures, and
from both universities received honorary degrees. For
several years he taught in our Summer School. He took but
one sabbatical year and few vacations, in the early years
seldom went to bed till after midnight, smoked incessantly,
and allowed himself little exercise. Feeble as he was left by
a serious illness four years before he died, it was during those
four years that some of his strongest books were written, a
striking instance of scholarly hardihood. To himself he was
ever a stern taskmaster, and while perhaps overconsiderate
in dealing with earnest students of middling powers, he was
exacting with men of capacity, impatient with pretenders,
and scornful in exposing careless ignorance. Perhaps his
classes did not always follow the intricacy of his lectures,
but they knew that something big was going on above them,
and were all duly elevated. Each gained his own vista into
an unsuspected world, many having their minds and char-
acters re-created in the process, and every year a sufficient
number stood ready to elect courses known to be severe.

His large tolerance of those who differed with him had in
it nothing of that negative indifferentism which, having no
convictions of its own, counts one belief as good as another.
He was ever a believer, precise, insistent, and inquiring, his

8 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

temper constructive and not merely critical. Strikingly orig-
inal in thought and speech, he never ceased to build, each
bit of truth captured being firmly bound up with what had
gone before, till one was equally astonished at the range and
exactitude of his knowledge. Indeed, whoever talked with
him hardly thought of what he knew as knowledge. It was
rather a unified outlook on life spacious, detailed, conse-
crated, amusing, inexhaustible. All knowledge was his
province. Among his specialties were psychology, logic,
ethics, metaphysics, the philosophies of nature and religion;
he knew none better the course which philosophy had
taken since its rise; had elaborate acquaintance with mathe-
matics, biology, and most of the natural sciences which re-
late to man; he wrote a novel and History of California;
music and poetry were the arts that moved him, and he was
at home in the literature of England, Germany, France, and
Italy. Yet the living man was never lost in the great scholar.
The same intellectual impulse which carried him over such
vast scholastic fields sent him just as eagerly into the com-
mon affairs of the day. His belief in the crimes of Germany,
the land of his spiritual birth, pursued him day and night
and had considerable influence in bringing about his death.
When the quiet scholar stepped on the public platform to
speak of the war, his moral passion swayed the entire
audience and much of the world outside.

But that moral passion deserves a higher name. It was,
indeed, religion, a feeling not merely reverential toward law,
but addressed to a person manifested wherever order appears
and needing our concurrence to complete that order. In
his all-embracing Absolute, Royce found room for our indi-
vidual existence here and hereafter, for our sins, repentance,
atonement, and salvation. Loyalty to this sovereign Per-
son made him one of the most unshakably religious men I
have ever known. From organized religion he held aloof,
partly because it was his disposition in all things to go his
own way, partly, too, through reaction from certain rigidi-
ties of his boyhood. But he acknowledged to me that there
was something childish in such aversion, and twice in his

JOSIAH ROYCE 9

later years he conducted prayers in Appleton Chapel. Per-
sonally he fairly lived with the Eternal, the affairs of time
being still counted worth while because in them too can be
seen "bright shoots of everlastingness." To his happy home
came many sorrows, "afflictions sorted, anguish of all sizes."
And he suffered. Who that knew that tender heart could
doubt it. But at the center of him there was peace. "Shall
not the judge of all the earth do right?" he always seemed
to say. Through every experience he walked unperturbed,
no fear, no clouded intellect, no check of philosophic humor.
I do not believe he was ever known to complain. At one
time he was bitterly attacked by a man whose book he had
scathingly reviewed. Abusive articles were sent broadcast
through the country and the Harvard Corporation was pe-
titioned to remove him. Just at this time his mother died.
When I said to him that it was hard to meet two such blows
at once, he answered, "No. Each is bad, but there is a gain
in having them together. They lean up against each other,
and when I become sore over one, the other gives change."
So did he travel on earth's common way in cheerful godli-
ness. That elfin figure with the unconventional dress and
slouching step, that face which blended the infant and the
sage, that total personality, as amused, amusing, and in-
tent on righteousness as Socrates himself happy the Uni-
versity that had for a long time so vitalizing a presence!

II

INTRODUCTION

CLIFFORD BARRETT
Princeton University

INTRODUCTION

Clifford Barrett

Half a century ago clear lines differentiated well-estab-
lished philosophical positions in America. Subsequently
those lines became blurred and broken at many points. The
dominance of Idealism, which had been conceded in earlier
days, came to be protested. If the protestants did not suc-
ceed in winning an equal authority for their own positions,
at least they were able to stir a widespread suspicion that
Idealism had its eyes fixed worshipfully upon its past
prophets, and was incapable of dealing adequately with
the problems of an expanding intellectual world. During
these years, investigations of the physical sciences have
shaken traditional cosmologies and disturbed metaphysical
assumptions. Objective psychology has undermined familiar
theories of the self, body and soul; it has raised doubts
as to the possibility of a justifiable non-naturalistic account
of mind. Realism has directed its most determined attacks
against the method of "speculative philosophy." Prag-
matism has reiterated with finality, the relative character
of all human thought and standards. Important changes of
social structure on its political and economic sides, with a
notable shift of emphasis toward economic interest, have
suggested a dubious fate for established theories of obliga-
tion. Widespread effort in the direction of revaluation of
moral and religious attitudes, marked by a sense of tragedy
or of inconsequentiality in human life, has shaken confidence
in "eternal values." More subtle has been a shift not merely
of opinions about philosophical subjects, but of the very
subjects which we trouble to have opinions about. The mas-
sive dramatic themes, God, Freedom, Human Destiny,
no longer hold the center in philosophical controversies.
The extensiveness of these changes places upon all philoso-

14 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

phers the necessity of redefining issues and positions, and
for Idealism, the need is particularly urgent. There is little
excuse for mere reiteration of the systems of Berkeley or
Hegel, but there is profound need for reconstruction which
brings to present problems the insight of each of the great
philosophical attitudes.

Even learned critics have tended to identify Idealism with
some one or a sum of idealistic systems of the past. The very
age and brilliance of its history, indeed, render this attitude
especially liable to such misunderstanding. But it is an
error which is impoverishing, imprisoning in systems con-
structed in the environment of other ages, the universal
genius of a major philosophical interpretation. The experi-
ences of each age are limited, and its interpretations are
fragmentary. Each must make its own intellectual adven-
tures, and bear for itself the hazards of philosophical
conquest. The welfare of any generation requires that its
problems be surveyed from each of the great philosophical
vantage points. Idealism, like Naturalism, is to be regarded
as such a primary point of view. It is an attitude, not a creed. ',
It is a way of interpreting human experience, not the con-
clusions of a specific interpreter. It is a living tradition, not
a religious veneration of accumulated philosophical dogmas.
Its classic expressions contain much that is of profound
universal significance, yet it lives as an insight, in new
situations enlightening the minds of successive interpreters.

It is the purpose of the present book to offer interpre-
tations of issues of fundamental consequence in the
present order of thought and action. The interpretations are
founded on the postulates and principles of Idealism, as
understood by the writers. What these postulates and
principles are can be made more clearly evident in the later
discussions than would be possible in any brief definition
here. Yet it is a fair question which asks at the beginning
of any discussion for some preliminary indication of the sig-
nificance of a central term. In the present intellectual world,
what are the characteristic marks of an idealistic philosophy?

By way of reply, certain typical aspects of idealistic inter-

INTRODUCTION IS

pretation may be illustrated from fields of philosophical in-
quiry. If we turn to thejfteLd of. metaphysics, for example, it
is clear that with disavowal of older conceptions of "mat-
ter," the clarity of line which characterized the age-long
dispute between "idealism" and "materialism" has been
lost. Scientific and metaphysical interests have shifted the
foci of their attention from problems of "substance" to
problems of "structure." For metaphysics, the pertinent
inquiry is that as to the ultimate order of a world which
"naturalist" and "idealist" agree in describing for scientific
purposes in terms of energy-structures or events. The funda-
mental difference between "naturalism" and "idealism" is
philosophical and not scientific. It has to do, not with de-
scriptions of physical processes as such, but with their sig-
nificance and final order, a problem which at once, leads to
questions of meaning and value in their systematic relations
to cosmic structure. The only fruitful "philosophy of sci-
ence" is that which keeps clearly in mind that its interpre-
tations, both in aim and method, are of a different kind than
the activities of the physical scientist which provided their
data, and that they are subject to quite different tests. The
idealist is deeply interested in the attitudes and results of
the physical and social sciences. He is ready to respect any
serious philosophical account of the physical world. But he
cannot take seriously the borrowed glory which any inter-
pretation appropriates to its conclusions from the scientific-
demonstrability of the data which it endeavors to synthe-
size and explain.

It is an extreme form of "naturalism" but rarely taken
seriously by even its professed adherents, which asserts, in
Mr. Russell's popular phraseology, that " thejnuyerse i s a u
spots and jumps, without unity, without coherence or order-
liness, . . . that the external world may be illusion, but if
it exists, it consists of events short, small, and haphazard.
Order, unity, and continuity are human inventions just as
truly as are catalogues and encyclopaedias." As if these
cataloguing minds were not themselves parts of nature!
Aside from so "short and simple" a metaphysical creed,

16 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

there remain possibilities for accounts of cosmic structure in
terms of "mechanical" and of "organic" systems of rela-
tionships. Of these, the idealist prefers the latter as a basis
for descriptive analogy, emphasizing as it does, the depend-
ence of the part upon the unity of the whole, or more ac-
curately, of the specific functioning upon the system of the
whole. This grounding of particularity within a larger and
finally within a universal and self-sufficient order which in-
corporates and gives meaning to its fragmentariness, con-
stitutes a primary insight of idealistic philosophy, variously
expressed in historic systems under concepts of "God,"
"Reason," the "Supreme Idea," the "Infinite," the "Causa
Sui," the "Absolute," and the "Blessed Community." The
idealist does not question the genuineness of the items of
his experience of the world, but their genuine separateness
and self-sufficiency. Out of that which the particular is, in
:ommon with what is not exclusively its own, must arise not
Dnly any claim to consideration as a participant in a world
order, but also the claim for any significance vested within
its particularity. The emergence of greater from less, how-
ever described, requires the miracle of creation ex nihilo.
But the partial expression of the greater in the less is by no
means incomprehensible or unnatural.

The idealist, dealing with the metaphysics of structure,
presses a step further. It is clear that no adequate account
of the world can neglect so important a datum as "spirit."
Here the definitive characteristic of Idealism is evident, for
more than in anything else, as Professor Bakewell points
out in later pages, the continuity of the idealist tradition
is to be found in the recognition of the primacy of "spirit"
in the world. The world is intelligible to man because and
to the extent that its order is also the order of his rational
life. The only form in which consciousness can exist as Kant
showed, is that of synthetic interpretation. The interpreta-
tions and syntheses of man's thoughts are of consequence
for knowledge only so far as the evaluative order on which
they are based also possesses a regulative status in the world
which they are taken to represent.

INTRODUCTION 17

Idealistic philosophy is no opponent of physiological psy-
chology, nor of the objective method in experimental in-
vestigation. It does oppose philosophical constructions
which blur the distinction between genetic physical relations
of psychological activities and their normative relations to
structures of meaning and value. Participating in a system
of physical relations, the structure of a specific thought-
activity presents problems for physiological psychology;
participating also in a system of meanings and values, it
may present problems for ethics and logic. In general the
newer forms of Naturalism have been pleased with a "bio-
logical" account of human life in its entirety. Purposes
are mechanically explicable responses arising from the pri-
mary urge toward adjustment to environment. Advances
in physics have tended to discredit thoroughly mechanistic
presuppositions, but these linger on in the work of numerous
psychologists. The idealist has no cause to argue whether
this type of explanation provides a valid account of certain
aspects of rational life, but he denies that it can offer a com-
plete or adequate account of all aspects. To insist that all
knowledge is to be adequately explained in terms of "events
in nature" is to destroy the possibility of any knowledge of
nature. If thought activity is only an occurrence in nature,
it can be judged in no other way than any natural occur-
rence, that is, as existing or not existing. To a physical event
as such, no test of validity or of moral quality is applicable.
"It would be as meaningless to ascribe truth to a judgment
as to the fall of a meteor if both are wholly the outcome of
matter-of-fact occurrence." l Even meaningless then loses
its significance as a descriptive term, and becomes inappli-
cable. Spirit and mechanics are not genuine antagonists,
for it is only in the service of purposes and values that the
"mechanical" may win significance.

The effort to isolate values and to regard them as consti-
tuting a field for independent investigation has been char-
acterized as "probably the greatest philosophical achieve-
ment of the nineteenth century." * In even so superlative a

1 G. P. Adams, Idealism and the Modern Age. * F. C. S. Schiller.

18 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

statement, many realists and idealists, as well as pragmatists,
would concur. But their investigations in this field lead to
widely varied conclusions. On one side of the "great divide
in philosophy," are those who regard human experiences of
value as resting back upon limited value-systems, which
themselves occur in an order of nature over which values
hold no regulative power. For them, values are human
creations, arising out of physiological processes, or emerging
from the valueless. On the other side are those who look
upon human experiences of values as arising out of man's
participation in the order of the universe, of which he is a
part. Values are not his creation, but his discovery. He is
aware of values because he has the capacity to realize in in-
telligent life, the order of universal nature. As its physical
processes participate in his bodily life, so its regulative order
is further discovered and expressed in his activities of reason,
appreciation, evaluation. The idealist, accepting the latter
general position, may view individuality as primordial and
the world in its ultimate structure as pluralistic, or he may
regard individuality as applying to the limited expressions
of a single universal nature. In either case, man's interpre-
tative activities may be based upon a system of meanings
and values which in kind are one with the regulative princi-
ples of the cosmic order out of which they arise and to which
they provide man's key of knowledge. It is in the significance
which they attribute to values in human knowledge that
Pragmatism and Idealism draw closest together. In their
metaphysical assumptions as to the fiature of these values,
they are separated.

Constructive activity may express as penetrating insight
as analytical reflection. The philosopher-king may be as
wise a man as the hermit. Enthusiasm for intelligent social
ends may be as honorable a philosophical condition as
cloistered retirement from concerns of human welfare. The
idealist, with the sincerity of his emphasis upon the neces-
sity of understanding the partial in its relations to larger
units than itself, and finally to the whole, is committed to
the consideration of aspects of thought and life in terms of

INTRODUCTION 19

the individual as a totality. The individual person, in turn,
with his purposes and activities, he must seek to understand
within the order of society, and human society as in some
way realizing the order of the universe. Of deep interest to
idealistic interpretation, therefore, is the present widespread
effort toward clearer understanding of social relations and
toward revaluation of social standards and institutions.

Eras of economic and political readjustment are likely to
be alert to problems of ethical theory. In some instances, the
desire for intelligent guidance, in others, desire for intellec-
tual justification, leads to exertions of effort to a degree un-
known in more complacent times. Out of the disillusion-
ment of the recent past, old faiths gave way to skepticism,
and men came to question not only their own and others'
purposes, which might have been profitable enough, but
they came to doubt the worth of purpose itself. This was to
doubt the worth of intelligent living, and to leave social
obligations without support. But the gloom of general dis-
illusionment seems now to have begun to cast its shadow
over disillusionment itself. That, too, proves futile, and
we must look for something more positive. It is clear that
freedom is not mere antagonism, but the wholehearted pur-
suit of well-examined and coordinated ends.

Here the idealist feels the need of extending the bound-
aries of ethical judgments. The horizons of an immediate
situation are too narrow for intelligent choice. Practical de-
cisions based upon their limited perspectives need to be
corrected and supplemented in the light of farther ends and
more inclusive purposes, ultimately, indeed, so far as pos-
sible, they are to be viewed in terms of their coherence with
the whole of life and the whole of nature. That this whole
is not directly apparent does not alter the fact that situa-
tions enjoy no atomic independence, but present aspects
of larger situations, and can be dealt with intelligently only
in the light of the fullest understanding of their universal
aspects, as well as of their limitations. To view the particu-
lar situation in the larger field of its far-reaching relation-
ships requires the accumulated experience of other situa-

20 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

tions, but it requires also the analytic ability to discover
the universal within the particular; the lines of the com-
plete within a present incomplete expression. It requires,
too, the synthetic ability which can see the present activity
in terms of distant ends. Idealism would reiterate that
rational direction of individual and social conduct must
always be in terms of purposes and ends, and that it follows
that the most inclusive organization of purposes should pro-
vide the basis for the most intelligent and moral life. In
turning its attention to farther purposes and distant ends,
philosophy need not deal, as is often charged, in vague spec-
ulations. Rather, it will be its aim to discover in more im-
mediate situations, principles which by their coherence and
stability, reveal not only a basis for an experimental assump-
tion of probability, but a foundation for wholehearted re-
liance upon their trustworthiness.

So much may be said in an introductory suggestion, by
way of pointing out characteristics of idealistic interpreta-
tion, as they appear in its application to contemporary
fields of inquiry. Whether in the considerations of meta-
physics or logic or ethics, or elsewhere, the idealist finds the
immediate and partial incapable of rendering a full account
of itself, but discovers that its essential nature is to be under-
stood only as it is viewed in relation to the more inclusive
order which it articulates in nature and behavior. The phys-
ical world and the physical body abound in analogies which
it is unnecessary to mention. The immediate datum is not
isolated, but appears within a situation including other fac-
tors than its presence. This situation, as Pragmatism has
argued convincingly, itself rests upon constructive activities
motivated by the desire to realize certain purposes or values.
The idealist would press farther, however, and maintain that
the purposes and values which dominate in the viewing or
controlling of a definite situation lose their character except
as they, too, are viewed as related within larger structures
of purpose and value, and ultimately, within a cosmic order
of purpose and value. Thus, within the specific situations of
life, purposes, meanings, and values constitute the basis of

INTRODUCTION 21

organization and control, and within cosmic structure, they
hold a regulative position. In part, at least, this is the
idealist's meaning when he speaks of the primacy of spirit
in the world. To the objection that purposes, meanings and
values are possessions of human minds, he replies that these
possessions are discovered and not created by man, who, as
a part of the cosmos, expresses its structure within himself.
It is with such a basis of systematic interpretation, rather
than detailed conclusions in which all necessarily concur,
that the present writers unite as idealists. Their purpose is
neither defense nor propaganda, but the presentation of a
view of fundamental issues in contemporary thought.

Ill

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST
TRADITION

CHARLES M. BAKEWELL
Yale University

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION
Charles M. Bakewell

Back of all differences that characterize the great systems
of speculative thought, differences in method, differences in
problems singled out for emphasis a matter largely deter-
mined by the spirit of the age differences in conclusions
reached regarding specific problems that fall properly within
the scope of philosophy, lies a common fund of agreement
which is apt to be lost sight of just because it is taken for
granted, and because philosophers spend their time in dis-
cussing their differences, which is, of course, as it should be,
for these are the live issues. One may even say that these
discussions of differences are keen and bitter in proportion
to the extent of basic agreement. We go together so far;
why can we not go together the whole way ? Aristotle was a
severe critic of the Platonic theory of ideas just because he
had so much in common with Plato. We do not argue
with those with whom we totally disagree; we pass by
on the other side. All this is especially true of those
philosophies generally regarded as idealistic. The agree-
ments are far more profound and more important than
the differences, and they give continuity to the idealist
tradition.

It is well at the start to emphasize the fact that idealism
is not, in any of its significant expressions, to be identified
with mentalism. That is, it is not a doctrine that resolves
physical objects into mental states; a doctrine that holds
that the things that you see out there in space are in reality
just bundles of feelings, groups of sensations, states of con-
sciousness, within the mind. We cannot even state such a
doctrine without assuming that we do, to begin with, know
things as distinct from our impressions. No idealist, at least
in the Western world, not even the much maligned Berkeley,

26 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

has defended a doctrine so patently absurd. 1 The idealist
keeps intact the distinction between subjective and objec-
tive, and views spatial experiences as the experiences of real
objects in space, and not as feelings or sensations having
their being in some mysterious way out of space altogether
and in the mind. He holds that Nature's laws and ways
and processes are what they are, and not what we in our
ignorance may fancy them to be; that things do not come
into being in coming to be known; that Nature is not created
anew with every revolutionary discovery in science; that
we must obey Nature to conquer her, must patiently inter-
pret and not impatiently anticipate her, to use Bacon's
phrases. It is indeed part of his task to show that if, and
insofar as, the material world is viewed as unreal, the mental
order becomes itself unreal. One can only fix one's mean-
ings, and distinguish thinking from dreaming, by tying up
to the physical order. The old Hindu thinker who had per-
suaded himself of the unreality of the world of physical
phenomena drew the only proper inference when he pro-
ceeded to deny the reality of the mental as well, and to teach
the "fourfold nothingness" in the words: "I am nowhere
anything for anybody nor is anybody anywhere anything
for me." In short, the idealist accepts the well attested re-
sults of science with as much docility as the most "tough
minded" thinker. It is true that some idealists have at-
tempted to twist the facts in order that they might the
better conform to their theories, as, for example, Hegel did
in his Philosophy of Nature. This, however, is a human
failing by no means confined to representatives of any one
school.

Further confusion arises from the tendency to regard
idealism as defined by contrast with realism. Modern real-
ism has found many expressions, and it is hard to reconcile
them with one another. In some of its forms it makes heavy
drafts on Platonic idealism, in others it appears as a sort of
attenuated materialism. Insofar as realism is a protest

1 The nearest approach to a defense of mentalism is to be found in the writings of Karl
Pearson, who can hardly be regarded as a representative idealist.

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 27

against subjectivism, insofar as it is an insistence upon re-
spect for the facts of experience in all their stubbornness,
and upon the humble acceptance of the teachings of science,
we are all realists. If realism means to affirm the existence
of independent reals outside the realm of experience, and
therefore wholly independent of consciousness, it is the old
hypothetical realism whose absurdities have so often been
shown up in the history of philosophy. If it means to affirm
the existence of independent reals which are none the less
wholly accessible to experience,* directly experienced or
known, it is hard to see how this doctrine conflicts with
idealism, except that the idealist would be constrained to
point out that the word "independent" is not strictly taken
in such usage. It is merely a name, and a rather unfortunate
one, for a problem, the problem how one and the same
empirical content can be viewed in one context as part of a
private individual experience, and in another context as
part of the universal realm of experience. The conflict be-
comes irrepressible and absolute only when the knower is
identified with the physical organism and one's realism is
tied up, as it is by some of its American defenders, to a be-
havioristic metaphysics.

Again, there is n&.conflict between idealism and pragma-
tism insofar as the latter is voluntaristic, emphasizing the
practical and insisting that thinking is determined and di-
rected by human needs. The conflict only becomes serious
when pragmatism is identified with "radical empiricism,"
and the latter is taken as meaning that the categories are
simply felt conjunctions within the stream of consciousness.
This the idealist must regard as a confusion of the logical
with the psychological which inevitably leads to subjec-
tivism and skepticism. Professor James himself escapes this
consequence by falling back upon faith, by an affirmation
q over-beliefs, which provide for the guidance of life. The
conflict with instrumentalism is more serious. We can all
readily agree that the pursuit of truth is the quest for means
of controlling experience, and that the good is that which
carries one forward in the direction in which one desires t<

28 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

go; that reason's task is to see that scientific criteria are
applied to inventions as they affect the lives of human be-
ings here and now, and that it is a misuse of reason to employ
it in the endeavor to escape from the world and find refuge
from its insecurities by conjuring up the picture of a "heaven
of pure delight where saints immortal reign." Nevertheless,
the idealist is constrained to point out that not only in an-
cient times but in modern classical physics as well, forming
a picture of reality has served as a means for securing con-
trol of events; that the concept of the fixed, both in science
and in philosophy, has served the same purpose; and that
even in modern physics the doctrine of relativity is very far
from being a return to the view of the old "flowing philoso-
phers" for whom all was changing and relative. The old
absolutes of Newtonian physics have but given way to new
absolutes which more successfully eliminate the "observer,"
and thus give more precise and accurate instruments of
measurement. Furthermore, ability to control events is of
little use except as determined by some standard, some value
that is decisive. If one is to use knowledge so as to affect the
lives of human beings, it must be so as to affect them in ways
which, antecedent to and exterior to your determination,
human beings are intrinsically entitled to be affected. Now
this end or measure of value is, the instrumentalist tells us,
not to be determined, after the usual fashion of empiricism,
by identifying it with what satisfies or is enjoyed. Pro-
fessor Dewey himself has no doubts as to what this end is,
and presumably the end, as he conceives it, represents the
direction in which every one really desires to go though he
may know it not: the manifold purposes and meanings of
life must be "interconnected"; we must recognize the
"solidarity of human interests," and work for an "abundant
and significant experience participated in by all." It is im-
plied that it is the duty of all to seek to further these ends.
These ends may be vague, but they represent the instru-
mentalist's substitute for what appears in idealism as the
categorical imperative or as the principle of loyalty to loy-
alty or as the essential form of the good. In other words,

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 29

when the instrumentalist turns social reformer he trails an
absolute unawares.

The one fundamental and persistent conflict is that be-
tween idealism and materialism with its attendant mechan-
ism l and consequent subjectivism. The first thoroughgoing
materialist of the ancient world, Democritus, found himself
compelled to represent the secondary qualities as subjective
but still believed that a finer organ of thought gave a direct
knowledge of the atoms and their mathematical qualities.
His fellow-townsman, Protagoras, rightly saw that the pri-
mary and secondary qualities were in the same case, and that
if one group were subjective the other must be subjective
also, and so he proclaimed a thoroughgoing relativity under
the doctrine that man is the measure of all things. The
philosophy of Socrates and Plato may, from one point of
view, be described as simply an attempt to escape from this
subjectivism while at the same time accepting the homo
mensura doctrine. They found in the doctrine that man is
the measure, not the last word of skepticism, but rather the
only hope of reaching certainty. If man did not measure for
himself he could never know whether he was being deceived
or not. In working out their position they laid down cer-
tain principles which have been characteristic of idealism
from that day to this. Knowledge involves spontaneity.
The soul or knower is self-dependent and creative. Never-
theless, the individual thinker, insofar as he observes the
rules of correct thinking, may reach results that are
valid for all minds. They saw clearly that when the ob-
ject is taken to be an immediate impression, the-thing-
as-immediately-apprehended, it turns out to be tantaliz-
IPgly subjective. Objectivity proves to be not something
handed over as a gift in the direct impression, but rather,

1 Modern scientific theory has so changed our conception of the nature of physical reality
as to make it difficult to define mechanism in positive terms. The most comprehensive defi-
nition that can be given is mechanistic is any interpretation of experience which excludes
purpose as a true cause. An attempt is sometimes made to escape from the antithesis, mech-
anism versus purpose, by means of the currently popular doctrine of ejnergcnt evolution,
explaining purpose as a certain set, configuration, or propensity in the physical organism.
This is, however, in truth, a denial of the effectiveness of purpose in its only significant
meaning. See McDougaU, Modem Materialism and Emergent Evolution, for a searching
criticism of all such attempts.

30 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

a characteristic which the impression acquires in being
thought.

There has been in recent years a revival of materialism
which has captured a considerable, and voluble, group of
men and women of the rising generation, sometimes with a
dash of Freudianism thrown in. They not infrequently ex-
ploit this view with an amusing cocksureness; but with a
commendable frankness they draw the inevitable conclu-
sions: the wisdom of the past is hoary folly, religion is fool-
ishness, morality (or what has hitherto passed for such) an
illusion. This modern materialism does not begin with atoms
and empty space, but with the physical organism, and it
would avoid the perplexing problem of knowledge as the
ancients confronted it by simply throwing out conscious-
ness altogether. It might be called the new dogmatic philoso-
phy of "nothing but," with its attendant mythology, of
which Mr. Watson is the high priest. According to this view,
the mind is nothing but a complex of word habits, " thinking
is nothing but talking to ourselves," personality is nothing
but the "end product of our habit systems," and so on. Is
this conclusion justified by evidence? No, but this is the
only way in which mind and mental behavior, or what has
passed for such, can be viewed as things tangible, observ-
able and measurable, and the only way in which thought
can be described in terms of natural science. In a word, it
accords with our initial dogma. But alas, this view that
would be ultra-objective turns out to be ultra-subjective
just Watson's way of working his muscles. The word mean-
ing itself must, we are told, be tossed overboard as nothing
but a "literary expression" whatever that may mean in
behavioristic terms. The thinker, or what passes for the
thinker, is chasing around like the rat in the maze, looking
for the satisfying verbal pattern and, having found it,
pounces upon it like the rat upon the cheese; its word-
hunger appeased, it looks no further. The words true and
false have, however, no application to the result. How
childish then is our interest in one another's views; just idly
watching the wheels go round in some man machine.

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 31

As Aristotle put it, philosophers may be divided into two
classes, those who begin with chaos and those who begin
with Zeus. For the former the problem is to account for the
amount of order and rationality that has resulted; for the
latter the problem is to account for the amount of disorder
and irrationality that, seems clearly to exist. Now the
idealists, from Plato and Aristotle through to Kant, Fichte
and Royce, "begin with Zeus," which means that they be-
gin with the soul, for as Aristotle is frank to admit, the only
positive meaning we can put into the idea of God is found
by ascribing to Him what we are "in our best brief mo-
ments." l

The point of departure for idealism is then the reality,
the existence, the spontaneity, the hegemony, of the soul. I
use the word soul, in spite of the psychologists, without
apology. It is fully as respectable a term as matter, and cer-
tainly no more elusive in meaning. When the soul dons<
academic garb and puts on its dignity its nom de guerre is
mind, but since it is not merely knower, but the determiner
of all other values as well as truth values, both individual
and social, the old-fashioned term is the more fitting. The
more sophisticated call it the self; those primarily interested
in religion prefer the term spirit.

The initial ground for our belief in the existence of the
soul is found in the pntological argument "when me they
fly I am the wings." Its reality is affirmed the more certainly
the more stoutly it is denied. It is affirmed in every conscious
purpose, presupposed in all rational intercourse. This argu-
ment could only apply to supersensible realities. Perhaps it
is misleading to call it an argument. It is, in fact, imme-
diate knowledge, corresponding, where noumenal reality is
concerned, to awareness of objects in the phenomenal order.
Belief in the existence of the soul is as instinctive as my be-
lief in the existence of yonder table which I see. But it may
be an illusion, as may be the table. The only test reason can
then apply is, does the recognition of its existence help to
explain the facts of experience? Kant, to be sure, while

1 And, we may add, what is implied in the possibility of those "best brief moments."

32 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

virtually accepting this argument in the case of practical
reason, denied it in theoretical, but, because of this denial,
he created an impassable gulf between theoretical and prac-
tical reason, and left the soul helpless and useless in the
interpretation of experience. This was due to the dogma,
which his own philosophy should have freed him from, that
for theoretical reason existence must be given in a presenta-
tion. Obviously, the soul cannot be presented as an object
to itself. Kant's argument (the supposed paralogism) con-
sists merely in pointing out the fact that the soul cannot
be found as what the soul is not. If the soul is real it must
actually function in the determination of the facts of experi-
ence; if belief in its reality is to be justified it can only be
because its activity supplies principles which are needed to
explain those facts.

The drive of philosophy is the homing instinct, as Plato
called it; the desire to be at home in the world of nature as
science teaches us to interpret it, and in the world of the
spirit as the saints and seers have taught us to interpret
that; and through the knowledge thus attained to build a bet-
ter and more homelike world. The jum is vision in the light
of the whole. Could one attain that vision one would no
doubt be able to " run up and down the dialectical ladder,"
needing no outside support, for the whole would be self-
supporting. But this remains an ideal of reason. Science
itself, however, similarly aims at wholeness of vision, but
within the field definitely marked off from other fields by the
presuppositions and the point of view of the particular
science in question. The method of philosophy is, like that
of science, both empirical and rational. It must, of course,
begin with experience, with accurate observation and descrip-
tion; but its aim is explanation, and this means finding the
principle or the law which links all facts together and reveals
the pattern of the whole.

Let me give an illustration. Plato was in the habit of giv-
ing his pupils problems, and one in particular that greatly
exercised the Academy was that of the motion of the planets.
They seemed to wander to and fro in a most irrational man-

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 33

ner. But the world must be orderly and intelligible. That is
the primal demand of reason. And so the problem was, to
"save the appearances." This the Platonists did by means
of cycle, epicycle and eccentric, and presumably drew a
fairly accurate pattern of planetary motion. But it was
still merely a description. The explanation came with the
discovery of the law of gravitation. Here was a principle
that tied all bodies in the universe together and enabled
one not only to describe the movements of the planets but
to show why they must be as they are; enabled one to move
forward to fresh discoveries (Uranus and Neptune), and
really "save the appearances."

Similarly, in the early part of the nineteenth century
science was almost wholly descriptive, card-indexing the
facts in chemistry, botany, geology, biology. But the princi-
ple of the conservation of energy, of elimination by natural
selection, and perhaps we should add the theory of cellular
tissue, changed all this. These principles enabled the scien-
tist to box the compass of reality within the limits of his
subject matter and swing full circle. Description became a
stepping-stone to explanation, and the laboratory super-
seded the museum. The appearances were saved. One be-
gins by wondering that things should be as they are, but in
the end, with the right thread in hand, one would wonder
should things be other than as they are. 1

Philosophy differs from science simply in comprehensive-
ness. It takes all experience for its province. It must be
judged, as science is, by its success in discovering the princi-
ple or principles that link all the facts of experience in a ra-
tional and orderly whole.

There are three distinct steps in the development of phi-
losophy as an interpretation of experience. As is well known,
the Greeks, in the age of mythology, and before the rise of
philosophy, while explaining experience by reference to the
Gods as powers behind the scenes, had been forced, in order
to explain their behavior, to set up a further principle,
necessity, fate, or destiny, which kept them within their

1 Cf . Aristotle, Mctoph., Bk. I.

34 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

proper bounds. It was taking this idea of fate from the back-
ground of Olympus and placing it in the actual world of
experienced objects that gave the concept of nature that
started philosophy and science on their way. We should
find the key, the bond of fate, if we could only discover
what nature abidingly and steadfastly is., The changing
could then be interpreted in terms of the changeless, and
tjiis seemed to be what reason demanded. Zeno, once for
all, showed the insufficiency of this principle. His puzzles of
motion are unanswerable, if you let him state his case, and
jfor the simple reason that he is stating motion in terms of
Test. The solvitur ambulando of Diogenes is the plain man's
sufficient answer. There is something wrong with your
premise if it forces you, in trying to explain experience, to
explain it away.

The second step is to start with motion, with an ever-
changing world, and see if we fare any better in finding the
permanent in the changing; and as a matter of fact we do.
The permanent is found in form rather than in matter, in
the law and the logos. This is the view that still dominates
science. In the practical reference, it dominated the think-
ing of the Stoics, of Augustine and of Calvin. But there are
two things that give us pause in accepting this principle as
adequate. It may be true that man's search for permanence
in this way has created the world of physics. But this method
of interpretation gives universals and identities, not the
unique, the individual. Furthermore, the explanation is
too simple to account for the facts. The world as ordered
in accordance with this principle is shot through with dis-
order, and most clearly so where the deliberate actions of
men are in evidence. Here are physical happenings that do
not fit into this conception of rationality. They are more
troublesome than Plato's errant planets. They present a
"problem," and the problem is again, to "save the appear-
ances." Finally, this method of explanation represents the
story of the world as a tale that is told. One is still caught
in the toils of fate, and the significant human values are
lost. The plain man's sufficient answer is, like that of

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 35

Diogenes to Zeno, Solvitur volendo, solvitur agendo, solvitur
intelligendo* There is something wrong with your premise if
it forces you, in trying to explain these experiences, to ex-
plain them away.

And this brings us to the_third step, which is the position
of idealism. What we need is another dimension of reality,
another type of order. Into a world bound by fate you can-
not squeeze freedom, any more than you can translate mo-
tion into rest. But if we start with freedom we can perhaps
account for fate. So the idealist starts with freedom, with
spontaneity, creativity, that is, with soul or spirit. We come
nearest to a description of reality when we regard it as a
community of self-active creative spirits; l and the test of
the validity of this view can only be, does it enable us to
explain, better than otherwise appears possible, both the
stubbornness and independence of the physical order as
science describes it, and also the effectiveness of ideas and
ideals in determining events in that order, while at the
same time preserving the significance of human values.
When one speaks of the soul as existent or real, one must
mean that it is actually effective in determining facts in the
common realm of experience. The universal form that this
activity takes is the creation of wholes, in which the whole
is always more than the mere sum of the parts.

If Driesch is right, this is a factor in all living organisms.
It is as if the end were present as a determining factor
throughout the process. (Aristotle's rt> rl fy ctau.) And al-
though the great majority of biologists, especially in America,
refuse to follow him, their chief reason for not doing so seems
to be that they cannot put meaning into the principle he in-
vokes; that is, they cannot interpret this third stage of
knowledge in terms of the second, which of course they can-
not. But in any case the principle here, in plant and animal,
is implicit, and confined to the individual organism. In

1 1 do not mean to imply by this statement that all idealists are pluralists. Socrates in
one of the Dialogues is made to remark, in effect, "1LI could find any one who could solve
the problem of the one and the many I would follow in his footsteps as in those of a god."
And this is still the central problem in idealism. Professor Royce devoted the better part of
his time in his riper years to its solution, seeking in his conception of the "beloved com-
munity" to transcend the antithesis, monism versus pluralism.

36 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

man, the principle is, at times, more or less explicit and over-
individual. But it still manifests itself in making wholes,
piecing together the fragments of experience into a whole, a
single realm of experience; or, in creative art and enlightened
conduct, seeking to create wholes that do not yet exist.

In the first stage in the development of philosophy reality
is viewed primarily as stuff, in the second as form, in the
third, through emphasis of end or purpose, as spirit (soul or
entelechy).

A word of caution in passing. The^spulj as the term is
used in this paper, is not an existent of the same order as
physical existents, nor is it that curious metaphysical hy-
brid, a disembodied spirit, external to the body, and stepping
into the body and out again as a man might step in and out
of a boat. The relation is one of inclusion. The soul in its
essence, or taken absolutely, is no where and no when, for
all wheres and whens are by intention present in it. But the
soul as just this unique individual soul, with definite knowl-
edge and definite tasks, has its TTOV (mi in the physical order
precisely in the body, and, through the body its specific
time and place and history. Thus the soul is the life of the
body, but it is moje than that, for it is also transcendent of
bodily limitations; and the body is the expression in the
physical order of the nature of this soul, of this soul made
flesh, but it is less than that, for at best it could only repre-
sent the soul to date, and that most inadequately. Now the
body is, more or less, under the control of the nervous sys-
tem. And nervous tissue has the peculiar property of being,
under limitations, sensitive and directly and immediately
responsive to the desire and volition of the knower, to the
creativity that is the soul. This seems to be an ultimate
fact of experience.

The continuity of the idealist tradition is manifest in
that all idealisms deserving the name undertake to explain
experience from the standpoint of what I have called the
third stage of knowing. This does not mean abandoning the
principles employed in the second stage, but, rather, a re-
striction of their use, and a re-interpretation of their mean-

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 37

ing from the point of view of the third stage. The categories
employed under the second stage in the interpretation of
nature are inadequate for the interpretation of the realm of
the spirit, for describing the relations of persons as per-
sons. Nevertheless the physical world as thus interpreted is
the manifestation of one aspect of the universal nature of
spirit.

The continuity of the idealist tradition may be illustrated
by comparing Plato and Kant, two thinkers who are often
by superficial students of philosophy supposed to be so far
apart that the word idealist is not fittingly applied to both.
Both begin with the conception of the soul as self-active,
creative. Socrates is only interested in fertile, creative minds.
With the barren, the unthinking, he can do nothing but send
them off to Prodicus or some other "inspired Sophist" to
be pumped full of sham wisdom. Truth is not truth for you
until you have created it for yourself. The most fundamental
difference is the method of approach. Plato, like a true
Greek, is object-minded. He looks out rather than in, but
is led by inevitable steps to the interpretation of the real
world as the world that reason makes. Kant, a true modern,
begins with the subject, the knower, but, in order to inter-
pret him is led by inevitable steps to interpret the known
world in objective, realistic, fashion. The clearest statement
of Plato's idealism is found in the sixth and seventh books
of the Republic. There are four degrees of reality, and four
corresponding stages of knowledge: shadows (guesswork),
things of sense (opinion), mathematical or scientific truths
(discursive reasoning), and ideas or philosophic vision (wis-
dom). The first pair taken together comprise "things that
come and go," i.e., transient realities; the second pair, things
that abide, permanent realities. But it is clear from the
interpretation given that there is no absolute separation of
these groups. One and the same object may appear in all
four divisions. It depends on the degree of knowledge at-
tained. Knowing consists in fixing the object in an ever-
enlarging setting. The thing, anything you please, is what it
is experienced and known as. Things are unstable and un-

38 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

real in proportion to our ignorance. All of us live part of
the time in the shadow world, in a world of unrealities, giv-
ing the prize to the best guesser of the shadow that is coming
next. Often we rise to the "thing" view, occasionally to
scientific truth, rarely, if ever, to that completed insight
which is our goal and guiding principle. That vision attained,
we should see things as they truly are in the light of the
"idea of the good," and find in it the source both of truth
and of reality. The real world is the world that reason
makes, starting from the confused facts of sense.

The activity of the soul Plato represents (again because he
is object-minded) as desire, whose true object is the whole,
the perfect, the complete. "The fiend that us harries is love
of the best." In knowledge, it is desire for completed wis-
dom, vision in the light of the whole. But this same activity
expresses itself in passion (eros). And there are gradations
in the love bond corresponding to the stages in the develop-
ment of knowledge, from the shadow world of brutish crav-
ing where there is no reverence for the object of desire up
to the ideal, where alone true beauty is found, and "the
better part of the soul is victorious" leading to "an ordered
life and to philosophy." It is beauty that "fills the soul
with warmth and relieves it of the rigidity that had kept
its wings from growing." The quest of the soul is like the
Faust quest for the experience to which he could say "wr-
weile dock du bist so shon" but with this difference, that
it is not enjoyment that the soul seeks, but creation, "pos-
session and birth in beauty absolute."

Again in the will, the "spirited element," under the
guidance of reason, the soul is seeking to create the perfect,
the completely integrated life. This is the "royal art" of
justice. All the activities of the soul are good when they
function in cooperation for the welfare of the whole; any
one is bad when it seeks its own interest at the expense of
the rest. But since man cannot live alone the "royal art of
justice" finds its fullest expression in the social order, in the
ideal, and only real, state, where each is performing the task
for which he is best fitted in the interest of the whole.

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 39

There is an element of mysticism in Plato's idealism.
One lives always ahead of the actual, molding the actual in
conformity with the ideal, and there is a sense in which one
is even now at the goal that one is seeking.

When we turn to Kant certain striking contrasts are in-
deed evident. The mysticism is lacking, though there are
not wanting hints that point in that direction, especially in
the Critique of Judgment. And the exuberance of Plato's
imagination in describing the gradations of the love bond
would make the austere and thrifty old Konigsberg bachelor
blush to the roots of his old gray wig. This was something
he never could understand and probably a case for the
censor. But when we turn to their ethical interpretations
these two men have more in common than is generally
supposed. To be sure, the puritan in Kant led him to make
central the concept of duty, a word not found in Plato's
vocabulary, and to regard the pure will, and not desire, as
the true measure of moral value. It is, however, just this
that makes Kant's moral law so formal that it is all but im-
possible to translate it into precepts applicable in the de-
termination of concrete moral issues. But Plato distin-t
guishes sharply between what one may think one desires,
and what one really desires. The real desire is for the com-
plete good, and this is just a more concrete interpretation
of the Kantian good will. Moreover Kant himself finds that
in the conception of the complete good virtue and happiness
are conjoined. And the Platonic conception of the ideal
(and real) state from which selfishness, the desire for self-
aggrandizement at the expense of others, has been com-
pletely eliminated, is in effect just a more concrete picture
of the Kantian Kingdom of Ends.

But it is in the theoretical region that the fundamental
agreement is most striking. Even the fourfold division of
the line representing stages of knowledge and degrees of
reality finds a parallel in the Critique. There is first the
"raw manifold of sense perception," corresponding to
the shadow world, where thought is at a minimum; then
the world of things dated and placed, and named; then the

40 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

same world as interpreted by the principles of science, and
finally the same world unified through the ideals of reason.

But Kant's point of approach is from the subject, the
knower, as active, creative, and the form of his problem is
how can man with just his human categories and human
fashions of thinking determine the nature of real objects;
and what must we mean by objects that can be so deter-
mined. This brings us at once to the problem of the cate-
gories. Plato had, indeed, in one of the later dialogues recog-
nized this problem, but apparently he did not make much
of it. Aristotle gives us a table of ten categories, the so-
called predicaments, which is an attempt to discover the
points of view implicit in significant predication, in the
definite determination of an object. It may be described
as the first attempt to discover the logic underlying gram-
mar. Kant attempts to discover the points of view implicit,
not in the determination of an object considered by itself,
but in the determination of an object in its relation to all
other objects of possible experience. In other words, it is an
attempt to discover the logic underlying science.

Now if the mind is active, creative, in knowing, it follows
of necessity that its activity must have its own dependable
structure, must function in definite ways, else would all be
confusion, no mind at one with itself, and no coherent or
objective world. The categories are just the structure of
self-active reason, but, being such, they are also structural
in the world that reason knows, for it is reason's world.
Growth in the unity of self-consciousness runs pari passu
with growth in knowledge of an objective world. Should
one doubt one's sanity the last thing to do would be to look
within. One must look out, link fact to fact in the world of
experience and in discovering its unity recover one's own.
The transcendental ego is not another ego, but my own.
The world of nature is both dependent and independent;
dependent on the universal knower, but independent of just
this finite and most imperfect knower; except insofar as
through his particular center of activity in the space-time
order, that is, his body, he can effect changes in its history.

CONTINUITY OF THE IDEALIST TRADITION 41

The soul discovers further what its nature is in the uni-
fied world of science that it constructs from the fragments of
experience; as also in creative art, and in righteous living,
in living the integrated life, individual and social.

The physical world is, and can be, understood only in
terms of experience and possible experience. This does not
mean that it is made up of the sum of our several expe-
riences. It is infinitely more than that. It contains in-
numerable facts that no one has experienced or ever will.
There is a single realm of experience, and our individual
experiences have their being therein. My experience fixed
in its place in the space-time and in the causal order is no
more mine than thine, though it may mean many things
to me that it does not to you because of the different pri-
vate context into which it is received, for, for each of us
life is, after all, a fresh adventure.

\\When I perceive an object, yonder table, for example,
I do not perceive some shadowy copy, in my mind or in my
brain, of an existent object. It is the existent object itself in
the common world that I am directly and immediately con-
scious of, for the knower is on the object as well as the sub-
ject side of the subject-object relation, as Kant clearly saw.
Subject and object, inner and outer, are strictly correlative.
Now, if it is fatal to regard these as separate and then to
draw the object into the subject, it is equally fatal, having
once separated them, to draw the subject into the object.
If the former gives solipsism, the latter may be said to give
splistism, or what Professor Lovejoy has called "solipsism
of the object." Thus a realistic interpretation of nature is
not only consistent with, but demanded by idealism.

But because the knower always views the world from his
particular station therein, his body, there is a foreground of
more or less distinct experiences, and a background that
fades away into the distance Yet the background is one
and continuous with the foreground, and every whit as real,
and I can penetrate that hidden background and discover
what it contains just insofar as I find indications in the fore-
ground, in facts that I can only weave into the contexture

42 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

of unified experience by inferring the reality of such un-
experienced things.

I have illustrated the continuity of the idealist tradition
by comparing Plato and Kant, but might equally well have
taken almost any of the other great idealists, such as Leib-
niz, Ward and Howison, Hegel and Royce, Green and Bosan-
quet. It would be more difficult, I confess, to fit Bradley
into this picture, and yet perhaps not wholly impossible.

In what has been said above there has been no intention
to disparage logic and technique, or to minimize the im-
portance of the differences that separate idealists, or to
make light of the issues that are still in dispute. But it is
well, once in a while, to overlook these things and to at-
tempt to describe the common bond that brings idealists
together in a single fold. If we fought less we might under-
stand more, and more hopefully cooperate in constructive
effort.

IV

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN
ROYCE AND OTHERS

WILLIAM ERNEST HOCKING
Harvard University

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE
AND OTHERS

William Ernest Hocking
I

In his last course of lectures on metaphysics, that of the
year 1915-16, Josiah Royce brings forward the ontological
argument as containing in some form the central doctrine
of idealism. In his lecture of February 29, 1916, he said:

Sooner or later, if you are going to take any position about meta-
physical questions, you find it necessary to face this matter. There is
no more important issue between realism and idealism than this. I
don't think you get a fair view of idealism if you think of its issue with
realism merely in terms of Professor Perry's egocentric predicament.
It is not the most important feature of idealism that it appears to be
committed to an insistence . . . that the being of things, whether of
God or man or the physical world, is a being in the mind of some thinker.
I ... The really most important feature is exactly the issue here con-
i cerned: does the existence of anything make any difference to its exist-
ence? is it any part of the essence of a thing that it exists? *

During the course of these lectures, he repeatedly recurs to
this theme, the misconception of idealism involved in Pro-
fessor Perry's exposition with its emphasis on the egocentric
predicament; the fact that idealistic metaphysics, like all
metaphysics, is concerned with the nature of the objective
world, the world of reality; that any approach to reality,
however completely it moves in the realm of objects, however
"realistic'' if you like, if it is capable of reaching the truth
at all, will bring the thinker to the result that the world of
the reals is a world of spirit. Royce himself stood for no
one way of reaching his result: indeed, this last course of

1 By remarkable good fortune two students in this course (Philosophy 9) during this year
took fairly full stenographic notes. Transcriptions from these notes are deposited in the
libraries of Harvard and of the University of California at Los Angeles.

45

46 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

lectures was divided into two parts, which were entitled
"The social approach" and "The logical approach," in
neither of which is there any trace of that subjectivity sug-
gested by the phrase, "The world is my representation." To
emphasize this fact, he makes his "logical approach" by
way of Santayana.

Santay ana's thought is resolutely objective with that
well-limned outline which comes from a carefully personal
choice of lighting. His discriminations readily appear as
persuasively final partitions among the reals; it appears
both ungracious and impious for man to unite what Mr. San-
tayana has put asunder. It is this adventitious clarity of
Santayana which makes him an excellent text from which
to initiate any discussion of the radical relations of essence
and existence. Royce lights for this purpose upon one of
his charming obiter dicta, put out in the course of a paper on
"Some Meanings of the Word 'Is.'" l The verb "to be"
as copula, says Santayana, has two meanings which belong
purely to the realm of essence, viz., identity and property.
"A is A," "business is business," "This is Odysseus" exem-
plify the first use : " Wine is red " the second. This same word
is used, however, to express something quite different, namely,
existence. Here Santayana takes pains to exhibit the com-
plete disparity between this and the prior meanings which
language perversely conveys by this same most-used word.

Existence adds no new character to the essence it hypostatizes, since
the essence of any existing thing is its full character; but the hypos-
tasis is temporal and caught in a mesh of natural relations to which the
essence is impervious. . . . Existence exhibits things in a situation and
with an emphasis (shock?) which their mere essence could never have
had. Things generate one another, and their flux, by catching the dye
now of one essence and now of another, becomes varied and describable.
Something is, in the sense of exists, when it figures in this changeful and
selective illustration of essences. . . . (Existence has to be determined
by exploration; it) can never be determined by analyzing the essence of
what is said to exist.

Nothing could be clearer; Kant's "existence (Sein) is evi-
dently no real predicate" 2 becomes "existence adds no new

1 Journal of Philosophy, February 4, 1915. * K a r V 2 Aufl., 626.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 47

character, since the essence of anything is its full character";
and with this admirably adroit phrasing of the case, the
ontological argument appears, as Santayana later terms it,
"an obvious fallacy."

In expounding this passage, Royce merely raises the ques-
tion whether a distinction so evident can remain an absolute
gulf, without "mediation"; perhaps, he suggests, "to under-
stand the distinction between essence and existence means
to find a certain inadequacy in it." For how could we
understand that essence is not existence without knowing
what we mean by existence? And to find a meaning for
existence, is this not to find its essence? I interpose these
questions, which do not appear in the report of Royce's
lecture; for they seem to convey the situation which Royce
then designates by the remark, "Here Santayana relieves
one of mere polemic." For his success in making the distinc-
tion between existence and essence an understood distinction,
is the substance of his failure. Essence, which was to remain
on one side of the gulf, appears on both sides!

With this suggestion of Royce's I take leave for the mo-
ment of his argument. It is characteristic of contemporary
realistic thinkers to adopt in some form or other Santayana's
distinction between the realm of essence and the realm of
existence. The former is an infinite world of eternal and
changeless subsistence, in which each essence is not only
eternally self-identical but also eternally distinct from every
other essence. The latter is a world of flux and causal con-
nection, a world of variety but of mutual invadedness, a
world of passing spatial-temporal events. There is however
this unsymmetry in the relation; the essences are not per-
turbed by the existences, they are "impervious" to these
natural relations; but the existences are visited by the
essences, as mortals who cannot pass into heaven are never-
theless visited by the angels, they "catch the dye" now of
one essence, now of another. Perhaps it would be more ac-
curate to say not "they" but the web of becoming catches
the varying dyes, and by this impregnation the existences
are constituted. For after all, when a "thing" exists, it is a

48 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

group of essences that has become momentarily I will not
say entangled in the flux, but exemplified there. Realism
still labors with the problem of Plato, what is meant by
this exemplification, this "participation," this dye-catching
process? No one suggests that the process is accidental, or
managed by some deus ex machina: it is assumed to be a
regular character of the cosmos. And this, without further
ado, would imply that essences and existences, so far from
being disparate types of entity, have a natural adjustment
and mutual reference.

II

Now the ontological argument, in its traditional forms,
undertakes to define a bridge between essence and existence;
but only in a special case, that of the essence of God. The
idea of God, it avers, is peculiar in this, that its essence con-
tains the essence of existence, that essence which neo-realism
would feign non-extant, while giving it careful definition.
Because of this peculiarity, it cannot be the idea of a non-
existing thing. To suppose it so, to suppose it to have mere
esse in iniellectu, as may well be the case with every concept
of imagination, would be to admit the contradiction, "My
idea of the real may possibly be my idea of a non-real." It
becomes a case of the identity of essences, and of my ability
to know what my own essences mean.

Two things are evident at once. First, that this argument
does not cover the whole scope of the traffic between essence
and existence, as we have just described it. Either the prop-
erty of becoming existent, when the appropriate signal is
given from the heart of the flux, is common to all the possible
essences, or else there is a general principle of ingerence,
which manages the emergence in the flux of now this and
now that essence. It is possible to extend the conception of
God, so that God includes this general principle of ingerence.
It may be possible, with Professor Whitehead, to identify
I God with the principle of ingerence alone (ingression, reali-
zation, concretion). But this aspect of God's nature was not
explicit in the minds of St. Anselm and his followers. In

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 49

their theological language they might have commented that
this function of passage from the ideal to the actual realm
was allocated to the Second Person of the Trinity; and per-
haps that a special form of the argument might be stated
for that Person. Since if one's idea of the "Word becoming
flesh" were supposed to be a "mere idea," it would not
refer to that which it does in fact mean, the general agency
or principle by which eternally perfect essences are per-
petually being born into the world of becoming and perish-
ing, but without surrendering their immortal nature. In
any case, they were not attempting in their ontological argu-
ment to deal with the whole problem of the relation between
essence and existence.

In the second place, it is evident that the present state-
ment of the argument does not correspond precisely with
any traditional form. Anselm does not say of God's essence
that it includes the essence of existence: he says simply that
it is the idea of "the greatest," "aliquid, quo nihil majus
cogitari possit"; and he argues that by logical necessity, this
"greatest" must include objective as well as subjective
being. In his reply to Gaunilo he changes his ground: God
is defined not as "the greatest," but as "the necessary"
being. And if we mean by necessary being, an essence
such that it cannot help existing, the definition begs the
question: it is requisite that the essence be alleged in other
terms if the argument is to avoid circularity. If there
is any necessary being, that being surely exists. But is
there ?

Here the formulation of Spinoza and one of the formula-
tions of Descartes mark a distinct advance in cogency by
making an advance in metaphysical perception. It is no
longer the "greatest" that must exist, it is the "perfect."
And with the radical premise that it is necessary to assign
a reason for non-existence as well as for existence, Spinoza
isssues the bold doctrine that nothing can prevent a good
thing from coming into existence except a better thing:
it is the inherent nature of the valuable to realize itself.
With this premise, the perfect would necessarily be without

SO CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

effective opposition in the supermundane struggle for exist-
ence: if the good and only the good tends to be, the perfect
necessarily is.

It would be inviting to inquire at this point whether the
concept of "the perfect," or of "the most perfect," is a true
essence, or only a pseudo-essence. I shall adopt however a
more technical line of comment, namely, that this advance
in cogency is gained by leaving the strict ground of the onto-
logical argument. It is not from the very essence of the
perfect that its being is seen: it is from the additional meta-
physical thesis restated in recent years by Mr. L. T. Hob-
house, that the only reason that can be alleged for exist-
ence is value.

The criticisms of Hume and of Kant were necessary, not
to demolish the argument, but to prepare the way for a
valid statement.

Ill

Hume is not interested in the ontological argument. It is
not for the sake of disposing of it that he reiterates his doc-
trine that all questions of existence are questions of fact. He
would approve Mr. Santayana's view; the proper method of
verifying existence is exploration. There can be no necessary
existence; for anything whatever can be supposed, without
contradiction, not to exist. If this is true, the ontological
argument is swept away; for whatever its form, it proposes,
at one point at least, to abandon empirical humility in re-
gard to existence: " This essence, we know a priori, is to be
found in the realm of the real."

Now Hume himself supplies a mode of reasoning from idea
to existence. For since all ideas, in his system, come either
from impressions or from derivations thereof, every underiv-
able idea evidences an impression, ergo an experience of its
object. A hippogriff is an ingeniously derived idea; no expe-
rience is implied: the idea of color, supposing it to be un-
derivable from other sense-impressions, evidences the ex-
perience and therefore the existence of color. It is precisely
because he rejects the possibility of innate ideas that he is

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 51

compelled to trace the essence in intellects, to the essence
in existentia or in re. There is for Hume no ingression of
essences into existence; there is an egression from existence
to essence, from impression to idea: in the moment of im-
pression, essence and existence are in contact; and because
of this origin, no essence is ever wholly mine, it bears
upon it a trait of reference to its source in experience, some-
times in the distinct form of memory. Thus every primary and
underivable essence may be said to be twofold; itself plus
an accent in turn an essence denoting "My original is or
was in existence." To put it otherwise, the essence, as
merely in intellect!*, is known as an abstraction: one is
always safe in arguing from a primary essence to an ex-
istence via an experience! Thus in place of a single a
priori argument from essence to existence, Hume presents
us in effect with an undetermined plurality of such argu-
ments a posteriori.

In contrast with Hume, Kant has a lively interest in the
ontological argument. He begins by accepting it (Nova
Dilucidatio, II, vii); he continues by distinguishing two
forms, of which he accepts one and rejects one (Einzig
mogliche Beweisgrund, III); he ends by rejecting one carte-
sian form, without reference to the form he has earlier judged
valid, and leaves this sole negative impression on the minds
of posterity. And this famous refutation, which to those
who are satisfied with the hundred-dollar illustration is con-
clusive, is based upon the erroneous ground that existence
is in no case a predicate.

But like Hume, Kant replaces the ontological argument
by a series of inferences from essence to existence, though of a
far more intimate and inescapable sort than Hume's.

The proper evidence for the existence of a particular
thing Kant would say, quite in agreement with Hume, is
discovery, Wahrnehmung, together with inferences from
what we observe, along the lines of the known laws of na-
ture. But the evidence for the existence of things-in-general
is of another sort. The shock of givenness belongs to the
crude stuff of experience; but if one asks what is experienced,

52 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

one has to answer in terms of essences some of which expe-
rience cannot furnish, nor yet evade. The existent is not
an "object" until it is formed according to the categories;
and the categories are so many essences, conditions of the
possibility of any experience at all, and yet integral constitu-
ents of existing things, and of the order of nature in which
things are found.

To generalize somewhat the Kantian doctrine, experience
cannot present itself, the realm of existence cannot tell its
own tale, without our cooperation. It comes as a dumb
stuff which requires to be interpreted; we must help it up
into meaning by supplying it with a language. It cannot
resist the categories we supply, for it has no others; it cannot
belie them, for in order to reject or deny, it must first be-
come vocal. On the other hand, we cannot change "the
facts"; our help, rendered to the voiceless, cannot exceed
the minimum requisite to lend it the power of assertion.
The categories are the elements of this minimal language.
Whatever these categories may turn out to be, whether the
Kantian list or some other, we may say of these essences that
they "exist," that is, they characterize existence, if there
is any existence at all. They cannot be in intellectu without
being also in re.

Thus, on Kantian grounds, one would be prepared to
erect an ontological argument for the existence of space, of
time, of the various categories of quantity and quality, of
substance, of causality, of the reciprocal interplay of events
in nature. And it lay within the scheme of Kant's philosophy,
though he failed to explore the psychological and social
categories, to inquire whether there were here also interpre-
tative essences as of selfhood or of deity, which the stuff of
experience demanded in order that it should become a sig-
nificant realm of existence.

Much of Santayana's language is Kantian; but Kant
could never wittingly have subscribed to Santayana's easy
and complete severance between essence and existence, for
the whole labor of the deduction of the categories is but a
majestic attempt to unravel the essence of existence.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 53

IV

We are now prepared to return to Royce's argument with
a better appreciation of its setting. It is concerned, not pri-
marily with the proof of the existence of God, but with the
general argument from essence to existence. For "it is an
essential feature of idealism (a difficult thesis, and not the
one most commonly made explicit) that there is a connec-
tion between essence and reality, such as Santayana doesn't
recognize."

Royce appreciates to the full the plausibility of the ordi-
nary refutation of Anselm, and characteristically supplies
certain apt illustrations of his own.

Whoever fills out a check writes out the essence of the thing so far
as he can express it. The problem of the contrast between essence and
existence is closely analogous to the problem about the relation between
the check and the account. ... If it were possible to define the greatest
possible amount that one could write out on a check, that would hardly
guarantee that the check would be honored. . . . The ontological argu-
ment appears to have this fundamental absurdity about it, and has been
repeatedly thrown out as utterly insignificant, yet it has a fashion of
returning.

He adds an incident which had remained in his memory as
further illustrating the absurdity in question. A Maine
farmer, having been induced to exchange his greenbacks for
counterfeit gold, remarked pathetically "I thought gold
was so precious that it couldn't be counterfeited": wherever
you had the essence you must, in so precious a metal, have
the existence also! But

Over against these obvious objections, we are using something like
the ontological proof all the time. Aren't you using at the moment
something like an ontological argument for supposing that there is a real
world, and answering the question why there isn't rather nothing at all?
You reply that something has to exist . . . you know there is a world
from the nature of the case, from the very definition of the world.

Likewise with the time categories, the past, the future,
why not regard them as "all some sort of dream"? Any
particular memory may be in error, any particular historical
proposition false, any particular expectation misleading.

54 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

Even the results of scientific induction, as they apply to the
future, are merely probable. Nevertheless, past and future
must have some reality: we cannot be mistaken in thinking
there was a past and will be a future, though we have at
hand only their essences. "If the question arises, 'Why
anything at all in the place where tomorrow will be if it
comes? why not suppose that there is nothing whatever
there?' your answer is that somehow the nature of the case
seems to forbid this. It is of the essence of the past that it
was; it is of the essence of the future that it will be/'

The same is to be said of those general principles of the
structure of existence which lie at the basis of induction.
There is a "coherence of past and present which we verify
neither in the past nor in the present, but only by interpret-
ing our relations to a past and a present." Prior to discover-
ing the particular laws of nature we believe in the lawfulness
of nature: the conception of a law, its essence as a universal,
removes it from the possibility of direct observation; one
cannot by the method of "exploration" determine whether
a law, or law, exists in the world. It lies in the nature of a
universal that it cannot be discovered by inspection, by
Wahrnehmung; nevertheless the realm of existence cannot
be defined without reference to law. It belongs to the essence
of law to form an element in existence.

Santayana's method of learning of existence is "only by
exploration, through experience or evidence, or the flux of
nature." By "evidence" we extend our knowledge beyond
the limit of immediate perception: this is Kant's method
of tracing outward from present Wahrnehmungen along the
lines of natural sequence. 1 Royce illustrates:

You go out doors in the morning and see in the snow the foot-tracks
of a human being, a cat, dog or whatever it is, and thereupon you make
an existential judgment: A cat or dog or man has been finding its or his
way through the snow. . . . Owing to the laws of nature or to something
known about the world, it is the essence of foot-tracks to imply, not the
existence of foot-tracks, but the existence of some animal adequate to
make them. 2

1 K d r V, Postulate dcs cmpirischtn Denkens uebcrhaupt, 2 Aufl., 273.
9 Lecture of March 7, 1916.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 55

It is not the particular meaning of the footprints, but the
underlying basis of all such inferences, namely, this relational
form which we assume; and to say that we assume rather
than perceive it is to give it a primary status as essence, but
as an essence which we so spontaneously refer to existence
that we fail to observe that we are doing so.

My whole point is this: Whenever one existent is supposed to give
you ground for inferring another existent, then the ontological proof is
used, in so far as this relational system, of which the evidence and that
of which it is the evidence form parts, is a system such that the world
cannot but contain it. 1

Royce designates this a "relational form of the ontological
proof."

In this connection Royce makes effective use of his doc-
trine that individuals are not objects of direct perception.
One is certain, let us say, that his brother is a part of the
world of existence; his evidence is that he has seen him this
morning. In presence of the skeptical questions regarding
the possibility of absolute identification, one is driven to
one's conviction of the uniqueness of the personal quality of
the brother.

If common sense is asked, But what evidence have you that this is
your brother and not merely somebody who looks like him? you would
have to answer, The evidence I have certainly goes beyond experience:
this is very like my brother, and there cant be anybody else who looks
so like my brother. . . .

Whoever says that, concludes . . . that there is some essence or
nature such that the world cannot give it any embodiment unless an
individual embodiment, and that the world does give it this individual
embodiment. 2

In brief, there is here, and in all personal relations a union,
of observation with belief a continuous use, in interpreting
experience, of a conception of personality which is not de-
rived from existent facts, but contributed to them. "Who-
ever appeals to evidence for existence is using some form of
the ontological proof."
There are dogmas about existence which can have no

1 Lecture of March 7, 1916. f Lecture of March 2, 1016.

56 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

support at all unless by an ontological argument, as that
the world of existents consists of individual entities. The
realistic tendency to place the realm of essence apart from
the realm of existence often goes with a tendency to take it
as "inevitably necessary" that all existents shall be indi-
viduals. What is the basis of the view of the nominalist,
who rejects the existence of universals "as a matter of com-
mon sense"? It is certainly not an exhaustive enumeration
of particulars! He has not encountered "courage" nor
"leoninity" nor "the community" in the flesh: but it is
not on account of this merely negative aspect of experience
that he issues his denial. It is on account of a preliminary
assurance of what the world must be like, an essence which
must be existent. Hence

Nominalism is a doctrine depending on its own form of the ontological
proof. The only ground which you can give for the assertion that this
world consists of individual beings depends on saying it couldn't be
otherwise; it is of the essence of existence that the existents should be
individual. The world of the Platonic ideas may have its own shadow
of reality, but the world of existents must consist of individuals . . .
because it is of the essence of an existent to be individual. 1

Without attributing this sort of nominalism to Santayana,
Royce finds that

Santayana gives you his own carefully shaded version of the ontologi-
cal proof: "It is idle to say that a thing exists or does not exist if we do
not say when or where." That is, you couldn't mean anything unless
you were ready to add the time and place. This is to say something
about the whatness of the that: nothing can exist unless its space and
time have this determinate character . . . because it is the nature of
existence to reject existents not determinate by time and space. 2

Royce has thus given good account of his view that "the
ontological proof underlies all your notions of all reality,"
even to the extent that its severest critics unwittingly em-
ploy it. It is the central problem of metaphysics whether
reality is such that we can understand it. Those who make
a clean break between essence and existence impose a final
negative at the outset. Anselm's route is indeed not tenable:

1 Lecture of March 9, 1916. * Ibid.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 57

You cannot get the ontological proof to apply to the divine being in
Anselm's way, nor to the counterfeit gold; but unless there is somewhere
an ontologicai proof which holds, then indeed we have no logical proof
for any existence, and there need be no real world at all. 1

Royce regards this result as confirming an idealistic view of
the world:

Giving the realistic doctrine of Santayana its fullest scope, it forced
upon us a problem as to what instances of reality are determined by
the nature of the essences. ... It was not by retiring from Santa-
y ana's clear and cool and objective view of the world into some mystery
of romantic consideration of our own inner states of mind that we were
led to idealism. It was by endeavoring to find out what evidence there
could be for asserting the existence of anything. If there is any such
evidence, there is a what such that in a certain context it demands . . .
existence. 2

The direct bearing of this discussion on idealism remains, in
these lectures, suggested rather than fully stated; but the
purport is clear. The world of existence is a world whose
character is ascertained by a process of "interpretation,"
whose whole concern is with essences: that which distin-
guishes existence from essence, the actual from the merely
ideal, turns out to be itself ideal. The object is shown to be
not subjective, God forbid but shot through with catego-
rial essences: to those which Kant mentions, Royce adds
certain categories from the personal and social order. To be
real is to fulfill certain rational purposes.

There are important differences between the positions
of Royce and of Kant on this point. For Kant it is only a
part of the objectivity of the object that is constituted by
the categories: there remains the brute givenness of the
material of experience. 3 Royce implies that the entire
fabric of the object is derived from the world of the essences.
He does not use the word "category" in this connection; nor
does he use the freer terms "hypothesis," "postulate." The
word "interpretation," which he prefers, suggests a tenta-

1 Lecture of March 7, 1916.
1 Lecture of May 25, 1916.

8 " Die Wahrnehmung aber, die den Stoff zum Begriff hergiebt, 1st der einzige Character
der Wirklichkeit." K d r V 2 Aufl., 272.

58 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN 'AMERICA

tive rather than a necessary essence; since it is in general
true of an interpretation that it- admits a re-interpretation.
Nevertheless, it is clear that Royce aims to establish such
a relation between certain essences and the existents that
one may say, If there is any world at all, it must be of this
sort, an element of invariance in our interpretation of the
world for which the term category would be appropriate.
And he aims also to eliminate in the end that "if" which
distinguishes his ontological arguments from the classical
form; for he holds that there can be in the end no "if" about
the existence of the world. The essence, world, is such that
it must exist.

Let us briefly estimate the effect of Royce's discussion.

Royce has established his general thesis that there is a
close connection between essence and existence. The central
element of logical force in his discussion is the dialectical
showing that whoever undertakes to make a rational dis-
tinction between essence and existence unites them, pre-
cisely in proportion to the vigor and definition of his thought.
Existence, for such a thinker, must be thought, and thus
taken up into essence.

Royce has also fairly disposed of the assumption that
idealism is wrapped up in egocentricity. The ontological
argument is the fit weapon for this work; for the ontological
argument is precisely the escape from egocentricity. It is the
demonstration of the essence or essences which cannot be
in the mind without being also in the thing. If there is any
answer to solipsism on the logical plane, its kernel will be
found in what the ontological argument essays to state. It
thus deserves the particular attention of the realistic school;
for in their characteristic assurance that in knowledge we
are dealing with a world "outside of the self," they are
either relying dogmatically on natural intuition, or else on
a bit of submerged logic which it is greatly to their interest to
bring forward. The rifts in the realistic school indicate the
pertinence of this comment.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 59

Instead of an egocentric idealism, Royce presents a logo-
centric idealism. Nothing- can escape the net of essence;
nothing which can enter into experience or thought can evade
the fate of being known as essence.

Royce has no intention of ignoring the value of the actual
distinction between essence and existence: he distinguishes
throughout between the "conceptual essences" which may
be and commonly are in intellects, without being in re from
those essences (which I have called categorial) which must
also be in re.

Of these categorial essences, Royce does not undertake
to demonstrate severally their necessary objectivity. His
appeal here is to individual acknowledgment: we are, in-
deed, "using an ontological argument all the time." Time
we regard as such that "in the nature of the case it must be
true of existence." If we undertake to defend this habit of
reference in any special case, we are reminded that the nom-
inalist is presented as using the same form of objective
attribution for his view that the world of existence must
consist of individuals, and as using it erroneously. For the
completion of the argument there would be required either
a separate showing for each of the categories that its essence
is such that it cannot not be, or else a deduction of the cate-
gories from a single essence which has this demonstrable
objectivity. This logical completion lies beyond the scope
of Royce's effort in these lectures. 1 He here confines himself
to the general thesis, existence has an essence, and to its
ample exemplification.

It is perhaps an incident of this fruitful generalization of
the ontological argument that the logical keystone of the
arch should have been assumed rather than rendered salient.
Let us now consider for ourselves the relation between these
general connections of essence and existence and the central
motif of the ontological argument.

1 His essay on " Principles of Logic " in Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science indicates
that his thought would take the latter direction; perhaps appealing to the conception of
"order" as the essence which most fundamentally must characterize existence.

60 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

VI

The field of eventual connection between essence and
existence is twofold: the passing over of existence into
essence and the passing over of essence into existence.

1. There is nothing in experience which cannot be taken
up into essence. Insofar as existence appears in experience,
this proposition holds for existence also.

We are obviously dealing here with the processes of re-
tention and analysis which form the basis of Hume's system
as a psychological picture. Its logical substratum is the
postulate, whatever is experiencable is thinkable.

But psychology here gives an admonition to logic in re-
quiring us to allow for a " residuum" which is not "think-
able" in the usual way of conceptual analysis. It is this
kernel of unformed "stuff," the "given," which thinkers
from Plato and Aristotle to Kant, and to Santayana, have
attempted to preserve as diverse from the achieved catego-
rial essences. This residuum continues to give off "charac-
ters" as the history of speculation proceeds, which suggests
that it may ultimately be resolved into essences; but this
resolution has not been effected. Spencer's discrimination of
"vivid" from "faint" manifestations, Santayana's "em-
phasis" and "shock," and the like, attempt to give it a
characterization in terms of energy. It has something to do
with an external "activity" to which we are "passive" or
"receptive." It has something to do with our ontological
dependence, our being-made from moment to moment in
what we call "experience." It has much to do with that im-
position of a not-self upon the self, conveyed by the term
"experience," which implies a cognitive reaching out of self
into the not-self. It occasions, and enters into, the meaning
of the essence "not-self," which is one of the fundamental
essences.

2. There is nothing in essence, so far as it is apprehended
by mind, which does not tend toward existence. It belongs
to the essence of the world of apprehended essences to have
a nisus toward existence. This aspect of the connection be-

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 6l

tween essence and existence is prominent in Spinoza and in
Hegel. Its anthropological aspect is will: its logical sub-
stratum is the postulate, Whatever is desirable is possible
(I do not say realizable); the existence of desire is itself a
highly general union of essence and existence.

Hegel is especially interested in what we might call this
active version of the ontological relationship. He first at-
tributes to the Notion (Begriff) a self-objectifying character.
When we conceive Begriff as a merely subjective essence, we
at the same time conceive something more complete, namely,
the embodied Begriff: this is to appreciate, as it were, the
tug of the Begriff toward existence. Hegel, following his
habit of giving in his language a quasi-personal life to his
logical characters, has it that "Begriff differentiates itself
from Sein, and sublates the difference between them." Now
if the self can be regarded as a focus of Begriffe, the will
may be regarded as a resultant of their several tendencies
to being: for according to Hegel, life is of the same stuff as
Begriff, and the "soul" is not something which we merely
have or make, it is our grasp of a universal process. Hence,
"No man is at peace with his pure Selfhood; that self-being
must give itself Existence; the activity of Begriff is not
merely dialectic, it is also (in the field of anthropology) im-
pulse." When we thus survey the processes of the world, we
see that

There is nothing of which everything is so Beispiel as the overcoming
of this opposition between subjective and objective. 1

When Kant said that we cannot claw out the Sein from the
Begriff he was thinking, Hegel remarks, not of Begriffe at
all, but of finite conceptions such as we deliberately set off
from actuality.

Apart from Hegel's effortful and figurative language, it
is clear that he has in mind an actual trait of the interplay
between essence and existence. This interplay is circular.
In perception we take outer objects up into essence. If we
are interested in them, we improve our concepts until we

1 Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God.

62 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

have the "real essence" of the thing. The test of having this
conceptual mastery is that we can make or reproduce the
object; we cannot be sure of the adequacy of our essence
until we can thus realize it in existence.

Existence, then, is to be conceived, inter alia, as the field
for the realization of essence. It is at least possible that
"existence" has no other meaning: its distinctive character
is entirely contained in the relation "realization of": our
problem then centers in the nature of this relation.

VII

Thus these generalizations again lead us to look to the
center of the traffic between existence and essence. For the
scholastics, this center was the being of God : for Descartes
and Malebranche it was the necessary objectivity of the
God-idea that guaranteed the objectivity of the rest of our
experience, which objectivity has suddenly fallen into sus-
picion. Descartes particularly needed an ontological argu-
ment of some kind as a rescue from the artificial subjectivism
which his own meditations had imposed on the whole field
of experience. In losing sight for the moment of the scholastic
interest in the being of God, we have run the danger of miss-
ing the unity which that interest confers on the whole prob-
lem. And in his wholly justified concern for showing the
relative unimportance of the egocentric predicament for
the case of idealism, Royce, I am inclined to think, unduly
subordinated the element of truth in the Cartesian insight
which is essential to the point of the ontological argument.

Normally speaking, it is in our own experience that we
"realize" our desires; i.e., "realization" is something which
happens to essences of ours within experience. If the ques-
tion arises whether our experience is "real," we must counter
with the question, What is our standard of reality? If you
doubt whether experience provides that standard, are you
assuming that the standard itself is a wholly a prior essence?
Then are you yourself assuming an essence of such sort that
it must be realized? These are the questions which lead us
to the center of the ontological problem, and which are

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 63

rendered inescapable by the tremendous force of the Car-
tesian subjective reflection.

In this respect Hegel is thoroughly justified when in his
Lectures on the History of Philosophy he discusses the onto-
logical argument in immediate connection with Descartes'
"I think; I exist," itself an assertion of a union between
essence and existence.

Das "Ich denke" enthalt unmittelbar mem Sein: dies, sagt Carte-
sius, ist das absolute Fundament aller Philosophic. Die Bestimmung
des Seins ist in meinem Ich. When I say "I," I am saying implicitly
what I mean by Being.

For at least a part of what I mean by Being, he elsewhere
asserts, is "immediacy." Then, he continues,

Kant has objected that Being is not contained in Thinking, that it is
different from Thinking. That is true. But still they are inseparable,
constituting a single identity: their unity is not a prejudice to their
difference (nor their difference to their unity). The idea of God is an
idea of an idea (or subject) with which existence is bound up. The very
notion of existence is that of a negative to self-consciousness: neverthe-
less, not "out of thought," but the thought of the "out of thought."

The problem and its solution are bound up with self-conscious-
ness and the self-transcending habit of self-consciousness.

The inevitableness of this course of thought is confirmed
in an interesting way when a competent thinker, out of a
quite independent background, strays into this field of spec-
ulation. Mr. Eddington, to indicate the difference between
theoretical and experimental physics, is obliged to inquire
into the meaning of the terms "real," "existent," "actual."
"Actuality," he says,

is that distinctive property of the world A the world around us which
we study experimentally which is not possessed by the other worlds
which might have occurred consistently with all the laws of nature.
... It does not appear in the scheme of the theoretical physicist. . . .
The experimental physicist, for whom actuality is vitally important,
has to turn elsewhere, and he turns to consciousness. He simply accepts
[ as actual that which the mind recognizes as actual. 1

1 This phrasing is from Eddington's essay in Science, Religion and Reality, Joseph Need-
ham, editor. Similar doctrine will be found in The Nature of the Physical World. Quoted by
permission of The Macmillan Company, publishers.

64 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

According to Hegel and Eddington, then, the essence of
existence cannot be completely described without bringing
"immediacy" into the picture. Neither, I think, can it be
completely described without bringing in something very
opposite from immediacy. I can be only as actual as the
things I am at any time dealing with; I get my reality in
part from what is over against me. On the other hand,
nothing can be more real than the self: that which is over
against me gets its actuality from the fact that I am deal-
ing with it. Reality implies an intercourse between self and
not-self; it lies, as it were, on both sides of the line between
them. When I speak of "realizing" my self or my ideas, I
am lending the standard to the not-self: when I speak of
"realizing" the purport of an event, I am taking the stand-
ard of reality into my own world of meanings. The meaning
of reality involves this reciprocity: the other realizes itself
in me, in my essences; I realize myself in the other, in its
existences.

Let us recur to that "residuum" in the meaning of exist-
ence toward which, we said, we hold a truce of logical analy-
sis, and at the same time find a sense of personal dependence
as of something by which we are being made. This non-ego
is no doubt something which I apprehend : I have a thought
of the "out of thought"; it is something meant by me and
placed among my categories. But it is mere dogma to say
that this or any other category I may apply to it is imposed
by me, Kantian fashion, on a non-vocal stuff. Let us adopt a
radically opposite view, which, as I see it, experience re-
quires. Let us say that reality interprets itself; that the cate-
gories, the fundamental essences, are given with the stuff,
- the nature or essence of reality being revealed with the fact
of reality. There is no use grubbing for a dumb datum, as a
sort of inarticulate minimum of experience, as if all the in-
terpretation were a gift of the individual knower. Such
"contributions to the given," as the fate of Kantianism
shows, cannot escape the odor of subjectivism, even though
they constitute for us the very meaning of existence. Expe-
rience is of universals and not merely of the here-and-now.

THE ONTOLOGICAL ARGUMENT IN ROYCE 65

Which ones of the received essences are necessary we learn
as we distinguish within our propositions those existential
elements which experience can have no tendency to revise.
But at least this is necessary, that selfhood is not limited to
one side of the line between ego and non-ego in experience.
As with "reality," the entertaining of essences, which is
selfhood, is reciprocal.

Consider now that by the term God we shall mean, what-
ever else may come to belong to its essence, this reciprocal
of self, inseparable from self and from self-consciousness, the
external factor in a single reality which consists in the inter-
course of both. By the essence of God I here mean not pri-
marily "the infinite," "the perfect," nor merely "the real":
the ontological argument does not consist in the tautology.
The essence of "the real" is real. The ontological argument
is the answer to the question, May the idea of God be
merely subjective? That answer is, In forming the essence
* merely subjective" you have at the same time formed the
essence "not merely subjective" as in contrast thereto; and
"God" as essence belongs to the "not merely subjective."
Whatever artificiality there is in the argument hails entirely
from the artificiality of the question. The natural situation
may be stated thus: the essence of God must be real, because
it is an essence inseparable from my continuous conscious-
ness or experience of reality. 1

There is a phrase in one of Descartes' discussions of this
argument which reaches beyond any statement which he
developed: it is that the notion of the infinite precedes that
of the finite. The ontological argument has to do with thisj
question of logical precedence. The whole precedes in our
thought and in experience the two partial aspects of ego
and non-ego; the necessary precedes the possible, the prob-
able and the actual, a strand of consideration dwelt on by
Leibniz and the earlier Kant; the real, as self and other-self,
precedes the distinction of essence and existence. For that

1 It is a terminological error to regard the ontological argument as an argument that God
"exists." God does not exist as an object placed in space and time, in Santayana's third
sense. Both God and self are factors of reality which span the distinction between existence
and essence.

66 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

by which we distinguish essence and existence is more com-
pletely present and known than either. To be aware, as the
common man is aware, of the lack of finality in the mode of
being possessed by essence and by existence, is to possess
in a negative form the heart of the metaphysical problem.

V
ON THE MEANING-SITUATION

G. WATTS CUNNINGHAM
Cornell University

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION

G. Watts Cunningham

The notion of meaning is frightfully ambiguous, and yet
no term is more frequently used in discussion. It is indis-
pensable, despite its ambiguity. Particularly is it impor-
tant for philosophical discussion; not only must it be con-
tinuously employed in such discussion, but many issues in
philosophical construction turn around it and in some of
these at least it is basal. The purpose of the present essay
is to enter upon some preliminary considerations with refer-
ence to its empirical setting.

This study is avowedly introductory. It aims to focus
attention upon what I shall call the "meaning-situation"
and to inquire concerning its main characteristics. All
larger questions about the meaning of meaning and its im-
plications will be rigidly excluded from consideration,
though it is assumed that what is here said is logically funda-
mental to such larger issues. Whatever meaning may in the
end mean and whatever in the end its implications may be,
it is in any event first of all observable in meaning-situations,
which deserve to be studied on their own account and
without prejudice to these later questions; indeed, such
a study is an indispensable prerequisite to such further
inquiries.

The method to be followed is partly analytical and
partly synoptical. The attempt is made, first, to analyze
the meaning-situation into its more obvious components;
and, second, to sharpen the analysis by refining and enlarg-
ing it. I call this second step "synoptical," because as we
shall see it necesarily involves an appeal to the larger con-
text within which the components of the situation severally
stand. If such an appeal is admitted as a step of analysis (as

60

70 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

I think it generally is, in practice at least), then the method
may be called analytical without qualification.

By the meaning-situation I understand any empirical
situation of which one may significantly say, "This situation
is meaningful." And the analysis here undertaken will pro-
ceed primarily with reference to the situation viewed from
within. The question to be answered is, What are the char-
acteristics of the meaning-situation thus viewed ? This limi-
tation of the inquiry is to be borne in mind throughout. It
has the disadvantage of excluding from consideration many
issues of importance of philosophical construction; but, on
the other side, it has the advantage of bringing to the fore
certain preliminary matters that need saying. And, in any
event, it is made necessary by the limitations of space here
available.

Nothing which will be disclosed by the analysis is, I
think, in principle novel; but it all seems to me quite im-
portant, and so far as I am aware it has nowhere been
brought together explicitly and with special emphasis. I
cannot hope, however, to claim universal acceptance of it,
though much of it has been presented in varying contexts
by others. No effort will be made to trace agreements or
differences with other thinkers, since the purpose of the
analysis is primarily constructive and would hardly be for-
warded by raising troublesome questions about the historical
attribution of views. It presumably should go without say-
ing that no dogmatism is intended by this procedure, or that
the writer is not over-confident of the positions advanced.

I

Of the meaning-situation there are five prima facie dis-
tinguishable types. Whether these may be permitted to
stand as distinct in the end, they are in the beginning
apparently so and should be distinguished. They may be
classified as follows: (i) the perceptual-situation, (2) the
conventional-situation, (3) the conceptual-situation, (4) the
affective-situation, and (5) the evaluative-situation. What
these several types of the meaning-situation are, and what

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 71

are the subtypes falling under them, the following analysis
may serve roughly to indicate.

1. Any meaning-situation which focalizes around the
"here-now," broadly understood as a "this-here" with
meaning attached, is what I understand by a perceptual-
meaning-situation or, more shortly, a perceptual-situation. 1
"This means" may be said to be the general formula for
this type. And of this there are at least two subtypes. In
the first place, there is the perceptual-situation exemplified
in pointing and, when verbalized, describable in some such
phrase as "I mean this" or "this is meant." Such a
perceptual-situation we may conveniently call the direct
perceptual-situation, since it is in some sense immediate
and self-contained. In the second place, there is the type of
perceptual-situation, verbalized in the phrase "this means
that," where both the "this" and the "that" are natural
things or events. Concrete examples of this type are: "the
glow in the sky means fair weather," "the sound from the
street means an automobile," and the like perceptual expe-
riences. Clearly, this is essentially the same sort of situation
as the preceding, only more complicated. It may therefore
be distinguished as the indirect perceptual-situation. In it
immediacy tends to become more comprehensive and the
"here-now" aspect of the situation correspondingly expands
both spatially and temporally.

2. The second general type of meaning-situation I have
called the conventional-meaning-situation or, more briefly,
the conventional-situation, because "conventions" are focal
within it. And by conventions I understand products of
human ingenuity which may on occasion bear meaning. In
this type, the "this" in "this means" is a convention, not a
natural thing or event taken as such; and herein lies the
chief difference between this type and the one just described.
And here, again, two subtypes are distinguishable, namely,
the verbal and the symbolic. The verbal may be expressed

1 There is no intention of asserting here that all perceptual situations arc meaningful,
but only that some are. These alone are to be understood as designated by the hyphenated
"perceptual-situation." Perceptual-situations that lack meaning, if there be such, are not
under consideration. Whether there are such is a question left open.

72 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

in the phrase "it means," where the meaning is of some state-
ment whether oral or written or pictographic. In this case,
the meaning is the meaning of statements in this broad sense.
The symbolic finds its expression in traffic-lights, flags of
countries, ceremonial artefacts, and the like human con-
trivances that function as signs and symbols. Here the
meaning is the meaning of artificial things set with design.
Of course there is no difference in principle between the
two subtypes of the conventional-situation here distin-
guished; but there is a difference between them sufficiently
important to justify at least a preliminary differentiation of
them.

3. By the conceptual-meaning-situation, or the concep-
tual-situation, is to be understood any meaning-situation
exemplified in an ideational or inferential structure, such as a
scientific system. Such structures are, of course, numerous;
and so, consequently, are the situations of this type. But they
seem conveniently to fall into two main groups which I shall
call the categorial and the postulated respectively. The cate-
gorial are those meaning-situations centering around the
sundry conceptual systems of common sense and science
tables, electrons, organisms, evolution, society, God in
which the body of our so-called knowledge about existence
is presumably more or less precisely, and more or less truly,
formulated. The postulated-conceptual-situation includes
within its scope all of those ideational structures which are
founded on more or less arbitrarily chosen initial assump-
tions such structures as are exemplified in the systems of
pure mathematics, for example, or in any system of logic
avowedly built on definitions and postulates. Between
these two types of the conceptual-situation there is a differ-
ence that apparently runs quite deep. The postulated-
situations appear to be arbitrary in a sense in which the
categorial-situations are not, involving as they do a sort of
necessity which is not "factual" (as it is in the categorial-
situations) but which seems to spring from internal con-
sistency alone and to be completely determinable by the
abstract law of contradiction.

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 73

4. By the affective-meaning-situation, or the affective-
situation, I understand any meaning-situation in which
impulsion to action or to gratification of desire plays an
important role. 1 This situation is broadly identical with a
plan of behavior in the larger sense which includes also
satisfaction of interest. And here, once more, one may dis-
tinguish two subtypes: the purposive and the desiderative.
The purposive is exemplified in overt conduct directed
towards the attainment of an end. The end may be immedi-
ate or remote, simple or complex; but in any case it is some-
thing which is sought through purposive behavior, and
which stands as in some sense the goal of the behavior. The
desiderative-situation may be merely desiderative, as in the
case of "A wants (or does not want) this" where "want" is
equivalent to a desire or interest and the "this" stands, so to
say, alone without a competitor. Or the desiderative-situa-
tion may involve election or choice, as in "A prefers (or
does not prefer) this" where "this" is the object of desire
standing in competition with other objects of desire.

5. Finally, by the evaluative-situation is to be under-
stood any meaning-situation in which evaluation is involved.
And by "evaluation" is intended the process of appraisal,
both positive and negative. Here the more obvious subdivi-
sions correspond with the traditional distinctions among
truth, goodness, and beauty the ancient trinity of values.
The first type of evaluative-situation, then, we may call
the logical; here the situation is that in which "X is true
(or false)." The second we may name the ethical, in which
"X is good (or evil)." And the third is the aesthetic, in
which the meaning is that of "X is beautiful (or ugly)."
To these should be added a fourth, however, which falls
broadly under the heading of the economic and in which
the general notion of utility is dominant. Here the meaning
is that of "X is useful (or useless)," its worth being measured
primarily in terms of more or less immediate wants. Analy-

1 In terminology, I am following Spinoza here. But in taking over his term "affect," I am
adapting it to nay own use; with the term I do not intend to adopt the implications attach-
ing to it in Spinoza's system, or to burden him with any responsibility in connection with
my use of it.

74 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

sis of each of these subdivisions of the evaluative-situations
might readily be carried to greater length, but for the pur-
poses of the present survey this is hardly worth while
though it would appear to be an oversight of significance
not to include the type above called the " economic " in the
list with the traditional three. And it should also not be
overlooked that empirically the "X" in any of the types
may vary widely in nature.

We have then, in sum, the following types of the meaning-
situation: the meaning of "this is meant/' where the "this"
may be fairly indicated by pointing (direct-perceptual); the
meaning of "this means that/' where the "this" is more
immediate in the situation and the "that" more remote
(indirect-perceptual); the meaning of "this means," where
the "this" is a statement broadly interpreted so as to in-
clude pictographic representations (verbal-conventional) ; the
meaning of "this means," where the "this" is some sort of
perceptual artefact (symbolic-conventional); the meaning
of "X means," where X is some more or less complex con-
ceptual system ultimately connected inferentially with some
perceptual occasion (categorial-conceptual) ; the meaning of
"X means," where X is either itself a postulate or linked im-
plicatively with a postulate (postulated-conceptual); the
meaning of "A purposes," where overt behavior is directed
towards the attainment of a consciously entertained end
(purposive-affective); the meaning of "A wants" or "A
prefers," where the want or the preference is definitely ex-
pressed (desiderative-affective) ; the meaning of "this is
true (or false)," where the "this" is anything of which truth
or falsity may be predicated (logical-evaluative) ; the mean-
ing of "this is good (or evil)," the adjectives having a moral
reference (ethical-evaluative); the meaning of "this is beauti-
ful (or ugly)," the situation being interpreted broadly to
include passive enjoyment, active and critical appreciation,
or creative construction (aesthetic-evaluative); and, finally,
the meaning of "this is useful (or not)," the notion of utility
being broadly construed but without direct moral reference
(economic-evaluative). These several types, taken in their

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 75

appropriate groupings, constitute five major types of the
meaning-situation. No brief is held for the names used to
designate them, and doubtless the terms could be improved
upon; but, terminology apart, the types appear to be im-
portant and to need delimitation.

It may be questioned whether this classification exhausts
the denotation of the meaning-situation. And one may spe-
cifically suggest that there should at least be added what
might be called the memory-situation the situation, that is,
where "this-now" means "that-then." I should have no
fixed objection to making such an addition; but, on the
other hand, I see no special reason for it. The memory-
situation seems to be involved in principle in every meaning-
situation. Its chief claim to separate classification would
appear to lie in the fact that it uniquely stresses the temporal
process and its part in experience; but all of the types of the
meaning-situation mentioned above overflow the limits of
the "now," if not in both directions, at least backwards.
And, if this is true, not only is there no positive reason why
the memory-situation should be separately classified, but
there is positive reason why it should not be; separate classi-
fication of it might tend to lend support to the assumption
that it is not basically involved in the other types, and this
would be very unfortunate.

I do not myself at present see what additions to the list
should be made to make it exhaustive, and I am assuming
that it is at least roughly so. But whether it is so or not, it
is sufficient for the purpose of the present discussion so long
as it is admitted to traverse an important segment of the
denotation of the meaning-situation. Only in the event it
can be shown to be incomplete and to leave out of account
types of the meaning-situation which are negative instances
with reference to the conclusions of the present discussion, is
its incompleteness logically significant in respect of those
conclusions. Any limitation of them necessitated by the
possibility that this can be shown is hereby acknowledged.

Two other questions about the classification remain. Do
not the divisions in it, both major and minor divisions,

76 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

overlap in various directions? And is there any justfication
for including (4) and (5) in the denotation of the meaning-
situation, in fact, does not one beg some quite important
issues by so doing? These two questions undoubtedly raise
issues that are basal so basal, indeed, that they cannot be
discussed here with any degree of adequacy.

The first question readily resolves itself into several prob-
lems. Are perceptual- and conceptual-situations separable
from each other, or are perceptual-situations also ideational
structures? Can postulates and categories in the end be
kept apart, or are postulates also categories and run some-
where ultimately to ground? Is postulated necessity in
principle different from categorial necessity and determi-
nable by the law of contradiction alone ? Such are some of the
more fundamental issues raised by the first question. The
second question raises specifically the issue concerning the
relation between "thought" and "will," or meaning and
value an issue, once more, of profound significance.

Whatever may be the final solution of these problems, they
are inescapable for a theory of knowledge. Indeed, one would
hardly go wrong in saying that a theory of knowledge is just
a solution of them. I can here make no pretense of dealing
with them, since they lie beyond the scope of the present
inquiry which is concerned with matters that are prelimi-
nary to them. One or two observations, however, must be
set down.

The classification of meaning-situations I have given does
seem to me to violate the formal rules of logical division,
since the several divisions appear to overlap in various di-
rections. Precisely why this is so cannot be stated until the
results of our further analysis of the meaning-situation are
developed. Nor can one intelligently inquire into the sig-
nificance of the fact until after these results are obtained.
Hence further discussion of the matter would at this point
be premature. I wish to observe, however, that this ad-
mission of the formal inadequacy of the classification does
not negate its importance, either with reference to the use
made of it in the later analysis or with reference to its in-

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 77

trinsic significance. For it will here be used merely as a pre-
liminary basis for the later analytical study; and its intrinsic
significance lies primarily in the fact that it forces into the
clear precisely those issues that turn about the question of
its own formal adequacy.

I am compelled to admit, further, that in classifying (4)
and (5) among meaning-situations, I have in some sense
prejudged the question whether they should be called mean-
ings at all. This is partly a question about terminology, but
I am not blind to the fact that the issue runs deeper that
in this instance, at any rate, terminology is of material sig-
nificance. Whether I am right in the position implicitly
taken is, once more, a question that lies on before. It should
be noted, however, that the inclusion of (4) and (5) among
meaning-situations involves nothing more than the assump-
tion that they are types of the meaning-situation among
other types. In this there is no implication that they are
identical in every respect with the other types, of course,
or that the other types are of a kind with them; in other
words, there is no implication that values are simply mean-
ings (in the cognitive sense), or that meanings (in the cog-
nitive sense) are simply values. All of this is subject matter
for later study; and this special issue is in no way pre-
judged by the classification itself. And I wish to urge, with
respect to the use I am here making of the classification,
that, even if the inclusion of (4) and (5) should in the end
turn out to be unwarranted, its significance for the present
purpose would be unimpaired. For the conclusion later to
be advanced is not bottomed on the assumption that this
inclusion is essential. This conclusion is to hold merely of
the meaning-situation; and if (4) and (5) are not types of
this sort of situation, then they are simply irrelevant. The
only admission that this conclusion involves is that the
classification includes at least genuine types of the meaning-
situation, and does not exclude instances that are negative
relative to the conclusion advanced.

Proceeding, then, with the analysis, I wish next to em-
phasize the complexity of the meaning-situation and to

78 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

state in what respects it seems to me to be complex. And I
shall first note the more obvious points.

II

The prima facie components of any meaning-situation are
two. They are: (i) that which means, and (2) that which
is meant. Each of these is, at first glance at any rate, dis-
tinguishable from the other; and they call for separate
consideration.

I. "That which means," it is first to be noted, is itself
complex. There is that which means, in the sense of enter-
taining meaning; and there is that which means, in the sense
of bearing meaning. Where "this is meant," for example,
there is that "for" which the meaning is and that "to"
which the meaning somehow directly attaches. And these
components seem to be present throughout the several types
of the meaning-situation. Neither of them taken alone is,
at least on first look, fully equivalent to "that which means"
within the situation; only the two taken together seem ade-
quately to meet the empirical demands. In further exposi-
tion I shall employ the term "mind" to refer to that "for"
which the meaning is, and the term "content" to refer to
that in which the meaning seems somehow directly to in-
here. In the case of the direct perceptual-situation, "mind"
is that in respect of which the "this" appears as meaningful
and "content" is the " this" which so appears. 1

1 In making use of the term "mind," in this or in any context, one of course plays with
fire. One thereby exposes oneself to a grave danger, which is inherent in the very term and
against which I myself am most anxious to be on guard the danger, namely, of begging the
quite important question concerning the nature of the "agent" in the meaning-situation.
But what other term, as adequate and yet less objectionable, is here available? Meinong's
"act," or any term like it in respect of its reference to a specific event or happening at a
given time, certainly will not do. As I have tried to show elsewhere (Five Lectures on the
Problem of Mind, Appendix I), it inevitably leads, through the logic for example of Mr. Rus-
sell, into a blind alley from which there is no exit except backwards. Such an "act" or simi-
lar event cannot serve to function in the rdle of the element of "that which means" here
under consideration; and I think much confusion has arisen from the attempt to make it do
so. "Organism" is hardly acceptable, because it even more definitely tends to beg the
question we are wanting to save from such a tragedy. "Psycho-physical organism" would
come nearer to meeting the demands of the situation, since its very indefiniteness is in its
favor. And I should have no objection to using this term, save for its cumbersomeness. I
prefer to use the shorter term, largely because it is more convenient. I beg the reader,
then, in what follows to understand that "mind" is used in the very loose sense in which
it is generally equivalent to the psychophysical organism. And I should also beg him to
remember that the question concerning what more specifically the term is to mean is a

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 79

Any analysis of the meaning-situation which fails to note
this distinction within "that which means" is simply un-
faithful to what apparently are the facts in the case. For in
all types of the meaning-situation this duality indisputably
appears to be present, as a survey of the several types will
show. In the perceptual-situation, both direct and indirect,
mind and content plainly appear to be distinguishable
aspects of "that which means." The "this," in "this is
meant" or "I mean this" where the experience is essentially
that of pointing, discloses on analysis that in one aspect
at least it is the bearer of the meaning in the situation, while
the passive form of the verb in the first formulation of the
situation, or the "I" in the second, implicates that with
reference to which the meaning is a meaning and which is
another distinguishable aspect of what means; and the two
conjointly taken seem to be necessary empirically to equal
"that which means," neither alone will suffice. Likewise, in
the indirect perceptual-situation, where "this means that"
and where "this" and "that" are both natural things, what
means is not only the "this" but also something to which
the "this" as the immediate bearer of meaning refers for
support; apparently, "this" alone does not mean, but "this"
in conjunction with some center of reference "for" which
or "to" which the meaning "appears." Again, the con-
ventional-situation seems to exemplify the same dual na-
ture of " that which means." In the verbal type of this situa-
tion, the statement of course means but it is somebody's
statement, and "that which means" is neither the state-
ment nor the somebody taken by itself alone; while in the
symbolic form, that which means is at once the thing set
with design and the designer. 1 The conceptual-situation,

question the answer to which must be approached through some such analysis as we
are here engaged upon. I will venture the suggestion that, as a result of such analysis,
the term in all probability would have to be variously described in different types of
meaning-situation.

The term "content" is perhaps colorless enough to be used without serious risk, though
of course it too involves ambiguities that threaten. At the moment I can think of none
better, and there seems no reason why it should lead into thoughtless assumptions.

*If an interpreter is introduced into the conventional-situation, "that which means 1 '
is even more complex; then there are two minds and a correspondently dual content. The
same in principle holds of the other situations, of course, where two minds are trying to
share meanings.

80 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

also, in each of its types exemplifies the same duality: in
the categorial, there are the category itself and its context,
both of which mean and only when taken in conjunction;
in the postulated, there are the postulatum and the ground
of it, again both together being apparently necessary to
constitute "that which means." In the affective-situation,
once more, there is something which immediately initiates
the act or desire or choice, about which the act or desire or
choice focusses as its immediate content, and there is also,
apparently implicated in these, the agent or desirer or
chooser; and, insofar as meaning may be said to be in-
volved in the situation, each of these is indispensable to
"that which means." And, finally, the same bipolar rela-
tionship is manifest in all types of the evaluative-situation.
Where "this" is true or good or beautiful or useful, if such
statements are empirically meaningful, "that which means"
is both the "this" which is true or good or beautiful or use-
ful and that "to" which or "for" which the "this" is thus
true or good or beautiful or useful.

Thus, in all of these several types of the meaning-situation
(and I am frankly assuming in all others, if there be others)
"that which means" is a major component and is every-
where complex, involving both mind and content in in-
separable union.

Before passing on I wish to recall to the reader's atten-
tion the limitation within which the present analysis is
moving. This limitation must be borne in mind, or the con-
clusion here stated may be misinterpreted. For one may be
disposed to ask whether the conclusion is supposed to imply
that all meanings are riveted to "mind," and whether this
implication is being lugged in as opening an easy road to
idealism. But the limitation of the present analysis is that
it has to do with meaning-situations empirical situations,
that is, which are meaningful. And all that has been said
so far concerns only such situations. The conclusion, then,
is that empirical meaning-situations, when viewed from
within, involve a complex component ("that which means")
which on analysis discloses itself to be composed of mind and

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 8l

content, both of which seem to be fundamental. Whether
both of these are indispensable within the structure of
"that which means " is a question yet to be considered.
Whether, if so, meanings are riveted to mind and whether,
granting this for empirical situations, we are committed to
some form of idealism these are questions that cannot in the
present context be raised. It is clear, however, that the pres-
ent analysis of the empirical situation is preliminary to a con-
sideration of them. And we now proceed with the analysis.

2. The second prima facie major component of the mean-
ing-situation, we have said, is "that which is meant." This
component has traditionally been called the "object" within
the meaning-situation, and I propose to adopt this term in
further discussion. Like "mind," "object" is ambiguous;
and in using it one runs a risk of being misunderstood and
(which is worse) of misunderstanding oneself. But, once
again, it is the commonly accepted term for the referent
here in question, and there is no other clearly preferable.
And, when properly guarded, it need not lead into blind
assumptions. As used in the present analysis, it refers sim-
ply to that within the meaning-situation which is what is
meant. And it is so used without prejudice to the question
concerning the detailed nature of the "that" which rather
obviously varies with different types of situations.

In all types, however, the object in some sense is clearly
present; there is always something which is meant. This is
commonly acknowledged, the chief debate turning about
the question of the relation between content and object.
Before entering upon this question, however, it is important
to observe that content and object are everywhere prima
facie distinguishable within the meaning-situation.

In the direct perceptual-situation, the "this" which is
meant is apparently not at one with the "this" which func-
tions as the content within "that which means": the only
alternative would be to hold that what is meant is the bare
datum, and there is no evidence for holding this on the
contrary, the evidence seems to lie against it since what is
immediately given in the situation is never quite identical

82 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

with what is intended. In the indirect perceptual-situation,
clearly "this" and "that" appear to be different; the glow
in the sky is not fair weather, nor is the sound from the
street an automobile. Again, in the conventional-situation,
the object is always distinguishable from the content; the
statement does not mean itself, and the symbol is not a
symbol of itself. Categories, too, have meaning only within
a context which somehow reaches beyond them and which
in some important sense appears to remain constant despite
the more or less radical variations in the categories them-
selves; while postulates and definitions fall within a system
of some sort, which apparently is significantly different from
them as the background with reference to which they are
posited and in terms of which their full meaning is to be
defined. Purposes and preferences, again, are selective, and
the focus around which the selection converges is not the
totality of the situation within which the selection is made;
there is always a broader context which is not immediately
involved in the purpose or preference, but which would ap-
pear to be basal to the meaning of the purpose or prefer-
ence. And, finally, in the sundry types of the evaluative-
situation the same distinction would seem to be apparent:
the trueness or goodness or beauty or utility intended in the
several cases outruns that which is true or good or beautiful
or useful, and such predicates are apparently meaningful
only with reference to this larger context.

Thus throughout the various types of the meaning-
situation content and object apparently do not fall together
into a precise identity. Everywhere the two seem to be
significantly distinguishable. Such is the general conclu-
sion to which we are driven by an analytical survey of em-
pirical situations which are meaningful.

In general summary, then, we may say that a first analy-
sis of the several types of the meaning-situation discloses:
that the meaning-situation is primarily made up of some-
thing which means and something which is meant; that the
first of these seems to be complex, and on analysis resolves
into mind and content; that the second major component,

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 83

the object, is everywhere present and everywhere prima
facie distinguishable from the content. The meaning-situa-
tion is therefore apparently a relationship involving three
distinguishable aspects; the words ("mind," "content," and
"object") used to indicate these aspects are used without
prejudice to any later issues that may arise concerning the
nature of each.

Ill

The general direction of further analysis is pointed by the
questions that spring directly from the results we have thus
far obtained. Are the three aspects apparently embedded
in the meaning-situation severally to stand in the end? If
so, how is their interrelationship empirically to be described?
With these questions we come to the parting of the ways,
at which important differences among epistemological the-
ories begin to emerge.

I. The first question, whether the three aspects may be
permitted to stand, naturally divides itself into three sepa-
rate questions under the headings of (a) mind, (b) content,
and (c) object. What is to be said of the claims of each of
these? A full consideration of any one set of claims involves
the others, of course, but their interconnection may for the
moment be neglected.

(a) The historical fortunes of "mind" have indeed been
very hard. In its history it has been forced to assume sun-
dry forms the full-blooded "soul" of the earlier tradition,
the "bundle of perceptions" or the "transcendental unity
of apperception" or "subject" or "consciousness" or what-
ever other "echoes of the full-blooded soul" there are in the
later periods, and the stirring of the guts or the movements
of the mechanisms of breathing and vocalization with which
some of our later enthusiasms have identified it. But with
these historical details, fortunately, we are not here immedi-
ately concerned. And I wish to turn at once to the main issue:
Let mind be what in detail it may be, must it in some sense
be left standing as an integral element within the meaning-
situation?

84 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

I confess that the answer to this question seems to me
plain, and it is an affirmative one. If mind, in any and
every sense, be utterly abstracted from the meaning-situ-
ation, what is left? Certainly not a meaning-situation: the
meaning-situation is thereby irremediably disrupted. There
seems to be no significance whatever in the statement that
something specifically means, or is meaningful, unless there
is a mind as some sort of center of reference "for" which it
means. I at least can see no other possible reading of the
meaning-situation, so long as one sticks to empirically veri-
fiable considerations. Everywhere, as we have already seen,
mind is present in the meaning-situation; to abstract it from
the situation is quite arbitrary and indefensible.

Nor do I find that any philosopher has ever consistently
maintained, or even intended to maintain, that mind can
be wholly abstracted from the meaning-situation. Those
who apparently do so, or who openly avow an intention to
do so and suppose they have proved their case, are always
thinking of mind in some peculiar sense which is distasteful
to them, and in that peculiar interpretation of it they deny
its existence both generally and specifically. But, as I read
them, for mind in the sense denied they invariably substi-
tute mind in some other sense. If mind as "soul" no longer
appeals, they in this sense negate it and substitute mind as
"subject" or "consciousness" or "act" or "psycho-physical
organism"; or, if mind as in any sense non-bodily is unaccept-
able, the physiological organism robbed of its "psyche" is
made to play the role. In any case, if mind is denied, some
substitute is provided whereby its function in the meaning-
situation is carried on. And this substitution is plainly
necessary, since that function is indispensable: to neglect
it utterly is at once empirically without warrant and the-
oretically intolerable. Mind in some sense must remain.

Of course, I am not blind to the crucial issue here, which
indeed lies close at hand. It concerns the precise sense in
which mind is to be taken if permitted to remain. This is
precisely the issue that underlies widely divergent con-
structions. Since the issue leads beyond the limits of the

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 8$

present analysis, however, it cannot be considered here in
any detail. But I will venture to make a general observation
which falls within the purview of this analysis. And this
observation is that, whatever other characteristics mind
may have, it at any rate is complex and systematic in re-
spect of the meaning-situation. Its constituents are not
joined together agglutinatively, so as to compose a mere
bundle or aggregate. On the contrary, they interpenetrate
in such a manner as to form a systematic whole a whole,
that is, within which the constituents are so linked and
merged as to fall into a unity. There is here, of course, no
reference to mind's unity taken as a whole or in general; in
what sense the mind of an individual from birth to death is
unitary is a question with which we are not here concerned.
The thesis is, simply, that a given mind in a given meaning-
situation is complex and focalized: its multiplicity goes
beyond the immediate situation, but it also converges signifi-
cantly upon the immediate situation. Mind always over-
reaches the given situation, and this is the reason why mind
in the meaning-situation can never be identified with an
"act" however defined; but mind also significantly includes
the given situation within its multiplicity as a constituent
part, otherwise the situation would not be meaningful. And
this significant inclusion of the situation within a multiplic-
ity which reaches beyond is precisely the exemplification of
the mind's systematic nature within that situation. Mind
is a biographical history; this history is not a rope of sepa-
rate strands, but of interwoven and interweaving strands;
and the given meaning-situation is a set of these.

And from this follows a consideration of importance,
which because it frequently is neglected needs emphasis.
Any analysis of the meaning-situation which proceeds as if
its connection with a biographical history were of no signifi-
cance to the analysis is ab initio caught in a vicious abstrac-
tion and can hardly obtain anything but abstractions in the
end. The plain empirical truth seems to be that every
meaning-situation is somebody's, and the "somebody" is
no mere "act" but an historical process. And the process is

86 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

deeply involved in the meaning-situation that finds its
place within it. This is the truth at the bottom of the "ego-
centric predicament," if one chooses to call it so a predica-
ment, be it noted, which is inescapable, so far at least as
empirical meanings are concerned. To read the meaning-
situation as if it had no part in such a biographical process
is to misread it: taken thus it is taken abstractly, and vi-
ciously so.

(b) Though varying in nature with different types of sit-
uations, the content seems to be present in them all as em-
pirical observation discloses. This we have already seen,
and it now remains to inquire whether content is logically
indispensable.

The only alternative to acceptance of content as basal
within the meaning-situation is the identification of it with
object. Such an identification has been attempted, but
the attempt seems definitely to have ended in failure. In-
superable difficulties stand in the way of it. If the content
is to be identified with object, how are we to account for the
discrepancies in perceptual-situations that arise from the
finite velocity of light (as in the instance where this ray of
light means an extinct star, for example) or from the varia-
tion between public and private spaces (as in mirror images,
perspectives, and the like) ? What is to be done with dreams
and hallucinations? How, above all and comprehensively,
are we to understand our "mistaken" meanings indeed,
how could there be any such meanings? The plain implica-
tion seems to be that, once we merge the content with the
object and are willing to be consistent, error in all its forms
defies us. How could erroneous meanings then arise; or,
having arisen, how could they possibly be corrected? It
strains credulity to hold that objects are erroneous, and it
is even more fanciful to suppose that one object could cor-
rect another. All of this would appear to be nonsensical:
objects are not erroneous, they simply are; and if they could
be erroneous, they would not be corrigible. But if content
and object are to be identified, then objects must be errone-
ous or erroneous meanings must be denied. The identifica-

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 87

tion of content with object, thus, leads to an impasse: it
renders the existence of erroneous meanings unintelligible;
and, once admitted, such meanings remain on the hypothe-
sis intractable.

It is sometimes urged that, if the content is permitted to
stand as distinct from object, we are thereby committed to
a dualism the logical result of which is solipsism. This is
the consideration that motivates recent attacks on the sta-
tus of the content. If this consideration is well-founded, I
see no way of escape; in any event, the distinction between
content and object is indubitably characteristic of the
meaning-situation and whatever consequences the distinc-
tion entails must be accepted. Whether the consideration is
well-founded is a question which remains open to debate,
and some observations in connection with it will emerge
from our further analysis.

(c) The object has not infrequently been supposed to be
the most important term in the meaning-situation. Whether
it is so or not, it certainly is an indispensable one. To say
that it may be utterly abstracted is equivalent to saying
that the meaning-situation is a situation in which there is
nothing meant; and this, on the face of it, appears to be an
absurdity. Abstract the object, and the meaning-situation
is thereby hopelessly truncated and rendered nugatory. The
status of the object within the meaning-situation must be
accepted as ultimate for that situation.

An alternative to this position is the identification of ob-
ject with content. The attempt to identify object with con-
tent, however, is doomed to failure; it is logically on a par
with the attempt to persuade the content to perform the
office of the object, of which attempt indeed it is but the re-
verse error. The emphases in the two cases are, of course,
different; and so are the detailed consequences following
from them. But in the end both come to the same thing:
the discrepancies between the immediate and the more re-
mote aspects of the meaning-situation are left unexplained
and inexplicable. Both alike do violence to the complexity
of the meaning-situation by eliminating from it one or the

88 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

other of two components, both of which are essential to the
situation in its full character as meaningful.

Some philosophers have made the attempt, however, and
their failure to carry it through consistently is particularly
instructive with reference to the logical considerations in-
volved. Hume and Kant, each in his own way, have come
nearer accomplishing the identification of object with con-
tent than have any other thinkers with whom I am
acquainted; but each in his own way is inconsistent with his
basal principles, and his inconsistency is inescapable. Hume,
in his very attempt to derive all ideas (especially ideas of
relation) from "impressions," is compelled to assume a
definite context for the impressions a context which in his
system cannot logically attach to them but which, as in some
sense including them, plays an indispensable role in his ge-
netic account. And in his description of the function of belief
and judgment in experience he constantly appeals (at times
explicitly, though more often implicitly) to the object. In
fact, it would perhaps not be an exaggeration to say that
there is no crucially important step taken in Hume's analy-
sis at which the object as distinct from the impression is not
functioning in the background and rendering necessary aid
in the analytical procedure. Likewise, Kant's phenomenal-
ism exemplifies the same point, though naturally with im-
portant differences in detail. In his more subjectivist moods
Kant does indeed identify object with content, though even
here he is forced to supply a context beyond the mere
"given" which he reads in terms of his a priori forms. But
when he raises the inevitable issue concerning the "objects"
thus constructed (phenomena), he finds himself driven on
to some admission into his scheme of the functional office of
" things-in- themselves " in order to account for the "objectiv-
ity" and the peculiar sort of "necessity" which belong to his
phenomenal objects. Objects, he in the end agrees, are more
than data, even as organized through the instrumentality of
the a priori forms; for, as thus organized, they are also in
some sense noumenal in reference. Thus Kant, like Hume, is
at last forced into a position which is inconsistent with any

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 89

thoroughgoing identification of object with content. And to
those who would uphold this identification the suggestion
may not irrelevantly be made that they give careful atten-
tion to the analyses of these two protagonists of the thesis
and indicate precisely at what points their arguments may
be reconstructed so as to remove the inherent inconsistencies.
The upshot of such a study, I dare say, will be the conclusion
that cither a distinction between object and content must
be admitted or the meaning-situation is logically intractable.

It has at times been suggested that historical idealism, on
its side, has been disposed to deny the object, and this is
occasionally advanced as a very damaging criticism of it. I
wish in passing to make a remark on this accusation.

That this accusation, if true, would be a very damaging
criticism of historical idealism, I thoroughly agree; in fact, I
should hold it to be a wholly damning criticism. But that
the accusation is not true seems to me certain. It does
not apply, without important qualification, to any of the
systems of idealism with which I happen to have acquaint-
ance. I know of none in which such a denial is affirmed; and,
on the contrary, all seem to me to place emphasis precisely
on the object. 1 Even Berkeley, who is traditionally supposed
to be the arch-offender here, is hardly open to the charge
if, that is, one is willing to judge him on the basis of his sys-
tem taken as a whole. His initial assumption, I think, is that
object and content must be identified; and, so far, he is
guilty of denying the object. By this assumption he is logi-
cally committed to solipsism, since in the circle of his own
presuppositions public objects are non-existent. But, of
course, he admits public objects; not only does he admit
them, but he bottoms his arguments for his theistic meta-
physics (in whose fortunes, be it remembered, he was chiefly
interested) directly on them. The "choir of heaven and the

1 1 must exempt from the above statement that type of idealism represented by such
thinkers as Croce and Gentile and sometimes called "nee-idealism." I except this type of
idealism, not primarily because I positively think it is open to the charge under discussion,
but because I am unable to see (from inability to understand, no doubt) what position on
the point its exponents wish in the end to maintain. I may refer to a brief comment I have
elsewhere made on the view as I understand it (Five Lectures on the Problem of Mind, Appen-
dix II),

90 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

furniture of the earth," as different from ideas in the sense
in which ideas function in empirical situations, play an
indispensable role in his construction; and in this sense, at
least, he certainly does not wish to deny them. This may be
inconsistent with his basal assumption, and I think it is;
but precisely on that account it emphasizes all the more the
indispensable character of the object in meaning-situations.
The post-Kantian idealisms, one and all so far as I am aware
and without inconsistency (with the possible exception of
certain phases of Fichte's system), lay great stress on the
object. This is particularly true of the so-called "absolute"
idealism which derives from Hegel, who, despite the common
assumption of his critics to the contrary, finds the drive of
his dialectic precisely in the object; and in this emphasis at
least the later formulations of "absolute" idealism are at
one with Hegel. But into these historical matters there is
here no space to enter, and they are largely irrelevant to
the present purpose. In any context, however, insistence on
accurate interpretation of philosophical systems is not en-
tirely irrelevant.

Presumably there is no need of the warning that the im-
mediately preceding observations are not supposed to be in
any sense a proof of idealism. They are concerned with
the historical formulations of idealism only in respect of
their treatment of the object. And the assertion is simply
that in them the object has not been denied, either in in-
tention or in principle. That idealists have insisted on a
peculiar reading of the nature of the object is, of course, his-
torically true; that they have negated it or that they have
thought that its negation is of importance to their ultimate
thesis is, equally certainly, historically false. The assump-
tion that they have done so is an unsupported prejudice.

But, historical considerations apart, what is one to say
about the object in such meaning-situations as those con-
cerned with Humpty Dumptys, golden mountains, round
squares, and the like? Or what about those postulated-
situations, in which the postulata are apparently quite
arbitrary? Here if anywhere, it would seem, objects fall into

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 91

identity with content. Even in such cases, however, content
and object remain distinct, and the object functions. In so
far as Humpty Dumpty or a golden mountain or a round
square is meaningful, there is the universe of discourse
within which it means; and the meaning of postulata, how-
ever arbitrary, involves their larger implications which, on
being drawn out, constitute systems of greater or less sig-
nificance and complete their meaning. And it is clear that
the universe of discourse is not identical with Humpty
Dumpty or the golden mountain or the round square in the
sense in which these are the immediate content of the
meaning-situation; nor is the system of its implications
literally identical with the postulatum. In such imaginary
or arbitrary situations, object and content remain distin-
guishable: the object is always in some sense beyond the
content and is inextricably linked, in the background at least,
with the meaning of that which in the particular instance
means. Of course, in such situations object tends definitely
to break away from "existence" and somehow to float free;
and one may suspect that just in this fact is the root of the
difficulty most of us feel with reference to the object in such
cases. It is not to be forgotten, however, that the question
whether all objects "exist" is an open one and should not
be begged by tacit assumptions burdened with ambiguities.
While any consideration of the nature of the object, like
that of the nature of mind, lies beyond the limits of this
analysis, it must be noted that the object, like mind, viewed
as an aspect of the meaning-situation, is complex and sys-
tematic. It is no mere aggregate of loosely related constitu-
ents lying, as it were, side by side; it is no bare summative
manifold. Like mind, the object too is a history a history
of causally connected occasions or events, among which is
the immediate occasion that constitutes the meaning-
situation. Or, if the situation be of the postulated type, the
object is an ideational structure rather than a history
strictly so-called; but, as such, it still centers about the
situation, even though it reaches beyond, and includes it as
one of its integral elements. In either case, it is a systematic

92 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

whole a whole, that is, within which inference may move
prosperously from constituent to constituent, at least within
limits, without running against the "unintelligible." There
is within it a sort of necessity which is implicative or infer-
ential, never merely additive: what is merely additive is not
regarded as a constituent of the object at all, but is looked
upon as simply belonging to another object. Within the
meaning-situation in which it functions, thus, the object
is a systematic complex in which implication and inference
hold. This, indeed, is only another way of saying that the
object is meaningful; and herein, I think, is to be sought and
found what justification there is for Kant's dictum that
"the understanding makes nature."

This systematic complexity of the object, like that of
mind, is also of profound significance with reference to the
meaning-situation; and any analysis which proceeds in for-
getfulness of it is intolerable. Such analysis truncates the
meaning-situation ab initio, and is consequently ruinous. To
neglect this characteristic of the object is to overlook one
of the outstanding features of the meaning-situation; for,
whatever other characteristics may belong to the meaning-
situation, it certainly is characterized by this reference be-
yond the merely immediate. And the significance of this
reference is that it is the Ariadne-thread which saves us from
the subjectivity and solipsism with which the "egocentric
predicament," if abstracted from it, must surely engulf us.
The complexity of the object, thus, like the complexity of
mind, cannot with impunity be overlooked. If either is
denied, explicitly or implicitly, the situation is thereby dis-
rupted and falsified. And the consequences of such an
oversight are disastrous: neglecting the complexity of the
object, we are in imminent danger of being lost in the fog of
a romantic sentimentalism or of an irresponsible phenome-
nalism; neglecting the complexity of mind, we are only too
likely to indulge ourselves with imaginary "absolutes."

To summarize the results of this discussion of the sepa-
rate claims prima facie presented by the three aspects of the
meaning-situation, the conclusion is that each in the end

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 93

must be left standing as integral to the situation. Analysis
cannot take any one of them away; or, if it does so, the rela-
tional complex which bears meaning is by such analysis
destroyed. Mind cannot be identified either with content
or with object, for neither will perform its function in the
situation; and the object cannot perform the function of the
content, nor can the content perform the function of the
object. Mind, content, and object are all alike in some
important sense ultimate within the meaning-situation; each
has its unique office which neither of the others can fill.

2. But are the three to be left standing, each, so to speak,
on its own ground? With this question we are brought to
our second problem and to the verge, be it added, of even
more debatable territory.

That mind and object are everywhere separate and dis-
tinct entities seems quite clear. And this is so, whatever
view one may hold of cither of them. Where the object is an
existent in the temporal order, as in the perceptual-situation
for example, the distinction between it and mind is pre-
sumably not open to serious question. Where the object is
not an existent in the temporal order, as in the postulated-
situation, the matter is somewhat more involved; but the
distinction still quite evidently holds. Everywhere through-
out the different types of the meaning-situation, the bio-
graphical history within which the situation falls is plainly
other than the object which functions in the situation. This,
I think, may be taken for granted. But what is one to say
of the content? Is it a separate entity in its own right, a
"third thing" between mind and object?

Of course, there is always an existential aspect of the con-
tent. There is always some specific happening within mind
which serves as the immediate focus around which the
meaning-situation centers. Let us call this the eventual
content, or the content a? eventual. Thus taken, the con-
tent is literally "in" mind as a part of it a perceptual
image, a memory image, a statement, or what-not. But,
thus taken, the content does not belong to the object and
can in no sense be said to be "of" the object. There is no

94 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

element of identity between what existentially is "in" mind
and what belongs to the object; the two are always numeri-
cally distinct, and distinct in every detail. They are in dif-
ferent places and different times, if the object is spatial and
temporal; and, if the object is non-spatial and non-temporal,
that very fact makes it non-identifiable with the eventual
content which is eo ipso both spatial and temporal. And it
should be clear (though it is not always so) that this epis-
temological dualism cannot be avoided by the expedient of
denying the "mentality" of mind and identifying it with the
organism biologically conceived. Identify mind with the
central nervous system and set it plumptly in "nature" as
you will, the epistemological dualism remains; organic be-
havior is not the object and has no element of identity with
it. The chasm cannot be bridged in this manner. Nor can it
be bridged in any manner, so long as mind and its object
are held to be distinct entities so long, that is, as the in-
tegrity of the meaning-situation is respected.

It should be noted, in passing, that any analysis which
seeks to find the content exclusively in its eventual character
is logically doomed to skepticism. This, I think, is clearly
enough illustrated by the procedure and the logic of the
older representative theory. If the content is merely an
event "in" mind as an "idea" or an "impression," then the
object is a mere unknowable entity, so far at least as cogni-
tion is concerned. And the principle holds, if organic proc-
esses are substituted for "ideas" and "impressions."

But the eventual content is not the content which func-
tions in the meaning-situation. Of course, the two are inti-
mately connected; and presumably the functional content
is dependent on what takes place in mind. But the two are
by no means identical. A descriptive statement of the one
is not at all adequate as a descriptive statement of the other.
The eventual "this," where "this means star" for example,
is what the psychologist would describe as belonging to
mind (however defined) at the moment the percipient event
with whatever qualities an analytical survey might disclose
as characteristic of it. But the "this" which actually func-

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 95

tions in the meaning-situation has other features which do
not belong to the eventual content. It is much more com-
plex, involving as it does a whole body of more or less
competent knowledge (or so-called knowledge) concerning
physical and astronomical phenomena the velocity of light
and the motions of stars as well as the more commonplace
knowledge derived from experiences with stellar appearances.
And this distinction between the functional and the even-
tual content would appear to be of basal importance in
epistemological theory.

There are two characteristics of the functional content
which, in conclusion, I wish to note. These are (a) its com-
plexity and (b) its relational character. And each of these
is essential to the logical function which the content per-
forms in the meaning-situation.

(a) It has at times been held that the content is simple, or
an aggregate of simples. But I am not convinced that it is
ever so. On the contrary, the complexity of the content
seems to me everywhere empirically present and theoreti-
cally necessary.

Those who are inclined to hold that the content is simple
suggest that it is empirically so found in perceptual-situations
where the "this" is a mere datum or an aggregate of mere
data. What they have in mind in such a statement is the
eventual content, the content as a given color or shape or
image. Whether the eventual content is simple or not, the
functional content at least is never simple. It is always
characterized by a complexity, which of course is amenable
to analysis but which by such analysis is disjointed and
broken into aspects abstractly taken. This is true of the
content in perceptual-situations; it is even more clearly true
of contents in other types of meaning-situations. The chief
difference between contents functioning in the other types
of situations and those functioning in perceptual-situations
is the difference, broadly speaking and without reference to
possible exceptions in detail, between relatively more and
relatively less complex contents, and not the difference
between contents that are complex and contents that are

96 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

simple. And in some of the other situations, notably in
conceptual-situations, the complexity of the content is so
involved that it lies beyond the reach of many minds: cer-
tainly, not to every mind may scientific categories or mathe-
matical and logical postulates be "given," and some of
them can be "given" only to a relatively few even among
the experts. This holds in a greater or less degree of all con-
tents that pass beyond the relative simplicity of those com-
monly accepted as common sense notions a simplicity
which, in its turn, is never quite simple but involves at least
the degree of complexity characteristic of spatial and tem-
poral patterns.

The complexity of the content manifests itself in a pecu-
liar characteristic which I may call its elasticity. It is not
hard and fixed, but elastic and a thing of degrees. This is
true of the content in what one may loosely call the same
situation the "this," for instance, in the case of two per-
ceivers confronted by what may vaguely be said to be the
same object. Here the "this" is by no means fixed, but
varies within rather wide limits, as is evident when one
compares the botanist's perception of the flower with that
of the layman or that of the layman at one time with a
later and more instructed observation by him. The same
point is perhaps even more clearly illustrated by comparing
different types of content the "this" in "this means
table," for instance, and the "this" in "this means elec-
tron" or "this means a denial of the axiom of parallels."
The first of these is complex and varies within limits, and
to take it as simple is to mistake it; but as compared with
the others, it is relatively simple since its inner structure is
much less involved and intricate. Of course, any content is
always unitary; it is also in some sense immediate and, for
the occasion, must be accepted with "natural piety." This
is true of even the most arbitrary postulated contents. But
this characteristic of the content should not blind us to the
fact that it is also mediate, and that the degree of mediation
involved may be greater or less according to circumstances.
As Dewey has well urged, the "given" is also a "taken."

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 97

And to this observation should be added the emphasis that
its "taking" is in varying degrees, but always in some de-
gree, inferential; it is never quite a hard atomic datum, but is
ever complex and inherently expansive.

(b) The essentially relational character of the functional
content is manifest in its dual reference. It is at once "in"
mind and "of" object. As "in" mind, it is logically linked
with a biographical history to which in some important
sense (not here considered) it is relative and with reference
to which it must be understood. As "of" object, it is char-
acterized by an "objective reference" a reference, that is,
beyond itself to a nexus of events or implications. This dual
reference, to mind on the one side and to object on the other,
is a basal feature of the content.

In this dual relationship is to be found the ground for the
theoretical necessity of the complexity of the content. On
the assumption that the content is simple, we are driven to
hold that it cannot logically perform its function in the
meaning-situation. For, in order that it may perform this
function, it must be at once "in" mind and "of" object;
and it cannot without contradiction stand in this dual rela-
tionship, if its simplicity is to remain inviolate. As simple,
it is logically incompetent to do what empirically it actually
does; its simplicity must therefore be denied, and its com-
plexity be admitted.

The reference of content to mind has not infrequently
been supposed to be its basal relation, and on this supposi-
tion have been constructed sundry types of subjectivism
and phenomenalism. This supposition is, of course, true to
experience, but only provided it is not read so as to exclude
the other reference. Undoubtedly, content is a mere abstrac-
tion when taken apart from its reference to mind; taken con-
cretely, it is embedded in mind and has meaning only as
thus embedded. But, taken apart from its objective refer-
ence, it is equally an abstraction, for this reference is equally
fundamental to it. It is both references at once; and it is
neither apart from the other.

The objective reference of the content is of peculiar im-

98 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

portance when one comes to read the metaphysical implica-
tions of the meaning-situation, and failure to recognize this
fact is at the bottom of relativistic theories of knowledge
which would read the content exclusively in terms of its
mental reference. Such theories of knowledge are logically
possible only provided the objective reference of the con-
tent is annulled; but to annul this reference is both arbitrary
and vicious.

So far as the meaning-situation itself is concerned, the
objective reference of the content is ultimate. Analysis
cannot go back of and beneath it. If analysis seem to do so
(as, for instance, in the cases of Berkeley or Hume, on the
one side, and Thomas Reid on the other), this is only be-
cause the distinction between content and object, or between
object and content, is supposed to be negated. But such a
supposition is baseless; the distinction cannot be negated, if
the meaning-situation itself is to stand. And, as we have
already urged, the distinction is in the end accepted by
those who wish ab initio to deny it. If we insist on raising
the question, Why the objective reference of the content?
our only answer must be, Ignoramus. But there appears to
be no reason why the question should be raised. The refer-
ence is simply an ultimate characteristic of every content
which functions in a meaning-situation, a requisite of its
office. If to stop here in our analytical procedure is to re-
main content with a mystery, I at least can see no alterna-
tive. On the other side, however, I see no justification for
making a mystery out of a fact unless, of course, all ulti-
mates for analysis are to be called mysterious.

But, if it be impossible to " explain'' the objective refer-
ence by tracing it to some source beyond, it is not impossible
to describe it by noting its characteristics. It is a relation
between mind and object such that, on the one side, mind
apprehends the object and, on the other side, the object
controls. Each of these statements is, I think, amenable to
further descriptive elaboration; but there is no space here
available for this. I can only urge that the relation cannot be
accurately read if abstracted from the mental reference of

ON THE MEANING-SITUATION 99

the content, and that consequently the "object of knowl-
edge" and the "object per se" are systematically joined.
The object is what the mind intends, but the mind's inten-
tion is subject to the directive discipline which the object
exerts. Just here, it may be noted parenthetically, is the
fact which lies at the bottom of Royce's famous distinc-
tion between the "internal" and the "external" meaning
of ideas, though the statement of the fact seems to involve
an emphasis quite different from that which Royce himself
placed upon it: the "external" meaning controls, not the
"internal."

But this cannot be entered upon further, and I will con-
clude the analysis with a summary statement of its results.
In the meaning-situation, mind and object are distinct sys-
tems; existentially, the content is a part of mind and not a
part of object; functionally, the content is dual in reference,
on the one side mental and on the other side objective; as
functional, the content is not atomically simple but is itself
a system characterized by an inner elasticity; as mental in
its reference, the content is logically linked with a biographi-
cal history and is in some important sense relative thereto;
as objective in its reference, the content implicates the ob-
ject and is subject to its control. The meaning-situation,
thus, is a system which is a relationship between two sys-
tems through the mediatory function of a third system;
this third system is not a "third thing," however, but, ex-
istentially, is a part of the system of mind and, functionally,
is common to mind and object by virtue of its dual reference.
And this dual reference is not amenable to further analytical
statement, though it is amenable to further descriptive
statement; and such a statement must emphasize the syste-
matic nature of the meaning-situation.

The system which is the meaning-situation may be called
a dyadic relationship between mind and object, if the con-
tent is viewed in its functional capacity. But if the content
is thought of as eventual only, then the relationship con-
stituting the meaning-situation may be designated triadic.
In any event, however, the content which bears the meaning

100 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

in the situation is the functional content, and the problem
of the meaning of meaning focuses there. The eventual con-
tent, viewed merely as eventual, is without meaning. It is
significant only when it is merged into the functional con-
tent, only, that is, when its reference to mind and to object
is added to its eventuality: the meaning attaches, not to
the percipient event or mental state as such, but to it when
taken in its ultimate dual reference within the system.

IV

If the preceding analysis of the meaning-situation is in
principle sound, it has important bearing on the issue at
debate among those traditionally called realists, idealists,
and pragmatists, so far at least as this issue centers in the
cognitive situation. If the analysis is not sound, then what
is needed is a truer analysis devoted to the same end. For
the attainment of this end is an indispensable prolegomenon
to any clear-cut consideration of this issue, since any atti-
tude one takes with reference to the issue logically involves
some disposition of the matters towards which such an
analysis is directed.

VI

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT:

IDEALISM AND THE PHILOSOPHY

OF VALUE

WILBUR M. URBAN
Yale University

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT: IDEALISM
AND THE PHILOSOPHY OF VALUE

Wilbur M. Urban

Any philosophy written in the tradition of historic ideal-
ism is, of course, in its totality a philosophy of spirit. On
the other hand, the philosophy of spirit, in its narrower
sense, is but a part of this totality. Over against it one must
set in contrast the philosophy of nature. Natur und Geist,
nature and spirit no philosophy that refuses to make this
distinction can be called idealism. The object of this paper
is to consider the philosophy of mind or spirit in this nar-
rower sense, to examine some of the problems and tendencies
in our more recent thought about mind in so far as they bear
upon the larger questions of idealism.

Those familiar with Hegel's classical Philosophie des Geistes
will at once be aware both of the scope and nature of such an
enterprise. His great work begins with the natural soul as
conditioned by body; passes on to subjective consciousness;
rises then to objective spirit, with its social realization of
the good in law and morality; and culminates in absolute
spirit in which philosophy appears as synthesis of art and
religion. The range of topics includes then all those phases
of mind or spirit which appear in psychology, or the science
of mind eo nomine, but also all those which appear in what
are now called the cultural sciences. The nature of the enter-
prise, as indeed of any enterprise that may be called philo-
sophical, is to bring speculative unity (in Hegel's phrase,
unity of idea or principle) into this wide range of facts. In
prosecuting his own search for unity, Hegel followed the

103

104 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

classical lines laid down by Aristotle, of whose "books on
the Soul" he said that they were "still by far the most ad-
mirable, perhaps even the sole work of philosophical value
on this topic." He believed himself to be simply "re-
interpreting the lesson of the Aristotelean books." In prose-
cuting the same search for unity to-day and that search is,
I believe, one of the major preoccupations of present-day
philosophy we find ourselves again re-interpreting in mod-
ern ways the lessons of the classical philosophy of mind.
One of the things I hope to show in this paper is that through
the dust which obscures the present battle about mind, we
may see emerging certain agreements which are in the direc-
tion of the strong lines marked out in this classical philoso-
phy of spirit. More particularly, that the philosophy of value
is of major importance in this development, and that it is
leading us ultimately to an idealistic philosophy of mind. 1

II

THE IDEALISTIC MINIMUM

First, however, let me make clear what I mean by the
statement that any idealistic philosophy is, in its totality, a
philosophy of spirit. The point of departure of idealism, as
has been well said by one of the contributors to this volume, 2
is "the reality, the existence, the spontaneity, the hegemony
of the soul." It gives a privileged position to mind.

This must, of necessity, always remain the premise, ex-
pressed or unexpressed, of any idealism; but the misunder-
standing to which this simpler and more natural form of
expression has been exposed has led modern idealists to
formulate the essentials of idealism in terms both more con-
genial and more relevant to present-day issues. A good deal
has been written recently on the question of what constitutes

1 Many still shy when the name of Hegel is mentioned, but we should get over our fright
and recognize that Hegel at least found the structural form in which a philosophy of mind
can be best stated, and that this form is, in its essentials, not only detachable from Hegel's
special terminology, but constitutes the background of our thought about mind to-day,
even of those who most strenuously deny any relation to Hegel.

2 C. M. Bakewell, The Continuity of the Idealist Tradition.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 105

the minimum of idealism. I shall therefore attempt to state
this minimum from three angles.

' In the first place, idealists may be said to be agreed that
the world or universe has a meaning. Any philosophy, they
are disposed to think, must assume this. It is not so much
the assumption of a separate type of philosophy as the es-
sence of all philosophy, an assumption, whether admitted
or not, of the philosophical enterprise itself. To them, how-
ever, meaning is inseparable from the notion of system. The
world, therefore, is viewed as a "logical" or spiritual totality
not mechanical in structure, but organic in the sense that
the part expresses within itself something of the meaning
of the whole.

It follows and here we find a second aspect of the idealis-
tic minimum constantly insisted upon that meanings are
more than bare facts of the " natural order," and cannot be
understood as merely products of the causal order of nature.
Causality itself presupposes a larger structure of meaning, is
a mode of organization by which certain relations within
experience become intelligible. This general position finds
an important specific application in connection with the
meanings of knowledge. Idealists quite generally deny that
knowledge in its character of truth and revelation of reality,
is an empirically describable and observable relation be-
tween empirically describable and observable existents, and
therefore subject to naturalistic causal explanation. This
dialectical element of idealism is also inexpugnable and part
of the irreducible idealistic minimum.

What is true of "meaning" is a fortiori true of "value."
In general, idealists are disposed to think that meanings
themselves presuppose values (the primacy of values); but
the necessary characteristic is the belief that values are not
an addendum to reality, nor merely emergent within an order
of physical forces. They are not derivative but ultimate;
they are not our contribution to reality, but have a cosmic
significance.

Finally, since "meanings" and "values" are abstractions
unless they are somehow known or appreciated, the existence

106 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

of objective meaning and value in the world implies some
kind of "mental life" as the core of reality. This also is part
of the idealistic minimum. The idealist can afford, in the
first instance at least, to be quite vague and liberal in his
use of this expression "some kind of mental life." From the
standpoint of basal issues he may also allow considerable
latitude among idealists in their characterization of it. The
significant point is his insistence upon the truth that, in the
last resort, we cannot detach meanings and values from
mind without becoming unintelligible.

Ill

THE BACKGROUND OF A PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT

The aim of a philosophy of mind or spirit, as conceived
by Hegel, was to introduce unity of idea or principle into
the theory of mind. The term Geist as used by him, had,
however, as has been frequently pointed out, this ambiguity,
that it covers both of the English equivalents, "mind" and
"spirit." For a range of subjects such as he contemplated,
the term mind is wretchedly inadequate and commonplace,
and a better rendering, perhaps, is spirit all the more
nowadays when the notion of mind has so often been reduced
to a mere pittance of its former self. Certainly, while the
notion of spirit includes and presupposes that of mind, the
notion of mind does not necessarily include and presuppose
that of spirit. In any case a task such as that proposed
by Hegel, and taken up in the present paper, to be suc-
cessfully prosecuted, requires that it shall begin with some
preliminary notion of the meaning of these terms. It re-
quires, in the second place, some preliminary notion of
the structure of reality in which mind or spirit find their
place.

In other words, the problems of a philosophy of mind
cannot be defined, much less solved, except against the
background of some recognized concept of the structure and
levels of reality some accepted system of categories. For-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 107

tunately for our purposes such a conception exists and forms
the presupposition of the major part of present-day philo-
sophical thought and discussion. Four such levels are, in
general, assumed and acknowledged: namely matter, life,
mind, and spirit (sometimes characterized as value).

Elsewhere I have written of these broad divisions in reality
in some detail. 1 The term "matter" is quite generally taken
to cover the substance, or modes of action and reaction,
which are studied in the sciences of physics and chemistry.
It is clear that these sciences do not attempt or, if they
attempt, quite obviously fail to make intelligible the self-
movement that is one of the characteristics of life, or the
comprehension of things in space and time which is one of
the characteristics of mind. But this is not all. The living
organism has in its constitution an integral character, a
subtlety of coordination and a spontaneity of adaptation,
that no knowledge of chemistry or physics would enable the
spectator to anticipate. Matter itself becomes fully intelli-
gible reveals its full possibilities, what it really is, only
when life supervenes upon it, when it, so to speak, expresses
itself in life.

Similarly life is quite generally taken to cover the sub-
stance or modes of behavior studied in zoology and biology.
But life also reveals what it really is only when mind super-
venes upon it. No study of zoology or biology would enable
us to predict the occurrence among living things of a Plato
or a Shakespeare, a Beethoven or a Newton. Their employ-
ment of faculties, doubtless first used for survival, in the
interest of ends that have nothing to do with survival, is in-
trinsically unintelligible where life is taken in its exclusively
biological sense. Even in this limited sense, life is under-
standable only when we accept its immediate and indubi-
table meaning as a center of values, values realized in the
processes of growth and survival. It becomes really intel-
ligible only when values become explicit in mind and con-
sciousness.

1 The Intelligible World. Chapter XIII, Section IV.

108 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

IV
THE NOTION OR CATEGORY OF SPIRIT

But now we come to the most significant point in this
traditional structure of reality: the levels of mind and spirit.
Mind too, as mere intellect, becomes intelligible to us, shows
us what it can do, only when it is guided by mind as spirit.
Intellect, except as interpreted by this fourth level or cate-
gory, only too easily appears merely as instrument or means
to life and appears oriented towards space and matter. Yet
the mere existence of knowledge or science, to say nothing of
art and morals their absolute values and their absolute
claims on life itself suffices to refute this conception
of mind. The acknowledgment of these claims and the
values to which they correspond, is the very condition of
a large part of mind and of its activity being intelligible
at all.

We have no difficulty, then, in making clear what is to
be understood by spirit as the fourth level of a developing
reality. The word spirit in our vocabulary stands for an
acknowledgment of values, of their existence and of " some-
thing in ourselves, not sense, that perceives and values
them." Otherwise stated, just as mind or consciousness it-
self emerges on certain levels of development, so conscious-
ness of meaning and purposiveness, of value, emerges as a
quality of enhanced consciousness. When once higher levels
of life emerge, so does the knowledge and acknowledgment
that they are higher levels, and ultimately that they are
stages of a process that involves the emergence of levels that
are higher yet. This consciousness of values is the character-
istic of higher levels of mind, and it is this that we have in
mind when we use the term spirit.

What I have been maintaining here is that "spirit" is an
ultimate and irreducible category, whether the term spirit
is used or not, and is part of the background of our thought.
Spirit can no more be reduced to the intellect than mind to
life or life to matter. This principle of anti-reductionism is
recognized quite generally in the case of the three levels,

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 109

but not quite so readily in the case of the fourth. Yet the
same principle which makes matter not wholly intelligible
until life supervenes upon it, or life until it finds expression
in intelligence, requires that intelligence or mind shall not
be understandable except as interpreted by spirit. It is for
this reason that the notion is not only indigenous to philo-
sophic or metaphysical thought wherever found, but one
which resists all efforts to exclude it from philosophical
discourse.

The significance of this structural background of thought
lies in the fact, as I have pointed out, that it can be, and in-
deed must be, accepted quite independently of any specific
metaphysical prejudices or presuppositions. Without recog-
nition of these divisions and levels no intelligible communica-
tion of our meanings is possible and no intelligible account
of reality can be given. From this larger point of view, more-
over, it is a matter of indifference what we call them, funda-
mental categories (with the idealist) or empirical qualities
(with the realist). The significant point is that each of these
levels has sufficient identity in itself, sufficient distinction
from the others, to make it integral from the standpoint of
communication. Intelligibility depends upon their reten-
tion, and therefore also that intelligible discourse which we
call science and philosophy.

For a philosophy of mind, therefore, we must distinguish
mind from the lower levels of nature, and spirit, with its
sense for and acknowledgment of values, from mind as mere
intellect in the service of life.

V

THE PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND THE THEORY OF VALUE
I think we may then take it for granted without further
argument that the philosophy of mind or spirit revolves
about and centers in the theory of value. In a very real sense
our philosophy of mind is determined by our theory of value.
Spirit is unintelligible except as the acknowledgment of
values, and perhaps mind, even in the sense of the psycholo-

110 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

gist, is not understandable except through the values
upon which it is intentionally directed. But of this more
later.

This is generally recognized in present-day thought and
it is for this reason, among others, that the value notion has
become central. The other reasons are of a more metaphysi-
cal character. The standing problem of modern philosophy,
John Dewey tells us, is the relation of science to our values,
and in this he is undoubtedly right. From our present stand-
point, however, this standing problem may be stated in
another way, namely, what is the relation of spirit, as postu-
lated by the Geisteswissenschaften which deal with meanings
and values, to the concept of nature as postulated by the
natural sciences in short the place of mind and spirit in
nature.

Value is a word of many meanings and its ambiguities
have been prolific in misunderstandings. One way to avoid
these ambiguities is to take the simplest and most natural
definition and to maintain that against all comers. Such a
definition is found in the notion of value as any object
that satisfies any desire, or that corresponds to any in-
terest. Value would then be a relational quality, the
two terms of the relation being consciousness and its
object, and the value essentially the subject matter of
psychology.

Despite this natural and apparently common sense view,
there has been a persistent, and in the end I think successful,
tendency to extend the notion of value both below and above
the level of consciousness.

The movement to extend values below consciousness is
represented in recent philosophy chiefly by certain " realists/'
notably John Laird. The reasons given are of both a factual
and a logical nature. There seems to them no good reason
why the notion should be limited to the level of conscious
interest and appreciation. Below this level are values of
"natural election," relationships which are, so to speak, as
significant for the things related as any relation of interest
on the level of consciousness. These natural elections or

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT ill

affinities form the conditions or context for the values of
appreciation; on what grounds do we deny to them the na-
ture of value? In living nature the parts are not indifferent
to each other. In fact we cannot understand living nature if
we assume this indifference. It is only, as certain biologists
and philosophers assert, only as we conceive the organism
as a center of values that it can be understood at all. How
far this principle of non-indifference shall be extended is, of
course, debatable, but that it extends far below conscious-
ness is factually demonstrable. The extreme of this view is
found, of course, in the metaphysics of Professor Whitehead,
who makes conceptual value a character of his elements,
and who says that if you are to get value into your universe
at all you must have it at the beginning.

The argument for the extension of the notion of value
beyond and above the level of interest and appreciation is
still more significant from our point of view. It is briefly
that the "appreciative" point of view cannot stand without
somewhere presupposing objective and over-individual
values. The arguments here are likewise both factual and
logical, and are maintained by both realists and idealists.
Factually, men simply do not identify values exclusively
with objects of interest and appreciation, and the trans-
cendent reference in the value judgment cannot be explained
away by any reference to limitations and defects in language.
The logical reasons are, if anything, even stronger. When-
ever we examine the attempts that are constantly made "to
make feeling potentially objective," we find that they do not
succeed, and that any objectivity of values requires the truth
of value judgments of an over-individual and over-social na-
ture. Moreover it is equally certain that it is impossible to
get any standards or scale of value out of a merely subjec-
tive principle of preference. In fine, the appreciative view
cannot stand without presupposing somewhere objective
timology or axiology. Any theory that attempts to do so,
finds itself arguing in a circle.

112 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

VI
THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE LADDER OF VALUES

This is obviously not the place to go into these arguments
in detail. Assuming this movement to exist in the direction
of extending the notion of value both below and above the
level of interest and appreciation it is for us to ask, what
is its meaning for a philosophy of mind ? To me there seems
to be but one answer. The significance of this emerging "lad-
der of values" lies in the fact that it gives, or at least sug-
gests, the idea or principle of unity which is necessary to
any philosophical conception of spirit. It is, to use the
words of Professor Laird, the "thread of Theseus" that may
conceivably guide us through the levels of mind. Against
our will, as it were, there begin to emerge those same general
categories of soul, subjective mind, objective mind, and
perhaps even mind absolute, of which Hegel wrote.

The necessity of reading value down into subconscious
levels can scarcely be unaccompanied by the necessity of
some notion of soul not unlike the classical conceptions. We
can scarcely talk intelligibly about values of election without
some notion of mind, even if we have to "trench upon the
mystical " to do it. Nor can we extend the notion of values
beyond the level of appreciation and interest without en-
tailing some notion of objective mind, even if here again
we have to trench upon the mystical to do so. The important
point, however, is that we are doing just these things, even,
as it were, against our will. Many are doing it even in psy-
chology, as we shall presently see. Certainly it is inevitable
in any philosophy of mind which uses as its principle of
unity the theory of value. It would be going beyond the
facts to say, either that the theory of value, with its ladder,
has become the key to a modern philosophy of mind, or that
it has yet been able to introduce unity into the phenomena
of mind, but it seems to be moving in this direction.

It will be well to compare this principle of unity with
that employed by Hegel in his philosophy of mind. For him
the principle of unity was the Idea and the "realization of

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 113

the Idea." To understand Hegel's conception Idea must
first be equated with our modern notions of meaning and
value.

The thread of Theseus for Hegel, which led him from one
level of mind to another, was increase in meaning and value.
Hegel uses neither of these terms in their modern technical
sense, for the very good reason that their presence is so all-
pervasive that there was no need of explicitly distinguishing
and defining them. 1 Professor Brightman says quite rightly
that "his Absolute, then, is value; and morality, beauty and
religion are the life of the Absolute Spirit."

The principle of unity of interpretation employed by Hegel
consisted in the identification of the principle of totality
with the principle of value, through the concept of individu-
ality. It is true that it is only in later developments, such as
Bosanquet's, that this identification has become completely
explicit, but it was always implied in Hegel's thinking. On
this theory, the attempt was made to include the hierarchi-
cal principle of scale or subordination within the concept of
system by equating degrees of value with degrees of whole-
ness or individuality, and equating the latter with degrees
of reality. For Hegel value is objective; value and reality,
if not completely identical, are inseparably related.

VII

PHILOSOPHY OF MIND AND PSYCHOLOGY

It is then, I am suggesting, through the idea of value that
a philosophy of mind is developing which may conceivably
again introduce unity of principle and idea into the theory
of mind. In this notion of value, which the demands of

1 So far as I know the specific term, " value," is used only once in the Philosophy of Mind.
Hegel is speaking of contract as a from of objective mind. Contract is a form of communica-
tion, as he says an " ideal utterance." " In this way there is put into the thing or performance
a distinction between its immediate specific quality and its substantial being or value, mean-
ing by value the quantitative terms into which the qualitative feature has been translated.
One piece of property is thus made comparable with another, and may be made equivalent
to a thing which is (in quality) wholly heterogeneous." (Wallace, Hegel's Philosophy of
Mind, p. 109.) This identification, by Hegel, of value with substantial being is significant.
In principle, Hegel never separated the reality of a thing from its value. Reality is, for him,
existence plus meaning and value.

114 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

fact and logic have compelled us to extend both below and
above the conscious values of appreciation, we may have a
principle which will enable us to interpret mind in all its
forms. But it is first necessary to consider the disunity of a
most flagrant kind that now reigns in our conceptions and
theories of mind.

The oft-quoted witticism, that psychology first lost its
soul, and then its mind, and finally lost consciousness, is a
vivid picture of a progressive dissolution which has finally
brought on what is everywhere recognized as a "crisis in
psychology." The loss of its basal concepts those notions
without which no philosophy of mind has hitherto been
written, has involved not only a growing uncertainty as to
what the object of its study is, but also a growing divergence
in its aims and methods.

This crisis appears at two important points: (i) within
the science itself; and (2) in its relations to the Geisteswis-
senschaften or cultural sciences with which it has been tradi-
tionally related.

The crisis within psychology itself arises from a deep-
seated divergence, a fundamental contradiction as to aims,
content and method of the science. For most of us this dis-
unity presents itself in its sharpest form in the contrast of
Behaviorism and Gestalt psychology; and while the contrast
appears at many points it is sharpest, perhaps, on the ques-
tion of meaning.

Meaning, as many psychologists have said, is all-pervasive
in mind, and it is quite generally recognized that it must
receive adequate attention or a psychology is ipso facto in-
adequate. Elementaristic theories of whatever kind cannot
cope with meanings; and strict Behaviorism, being atomistic
in principle, has under Watson's influence, excluded the
problem as non-psychological. Only a "purposive" behavior-
ism, if there be such a thing can formulate a theory of
meaning. Gestalt psychology, on the other hand, recognizes
meanings as the very criterion of mind, and in insisting that
meaning is bound up with totalities or wholes, also holds
that the method of the study of mind must be determined

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 115

by that fact. In further insisting upon the principle of non-
correspondence between stimulus and meaning, it main-
tains that there can be no understanding of mind by any
method that seeks to build up meaning out of the summation
of sense elements, conditioned reflexes, or what not.

The increasing influence of the notions connected with the
Gestalt psychology cannot, I think, be denied. Whatever
this fact may mean for technical psychology, for a philosophy
of mind, it can mean only one thing, namely the re-instate-
ment in a modern form of that which has been the essen-
tially idealistic conception of mind from Kant on. When the
implications of this criterion of mind are thought out, it
seems difficult to keep away from a notion of synthetic
activity as constituting these wholes.

In the light of this larger perspective of a philosophy of
mind it is also most interesting to observe that the stric-
tures passed by Gestalt psychology upon "atomic" psy-
chologies, whether of the sensationalistic or behavioristic
types, have a striking likeness to the criticisms made by
Hegel on the sensationalists, the atomistic psychologists of
his own day. Of them he said:

"Their ruling principle is that the sensible is taken (and
with justice) as the prius or initial basis, but that the later
phases that follow this starting point present themselves as
emerging in a solely affirmative manner, and the negative
aspect of mental activity, by which this material is trans-
muted into mind and destroyed as sensible, is misconceived
and overlooked. As the theory of Condillac states it, the
sensible is not merely the empirical first, but is left as though
it were the true and essential foundation." Allowing for
differences of terminology and context, it would be difficult
to find any really important point in which the two forms
of criticism differ.

But the crisis in our present-day psychology goes deeper
than this. It affects, as I said, its relations with the Geistes-
wissenschaften or cultural sciences with which it has been
traditionally related.

Ever since the days of the famous dispute of Wilhelm

Il6 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

Dilthey with Ebbinghaus over the nature of psychology,
there has persisted a problem (and a dilemma) in the study
of mind which has refused to be silenced and which in the
last years has broken out more fiercely than ever. Dilthey
attacked the "explanatory psychology" of Ebbinghaus,
which, as he held, was modeled after the ideal of atomistic
physics, and insisted that such a method of studying mind
could give no understanding of it and was quite useless as a
basis for the Geisteswissenschaften. "Die Natur erklaren
wir, das Seelenleben verstehen wir." Since that time there
has been developing a verstehende Psychologic^ as it is called,
which claims for itself totally different aims and methods.

Of outstanding importance in this movement is Spranger
and the important school deriving from him. For this cul-
tural psychology, as for the Gestalt psychology, meaning is
also of prime importance. Psychologically we must start
from totalities characterized by meaning relations. A re-
lationship is called meaningful, however, when all its con-
stituent parts and processes become intelligible with respect
to a total performance of value import. Mind is held to be
more than a teleological structure which is regulated by
tendencies of self-preservation and adaptation. We must
start from the personality as a whole, as it stands in intimate
contact with an historically developed cultural environment.
The personal can be understood only through the over-
personal; subjective mind only through mind objective. Of
even greater significance is the notion of what this under-
standing consists in, and of what the method of any such
psychology must be. It is quite frankly recognized that the
structure of personalities is given only in terms of the pre-
dominating evaluative tendencies. The starting point of
understanding, the environment in terms of which the per-
son is to be understood, must be recognized, then, as a
world of objective values upon which mind, in the psychologi-
cal sense, is intentionally directed. The concept of value
becomes specifically the idea or principle that shall intro-
duce unity into the phenomena of mind.

I have cited Spranger's psychology merely as bringing out

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 117

most clearly the true inwardness of a much wider and more
far-reaching movement the general movement, namely, to-
wards a clear-cut distinction between natural sciences and
cultural sciences, and the tendency to think of the latter as
"value sciences." It is easy to understand why, during
the last two decades, dissatisfaction with "explanatory"
psychology has constantly increased. It became evident
that any psychology starting with elements, whether sen-
sations or reflexes, could not attain to an understanding of
the higher processes of mind. It became even more evident
that any such psychology was incapable of developing into
a philosophy of mind which could in any way introduce unity
into the material of the Geisteswissenschaften. The modern
mind is faced therefore with a dilemma. Either it will hold to
the conception of psychology as a science which actually
gives us the truth of mind, and in order to secure that truth
and understanding, move in the direction of a cultural
psychology. Or, holding to the conception of psychology
as a natural science, it will deny its function as the exclusive
source of such knowledge and turn to other cultural and non-
psychological sciences in forming its notion of mind. In
either case it means that this aspect of the present crisis in
psychology is really an expression of the demand for a
more satisfactory philosophy of mind.

VIII

THE EMERGING CONCEPTION OF MIND

It is, of course, impossible in the present state of confusion
to say just what is and what is not our reigning notion of
mind. We may say, however, that there seems to be a general
movement in the direction of a consensus of judgment as
to what we may call the criterion of mind.

I think Driesch is right in saying that "the notion of mind
to-day has underlying it the conception of individuality as a
category." As a distinguished American psychologist has
told me, no psychologist really denies integration as the cri-
terion of mind. Moreover, it may be said that the emerging

118 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

problem of all psychologies is the problem of personality and
the question of the methods of knowing and understanding it.

With almost equal certainty it may be said that a fur-
ther criterion of mind, if indeed it is not really an aspect of
the first, is the character of intentionality. "The most uni-
versal characteristic of mind as such is intention or mean-
ing." The mind is recognized as being different from every
other aspect of nature in that it is thus intentionally directed
upon something. If use may be made of a familiar concept
in philosophy, the criterion of mind may be said to be its
transcendence. This self-transcendence is first seen in the
intentional direction of mind on the possible and the future.
This form of intentionality, as is increasingly seen, cannot
however, be understood until the notions of purpose and
ultimately of value, are brought in. I should venture to say
although I have no desire to press my point beyond what is
justified by the facts, that we are driven more and more to
see that no notion of mind can be formed without this idea
of direction upon values. Values are not so much understand-
able through mind, as mind through values.

In the foregoing I have tried to show that in our thinking
about mind certain strong lines are beginning to appear
which, when made sharp and distinct, are clearly in the di-
rection of restoring the structural features of a philosophy of
mind of the classical type of Aristotle and Hegel. It may be
well to emphasize some of these lines. The first of these is
what I may describe, in the terms of Professor Hocking, as
a growing sense of the depth and breadth of mind.

The shallow conceptions of mind that reigned in the latter
part of the nineteenth century were due to the wholly ar-
bitrary and artificial limitation that nothing was to be in-
cluded in the concept which could not be handled by the
methods of the natural, in the last analysis physical sciences.
It was inevitable that certain things had to go. First of all,
of course, the soul, in the Aristotelean and Hegelian sense,
for it involved the notion of the unconscious. The notion of
objective mind or spirit had to follow, for this also involved
notions of personality and of over-individual mind that the

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 119

arbitrarily chosen method could not touch. It is the return
of these concepts, a return forced by a growing familiarity
with the phenomena of mind that has created the crisis in
psychology.

Psychology lost its soul and of necessity became shallow
so shallow, indeed, that it became useless for any really
dynamic understanding of human behavior. Other ways of
studying mind through its concrete activities and products
rather than through the abstractions and simplifications
which permit it to be connected with biological reaction,
have forced upon us again the recognitition of the older no-
tions of unconscious and social mind.

Our growing familiarity with psychic phenomena has
served but to impress upon us the reality of unconscious mind
and with it of unconscious purpose. Human behavior, in
all its aspects, emotional, volitional and cognitive, has
shown itself to be so complex, and in a sense so amazing,
that we simply cannot understand it in terms of merely
conscious phenomena. Whatever modifications and limi-
tations Freudian psychology may undergo and they are
doubtless many; whatever dialectical difficulties in the no-
tion of the unconscious mind and they are perhaps as
great as ever it is hardly likely that men will ever be able
again to get along without this notion. But even more
than psychology in the narrower sense, it is the cultural
sciences that are bringing back the conception again. The
study of the products of mind through cultural history and
the sciences of the spirit seems to make the notion inevitable.
Troeltsch, for instance, tells us that the historian must postu-
late unconscious mind. But this mind is "but the thousand-
fold proved fact of history and sociology, that our acts,
feelings and efforts carry within them many more presupposi-
tions than we think, and a much greater and quite other
meaning for the whole than we ourselves are conscious of."
The concepts of unconscious mind and unconscious purpose
which the historian and sociologist must use have in the
first instance at least, he tells us, little to do with the difficult
notion of psychology. It is not unconsciousness so much

120 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

that we have in mind, as the transcendence of content beyond
the actually conscious, and the going back to unknown
depths of the spirit. "The psychology that would learn
these things," he concludes, "must itself go to school to
history and the cultural sciences and not the reverse."

This increasing sense of the depth of mind not only as
selfhood but of mind as displayed in its historical and cul-
tural products, has been accompanied also by an increas-
ing sense of its breadth or extent. Growing familiarity
with the products of mind has led to a revival of the notions
of social and objective mind. The drift towards these con-
ceptions in psychology and sociology is unmistakable, and
the interesting thing about the movement is that it is mo-
tivated largely by exigencies of a purely empirical order.
It is increasingly realized that the individual and his be-
havior can be understood and can function efficiently only
to the extent that his mental activities are linked up with
the psychology of society. Even psycho-analytic science and
practice are leading to the conviction that " the Freudian
psychology of the individualistic type is inadequate to
handle completely those disorders of the personality the
essential meaning of which is their unconsciousness." A
notion of the common or organic conscious is necessary. 1
Still less is anything like a social psychology possible without
some similar notion of objective, over-individual mind. It
is true that in reviving this notion, many of its exponents,
like McDougall, protest against identifying it with any
such ideas as those of Hegel, and insist that it is purely
empirical and scientific in character. In view of its un-
doubted similarity to the older notion, both in idea and use,
the student of the philosophy of mind, can gladly permit
the upholders of this view to take this pleasing unction to
their souls, and secretly smile at the persistence of the Hegel
phobia. The important thing for a philosophy of mind is the
return of classical conceptions without which mind in all
its depth and breadth cannot be understood.

1 Trignat Borrow, The Social Basis of Consciousness, International Library of Psychology,
Philosophy and Scientific Method.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 121

IX

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT AND MIND ABSOLUTE

The deepening and broadening of our conception of mind,
as depicted in the preceding paragraphs, inevitably re-
instates those structural lines which characterized the tradi-
tional philosophy of mind. It is of secondary importance
whether we use the terms soul, subjective mind, objective
mind, or not. The concepts or categories are there and are
operative in our present-day thinking about mind. It re-
mains to see whether the notion of "mind absolute " is in
like manner reappearing in the thought idiom of the present.

The "silly old absolutes" of the idealists, of which H. G.
Wells spoke with such contempt, are coming back again,
and it is the philosophy of value that is bringing them back.
In this matter of values, Professor Muirhead l tells us there
has been, among English philosophers at least, "a broadening
of view, a widening of outlook, shared by idealist and realist
alike. It has come to be recognized that, as there are trans-
individual values, so there may be and are trans-social
values. Whatever be the origin of values, or more concretely,
of the sense of duty, of devotion to truth or love of beauty,
these objects, once apprehended, mean not only an adden-
dum to existence, but a source of insight into the nature of
the world of which they are a product or expression. They
thus acquire a status and value of their own by which our
conceptions of being are extended and enriched." What
Professor Muirhead finds characteristic of present British
philosophy is a fortiori true of German thought, of which it
may be said that this is the basal insight, cutting across all
divisions of realism and idealism.

Now no one familiar with the spirit of the traditional
philosophy of spirit can fail to recognize that in this acknowl-
edgment of trans-social values we have precisely what Hegel
had in mind in his concept of mind absolute. The issue
then, as I see it, is not the question of the being of over-
social absolute values in the sense defined. Idealists and

1 Introduction to Contemporary British Philosophy, Vol. II.

122 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

realists alike recognize the difficulty of understanding the
values of appreciation without these timological values as
Laird calls them, or the axiological values as they are more
frequently and perhaps better named. The question is
rather whether values of this sort bring with them neces-
sarily the notion of spirit.

The timological point of view, Professor Laird admits,
requires not only an absolute point of view, but also in some
sense an absolute mind. In Professor Laird's words, "this
point of view has to do, in old-fashioned words, with what
is excellent from God's point of view." (The Idea of Value,
p. 321.) One is not sure just what this is meant to imply. It
is all very well to say that the absolute values are there, but
we find it difficult to say just how they are there without
some such conception of God's mind. It seems difficult to
transcend the relativity of the elective and appreciative
values without some doctrine of transcendent mind which is
not far removed from that of objective idealism.

X

MIND AND NATURE

In this fashion we are brought back to the starting point
of this paper. Any philosophy, we said, written in the tradi-
tion of historic idealism is in its totality a philosophy of
spirit. It gives a privileged position to mind or spirit in its
interpretation of the world. If the world is to be viewed as
a totality at all and classical idealism has always believed
that there are reasons for so viewing it that totality must
be conceived as organic rather than as a mechanical ag-
gregate, as mental rather than as merely vital, and as con-
cretely spiritual rather than as a system of abstract ideas or
essences.

The classical way of stating this has always been from
Aristotle to Hegel in principle the same. Life is the en-
telechy of matter, mind of life and spirit of mind. Or, as
stated by Hegel, life is the " truth" of matter, mind the
"truth" of life, and of mind, in its subjective sense, the

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 123

" truth " is mind objective and absolute. A philosophy of
mind then, in the narrower sense above defined, has as its
problem the " place of mind in nature" or more broadly
stated, the place of mind in reality. I am inclined to think
that our present thought on the problem is bringing us to
conceptions not unlike those that I have called classical.

There can be no question, I think, that negatively at
least, the emerging conceptions of the place of mind in
nature are approaching what was earlier described as the
idealistic minimum. The point of departure most congenial
to the modern mind in this matter is its thinking about
meaning and value. There are few thinkers, of any philo-
sophical sect whatsoever, who would not be decidedly wary
of reducing meaning and value, which belong to the level
of mind and spirit, to any lower levels of being. The wide
acceptance of the negative aspect of the doctrine of Emer-
gent Evolution registers this wariness. In interpreting the
significance of this theory, Professor R. B. Perry has
wisely said that "by employing this notion it has been
thought possible to reconcile the essentially realistic insist-
ence on the priority, from a genetic and explanatory point
of view, of processes of the elementary type such as those
of physics and chemistry, with the essentially idealistic
insistence on the geniune uniqueness and, in a sense, privi-
leged character of the cultural processes of a higher and
more complex type." In saying this much, one has said a
great deal indeed something which has all along been one
at least of the major contentions of an idealistic philosophy
of mind. The next step and one not so far off is to say that
in the process of understanding we can move very much more
easily from meaning and value to mind, and from mind to
life and matter than in the reverse direction. In face of
the alternative whether the lower levels are the "truth"
of the higher, or the higher the "truth" of the lower the
choice, although one we are perhaps loath to make, is never-
theless ultimately forced upon us, and when the option is
thus forced, the answer cannot be long in doubt.

So much for the negative side of our present-day concep-

124 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

tion of the place of mind in nature. Let us turn to the more
positive side. Here the important thing is our changing con-
ception of nature.

When used in contrast to mind, nature is the name we
give to those levels of reality designated as matter and life.
There can be little doubt that our conceptions here have
been changing in significant ways, significant in the sense
of altering in notable fashion the manner in which we en-
visage the place of mind. The general situation may be
summed up in this way. It is becoming increasingly difficult
to pass from matter to life and mind. It is becoming in-
creasingly easy to pass from mind to life and matter.

So far as the relation of life to matter is concerned certain
definite tendencies may be discerned which may perhaps
be summed up in a statement of the biologist, G. H. Parker,
quoted with approval by Professor Julian S. Huxley. He
suggests that "had some accident permitted us to make the
fundamental biological discoveries of the later nineteenth
century before the fundamental discoveries of physico-
chemical science, the term matter would have had a differ-
ent connotation, for it would have connoted mental proper-
ties in addition to the matter of present-day physicists."
One could scarcely have a more clear-cut expression of the
principle that life is the truth of matter, that we do not
understand matter in all its depth and breadth until life
supervenes upon it. But this is not all. In physical science
the concept of nature, and with it the concept of mat-
ter, is undergoing a far-reaching change at the hands of
the physicists themselves.

This may be defined as a change towards an organic and
ultimately, perhaps, a "mental" conception of matter itself.

What has been aptly called the growing elusiveness of
modern matter is an oft-told tale which need not be repeated
here. It is enough to remark that the effects have been
of so striking a character that our present outlook would
have been a scandal to the tight little island of nineteenth
century scientific mentality. We have lost completely the
awe of the inorganic, and there are not wanting physicists

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 125

who tell us in their own words, that the truth of the inor-
ganic is found in the organic and mental.

The organic conception of physical nature, proposed for
example by Whitehead, rests in the first place upon what
he conceives to be the complete breakdown of mechanism
in physics. But it involves something much more funda-
mental than this, namely a veritable revolution in the con-
ceptual foundations of science. In place of the substantial
material entities persisting through time and moving in
space, he would substitute as the ultimate components of
reality a very different kind of entities and these he would
call events. In the language of science it is the displacement
of the notion of static stuff by that of fluent energy, but in
the language of philosophy it is a great deal more than
this. To hold, as he does, that " biology can not be considered
a chapter in physics, but physics may be considered a chap-
ter in generalized biology," and that "if you have established
the general categories of life, you find that you have already
by implication established the categories of your physics/'
involves a real revolution in our conceptions of the place of
life in nature. Moreover, when one adds that in his develop-
ment of the category of organism mental terms become more
and more prominent in his descriptions, it becomes obvious
that he finds it not only easier to pass from life to matter
than the reverse, but from mind to life than from life to
mind.

Professor Whitehead seems to remain "realistic" in the
sense that he makes the organic character ultimate, al-
though in view of later developments and pronouncements
this is at least doubtful. There are other physical thinkers,
however, for whom to stop at the organic category is not
possible. A recent statement of Sir James Jeans may per-
haps be taken as typical: "I incline to the idealistic theory
that consciousness is fundamental and that the material
universe is derivative from consciousness, not conscious-
ness from the material universe. My inclination towards
idealism is the outcome largely of modern scientific theories
for instance the principle of indeterminancy. ... In the

126 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

modern scientific view, the universe seems to be nearer to
a great thought than to a great machine. It may well be, it
seems to me, that each individual consciousness is a brain
cell in a universal mind." By this may well be placed a
statement of Schroedinger: "Consciousness can not be ac-
counted for in physical terms, for consciousness is absolutely
fundamental."

XI

THE COSMIC STATUS OF VALUES

It goes without saying that such quotations are not meant
to be of the nature of argument, but merely a suggestion of
a tendency. That tendency, I repeat, is in the direction of
a change in our conception of nature such as involves an
equally fundamental change in our conception of its rela-
tion to mind and of mind's place in it. That change is
expressed negatively in the proposition, implied in Emergent
Evolution, that the "truth" of mind and spirit (value)
cannot be found in life and matter. It is expressed posi-
tively in the idea that the truth of matter must be found in
the organic, and finally in the notion of mind without which
it seems impossible ultimately to make the organic intelli-
gible.

In speaking again of Emergent Evolution, we may refer
finally to what may be described as a revision of our notions
regarding the intelligibility of the evolution process. Many
thoughtful men have been pointing out a certain paradoxical
element in the notion of evolution as it is ordinarily con-
ceived. If it is interpreted merely in terms of survival through
adaptation to environment, we are forced to recognize that
such adaptation, or at least a greater measure of it than
exists among men, was achieved long ago among beings
whom we are accustomed to regard as inferior to man. Con-
sidered from the physical point of view, man is ridiculously
unfitted for his environment and may even be said to be
more destructive of himself and of his environment than
are the lower animals. Why, then, if the motive force and
driving power behind evolution is the need to secure adap-

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 127

tation to the environment, did evolution not stop at the lower
forms so completely adapted? Why did it go on at all to
produce man?

The situation becomes infinitely more puzzling and im-
pressive when we take into account the "mind" and "spirit"
of man, his intelligence and his sense of values. The same
nature that made the sense organs of living creatures merely
selective organs that transmit only biologically important
stimuli and which, like the organs of movement, serve neces-
sary life functions, this same nature has made possible the
acquiring of knowledge in a wholly different sense of the
word. The same nature that made instincts and msres merely
to serve life functions has again made possible the acquiring
of a moral and aesthetic sense often independent of this
purpose and often in opposition to it.

We seem to be faced here with a curious dilemma. Either
the turning of life and nature to ideal ends, at least in man,
is an accident, a superfluous luxury; or else it contains in
some way the key to a truer knowledge and understanding
of the evolutionary process. It is impossible to resist the
conclusion that evolution is the expression of some force
which is not content with achieving merely survival and
adaptation for its creatures, but is even ready to complicate
itself ever more dangerously in the endeavor to evolve ever
higher forms of life which have their own intrinsic ends.
More and more thoughtful men are no longer trying to
resist that conclusion even in the interests of preconceived
theory. Mr. Shaw's Don Juan cries to the "perverse devil,"
"Life was driving at brains." More and more it becomes clear
that that which life was driving at is not describable merely
as "brains," but rather as spirit, in other words at those
values, and consciousness and acknowledgment of values,
which we mean when we use this ancient and honorable
word.

From the foregoing it becomes then quite clear that
the philosophy of spirit in the broader sense is bound
up with the question of the cosmic status of values.
Professor Kemp Smith seems to be justified in finding the

128 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

cardinal principle of idealism not in so naive and prim-
itive a notion as that the world is my idea, but rather
in the notion that my values constitute a key to the na-
ture of the world that values have cosmic significance.
Against the background of modern thought, as we have
sketched it, this seems to be the minimum of metaphysical
idealism.

Of these values most modern thinkers are quite ready to
say that they are there in some sense. With the exception
of a few whose notions of being and existence still move
within the circle of the ideas of scientific positivism, there
are none for whom values are merely subjective states. They
may be thought of as entities or relations, as existences or
essences, but some sort of objectivity or being they have.
It is not, I repeat, a question of whether they are there; it
is rather a question of how they are there, what sort of being
they have. Many men are trying to find an intelligible an-
swer to that question to-day to find a form of sound words
in which the relation of value to being can be adequately ex-
pressed. The idealist can afford to welcome these attempts,
for he feels sure that in the last resort some notion of mind
absolute will inevitably emerge.

CONCLUSION

The purpose of this paper has been to show that through
the clouds of dust that obscure the battle about mind and
its place in nature we may see emerging certain agreements
which are in the direction of the strong lines which marked
out what I have called the classical or idealistic philosophy
of mind or spirit. This purpose has, I think, been in some
degree fulfilled. One cannot fail, I think, to be impressed
with the return to that "one definite and fundamental
scheme" which seems to underlie any philosophy of mind.
A very recent instance illustrating this situation may well
serve to bring this paper to an end.

In his Preface to Process and Reality Professor Whitehead
remarks: "Indexed, if this cosmology be deemed successful, it
becomes natural at this point to ask whether the type of

THE PHILOSOPHY OF SPIRIT 129

thought involved be not a transformation of some main
doctrines of Absolute Idealism onto a realistic basis." It does
become natural to ask this question, but it is also inevitable
that we ask another one has the transformation been
successfully accomplished ?

VII

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY
AND VALUE

JOSEPH ALEXANDER LEIGHTON
Ohio State University

THE PRINCIPLE OF INDIVIDUALITY AND

VALUE

Joseph Alexander Leighton

In the interpretation of the meaning of things as a whole,
the fundamental antithesis, the great divide, is not between
idealism and realism nor even between mentalism or spirit-
ualism and materialism. It is between "abstract universal-
ism" and "concrete individualism" Is individuality, con-
creteness, the organized wholeness of qualitative diversity,
the accidental and ephemeral consequence of the blind
junction of universals, such as space-time or energy; or is
reality perennially concrete and individuated? Is individual-
ity derivative or primordial?

The drift of mathematico-physical science is towards the
reduction of individuality to an ephemeral product of the
junctions of quantitative universals. On the other hand,
in the immediate experience of living and doing, the con-
crete individual is the center of reference. Our experienced
relations to other living beings, and even to inanimate
events, appear as an individuating process.

In considering the relations between the Platonic Forms
or Essences and the actual real, Aristotle sensed the cen-
trality of this question. He said that, while science deals
in universals, the real is individual. Hence the universal has
real significance only as the formative principle of the par-
ticular. Herein Aristotle was right. The scholastic philoso-
phers showed a true instinct for the heart of philosophy in
the controversy between the realists and the nominalists.
If extreme realism be the true view, then the individual
is an illusion. Their concern was, of course, primarily for
the soul of man for personality. In Spinoza the finite
modes have various degrees of individuality; on the other
hand all individuals are but determinate parts of the one

133

134 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

substance. Leibniz, the modern Aristotle, sees the problem
clearly. He makes the real to be individual and self-active,
a dynamic organizing form and goes a step farther than
Aristotle in finding the true nature of the monad to be appe-
tition. (I find no meaning in the assertion that a physical
monad has appetition.)

The artificiality of the preestablished harmony is due
to Leibniz starting with the assumption that every monad
must be a self-existent substance, indestructible and un-
modifiable by any other finite agency. Hegel embodies the
same principle of individuality in his insistence on the con-
creteness, determinateness of the real. In Bradley it appears
as the doctrine that the finite centers of experience are time-
less differentiations of the Absolute and "souls" are the
temporal expressions of finite centers. McTaggart has a
similar doctrine, with the Absolute as the All-inclusive Har-
monious Experience left out. (In this McTaggart is more
logical than Bradley.) In Whitehead's Philosophy of Or-
ganism it appears again as the principle of concrescence.
And of course the various expressions of Personalistic Plural-
ism embody the same insight with varying emphases. Royce
tried to hold the balance evenly between a pluralism, for
which the individual is the center of value, and the Absolute
as All-inclusive Unity. I do not think he succeeded in this.
In his later work, The Problem of Christianity, pluralism has
the upper hand.

I hold that the individual is real and the universal as such
is an abstraction from the concrete qualities-in-relation of
individuals. But what does one mean by " individual"?
The highest empirical form of individuality is that of a
community of persons. The lowest form may be the electron-
proton or Jt may be something more minute. What is the
primordial in organization or structure we do not know. It
would be better perhaps to call the lowest forms individua
rather than individuals, and to reserve the latter term for
empirically known organisms. "Monad" would serve, were
it not for the association clinging to it of "windowlessness"
and of "awareness" or "feeling." "Organism" is objec-

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 135

tionable, on the ground that we do not know that the lowest
individua have the organismic qualities of self-reparation
and self-reproduction with variations. They must be self-
maintaining. Perhaps they have all the qualities of empirical
organisms. But to say so goes beyond the evidence. On
similar grounds I must dissent from Doctor Whitehead's
attribution of "prehension" as "feeling" to all individua.
"Feeling" loses all definite meaning, if it be taken to in-
clude one electron "taking account of another" without
sentient awareness. I regard it as an undue concession to
the abstractive method of reducing the qualitied to the
qualityless, the concrete individual to the abstract universal,
to say that all individua must be fundamentally of the same
quality; and therefore that all must "feel."

The minimal meaning of an individuum is that it is a
dynamic pattern, an activity with structure, an organiza-
tion; it is a concrete unity; its parts are not parts apart from
the individuum. In a broad sense it is a living whole, but not
a self existent whole. It lives and moves and has its being
only as a member in an organic system. Electrons are in-
dividua (possibly primordial); they are members of atoms;
atoms are individual societies; actual physical substances
are more complex societies; cells are individual societies;
organisms are more complex societies of cells; human per-
sons are unique kinds of organisms living only as members
of actual and ideal communities of the living, the human,
the spiritual; in final sweep, living as members of the cosmic
order (I would reserve the term "community" for socie-
ties of persons). I consider it a going beyond the evidence
and an unnecessary extension of the principle of continuity
to maintain that all apparently different types of individua
must be reduced to one type either downward to the elec-
tronic type or upward to the personal type. There is a
multiplicity of qualitatively unique types of dynamic forms
or energy patterns. The universe is constituted by a dy-
namic, qualitative diversity of individual forms; not merely
an enormous multiplication with only intensive varieties
of the one fundamental type of qualitied structure. The

136 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

electrons which make up iron probably remain insensate
even when they enter the blood and their course is modified
by the unique dynamic form of blood and this, in turn,
by the unique dynamic pattern of thinking individua.
This is the principle of qualitative multiplicism. Reality
includes a multiplicity of qualitatively different levels of
individuality. I mean by "individuum" what Mr. Boodin
means by activity system or pattern. His cosmology and
mine seem quite the same.

Much criticism has been passed on the doctrine of de-
grees of reality. It is said that whatever is, is, so long as it
is; and therefore everything that is is equally real. But are
not continuance and inclusiveness measures of degrees of
reality? The more comprehensive and richly organized and
dynamic an individuality, the greater the extent and per-
sistence of that individual whole. The degree of individual-
ity coincides then with the degree of reality. An atom of
oxygen has more reality than one of its electrons. A na-
tional state or a church has more reality (not better) than
any single citizen or member. It is much more comprehen-
sive and enduring.

What is the meaning of the higher individuality, of the
individual in the full sense? An individual is a complex
organized unity, a dynamic system or structure in which
qualitative diversity or variety of functions constitutes a
self-maintaining, self-active whole. Individuality means that
the specifications or differences that make up the whole
are not externally juxtaposed. The principle of the whole
operates in all its special organs or functional processes, and
no one of these has any being apart from the unity. An
organism is an individual; perhaps an electron is a true in-
dividual. It appears at least to have some of the character-
istics patterned dynamic structure and self-maintenance.
A human person is self-conscious, and therefore is a richer in-
dividual than a mere organism. A community of persons
is a richer individuality than a single person. Indeed it is
only as a member of a community that an individual real-
izes his individuality. On the other hand, it must not be

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 137

forgotten that, while spiritual structures or wholes, such
as a living culture, a nation, a religion and in lesser degree
a great art movement or the scientific spirit, include and
transcend personal individuals; these structures come alive
only in and through persons, and there is something in the
creative urge of personality that transcends the community.
The person is the true living focus of the cultural life, as
well as of the subcultural basis of culture.

So far there is no ground for divergence among idealists.
I assume that all idealists would agree that individuality
or personality is the richest concretion or incarnation, in
finite life, of the Principle or Spirit of the Whole. No one
of us would quarrel with Bradley's and Bosanquet's thesis
that the nature of individuality is to be a whole, a living
system, a world; and this means to be a living center in
which unity and diversity, comprehensiveness and harmony
are balanced. We should also agree that self-realization
takes place through continuous self-transcendence; that it
is only in so far forth as the individual center continually
goes outside itself and lives actively as a member of greater
wholes that it lives at all. Ideally, individuality means a
world self-complete so far as may be. Its essence consists,
as Bosanquet puts it, not in the not-being-something-else
but in the being-oneself. (See especially, Bosanquet, The
Principle of Individuality and Value, pp. 69 ff.) Again,
as he says, the individual is one with the spiritual, but not
with the spiritual as excluding the mechanical. In individual-
ity, the mechanical, the externally juxtaposed system of
parts side by side and determined by external relations, is
taken up and transformed as a moment in spirit or mind.
Individuality will show itself as inwardness and spirituality,
not by emptiness and abstraction, not even by blank in-
tensity of incommunicable feeling; but, in a word, by the
characteristics of a "world." The individual is the concrete
universal. Universals, laws, relations are "abstract,"
"unreal" except as the common features and interrelation-
ships of the diversity-in-organic-unity of individuals. 1

1 Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 77.

138 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

There are then all sorts of degrees of individuality in the
finite forms of life. And the richer, fuller, higher individuality
has more reality, by reason of having greater inclusiveness
or comprehensiveness and harmony or logical stability or
organization.

The principle of individuality then is the principle of value.
All intrinsic value is in individuality. Just as the tendency
to hypostasize abstractions appears in the form of setting
up some nearly featureless or quite qualityless universal;
such as Matter, Force, Space-time, Energy, Neutral Enti-
ties, or Essences; as the Substance of Reality from which
individuals are derived; so it appears again in the tendency
to set up abstract "Values" as having a reality superior to
individuals. Truth, Moral Values, Aesthetic Values are
hypostasized. A "Value" as such has no more genuine
reality than a "law" or a "relation." Values are only generic
names for types of satisfaction of interests by individuals.
If my thought finds satisfaction, if my mind is realized, in
understanding the relations of the members of galactic
systems or of atoms to one another and in formulating physi-
cal laws, that activity has much value; but the value lies
in the fact of the satisfaction of a fundamental interest of
a self. It is the false worship of abstractions to set up
values as real or objective apart from selves. Values are
real only in and for selves that feel them. There are really
no such entities or subsistents as truth or beauty or goodness
and the like. There are concrete truths, things felt to be
beautiful, satisfying goods for selves. Individuality is both
the locus and the measure of value. For only in and for senti-
ence which involves a highly organized individuality is there
any value; in so far as subconscious individua contribute
to the satisfaction of conscious individua (persons) they
may be said to have instrumental value, but not value in
and for themselves. Perhaps an oyster has intrinsic value
for itself. I do not know, but I do not believe it. Therefore
I eat oysters without any qualms (except as to their fresh-
ness).

What, then, becomes of the objectivity of values of

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 139

truth, goodness, and beauty? These values have the ob-
jectivity inherent in the fact that only certain types of ac-
tivity and experience yield enduringly and massively satis-
fying values. In the first place, the values of knowing and
enjoying the physical and historical orders (truth and
aesthetic values) or the values of living as a member of a
social order (social-ethical values) are dependent upon the
right relations of the individual valuer as member of the
actual given orders. He must have eyes to see, a mind to
think, a heart to feel and will, in harmony of response to
the given, in order to realize the values. It would require
a whole theory of truth, an aesthetics and an ethics to ex-
pound fully this position. What I wish to insist upon here
is that objectivity or reality of values is not anything apart
from selves; but consists in the harmonious relations ex-
perienced between the active experiencing self and the given
conditions of value, which are involved in membership in the
world of individuals.

The more individuality, the more value; because the
more individuality the richer, the more comprehensive and
harmonious the activities and experiences of selves. The
objectivity of values, of the criteria of truth, goodness, and
beauty, consists in the fact that there is a community of
structure and of function amid all the individual diversities
of minds. The axioms and postulates of thinking are of
this character. Mind has a structure and its environing world
has a structure. Mind realizes itself through expansion into
harmony with the cosmic structure. Amidst all the varie-
ties and diversities of conduct, due to differences of culture
and variations of individuality, there has been, I hold, a
gradual discovery of certain fundamental conditions of
the good life. This is the realization of the ethical commu-
nity of structure.

In the most inclusive sense, all values are forms of the
Good. Truth, beauty, and goodness are not isolated forms
of value. This principle is recognized in our saying that it
is good to know the truth, that certain truths are beautiful,
that beauty is good, that there is no massively and per-

140 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

manently satisfying beauty in a work of art that does not
express in individual form significant and enduring features
of human experience. Beauty without truth is dust and
ashes, dead-sea fruit. Truth not felt and served is worth-
less and powerless. If we take the "Good " as the fulfillment
of personality in the totality of its fundamental capacities,
then knowledge and intellectual integrity, sympathy with
man and nature, love guided by intellectual light quickened
and concreted in imagination, are facets of the Good. (I am
not attempting a definition, but only a pointing out of the
main aspects of the Good.)

If reality consists of a hierarchy of individua, what of
totality or unity? Individuals, from the meanest and poorest
to the richest, most comprehensive and harmonious, are
members one of another, members of a world. Electrons are
individua in dynamic relations. The electron's sphere of
action is the universe. Organisms are more enduring and
inclusive dynamic patterns in dynamic relations in which
the lower individua function. Persons are the fullest in-
dividuals that we know, and persons are such only as mem-
bers of the community of organisms, the higher communities
of persons and, ultimately, of the cosmic community.

As Bosanquet puts it: the differentia is in the most com-
prehensive organized harmony. 1 "The sense of unity and
reconciliation with the world is a far larger factor in our
awareness of selfhood, and one which increases concomitantly
with it, than is the sense of collision with the not-self." 2 "We
experience one self most completely when we are least aware
of its finite selfness." 3 "The positive awareness of an area
or quality of self-maintenance is the real foundation of
selfhood." 3 "When you have admitted the unity of the
person with himself, it is impossible to stop short of his
unity with others, with the world, and with the universe; and
the perfection by which he is to be valued is his place in
the perfection of these greater wholes." 4

So far I take it that idealists are in agreement. Thus

1 Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 168. Ibid., p. 250.

. 344-

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 141

far I acknowledge my adherence to the doctrine so ably
expounded by Bradley and Bosanquet. But now we come
to a difficulty and a parting of the ways. In his rejection
of mere uniqueness, being not like any other self, self-inclosed
privacy, as characteristics of the individual, and in his
insistence on membership in the greater whole through self-
transcendence, Bosanquet goes too far.

Since value is such only in and for conscious beings
persons; and, since individuality, however imperfect, has
value just in so far as it has individuality; it follows that,
while selves realize their spiritual vocations only by con-
tinuous self-transcendence, if value is to be conserved,
this self-transcendence cannot mean self-negation or oblitera-
tion. Bradley and Bosanquet overwork the idea of system,
totality, logical stability, comprehensiveness, and harmony; as
inclusive Unity, which absorbs and transmutes into its static
and stainless-perfection all the variety, color, and movement
of finite lives.

Mind is the active form of totality. Mind does develop
through continual self-transcendence. Individuality is the
ideal form of totalizing self-actitivy. It is that toward
which the whole creation seems to move. A philosophical
interpretation of the evolutionary process can only be ade-
quate, for which the chief stages in evolution are the emer-
gences of higher types of individuality. So far so good.
But, when Bosanquet concludes that since, where we are
strong we come together, our being distinct "we's" is of
little or no account, I cannot follow. In discussing Immor-
tality, he starts from Green's thesis that nothing is of value
except in and for persons, that no impersonal mode of being
satisfies the principle of value. But Bosanquet turns this
around into the problem of the assurance of our fundamen-
tal interests being eternally real in the Absolute, rather
than in the permanence of formal personality. Since all
interests are to find fulfillment in the ultimate Being, it is
of little or no account what becomes of the persons, in and
for whom alone (so far as we know) these interests come
alive.

142 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

This is to me a lame conclusion. Since values are real
only in and for persons; then, if values are to be conserved,
personalities must, somehow or other, be conserved. Brad-
ley has the same attitude. The "centers of experience"
are " timeless differentiations of the Absolute." But " selves "
or "persons" are merely temporal expressions of finite
centers. Persons may be immortal, but this is not likely.
Anyhow it is quite unimportant. Yet, although we are
all transmuted, beyond recognition by ourselves or others,
in the timeless Absolute; nevertheless our main wants are
satisfied therein. Our wants shall be satisfied, but probably
we shall not want anything, since probably we shall no
longer be persons.

This seems to me little short of nonsense. I understand
a materialistic philosophy, like that of Russell in the Free
Man's Worship or Santayana's, beautifully dressed up in
poetic garlands. I understand an Idealism which holds
that, since all values, including all truths (no less the truths
of mathematics and physics than of ethics and aesthetics),
are in and for persons, persons therefore must be real and
enduring; and the most adequate interpretation of the uni-
verse must be that the Ultimate or Supreme Reality is a
personality-creating principle and therefore at least richer
in nature than any finite person. But an idealism which
holds that individuality and value and reality are identical
and yet assumes an air of lofty indifference towards the
unique distinctness and enduring self-activity of individual
persons is to me a contradiction in terms.

I believe that this contradiction is due to riding the idea
of system, totality, comprehensiveness and harmony, to
death. Individuality is stretched to mean literal inclusive-
ness of other individuals. Comprehensiveness and harmony
are taken to imply that all finite individuals must liter-
ally be included, and therefore swallowed up, in one all-
devouring Individual the Absolute. And so the only true
and really real Individual is the "Concrete-Universal,"
the absolute all-containing and all-digesting System. I see
that there is a real meaning in the idea of the concrete uni-

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 143

versal. It is the idea of a living organic system, an all-
inclusive Cosmic Order. But, if the individuality from
which we start, namely personality, is so merged and trans-
muted in the Absolute, that it becomes a mere unknown
adjective, the Concrete Universal, the Living Organic Sys-
tem of the Whole is no longer concrete in any genuine
sense; for the only clue or standard of concreteness of truth
and value has itself been transmuted beyond recognition.
It seems to me, one must either affirm that finite selves are
genuine self-active, self- worthy members of the whole; or
one must cross the great divide and admit that all the varie-
gated individuality and plurality of concrete existents is
the inexplicably engendered and transitory mirage of ab-
stract universal forces.

When recognition has been given of the much more ade-
quate development of the notion of mind as the active form
of totality, and thus the best key to the nature of the whole,
the position of Bradley and Bosanquet with regard to the
place of the finite self in the cosmos seems to me essentially
that of Spinoza. Viewed under the form of eternity , and by
the scientia intuitiva which gives the vision of absolute
totality, the idea of the finite self has a certain eternity;
that is, in so far as there is in the Absolute an idea of the
finite self as a transitory mode of the Absolute. But then
every sort and degree of finite mode has this sort of eter-
nity, since every one has some reflection in the eternal and
self-complete mind of the Absolute and it is this reflection
that is the real reality of the finite self.

I quite understand the motivation of this position. On
the one hand, the finite self is always imperfectly a whole,
always a changing, growing, or disintegrating, complex;
subject to all sorts of strains and vicissitudes; the sport,
more or less, of finite circumstance. On the other hand, it
is desired to anchor the values of selfhood securely in an
eternally poised, wholly stable and self-coherent Whole.
The finite self is to find its values by recognizing its own in-
significance and ephemerality and living in the light of
the Eternal Order.

144 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

It is worth while to note the ultimate similarity between
the Idealism of Bradley and Bosanquet and the Indian
philosophy of Samkara. I do not say that they are identical
but I do say that, in the final position of the finite self,
Absolute Idealism is very close to that of Samkara. Pro-
fessor Radhakrishnan says that the philosophy of Samkara
does not hold that Maya, the realm of multiplicity and in-
dividuality and change, is sheer illusion. It is the inexplic-
able expression of Brahman, the Universal Atman. But
the true destiny of the individual soul, the jiva atman, is
to realize its identity with the Brahman Atman. If the writ-
ings of southern Buddhism represent its primitive form,
then Buddhism means the same attitude with a more posi-
tivistic or phenomenalistic basis. The source of all suffering
is the clinging to the illusion of individuality, and the way
of redemption is the release from this cardinal illusion and
the consequent evanescence of individuality Nirvana.
What remains, beyond sheer nothingness, I do not under-
stand. I take my stand with the western empirical and
humanistic affirmation of the central significance of in-
dividuality. Give that up and the world becomes a dis-
appearing wraith !

If, on the other hand, by identity of various selves from
man to God is meant only a fundamental sameness of
spiritual organization, incarnated in various degrees, that
is not an essentially different insight from the basic faith of
the classical Christian "Beloved now are we the Sons of
God." But if identity means existential oneness then the in-
dividuality of the finite self is lost. Greek philosophy in
Plato and less clearly in Aristotle, and the Christian view
of life, have this in common affirmation of the significance
of individuality. Certainly, the Gospel of Jesus and its
interpretation by Paul and John are based on the primary
faith in the reality and value of the individual person.
The Christian life-view faces the facts of error and sin,
even of unmerited suffering. In its doctrine of vicarious
suffering as an instrument of redemption, which is in-
carnated in its picture of the Saviour, it makes the most

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 145

heroic venture that the spirit of man has yet made in the
face of the tragic issues of life. Accepting the reality of evil
and of unmerited suffering, it affirms these to be means to
the fulfillment of spiritual personality. It does not say
that the way out is the suppression and final extinction of
personality, but rather the ethical development of personal-
ity in solidarity with the community. Here I think Royce's
interpretation of Christianity is profoundly true, although
I cannot share his confident speculation as to the relation
of the Temporal and the Eternal nor accept the theory of
"The World and the Individual" that imperfect finite
selves are literally parts of the Absolutely Perfect Timeless
Self. No real self is merely part of another self.

I admit that to believe that in personality is the best
key to the meaning of the universe is to make a venture of
faith, to make a bet against odds. If I hold it, in the face
of all the burden and the weary weight of this unintelligible
world, and through the gloomy days made for our searching,
it is because the only logical alternative is Materialism and
despair of everything of science no less than beauty and
goodness. Emergent evolutionisms et hoc genus omne are
evasions of the ultimate issue in cosmic philosophy. They
owe their plausibility to an equivocation the richer quali-
tied, the more individuated existent is not the mechanical
by-product of the less, but nevertheless it is blindly pro-
duced therefrom!

There are three logically consistent cosmic philosophies-
materialism, dualism, and an idealism of individuality, or
personality. Either: (i) All the wealth of psychic life all
feelings, ideas, ideals, values, choices, volitions are the
episodic by-products of blind, insentient energy omnipo-
tently rolling along; or (2) there is an unsettled cosmic con-
flict between the integrating and the disintegrating, the indi-
viduating and the dissipating forces; or (3) all appearances
to the contrary notwithstanding, the goal toward which
the whole creation moves is personality: if so, then clearly
the richest individuality, the spiritual personality, is the
key to the meaning of the whole. The structure or plan of the

146 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

whole cosmos must be essentially more akin to the nature of
personality than to the nature of anything else in our empir-
ical order. It is a personality-engendering plan or structure.
The final paradox of our being is that, while spiritual
Individuality or Personality seems the highest form of ex-
istence, the outcome of the evolutionary process, and cer-
tainly is the center and ground of all values, the course of
the cosmic process seems to show an indifference to the fate
of personality. Is the richest, the most integrated form of
existence ultimately nothing but dust and ashes on the
cosmic scrap heap? Is all life nothing but a stupendous
Aeschylean tragedy? We cannot know. But, if increase
of individuality and value is the burden of the evolutionary
process, we may believe with good grounds that, all appear-
ances to the contrary notwithstanding, it will not be re-
duced to nothingness. An idealism which finds in per-
sonality the key to reality and value I hold to be the only
consistent form of idealism. I do not find it an accident that
Hegel, who is cryptic and evasive about the place of finite
personality, as about the personality of the Absolute (I
do not think his Absolute can be called "personal" or self-
conscious spirit), showed a lack of appreciation of the social
and ethical conditions of personal individuality. I have in
mind his glorification of the objective mind and his prac-
tical apotheosis of social organization in the form of the
state. Bradley and Bosanquet were Englishmen and had
more practical appreciation of individuality, but I think
Bosanquet's political philosophy suffers, though not to the
same degree, from the same overemphasis on social organ-
ization and the "real social will." Make any form of social
organization, whether State, Church or Soviet, God-upon-
Earth and a blow is struck at the sacred spring of creativity
in the individual. A consistent personal idealist must esteem
individual self-determination above every other social value.
This does not mean laissez faire in the economic sphere. For
our economic order is now so collectivistic in fact that it
must be controlled to insure a living and spiritual oppor-
tunity for all the individual members.

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 147

The whole trouble arises from assuming that, since the
whole is the Perfect All-inclusive Individuality, the Absolute,
all other individuals are merely parts of it ("adjectives,"
Bosanquet said in a symposium). Since, after all, we get our
conception of individuality and value from the world of
finite selves, I maintain that we must keep to them, not
abandon them for a timeless all-inclusive Absolute which yet
is called a conscious experience (surely an inconceivable
monster). A self is real and realizes and conserves value
not as a mere part, but as a self-active, intrinsically valuable
member of a world, within which it is a world. I am myself
and realize values as a living organism, as a member of a
human family, a moral and spiritual cultural tradition, a
nation, a human being, a son of the Earth and of the Cosmos.

Idealism commits suicide on the altar of an abstraction,
if the finite individual is regarded as merely a part of an
Absolute Experience or Absolute Self. How can one self
be literally part of another self? How can one self's private
experience be merged in the total experience of a larger all-
inclusive self? The Absolute Utterly Harmonious Experience
must swallow and digest all finite experiences, good, bad and
indifferent, sane and insane, true and false. So I am unable
to accept an idealism for which finite personality (the only
one we intimately know) is transitory. How can our main
wants be met, if persons are merely transient expressions
of eternal finite centers and are transmuted beyond recog-
nition in the Absolute?

Bosanquet says the important point is this are values
realized and conserved, not what becomes of finite persons?
But what becomes of values, if finite persons are obliterated
or transmuted into that in which they are no longer recog-
nizable selves?

I do not say that empirical values are illusory, if the finite
locus of values have no permanence. We can still extract
the immediate values of the flying moments. But that is
all. If the finite locus of values be transitory, the Universe,
in its totality, has no value.

It is contended that the Supreme Reality cannot have

148 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

"personality" if the latter term be taken strictly. Brad-
ley puts the matter with his usual vigor and clearness. For
him a person is finite or meaningless. The Absolute is the
all-inclusive, self-existent whole and, therefore, cannot be
a person. "If by calling it personal you mean that it is
nothing but experience, that it contains all the highest that
we possibly can know and feel, and is a unity in which the
details are utterly pervaded and embraced then in this
conclusion I am with you. But your employment of the
term personal I very much regret, . . . because it is mis-
leading and directly serves the cause of dishonesty. For
most of those, who insist on what they call the ' personality
of God,' are intellectually dishonest. They desire one con-
clusion, and, to reach it, they argue for another." 1 They
desire a self amongst, and over against, other selves and
they argue for an Absolute. The Absolute cannot be ab-
solute and a self. It is personal in the sense that it includes
personality; but, being above all these distinctions of the
finite, it is better to call it superpersonal.

Certainly, Bradley is right in holding that an all-inclusive
Absolute cannot be a self or person. I find no meaning at
all in a self which includes and digests all other selves in its
devouring maw. If the Supreme Reality be a Self, it may
be the ground of whatever degree of world-order and value
there is. But it must be finite, if "finite" means to be a self
in relation to a world of selves and things, even though it
be the ground of the society of selves. I do not know how
to harmonize the concepts of one World Ground and of a
Perfect Self. I do not understand how a Perfect and Supreme
Person can be the Ground, as well as the Goal, of all that is.

On the other hand, I think Bradley and Bosanquet (and all
who think like them) are in an even worse quandary. They
are intellectually muddled. For the central question is
what is the Ground and Seat of Values, the principle of Indi-
viduality and Value having been identified. Then the real
issue is this are we entitled, even forced, to say that, if
Individuality and Value have cosmic status, the Supreme

1 Appearance and Reality ,p. 532.

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 149

Reality must possess selfhood or Personality and this must
be its highest character? I answer, unequivocally Yes! If
the Supreme Reality is self-conscious, self-active, thinking
and willing, it is personal. If it has not these powers in
full actuality, it is not only not personal, it is even subper-
sonal. It might, in such case, be a mass of dumb feeling,
but it would be lower in value-quality and power than the
humblest self. Strictly speaking, there cannot be a conscious
unity of Experience that is superpersonal. If the Absolute
Experience is conscious, it is personal and is not The Ab-
solute. If it is not conscious, it is unconscious and beneath
personality. The notion of an Absolute or Perfect Ex-
perience, in which all Value and Individuality are conserved,
but which is not a self-conscious self-active being, is a con-
tradict io in adjecto.

The Bradleyan absolute or any similar absolute cannot
know in any sense in which we know. All its knowing would
be self-intuition, but what is self-intuition if there be no
Other? The Absolute cannot do anything, for there is
nothing to be done. All change progressive, retrogressive
or even circular is mere "appearance" swallowed up and
transmuted into the static timeless being of an Absolute
which, though it contain histories without number, has
no history. Certainly such an Absolute could not be a God;
for it has neither the practical, ethical nor even the theoreti-
cal functions of a Godhead. By what right it could be said
even to feel passes my comprehension. How could the all-
inclusive statical Unity have any feelings?

If the Absolute cannot be God, certainly a God cannot
be the Absolute. A being who is to serve as the Ground of
real Individuality and Values cannot be the unvarying and
indiscerptible Unity of all that is. If there are to be genuine
individualities with values, there must be plurality, some
looseness of conjunction, real change.

If Individuality and Value are conserved in the cosmic
process, the Conservator has personality and that is the
highest we can say about it. To talk about personality
and value as having cosmic status, and then to say that their

ISO CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

Ground is not in personality; but in impersonal personality-
producing forces, seems to me utter intellectual and axio-
logical confusion. Either the cosmic force that produces
personality is personal, or personality is an unaccountable
but none the less ephemeral by-product of brute unconscious
forces.

A timeless self is a psychological monster, says Bradley.
I agree. But a timeless Experience, which includes and trans-
mutes all temporal experiences and experients into an eternal
harmony; and in which there is no longer any world of dis-
tinct selves of which this Experience is the experience; and
no selfhood which has the experience and is distinguished
from, in being related to, the objects of its experience;
such a being is at once a psychological and a metaphysical
monster.

Finite individuality must have its ground in a Supreme
Individual, if individuality be inexplicable in terms of
abstract Universals. But this Supreme Ground of Indi-
viduality, this Super-Personality, must be a member of
the world of which all finite selves are members, as well as
the ground of the spiritual community. I reject the no-
tion that finite persons are mere parts of an all-inclusive
Mind or Experience on three grounds, (i) I cannot con-
ceive how this could be so in terms of experience. (2) It
conflicts with the conception of individuality as implying
the free membership of self-active beings in a community.
(3) It undermines the entire notion of value. If value is
real only in and for selves, it disappears if selves disappear.

Personal Idealism does not logically imply mentalism.
Personality is the supreme principle of value and the best key
to the meaning of reality. But I cannot see that all that exists
is mind. It seems to me that the simpler forms of dynamic
structure are not minds. They are dynamic patterns which
may be taken up into and made subservient to the higher
conscious dynamic organizing principles which we call
"minds."

The differences between mental and non-mental indivi-
dua are most significant. Mind supervenes upon an enor-

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 151

mously complex physico-vital organization; mind has a
range of sensitiveness or discriminatory response, of selective-
ness, of organization of experience (through memory records
and creative synthesis), of creative synthesis by which it
spans time and space from the infinitesimal to the infinite;
in short, of varying and supple adaptation, self-maintenance
and self-creation, which make the difference between mental
and non-mental individua the most significant of all differ-
ences in our world.

It may be that all dynamic structures or patterns are
minds of sorts. It may be that the electron is a low grade
soul, with which we are unable to hold communication,
because of the differences in tempo between its psychic
rhythms and our own. It may be that its self-maintenance
is due to appetition. Absolute proof or disproof is impossible
here. But, in view of the poverty of the electron's behavior,
it seems to me very implausible to maintain panpsychism.

Such a thesis is motivated by making continuity or quali-
tative identity one's paramount category. The logic of the
argument runs thus: psychical life cannot be derived from
a combination of factors in which it was not present. But
all existence must be continuous, of identical quality. But
this is a purely a priori argument. Empirically, the lower
forms do not behave like minds. Empirically, they do not
communicate in any intelligible fashion with us. And yet
there appears to be interaction, interdependence.

Well, what is gained by the assumption of identity of
quality? What light is shed on the problems of personality
and value and of the place of man in the universe by assum-
ing that rocks and seas, galactic systems and atoms are really
assemblages of souls? None whatever, that I can see. Per-
sonally, I should feel very uncomfortable if I seriously held
that what I walk on, breathe, eat and drink is psychic life.
Is it not more consonant with fact to say that "mind" is a
unique form of organization and control which is capable
of self-development beyond that possessed by any lower form
of individuum, and let it go at that? Values lie wholly for us
men in the uses we are able to put our environments and

152 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

our selfhoods to. The realizable values of mind are what they
are, regardless of the question how the minded and the mind-
less dynamic structures interact.

Why should we sacrifice everything to abstract continuity
or identity? To reduce everything to "mind" is to reduce
mind to vacuity, to a quantum of mere energy. I hold rather
to multiplicism, as more consonant with the evidential data.
There is a hierarchy of dynamic forms or patterns. Mind is
the richest and most significant of these forms. In our em-
pirical world, that is in our spatio-temporal section of the
universe, mind supervenes upon an arrangement of simpler
or less structured and less qualitied forms. I would not say,
without qualification, that mind "emerges," for that seems
to imply that mind, a higher individuality, appears miracu-
lously in a universe which once upon a time was mindless.

The higher individuality, the "minded" form, cannot be
accounted for in terms of poorer forms. If it be assumed that
it can be so accounted for, we must go on and say that, not
only mind but life and even qualitied inorganic structures,
are the blind products of the interaction of spatio-temporal
conjunctions of atomic quanta of bare energy. This hypoth-
esis is inadequate to account for our complex richly qualitied
world of individualities. For: (i) It is highly improbable
that the complexity of persistent dynamic structures, cumu-
latively enriching themselves in the process of evolution, can
have arisen in an environment in which anything might
happen, an environment wholly random in its behavior.
Adaptation implies an order to which the adaptor adapts
itself. (2) Qualitatively rich and organized structure is not
explicable in terms of the qualityless, the featured in terms
of the featureless. An infinitude of randomly occurring
quanta, atomic "events" or "point-instants" cannot take
on structures, habits, self-maintenance, self-expansion, self-
reproduction with variation, in the absence of any persistent
order or arrangement. Pure Tychism will never account
for any structured whole getting started, persisting and
growing.

It is significant, in this connection, that Samuel Alexander

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 153

has to invoke the Nisus to provide for the progressing quali-
tied enrichment, from level to level, of his space-time, and
that Dr. Whitehead has to invoke God as the Principle of
"concrescence" or Individuation. Let it once be admitted
that the blindly contingent happenings of mass-particles will
not account for Individuality, then one is logically committed
to the principle that the highest type of Individuality is
rooted and grounded in the Order of the Whole. Individual-
ity is primordial. Absolute genesis of individual wholes from
random fermentations of atomic space-time particles is ruled
out. (3) If the emergence and enhancement of finite indi-
viduality be, as I hold, the most outstanding feature of the
world process, the meaning of evolution, is it not in the high-
est degree improbable that in the universe as a whole this
process should reverse itself and individuality be reduced to
nothingness ? (4) The world-process has been obviously a
creative process, including a succession of levels of novelties.
If the principle of entropy or energy-degradation be an all-
including or cosmic principle, then, since its presupposition
is that there is a definite amount of energy in the universe,
the state of heat-death in which a world operating according
to the second law of thermodynamics must eventuate, should
have eventuated endless ages since. It is impossible that the
principle of entropy should rule in a creative or novelty-
producing cosmos. In short, a cosmos in which individuals
emerge and grow is not a mechanical system in any precise
sense of the term. In Eddington's terms, continual increase
of the random element and decrease of organization, in the
universe as a whole, involves a dead universe.

Matter I conceive to be a limiting concept. As such or
as a thing-in-itself it does not exist. Empirically, matter is
the principle of routine, of habit, a tendency towards same-
ness and fixity, a groove into which the habits of energy
life and mind tend to run. It has no principle of activity of
creativity. Its rules are the identical laws of Eddington
the laws of Conservation of Mass, Momentum, Energy.
When matter changes from one state to another, it is subject
to the principle of quantitative equivalence. What is gained

154 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

on one side of the equation is lost on the other. Equality of
action and reaction, purely quantitative give and take,
non-creative, non-initiating motion, absence of self-activity
are basic characteristics of matter.

On the other hand, the patterned dynamic structures of
atoms, whether minute solar systems or waves, the quantum
theory and the principle of indeterminacy all point towards
the idea that the strictly material aspects of the physical
order are simply the results of our statistical, crude, in-the-
lump way of describing the behaviors of minute dynamic
individua; and that everywhere in nature what is real is a
dynamic organization, an energy-pattern.

Life and mind gain, develop, by giving away, by activity,
by going beyond their existential states. Mind or spirit is
self-active and the more self-active the more living and
spiritual. Spirit does not lose itself by self-expression; but
rather so finds itself. It is not impoverished but rather en-
riched by giving. The more it spends the more it has. The
more it goes outside itself the more it is at home with itself.
The more it risks the more it wins. The laws of spirit are:
compenetrability, self-realization through self-transcend-
ence, self-activity, through living in and for other selves,
the richest individuality through the fullest commonalty.

I do not mean that matter is thus explained away or
shown to be a by-product of mind. All attempts at such a
solution are mere verbalisms. Matter or Blind Energy
must be accepted as a primary datum. Mere animal and
vegetable life are also primary data. There is a multiplicity
of forms of existence that interact not a simple duality
of matter and mind. Such notions as " mind-stuff ," or uni-
versal "organism," to bridge the differences, seem to me
to conduce merely to confusion of thought. What is a " mind-
stuff " that is not exactly "mind," nor a "stuff" at all?

It is quite possible that the richer forms of finite individual-
ity are the highest or most complex expressions, thus far,
of an immense but finite current of life that surges against
and oozes and trickles through obstacles that are not hurdles
set up by itself. There are many features of the life-situation

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 155

for which such a conception as Bergson's is the most plausi-
ble interpretation.

Livingness cannot be derived from non-livingness. Either
life is an original constituent of a universe, qualitatively
dual or multiple in its constitution, or all matter is alive.
The career of life is best accounted for by the hypothesis
that there is some sort of non-living factor which is a partial
hindrance to life. In this hypothesis Life is the creative prin-
ciple, which has, up to now, achieved its highest and most
paradoxical creation in spiritual selfhood or personality.
Life is finite and hindered, but it is increasing in individuality
and power and it may, in some far-off divine event, dominate
the cosmos.

I say this view is very plausible. The greatest difficulty
with it is that a reflectively-minded life seems, in comparison
with a lower organism, at least just as much sui generis as
does an organism in comparison with an inorganic thing.
(Indeed, I would say even more so.) If the urge of mere gen-
eral livingness is inadequate to account for the emergence
of personality, the latter must either be grounded in a crea-
tive principle of its own order or be eternal. Either person-
ality is just the richest emergent form of the organic urge
or it has a super-organic ground.

Individuals emerge but their emergence is the expression
of the enduring plan or structure of the whole cosmos.
The weight of evidence indicates that the history of our
geocosmic epoch is one of the emergence of a succession of
levels of increasing individuality-in-association. By a tidal
tug from another sun rushing past, a sun was torn to pieces.
A spiral nebula was formed, new knots formed upon this
gave rise to our sun and earth and other planets. Our
planet was, like the other planets, composed of very com-
plex highly radio-active atoms. Through the breaking down
of these, molten compounds and hot vapors were formed.
Earthquakes, volcanic storms, meteoric hail gave rise to
molten lava and hot rain. The earth's crust solidified; hot
water and steam were very abundant on it. Unicellular
organisms emerged, then multicelled organisms in immense

156 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

variety and succession from hydra to dinosaurs, and finally
to the primates and man.

We must accept the historic sequences determined by
the earth sciences as the most adequate, available descrip-
tion of the emergence of successive levels of individuality;
culminating, so far as our empirical evidence goes, in per-
sonality-in-community. To call this geocosmic process an
"emergent evolution" is to recognize the qualitative unique-
ness of each emergent level, in relation to lower levels;
it is to admit the inadequacy of a mechanical explanation.
The qualitatively novel level emerges and adds new signifi-
cance and richer reality to the process. For, as Spinoza
put it, the more attributes anything has, the higher its
degree of reality; and, I would add, the more persistent
and pervasive the pattern of its dynamic organization.

If new levels of individuality are inexplicable in terms of
a sheer mechanical process (the random rearrangement
of fixed particles having simple locations in time and space)
then their emergences imply a perennial cosmic dynamic
structure or plan, which is their enduring ground. Then
the emergence of individuality-in-association is the self-
expression (the revelation, if you like) of a Cosmic Principle
of Creative Order which can only be described as the Eternal
Ground of Individuality-in-Association. Since Personality-
in-Community is the richest form of Individuality-in-
Association, the Cosmic Ground is conceived, with least
inadequacy, as the Superpersonal and perennial spring of Per-
sonality.

Freundlos war der Grosse Welten-Meister.
Darum schuf Er Geister.

This is a poetic license. The Great World Master can
never have been friendless. The aeons of time and the
vast reaches of space must have always been pervaded
and permeated by individuality-producing Energy; there-
fore, by Individuality-in-Community raised to the nth power.

I do not say that this Creative Spring of Selfhood, eter-
nally includes and wholly subdues all that is. There remains
an apparent surd.

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 157

Moreover, it must be admitted that all attempts to form
any definite conception of the World Ground as Overself
or Superpersonality must end in failure. We needs must
interpret the ultimate in terms of the highest and fullest
life that we know. But the greatest of us men are at best
but very imperfect and dependent personalities. We are
finite, not merely in requiring the Others for our lives and
living in and through them; we are very finite in power and
range and possibility of achievement. And even the richest
cultural community which transcends the individual lives
of its individual members and spans the generations, is
fragmentary and full of vicissitudes. Even the life of the
greatest nation or church rises and falls, subject to the
changes and chances of this mortal life. As Plato said, the
Maker of all things is very difficult to know and hard to
communicate in so far as known.

Nevertheless, we can at least say this insofar as there
is a meaning discernible in the life of this cosmic epoch, that
meaning lies in the cumulative fulfillment of individuality-
in-association, of which the highest form is personality-
in-community. And this enduring meaning must be rooted
and grounded in the total cosmic structure which therefore
reveals its significance most fully in the communal life of a
society of persons.

What is the place of the abstract uniformities of routine,
repetitions of similars, in the scheme of things the "Laws"
of the physical order, the vital order, the mental order?
These express the stable environmental systems or condi-
tions for individuality. The repetitions of the physical are
the expressions of the interrelations of individua. Their
regularities are those of the natures of the component in-
dividua and are the environmental substructures for the
emergence of higher individua. Vital order has its own
social habits or "institutions." These are environmental
conditions of mental individuality. Persons have their own
habits or institutions. These routines change much more
than those of vital individua these in turn more than
those of physical individua; because the richer, the more

158 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

self-active the individuum, the less is it a creature of the
environmental substructure, and to the greater degree it is
self-creative.

There is then no order of iron law or set of iron laws,
outside or above the individuality of the real and imposed
upon it; not even in the physical sphere. All universals or
laws are immanent in the relationships of individuals
physical laws in the electronic relationships, vital laws in
the organic relationships, spiritual laws in the mental com-
munity.

Insofar as all these orders or structures constitute an
ultimate system, insofar as there is a universe, there must
be a preestablished harmony an Order of orders; therefore
a Principle or Ground of Order. But this Supreme Ordering
Principle cannot be something in which finite individuality
is swallowed up. It can be nothing other than the Supreme
Individual, which, as the creative source of all lesser in-
dividuals, is the ground of their interrelations, as well as
of their inner potencies. Potencies and relationships are
nothing apart from one another. I do not say there must
be a Supreme Individual, the Ground of all finite individu-
ality. I say, if there be an Absolute Ground of individuality;
as the ground of a developing community of developing
finite individuals, it can neither absorb all these individuals,
which would be a nullification of its own world-creating and
sustaining activity, nor can it impose on the finite individuals
ab extra an order of laws that is other than the relation-
ships of a community of individuals that issue from the joint
natures of the individuals composing it.

In brief, if there be one World-Ground, its nature is
expressed precisely in the variety and active movement of
finite individuals. The term " universe" means only the ac-
tual community of the diversity of an immense multiplicity of
finite individuals. It is either an eternally existing commu-
nity of individuals or it has a ground, an ultimate Individual.
The interrelationships of the various orders of individuality
(electronic, physical, vital, and spiritual) and their apparent
genesis in time point towards one creative and sustaining

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 159

ground. The conflict and confusion between the orders
and within each order (struggle for existence, egoism vs.
altruism, etc.), make the hypothesis of one ground dubious.

There are many considerations that make for a radical
pluralism. But I think the truth probably lies between an
absolutism such as Bradley's, which also has a strongly
pluralistic tinge (his "finite centers*' are timeless differen-
tiations of the Absolute), and a radical pluralism.

On the ground that the various orders of individua are
interdependent and thus point towards one supreme order
and also on the ground that the continuity of meaning and
value implies a world goal as now real, a terminus ad quern as
well as a terminus a quo, I elect the mediating position.
The real is individual. There is a supreme Individuality,
a World-Ground of the orders and self-activities of finite
individua. This World-Ground includes the World-Goal
the multifarious and harmonious values and ends of finite
individuals.

I do not say that, from factual evidence alone, an ideal-
ism of personality and value is the world-view that alone
has plausibility, much less compulsiveness. I admit that
there are perplexing problems for one who embraces this
world-view. And it can no more be explained why and how,
in a world in which value-creating-and-enjoying personality
is supreme, the obstructive and oftentimes seemingly de-
structive blind material forces operate as they do; than it
can be explained why or how, in a world in which blind and
insensate event-particles rule and are alone substantial, a
realm of culture-creating personalities should arise and ap-
pear successful.

Cosmic pluralism is the world-view that best meets all
the issues. The members of the world do hang together;
but in a loose-jointed way, which permits some free play
among them. There is a cosmos only in the sense that its
members are in intercommunication; they interact and inter-
suffer. All manner of interchanges take place between them;
they are dynamic organizations or activity-forms; and not
only quantitatively plural, but qualitatively various.

160 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

The only world-view in which values and meanings can
have a permanently real status is one for which minds, per-
sonalities, and their values are supreme. After all, what
preferred meaning has materialism, energism, or any other
world-view in a riotous chaos of material energies in which
all world-views, all ideas, valuations, ends, ideals, and voli-
tions are equally illusory products of the fortuitous concourse
of bare event particles ?

The personalist can account for the materialist. He is
one whose thought is dominated by mathematico-physical
concepts, and by the empirical correlation between the
physical and the mental. He takes a set of useful, and so
far true, abstractions to be the whole truth about reality.
The materialist cannot explain why and how reason, valua-
tion, and volition should seem to be creative agencies in the
world; as they plainly are in the cultural world of human
kind. He cannot even account for his own theorizing and
theory. He cannot account for anything significant in
human culture. For culture, in all its forms, is a creation
of mind. It is not dictated by the dance of electron-protons
nor by the empirical milieu. In the applied arts, manners,
morals, social organizations, sciences, fine arts, philosophies,
and religions of humanity there have arisen, in the same
physical environment in which the other animals produce no
cultures, all the varied, stately, and changing cultures by
which man is man. The existence and career of human
cultures in their totality is to me the most convincing evi-
dence that mind is the supreme creative principle. Man is
ever creating and re-creating, by the activity of mind,
values, purposes, ideals; and forms of social culture, in
which he may put these values, purposes, and ideals into
good effect. All the institutions and forms of human cul-
ture are utterances of self-active spirit, of the creative life
of mind.

In certain forms of Personal Idealism the finite self
is treated as a tiny Absolute, a kind of self-existent or self-
complete spiritual entity. This is just as erroneous a notion
as that which regards the self as only a mechanically as-

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 161

sembled complex. The finite self is an imperfect developing
product of the Cosmic Order. It is the richest concentra-
tion of the macrocosmic forces. But it is a dependent mem-
ber, not a self-existent entity. Its centrality and value lie
simply in the fact that it is the richest finite expression of
the Cosmic Whole, and that its supreme activating form
individuated reason or spirit cannot be accounted for in
lower terms and, therefore, is the most significant expres-
sion of the spirit of the Whole, of the Cosmic Structure.
I will put it this way since the universe gives rise to per-
sons, these must be a revelation of the Nature of the uni-
verse. This, of course, is true, but in everlessening degree,
of subpersonal individua. And certainly reason or spirit is
never anything but individuated. Consciousness, Spirit or
Reason in general is an empty abstraction. If the Creator
be nothing more than a cosmic mathematician, he is no
creator.

Finite selfhood is a complex, a composite of many factors.
It has many degrees of inclusiveness and integration. The
fullest selfhood is a time-spanning and space-binding power.
It is freighted with knowledge and insight in regard to
nature and humanity, integrated into a living whole. The
poorest selfhood is that of an inharmonious complex of
impulsions and habits, or partial complexes, that cannot
achieve unity and so remains divided or even alienated from
itself; arrested in its growth and protecting what it has by a
make-believe world of illusion.

Personality or selfhood is always growing and developing.
Its basis is a complex organization, a dynamic equilibrium
of electromagnetic energies in which emerges the creative
organizing form of vitality (if indeed vitality be not present
all along). On the basis of this vital organization there
emerges reflective mentality selective and recognitive mem-
ory, analytic and synthetic thinking, creative imagination
and rational valuation and self-directive choice. The
organization is always a moving equilibrium in a milieu;
never self-complete. The moving end is integration of self
by integration with its physical, social, and cosmic milieus.

162 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

The higher, more inclusive, more creative integrating pat-
tern is not the mere by-product of that in which it emerges.
Nor, on the other hand, is it an eternally self-complete
monad. It is a supervenient dynamic structure granted,
as Lotze put it, by the cosmic milieu, to a specific pattern
of material and vital organization.

The dynamic pattern, the form of individuality is not
something apart from the stuff and the process in which it is
expressed. Classical philosophy did tend to separate the
forms from the matter and make the forms in themselves
transcendent. Just as Energy and Matter are one, so organ-
izing form and process of realization are one. There is no
stuff that exists apart from its organization. There is no
vital principle other than the immanent dynamic organiza-
tion of the body. There is no soul or mind other than the
immanent dynamic and reflective selective and elective
principle of conscious and rational organization.

The older materialism and certain forms of rationalism
emphasize structure at the expense of function. Instrumen-
talism and analogous forms of biocentric philosophy empha-
size function at the expense of structure. Function appears
as an indefinitely plastic capacity to make something out
of nothing. Dualism really rests on the duality of structure
and function.

Structure and function are two aspects of the same thing
patterned and organizing activity. Structure is meaningless,
except as a definite dynamic pattern of activity or function.
Function is nothing except as patterned activity. Patterned
processes, varieties of individualities mean structured ac-
tivities.

This principle must be as true of the whole universe as it
is of its various members. If there be an Originating and
Sustaining Ground of Individuality, the ultimate Individual,
he must be continuously immanent in the cosmic order. He
can have no structure which does not function. The only
sense in which an Ultimate Individual Whole could be said
to transcend the cosmic order is that his organization or struc-
ture, which is his immanent nature, in its inner unity must

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 163

transcend the functioning structures of any, or of the mere
sum, of finite individuals. His substance transcends the
finite multiplicity only in the sense of being the substantial
ground of all finite multiplicity.

It is not the function of a philosophic cosmology to explain
the details of phylogenesis nor of ontogenesis. The natural
sciences, as evolutionary, can trace and describe a succession
of steps. But the emergence of Emergent Evolution, in these
latter days, is significant testimony to the inadequacy of any
sheer mechanicalism, as the ultimate principle of genesis.

What we find is a hierarchy of individuated forms or struc-
tures in manifold interplay. The universe is a richly complex
living whole of multiform types of individuality. Mind or
Spirit is the most inclusive and self-active form of totality,
of organizing individuality; therefore it is the most adequate
principle for the interpretation of the meaning of the Whole.
In the universe, Life and Mind must always have been pres-
ent. The universe is too rich to be dissolved into any of the
lower categories. The Whole, in its highest and most signifi-
cant sense, is a community of minds.

Personality cannot be derived from less than itself.
" Emergence " does not ultimately account for anything
significant. The fullest significance of the universe lies in
that it is a personality-in-community creating process. The
creative ground of the universe must be personal, and how
much more we cannot know. But that more must transcend,
without annulling, finite personality.

A pantheism which talks of an impersonal Absolute, of
which all persons are literally parts, is the most inconsequent
kind of attempt to conceive the whole and at the same time
provide for the conservation of values.

There are three final metaphysical possibilities: (i) Such
an eternalistic pluralism as McTaggart's. This seems to me
to suffer shipwreck on the data of creative evolution. If it
is the true interpretation, then all the apparent coming-into-
being of finite individuated structures is illusory. There can
be no genuine emergent evolution nor any genuine signifi-
cance in the development of the single individual, if all finite

164 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

individuals eternally exist as such. The history of the world
as well as my own history are, in such case, tales without
meaning or end. (2) A finitistic theism which recognizes
a supreme self as the ground and goal of the lives of finite
selves, but not of all that is. This leaves an ultimate rift in
the universe between the ground of individuality and value
and the tendency that thwarts individuality and value. (3)
A theism which makes Deity the Eternal Individual, Crea-
tive and Sustaining Ground of all individuality; but recog-
nizes that in his own nature as given there are hindrances
to the full realization of individuality. This view has to
swallow the problem of evil with as good a grace as possible.
The total real is a world of individuals of various kinds and
degrees, interacting.

Individuals clash and suffer apparent defeat or extinction
in this world. The great enigma is this individuality is the
significantly real and valuable, and yet it seems to suffer
shipwreck. Life is struggle, tragedy. The individual seems
to be "cast, as aimless, to the void."

A fundamental postulate of idealism is that Nature is
organic to spiritual ends. 1 But the trouble is that, eviden-
tially, Nature appears far from being always organic to spir-
itual ends. Indeed, in the latest theory of the career of the
physical cosmos, stars and systems arise through the break-
ing down of very complex atoms whose constituents vibrate
at very high frequency, matter is radiating into space and
the world is headed towards heat-death apparently a proc-
ess of de-individuation. I am not saying this is true for the
entire cosmos. Indeed it cannot be; else how could there now
be individuals?

What are we to make of the apparent fact that selves are
ruined and hence values are lost? The world seems to make
for individuality in increasing measure, as we run through
the scale of finite being from the atom and the crystal to
man and beyond; on the other hand, individuality seems
the hapless prey of finite contingent forces. A youth of great
promise is snuffed out or goes awry in mental alienation,

1 See Bosanquet, The Principle of Individuality and Value, p. 140.

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 165

thousands of human beings suffer unmerited destruction or
endure unmerited agonies!

There are here two alternatives: (i) Either there is in the
universe an unspiritual impersonal surd outside the person-
ality-creating-ground; and against the brute contingent
forces the Eternal Ground of Individuality, as well as his off-
spring and companions, must contend; or (2) there is in the
Supreme Self something we do not understand. A "given/'
as Mr. Brightman puts it, which constitutes the limitation
to his and our creative development of individuality. But
God must be perfect; otherwise the concept of God is with-
out meaning or use. I conceive of Him as the perfection of
personality; therefore finite in that He does not include all
that is. The theory that evil is due to the ethical self-limita-
tion of God in order that persons may be self-determining,
if presented as a full solution, is mere verbiage. It has a
limited area of application. We may say that, just as a hu-
man parent must allow a certain range to the child in order
that it may grow to maturity by trial and error, so it is in
regard to the Supreme Self and man. But this theory fails
to account for the pure brute contingencies that seem to ruin
human lives. It does not even explain man's inhumanity
to man, insofar as this arises from brutish stupidity or sheer
mental disorder. It might account for certain forms of in-
telligent diabolry, but not for the idiot and the dangerously
insane. Some evil is a means to good stimulus and incite-
ment to individual and social effort. Some is due to remedi-
able thoughtlessness. But a large remainder is an impene-
trable mass of mystery. To say that the Creator creates
wills whose vocation is to be free, is no solution. To create
a will is, in principle, to will what that will wills.

If one says, with the Buddhist, that clinging to individual
existence is the root of all evil, the answer is that the uproot-
ing of evil is then the extinction of the seat of all values.

In any hypothesis that meets the issue, tragedy and enor-
mous apparent waste are not eliminated. Reality is an
arduous process. But it is creativity, issuing in novelties,
richer and richer wholes. And the very notion of a creative

166 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

whole, of novelty, is taken from individuality. Therefore
the ground of the Universal Creative Process must be the
Eternal Individual or the Over-self.

I come back then to the point that, since the universe, in
the increasing manifestations of its nature, shows ascent
through increase of significant organized wholes or the con-
tinuously creative process of emergent individuals, and since
mind is the most inclusive form of totality or individuality,
the ground of the whole process is most adequately pictured
as mind. But whether the Principle of Individuality is the
ground of the entire universe I do not know. A cosmic dual-
ism is a plausible theory. I have no esoteric insight. I can
only indulge a reasonable hope, based on the apparent tend-
ency toward Individuality or Personality.

To sum up this discussion: If the world has a meaning, if
it sustains real values, the most coherent philosophical doc-
trine is personal idealism. The principles of individuality
and value are one this implies that spiritual selfhood is a
qualitatively unique self-active kind of reality. Simpler
forms of individuality interact with it. Mind-body is a dual,
yes, a multiple, interactive system, in which the mental self
is the ruling principle. The universe is, of course, in some
sense one; but it is not one absolute all-including mind or
experience. The absolute of absolute idealism must be re-
jected. It no more provides place for the unique value-
reality of selves than does materialism. To say that there
is only one ultimately real Individual is, in effect, to de-
realize individuality. Since personality is the principle of
value, and persons are self-active members of a community,
reality in its highest terms must be a community of inter-
related selves. The histories of selves have dramatic sig-
nificance. Reality as an eternal motionless One is valueless,
because value-destroying; value-destroying because selfhood-
annihilating.

There are two consistent ultimate philosophies: Material-
ism, which makes individuality and value illusory and un-
accountable by-products of the blind fortuitous concourse
of atoms; and Personal Idealism, which takes its stand on

INDIVIDUALITY AND VALUE 167

the reasonable faith that, since the meanings and values
of existence reside in individuality, everything in the uni-
verse must in the end be subservient to the fulfillment and
perduration of personality-in-community. I elect personal
idealism; as a hypothesis based on the evident individuation
of the empirically real and a postulate based on the faith
that the cosmos must have Meaning and must honor
Value.

Note. The above essay is a condensed restatement of the metaphysics
of my Man and the Cosmos with a more pluralistic emphasis. I first
formulated this position in 1893-94 in my doctoral dissertation, which
was published in 1902, under the title "Typical Modern Conceptions
of God." I was led to it by reflection upon the place of human life in the
cosmos, after a somewhat extensive study of biological evolution and of
chemistry. In formulating my theory of individuality, I was much in-
fluenced by Plato, Aristotle, Leibniz, and T. H. Green; later I was
influenced chiefly by Kant, Hegel, and Bradley, although I never could
accept the latter' s view of Time and his Absolute. I profited by Royce's
The Conception of God and The World and the Individual, but the latter
appeared too late in my development to influence me much. His Problem
of Christianity is to me his greatest book. I was also influenced a good
deal by William James and Beigson.

VIII
THE FINITE SELF

EDGAR SHEFFIELD BRIGHTMAN
Boston University

THE FINITE SELF

Edgar Sheffield Brightman

The problem with which we are now to deal is that of
the nature of the finite self. This phrasing is perhaps mis-
leading, for it might suggest some implied infinite Absolute
Self as a counterpart to the finite self. But such a sugges-
tion is by no means intended here. The expression is used
partly because of its historical place in idealistic discussions
and partly to emphasize the finiteness of the selves that we
are and associate with. The question of whether there is
either an infinite Self or a finite, but supreme, Cosmic Self
will be left out of consideration in our treatment of the
finite self.

In the light of the general aim of this volume, the intent
of the present chapter is to develop an idealistic view of
the finite self. In undertaking to fulfill this purpose, we
shall seek to analyze and criticize the chief traits of finite
self-experience as they have been apprehended by histori-
cal idealism. By way of an experiment in testing the validity
of the idealistic view, we shall go on to consider some of
the main features of the account of the self given by a thinker
who is no metaphysical idealist, namely, Franz Brentano.
At the end we shall draw such inferences as the facts con-
sidered seem to suggest.

A preliminary inquiry may render the advance of our in-
vestigation more profitable. If we ask what contributions
idealists have made toward the discovery of fundamental
traits of the finite self, we confront an embarrassment of
riches. Not only is there an amazing abundance of material,
but also there are amazing contradictions in it. It cannot
be said that there is a single consistent doctrine of the self

171

172 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

shared by all idealists. However, there are four propositions
which conspicuous idealists have held, although relatively
few have held consistently and with equal emphasis to all
four. The propositions are: (i) The self is a system (or-
ganic); (2) The self is a self-existent unity (monadic);
(3) The self is conscious experience (mentalistic); and (4)
The self is active (activistic).

To say that the self is organic, means that every phase
and experience of the self is so interconnected with every
other in the self as a whole that no single experience can
be understood until it is interpreted in the light of its mem-
bership in the whole self. The organic idealist would say
that it is, of course, possible to describe the phenomena of
vision apart from the character and personality of John
Jones who sees. Such description is essential to psychology
as an abstract causal science. But the idealist would add
that complete knowledge of the laws of the phenomena of
vision falls far short of giving us an understanding of what
any visual experience means to John Jones. When Mr. Jones
sees a Chinese character, he is filled with mingled perplexity
and amusement. When he sees an English word written
by a friend, the whole current of his life is changed. Each
of his experiences is affected by the whole of his experience,
so that no part is exactly and in all respects what it would
be in any other whole. This organic view is characteristic of
Hegel, although his interest is more in societies than in finite
individuals. It appears in Royce's teleological theory of the
self in his Gifford Lectures and more recently in G. W. Cun-
ningham's lectures on the self at the University of Texas.
It is, indeed, the most widely agreed on trait of the self
among idealists in general. It obviously conforms to the
cardinal principle of idealism, namely, that of organic logic.
We shall, however, resist the temptation to consider the
implications of this logic with reference to the relations of
the self to the universe as a whole.

The second trait of the self which we merttioned was the
monadic; the self is a self-existent unity. One who describes
the self in terms of this proposition has observed that a self

THE FINITE SELF 173

is radically different from what we commonly (although, in
the last analysis, falsely, as the idealist would say) take
to be the character of a physical thing. A thing seems to
be made up of separable parts which enjoy an independent
existence both before and after their conjunction in what
we call a thing. An apple has an aesthetic and organic unity;
yet every particle of matter in it existed before it entered
into the apple and will continue to exist in some form long
after the apple has decayed. But the parts of a self (a mind,
I mean, as distinguished from its body) exist only in the
unity of the experience of the self to which they belong.
A sensation has no continuous existence analogous to that
of an atom. It exists only when and as sensed by a self.
The organic wholeness previously mentioned can become
an actual function only in the concrete unity of the self.
Moreover, each self is a unity as distinguished from other
selves. It is this trait in particular which justifies us in using
the world monadic. It may be that Andrew Seth was
one-sided when, in Hegelianism and Personality, he made
the famous statement that the self is "perfectly imper-
vious . . . , impervious in a fashion of which the impene-
trability of matter is a faint analogue." * However much
supplementation these words may need in order to be a nicely
balanced account of the whole truth, they embody ad-
mirably one genuine fact about the self. No inspection,
observation, or inference can give to the observer such ac-
cess to a self as that self has to itself in its own immediate
consciousness. Each self, then, is a unique unity, a unit
that exists only for itself and shares its immediate ex-
istence with no other self, although experience shows that
it knows and communicates with many other selves. As
every student of the history of philosophy is aware, this
view received its classical formulation in Leibniz, and a
significant re-interpretation by Lotze and, in America, by
Bowne. Among others, H. Wildon Carr advocates this in-
sight of idealism. The monadic unity of the self has been
most thoroughly attacked by Hume and by John Stuart Mill,

1 Page 227.

174 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

yet each of these men expressed frank misgivings about the
success of his attack. The attack in both cases was due to
imperfect idealism: an excess of mentalism, combined with
a deficiency of organic logic.

Already in discussing the monadic factor we have to some
extent anticipated the third trait of the self, namely, that
it is conscious experience. This we called the mentalistic
trait. Powerful currents of thought at the present time
tend to depreciate the fact of consciousness; physiological
behavior tends to usurp the place of mind. These currents,
as interpreted by organic logic, have not been without in-
fluence on some idealists. Nevertheless, the predominant
intent of idealism is to magnify the importance of actual
conscious awareness. The idealist who does this starts
with what he regards as the unde'niable fact that conscious-
ness exists and that all statements about what is not the
present consciousness of the speaker must find their vali-
dation ultimately in some future conscious experience of
his. The idealist also believes that consciousness exists
only as a self, so that tQL.be conscious means to be a seJLf,
and conversely, selfhood consists in conscious experience.
Descartes and Berkeley were among the first to call emphatic
attention to this aspect of the self. The self is res cogitans.
With Locke and with Kant there survived relics of the scho-
lastic theory of a substantial soul which is other than the
phenomena of consciousness; but in both of these men, espe-
cially in Kant, fundamental interest was centered on the anal-
ysis of consciousness. In the arch-idealist Hegel, this interest
was so highly developed that Professor Theodor Haering
has characterized him as the great empiricist of conscious-
ness. Among recent idealists, the late Professor Mary W.
Calkins, whose passing is universally lamented in American
philosophy, was a conspicuous proponent of mentalism, in
the sense defined. We may relate this view to current
discussion of the nature of what is given in perception
by asserting bluntly of the datum (which has evaporated
into the ghostly unreality of essences at the hands of the
realists) that this datum is the self.

THE FINITE SELF 175

A fourth trait of the self emphasized by idealists is, as
we have said, its activity. Idealists have very generally op-
posed the view that the mind is a tabula rasa and have been
critical of all theories which have asserted or tended to as-
sert the passivity of the self in knowledge. The activity of
the mind in knowing has been a major theme of idealistic
thought, perhaps most conspicuously in Kant and those
influenced by him; although interpreters of Kant have varied
in their view of the meaning and importance of this activity.
But the activistic trait is, according to many idealists, not
manifested in knowing alone; they hold that it is the very
nature of the self as a whole to be active. For Berkeley the
spirit was throughout active. For Leibniz activity was the
very essence of the monad. The voluntaristic idealism of
Schopenhauer embodied the same insight. Lotze and Bowne
and others continued the tradition.

As we said at the start, not all idealists would agree that
all the traits mentioned are essential to the self. There is,
however, an almost universal acceptance of what we called
the organic factor. That factor is perhaps least evident
in Berkeley's empirical idealism, yet there are traces of it
even there. There is less unanimity about the other traits.
Absolutists even incline to believe that there are contradic-
tions between the organic and the monadic views; they hold
that the point of view of the whole precludes the ultimate
separateness of the monads. It must be granted that com-
plete separatcness is impossible. But absolutists and plu-
ralistic idealists differ regarding the nature and degree of
the separateness and of the relations among the finite selves.
This problem lies beyond our investigation, as does the
mind-body problem.

II

More substance may be imparted to the foregoing outline
view of the self as seen by idealists if we consider the ideal-
istic account in its distinction from other accounts.

If we ask how an idealistic view of the self is distinguished
from other views, it lies close at hand to say that the idealis-
tic view is complete, concrete, whole, while other views are

176 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

partial and abstract. As Hegel says, "The knowledge of
the Spirit is the most concrete, and therefore the highest
and hardest." 1 Yet it is doubtful whether this statement
would wholly satisfy anyone but an idealist. To be satisfied
by it is already to be an idealist! In fact, it might be argued
that completeness and wholeness are the common property
or at least the common aim of all philosophical thought, so
that the suggested criterion fails to distinguish idealistic
from other philosophical views of the self.

Postponing for the moment any attempt to differentiate
the idealistic from other philosophies of the finite self, we
deem it necessary to dwell somewhat on the differences be-
tween a psychological and an idealistic view of the self. Both
views, obviously, deal with the same self, operate with the
same facts, are activities of the same mind. There can, there-
fore, be no absolute separation between them. It must be
confessed that some philosophers (notably logicians and
epistemologists) have given the impression that they have
enjoyed access to a realm of mind of which the psychologist
could know nothing. Their opposition to psychology has
savored of incantation. Such excess of abstraction, however
useful it may be for some special purpose, can only confuse
the essential issues. There can be nothing in the mind that
is not psychological fact, although the psychological fact
must for many purposes be studied by other methods and
with other problems than those of psychology.

It needs, then, to be made clear that the methods of psy-
chology and the methods of philosophical idealism are dis-
tinct, although their subject matter, the mind, is identical.
The psychologist is primarily concerned with the observation
and causal explanation of the experiences of finite selves.
Hence his chief interest is in fruitful methods of experimen-
tation and in the data which can be gathered by those meth-
ods. The idealistic philosopher, on the other hand, while
relying on the psychologist for experimental procedures
and their results, differs from the psychologist in having an
even greater interest in the presuppositions and implications

1 Hegel, Encydopadie, $ 377.

THE FINITE SELF 177

of experimental method than in the method itself. Moreover,
he is concerned to interpret the results of psychological sci-
ence in at least two ways: First, by relating them to a system
of ideal values, that is, by a normative study of the results
of psychology. The fact that the norms themselves, as con-
scious experiences, are subject matter for psychology in no
degree lessens the difference which we are mentioning; for
the difference in method of studying the same subject matter
remains, and differences in method are fundamental. Sec-
ondly, the idealistic philosopher aims to relate the whole
point of view and field of psychological science to other points
of view, such as those of the physical sciences, and also to
our non-scientific experience. In so doing idealism stands
far closer to actual life than does the point of view of the
scientific technician. Science is, for cultivated people other
than scientific specialists, a relatively small part of civilized
living, and that part chiefly instrumental. Music, art, social
organization, recreation, literature, and religion bulk larger
than science in the life of most human beings. Idealism,
regarding this phenomenon as significant and justifiable,
seeks to interpret it.

A mind that finds no problem in the relations between
philosophy and science in general, or between philosophy
and psychology in particular, must be either singularly
placid or singularly provincial. Who can rest content, for
example, with the humanly explicable, yet logically inde-
fensible, hostility of experimental psychologists to philos-
ophy, evidence of which fairly peppers the pages of E. G.
Boring's A History of Experimental Psychology? 1 Indeed,
the impression which Boring's book leaves is that, for the
experimentalist, interest in his method has run away with
every other intellectual interest, so that comprehensiveness
of view and even the facts of immediate experience are sub-
ordinated to the demands of method. If the act "is a datum
that does not lend itself to experimentation" 2 the experi-

1 Edwin G. Boring, A History of Experimental Psychology (New York, Century, 1920).
Hereafter referred to as Boring, HEP (1929). For the hostility of experimentalists to
philosophy see pp. 21, 412, 424, 452, 521, 539, 589, 638, 659, 660, etc.

2 Boring, HEP (1929), 442.

178 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

mentalist loses interest in it. Important as method is, ex-
clusive interest in any one method is nothing short of intel-
lectual provincialism. Methodological dogmatism is not
intrinsically superior to other types of dogmatism. Boring
himself sees clearly that reasoning is not secondary to ob-
servation l and thus holds out an olive branch to philosophy.
All this makes clear, I think, that the major problem regard-
ing psychology is not that of psychology vs. idealism, but
rather that of psychology vs. any philosophical criticism at
all. The anti-philosophical psychologist has dug a pit into
which he will fall.

In addition to the difficulties arising from these general
considerations, idealism has to face special difficulties in
defining its position relative to certain empirical psychologi-
cal facts. Idealism deals with wholes, with unitary struc-
tures, with coherent meanings. But mind as experience is
notoriously disunified, subject to normal and abnormal in-
terruptions, lacking in coherence and meaning. The frag-
mentariness of consciousness is to many a decisive argument
against an idealistic view of mind.

Here, indeed, idealism must despair unless it can find
footing in actual psychological experience. If it cannot be
shown that ideals of logical meaning actually function, ex-
plicitly or implicitly, in all consciousness, and that time-
transcendence is an actual property of every mind, binding
its seemingly scattered fragments into a unique whole, then
idealism fails for lack of a foundation. Hence, while an ideal-
istic interpretation is not the same as a psychological de-
scription, it must be emphasized that every idealistic inter-
pretation rests on a psychological foundation. Otherwise
what is there for idealism to interpret?

An idealistic account of the self is, furthermore, to be dis-
tinguished from the accounts given by non-idealistic phi-
losophers. As we said above, all philosophers agree in their
attempt to see the self as a whole. Idealists, materialists,
analytic realists, and most pragmatists agree on the view
that the world is homogeneous, i.e., that there is no radical

14.

THE FINITE SELF 179

and insuperable distinction between "mind" and "matter."
Yet there is a marked difference between the idealistic and
the realistic ways of conceiving the wholeness of the self.
The essence of this difference may be stated concisely by
saying that the realist explains the whole mind in terms of
its parts and their relations, whereas the idealist explains
all parts and their relations in terms of the whole mind. This
formula serves also to distinguish idealism from empiricism
and rationalism. Emgincism tends toward an exclusive
interest in terms (and when it includes relations, tends to
view them as if they were kinds of particular terms). Ration-
alism tends toward an exclusive interest in relations (and
when it views terms, tends to view them as if they
were complexes of universal relations). Idealism seeks to
understand terms and relations through their member-
ship in a concretely whole self which is a universalizing
particular.

It cannot, however, be denied that the idealistic view con-
tains distinctions within itself. We may best state these
distinctions by referring back to the traits of the finite self
to which idealists have called special attention. Substan-
tially all idealists agree, as we have already said, that the
self is organic. But there are at least Jwo issues on which
idealists differ among themselves. The first is that of monad-
ism vs. absolutism. The.monadist regards the separateness
and privacy of each individual self as an ultimate trait of
the world; he therefore inclines to some type of quantitative
pluralism, yet recognizes some sort of interrelation among
the plural monads. The absolutist holds that the many finite
selves are members of one Absolute Self, and so are not ulti-
mately separate or private; he therefore inclines to what
James Ward has called singularism, yet seeks to provide for
the many selves within the one. It seems to the present
writer that this issue is indissolubly connected with that be-
tween epistemological dualism and monism. Idealistic epis-
temological monism the doctrine that the object is immedi-
ately present as idea leads straight to the Absolute Self;
but if epistemological dualism is true (and I believe that

I8o CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

A. O. Lovejoy's Carus Lectures 1 have conclusively proved
it to be true), then the absolutistic view is practically ex-
cluded and the monadic becomes possible. The second issue
among idealists is that ofjmentalism vs. logism (as it may be
called). The mentalist finds the essence of mind to consist
in and to be inseparable from conscious awareness. The
logist is less interested in consciousness than in logical whole-
ness, and he speaks more of system and of transcendental,
extra-psychological egos than of mind as consciously experi-
enced. Logism has sometimes generated a fine contempt of
empirical fact and of individual selves.

My own bias in favor of monadism and mentalism is per-
haps too evident from my statement of the issues. But the
reader who is warned of this bias will be able to evaluate it
more successfully and will be prepared to consider some rea-
sons for preferring one member of each pair of alternatives
which will appear in the course of the chapter to the other.

Ill

An idealist should be even more alert to the defects of
idealism than any external critic could be. It may help us to
understand the finite self from the idealistic standpoint if
we consider some of the respects in which the idealistic
vision has failed of realization. That vision may be stated
simply: The self is a genuinely organic unified whole. In
all its variety and change, it is one. A writer so remote
from idealism as E. G. Boring makes the somewhat sweep-
ing statement that "the unity of the soul has been an
echo from Aristotle to Descartes, from Descartes to
William James, and is today the central dogma of Gestalt
psychology." 2

It must be admitted that, while idealists of almost every
type have asserted the unity of the self, they have failed to
frame a theory of that unity which consistently lives up to
initial expectations. The dualism which runs through Plato's
whole philosophy infects also his view of the soul, despite his

1 Arthur 0. Love joy, The Revolt against Dualism (Chicago, Open Court Publishing Co.,
1930).
'Boring, HEP (1929), 156.

THE FINITE SELF 181

conviction of its unity. Aristotle set the vovs 7rot7?rnc6s apart
from the rest of the mental life, so that it alone was immortal,
but doubtfully personal and doubtfully related to sense and
to individuality. Berkeley placed passive and inert ideas
in active spirits, without welding, or apparently feeling the
need of welding, these refractory elements into a living whole.
Kant came nearer to the goal than did Plato, Aristotle, or
Berkeley; but for all his transcendental unity of appercep-
tion, he falls short of genuine unity in at least three points :
the manifold of sense with which the categories have to deal
seems to have in itself a Humean discreteness; the specula-
tive and the practical reason are not sufficiently unified by
the assertion of the primacy (and immortality) of the prac-
tical (as contrasted with Aristotle's primacy and immortality
of the speculative); and the unity of consciousness is reduced
to an als ob status which is far from satisfactory. 1 Hegel
was too much concerned with the social and the absolute
to pay sufficient attention to the problem of the finite indi-
vidual. Schopenhauer's preoccupation with the will blinds
him to the empirical details of consciousness and the unity
of the whole self. Fichte's preoccupation with the episte-
mological subject-in-general causes the treatment of the finite
self at his hands to suffer; logism crowds out monadism and
mentalism.

In short, the very nature of reason, which is the principle
of unity, has been fated to prevent the attainment of unity.
Reason proclaims its utter superiority to sense, its univer-
sality and so its independence of the empirical self, and its
own complex structure as both speculative and practical.
These three interests of reason have stood in the way of its
interest in the unity of the finite self, and therefore idealism
has, to a degree, frustrated itself.

Yet the conception of organic wholeness, which is the
cardinal principle of idealism, contains the cure for these
ills, if it be applied rigorously to the problem of the self. The
finite self is a genuine whole, an experienced unity, in which
reason and sense are inseparable aspects of one indivisible

^drV. A 672 [Sup. 54].

182 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

mind. That mind may be studied from many points of view;
but it is one and the same mind whether empirical or tran-
scendental questions are asked about it. Even so clear an
idealistic thinker as H, J. Paton breaks down the living
unity of the self when he continues the traditional confusion
by distinguishing the subject-self from the object-self, or
the empirical self from the transcendental self. 1 If idealists
were to speak of empirical aspects or problems and of tran-
scendental aspects or problems, constantly making clear
that both types of aspect and problem refer to one and
the same identical finite self, then thought would become
less ambiguous, idealism would be more consistent, and
much confusing, half-intended hypostatization would be
avoided.

But if this program were carried out, what a revision of
terminology would ensue! Instead of "consciousness in
general" we should have "principles common to all finite
selves." Instead of the "pure ego," that strange being which
has engendered far more nonsense than sense and which
stands in a very vague but very superior relation to the
empirical ego, we should speak of "certain rational func-
tions of the finite self, considered apart from sense experi-
ence." It would become unambiguously clear that the "pure
ego" and the "empirical ego" are experiences of the same
finite self, namely each and every normal finite self in the
known world. Moreover, the careful idealist would avoid
speaking of an "epistemological subject," for he would not
wish to give the impression that this subject is a different
being from the psychological subject. Rather, he would
make clear that the subject in all its functions is one and
the same self, considered from the standpoint of different
scientific problems. In short, he would recognize that Ex-
perience exists only in experience; that real consciousness
exists only as real selves. Thus idealism would come to
have a more adequately empirical cast. While retaining its
organic logic, it would become explicitly monadic, and thus
might tend toward an organic pluralism.

1 H. J. Paton, "Self-Identity," in Mind, 38 (1929), 312-329, especially 316-317.

THE FINITE SELF 183

IV

Thus far we have been looking into the problem of the
self from a particular idealistic standpoint. As was indicated
at the outset, we are now going to submit the idealistic view
to the test of considering it in relation to Franz Brentano's
theory of the self. He is a peculiarly appropriate thinker
to bring on at this point. On the one hand he is an Aris-
totelian, who is out of sympathy with modern idealism,
notably with that of Kant and Hegel. On the other hand,
he has avowed a certain relation to idealism. " My stand-
point in psychology is the empirical; experience alone is
my teacher. Yet I share with others the conviction that
a certain ideal view is well to be reconciled with such a
standpoint." 1

E-rentano is but little known in America, partly because
he was not an experimentalist in psychology and partly
because the bulk of his work is still in process of posthumous
publication. A word about his personality would therefore
be appropriate. His life was marked by three great crises
in each of which he exhibited a high degree of practical
idealism. In 1873, at the age of 35, he resigned his profes-
sorship and his priesthood in the Roman Catholic Church.
He had been appointed to his chair as a priest and had
written against the doctrine of papal infallibility. His
double resignation was a result of his unwillingness to con-
form to the decree of the Vatican Council in support of
that doctrine. In 1880, having fallen in love with a Roman
Catholic woman whom he desired to marry, he found him-
self confronted by an Austrian law prohibiting the marriage
of a Catholic with a former priest. He then resigned his
new professorship, withdrew entirely from the church, and

l The quotations in the text will be derived from the following volumes; the translations
are made by myself.

Franz Brentano, Psychologic vom empirischen Slandpunkt (herausgegcben von Oskar
Kraus).

Erster Band (Leipzig, Felix Meiner, 1924). Hereafter referred to as PES, I (1924).

Zweiter Band, Von der Klassifikation der psychesihen Phdnomene (Leipzig, Felix Meiner,
1925). PES, II (1925).

Dritter Band, erster Teil, Vom sinnlichen und noetischen Bewusstsein (Leipzig, Felix
Meiner, 1928). PES, III, i (1928).

The specific quotation referred to by this note is from PES, I (1924), i.

184 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

left Austria, in order to marry the woman of his choice.
At the outbreak of the World War, having the convictions
of a pacifist, he moved to a neutral country, Switzerland,
where he died in 1917, in voluntary exile. He displayed
in his intellectual life the same sturdy consistency that he
manifested in his practical conduct.

Brentano is worthy of our attention on account of his
influence. Since the great post-Kantian era, Lotze, Bren-
tano, and Dilthey are perhaps the chief names in mod-
ern philosophy. To say Lotze is to call to mind Bosan-
quet, Royce, Bowne, Ladd, and many others. Dilthey's
name calls up the whole geisteswissenschaftliche Schule and
the renewal of interest in Hegel. But Brentano has had
an even more impressive following, at least in German and
Austrian philosophy. Under his instruction came Meinong,
Ehrenfels, Kraus, Kastil, Kxilpe, Heidegger, Husserl, and
others. Oddly enough, Husserl, the most prominent thinker
of contemporary Germany, was regarded by Brentano as
one of his least promising pupils. Brentano' s influence bids
fair to be further extended by a translation of his works
into English which is now in preparation.

We shall confine our attention to his theory of the self,
which is best known to English readers through the mis-
leading over-simplification in Bertrand Russell's The Analy-
sis of Mind. Disregarding Russell's treatment, let us pro-
ceed to look into his account of the self.

By way of introduction, one or two general traits of
his theory should be noted. His empiricism means that
he thinks concretely, in terms of actual experience. He
has a predilection for the actual, a feeling for the real, which
many professional realists seem to have lost. Hence he has
no sympathy with realistic attempts, whether by his fol-
lowers or others, to construe the mind in terms of ghostly
essences or substanceless subsistents. The mind is Sein,
Re ales > Wirkliches; the self is "der ein Reales Vorstel-
lende." l In his latest phase, Brentano entirely denies the
existence of unreal objects of consciousness, irrealia, and,

THE FINITE SELF 185

in thus criticizing Meinong and Husserl, by anticipation
criticizes much of American neo-realism.

Moreover, his view aims to bring out the unique properties
of mind. He is no reductive thinker, seeking to prove con-
sciousness to be a form of something else. Hence he opposed
those who, like Maudsley, aimed to base psychology on
physiology and to show that consciousness was not essential
to mind. 1 He distinguished psychology sharply from physi-
ology, and also from the sciences which can use mathematical
methods. 2

All of this is, in a general way, in harmony with certain
forms of idealism. There are, however, definitely anti-
idealistic currents in Brentano's thought. He makes a
sharp, dualistic distinction between psychical and physical
phenomena, using the distinction, it is true, to vindicate
the non-spatial character of consciousness. 3 But the ideal-
ist would find such a Cartesian view of the relation of men-
tal and physical phenomena artificial and unintelligible.

In another direction, Brentano's psychology stands in
opposition to idealism. He holds, namely, to the belief that
what he calls "descriptive psychology" not merely reveals
the facts and causal laws of consciousness, but also leads
to the discovery of a priori intuitions. Now Kantian ideal-
ism rests, of course, on the recognition of the a priori. But
the Kantian a priori must in some sense be "deduced,"
while the a priori of Brentano is an intuition, which is
"evident," because it is an ultimate presupposition of all
proof, itself incapable of being proved. 4 Yet, while this
seems to be close to a logical atomism of first principles,
it is not sure that Brentano's real intent is very remote
from that of organic idealistic logic; for, in discussing the
intuitive "evidence" of inner perception, he says, "Who-
ever might wish to attack this ultimate foundation of knowl-
edge would find no other on which to erect a structure of
knowledge." "A structure of knowledge" (Gebdude des
Wissens) seems to imply the idealistic principle of the whole,

1 PES, 1. 7, 79, 81-82. * Ibid., 124.

' Ibid., loo-xoa. 4 Ibid. t III (1928), i-a.

186 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

and to admit left-handedly that improvable intuitions must
be proved by their relations to the whole of which they are
essential members.

A further trait of Brentano's psychology which is at
least not typically idealistic is its marked interest in clas-
sification. The idealist is more concerned to grasp the unity
of the self than its constituent elements; he regards the
search for such elements as based on an abstract method of
analysis which is useful in many respects, yet not fruitful
in leading to a concrete understanding of the self. But Bren-
tano makes the search for "fundamental psychic elements"
one of the first and universally important tasks of psychol-
ogy 1 and devotes to it the entire second volume of his
Psychologic.^ Yet here also his treatment is very much
less atomistic than his language would imply. His analysis
leads neither to "neutral entities" nor to sensations as
professional sensationalists view them, but rather to "rep-
resentation, judgment, and feeling (including love and hate
and will)," which he regards as a division far superior
to the thought-feeling-will analysis which has dominated
thought since Kant. The details of his discussion here
need not detain us. There are, however, certain important
points to note. Every moment of consciousness includes
all three. Moreover, the three are interdependent. Judg-
ment presupposes representation, and feeling both of the
others. The outcome of this analysis is more nearly an em-
phasis on mind as system than it is on the elements as in-
dependent. Brentano goes on to carry out an idealistic
speculation on the basis of his analysis when he develops
certain aspects of his theory of value. "The highest per-
fection of the representing activity lies in the contemplation
of the beautiful. . . . The highest perfection of the judg-
ing activity lies in the knowledge of truth. . . . The high-
est perfection of the loving activity, finally, lies ... in
the practice of virtue or of the love of the good for its own
sake. . . . The ideal of ideals consists in the unity of every-
thing true, good and beautiful." 8 There is but a step from

1 PES, I (1924), * 4 .

THE FINITE SELF 187

this to metaphysical theism, a step which he defends in
full detail in his great work, Vom Dasein Gottes. The re-
semblance to the idealistic thought of Lotze's Microcosmos
is evident.

We have seen that Brentano does not consider himself an
idealist and yet that some of his utterances intended as anti-
idealistic are in substance less so than at first appears. Now
we turn to a closer consideration of some of the main points
in Brentano's theory of the self, looking for their relation
to an idealistic view.

Perhaps the most fundamental proposition of Brentano's
psychology is his thesis that consciousness is given fact.
"What we perceive with immediate evidence is something
psychically active, that Descartes designates in the widest
sense as 'thinking.'" l This given in all perceiving is not
merely an object, although all consciousness refers to an
object, but is a self. In a sense, he tells us, "every observa-
tion is aimed at ourselves. He who analyzes a complex
sound apperceives really constituents of himself as a hear-
ing being. He finds that in being one who hears a complex
sound, he is at the same time one who hears this or that tone.
There is no sound at all." 2 Here is not only an idealistic,
but specifically a personalistic or self psychology. It is
peculiarly interesting to find him combining, as most ideal-
ists do, the subjective nature and immediacy of conscious-
ness with its objective meaning and reference.

While his interest in this objectivity leads him to attack
the Kantian theory of phenomena, it is noteworthy that
his substitute for that theory consists in a more-than-
Kantian emphasis on the reality of the individual self as
bearer of phenomena, perhaps an unconscious return to
the first edition of the Critique. "The so-called phenomenal
existence of anything," says Brentano, "amounts to noth-
ing else than that there exists a real being who represents
it, intuits it, and so refers to it psychically. With the dis-

1 PES, III, i (iga8), S3. * /W, S, 33.

l88 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

appearance of the knowledge of something really existent,
that so-called phenomenal existence necessarily disap-
pears." *

The self (to use my own language rather than Brentano's)
not only is a datum, but also is the only datum. "Beyond
ourselves as psychically active beings we have no immedi-
ately evident knowledge of any fact." 2 "Inner perception
is really the only perception in the true meaning of the
word." 3 This is not intended in any way to deny the valid-
ity of external perception. It is Brentano's explicit view
that a double object is present in all sensation an outer
as well as an inner but that the outer is never given in
isolation from the inner. 4

This emphasis on the self as given in all consciousness
stands in a somewhat curious relation to his Aristotelian-
scholastic heritage of a substantial soul. In his earlier phase
he holds to the great importance of such a substantial soul,
because the truth of the belief in immortality seems to be
at stake. 5 Yet in his later view he holds that this psychical
substance is perceived and is not a transcendent assump-
tion. 6 In other words, he abandons the Lockean for the
Berkeleian view of substance a greater change than is
commonly recognized by those who contend that Berkeley
retained spiritual substances, for Berkeley transformed the
meaning of the category of substance from that of an X-
substratum to that of active spirit. At any rate, Brentano
was wise enough not to allow his theory of substance to
interfere with his study of the conscious self.

We have been saying that Brentano holds to a direct and
immediate knowledge of self. The status of the self in his
thought may be brought out more clearly by amplifying
his distinction between direct (modo recto} and indirect (modo
obliquo) knowledge. Modo recto we know only ourselves,
as perceiving, loving, etc. Everything beyond ourselves

*Ibid. t 128. See article "Innerer Sinn" in Eisler's Kantlcxikon.

4 /We*., Ill, i (1928), 37-

* Ibid., I (1924), 15, 16, 21, etc.

6 Ibid., notes on 257, 258.

THE FINITE SELF 189

which we have as object we know modo obliquo. 1 Brentano
correctly points out that there is a tendency in Kant to
hold that all knowledge is modo obliquo. This tendency is
a weakness of organic logic which monadism aims to cor-
rect. A delicate point is involved in Brentano's view that
consciousness is a Beziehung, but not a Relation. 2 This I
paraphrase by saying that consciousness is a relating per-
son, not a relation among impersonal terms. All knowledge
modo obliquo is thus an act of a relating person. 3 Hence
Brentano is plainly sympathetic with mentalistic and activis-
tic views of the self.

To say that knowledge is an act of a person leads our
thought to the best-known aspect of Brentano's psychology,
a doctrine logically affiliated with one type of idealism,
namely, his theory of the act. This doctrine is simply the
proposition that "consciousness," "psychic phenomenon,"
and "psychic act" are synonyms. 4 All consciousness is
activity. This view of Leibniz and of Lotze has had a
marked influence on psychology through Brentano. The
analysis of this doctrine in detail would lead us too far afield
for our present purpose. Suffice it to say that it is central
for Brentano.

Not only is consciousness directly perceived as act, but
for Brentano consciousness is always a unity. All psychic
phenomena are "part phenomena of a unified phenomenon
in which they are contained." 5 The psychic datum is not
a Collective, but a Real Unity. 6 This unity is involved in
and demonstrated by all knowledge of comparisons and of
relations and of simultaneity. 7 He brings out a point vital
to the idealistic view of mind when he asserts that the unity
of consciousness implies neither simplicity nor indivisibility. 8
In this connection he shows that a real unity may be com-
plex, so that one may speak of its various aspects as "divi-
sives," which exist only as members of the unity.

This emphasis on the unity of consciousness brings him

1 PES, III, i (1928), 37-44 B /W<*., 136.

*ibid., XLV. /wrf.,222.

9 Ibid., 42. ''Ibid., 226-228.

4 Ibid., I (1924), 142. Ibid., 243- Cf . Aristotle, M etaph. A, 7.

190 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

much nearer to the organic principle of idealism than do
some other currents of his thinking. For instance, it leads
him, as we have already seen, to overcome in a measure
the apparent atomism of his classification of conscious phe-
nomena. He speaks of the three basic classes as intimately
interwoven with each other. There is no psychic act in
which all three are not represented. Judgment presupposes
representation and love presupposes judgment. 1 Yet this
interrelationship, it must be admitted, falls considerably
short of the idealistic conception of the self as an organic
whole. Brentano sees the self to be a complex unity. He
does not see so clearly the truly systematic character of
that unity.

The theory of judgment stands in close relation to the
theory of the self. Since the self is, for Brentano, a unity,
one would expect him to view the judgment as a unitary
act of a unitary self. That is, one would expect him to be
more sympathetic with an organic than with an atomistic
logic. We have, it is true, found a certain tendency to atom-
ism in his theory of intuition and there have been few in-
dications that he grasped explicitly the logic implied by
his view of the unity of consciousness. Yet his theory of
judgment shows "a nisus toward totality" which is signif-
icant. Like idealistic logicians, for example, he is critical of
the traditional view that a judgment consists merely of
a combination of concepts. This traditional view he ascribes
to an accident of linguistic form rather than to the nature
of thought. A judgment, in its true meaning, is the conscious
act of acknowledgment (Anerkennen) or rejection (Ver-
werfen) of something (etwas)* This is not unrelated to
Bradley's view of judgment as description of reality. The
theory of the Urteilsakt as Glaubakt (act of belief) or Anerken-
nen is also related to W. M. Urban's use of the term "ac-
knowledgment" in The Intelligible World* although Urban
seems not to mention the relation. We may paraphrase
Brentano's view by saying that the judgment is an act of

1 PES, II (1925), 125-128.

8 Ibid., I (1924), 125, 200-201, 2S5n.

1 Wilbur M. Urban, The Intelligible World (New York, Macmillan, 1929).

THE FINITE SELF 191

the unitary self-consciousness in which it acknowledges or
rejects something.

This view of judgment must be taken in connection with
the theory of knowledge in order to make the status of the
self fully clear. Earlier in this chapter we pointed out cer-
tain issues on which idealists differ, namely, monadism
vs. absolutism and mentalism vs. logism. It is evident that
monadism and mentalism ascribe a greater significance to
the empirical finite self than do absolutism and logism,
which often tend to lose the self in the larger whole to which
it belongs. It is arguable that the finite self may not be
"lost" in all forms of absolutism; yet, as we have pointed
out, the status of the self is much more secure under episte-
mological dualism than under monism. If monism be true,
then ultimately the self is identical with its objects, be
those objects mental or non-mental; and a complete descrip-
tion of the objects of self would leave no place for the finite
self as a constituent of reality. But if dualism be true, the
knowing self is always other than the objects known, and
consequently the realm of finite selfhood is secure.

Brentano places himself squarely on the side of epistemo-
logical dualism and so on the side of the rights of finite self-
hood. To this end he avails himself of the scholastic phrase,
"the intentional (or mental) inexistence of an object," by
which is meant reference to an object. This objective refer-
ence, he says, is an exclusive peculiarity of psychic phenom-
ena; the physical realm contains nothing like it. 1 Brentano's
refusal to assimilate knowledge to models furnished by the
physical sciences is significant for his affinity with idealism.

Brentano distinguishes between what is represented (das
Vorgestellte) and the act of representing (das Forstellen,
which is a Vorstellung^ a pyschic phenomenon). 2 The so-
called secondary qualities, such as color, belong to the act.
"I do not know that color is, but that I represent or intuit
color." 3 Considerable confusion has arisen from Brentano's
unfortunate early tendency, in speaking of das Vorgestellte^

l PES t I (1924), 124-125.

* Ibid., in-112. There is an interesting relation here to Lloyd Morgan's -ing and -cd.
II, i(ig 2 8), 4 .

192 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

to use object and content as synonyms. He himself has ad-
mitted that it was poor usage. 1 It has led Bertrand Russell
and others to suppose that "content" meant an aspect of
consciousness to be distinguished both from act and from
object. If this had been his view, it would have been hard
to reconcile with the unity of consciousness and impossible
to reconcile with his theory of mind as act. But content is,
for Brentano, no part of consciousness. It is simply the object
referred to. The notion of a "content" which while in mind
is yet not mental, is, as Professor Mary W. Calkins once
remarked, a source of many evils in psychology and philos-
ophy. Brentano's language, but not his thought, may have
been partly to blame for these evils. His intent was always
to assert that the mind in its acts refers to objects (contents,
things). Content is that to which mental acts refer. In
other words, Brentano was an epistemological dualist. For
our purposes it is not necessary to inquire into the meta-
physics which he adopted; for epistemological dualism is
metaphysically neutral and is as consistent with an idealistic
view of the object as with a dualistic ontology.

VI

We have found in Brentano an excellent illustration of
several idealistic principles. His view of the self is primarily
mentalistic and activistic, and is in principle monadic. In
spite of his emphasis on the unity of consciousness, he falls
short of a clear apprehension of the organic nature of the
self.

After our study of the self through the eyes of Brentano,
a few concluding reflections on an idealistic view of the finite
self may be in order. We have said that the self is organic,
mental, monadic, and active, and that the organic principle
is the governing one, the cardinal principle of idealism. This
may now be illustrated by showing how each of the other
traits embodies the organic.

To say that the self is mental or essentially conscious is
to lay stress on the temporal aspect of the self. Conscious-

l PES t Brentano's last edition of igu, agn. Cf. PES t I (1924), 174.

THE FINITE SELF 193

ness is always a process in time, whether its experience has
spatial form and reference or not. Yet the idealist has usu-
ally dwelt on the eternal and the time-transcending features
of experience. If the idealist is sufficiently empirical, how-
ever, he will perceive that time-transcendence is not a denial
of time, but is both a fact of temporal experience and a logi-
cally necessary condition of it. All mental existence is com-
plex and every field of attention is a flowing stream or mov-
ing whole, such that in one mental act conscious events are
apprehended which actually succeed each other by the clock.
The field of attention, from this point of view, is often called
"the specious present." Royce called it the time span. This
really means that for time to be experienced at all, the mind
must be able to grasp successive times, not at one time
(which would be logical and psychological nonsense) but
in one mental act. This given fact of time-transcendence is,
as idealists have often pointed out, also logically necessary;
for if successive instants were not present to a mind that
included and transcended them, no experience of time could
arise at all. Experience would be a changing but timeless
present. In other words, the temporal structure of mind as
conscious experience is that of a system or organic whole,
in which the parts (the successive events) derive their
meaning from the whole (the time-transcending act of the
mind).

Regarding the monadic aspect of mind in this chapter
our attention has been directed especially to its unity. It is,
however, to be noted that there are many varieties and de-
grees of unity. The minimal unity of a self is the unity of
self-identification, i.e., the fact that all experiences of a self
belong to that self and to no other. But such unity is barren.
A self is significant in proportion as it achieves meaningful
unity through rich systems of moral activity or aesthetic
appreciation within the limits of self-identity. To bare ex-
perience a kind of unity is given, or, to use a Kantian term
in a somewhat non-Kantian sense, gegeben. But unity is also
aufgegeben, as an ideal to be achieved, a task to be performed.
Following Brentano's classification, we may say that higher

194 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

unities of representation, of judgment, and of love always
lie ahead. But these unities find their realization in and de-
rive their actual unity from the fact that they are the ex-
periences of one monad. Whatever the objective significance
of conscious structures may be and this I am not now con-
cerned to interpret and much less to deny their subjective
significance is undeniably dependent on their presence and
psychological interconnections in one mind, although the
bare fact of mental unity is admittedly barren of signifi-
cance. This interrelation between unity and variety and
among different forms of unity further illustrates the organic
nature of the finite self.

The self, we have said, is also active. Yet common sense
and reflective thought alike have difficulty with the concept
of activity. Some have even found it more natural to think
of the mind as passive in knowledge than to think of it as
active. Is not the self at its best when it is receiving truth
and mirroring reality without any activity of its own to dis-
tort its objectivity? Must not the self feed on its environ-
ment and receive far more than it gives? "What am I,"
asked Augustine, "but what I have received?"

These considerations lead to a revised statement of the
activity of the self. It seems that the activity of mind is
never pure, wholly self-determining, or self-creating action.
Rather it is the selecting or forming of a conscious content
that is given. 1 This content is conscious experience and is an
inseparable part of the very structure of mental action, yet
it is not produced by that action. Brentano cites the in-
tuiting of color as a mental act. The mind must indeed do
something in order to apprehend color as such; yet redness
is surely no product of will or of mental activity. Here,
again, the organic nature of mind is illustrated; for the
indissoluble union of act and content in one conscious ex-
perience which is evidence both of a self to which it belongs
and a world to which it refers is another instance of an
organic whole.

l The use of the word "content" here is sharply to be distinguished both from Bren-
tano's identification of content with object and from the use which Miss Calkins condemned.
It is a constituent, but not a product, of mental activity.

THE FINITE SELF 195

This discussion has made evident how incomplete a treat-
ment of the self must be apart from a consideration of the
world to which it belongs, yet has also shown that the self
has a structure of its own which corresponds to the main
insights of idealism.

IX
GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE

JOHN ELOF BOODIN
University of California at Los Angeles

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE

John Elof Boodin

It is a momentous venture to attempt to frame an hypothe-
sis of the universe. But if we reflect upon the meaning of life,
we are forced to make such an effort. The only way we can
escape the responsibility is to be guilty of the great refusal
the refusal to think. If we frame an hypothesis, it should be
such as to assign the proper significance to all the facts of
human experience not merely the physical facts but the
biological and mental as well; not merely our scientific inter-
ests, but our aesthetic, ethical, and religious interests as well.
And it should do so in the simplest possible way. It would
be futile and impossible to examine all possible solutions.
Henri Poincare proved long ago that if there is one explana-
tion of a class of phenomena, there are an infinite number of
explanations. We must follow the example of science and
work out from the significant efforts in the past. We must
try to discover the hypothesis which is most probable. In
general we may say that the theories of the universe fall
under two fundamental types. One type starts with the
assumption that the world is a shifting heap of elements,
which arrange themselves by external relations. This type
of theory denies any guiding whole, whether in the small
or in the large. The opposite type of theory presupposes
that the events in the universe are guided by form or pattern.
In a broad sense it assumes that the universe is in some sense
organic, i.e., that the activities of the parts have reference
to one another and to the whole in such a way as to supple-
ment one another and to promote the continuity and har-
mony of the whole, though the indeterminacy and inertia of
the parts limit the realization of such harmony in our world
of change.

We may assume the doctrine of evolution "in the broader

199

200 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

sense of the continuity of the physical universe throughout
all time, and the orderliness of the processes of change which
go on unceasingly. Every physical unit which we recognize
in nature electrons, atoms, crystals, cells, stars, galaxies
has at some time come into existence and at some time in
the future will pass out of existence; and furthermore the
manner of their coming and going is quite orderly, and,
within certain limits, is even predictable/' 1 But we must
keep in mind that nature is not just one evolution "from
the homogeneous to the heterogeneous with the correspond-
ing dissipation of motion," as Herbert Spencer conceived it
and as it has been the custom to conceive it. Even S. Alex-
ander, in his Space, Time and Deity, thinks of evolution as
one process where everything, including Deity, emerges
from an original matrix of Space-Time. Alexander's Deity
is earth-born. To conceive of evolution as one history is to
think of it as a finite drama, where the curtain is rung up
on an original distribution of elements however they be
conceived and is rung down with the dissipation of the
available energy. This leaves the beginning and the end
in the dark. Evolution as science conceives it, on the basis
of the available facts, is multiple. There are an indefinite
number of cosmic histories at various stages of integration.
In some way these histories must sustain a give-and-take
relation to one another, so that the available energy is kept
constant. Running up and running down, expansion and
contraction are relative, depending upon the frame of refer-
ence. For we do not conceive of the cosmos as running down,
though we know that individual parts run down. The cosmos
must be conceived, not merely as a dynamic equilibrium,
but as a living dynamic equilibrium of such structure or
"curvature" that the loss of available energy in one part is
compensated for by an equal increase elsewhere, for only a
living equilibrium can be self-sustaining. This conception
of equilibrium must apply to the organization of energy as
well as its intensity. Energy apart from organization is an
abstraction. There is not one evolution, but an indefinite

1 Professot W. D. MacMillan, A Debate on Relativity (Open Court, 1927), p. 118.

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 2OI

number of local evolutions, with compensations amongst
them. This is implied in our conception of the universe as a
going concern.

The real question then is not, What does evolution in gen-
eral mean ? The cosmos as a whole does not evolve. The ques-
tion is rather, What does local evolution mean? And the
local evolution of which we are a part, m., the evolution of
our earth, has naturally a special interest for us. The theory
of "strict emergence" holds that new forms, characteristics,
events, arise from a state of affairs in which these novelties
did not exist; and this happens without any guidance whatso-
ever, immanent or transcendent. According to the proba-
bility of chance, if you shuffle certain elements, any com*
bination can occur in infinite time. To be sure, science does
not allow infinite time for the cycles which it studies. On the
contrary, evolution in any one cycle, including an astronomi-
cal cycle, takes place in a finite and calculable time. But the
emergenist points to the fact that the configurations in ques-
tion, with their novel characteristics, have occurred. On our
earth such configurations as possess the characteristics of
life and mind do exist. All we need to do is to examine what
sort of configurations give rise to such properties as life and
mind. In this respect emergence is merely descriptive.

The theory of emergence need not commit itself to any
special conception of world stuff. It may, like W. K. Clifford,
start with mind-stuff. It may assume with Haeckel that
the simplest matter is endowed with soul. But the emergence
theory now in vogue calls itself "materialistic emergence,"
which means that everything emerges from "configurations
of matter." This theory owes its precision to the fact that
it assumes the nineteenth century conception of matter and
mechanism. Just now it would not be so easy to say what is
meant by matter and configurations of matter. It is certain
at any rate that the billiard ball model of the seventeenth
century is no longer applicable. Professor R. D. Carmichael
has well summed up the present plight of mechanical ma-
terialism: "It is absurd to speak of a mechanical explanation
of life and thought when we have found ourselves in such

202 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

difficulties that we no longer know what we should mean
by a mechanical explanation of phenomena not involving
life/' 1 But, as Hegel with great sagacity observed, when
philosophers arrive on the scene, the owl of Minerva has
taken its flight.

We may say that "materialistic emergence" owes its
plausibility to the fact that it is built on an antiquated sci-
ence. The conception of the world which is implied in the
science of to-day gives the lie to the idea that the world as
it is can be accounted for on the probability of chance. On
the contrary, it makes necessary the conception of cosmic
control or cosmic structure. The quantum of radiant energy
is universally measured. The electron carries a constant
charge throughout the cosmos. The shifting of an electron
from one energy level to another is constant for the various
elements. Hence the identity of the spectra of the various
elements wherever observed. The organization of matter
is the same everywhere. The atoms have the same patterns
and fall into the same natural order everywhere when the
conditions permit. The only diiference (aside from mass)
between our earth and the sun, and between our sun and
other stars is a difference in temperature, permitting the
organizing process to take place. Matter, moreover, has no
privileged character. Matter and the patterns and laws of
matter emerge in the various local histories. But there is
correspondence amongst emergent histories, and such uni-
versal correspondence cannot be accounted for on the prob-
ability of chance. The postulate of the uniformity of nature
may be predicated throughout, from nebulae to the most
advanced types of organization, such as human intelligence.
Any ad hoc hypothesis which violates the law of the uniform-
ity of nature must be treated as suspect. But the uniformity
of nature is possible only because of a universal cosmic con-
trol. Moreover, if the stages of nature which we are able to
observe, are universal, we are justified in holding that this
uniformity of nature holds for evolution at all the stages,
though we must allow for variations due to local conditions.

1 Of. a*., p. 148.

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 203

Our information in regard to the structure of nature out-
side our earth is scanty enough. We have established the law
of the uniformity of nature only within the realm of inorganic
nature. We have no direct evidence of the appearance of life
outside our earth, unless it be on Mars. But the implications
of the evidence, which we do possess, are far-reaching. The
universality of the structure of matter, within the limits of
our scientific observation, shows that the cosmic control
which we must postulate operates as mathematical genius
in the sense that we can discover number and measure in
nature. This means that the laws of logic, whatever they
may be, hold for the entire universe. The human intellect
is at home in nature. "Even inorganic matter," to quote
Trystan Edwards, an artist, "is everywhere subject to the
laws of logic which are essentially intellectual." Moreover,
the architecture of nature is such as to give aesthetic satis-
faction. The principles of aesthetics, whatever they are,
may be said to be universal. Cosmic control operates not
only as mathematical genius, but as aesthetic genius. A
scientific hypothesis, to be acceptable, must satisfy not only
the demands of convenience, but our aesthetic demands as
well. Art has its claims as well as science and indeed posses-
ses a logic of its own. While the human mind is a local emer-
gence, it finds that its structure is universal, i.e., it applies
not only locally but everywhere. This is no accident. The
emergence of mind locally may be due to temperature con-
ditions, but its relevance is universal. Hence we must con-
clude that it owes its character to cosmic genius. We are jus-
tified, I think, on the basis of present science in ruling out
emergence by accident, i.e., without cosmic guidance, as
impossible. The uniformity of the constituents of matter
and of the structure of matter could not result on the prob-
ability of chance.

If we assume guidance in the evolutionary process, we
must try to see how this guidance operates. We need not
here consider fiat creation, such as has been attributed by
theologians to the first chapter of Genesis, since such an
hypothesis cannot be regarded by philosophers as a living

204 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

option. There are two types of hypothesis of interest to us
one is that of preformation and the other that of creation,
i.e., emergence under guidance. Strict preformation means
that the structure of a process in its actuality, as Aristotle
would say, i.e., in its complete stage, must be present some-
how in the process from the beginning, in order to guide the
development towards the observed outcome. Preformation,
like emergence, takes a local view. It fastens its attention
on the particular history and holds that the form or structure
of the final stage must have been immanent throughout the
history. The philosopher who is usually regarded as the
author of the hypothesis had in mind exclusively embryology.
For Aristotle, species are eternal. Evolution, therefore,
means individual genesis or ontogeny. Even here individual
characteristics emerge in the process. It is the formative
impulse which is present from the beginning. Aristotle is
not a strict preformationist even in embryology. Hans
Driesch has tried recently to revive the Aristotelian con-
ception by holding that we must assume an entelechy as
guiding the genesis of the embryo. Driesch, like Aristotle,
limits the hypothesis to embryology. He is no clearer than
Aristotle as to how the individual entelechy originates,-
though of course in some way it has reference to heredity.
Preformation as a special scientific hypothesis must be fought
out in the realm of science. We are interested in the emer-
gence of structure. This means the relation of the emergence
of structure in the individual to evolution generally, not
merely the origin of species and other structural characteris-
tics of life, but the emergence of life from matter and the
emergence of matter itself, as we know it.

Is it possible that the whole evolution of life with its
branching and radiations and its progressive manifestation
of structure is latent in the first life-compounds and not only
in these but also in inorganic matter back to its primitive
constituents ? The Stoics were the only consistent preforma-
tionists in ancient times. The seeds or germinal reasons are
supposed to be latent from cycle to cycle, when everything
returns to fire. But they do not show how the seeds could

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 205

be latent. Leibniz in modern times developed a thorough-
going preformism both in cosmology and embryology. But
in cosmology he required a deus ex machina to make his
theory possible; and in embryology the microscope has re-
futed the presence of a homunculus or miniature man in the
early stages of embryological history. A recent vitalist,
Henry Bergson has, unintentionally I think, offered a sug-
gestion of universal preformation : "Life," he says, "does
not proceed by the association and addition of elements, but
by dissociation and division." 1 Everything is thus present
in the original vital impulse. It is like a rocket shot up in the
air which, owing to the resistance of matter, splits up into
its manifold inherent impulses, thus giving us the display
we see. But matter for Bergson is not real. It is the mere
downward trend of life. Reality is fundamentally life and
consciousness. Bergson, however, has not seemed to see
the implication of his theory of dissociation, or he would have
seen its inconsistence with his idea of evolution as creative
synthesis. The solution is probably to be found in his pan-
theism. In a later statement he professes "the idea of a God,
creator, and free: the generator at once of matter and of life:
whose creative efforts as regards life are continued through
the evolution of species and the constitution of human per-
sonalities." 2 Bergson has not yet shown us how he would
account for evolution on this basis. What is the relation of
God to the evolutionary process? If God is eternal, what is
his relation to evolution? It was easy for Hegel to say that
the absolute is present in the beginning, wherever you begin,
because reality is fundamentally a system of dialectical im-
plication and hence eternal. But that does not account for
evolution.

We may say, I think, that there is not, at present, a theory
of strict universal preformation, i.e., a theory attempting
to account for real evolution from nebula to man on the
basis of a structure latent somehow in the process from the
beginning and only waiting to be called forth under specific

1 Creative Evolution, p. 89.

' Letter from H. Bergson, in the Nation (London, Jan. 4, 1913). Quoted by Sir Francis
Younghusband in his beautiful book, Life in the Stars.

206 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

conditions. Even if we could conceive of such preformation
in individual histories we should still have to account for
the intersupplementation of such histories into a cosmos.
Leibniz, who did conceive of reality as made up of an infinite
number of preformed individual histories (every history
having its own entelechy or inner principle of development),
was obliged to add the hypothesis of a preestablished har-
mony to account for the correspondence of these histories.
God, like a clock-maker, constructed the monads so that they
would run in unison. But such an appeal to God to make
good our failure in scientific theory is out of fashion now.

The theory which I have advocated is that of creation
through interaction, under cosmic control. The analogy of
reality to an organic whole is not new. It was advanced by
Plato in a mythological fashion in the Timaeus, and in a
simpler and more dogmatic way in the tenth book of the
Laws. It was stated by Aristotle in terms of a teleological
hierarchy, which is also an astronomical hierarchy, in which
God is the supreme and final cause. Aristotle's cosmological
scheme was revived in scholasticism and formed the frame-
work of Dante's Divine Comedy, but its astronomy has
given place to the Copernican theory; and its rigid hierarchy
of forms has melted into Darwin's origin of species. It does
not meet the demands of the epoch of evolution. In modern
idealism the essential whoseness of reality has indeed been
emphasized. But the wholeness contemplated is that of
an eternal, inclusive psychological ego. Modern idealism
has been afflicted with psychologitis; and in spite of its
great contribution to the interpretation of human institu-
tions, it has failed to connect with the main current of modern
thought. We cannot banish the galaxies of stars and their
space-time relations by retreating within our own subjec-
tive world and declaring matter, time, and space to be mere
appearances. No day-dreaming can undo the fact that
we have emerged in the history of the earth, which in turn
is part of the sun, which in turn is a member in one of mul-
titudinous galaxies of stars. If we are to understand the
meaning of our existence, we must understand it in terms

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 207

of the whole of which we are a part. If the cosmos func-
tions somehow as an organic whole, the guiding field must
be as wide as the galaxies of stars, and it must explain the
interrelation of the multitudinous cosmic histories, in one
of which our life figures.

An organic whole requires both a control a genius of
the whole and interacting parts. We may use the human
organism as a type. In the human organism we have a
hierarchical organization of levels of control in which the
lower levels are subject within limits to a dominant control.
Through this control the parts of the organism are regulated
so as to serve one another and the whole. This wholeness of
the organism is made possible by the interaction of the parts
under the guidance of the dominant control. This interaction
is effected through two kinds of "messengers" or energy
patterns neural patterns and chemical patterns which
carry determining influences from part to part. That neural
currents communicate patterns of behaviour to the various
parts of the organism has been known for some time. Chemi-
cal patterns are carried by the hormones, probably through
the blood, to regulate the growth and stimulate the energies
of the parts consistently with the life of the whole. But a
human being is not merely a physiological organism. It
is an organism endowed with mind. Its actions are in part
meaningful or purposive, not merely mechanical. This
means a whole-control by mind. The development of mind
in turn involves a milieu of social relations the inter-
stimulation of individuals by means of language and other
signs. The environment of mind is a social organism. Within
this there is an overlapping of generations so that the new
generation may develop its life under the nurture of older
generations. This is admirably provided for in the family.
There is also the contact of various cultural groups with
their varying advance and varying quality of culture.
In human life, therefore, there is a level of spiritual control
as well as various levels of organic control. And this spirit-
ual control is made possible by the communication of
energy patterns determinate social influences to which the

208 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

individual responds. The response, in the case of interaction
on any level, depends not merely upon the character of
the stimulus which is communicated but also upon the
organization and plasticity of the responding individual.
The response is a synthesis of the communicated influence
and the character of the responding individual. The con-
trol in society consists partly of the consolidated struc-
ture of custom, but also involves, at a higher level, the
evaluation of the social sanctions in the light of reason.
The relation of the individual to society is not a closed con-
trol, but is open through reason to revision from a broader
relation to the genius of universe.

Now let us think of this vast starry world as analogous
to a super-organism of some sort, with a dominant control
and with the interrelation of parts by means of interaction.
We cannot of course carry over the analogy of the organ-
ism literally. The universe may function as a whole under
a guiding field without being integrated into a single or-
ganism. But in some sense the action of the parts must
have reference to one another and to the whole in the vast
cosmic drama. The interstimulation from part to part,
within the cosmic whole, as within the physiological and
the social organism, must be by means of energy patterns,
carrying determinate influences from part to part. These
determining influences have to do with all the levels
material, vital, mental, spiritual. So far as the universe
functions as a whole it must be by such intercommunication.
Every part must send out characteristic impulses to the
other p'arts in space under the control of the whole; and
no influence is really lost, though the motion at the receiv-
ing end is determined in part by the state of affairs at that
end. Thus while the correspondence between various cosmic
histories seems absolute on the level of atoms, the corre-
spondence must become more generic and variant as the
degrees of freedom increase. This we find illustrated in
the more complex reactions on our earth and especially in
human interactions. I am taking for granted that, when
energy is communicated from part to part of the cosmos,

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 209

it is not just energy in general that is communicated
this is meaningless but that characteristic or patterned en-
ergies are somehow communicated. The energies we are
able to observe from other parts of the cosmos are specific
types of material energy or of radiant energy. These types
are communicated as energy patterns. Within the earth-field
of communication we know that the communication of energy
is always the communication of patterned energy whether in
material or spiritual communication. This I have already
shown to be the case in the human organism and in society.
So in the cosmos spiritual patterns as well as material pat-
terns contribute to the steering of things in space-time.

We must get over the false notion that unless we are
cognitively conscious of the communicated patterns they
cannot be real. Neural messengers and chemical messengers
do their work whether we know it or not. It is not long that
we have known of neural messengers; and it is only within
a few years that we have known of the existence of chemical
messengers. Within the psychological realm, suggestion
may operate all the more effectively when we are not at-
tending to the stimulus. Moreover, since spiritual influences
are energies, they must produce effects in the steering of
matter even though there is no organization to respond to
them in kind. The patterned impulse of sound has a charac-
teristic effect on matter even though there be no one to
understand its meaning. As it is by hearing good music
that one becomes musical, so it is by responding to stimuli
of a higher level that a lower level eventually becomes
tuned to them. As it is through the influence of air waves
that the organism is brought to construct an ear, by means
of which we may respond by hearing sound instead of merely
getting its electrical impact, so one part of the cosmos is
stimulated to advance by the influence of other parts upon
it, though it cannot become conscious of these influences
in kind until the proper organization has been perfected
for the specific response. And even then we may not be
intellectually conscious. For intellectual communication a
common medium of signs is necessary.

210 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

All this may sound like poetry. But conceptions need
not be less true because they are poetical. I challenge any-
one to form a conception of the universe as an organic whole
in any other manner than I have stated. Cosmic control
there is, and it must operate through the interaction of parts.
In the part of the world of which we know most, cosmic
genius is mediated by the interaction of parts in chemical
synthesis, in the origin of a new individual, in the cultural
development of individuals. I believe that this is the way
in which development is mediated in the life histories of
stars and of galaxies of stars. And here too, as in the earthly
relations, the response is due to the character and initiative
of the responding agent as well as to the stimulus.

The possibility of distant parts influencing one another
has been made clearer to us through the quantum theory.
The radiations sent out by means of matter over the ether
are communicated as quanta or constant finite pulses of
energy. They act as the same quanta over any distance,
when there is no interference. The number of quanta de-
pends upon the wave length, or rather constitutes the wave
length. Each individual impulse, when it strikes matter
elsewhere, exerts its original force. A particular impulse of
soul may occur at a distance of a million light years, and
yet exert its energy undiminished when it strikes matter
in any stage of organization elsewhere. It has recently been
discovered that living tissue sends out radiations and its
wave length has been ascertained. This discovery furnishes
a new possibility of accounting for the unity of the living
organism. But such radiation does not stop with the limits
of the living organism. It must be effective through the
whole of space, sending its quanta everywhere to act upon
matter as the conditions permit. And mind, the highest
organization of living energy, must also send out its radia-
tions through the whole of space to effect results in accord-
ance with the readiness of the recipient steering the energies
of nature towards mental organization under the guidance
of the genius of the whole. We have no idea of the pene-
trative character of mental radiations. We do know that

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 211

the power of a mental impulse in social communication is
not affected by the sense medium. If it passes the thresh-
old of sense at all, it effects its characteristic results. Good
news or bad news has its characteristic effect, though the
sound be weak. We do not know the effect, upon our mood
and attitude, of all the spiritual influences which we do not
sense. Here lies the real power of the Weltgeist. In the
curvature of cosmic space no influence is dissipated. The
quality as well as the quantity of energy is conserved. This
is what the law of conservation of energy means in the last
analysis.

What is the nature of the whole-control? May it not be
merely the automatic result of interaction? Of late, great
emphasis has been placed upon the function of the ductless
glands, especially the pituitary and thyroid glands, in regu-
lating the growth, proportions and tone of the organism. It
has been assumed that the secretions of these glands furnish
a sufficient explanation. But the growth, proportion, and
health of the organism cannot be merely the result of the
automatic interstimulation from part to part within the
organism. There must be a control by the whole which regu-
lates the production of glands with their secretions and their
role in the whole. Else how can the glands know how to grow,
what amount of secretion to send out and where to send it?
We know that the control sometimes fails and then we have
abnormalities. In the universe there must be a control which
determines the size of the quantum of radiant energy, the
charge of the electron, the organization of electrons into
atoms, of atoms into molecules, of molecules into crystals.
The whole cosmic situation with its dominant pattern is a
factor, though ordinarily a neglected factor, in every trans-
action. There must be the genius of the whole in all creative
synthesis. In our attempt to comprehend nature, this genius
must be conceived as mathematical and aesthetic genius.
The history of science shows that the hypotheses which are
most effective pragmatically in the prediction and control
of nature are also the most beautiful, as Sommerfeld has
pointed out. This genius of the whole can be best understood

212 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

if we regard nature as permeated by creative spirit. For
this control of the whole cannot be regarded as a function
of matter, since matter owes its organization to this control.

The hypotheses of cosmic control and of compensatory
interactions between the parts do not conflict, but on the
contrary imply and supplement one another. We cannot
account for the constituent elements of nature or their struc-
ture without assuming cosmic control, nor can we account
for the behavior of nature without assuming a plurality of
individuals. On the level of matter, it is the cosmic field which
determines the constancy of the electric charge and also
prescribes the levels at which an electron can appear. These
levels are statable as integral numbers. But we cannot pre-
dict absolutely at what level the electron shall appear, though
it must appear at one of the levels prescribed by the field.
It is clear that there is both determinacy and indeterminacy
in nature a structural field which indicates the permissible
routes of transformation and a certain indeterminacy of
individual reaction. This duality of determinacy and inde-
terminacy holds throughout nature. There is a determinate
pattern of relations according to which we must live, if we
want to live healthfully and efficiently. But we need not
obey this pattern even when we know it. We cannot say
that nature is indeterministic microscopically (i.e., on the
primary levels of nature) and deterministic macroscopically
(i.e., on the complex levels of nature). This misconception
has arisen from the fact that macroscopically we deal with
nature by the method of statistical averages, as we do in in-
surance tables. But statistical averages are not norms of
nature. They are merely conveniences for dealing with large
numbers where we cannot follow the individual transactions.

We may think of the structure of the cosmos as a hier-
archy of fields. We are familiar with such a hierarchy in the
human organism. There are the fields of the lower centers
of the nervous system; there are also the cerebral fields and
the psychological fields. The cerebral fields give definiteness
and organization to the lower neural fields, as we see in the
difference between the precise and quantitative epicritic reac-

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 213

tions, when the cerebrum is in control, and the indefinite all-
or-none reactions when the cerebrum fails. The cerebrum
with its habits in turn is controlled by dominant interests
which give direction and purpose to our activity as contrasted
with the chaotic reveries when psychological control is weak.
In the cosmos we must suppose a far greater range of fields
electromagnetic fields, gravitational fields, chemical fields,
organic fields, psychological fields, and, over and above them
all, the supreme spiritual field which prescribes the architec-
ture of all the subordinate fields, each with its variant indi-
vidual factors. The measure and structure which we find
in matter is not due to matter alone. Matter by itself would
be as chaotic as the old mechanistic theories pictured it.
But it is no longer possible to picture the material world as
a world of chance. It is a work of genius. We must not, how-
ever, make the ridiculous mistake of looking for this genius
in the amorphous background of nature, call it ether or what
you like. The genius of nature must be sought in the activity
which gives measure and organization to nature, not in its
raw material. It is somehow akin to the spiritual activity
which we know as creative genius in man but vastly nobler.
The beauty of matter and the beauty of art are intimations
of its activity, but it is beyond them ever and everywhere
present in activity and essence to create and to heal, but
surpassing in quality all that is created.

In trying to picture the control and interrelatedness within
the whole in the language of modern science, I have stressed
perhaps unduly the analogies borrowed from the physical
sciences. If the universe is controlled ultimately by a spirit-
ual field, we must not think of interrelatedness within this
field as indiscriminate, mechanical communication from
part to part in space and time. We must rather think of
the interrelation as mutual adaptation and selection. The
target selects the appropriate stimulus, but also the stimu-
lating energies select the appropriate target. They do not
hit it by chance. If the cosmos is controlled by a spiritual
field, such must be the interrelation even in the field of physi-
cal radiation. We know that such is the interrelation on the

214 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

organic and psychological levels open to our investigation.
The interactions within the organism and of the organism
with the environment are determined by the unitary life of
the organism in its self-maintenance. Energy is not com-
municated at random but in subservience to the genius of the
organism as a whole. In the economy of the organism there
is selection of relevant energies. There is suppression of the
energies which do not fit into the dominance of the whole,
and in this suppression the suppressed energies do not count
in the integration unless they are transformed into the con-
trol of the whole. Else there would be endless confusion.
Where the control becomes psychological this selection
becomes even more obvious. The tendencies which are irrele-
vant or hostile to the dominant field of interest are sup-
pressed unless they can be sublimated into the dominant
pattern. This may be serious for the life of the individual,
but it may be necessary for the life of society. If we think
of the control of the cosmos as a spiritual field, we must think
of this pervasive spiritual control as regulating the inter-
communication for the maintenance and health of the life
of the whole. We must suppose that the tendencies which
are irrelevant or hostile to the spirit of the whole are in-
hibited or rather held by the gravitation of their own desire
in selfish isolation. They fail to seek integration within the
spiritual field of the whole and thus cut themselves off from
the life of the whole, to run their own tragic course of defeat
and disintegration. Only what tends to upbuilding and
health can have a part in the on-going spiritual drama.
Whatever there is of goodness, truth, and beauty in finite
striving becomes immanent in the spirit of the whole and
goes on towards its own development and the development
of life within the whole. Here lies the secret of salvation and
immortality within the spiritual economy of the whole,
where individual willingness is an essential condition, but
there must also be the abounding grace of the spirit of the
whole. Within the unity of the spirit of the whole, effective-
ness is no longer measured by distance in space and time.
What is immanent in the spirit of the whole is immanent

GOD AND COSMIC STRUCTURE 215

to all the parts that are in spiritual rapport. All the patterns
of energy are immanent somehow in this spiritual field and
have their characteristic effect in due season when the con-
ditions are prepared.

God is the spirit of the whole which, in the words of Clem-
ent of Alexandria, "gives spiritual tone to the universe."
For moral and religious purposes we need a cosmic Presence
which answers our craving for companionship and com-
munion. This the aesthetic conception of Aristotle did not
do and, therefore, it must be re-defined to meet the aching
need of the human heart. The God we discover as cosmic
control, as mathematical and aesthetic genius, is also a God
to whom we can pray and whom we can worship. He must
be capable of giving love for love and be willing to pity and
pardon our failures. No other idea of God will serve. A uni-
verse which meets our intellectual demands shall not fail us
in meeting our moral and religious demands. We must re-
member, however, that this organic conception of the uni-
verse places a momentous responsibility upon us for the in-
fluences we send out. If no atom can be set in motion without
affecting the remotest part of the universe, shall not new
impulses in the spiritual field have effect through all time
and space? Even now, by sending out noble impulses I may
help to save a soul somewhere in the Orion not to mention
some one nearer.

However much the meaning of this life in the whole tran-
scends my imagination, I am certain that in my noblest
moments of devotion my soul lives in the spiritual field of
the whole and participates in all that is immanent in that
field in the field of life and mind on the earth and in all
the life and mind in the cosmos. All that work in the spirit
are my comrades and co-workers, however distant they may
be in space. As the electron is part of the harmonics of the
physical field, so my mind is part of the harmonics of the
spiritual field; and it is the harmonics of the spiritual field
which in the last analysis determine the harmonics of the
physical field. So far as my willingness and insight make
it possible, my life is interwoven with the web of the whole

216 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

under the supreme master genius. If Tennyson's Ulysses
could say, "I am a part of all that I have met," I can say, I
am a part of all the struggling, suffering, victorious life of
the cosmos. With my beloved teacher, Josiah Royce, I be-
lieve that I am a member of a universal spiritual community
and that it is my vocation to participate creatively with
the eternal Spirit of truth, goodness and beauty, in compan-
ionship with all spirits that create in like manner, to spirit-
ualize this temporal world. And I take courage from the
faith that however confused and discordant the life of this
world may seem, there is ever present, like a Pilgrim Chorus,
the eternal harmony of the Spirit of the Whole; and the mu-
sic of this in my soul distant and faint though it often
seems is the inspiration to strive to bring more harmony
into a chaotic world.

X

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE

RADOSLAV A. TSANOFF
Rice Institute

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE

Radoslav A. Tsanoff

In the study of human nature, of body and mind alike,
understanding of the normal has often been furthered by
knowledge of the respective pathology. To Spinoza's mind,
truth revealed its own nature as well as that of error; but
the opposite is as likely: more tragic and more gripping,
evil in disclosing itself likewise points to the nature of good.
On the same principle and more obviously, by examining
the characteristic defects of the traditional varieties of
ethical theory, we may more clearly perceive the demands
which an adequate ethics must satisfy.

The broad topic of this essay is thus briefly indicated;
perhaps another word will make clearer the problem which
prompted its writing and determined its aim. In my re-
cently published work on The Nature of Evil, the critical
examination of pessimism and theodicy in the history of
thought leads to the formulation of a gradational theory of
the nature of evil. 1 The value-character of reality is pos-
tulated; nature discloses value in situations of a certain
self-involvement or self-commitment, centering interest on
what is or what is to be realized or negated, enjoyed or
endured, pursued or resisted. Value of whatever sort im-
plies a gradational outlook, a recognition of higher and lower,
a positive or negative rather, an incipient or determined
preference. Whether it concern truth or beauty or justice,
value-experience is never merely factual and passive, but
conative, prospective, espousing. In this gradational view
of things, evil is disclosed as literally degradation: the sur-

1 Occasional sentences and phrases from this book, The Nature of Evil (New York, Mac-
millan, 1931), are cited or adapted to the purposes of this essay without further specific ref-
erence. The ethical theory here outlined was discussed in briefer form in the dosing pages
of "The Beginnings of Modern Ethics," published in the Rice Institute Pamphlet for Octo-
ber, 1931.

219

220 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

render of the higher to the lower in the scale of being, effec-
tive and ruinous drag. Evil is not a discrete quality of
particular things or experiences; it is relative and has no
status in isolation; it is essentially directional. A profound
saying of St. Augustine's repeatedly comes to mind: "When
the will abandons the higher and turns to what is lower,
it becomes evil, not because that is evil to which it turns,
but because the turning itself is perverse. Cum enim se
voluntas relicto superiore ad inferiora convertit, efficitur
mala: non quia malum est, quo se convertit, sed quia per-
versa est ipsa conversio."

Differences of judgment as to what in any specific case
is higher or lower would involve a corresponding difference
of judgment as to what in the circumstances is evil and would
thus reaffirm the fundamental conception of the nature of
evil. But precisely this detailed use of the gradational con-
ception is needed if our philosophy of value is to have, not
only a guiding principle, but also concrete content. "Nor-
mal" valuation in different fields of experience provides
ample warrant and illustration of the gradational principle,
and in the concluding chapter of the above-mentioned work,
I considered very briefly, from this point of view, disease
and other bodily ills, and also perversion and frustration in
the field of the higher values: logical, aesthetic, social-
economic, political, moral, and mentioned some religious
implications of the gradational view.

This theory of the nature of evil has serious implications
for systematic ethics: the probing of these is the real object
of this essay. Should it make possible a more adequate
synthesis of ethical ideas, the gradational view of evil would
itself receive thereby added substantiation.

A critical examination of ethical theories discloses two
fundamental sources of confusion. The first is the tendency
to select some one aspect of experience, concentrate on it
as the sole or prime essential of virtue and use it as criterion
for the ethical evaluation of the rest. The second source of
confusion, characterizing a great deal of spurious ethics,
is in the failure to distinguish between the demands of moral

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 221

evaluation and those of factual description or analysis. The
first defect is that of over-simplification and consequent
narrowness in the conception and judgment of moral experi-
ence. The second defect is that of insufficiency and indeed
irrelevance: in the treatment of moral experience, the charac-
teristic moral judgment and attitude are ignored, and con-
sequently we have a sort of anthropology, but not moral
philosophy.

A more explicit statement of these two defects will be
of advantage here. So, we may reflect, it is a truth that
moral experience and culture involve the progressive so-
cializing of the individual, and that moral categories are
social categories. But this truth becomes error if we pro-
pose to define moral categories as social categories: the
nature of virtue is not to be stated simply as social feeling
or benevolence. The reduction of good and evil offhand to
altruism and selfishness narrows unduly the range of value,
and even in this narrow range is largely forced. The ex-
pressions self-assertion and self-denial reveal an abstract
and artificial view of personality. Properly speaking the
term "self" signifies choice and pursuit of aims with which
one is identified, devotion to values, and it is clear that
through every act the ascendancy of one self marks the
decline or eclipse of another. On no act, then, can we say
simply that it is an act of self-assertion or an act of self-
denial. We may habitually brand selfishness as vicious, but
what we really condemn in the vicious man is not his self-
assertion: we condemn the sort of self he has chosen to
affirm and the sort of self he has chosen to deny. The real
problem is thus still on our hands: what self ought to be
affirmed and what denied, the problem of the scale of
conduct-values. The issue between egoism and altruism,
apparently insoluble at lower levels of conduct, is at the
highest levels meaningless: that which we admire in the
moral saint cannot be stated either in egoistic or in altruis-
tic terms, for here is utter self-denial together with complete
self-affirmation. Contrariwise the definition of moral ex-
cellence in terms of assertion of the will-to-power appeals

222 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

to our normal depreciation of weakness, but while rightly
aiming at power, confusedly ignores what it is that con-
stitutes moral power or power of character, which may not
be a monopoly of "the blond beast."

Likewise pleasure, happiness, or satisfaction of some sort
is a genuine element in the life which we judge to have posi-
tive worth. But this element is insufficient to serve as a
standard. The moral problem cannot be reduced to hedonis-
tic metrics. Unless ethics were to erect absurdity into a
principle by holding that I ought to do as I please, and ought
the more, the more I am pleased, we must recognize not only
amounts but likewise grades of pleasure: otherwise we run
against the sane judgment of mankind which has always
esteemed noble pain above low and dishonorable pleasures.
But if pleasures are to be graded, we require a standard
other than pleasure for the purpose, and then pure hedonism
is disclosed as inadequate. A man's character is revealed
in what satisfies or pleases him, but the worth of one's
character or of an act cannot be judged by the mere fact
that pleasure is experienced. Ethics as well as aesthetics not
only measure enjoyment; they also judge taste. Indeed
dissatisfaction with a certain sort of life may be the first
mark of moral uplift in a man. It was not ill but rather on
the way to being well with the prodigal son when his swinish
life became disgusting and painful to him. His blessedness
began when he realized that his pleasures were wretched.
So the real question in ethics cannot be simply: Are men
happy or unhappy? It is rather this other question: Is it
well that men are thus and thus happy or unhappy? While
pleasure and displeasure, satisfaction or dissatisfaction of
some sort enter into every moral situation, these require
moral evaluation and grading. The moral value of conduct
cannot be judged merely in terms of the amount of pleasure
it yields.

Again, to mention another example, moral acts have a
peculiar dignity in that they express active devotion to
a principle. Virtue is loyal to duty; it springs from convic-
tion; it meets the demands of the moral sense; it obeys con-

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 223

science. No matter how beneficial the results of an act,
we say, unless it springs from a person's convictions, it
is only a useful act calling for no distinctively moral ap-
probation. But even though an act performed against one's
conscience would lack moral value, we cannot define moral
acts as conscientious acts, for conscience, like happiness,
is only one element in the moral experience; while it cannot
be ignored in the formulation of the moral standard, it
alone cannot supply it. Unless we take due account of the
other elements and factors, conscience itself may prove mis-
leading and defective. Furthermore, while the sense of
duty is an important part of many moral experiences, and
resistance to it a grave moral hazard, virtue is not simply
dutiful self-constraint, for dutifulness is not always a domi-
nant nor even a perceptible factor in moral judgments.
Some of the finest examples of moral excellence, we shall
all agree, are characterized rather by wholehearted spon-
taneity of love or generosity, involving no explicit sense
of obligation whatever.

Thus repeatedly we see how various ethical theories, while
rightly recognizing the importance of certain elements in
moral experience, err in regarding these elements as by
themselves sufficient to provide a standard of moral worth.
The disclosure of narrowness in the criticism of many ethical
theories serves to emphasize the complexity of moral ex-
perience. Particularly confused is this onesideness, in view
of what should be evident, that genuine moral judgment
concerns and respects the integrity of human nature and
must therefore be opposed on principle to any narrow parti-
sanship in valuation.

The alternative to which fruitful ethical theory proceeds
is thus bound to be some variety of perfectionism. The moral
value of an act must depend upon the role it plays in the
perfection of human nature. We need not be misled by
the objection that this is a mere tautology: namely, that
an act is good if it makes us bettfer. It means considerably
more than that; besides the statement itself is decidedly
more than tautologous. The perfection of anything is in

224 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

its characteristic fruition: that it comes to be more fully
what it really and distinctively is.

Moral value here shows analogies to logical value. The
truth of a theory depends on this, whether it takes due
account of all relevant evidence, with appropriate distribu-
tion of emphasis, and whether it can itself be a principle
of relevance in the field of experience with which it deals,
rendering that field more intelligible and opening new sig-
nificant vistas of thought and problems. So with a valid
ethical theory: the true moral evaluation of a man's act
must be one that judges it in terms of what is relevantly and
characteristically human. The good act is the act of a man
who is not under misapprehension but truly knows what
he is about. Aristotle's general definition of the good is
to the point: the good in any field of experience is that which
adequately performs its characteristic function. The good
life thus regarded would be the humanly appropriate and
abundant life. Moral judgment involves self-evaluation
based on self-understanding and proceeding to discipline,
expression, realization and enhancement of personality: the
culture and enrichment of character.

How the moral standard and the moral ideal, the direc-
tion and objective of human life are to be conceived if we
adopt this general point of view, would of course depend
on our account and estimate of human nature: our account
and our estimate of it, essentially and in detail. Thus we
are brought to consider the second main defect of ethical
theories, that of confusing the description of human con-
duct with the evaluation of it, the confusion of so-called
descriptive ethics, a part of anthropology, with moral phi-
losophy.

The very emancipation of modern ethics from the bonds
of theological authoritarianism, as it occasions this error,
likewise imposes the critique of it. Modern ethics early
realized that it is not enough to declare that we ought to
do God's will: before God's commandments can get our
moral approval and loyalty, we must be assured that God is
good and his principles worthy of our devotion. So, far

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 225

from our being able to establish morals on a theological
basis, the very conception of God, before it can be available
either for morality or for religion, demands a foundation
in our moral consciousness. This is patently clear and in-
duces secular ethics. But what should be equally clear is
this: before we can speak of God or of good, we require a
view of the world, of nature and of human nature, that
can take in these ideas. For all we know they may be mere
superstitions, though even if they were, man's capacity to en-
tertain them would call for explanation. It is all-important
to consider what grounds, if any, a moral interpretation of
human life has in our view of the objective reality of things.
Here is a man engaged in moral activity, or at any rate
morally perplexed and engrossed in inquiry. What does this
activity or perplexity or inquiry imply regarding his charac-
ter? What sort of being does his moral conduct show him
to be, and how must we think of a world that includes such
beings? Modern thought is confronted with these two prob-
lems and thus in a sense experiences a twofold enrichment.
On the one hand, the study of nature and of human nature
leads to a more detailed knowledge and a more critical under-
standing of conduct and of moral activity, and the science
of ethics thus gains in substance what it perhaps loses in
sanctity. But on the other hand this very bringing of moral-
ity down to earth, from the supernatural to the natural level,
as it gives us the setting of the facts of moral conduct, im-
poses on the modern mind the demand to interpret these
facts with the other facts of so-called physical nature in a
thoroughly philosophical view of Reality. If we say that
ethics is a science and that man in his moral activity is to
be studied as objectively as astronomer or physiologist stud-
ies his respective field, then while on the one hand doing
justice to what is distinctive and "natural" in moral activity,
we must, on the other hand, consider how it is to be related
to the rest of nature. What is the sort of cosmology that
can make sense both of physics and of ethics ? If justice and
veracity are nothing occult or supernatural, but quite as
natural as breathing or gravitation, then what is the science

226 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

and philosophy of nature that can comprehend not only
gravitation and breathing, but also veracity and justice?

Hobbes and other materialists may describe man as re-
acting thus and thus to various kinds of pressure, contact,
and concussion. It makes no difference how complicated
the mechanism may be, if it is nothing but a mechanism it
may admit of a description, of a reference of effects to ante-
cedent conditions, but it is nowise subject to evaluation.
Materialistic ethics is thus pure irrelevance.

Though less obviously, yet none the less surely, all merely
descriptive or factual ethics is also irrelevant and spurious.
Eminent doctrines of naturalistic ethics may mislead in their
apportionment of emphasis. We may, for instance, recognize
the distinctively personal, human character of moral activ-
ity, the truth which Green expressed more largely in his
dictum that values are always "relative to value for, of, or
in a person: " a statement which is a recognition of a lofty
cosmological category and involves a revision of meager
naturalism. But the statement that values are personal or
human may, by a depreciating shift of emphasis, be taken
to mean that they are merely human. In that case how is
man's serious devotion to virtue, as distinguished from his
sentimental attachment, to be sustained ? With more perfect
knowledge of reality, as we are enabled to see things in their
true cosmic setting, we should presumably come to perceive
our own life of moral activity as something to be analyzed
or explained, and with a cosmic sense of humor may come
to see things as they really are, "beyond good or tevil," Eter-
nal Actuality. But if ultimate nature is morally neutral,
if good or evil, justice or injustice, lack ultimate status, then
ethics, properly speaking, is a sublime and solemn misappre-
hension. Thus Spinoza's ethics may indeed be one of the
noble systems of morality, but how is its nobility to be sup-
ported by his metaphysics ? Even the Aristotelian functional
definition of the good requires a warning qualification lest it
mislead us as to the essence of moral value. The " excellence"
of everything is indeed in its adequate characteristic func-
tioning, but in the case of man this excellence is distinctively

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 227

moral in that it expresses the presence in man of what is
more than morally factual.

In personality nature reveals its hierarchical character.
There is higher and lower in the universe, and our moral
consciousness is preeminently a recognition of this grada-
tional character of reality. The moral judgment is not a
judgment merely of like or dislike, of desire or aversion,
though it does include these: it is distinctively a judgment
of approval or disapproval, of preference not only felt but
judged to be defensible. Whether or not the sense of obliga-
tion is dominant in a specific moral judgment, the sense of
the superior right or demand of what is judged good over
what is judged evil is always dominant. That something is
better and worthier is the basic certainty; to ascertain what
it is in any past situation is the aim of deliberation; to have
spurned or missed it, the sting of remorse; to be unresponsive
to its appeal, moral dullness. This sense of the gradational
and of the rightful dominance of the higher colors the entire
moral consciousness. Moral conviction is man's active self-
identification with the upward trend in this scale; moral
devotion, the wholehearted direction of the will in the line of
this conviction.

Naturalism need not always be meager and bound to the
factual. A really scientific ethics is one which, in dealing
with moral experience and moral judgment, perceives in
balanced view the characteristic factors of human nature
that enter into it: perceives that the act which we call mor-
ally good satisfies in appropriate measure all the demands
which the will is called upon to meet. In this sense moral
activity is man's adequate and complete functioning; scien-
tific ethics is thoroughly naturalistic and for the satisfactory
treatment of its task must be in constant touch with all the
biological and humanistic sciences. But just because it is
thus in a true sense naturalistic, it is bound to perceive what
sort of nature moral experience reveals : bound to recognize
that a moral judgment is not merely about things, but
a judgment of and on things, an evaluation and a verdict
implying approval or condemnation because conceiving of

228 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

human nature as ennobled or degraded by the act which it
judges. The recognition of this moral-gradational view of
nature is the recognition of an ultimate category, as ultimate
as intelligence, as life. It is not of the world apart, any more
than life or intelligence are, but if we pursue a truly scientific
method, we should see it for what it is, and not try irrele-
vantly to reduce it to something else. Factually viewed, all
things are on a par: carbons and chromosomes and con-
sciousness. But evaluation, the moral view of things, con-
sists just in the gradational recognition that some things
ought to be rather than others, that they are preferable to
others, higher, worthier.

"Rather" is a most important term expressing the very
essence of conscience: not the mere description or explana-
tion of this or that, nor the distinction of this from that, nor
yet the relating of them, but the gradational contemplation
and engagement of them as alternatives: this rather than
that. Here we have to do with more than a recorded pref-
erence, as with the pease-porridge of Mother Goose: "Some
like it hot, some like it cold; " it is the claim for a defensible
preference; not merely an expression of liking, but a judg-
ment of and on taste. Hence the imperative temper of con-
science as distinguished from science: it does not merfely state
but dictates; it states differences as alternatives between
which it dictates an order of worth: "Rather seek ye the
Kingdom of God; and all these things shall be added unto
you." Observe that the main point here is not in what is
chosen, but in that a choice is imperative and defensible.
"Rather," said Democritus, "would I discover the cause
of one fact than become king of the Persians." The choice
itself may be the kingdom of God or it may be scientific
knowledge; what it is will depend on our ethical conclusions.
The judgment of the choice as imperative and defensible is
the judgment expressing the moral outlook, the moral view
of things.

Man's moral recognition of himself as a member in this
hierarchy is twofold. First, he recognizes that this member-
ship engages all his faculties and energies, involving in active

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 229

relation all the factors of his personality and his environment:
body and mind, passion and reason, natural and cultural set-
ting, yielding self-expression and self-understanding. All that
is true in hedonistic, rationalistic, altruistic ethics may find
its place in this recognition : enjoyment in satisfaction of de-
sire and natural aversion to pain or distress, long-range vision
and balanced perspective in a reasoned ordering of interests
and efforts, socialized consciousness and disinterested, gen-
erous participation in the lives of others. All these partial
insights, which various ethical theories misleadingly cham-
pion as all-sufficient, may be incorporated without partisan
narrowness in an inclusive perfectionism. This is an impor-
tant aspect of our discussion of systematic ethics and will
be taken up further presently.

But there is another element in man's twofold self-recog-
nition which we should not ignore. Man also recognizes the
unrealized but worthy nature that reveals itself in the moral
challenge: what ought to be and only through moral achieve-
ment can be. Moral experience is not merely observable
behavior of whatever sort; it is likewise and essentially a
self-involvement. The distinctively ethical note in the idea
of freedom should not here elude us. The traditional issue
between the freedom of indifference and rigid determinism
may be resolved in a compromise leaning towards necessity,
self-determinism; or the fagged champion of spontaneity
may be stirred to new zeal by promising rumors of unex-
pected initiative within the atom itself. But this is all beside
the point in strictly ethical thinking. The crux and the kernel
of the moral idea of freedom is not disclosed in the question
whether an act is " determined " or "spontaneous," nor
whether it could or could not have been predicted, nor
whether it could have been omitted altogether. These are
all questions of the factual description or explanation of
events. The complete survey of the causal realm appears
to be still in progress: how much, if any, spontaneity or inde-
terminacy and of what sort it may include within its borders,
is presumably still to ascertain. As to unpredictability,
Spinoza's warning may not be neglected. An act may be

230 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

judged "free" merely owing to our ignorance of the operating
causes. But an event may be thus unpredictably "free"
and still have no moral quality whatever: recent physics
is citing instances of this sort and promises more. An act
may on the other hand be quite predictable and yet be
through and through moral: "Ask, and it shall be given you;
seek and ye shall find; knock and it shall be opened unto
you:" these are not propositions in mechanics. And as to
feeling that "it might have been" otherwise or not at all,
we are apt to overlook that the lured or deliberating self,
contemplating its deed in prospect or actually doing it, is
not the same as the self that ruefully or otherwise reviews
it in memory: not the same by just the margin of the deed,
if no more.

Is it not evident that the real meaning of the sense of free-
dom in moral experience eludes us so long as we consider
the problem in factual terms: whether spontaneity is an ad-
missible exception to the uniform necessity in nature. The
real question here is not whether moral activity is determined
or arbitrary: the real question is in what sense and to what
purpose it is significantly and responsibly mine: not an event
like others, but my act, which would not be except for me
and for which therefore I am responsible, in a judgment that
joins its worth and mine in the same verdict. Therein is the
sting of remorse which the thought of the inevitable does not
relieve: "It is impossible but that offenses will come: but
woe unto him through whom they come! " The moral view
of events is neither retrospective nor anticipatory, but alert
to the impending. Our life is morally free not in that it is
arbitrary; it is free in that it is not done and disposed of, set-
tled once for all, but in the making and in our making; save
for it, things would not be as they are, and may yet be differ-
ent. And this for us is not a fact to record, but a challenge
to meet. On some anvil the iron is hot and the hammer ours
alone. The ideas of self-determinism, of personal responsi-
bility, of self-involvement and dutiful obligation: all these
elements in the idea of freedom are here reflected on their
distinctly moral side. Only as we thus feel that it is "up

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 231

to us," do we also come to feel that we ought or ought not.
In this sense Kant would be right in regarding freedom as a
postulate of the moral imperative. There is no possible rec-
ognition of duty, of "I ought" unless the matter-of-fact
disclaimer "What is that to me?" is precluded: and pre-
cluded it can be only by a view of the self and of nature which
reveals our course of deliberation and decision as the course
of nature that may yet be. "There is a tide in the affairs of
men" and through men of the world-sweep itself. The
river before us is any river until we come to see it as our Rubi-
con, and then we realize what is freely and responsibly in
our power and alone morally significant: not whether the
river will be crossed, but whether we should and shall be
crossing it.

This idea is at the basis of the sense of moral obligation,
conscience, moral creativeness in conduct and character:
the vigilant, heroic, self-enhancing, self-transcending element
in all distinctively moral experience. Profound insight is
revealed in a sentence of Josiah Royce: "This is my duty,
nobody in the universe no, not God, so far as God is other
than myself can do this duty for me. My duty I must my-
self do." Only as a man is possessed by this consciousness
of being somehow more than a mechanism living or conscious,
only as he sees himself as a member of a world of possible
values, loyal to unrealized ideals that challenge his achieve-
ment and in such achievement finding his own ever truer
self, only thus is he morally conscious and morally active in
the full sense of the term. But in a measure this character-
istically moral nature is disclosed in each one of us daily, and
all approval or disapproval, all love of honor, compunction,
fair play, devotion, shame or aspiration, duty and piety are
evidences of it.

Moral experience thus conceived engages all the energies
of man, but engages them in such a way as to integrate his
personality, to reveal ever more clearly and more naturally
his character: what is within his grasp and his reach, but
also what is worth his reach and his grasp: his range of ca-
pacities and also the grading of them, his thorough self-

232 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

understanding and self-estimate: the recognition of what
in him is the line of his fruition, realization, enhancement,
and what in him is backwash and atavism, discordant and
unregenerate : the recognition of himself and of his life as the
concourse and interplay of ennobling and of downpulling tend-
encies, achievement and debacle, an urge and a drag, the
gleam of the ideal and the lure of the degenerate. Here are
we all, moving not on a level plane but on a slope, an upward
but also a downward slope; and every act and every thought
of ours is either uplifting or degrading us, and through us
uplifting or degrading the world in and of which we are.

The moral problem is not a specialized problem dealing
with one fragment or corner of life; it is rather a synthesis
of all problems of specialized value which confront men and
women. Ethics is both comprehensive and directional: the
core and the summation of the philosophy of value. Modern
insight demands a livelier sense of this more inclusive
morality. Though Christianity quickened our moral sensi-
tiveness, yet it allowed a certain shriveling of the moral
frame: we may compare the connotation of the Greek term
arete with the meaning we are apt to convey by such ex-
pressions as "an immoral man" or "a woman's virtue."
The Renaissance revolt against Aristotle notwithstanding,
do we not observe in modern thought a reaffirmation of
the Aristotelian integral view of virtue: of that perfection-
ism which absorbed the truth of hedonism without yielding
to its error? Yet rich in significance as this ethics was, in-
corporating theoretical and practical life in its ideal of well-
balanced characteristic human functioning, it yet missed
one important note. Perhaps Christian thought put an
exaggerated emphasis on this note, in its notion of sin, yet
it expressed on the positive side a central factor in the moral
judgment: the exacting, imperative, dutiful aspect of moral
value.

It is not enough, in the traditional manner of the ethics
manual, to classify moral theories as formalistic and teleo-
logical, and the latter into perfectionist and hedonistic, and
then leave the choice between them to a better day. To

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 233

disclose these three: happiness, perfection, duty as an in-
dissoluble triad must be the goal of systematic modern
ethics: to disclose it and to vindicate it. Neglect one or
another of these and you get a onesided moral theory. Ar-
gue the case of hedonism, socialize it most generously in
the formula, the greatest happiness of the greatest number,
and a Carlyle may still style it a pig-philosophy and ask
you sharply: "What right hast thou to be happy?" Espouse
the cause of rational perfection, and exalt Platonic, Stoic,
Spinozistic rationality: the common man, and even more
the uncommon, may yet protest: "But why should I con-
trol or otherwise order my life in accordance with your or
anyone's formula?" Along with Kant set all these aside
and champion devotion to the moral law, dutifulness pure
and simple, as alone morally good, and the rest of us, deeply
impressed, yet remain undecided. This ethics, we say,
lacks content and substance; we are asked to sail all the
way through under sealed orders; our hand is raised to
take the oath of loyalty, but the oath is not forthcoming;
we ask, what shall we do to enter this Kingdom of Ends?

Now it is precisely this synthesis of duty, attainment and
satisfaction, perfectionist and hedonistic, which the grada-
tional theory makes possible. Recognize the impending-
challenging character of value, the active-creative charac-
ter of personality, the inexhaustible-perfectible character
of nature, and moral worth is revealed as more than a mere
experienced quality of events or than an ambiguous, tran-
scendent "as if." Virtue in a gradational world is expres-
sion, realization, satisfaction in the fullest naturalistic sense:
the sap and the savour of man's soul. But in a gradational
world man's distinctive career makes his life more than
passive enjoyment or Topsy-like growing. Each value
which he contemplates is an alternative, unrealized not-yet:
alternative, and so involving rival loyalties and preferences;
unrealized, and so challenging. Man as a moral agent is not
a member of a realm of "as ifs." His moral activity itself,
and the values he pursues and achieves disclose the nature
of the world as a process of malleable perfection. In this

234 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

sense we may hold that reality is history: it is not only a
sequence of events, no matter how law-conforming, but
also a significant course of activities: a drama of achieve-
ment and a tragedy of frustration. The morally enlightened
consciousness, then, perceives that it is not a mere cog in
the machine, nor a mere spectator or passive recipient of
whatever sort, but in every distinctively personal experi-
ence, perfection or frustration of some sort is impending.
So the very nature of value, and the value-attaining process
invests moral activity with the imperative of duty. In the
drama of human life every man has a role, and conscience
calls out each man's cue. A morally enlightened mind is
a mind emancipated from thoughtlessness, a cosmically
alert, responsible mind. Here self-understanding, realiza-
tion, and satisfaction fuse with duty: man acts his part.
"In Labrador," writes Dr. Wilfred Grenfell, "I have been
allowed to find that there was a job that would not be done
if I did not do it."

So morality dramatically integrates all our capacities:
consciousness matures as conscience. It relies on the self-
criticism and perfection of intellectual activity and its logi-
cal truth-values. We are committed to the pursuit of
knowledge and we have an intellectual conscience. We
demand freedom of thought, champion tolerance, and re-
sist intellectual tyranny of whatever sort on the principle
by which we object to asphyxiation, and also on the prin-
ciple of noblesse oblige: if we are not to think straight and
freely in the world, who or what else is to do it? Morality
demands the ever more reasonable and just revision of
economic and social processes and systems to prevent neg-
lect of the human factor in industry and trade, to respect
essential human dignity and diminish the human hazard.
It resists the preoccupation with the mere amassing of
material possessions; man, we say, ought to be more than
a man of means, but we may not ignore the importance of
these means to further attainment, nor deny the rightful
claim of the many to the material conditions of more human
activity. We remember Mazzini's great political and eco-

THE THEORY OF MORAL VALUE 235

nomic maxim: "A man is entitled to the freedom which he
needs for the performance of his duties." Morality cham-
pions a socializing of our character, spiritual growth through
living with others, but likewise it sustains the eremite vigil
of man's soul, man's pilgrimage to the solitude of his own
intimate self. It counsels an ever saner attitude of man to
the larger nature which envelopes him and which he tries
to grasp and exploit, that it may vicariously be ennobled
through his own human imprint on it and not degrade and
brutalize and mechanize him. Here is Rodin's Thinker:
thought stamped on hard rock and living; yet wherever we
turn we may also see the stony look of spirit hardened into
inert unresponsiveness. Morality sanely respects our bodily
nature, not scorning it in misguided asceticism yet keeping
in mind that man is neither steer nor squirrel, that if he
is to keep his body fit, it is to be fit for something, a fit
instrument from human achievement and self-expression.
Furthermore it cherishes the whole field of aesthetic appre-
ciation and creativeness; to it the word virtuoso is more
than a term with a curious etymology; it seeks that intelli-
gence in taste which distinguishes culture from vulgarity:
the enrichment or the cheapening and corruption of the
soul by the experiences which arouse it to aesthetic delight.
And highest and deepest of all, morality finds its consum-
mation in man's utter self-yielding in worshipful devotion
to what he regards as Supreme Perfection and calls his God:
a most ennobling and yet most hazardous devotion, for
it confirms the soul in its ultimate direction and being the
pole-star of life's voyage, determines its course and its
destiny.

All this and more does the moral outlook on life embrace:
in all judging life as a process of progressive understanding,
mastery, individual and social, expression and perfection
of character, or as disintegration, degradation, and defeat
of capacities. Morality thus thrives on the mellowing of
man's intelligence in all the fields in which he is realizing
his values, and always it voices the imperious demand of
the larger life and character against upstart caprice or dis-

236 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

cordant and debasing passion. In each case it would keep
clear the rational sense of man's total enterprise in appro-
priate distribution of emphasis: what man is really about
in this world; "what he ought to do and to be, considering
what he is." Logic, aesthetics, social philosophy, philosophy
of religion are all tracing their curves of man's rise up the
scale of values: truth, beauty, social order, saintliness. All
these moral philosophy would see as various paths to the
goal that is its goal: a moving aim of perfectibility, the
achievement of character and the cultivation of a humanized,
civilized environment.

The gradational theory of moral value roughly outlined
here utilizes the results of the more significant ethics of the
past; it seeks knowledge of the thing which is to be known
and not of some other thing; it does not distort moral ex-
perience in order to make it fit in the conceptual molds of
factual science, nor sets up morality as somehow transcend-
ent and exalted above the actual lives of men and women,
but on the contrary undertakes to grasp what is distinc-
tive and characteristic in moral experience, and then tries
to make sense of it by suitable interpretation.

XI

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION

CHARLES W. HENDEL, JR.
McGill University

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION

Charles W. Hendel, Jr.

In the beginning of the modern age there were dicta on
law and politics very strange to us of the present: "The
laws cannot govern; only men can govern." "The laws, or
rules of reason, oblige merely in foro interno, not in foro
externo" "The laws of themselves cannot oblige, but
only the power of a superior." "No man can lay himself
under an obligation to law, that is, law as coming from a
superior." Today, it is thought, an obligation exists only
when the individual himself has assumed it: laws that are
self-imposed do verily oblige, and are indeed the only effec-
tual ones; and self-government, or the government of laws,
is precisely the right polity. The maxims of our times are
thus a defiance of all the pronouncements of political wis-
dom that once gained the assent of men. All the impossibles
of those early days are the very truths on which we base our
political order. We are not even aware of the paradox that
they would once have seemed to involve. How has this
change come about? The answer to this is the story of
idealism in modern life and society.

The maxims of any age possess their reasonableness
not in themselves but in reference to the whole scheme
of life of the time. Their logic depends on the expe-
rience of the people who accept it. That experience in-
cludes not only the historical events but also what men
imagine and think about themselves and the world they
live in. And it is more largely the order of things in
imagination that gives the meaning to any particular opin-
ions such as these on bw, obligation, and government.
The first step in an interpretation of men's beliefs, then,
is to understand the experience, and particularly their own
theory of it.

239

240 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

AUTHORITY AND OBLIGATION

"Our present unquiet world." The phrase is from Richard
Hooker and tells how things appeared to him and many
others in the days after the Reformation. They were wit-
nessing wars among the nations, civil and religious conflicts
within them, and in every quarter shocking violations of
law and right and the common precepts of Christian charity.
In every one's view too there was very present the occasion
of all such trouble and unrighteousness, a mortal sin of dis-
obedience, the assertion of "private judgment" in the
matter of the religious discipline of the Church. To the more
pagan-minded its analogue was the vice of "ambition" which
had created such havoc in ancient societies. In either aspect
the individualistic motif was deemed a prime cause of the
universal warfare and all its consequences and demoraliza-
tions. The separatist effects of that spirit were growing
apace. The recalcitrancy of sects came to plague even the
reformed and established churches, and so it came to pass
that those who were thoughtfully concerned for the peace
and common life of Europe regarded the individual con-
science, from their own experience of its workings, as essen-
tially a divisive thing. Conscience was looked at askance,
as but a "pretext of disobedience." It was a cause of dis-
unity in every province of human relations. The wise men
of that day naturally looked for something better than con-
science, something that would evoke a common allegiance,
produce a general attitude of obedience to law and rule,
and thus compose and unite men once again into a peace-
able life in one community, "the Christian republic." An
age that was seeing itself thus projected into such a career
of error and disorder because of the liberty of conscience
was bound to interest itself in authority. They were seeking
some control over people generally that would be a "su-
perior" to conscience. And the thought of such a thing was
not felt to be in the least alien or repugnant, a superior
was acceptable because it promised them an escape from

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 241

intolerable oppositions in matters of the spirit, and from
strife in all the nations of Europe. There was a deep-lying
expression of the contemporary ideal in the epic titles
Paradise Lost, and Paradise Regained, and in the story, too, of
the Divine Will triumphing over all disobedient men and
angels. The great desideratum of thinking men was a
righteous rule like that everywhere in the world, a divinely
superior authority.

The first thoughts were reminiscent of antiquity, for
they came in a time of revival of learning when the ideals
of Greece and Rome seemed of eternal value and directly
applicable to their own situation. Thus Jean Bodin saw
new meaning for the Platonic idea of the Republic, as the
great community which contained, properly ordered within
it, all the different elements of the existing society, the many
"families, colleges, corporations, estates." Here was the
common and universal ground for the existence of all such
particular bodies and it was a very real body itself. To dis-
cover this plainly to men might lead them to acknowledge
it, the Republic, as something above themselves and having
superior claims upon them all. On the other hand, Richard
Hooker, moving likewise in the Greek tradition, exalted
The Laws as just such a superior and he made out a case
for their supremacy by showing that while each order of
human association possessed a peculiar law of its own, as
law ecclesiastical, civil, political, or even as the law of na-
tions, yet these various systems and polities articulated with
each other perfectly so as to regulate the whole order of
human relationships. They were nothing short of a consum-
mate Law of Nature, exhibiting such as fitness of detail,
as well as a universality, that they must be conceived to
have issued from God Himself as their Author. Thus Law
seemed a grand enough authority for men. And Grotius,
likewise, demonstrated the universality of a system of Nat-
ural Right, or "laws of perpetual obligation," which ob-
tained among men everywhere, whether in or out of political
societies, or at war or peace, and he wrote about them as
one confident that such laws of right had a force to restrain

242 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

princes and peoples in their strife, if only these rules were
well expounded, in the plain language of reason. 1

Nevertheless all such sublime trust in reason and law and
in the ideal of a republic was far too much in the ancient
mode, and out of tune with the times. Those writers who
had begun thinking of ideal and universal authorities turned
increasingly toward some visible and particular powers effi-
cacious in their own modern world, for they could not escape
the fact that their day was not ancient but modern. The
eternal authorities fitted only a static picture of the past,
not their present. The times were those of rapid and marked
change; commerce and armies alike were conspiring to bring
men and nations into unprecedented relations with each
other which called for adjustments and actions suited to
the need of every moment. To meet such new conditions
there had to be a positive legislation over and above the
traditional laws and polities. And the power of making such
laws had to be likewise a power applying them and imparting
to them the force which they would be lacking from the very
fact that they were not habitual to the life of the people and
had to be laid down without waiting for their consent. The
power to do all this necessary law-giving was sovereignty. It
required very eminent capacities, an intelligence of the affairs
of State and a competence of will to command and carry out
policies. The persons so gifted seemed right at hand in the
national sovereigns of Europe. They were the personnages
who could truly be conceived to act for "the common body,"
either as its protector or as its representative. They had
appeared in history as defenders of "the commons" against
all the small holders of power whose barbarous and particu-
laristic antagonisms had made them intolerable in country
and city, and especially detrimental to commerce. The rising
chiefs of State were welcome to peoples who were cherishing

1 J. Bodin, Les Six Livres de la Rtpublique (Paris, 1583), Bk. I, Ch. i, p. 2; Ch. 2, pp. 10-
15; Bk. Ill, Ch. 7 (Des Corps et Colleges, Estates, et Communautes), p. 476.

R. Hooker, Of the Laws of Ecclesiastical Polity, Bk. I, especially X, pp. 188, 191, 193, 201;
XV, pp. 210-221; XVI, pp. 224-225, 228, 232. (Everyman Ed.)

H. Grotius, The Rights of War and Peace, in Three Books, wherein are explained The Law
of Nature and Nations, etc. (English translation, London, 1738), Preliminary Discourse,
XXVII.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 243

ambitions of a civilized life, to equal if not to better that of
the ancients, and who needed therefor security and peace.
Besides, the sovereigns enjoyed a certain authority in their
own right, for the nations retained something of their medi-
eval habit of thinking, and fancied themselves rendering
allegiance to their sovereign as to a personal overlord. Their
obedience would be the more effective because he was a
visible, familiar authority. To appreciate the authority of
an invisible republic, or impersonal law, or natural right,
required a difficult exercise of the reason. Men could accept
rule more readily from a person than an abstraction. And
the concrete imagination of poets tended to embellish this
figure of the ruling power. Noble offices kindled the expec-
tation that their incumbents would be noblemen. Those
of ready fancy, reading their Plutarch, transported his
heroes into the high places in their own civil order. The
drama of the time told of Statesmen, Princes, Courtiers, and
imparted to these roles an additional glamour through the
arts of language, music, and action. Many were the pictures
of the glorious sovereign, as great in his fidelity to his trust
and piety as in his magnificent power. So if there were
dreams of fair women in those days, there were also dreams
of superb men. Even the political writers, who were not
dreaming, were caught by the common persuasion, and when
they argued for the utility of the rule of sovereigns who
could act competently for the whole State and bring some
composure into the life of humanity, they wrote with an
eloquent enthusiasm, and represented those beings as grander
by far than the mere "guardians of the laws" they had ad-
mired in their Plato they saw their sovereigns as "the
living laws" superior to the letter of laws. So it naturally
happened that their first ideal of the republic and the rule
of law faded out by comparison with so illustrious a sov-
ereignty. However fine it might be to live "where only the
law is dame and mistress of all," it was better still to live
under a more masculine rule, under a Prince. Yet with all
that eulogy, such writers did not think of the sovereignty
as the all-embracing reality of the State it was only the

244 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

eminent and active part of the republic and it dwelt along-
side the other parts, able to give the law to them and make
adjustments among them but not to destroy them or their
liberties or their properties, for all together constituted the
community and without the lesser estates, bodies and prop-
erties, the sovereignty itself would be of little avail. Indeed
the sovereign was even subject to laws above him, though
they were not made by any other human authority. 1 Which
then was the authority the invisible laws or the visible
princes? The early writers could not make up their minds,
and could scarcely pose the question, and their predicament
was not unlike their predecessors in the Middle Ages who
had lost themselves in their notions of both a purely Spiritual
Power and a Church Visible.

But, quite apart from that confusion of mind, the modern
theorists had some difficulties in regard to the visible sov-
ereignty itself. They differed in their choice of the actual
rulers. Hooker, anxious over the threat against the Estab-
lished Church of England by the Presbyterians, and recalling
how the General Councils of the Church had, many times
in the past of Christendom, settled such disputes, favored
such a "council" in his day. His argument seems at times
wholly directed in the interest of the Episcopate, but it was
also forward-looking, prophetic of the supremacy of the
Parliament of the English people. On the other hand the
greater number of writers followed the example of Bodin in
France who preferred the rule of "one man," and thus
sponsored monarchy. 2

By offering authority in all too many forms those early
writers on politics and society defeated their practical aim.
Now the desired superior appeared to be something ideal,
like Law or the Republic, and again a concrete person, maybe
one man or else a council of men. Their intention was to
direct the people's minds to an object of common allegiance

1 Bodin, op. cit., Bk. Ill, Ch. 5, p. 429; Bk. I, Ch. 8 (De la Souverainet6), pp. 131, 140-142;
Ch. 10, p. 221; Bk. VI, Ch. 4, p. 938.

Cf. Grotius, op. cit., Bk. II, Ch. IV, Sect. XII, pp. 182 ff.

'Hooker, Ecclesiastical Polity, Preface VI, p, 120; Bk. I, X, pp. 200-201; Bk. IV, XIII,
p. 418; Bodin, op. tit., Bk. VI, Ch. 4, p. 961.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 245

and thus to foster in them an attitude of obedience to some-
thing genuinely superior to themselves and decisive of all
issues that might arise amongst them; but they failed in this
because they presented so many different, and competing
alternatives. For this eventually left the choice of what to
do to the judgment of the individual who could still appeal
over any one authority against him to some other who might
be for him, now to the King, now to the Parliament, now to
Natural Law, now to the Church of God, and so everything
would remain much as it had been before. An authority
would not be an authority unless it had none other beside it,
and were absolutely supreme.

Yet the tendency toward the recognition of an absolute
sovereignty was resisted. Those political philosophers were
unable to be entirely single-minded in their proposals about
authority. They were, despite themselves, men of the mod-
ern age, and could not fail to cherish some deep and silent
regard for things other than kingly rule, for something, that
is, of the conscience and claims of the individual. Their very
action in writing books on politics was indicative of this,
for they thereby made appeal to the "natural light" of all
who could read, and evidently had some expectation that
their readers would act rationally and according to their own
good. These authors were trying to induce their fellow-men
to obey, not to trick or force them. This implied that they
placed a real value on the inner convictions and will of hu-
manity. So another train of thinking ran alongside that di-
rected to authority and it was of this purport: the obedience
and lawful conduct of the people is founded upon their own
will as subjects, so that "consent is the original of all right."
This directed attention to the fact of obligation. Political
philosophy had before it the task of formulating not simply a
theory of personal authority but further, a theory of personal
obligation.

It was the great merit of Grotius to appreciate that task.
No one could have been more disposed by his experience to
plead for a settlement in Europe, and a peace, by authority;
for he had been a witness to the terror of the Thirty Years 1

246 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

War and was a fugitive from Holland and happy to be resi-
dent safely in France where he wrote the dedication of his
book to Louis XIII. Yet scarcely anyone else in his day put
so much faith in the sheer power of right, and of the human
conscience, if it were properly enlightened by reason. Sur-
veying the realm of human relations he marked how many
real duties there are naturally recognized by men, duties to
each other, to institutions, to Law, State, King, or God.
And he called these valid and binding duties in the life of
mankind, "obligations." Now obligation in its " perfect "
form, according to the tradition of Roman Law, meant a
bond which had the whole force of the civil State behind it.
To speak, then, of the various common duties of men as
"obligations" was to convey the notion that these duties
had a validity quite comparable to that of laws enforced
by a civil authority. Yet Grotius did not mean to suggest
by this that the obligations of men are all derived from the
authority of a sovereign he treated them as quite distinct
in character, exactly as they appeared to be in the organi-
zation of society. As Christians men have an obligation of
charity; as members of the civil community, an obligation
to common law; as subjects to a superior, an obligation of
allegiance or obedience to his commands. Indeed, even as
mere individuals, men can "oblige themselves," by an act
of covenant, for example, or by agreement, and this is
something quite distinct from their obligation to law, where
their own consent is not requisite. 1 Grotius simply described
these various de facto obligations of human life without
any doctrinaire idea of reducing them to one type, or deriv-
ing them from one authority. And this liberal view of the
situation had an important consequence: if there are so
many distinct types of obligation, there must be a cor-
responding number of different authorities. Such a re-
flection was a serious impediment to the drift of argu-
ment toward one supreme and all-competent authority or
sovereign.
In fact, the idea of obligation threatened ,the preeminence

1 Grotius, op. cit n Preface XVII; Bk. I, Sect. XI, p. 12; Bk. II, Ch. XI, Sect. II, p. a8o.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 247

of the sovereign as the one possible absolute authority.
For obligation was associated closely with contract. When-
ever persons enter of their own free will into an agreement
to do certain things they bind themselves equally to the per-
formance of their respective engagements. This aspect of the
equality of the duties and the benefits, as well as the freedom
of the parties in making the contract had long commended
the idea to political thinkers, who used it to emphasize the
perfect mutuality of the relation between a superior and his
inferiors, and to show that there were duties on both sides,
the superior owing those under him his protection and care,
and they, in turn, paying him their dues of willing service
and allegiance. Grotius fell in with this way of thinking.
Departing then from his merely descriptive account of
obligations, he proceeded to explain the particular obligation
of allegiance in terms of contract, instead of allowing it to
stand on a distinct basis of its own. He thus accounted
at one stroke for the obligation of the governed as coming
from consent, and for the authority of the government.
But his theory actually raised more questions than it solved.
For it represented "the sovereign" and "the people" as
equals, and thus lent a certain amount of encouragement
to popular ideals, that the people who would be competent
enough originally to make such an arrangement might
be able to keep hold of the reins of ultimate power them-
selves, without really making over anything to a particular
sovereign, that is, without alienating their sovereignty as
a people. Furthermore this doctrine invited the people
themselves to scrutinize the services supposed to be ren-
dered by their sovereign and to determine for themselves
what measure of protection and welfare they actually en-
joyed from him; all of which seemed likely to foster an
attitude of criticism which would readily become one of mal-
content. But worst of all, the theory had no solution for
the situation it itself seemed thus likely to create, when a
people became so bold as to renounce their obligation to
obey, on the ground of an imputed failure of the sovereign
to play his true part: then, apparently, only the sword

248 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

could decide the issue. 1 This predicament Grotius himself
saw, and he had no policy to meet it, but contented himself
with general appeals to the reason of peoples and princes,
and to the precepts of conscientious Christian behavior.
He changed nothing as regards the claims of the parties;
showed no way of determining conflicts; and therefore left
sovereign authority exposed to considerable jeopardy, all
because of taking up with those disturbing notions of ob-
ligation and contract.

II

PERSONAL SOVEREIGNTY

This political theory seemed to many of that time a
very feeble and doubtful thing. It opened the door to pri-
vate judgment. It meant a reliance on the Christian con-
science and the reason of men, both to be called into play
by teachings and by books on War and Peace. Surely some-
thing better was needed. Here it was Thomas Hobbes
stepped on the scene, a man with no illusions about the value
of words or conscience: "The laws or rules of reason oblige
merely in the inner mind, not in the external world of
human affairs." 2 Hobbes was very practical, adept in
argument, and capable of thinking out a system of philoso-
phy to support his view. He worked with single-mindedness,
keeping the one purpose of all the different theories in plain
view before him; there must be established an authority
which is unequivocal, and indisputably supreme, and that,
too, must be the authority of a person.

First Hobbes swept out of the picture of life all those
invisible authorities that had competed in men's minds
with the authority of the sovereign. The Greek ideals of
Commonwealth and the Laws were not only confusing
but also irrelevant to the exigencies of modern life, which
called for ready and positive action and not merely faith-

1 Grotius, op. a/., Bk. I, Ch. Ill, Sect. VIII, pp. 64, 69, 71, 75-77; Ch. IV, Sect. II,
pp. 102-103.

1 Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments (Molesworth, London, Vol. i; Bohn, 1841), Ch. 3,
Sect. 27, p. 46. Tripos, The Elements of Law, Vol. 4, Part I, Ch. IV; Part 10, p. 108.
Leviathan, Part I, Ch. XV, p. 82 (Everyman Edition).

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 249

ful adherence to an established order of polity. For "the
laws cannot govern, only men can govern," men, that is,
who have the ability to meet unprecedented situations
with intelligence and force, who can devise the laws for
"reasons of State," and who have the power to enforce
such laws and to make the State secure within and with-
out. 1 Thus all the authorities, other than the personal ruler,
were debarred, through being represented as incompetent
to deal with actual affairs. And then Hobbes brought the
vague and long-esteemed Natural Law down to earth, for
he depicted the law of nature as simply the brute law of
self-preservation, a law common to man with the animals,
and with nothing majestic about it. Thus he managed to
depreciate ideals of law and right as in any sense at all " au-
thorities," and cleared the ground for the undisputed title
of the visible sovereign as the one and only authority, the
true superior, by reference to whose will all law and the
State itself derived their value for the lives of men. What
had been a host of competitors of the sovereign, in the
popular estimation, were thus made subordinate to his
absolute power.

But the confusion over authority was not yet perfectly
cleared. What the particular visible sovereignty ought to
be was a question at issue in Hobbes* own England. The
people were in the midst of a civil war where the settlement
of their allegiance was at stake. For "the government of
men" might consist either of "one man or a council of
men." Hobbes seems to have avoided giving too explicit
an answer, perhaps lest doing so would identify him with
one or the other party, and thereby prejudice his appeal
on behalf of a common loyalty. Let the decision come by
the sword, or by wit, or by any other means, he seems to say,
but let it then be a true decision. This could be best accom-
plished, however, if the settlement were effected by contract,
by the will of all the people, as it were : Let every man agree
with every other to accept the rule of a common sovereign,

1 Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments, Preface XXII; Ch. 12, Sect. 4, p. 154. Leviathan
Part IV, Ch. XLVI, pp. 373-374-

2$0 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

whether one man or a council of men, whichever one is
acceptable at the fateful moment, and then all must abide
by that general decision and obey all the commands of the
sovereign as laws of the State. By that "social compact"
the individuals would create the obligation binding upon
them all, and at the same time, happily enough, they
would provide a sanctioning power for their obligations,
by authorizing the sovereign to enforce them even against
their own will. Thenceforward their own sovereign would
be in a position to see to it that they carried out every solemn
undertaking or agreement with each other in the common
business of life. Their sovereign would guard against any
renouncing on their part of the obligation they had assumed.
The sovereign would prevent any undoing of the bonds
they had consented to accept. The sovereign would stop
absolutely any rebellion to overthrow the regime of gov-
ernment that all had thus voluntarily instituted. 1 There was,
too, a certain carry-over from the older theory of contract,
for the sovereign was envisaged as providing security for
those who obey the laws of the State promulgated under
his rule, and Hobbes even allowed the possibility of the
sovereign's failure to render such protection and security,
in which case the individuals would be once more free to
look out for their own preservation according to the law of
nature. But this was well in the background of the discus-
sion and had reference to the extreme situation when force
majeure, that is, a force other than that of the subjects
themselves in revolt, proved the sovereign to be ineffectual.
Then alone did the subjects regain their liberty and private
judgment. 2 But the common source of trouble Hobbes
evidently considered to lie in the people themselves, espe-
cially in their temper of distrust and disobedience. He was
seeking to induce them to put themselves under a discipline
so as to overcome their own fickleness, blindness, incon-

1 Hobbes, Philosophical Rudiments, Ch. 5 (Of the Causes and First Beginnings of Civil
Government), Sect. 5, p. 68; Ch. 6 (Of the Right of Him Whether Council or One Man
Only, Who Hath the Supreme Power in the City), Part 20, pp. 89, 91. Leviathan, Part II,
Of Commonwealth, Ch. XVII, pp. 87-89; Ch. XVIII, p. 91.

1 Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXI (Of the Liberty of Subjects, p. u6), Ch. XXVIII, p. 165;
Ch. XXIX, p. 178.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 2$l

sistency, lawlessness, all of which was summed up in the
term, "irrationality." He believed that a human civiliza-
tion required a sovereignty above anything the people
might accomplish of themselves, and that this would make
them law-abiding and moral beings, rather than brutes, in
the satisfying of their desires, particularly the desire for
power which he saw writ everywhere in the record of human
experience. Acknowledge a sovereign, then, with one ac-
cord, and let that sovereign exercise his rule without such
endless questioning of right and attempted interference.

However, these arguments for the discipline of a sov-
ereignty were against a temper which had to be reasoned with
on its own terms. Hobbes was forced to bring in the notion
of obligation as a moral commitment arising from contract.
And he was exceedingly clever in suborning the popular
ideas to his philosophy of personal sovereignty. The trick
of his reasoning was this: though the individuals were
dealing with each other, it turned out that they were not
bound to each other, but to an outside party, their sovereign. 1
They originally obliged themselves, but only that once,
for they had nothing to say afterwards about any exactions
which that sovereign might make of them and to which they
would then be "obliged" by him as their "superior." All
participated in bringing this regimen into existence and
were committed to it, but they were then obliged by their
sovereign to maintain that regimen forever and to accept
all the detailed obligations of their lives in the form of re-
quirements of his command and will. That additional
coercive obligation was made to appear a great merit, for
the obligations of men to each other in society stand under
something which makes them all effective, or "perfect,"
in the sense of Roman law. Men were free agents only long
enough to subject themselves to a rule which denied them
any subsequent freedom. Their competence in reason and
morals was admitted only to be denied in the sequel. A
pretense, indeed, of their having a continued part in the

1 Hobbes, vide, PhU. Rudiments, Ch. 5, Sect. 20, p. 91. Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XVIII,
p. 89.

252 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

affair was made by calling the sovereign, ironically, their
"representative." l But in fact the will and good of all the
people were sunk wholly in the will of that sovereign who,
uniting in himself all their powers and perfections, shone
with high majesty. The sovereign constituted the unity
of the body-politic and therefore he actually made the
State. He was, too, the sole law-maker. He enjoyed a
perfect and an undisputed authority. So the whole duty
of man resolved itself into conformity to the will of that
sovereign.

Obligation was then and there dissociated entirely from
the free will of the persons obliged, and related exclusively
to the will of the "obliging" superior. Though the term had
originally a reference to the interests of the parties in some
transaction with each other, it was thought of only in re-
lation to an outsider from whom the obligation came, as
something raining down from above, and presumably having
the quality of mercy. Yet all liberty and benefits for the
contracting parties, save a supposed security, were sup-
pressed from the scene. Only the enforcing agency stood out
prominently, and this was an external person participating
in the affair without commitments on his side, a superior
who was admitted there by them but who was nevertheless
empowered to compel action from them for all the future,
regardless of any new interest or resolve of theirs in that
indeterminate future. Hobbes had manipulated so well the
notion of contract that the obligation which counted for
so much in the minds of men was actually employed to
fasten them more securely to their governing superiors.
Obligation was represented as a mere effect of political
mastery.

Ill

CRITICISMS OF SOVEREIGNTY

The philosopher's ideal of sovereignty was put into prac-
tice by kings. There was achieved a consolidation of central
control in the dominant nations of Europe. The civil wars

1 Hobbes, Leviathan, Part II, Ch. XXII, p. 118; Ch. XXVI, p. 142; Ch. XXVIII, p. 166;
Ch. XXIX, p. 172; Ch. XXX, p. 186.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 253

ended and war persisted only as an affair between strong
sovereign States. Royal government proved itself able to
keep a nation united as a body-politic and thus to put a
stop to the fatal disintegration to which all peoples in Europe
seemed for a time to be fatally doomed. This competence of
sovereigns to preserve their communities was warrant enough
for their title to supremacy. Consequently no lesser associa-
tions, no churches, no bodies of any sort could hold out
against them, but only enjoyed such rights as were recog-
nized by them. All the controls over men came to be en-
visaged as being of the same sort as positive laws, ordinances
or commands of the political superior. As for the individual,
there seemed to be nothing else in the world for him to be
obliged to, save the will of that majestic being, the sovereign.
Yet that ideal of sovereignty did not sweep triumphantly
over all the civilization of Europe, nor did it even establish
itself absolutely in those nations that accepted monarchy.
Thus the religious sects, though they were forced to be
tolerant, would not subscribe in conscience to the opinion
of a Divine Right of Kings which was a sacrilegious theft
from their own armory, putting kings directly in communi-
cation with God, in place of the Church. Nor were the
philosophers satisfied with the absolutist system. In serving
its purpose so well, it eliminated their preoccupation with
internal peace and order and released their minds to a con-
sideration of other values and desiderata, so that they be-
came critical of sovereignty. The criticism was expressed
by three writers who happened to be born in the same year,
1632, and who composed their works toward the end of
the seventeenth century; John Locke in England, Bene-
dict Spinoza in Holland, and Samuel Pufendorf in Ger-
many. These men reflected upon the premise of Hobbes,
that the basis of sovereignty is utility, that it exists to pro-
vide for security and peace in order that individuals may
then be free to pursue their own ends and enjoy their own
goods and property. But a little watching of "the mortal
god, Leviathan" had made them anxious. They saw peace
in the immediate locality, but peace without liberty. And

254 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

they noticed war still on the face of the earth, war between
the sovereign States themselves and reaching to the life
of humanity within every jurisdiction. The unity achieved
by the sovereigns seemed really at the expense of "the gen-
eral society of mankind," and therefore of humanity in
every nation. The lawlessness practiced in the external re-
lations of States was becoming the spirit of the dealings of
the sovereigns with their own subjects, a spirit of tyranny
going hand in hand with that of conquest. Because they
were individualists at heart, the philosophers tended to
become cosmopolitans. Their attitude detached them from
the reigning conceptions, they reflected on their own ex-
perience and began to rewrite the theory of society so as
to interpret it. Thus began a period of criticism in political
philosophy which was contemporaneous with the empirical
movement in philosophy from the time of Locke onward.

It so happened that the countries of which Locke,
Pufendorf, and Spinoza were inhabitants offered a variety
of political experience quite contrasting with that of the
other nations of Europe. The Whig Revolution of 1688 ex-
hibited a people delegating powers of government to a
ruler chosen by them through their representatives. Locke
was the spokesman of that policy and he wrote about it as
if the people constituted a power in their own right, sub-
sisting independently of their sovereigns and able, in crises
like the present, of providing for themselves and setting up
their own civil establishment just as they had already done
with their Church. Then the people of Holland, where
Spinoza lived, had proved themselves competent enough to
secure their independence from the Spanish monarchy and
to make an adventure with a republican system. Thus the
situation in both Holland and England disclosed, to the
observant philosophers, the reality of a common will in
the people themselves and the non-necessity of assuming,
as Hobbes had done, that the people never can be an entity
until they have first given themselves over without reserve
to a sovereign. On the contrary, their demonstrated ability
to cooperate, whether in making a contract for a ruler or

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 2$5

in revolting against oppression from above, proved that
they constituted a political society in their own right, and
that they were not made so by the sovereign, but contrari-
wise the sovereign was made what he was by them. Such
thoughts contained grave reflections upon the prerogative
of the sovereign.

A most striking criticism, however, came from a professor
of law and moralist of Heidelberg, Samuel Pufendorf, who
could not tolerate for a moment Hobbes' notion of a society
existing "by force of discipline," and who was empirically
disposed to make observations for himself on such a matter.
He was interested in the political phenomena of his own
land. The organization of the German States was looser
than anything recognized as a true body-politic according
to the regnant juristic theory, so that they were generally
spoken of, derogatively, as "the Germanic body." Having
in his veins some of the moral individualism that had caused
all the modern mischief, he was not inclined to disparage such
a form of society simply because it did not bear the authori-
tative hallmark. It was, at any rate, a form of society having
the dignity of a history, the federation. Moreover, this
body maintained both a peace and the liberty of its com-
ponent members without the domineering of any superior
in the grand manner of monarchy. True, a sovereign existed
but he was only an elective head. Such a working arrange-
ment in the Germanic body demonstrated that genuine
associations might arise distinctly prior to the active inter-
vention or services of a governing superior and could persist
without much ado on his part. Pufendorf no doubt took
comfort from the remark of Grotius, too, that there is first
of all in the order of events "a spirit or constitution in the
people" and that this really is the primary bond of union
between them. 1 With such notions in mind, Pufendorf re-
cast Hobbes' social compact so as to explain how any society
might primarily be constituted and provide the essentials
of peace and security without derogation from the liberty
of the individuals: every member makes a covenant with

1 Grotius, op. cit., Bk. II, Ch. IX, p. 263.

256 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

every other member of such an association to live together
as one body and under one set of laws or governance, but
without designating any particular governing sovereign.
This compact suffices in and of itself to make the members
into one body, or in the language of Pufendorf 's invention,
a "moral person," endowed with a will called "the general
will." Before people elect their own chief they must be "a
people," a generality with a will of their own. That will
can, thereafter, take further action. And, in Pufendorf s
opinion, such action must immediately follow the first act
of covenant. For the general will cannot really exist unless
it be vested in some particular and recognized authority
whereby it becomes determinate and effective. The action
by which the people do this is another contract, but this
time it is like that described by Grotius, a contract insti-
tuting a government. Here the body-politic, already made
such by the prior act of all its members, deals, as one person,
with a special party distinct from that body, and confers
the general right of governance upon him as a ruler. By that
deed the general will becomes identified with a determinate
particular will. The sovereign is the bearer, then, of the
sovereignty of the whole body and he is authorized to do all
the things for the community that were traditionally asso-
ciated with sovereignty, and especially, to make the positive
laws and enforce them. 1 The sovereign was thus allowed
by Pufendorf to have ubiquity of jurisdiction, and omni-
competence as a legislative and executive power. Law in the
State was nothing other than the command of the sovereign.
Nevertheless, despite such deference to the person of the sov-
ereign, Pufendorf betrayed far more inner respect for the
"moral person" he had discovered, and for the "general will"
of this person which he called, eulogistically, "the transcen-
dental power" of the State. 2 By such language he recom-
mended the general will to all men, as the truly supreme object
of their allegiance. The effect was indeed to restore an au-

1 Pufendorf, Of the Law of Nature and Nations (English Translation, Oxford, 1710), Bk. 7
(Of the Causes and Motives Inducing Men to Establish Civil Societies), Ch. 2, Sects. 4-14,
PP. 507-SiS.

1 Pufendorf, op. cU. t Bk. 8, Ch. 2 (Of the Power of the Sovereign), Sect. 2, p. 611.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 257

thority "invisible," but it was not the old-fashioned sort, like
the Law of Nature or the Republic, which Hobbes had driven
off the scene by his mockery of inert, will-less powers, in-
capable of adjustments to new conditions, this authority
was itself a will. And the general will was superior to the
will of the personal sovereign, for it and not any monarch
or a Parliament really made the State.

This position implied that the fundamental obligation
of men in society is to this general will and the body of the
people. Pufendorf did not explicitly make this invidious
distinction between the allegiances. He obscured it, perhaps
inadvertently, by the sheer multitude of his distinctions in
regard to obligation. For he reverted to Grotius* way of
thinking and paraded the variety of obligations obtaining
among men, some from the law of nature, others from cov-
enant, and still others from the authority of a sovereign
ruler. However, the obligations seemed to define themselves
in two contrasting ways. "What morally inclines the will
most, or ought to incline it, is obligation." This kind of obli-
gation was not regarded as a "denial of liberty," for it is
only a person who is free, and grasps the idea of a rule, that
can possibly have such an obligation. On the other hand, the
"obligation of law" or the "obligation laid by a superior"
was deemed a real abatement of personal freedom, because
it rested on some other power than the will of the person
obliged. "Though law ought not to want its reasons, yet
those reasons are not the cause why obedience is paid to it
but the power of the exactor." l These two conceptions of
obligation were not merely different; they were antithetical.
The one form was compatible with freedom, the other not.
The obligation to law was not a matter of moral right but
simply a conformity to an authorized general power, pre-
sumed to be acting for good ends in every case; the obligation
to a covenant, on the other hand, was a moral conformity,
and a better thing. The tendencies of Pufendorf s thinking
were toward an assimilating of the political obligation to

1 Pufendorf, op. cit., Ch. 4 (Of the Will of Man as it Concerns Moral Actions), Sect. 8,
P. 3d; Ch. 6 (Of the Rule of Moral Actions or of Law in General), Sect, i, p. 46.

258 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

this moral form. However equivocal his language might
be, he definitely refused to subordinate the moral to the
political, as Hobbes had done, and to treat obligation
solely as the bond laid upon subjects by the sheer power
of their superior. The Whole Duty of Man (as his briefer
work was translated) was not to be summed up in obe-
dience to the sovereign. Before the sovereign there is
God to be honored, the Supreme Being, and next to God
the "moral person" of the people whose general will it is
that makes the State, and only then come the particular
persons and superiors for their dues of honor and respect.
What then is the precise degree of "majesty" left to the
personal sovereigns ? They are not the creators of the bodies-
politic over which they rule. Their own authority to give
the law seems to be set in a larger jurisdiction of the people
with their general will. Such were the questionings suggested
by Pufendorf s writings, and these conspired, with the work
of his contemporaries, Spinoza and Locke, to destroy the
notion that an absolute sovereignty is vested in any particu-
lar person.

A cosmopolitan movement of the eighteenth century
carried the various political ideas into every quarter of
Europe. Through Bayle's great Dictionary and the dis-
cussions it aroused, the views of Spinoza received some cur-
rency, though, indeed, little real appreciation. Locke had
the good luck to conquer Europe, with the help of those
French writers who took up with English ideas of all sorts,
whether on religion, or government, or the human under-
standing. Pufendorf found an able translator and an editor
in Jean Barbeyrac who had likewise rendered Grotius in the
French and who contributed comments of his own. He was
insistent upon the need of greater clarity in the fundamental
notions, and this often led him to criticize his masters, with
a leaning toward the clean-cut lines of the Hobbesian theory.
Thus when Grotius, thinking of the authority of the Law of
Nature, seemed to insinuate that "law obliges of itself merely
as a rule" his commentator roundly declared that "all laws
derive from the superior" and have whatever validity they

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 259

possess solely from his power. When Grotius said he could
see "no reason why a man cannot oblige himself, if laws are
covenants" Barbeyrac retorted quickly in a note: "but laws
are not covenants" and ought never to be thought of by
analogy with them. In fact he inclined toward reversing
the analogy, when men seem to be "obliged by covenant,"
or by anything not the law of a civil authority, they are
really obliged by the law of some superior, and when such
law is not traceable to a civil authority it must be referred to
"the will of God," from whom all the moral and political
laws come. 1 By such commentary Barbeyrac put the ques-
tion of law in the forefront of discussion in France.

Then came Montesquieu, the true student of law, as a
phenomenon not of any special locality or of any age, ancient
or modern, but of all times and places. He achieved more
than any other writer the dignity of the scientist rather than
the propagandist for a cause, although his sentimentfc and
views were clearly enough liberal. He had a realistic interest
in "the laws," and considered them as if they were relations
of things, not unlike the relations studied by physical science.
This made his definition of law, as "the necessary relation
which derives from the nature of things," seem cold and
abstract to some writers like the ardent Rousseau. But it
indicated a new vein of thought. He had read Plato and
Aristotle with fresh insight, taking note of their practicality
which had been for so long denied, after Hobbes' contemptu-
ous aspersions, and he appreciated how seriously they had
reckoned with the objective circumstances of political sys-
tems, considering geographical location, climate, and various
other external conditions of the life of a nation. Of course
he saw, too, their recognition of the distinctive spirit or
character of a people, and in his own realism he counted
this as more important than the externals. But the relation-
ships of law to both the physical factors and the national

1 Grotius, op. cii. t Barbeyrac's notes, Bk. I, Ch. I, Sects. IX-X, pp. 6-xo; Bk. II, Ch. XI,
Sect. II, p. 28on.

Barbeyrac, Examen du Jugement d'un Anonyme (Leibniz?) sur V original de cet Abrtgt
(in same volume with Pufendorf's Les Devoirs de L'Homme ct du Citoyen, Amsterdam, 1718),
P. 473-

260 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

character had been entirely overlooked by the moderns
who had fashioned their theories in partisan atmosphere
and consequently stressed the will of this or that individual
or council, the monarch or the Parliament, as if the relation-
ship to such a person or persons contained the whole signifi-
cance of law. They had made entirely too much of the issu-
ance of law by a central government. They ignored the fact
that customs and morals are real in their own authority and
have quite as "imperious a rule" as any royal decrees.
Montesquieu undertook to exhibit, in respect to the many
known social systems of the world, this double relationship
to the whole people on the one hand and to their physical
environment on the other. And simply to disclose such a
fact that law sustained these other relations besides that of
issuing from the will of a sovereign was to rob the latter
relation of its exclusive importance. And further, to describe
legislation as the act of adjusting people to the conditions
of their life was to make it more like negotiation or contract,
as Grotius had suggested, than the mere command of an
authority. In any case the positive laws are but a small part
of the constitution; the constitution itself is operative and
effectually so, independently of the function of the personal
ruler, and every ruler, no matter how absolute he seems, is
actually limited in what he can do, or determine to have
done, by this larger regime of the popular life to which he is
subject like every one else, "the spirit of the laws." The
laws of the sovereign person who governs have their validity
only through their conformity with this organic law of the
nation, rooted in the sentiments, habits, and historical life
of the people. 1 Such a conclusion sapped the grand preten-
sion of the sovereign to an absolute jurisdiction. With the
really valid law thus placed entirely beyond the competence
of the ruler, either to make or to unmake, the sovereign
personnagt had lost another important prerogative in civil
society, that of being "the law-maker."

1 Vide, Montesquieu, (Euvres Completes (Paris, 1866), Considerations de la Grandeur des
Romains et de lew Decadence, Ch. 21, p. 180; Ch. 22, p. 184; De VEsprit des Lois, Bk. i,
Ch. i, p. 190; Bk. 19, Ch. 4 (Ce que c'est 1'Esprit Gtalral), p. 337; Ch. 5, p. 338; Ch. 27,
p. 345-

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 261

But the sovereign seemed still of value, as being at least
"the government" proper, and yet this role, too, was going
to be denied. It was realized that the importance of the
personal ruler in the function of government had been greatly
overestimated. It was Locke who started this line of de-
preciation, in his Civil Government, when he assigned to the
sovereign only certain specific functions. To specify power
was to limit it. Montesquieu went farther than Locke, and
following a suggestion found in Aristotle's Politics, dispersed
the powers of governance among several bodies, especially
separating the legislative from the executive. He pointed
to the existence of such divisions of power in the various
polities of history. But a lesser-known figure, Abbe de St.
Pierre, had gone farther still, though his work was available
to few and then largely through the divining genius of J. J.
Rousseau who rescued it from oblivion (in a piece entitled
The Plurality of Councils). 1 St. Pierre recommended a thor-
oughgoing administrative pluralism. He had observed the
administration of France during a period of Regency, and
reflected that the sovereign himself acted merely as a figura-
tive unity in the government and that all real acts of govern-
ance were performed by groups of minor officials. This sug-
gested to him a theory of government by a "plurality of
councils," where each council deals with a certain phase of
the nation's affairs, and is held to its place and function and
prevented from transgressing upon others by the great
number of other bodies of functionaries which have an inter-
est in maintaining the whole system. The variety of the
councils and their number make for the safety of the whole
State against any tyrannical seizure of power or violation of
justice or disturbance of the peace and good order. The
bodies of men in such a scheme hold each other to the law
without ever needing to invoke the coercive force of an
external party or superior. They constitute a self-contained
cooperative body, a group of self-governing councils. So
the usual predominance of the sovereign person in the busi-

1 Vide, C. E. Vaughan, The Political Writings of Rousseau (Cambridge, 19x5), Vol. i,
PP. 307 ff

262 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

ness of government appeared to St. Pierre not warranted
by any "utility." What he proposed, therefore, was a system
of government actually dispensing with the services of the
sovereign as the supreme executive.

Divested of the once-held high prerogatives of founding
the State and making its law and governing it, the personal
sovereign was fast losing all "majesty." Still a deep-seated,
primordial belief persisted, in the necessity of a Chief of
State to provide for the security of the society and its funda-
mental laws, so that most writers were committed to the
traditional theory of social contract which expressed the idea
that for protection and peace men give over to certain per-
sons the right to govern them. Even those who were no
longer captivated by any of the glamour and prestige of the
glorious monarch as the representative of a great civilization,
even such men as the editors of the French Encyclopedia,
were inclined to regard the sovereign as an indispensable
chief executive, whose function it was to use the powers of
the whole State to guarantee against injury all those dutiful
individuals who obeyed the laws, meaning laws "positive"
and "fundamental laws" and the laws of reason or "natural
right." 1 This need for social security was the primal raison
d'etre of all political authority, and it seemed quite a sufficient
reason for accepting limited monarchy.

It was not a reason at all for Jean Jacques Rousseau. Dis-
posed by his reading and by his idealization of Geneva to see
glory only in the whole people, he had, in very striking es-
says, challenged a princely civilization reared on opportunist
politics and poetic adulation. He was utterly antipathetic to
the very idea of a "superior." He could not think of author-
izing anyone to coerce and exercise control over other per-
sons. Jealous of his own independence, he was alert and
most critical in regard to such a scheme of giving over au-
thority by contract with a sovereign. He was looking at the

1 Diderot, (Euvres Competes (Paris, 1875), T. i, Suite de I'Apologie de M. I' Abb* de Prades,
Sect. XI, stating principles of the Encyclopedia, p. 469; T. 6, articles, Autorite*, pp. 392-
395J Cite", pp. 187-188; Fondation (Politique et Droit Naturel), p. 12; Pouvoir, p. 385;
T. 7, Souverains, pp. 166-168.

Cf. Ren6 Hubert, Les Sciences Saddles dans L'Encyctopldie (Alcan, Paris, 1923), PP- I5&-
159.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 263

whole situation entirely from the side of the subject. He
wanted to see the precise good of any such arrangement
for the individual. Security, first of all, it had been said and
repeated, time and again; security for all men as they render
honest obedience to the laws. And whose laws are these?
Those, apparently, of their sovereign, or interpreted by
him. It is for safety under such a regimen of law determined
by an external sovereign that the individuals are supposed
to renounce all employment of their own powers for their
own private interest and to vest them, instead, in that su-
perior who is thenceforward to take care of them and the
laws and the State. Here Rousseau proved himself as ob-
stinately logical and realistic as ever Hobbes had been.
Security is the desideratum, is it really obtained by this
contract? What security have the individuals against the
great power of sovereignty to which they have subjected
themselves? Rousseau asked this, remembering well what
Hobbes had said, that it is always men who govern; and
another saying, too, that men are ineradicably self-interested,
and thirsting always for the power to domineer over others,
whence it happens that all their existence is made insecure
for them. To escape that savage insecurity and domination
at the hands of their equals they are here supposed to commit
themselves wholly to the charge of a superior. Yet he, the
sovereign, is a mere man, with an inevitable self-interest
and a love of dominion. The individuals conscious of their
own human weakness are supposed to be so foolish as to
overlook the fact that their ruler is a fellow-man, exposed
to the same vices and likely to behave in the same way as
themselves; and then to bestow everything that is of any
worth to them upon him. Though their intention in con-
tracting is to obtain mutual benefits for themselves, they
actually make that outsider the chief beneficiary. After that
transaction they are bound by their deed to obey their
sovereign; he, for his part, is only bound to see that they do
it. His "obligation" is most curiously favorable to his nat-
ural inclination in the matter. All the powers of men have
been given over to him to carry out his superior will which

264 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

is very likely to be selfish and oppressive; only duties and
exactions fall to their lot. But they enjoy security, do they
not? Yes, a security in an equivocal sense. Theirs is a se-
curity to do their sovereign's bidding, but nothing is vouch-
safed them when they want to do their own. The individuals
have no guarantee whatsoever against the abuse of all their
social power by the human superior they have recognized in
their contract. Surely this contract is a spurious thing. If
men really seek security they never arrange for it on such
terms as these whereby the life and liberty and goods of
every one are jeopardized by an external power which has
an absolute right of way for itself. They are all equally en-
slaved to a person who has nothing holding him to respon-
sible action and justice. There is certainly no advantage
in such a pretended contract, none for the parties who are
"obliged" by it. Nor is it morally right. The individuals
are supposed by their own free will to bind themselves, then
and there, to have no other will save that of their common
master. By a free deed they deny themselves a will for the
future like that which their voluntary action of the present
evinces. They employ their will to make an absolute sur-
render of will for life. Such an action is unrighteous and ab-
surd. Freedom is the essence of humanity, and human beings
cannot, even if they are tricked into the formality of doing
so, divest themselves of this power to determine their own
conduct in the future. Nor are they likely to be fooled into
doing it by anyone, for when they once act in concert they
implicitly assume that they can do so again and they will
make every effort to safeguard that power of taking action
in common and for their own good. This guardianship of
the liberties and the common will of the people is precisely
what the sovereign of old is never seen to undertake as his
part in the contract. Instead he acts so as to threaten human
society and the freedom of the individual. Rousseau put a
question fatal to the lingering belief in a limited monarchy
based on contract: Is a secured slavery a real ground for an
allegiance to authority?
After such representations personal sovereignty seemed

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 265

to be worse than useless, a negative factor in the State, a
power dangerous to the things of greatest value to humanity.
The authority of kings being no longer admirable was felt
to be alien and inimical. True "majesty" had disappeared,
and with it went all sense of obligation. In such an aspect
the sovereign was the very last thing in the world an indi-
vidual could possibly be obliged to. Of course, an obedience
might be rendered him perforce, but it would not proceed
from the will and therefore it would be utterly different
from a true and moral obligation. This momentous differ-
ence Rousseau struck off in a phrase of remarkable decision:
" It is not a question of a power we are forced to obey, but
only of one we are obliged to recognize." 1 That statement of
the question was a turning point in modern political phi-
losophy.

IV

THE GENERAL WILL

Rousseau now embarked on a genuinely new quest: What
kind of power is it that men are obliged to recognize? This
research involved what might be called a Copernican Revo-
lution in politics. It was oriented from the point of view of
the individuals who recognize the obligation instead of from
that of a superior imposing it from above. Law and obliga-
tion were being conceived not as an effect of the will of a
superior, but rather as an expression of the will of the per-
sons who feel obliged. Rousseau was standing among equals
and deciphering a social world from their experience of com-
mon duties and rights. Whereas others had made obligation
subordinate to some preconceived ideal of authority, he
was starting with the idea of moral obligation as the funda-
mental thing and looking for the conception of authority
that would suit it. His problem was to describe a human
order where it is the individuals themselves who impose all

1 Rousseau, First Version of the Social Contract, Ch. 5 (False Notions of the Social Bond),
Vaughan, op. cit. t Vol. i, pp. 470, 480; Final Version, Bk. Ill, Ch. 10 (On the Abuse of
Government, etc.), Vaughan, Vol. a, p. 88.

The interpretation of Rousseau in this article is presented without the supporting evi-
dence which will be made available, however, in a book in process of completion.

266 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

the bonds of their society and give themselves laws, and,
in the largest sense of the word, actually govern themselves.
To the charting of this new order he intended to devote a
masterpiece entitled, Political Institutions, from which the
Social Contract survives as a fragment.

But it took time and patient meditation of the theme, and
even a second writing, to produce that essay on "the princi-
ples of political right." A certain inner work of imagination
was needed to assemble into one view all the divers sugges-
tions toward liberalism that had been made by previous
thinkers, and notably by Locke, Pufendorf, St. Pierre, and
Montesquieu. Each of those men had pronounced against
an absolute sovereignty and had stripped the ruler of this
or that particular prerogative. But these powers dislodged
from the sovereign person could not be left scattered in a
kind of limbo, unrelated to each other and unattached to
any common subject. The earlier idea of seventeenth-cen-
tury philosophy still persisted in the thinking of Rousseau,
that powers inhere in some substance and that "the whole"
is a very real thing. The powers of governance and legisla-
tion, though taken away from the eminent sovereign, some-
how belonged together and to the whole social body. How
to imagine that body-politic, its sovereignty, its legislation,
its government, that was a task for a genius who could gather
all the partial enlightenment of his predecessors into the
clear focus of a new theory and present, in its complete form,
a polity that would supplant the old rejected sovereignty.

The first step necessary was to reckon with the seeming
impediments of logic. The old and accepted maxims of poli-
tics were decidedly against even the possibility of such an
order of human relations as Rousseau was contemplating.
They had won such currency that they were virtually axio-
matic in philosophy and were consequently expressed in
the most emphatic form an opinion can have, the negative
proposition. Hobbes had written: "The laws of reason
oblige only in the inner consciousness of man but not in
external conduct," which was meant to imply that only a
power external to both the men and the laws could have

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 267

any force of control over them. And Bodin had voiced a
similar denial: "The laws of themselves cannot oblige,
but only the power of a superior," whence it followed that
"no man can lay himself under an obligation to law, if by
law is meant whatever is imposed by the power of a supe-
rior." And even Grotius had joined the chorus of denying
spirits: "No man can oblige himself, because, perforce, he
must then be his own superior, which is impossible and ab-
surd." 1 And an inference from this was drawn against de-
mocracy: since what holds of one man must hold of a multi-
tude of men, and man alone cannot govern himself, it follows
that a whole self-governing society is impossible. So the
only possibility is a governing superior. Always that su-
perior! This unanimity of the various opinions was enough
to raise a suspicion in Rousseau's mind about their impartial
logic. It seemed to him as if those writers had succumbed
to the vice of philosophers described by Montaigne, that of
letting their reason take its ply from their passions or inter-
ests. They all appeared to be committed in advance to an
ideal of "superior power." Their maxims were framed thus
cogently in order to vindicate that prejudice. Rousseau,
however, had a very strong counter-prejudice for "republi-
can principles." So he was neither persuaded nor coerced
by what he called the "principles of tyranny," but was in-
cited, by their pretense of logic, to examine them critically.
In this he proved himself to have an amazing power to get
behind the form of words to the real argument and the values
dictating it, a critical achievement which placed him in
the company of intellectuals in the eighteenth century whose
questioning of all belief and reason gave it fame as an age
of enlightenment.

Rousseau was a stubborn interlocutor. Why are the dic-
tates of reason of no account in foro externo? Because, it
had been said, the laws of reason cannot of themselves
"oblige." Why not? Because they must have the will of

1 Hobbes, cited above, p. 252.

Bodin, op. tit., Bk. I, Ch. 8 (De la Souverainte*), p. 135.

Grotius, op. cit. t Bk. I, Ch. I, p. 10; Bk. II, Ch. IV, Sect. XII, p. 182; t:h. XIV,
Sect. I, p. 330.

268 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

some active being behind them, the will of a "person." Why
cannot that effectual will be just the will of the persons them-
selves who recognize those laws as their own and as rightly
applying to their own conduct and life? But that, it was
rejoined, is impossible, for no man can lay down a law for
himself, or "oblige" himself, inasmuch as his will must then
be stronger than itself, a plain absurdity. Hence it is al-
ways necessary that there shall be in the society of men an
external and superior will to give law to all alike and to
oblige them to obey. This is a necessity, whether there be
one man or a multitude, and it was urged that the greater
number only increases the difficulty of conceiving an intelli-
gent self-control. This was the argument Rousseau saw on
behalf of the opinion that a political society must always
have the form of a body of men subject to a sovereign, that
is to say, the form of monarchy.

The necessity of an external sovereignty had here been
demonstrated in much the same way as God had been proved
to exist by the pure logic of metaphysics. This was in line
with a certain way of thinking about "power" common to
the philosophy of that period, whether the philosophy of
the State or that of things divine. The logic of it was chal-
lenged by Rousseau's contemporary, David Hume, who had
asked why everything which comes into being must have a
cause for its existence distinct from itself and external to it?
Usually God was conceived as a "first cause" of the world
and an external mover of the world machine. And by the
same pattern of thought, the sovereign was imagined as a
necessary cause for the society of individuals, a power ex-
ternal and, indeed, a veritable deity to them. This was a
political version of the cosmic arrangement represented by
philosophical deism. But there was taking place at that very
time in the eighteenth century one of those changes of im-
agination which expresses itself eventually in new theories
everywhere in the realm of thought. Various philosophers,
notably Bayle, Maupertuis, Hume, and Diderot had caught
up from the ancients the idea of Nature as containing within
herself all the powers of preservation and betterment which

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 269

had been customarily ascribed to the external agency of a
God. The writers of the Encyclopedia and others were ex-
ploring the possibilities of this "naturalism." Rousseau,
moving in this atmosphere of ideas, was helped thereby to
surmount, in his own thinking, the logic of the older political
writers. He conceived the "natural" order in society as
something analogous to the order of Nature in general; an
order where the whole people themselves are quite adequate
to the task of preserving and managing their own lives with-
out dependence upon any external cause; they are self-con-
tained and self-sovereign as a society. This was the social
polity which he called "The Form of the Republic," and
this conception so filled his mind that he made it the sub-
title of his first version of the Social Contract.

This vision of the new alternative gained support in his
mind from reflection upon the concrete instances which
preceding liberal thinkers had cited in their works. Pufen-
dorf had revealed the German people to be a "people"
with a permanent existence of their own independently of
any action on the part of their elective ruler. Montesquieu
had exhibited "the invisible rule" of the spirit of the laws
in every nation, pouring masterly scorn on the writers
" who see disorder wherever they do not see the Crown,"
and who must always have "visible chiefs." l And Abbe
de St. Pierre had presented two very definite projects, one
of a group of councils acting as a cooperative body in the
administration of government, and the other of the sovereign
States of Europe taking the necessary common action to
preserve order and peace amongst themselves and thereby
promoting the general happiness of mankind. It was quite
conceivable, in these several instances, that bodies of men,
or associations of any sort, might provide for their own secu-
rity, their needs and their growing interests entirely out of
their own resources, without subjecting themselves to any
external control, or to the direction of any sovereign. It
was possible to envisage very definitely a body of officials
functioning as a self-governing administrative unit, and

1 Montesquieu, op. ctt., Bk. 24, Ch. 6, p. 408; Bk. 39, Ch. 19, p. 478.

270 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

a body of principalities, as in Germany, managing to live
together safely under a form of federative society, and even
a body of sovereign States forming themselves into a solid
"European republic " and governing themselves, and se-
curing peace and justice in the international field. How
immediately feasible such schemes of government might be,
in the actual circumstances of the time, was entirely beside
the point which was one of logic. The simple fact that
these cases were clearly conceivable, without any ab-
surdity, discredited utterly those pretentious maxims
which declared such a form of association to be theoretically
impossible.

Freed from the tyranny of the old phrases Rousseau ex-
plored the possibilities of this new way of life in society which
had come into his view. Those exceptions to the prevailing
social order might actually be made the rule for the entire
range of human relationships, wherever men need permanent
ties other than those of their natural affections. For admin-
istrative bodies, cities, nations, federations, and interna-
tional leagues the general principle might be this, that the
parties to any association are governed only by themselves
or by their own laws. Yet this conception, though possible
to reason, seemed still very paradoxical. It had to be worked
out into a detailed theory, so as to meet every question and
satisfy the imagination. To this constructive argument
Rousseau devoted himself, "taking men as they are and laws
as they might be."

It had been argued that "laws of themselves" cannot
oblige. Certainly they cannot, if they are taken divorced
entirely from all human will. They cannot then be more
than what Hobbes called them rules or entities of reason.
But laws obtaining for any society of men are never in
fact so separated from the active will of the men who con-
stitute that society. It is false, therefore, to attribute a
lack of power to laws in abstracto when they only exist in
connection with human will. The real question is not as
to their validity absolutely by themselves, but only whose
will it is they represent. Now it had been further pronounced

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 271

that this will cannot be the will of the persons subject to
the laws. "Men by themselves" cannot impose their own
laws and obligations, because they are unable to be superiors
to themselves. Of course, if men are considered apart from
each other and in isolation, this is true, for man in such a
" state of nature" knows no law or ties. But the question
is not about such fictitious, isolated beings. It has to do
with people who can recognize bonds and laws. Men for
whom those things have a meaning are no longer in that
solitary condition but must already have joined with each
other in some form of social relation. Hence it is necessary
to think of them as having previously made a "social con-
tract." This is a fundamental condition which must exist
before there is anything like obligation or law: it is an action
in which men bind themselves to society with each other.
Why they do this is a matter of speculation, but it is reason-
able to suppose with Spinoza and Pufendorf that the conjoint
efforts of beings seeking their own preservation are of such
great avail to them that they will naturally form themselves
into a body in order to take a concerted action. They can
achieve much more so than if acting alone or in a less or-
ganized way. For when men, who have been brought by
some natural motives and circumstances into each other's
neighborhood, proceed to make terms with each other,
in order to live more like human beings, they create a power
in their community vastly greater and more permanent
than the sum of their individual powers without direction.
And Rousseau perceived, from a quaint suggestion of Pufen-
dorf's that they form a commonwealth in more than the
obvious sense, not merely a pooling of goods and of physi-
cal and mental forces, but above all a pooling of their moral
capacities : " some scattered seeds, (as it were), of government
lie hid in particular persons, which, by means of concurrent
compacts, being excited into motion, do grow and shoot
forth," and appear as the sovereignty of their society. 1
So the influence of all is brought to bear on the life of every

1 Pufendorf, Bk. 7, Ch. 3 (Of the Generation of Civil Sovereignty or Majesty), Sect. 4.
P. sag.

272 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

individual. And this common power, acting in and through
the will of every particular member of the body, is what
Locke, Spinoza, Pufendorf, and Montesquieu had called
either "the common will" or "the general will." Here,
then, is a real obliging power, this general will. And the
whole body or community from which it comes is, to all
intents and purposes, "the superior" for each and every
individual who is a member of it. Consequently it is en-
tirely proper to say that men oblige themselves: "there is
a vast difference between being obliged to oneself (impos-
sible according to the maxims of civil law) and being obliged
to a whole of which one forms a part." * "Men by them-
selves," if taken all together as one body can certainly oblige
"themselves" when considered merely as so many depend-
ent parts of the whole. And in the phraseology of the so-
cial contract this means that all the persons of any society
function simultaneously in two capacities, as " sovereign "
and as " subject." And this conception of what tran-
spires in the social relationship does away with all the
paradox about obligation as coming from within men them-
selves.

This conception of society makes it possible, too, to think
of a political sovereignty which is neither alien nor tyran-
nous but always just. When the whole of which every
member is an inalienable part acts in the common interest,
it "obliges or favors" every one equally. This sovereignty
gives no special privileges and makes no special exactions.
To do so, would be in effect to detach from itself the party
so singled out, and thereby to lose its authority not only
with that individual but with every other member of the
society. To be authoritative and valid the acts of the sover-
eign must always have this character of equality in regard
to persons. Indeed, this feature becomes so important that
it eclipses the old notion of superior power: "The act of
sovereignty, properly speaking, is not an order from a superior,
nor a command from a master to a slave; but an agreement
of the Body of the State with each and every one of its

1 Social Contract, Final Version, Bk. I, Ch. 7, Vaughan, ed., Vol. a, p. 34.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 273

members." l And law, which had been defined as the com-
mand of the sovereign, is now seen to be the will of the
whole body reached by agreement with every member.
"It has for its guarantee the public force and supreme
power." 2 Where then is the paradox in saying that the
"laws of themselves" can really oblige men? As expres-
sions of the general will having reference to the general
good they cannot even exist without enjoying an authority
that no individual can gainsay. Laws need no force ex-
ternal to themselves to make them valid. They are, in-
deed, so essential in themselves that without them there is
no public power at all, and therefore no sovereignty. The
whole body obliges its parts only because its actions take
the form of law, and are always just. Surely the laws, being
the condition of that obligation, may be said to oblige men
in their own right.

Of course there was still the puzzle Hobbes propounded,
that the government of laws is impossible and only men
can govern. The real power exists in the particular persons
who can exercise it without let or hindrance from others.
Yet, as Montesquieu showed, the actual administration is
always carried on within the limits prescribed by the cus-
toms and laws of the people. No ruler wields power apart
from the influence of the whole society and its constitution.
If his action as an executive of the public business violates
the code of procedure which the general will prescribes,
it ceases to have the public force behind it and actually
encounters evasion and opposition from every quarter of
the body-politic. It was simply a defect of the imagination
in the older writers not to have appreciated the power of the
laws, and behind them, the power of the "moral person"
which men themselves have constituted. "One man or a
council of men" is never the mighty and independent "su-
perior" that figures so prominently in the fancy of tradi-
tion; the governing body whatever its composition is but
a lesser agent, and it is doubly subject, first to the laws and

1 Social Contract, First Version, Bk. I, Ch. 6, Vaughan, ed., Vol. i, p. 473; Final Version,
Bk. II, Ch. 4, Vaughan, ed., Vol. a, p. 45-

274 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

then to the whole people whose general will is the true
measure of right and utility for every body, large or small,
within the society.

Rousseau was prepared by these reflections to state his
theory of politics and to tell definitely what manner of
power it is that men are "obliged to recognize." The true
sovereign in any association is the whole body or people.
The power that obliges the several members is that will
for life in common which must be there if the people actually
exist as a community. That general will is a power which
the individuals are bound to acknowledge because it is at
once their own will and a will corroborated by the wills
of all those with whom they are associated. That will it
is which creates the State, makes the laws, and, in the
broadest sense of the term, really governs the people. By
its nature belonging to all as a whole, it cannot be identified
with or conferred upon any particular individual, thereafter
to be miscalled "the sovereign," and it cannot act at any
time in the exclusive interest of any particular person, since
every sovereign act must be equal and just, that is to say,
it must have the form of a law. Thus the general will is
the real sovereignty. And the obligation of the individual
is to an authority which reigns justly and equally, over him-
self and the others.

This theory of politics rounded out a period in modern
thought. The first notion of an invisible authority, so
drastically repudiated by Hobbes, was here reinstated
fully as the only right authority. The general will of the
people is in itself the very rule of right, the criterion of
morality for every member of the republic, as the idea of
justice had been in the Republic of Plato. But it is, too,
an active power and not simply an impersonal idea, for the
modern mind, used to sovereign functions, could not dis-
pense with the notion of a will fully competent to perform
them. The general will is such a sovereignty, the will of the
whole body that adjusts it to the conditions of its social
life and at the same time exercises a control over every
member so as to maintain the integrity of the society. Thus

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 275

the two meanings of "superior," which had been in com-
petition with each other throughout the modern argument,
the ideal meaning of right and the practical meaning of ac-
tive power, were united in this conception of the general will.
That synthesis was accomplished, however, only at the
cost of the original premise of the argument for a supreme
authority. The search for something superior to conscience
had been made on the supposition of terrible defects in
the human conscience, manifest in men's disobedience,
division, and war. That older view implied a fundamental
evil in human nature, when left to itself and not subjected
to an external discipline. All such thoughts had been ab-
horrent to Rousseau. Consequently, when he had worked
out his alternative theory of political self-governance he
realized that he had won a new meaning for conscience, and
solid ground for a belief in the "natural goodness of man."
For conscience, it now appeared, is not merely "private
judgment/' as had been thought in those days of religious
divergences and apparent disloyalty to all righteousness.
At times like that, when men are resisting evil and fighting
against external domination, their assertions of conscience
do have a rebellious and divisive character. But in its
normal action conscience is the very factor in the life of
mankind which makes for their existence in peace and com-
munity. For the conditions of the rise of a conscience in
individuals are precisely such as to make it from the start
a will in common with others and a will directed to the gen-
eral good. Conscience is not what is peculiar in the indi-
vidual, or idiosyncratic. It is a communicated moral power,
generated in men insofar as they are willing to be social.
Indeed, it may even be said that the high power of sov-
ereignty engendered in the whole body descends upon every
good citizen where it shows itself as a power of self-control
in his personal life. Conscience is nothing less than the gen-
eral will particularized in the decisions and conduct of the
individual. And so the thing most feared by the Renais-
sance was eventually exalted by Rousseau as the supreme
and only veritable authority.

276 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

OBLIGATION AND CONTRACT

The general will had proved itself to be a liberating con-
ception. Naturally Rousseau tended to make much of it,
and to advance it as the key to the solution of every question.
Moreover, he was a publicist, a writer for the times, anxious
to make his point with people who were still used to the older
ways of thinking. To those who wanted a sign he gave a sign.
Some could not do without the thought of a grand authority,
a sovereign, a potent will, to serve in place of the magnificent
will of princes whose rule, nevertheless, they had come to
believe unrighteous, those readers were given a will in lieu
of the dispossessed one, the general will, and it was repre-
sented in a grand manner. The general will inherited all the
perfections once loaded on the personnage of the sovereign,
and was spoken of eulogistically as "one, inalienable, indi-
visible, imprescriptible, and incapable of wrong." Others
like the Encyclopedists were looking for some natural prin-
ciple to account for the phenomenon of individuals living
together in a society. Their first-chosen principle of "socia-
bility" Rousseau had publicly banned in his Discourse on
Inequality, but a principle was restored to them in the gen-
eral will. Then there were moralists who desired a touchstone
by reference to which men would be able to decide questions
of justice and right in dealing with each other. The idea of
the general will supplied this need and was exploited by both
Diderot and Rousseau in their respective articles for the
Encyclopedia, on " Natural Right " and " Political Econ-
omy." Thus many desiderata were being realized in this
single conception. The general will served in one connection
as a substitute for the private will of a ruler, in another as a
sociological postulate, the will to live in common that is pre-
sumably obtaining among people if they have any society at
all, and lastly, as an ideal norm of right, very much like
Plato's Justice or the Law of Nature of earlier modern
thought. The concept was becoming more voluminous
with meaning than even the idea of sovereignty; and

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 277

its disparate meanings were a source of confusion and
danger.

Thus Rousseau could not avoid falling into a dialectic
over the meaning of the general will. He found his associate
Diderot interpreting it as a "will for the good of the species,"
supposed to be operative through the understanding of every
human being, very much as instinct functions in animals.
Indeed, such a will for the good of the whole organism or
system was attributed by Diderot to every natural creature,
so that the case of man was represented as but one in a host
of others in the great realm of Nature. There is, then, a will
for the general good of mankind inserted with the will for
every one's private good. And this fancy inspired a fatuous
optimism, a trust in the social and intellectual tendencies
to work naturally toward a "general society of mankind."
But Rousseau could not stomach such happy cosmopolitan
illusions. 1 He was pessimistic about a civilization that comes
about by the natural powers alone without human "arti-
fice." Nor could he believe for a moment that a society of
the nations will develop naturally, without heroic effort and
cost. The institution of any human association is a moral
undertaking, not a natural phenomenon. And the general
will ought never to be thought of as a sort of biological prin-
ciple in Nature that silently organizes men into an ever-
increasing world-unity. Rousseau preferred to think of God
in this connection, not the general will.

There was a contrary mistake, however, one destined to
have tremendous effects in history. This was to identify the
general will literally with the will of a nation. Being proposed
as a substitute for the will of the Prince, it lent itself very
readily to the opposite error of identification with the will
of the people. Prince and people had been thought of for
so long as in opposition that to take sovereignty from a par-
ticular chief seemed tantamount to bestowing it upon the
mass of the people, designated a "person" for the sake of
the legal fiction. There was no reason, however, why the
will of a nation should in itself be taken as essentially more

1 Vide, First Version, Bk. I, Ch. a.

278 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

righteous than the will of their monarch. A greater rectitude
may, indeed, be presumed as regards the people within the
State, for the merely practical reason that if all who are
affected by any decision participate in making it they are
very much less likely to authorize harmful or wrong action,
since they themselves will be the first to feel it. Nevertheless,
they may often be mistaken even in regard to the real good
of the whole group. "It is very necessary that the public
shall learn to know what its true will is." l So the " will of all "
cannot ipso facto be taken as "the general will," if one keeps
in view the objective meaning of the latter. Furthermore
their will as a people may at times be quite as particularistic,
by very intention, as that of any single man or of a small group
within the State, and in that selfish aspect it is, also, not
truly the general will. And this aspect of the matter was
one Rousseau could not ignore, for he himself called attention
to the absurdity of the peoples of Europe setting up political
institutions like the State to achieve peace and community
and then allowing those States themselves to fall into a con-
dition of perpetual hostility or active warfare with each
other. Although he was often disposed to attribute such
evils to the dynastic ambitions and selfishness of Kings, yet
he realized there is a danger in conceiving of sovereignty
as essentially national. It lent countenance to the doctrine
that the Sovereign States have no law above them and so
must take the law into their own hands and base their poli-
cies on the condition that there is a perpetual state of war
between nations. But the general will ought never to be
identified with a will that could thus do wrong, for it is by
very conception a will which always intends right and the
general good. In this vein of thought, with his attention on
the international order, Rousseau was not disposed to iden-
tify the general will with the national will but preferred to
assimilate it rather with the pure ideal of justice, or else
with the final and perfect will for righteousness which is
God's. Christianity and nationalism, it then appeared, must

I 0p. cit., First Version, Bk. I. Ch. 7, Vaughan, p. 476; Final Version, Bk. II,
Ch. 6, Vaughan, p. 51.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 279

be absolutely incompatible. That was the perplexing sug-
gestion of the hastily-added last chapter of the Social Con-
tract, entitled Civil Religion, a piece written ambiguously,
however, as by one who is not yet sure of what is implied
in the choice between those alternatives. 1 He was actually
in a predicament over the meaning of the general will. It
is not surprising that he made the comment, years after-
wards, when he looked back upon the Social Contract, that
it was "a book to be done over again."

The coming into prominence of the subject of interna-
tional relations produced a change in Rousseau's thinking.
He had long been preoccupied with these matters. The
formal Conclusion of the Social Contract and the summary
of it given in mile show that he had contemplated an ex-
tension of his political theory to that realm. Nor was this
an egoistic pretense of learning on his part or the project of
an impulsive moment. From the very beginning of his career
as a writer his true subject had been very wide in scope:
Man and Civilization, not merely Man and the State. The
Arts and Sciences had been first condemned, in his prize
essay, as factors of European civilization threatening the
moral integrity of the people everywhere. The political
institutions typical of Europe next came under the ban, and
especially the monarchical State. And Rousseau was quite
as much concerned with war and its effects on mankind as
with the oppressive inequalities imposed upon the subjects
of every nation. It was about the time of his work on the
Origin of Inequality that he composed an essay on the subject
of War. His thesis was that the "state of war" is not at all
"natural" to man as such but only to those sovereign States
which are intended by men as "pacific institutions" but
which actually follow the principle of brute force among
themselves at the cost of the humanity whose concerted
power they wield. War exists because the political States
are not governed by any rule of right. The remedy is for
men to go one step farther with their "artifice" and subject
the sovereign Powers themselves to a controlling law analo-

1 Vide, LctUrs, cited by Vaughan, Vol. 2, pp. 166-172.

280 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

gous to that which obtains among the individuals within
the various States. How to establish such a regime of the law
of nations was, however, too great a problem to be solved at
that stage.

Rousseau turned to a practical scheme that appeared
likely to serve, as at least a palliative, for suffering humanity.
This is to check the power of the large monarchical States
by building up the powers of the small States through con-
federation, which is not so wholly artificial as might be im-
agined. Small States have advantages of their own, such as
strong internal bonds and patriotism; large ones suffer from
a natural weakening of control over their members on ac-
count of their very size and the laxer ties of community;
the odds against the small States are not so great as they
appear Nature tends to establish a balance of power and
great statesmen need only take the next intelligent step, of
uniting the small States definitely into a Confederation so
as to present a strong front against outer aggression. The
Great Powers will then be matched by the consolidated
powers of the lesser ones. And these will be strong enough
by their union to secure their own sovereignties and their
rights in the system of Europe. 1 But Rousseau seemed un-
prepared to develop this scheme any further at the time,
and he left his essay on The State of War an unfinished frag-
ment, but yet a constant hint to him of a task sometime to
be undertaken and carried through to a conclusion. He
continued his inquiries into the meaning of the social con-
tract, instead, and managed to complete them first. But
what he learned in working over Pufendorf, in that connec-
tion, was a further encouragement to him to go on with his
study of the external relations of States. He saw a double
virtue in that federated "Germanic Body" described by
Pufendorf and in others like it, the "Helvetic League" and
the "States-General": such a type of society is too large

1 Vide, Fragment on The Stale of War, Vaughan, Vol. i, esp. pp. 293-300, 304-305; Social
Contract, First Version, Bk.II, Ch. 3, pp. 485-486; Final Version, Ch. 13 (How to Maintain
the Sovereign Authority), Vol. 2, p. 94. Rousseau's later work on the Constitutions for
Corsica (1765) and Poland (1771-72) was inspired by the same idea and he then exalted
federation as a "masterpiece of politics." Vaughan, Vol. a, p. 470.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 281

and powerful to be attacked by any external power whatso-
ever, and yet, being only a confederation without a mon-
archical "sovereign," it lacks the military efficiency and
wieldiness needed for successful aggression upon its neigh-
bors. One or more federations of States in that form would
make for the stability and peace of all Europe, a great bal-
ancing factor in the system.

But it was the idea of Abbe de St. Pierre that really
touched off the spark of enthusiasm and genius in Rousseau.
In his Project for Lasting Peace he had applied the concept
of federation to the whole of Europe, proposing a general
union of all the nations large and small, a league to secure
peace. This scheme so deeply interested Rousseau that he
took great pains to recast it, and in doing so he transformed
it, for he assimilated the project to his own dream of a social
order having "the form of the republic" universally, in the
whole of mankind and in every partial society. He spoke
of this as "the European Republic." He represented the
federation of Europe as an institution for permanent peace
with justice, instead of merely peace by a balance of power
between States which still continue to regard their relation
to each other as fundamentally and inevitably one of a "state
of war." His work on that project gave great impetus to his
ambitions in the field of international politics. Hence it is
not surprising to find him planning a book to surpass Gro-
tius' Laws of Peace and War, where he would not truckle to
the monarchical prejudice but would honestly disclose to men
the possibilities of the new world-system on "republican prin-
ciples." Of these bold projects only one was completed and
published, that on Lasting Peace. But when so much and
persistent thinking had been done there were bound to be
new lights on political theory in general. Of this Rousseau
himself was aware, for he said, even in fimile: "These in-
vestigations lead us directly to all the questions of interna-
tional law (droit public) and the study of these will result
in enlightening us in regard to law and right in the State
(droit politique)." *

1 mfe, passage cited by Vaughan, Vol. a, p. 158.

282 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

Here, as in the earlier stage of his theory of politics,
Rousseau had to overcome rooted traditional objections to
the scheme he envisaged. This time the opinion of Pufen-
dorf, who had great authority over his mind, was against
him. For Pufendorf had declared: " Leagues for peace add
nothing to the obligation." l And the reason given for
this disparagement of what might be done "by interven-
tion of human deed, that is, by agreement or covenant," was
the curious one, that this obligation exists for men in their
"natural state," and therefore cannot be modified in any
way by human intelligence or art. Peace is right and war
is wrong. Men have a duty, by the "law of nature," to
live at peace with each other and to eschew war. True, but
how effective is this obligation of pure reason in the state
of nature? Rousseau had learned from his study of society
what a moral advantage it is for men to unite in all their
undertakings and not to try honest living entirely on their
own, and without the concurrence of others. He had come
to see that in such unions, by compact, the consciences of
men gain both in strength and in perception of the right.
Through association on such terms they learn to know what
is good for themselves and for the whole body, and that
determines what is the true law for all who are members of
the body. This knowledge of the law and right is won in
common and it has the weight of the community behind it
in short, the obligation to obey becomes present and real
only with the cooperative discovery of the law. If all this
may be realized in the relations of men to each other within
their diverse political societies, why may it not come to
pass in a more general society of the nations? Thus the
whole argument of the Social Contract committed Rousseau
to a belief contrary to the older politics, that the leaguing
for peace actually has everything to do with making peace a
real obligation.

The new international theory had its origin in Plato's
Laws. There it was related, as a fancy half-historical, half-
propagandist, that three peoples and their kings leagued

1 Pufendorf, Bk. i, Ch. 2 (Of the Natural State of Man), Sect, xi, pp. 02-03.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 283

together saying: Let us unite and make a covenant to abide
by certain laws within and without our realms, and if any
one of us attacks another or violates the laws, the third party
will come to the rescue and settle the affair, and preserve
the union and the peace. 1 This notion St. Pierre had taken
up and applied to the large scale of the European system.
He believed the scheme would work even better there than
in the ancient situation, precisely because of the greater
number of parties to the covenant. There is safety in num-
bers, a modern doctrine advanced first by Bodin when he
suggested that it is an advantage to the State to have a
great many religious sects, inasmuch as they all tend to
nullify each other's domination, and thus leave the State
free to pursue its real interests, whereas two or three quar-
reling sects keep the society in a constant turmoil and civil
war. 2 So here the third party which is interested in uphold-
ing the law of nations against any aggressor or violator is
not merely one lone State coming to the aid of one other
and engaging in a contest of power but a large majority of
States, the greater part of the peoples of Europe, whose
very interest and possible coming-on-the-scene can operate
to uphold the law, without a recourse on every occasion to
force of arms. Such a confederation affords a greater guar-
antee of security for every State, and therefore of the peace
of the world. And the beauty of this scheme, as St. Pierre
regarded it, is that it enlists in favor of the comity of na-
tions the very forces of self-interest which seem to be the
chief threat to general peace and unity, for the tendency
which prompts one State to take its own way, in disregard
of the law and the rights of all, works in all the others, too,
but in this manner, to draw them together much as all the
other stones of an arch would press against any one stone
that threatened to fall down, constraining that one member
to stay in its rightful place in the system. At this point in
the argument Rousseau struck off the thought in his own
mintage: the violator of the public law previously agreed

1 Plato, Laws, Bk. 3, St. 684, Jowett translation, Vol. 5, p. 64.
1 Bodin, op. tit., Bk. IV, Ch. 5, p. 655*

284 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

upon by hims v elf is there really "forced to be just" or "equi-
table," a phrase elsewhere turned into the paradoxical form
"forced to be free." l That paradoxical use of the term
"force" was his way of asserting how very effective the
obligation can be in so comprehensive a society formed by
a pact for peace. So long as the States of Europe make
only partial treaties their "reciprocal engagements" have
little validity, with the parties as with others not included
in the convention. Until they "submit to common delibera-
tions" they will never possess a "common and constant "
rule by which to determine their rights and pretensions.
There will be neither law nor obligation unless the associa-
tion is perfectly general and on a basis of equality. But
if they do thus associate themselves by a pact they acquire
greater control over their relations with each other. The very
conditions of bringing about an agreement on so large a
scale are educative of all the parties. In conferring about
the different claims and other relevant concerns, in work-
ing at a policy together, they clear up their first views of
national needs or rights and discern a common interest and
general rule of right or law. The process of negotiation en-
ables them to appreciate their own good in the general good.
Achieving this in common they are deeply committed to
it, that is, they are obliged. This seems to be the trend of
Rousseau's reflections upon the new system of international
politics.

It is universal right, then, or justice, that men and na-
tions are "obliged to recognize," not a "power." This in-
dicates the shift of thought in Rousseau's political theory.
And it is very significant that in all his discussion of federa-
tion, whether on the small or large scale, he never once
mentions the general will. This idea did not fit the context
of his thinking. The notion of a supreme power above the
powers of Europe, as the sovereign is above the individuals
within the State, was not really pertinent or imaginable.
Since Europe had never acknowledged a super-sovereign,
moreover, it was unnecessary to put forward the ideal,

1 Vaughan, Vol. i, pp. 374, 380, 390; Vol. a, p. 36.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 285

general will as a substitute for any false notions on that
score. Nor was there any point in employing it as a prin-
ciple in lieu of " sociability," for the will for general com-
munity among the nations of Europe was largely conspicuous
by its absence. The only meaning the general will could
have in this wider sphere was that of an ideal a will for jus-
tice. And Rousseau seems to have preferred to speak
directly of the ideal of justice, or else of the common in-
terest of all, reverting to the language of Plato rather than
strain the modern term to uses for which it hardly seemed
fitted.

This change of attitude toward the general will appeared
in the latter-day expressions of Rousseau's theory of the
State. Most of the time he was obliged to quote verbatim
from the original text of the Social Contract, inasmuch as
these later discussions constituted a defense of that book;
but when he was released from the necessity of a literal
quotation, he used language which shows an -alteration of
sentiment and meaning. Thus in the summary of the theory
which he wrote for mile he chose to speak not of the gen-
eral will but of "the will of the people or the sovereign will."
This suggests that he was conscious of a distinction between
a sovereign will which is only the will of a particular people
and a will that is truly "general" and therefore perfectly
"right." Again, in the Letters from the Mountains, there is
an elaborately careful statement: "the will of all is, there-
fore, the true ordinance, the supreme rule; and that rule, in
its general and personified form, is what I call the sovereign."
Yet "the will of all " had once been distinguished from the
general will it was now accepted as sovereign, presum-
ably because sovereignty itself is something only relative,
pertaining merely to a nation and not "general." So the
oath of allegiance proposed for the Constitution of Corsica
ran thus: "I unite myself in body, goods, and will, and
with all my power, to the Corsican nation." And similarly,
in the Considerations on the Government of Poland, the
reference was to "the will of the nation." l For practical

1 Vide, Vaughan, Vol. a, pp. 155. aoi, 350, 45*. 456,

286 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

purposes, then, the general will had sunk to the status of
the national will which enjoys a sovereignty only relative
to the members of the particular nation concerned. It had
ceased to be a Platonic idea, and a power absolute and uni-
versal. The majesty that had once passed to it from the
personal sovereign was now gone, and with this loss of
imagined glory went, as always must, its perfection of
authority.

But, after all, Rousseau was not interested in authority
as such: "it is better to think less about authority, and more
about liberty" and "the individuals." * In fact, his wrestling
over that question of authority had been done only in
order to reconcile his new principles with the traditional
ideas whose hold had been so strong upon himself as well
as others. And having learned from experience to treat
those ideas more pragmatically, that is, to think of sov-
ereignty and the general will as relative to a particular func-
tion, he returned from his digression, as it were, to carry on
his fundamental argument. And this argument was about
moral obligation.

"What is it that makes the State one? It is the union
of its members. And whence comes the union of its members?
From the obligation that binds them. We are all in agree-
ment thus far. But what is the foundation of that obliga-
tion? This is where the various authors part company.
According to some it is force; according to others, paternal
authority; and still others, the will of God. Every one estab-
lishes his own principle and attacks those of the others. I
have not done otherwise myself: and following the sanest
party of those who have discussed these matters, I have laid
down, as the foundation of the body-politic, the agreement
of its own members. . . . Quite apart from its truth this
principle has an advantage over the others, because of the
solidity of the foundation it establishes, for what firmer basis
can obligation have than this of being the free engagement of
him who is obliged?" 2 So the notion of greatest value, in

1 Letters from the Mountains, Vaughan, Vol. 2, p. 220.
. pp. 199-200.

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 287

political philosophy, is that of "contract," the act of agree-
ment and free engagement. But this "social contract"
is a very special type and must be conceived to fit the require-
ments of the case. Every one makes an agreement and un-
dertakes to do something with reference to all who associate
with him; and all are doing the same thing with respect to
the individual. This makes the resulting obligation equal
and just for all, and therefore solid; it simultaneously has
other results in that it is the means of determining the com-
mon rules of life for all, that is to say, the rules of their
society. This contract is, then, but the first act of a con-
tinual process of such mutual agreement and law-making.
So long as individuals dwell together in society they must
continue to deal with each other in the spirit of their orig-
inal contract. We may, if we like, attribute the laws they
establish by that procedure, to the agency of a general will
and then personify that entity as a sovereign. But the
essential thing is the "contract" in this extensive use of
the term, as meaning the democratic way of life between
men. All law and obligation arises from contract in that
sense. When taking leave of his fellow-citizens of Geneva,
in the conclusion to his Letters from the Mountains, Rousseau
put his idea in a remarkable piece of practical wisdom for
the men of his own city who were divided against one an-
other and in great turmoil, on account of his persecution
by the authorities: "Whatever part you choose to take,
even if it is one bad in itself, take it together; by that very
action alone it will become the best course to take; and you
may be sure that you will always do what ought to be done,
provided only you do it in concert." l

VI

FROM POLITICS TO ETHICS

The critical philosopher examines and defines what is
already significant in the experience of men. Thus Kant
was destined to reflect on the question of obligation. For

l /Wd., p. 291.

288 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

this was a concept that had grown in meaning during the
course of modern civilization. The first writers who had
sought to bring about peace and order by a control of in-
dividuals from above without regard to their own will and
convictions, as it was fancied God rules man, were com-
pelled to recognize the idea of "contract" with its inevitable
suggesting of an obligation that arises from the free commit-
ment of the individuals themselves. Some, like Hobbes,
had devoted their philosophical ingenuity to making the
value of freedom seem subordinate to that of security with
its promise of the satisfication of all human desires under
the aegis of an authority. This debasement of the human
will was argued for by a vast magnifying of the natural
powers and benefits of a sovereignty. But the more
empirical-minded thinkers, like Pufendorf, Locke, and Mon-
tesquieu had disallowed the magnificent services of the
sovereign and directed their attention more to the nature
of law and obligation, as if these features in the situation
were the more significant. This turn of thought, after many
years of preparation, gained its most effective expression
in Rousseau. His uncompromising denial of any glory in
the existing civilization was but a preface to a politics of
an ethical type, where it is precisely the laws alone that
do govern and these laws are rules of conduct laid down
by the people themselves who are subject to them, or obliged
by them. There the obligation was realized to be a bond
laid by men of their own free will, an aspect in which it
seemed quite compatible with their enjoyment of freedom.
But the obligation was also regarded as a social control,
for every political theory had to provide such a control, and
in giving the necessary prominence to this aspect Rousseau
erected "the general will" as a source and authority out-
rivaling far, with its ideal characters, the "sovereign" of
the ancient mode. In his later and more individualistic
vein Rousseau stressed the intrinsic validity of the obliga-
tion that is created by contract, and he described the form
such a proceeding takes, as one where men come to terms
with each other by public deliberation and so make the

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 289

common rules of life or laws which obtain in their com-
munity. This way of regarding the obligation made it pos-
sible to conceive of it as arising from international covenant
quite as well as from the "social contract" of a single nation.
The theory of obligation was thus, even in Rousseau's
work, attaining a greater generality, and pointing to further
meaning than had yet been realized. This was the kind of
thing to interest the genius of Kant, for the philosopher
is always concerned to achieve the most general signification
of ideas, to make them "cosmic," as it were, so long as they
continue to have meaning in their new applications. Kant
was appreciative of the republican ideals of Rousseau and
saw that they applied to the whole system of Europe and
were the condition of a lasting peace in the world and he
very naturally went on with the argument to see the full
scope of this idea of obligation based on the free engagement
of the persons concerned. This might be universally valid
as an ideal of life, not only true for man as a citizen, or
as a member of a world-society, but for man in all the re-
lationships of his life. So the concept was taken over into
ethics in general.

What Rousseau had done was to disclose the true form
of any duty, no matter in what sphere, whether in the State,
or in the home, or in the silent spaces of the conscience of
the individual. What is "virtue" in the citizen? The con-
formity of his personal will to the general will which acts
for the general good. But this general will, it had also been
stated, attains its end always by acting in the form of law.
Here it was that Kant seems to have taken an important
step of logical economy it was to omit the general will
from the account entirely, so that the prescription would
read more simply: the good will in the citizen is that will
which conforms to the principle of law. And so expressed
this definition of virtue need not be limited to man in his
political, or even his social, capacity. It tells what goodness
means as ascribed to man in any capacity, although we must
add, of course, that man is essentially a rational being,
because only a person endowed with reason is competent

290 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

to form the idea of law, and therefore to recognize, and pos-
sibly to act upon it.

By such a stroke of simplification Kant generalized com-
pletely Rousseau's conception of virtue, so that it is the
virtue of man as man and not merely of the citizen. He also
avoided all the problems that beset the notion of the general
will as a power, and the source of obligation and law. How
are men to know whether their will is truly "general" as
regards the people of the community? Must they wait,
before they begin their moral action, until they learn the
verdict of the generality? And how, even so, are they to
escape the error of following the general practice or custom,
as the will of the people, only to learn afterwards that this
does not really make for the good of all and that what they
have supposed to be the general will is not "general" in
respect to its end? But then, how is this good of all to be
determined? By the ordinary evaluations of pleasure or
satisfied desire? These questions are all very empirical, and
in every particular case they must wait long for a solution.
Meantime it is a fact that individuals are conscious of their
obligations in such cases. They recognize their duty quite
in advance of the decision of those issues about the general
will and good. They do not look to see if their will is surely
going to receive a corroboration from the wills of others and
become "general" in that sense. Though they never spurn
the approbation and aid of other men in the practice of vir-
tue, they do not make their own action conditional upon
such favoring agencies. Duty is an unconditional command
for them, and it comes directly from within themselves.
Nor are they determined by the consequences which they
foresee and estimate to be either generally good or ill. Inde-
pendently of these considerations they can be, and are, moral.
How is that possible, unless it be true that men can really
determine themselves to action prior to experience of goods
derived, and purely from a rfespect for the idea of law or
right? As rational beings they can envisage any course of
conduct in terms of its conformity, or lack of conformity,
to law as such. And this moral judgment constitutes the

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 291

true obligation, for a being such as man who is not perfect
but a creature of sensibility, with natural tendencies and
interests alongside the interest of pure reason.

In this wise Kant disengaged the ethical meaning of obli-
gation from all the social and political imagery with which
it was confused. No more of those concrete picturings of
events that never happened in history and never will happen,
but which must be "supposed" in order to convey the true
moral ideas no more imagining of isolated individuals,
stupid and undeveloped, meeting together, coming to terms,
making contracts, acquiring a conception of law and right,
declaring and maintaining public laws and institutions.
Nor was it any longer necessary to wrestle over the dubious
meaning of that great looming power for righteousness, the
general will, which had supplanted the will of the sovereign
of old. The essential idea of morality was now clear of all
images: every individual possessed of reason and freedom
of will recognizes the principle of law and knows that he
can act from that principle, regardless of the strength of his
affections and inclinations. This ideal of law, and not any
social power or any natural force, is really what obliges the
individual. Thus law is not obligatory because it is the ex-
pression of the general will which is fancied to be the real
and ultimate obliging power; the general will itself is but a
phenomenon of the ideal of law as it is operative in and
through individuals. There is nothing more real in the realm
of society or nature than the individual or person who is
possessed of ideals and can lay down the law for his own life
accordingly. With this doctrine arises a pure idealism in
modern philosophy.

This was also, in Kant's own eyes, a pure rationalism, a
view which subsequent idealists have criticized abundantly.
In doing so they have rather assumed that Kant actually
realized his intention of stating the sheer abstract meaning
of morality without recourse to any imagery or experience.
It is true that he described obligation in an abstract manner.
He made no reference to the political, social, and historical
phenomena of the human spirit so interesting to Hegel and

292 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

others since his time. Yet this only means, perhaps, that
Kant was not concrete in their way. He had imagination
enough, else he would not have exercised the influence he
has had upon modern thinking. But his imagination was
of a different type from theirs and it drew from a different
store of experience. To Kant there was something more
deeply engrossing than politics and history. He had spent
the greater part of his life as a thinker in trying to understand
this other important phase of human experience, namely,
scientific knowledge. There the question had to do with a
bond or tie, the causal connection between objects, and it
was not possible to escape the force of Hume's criticism that
such a bond is neither directly perceived nor deducible from
the nature of things and that it cannot be explained by refer-
ence to an external power because the very meaning of
" power " is here in dispute. The problem of moral obliga-
tion was somewhat analogous a tie or bond between men
which cannot be found inherent in them in their "natural
state" but which also cannot be made appendent to a sup-
posed higher power, because the source of all " sovereign"
power is itself the very thing in question. In both cases the
only way to a solution seemed to be by taking the point of
view of the beings for whom such relations obtain, to whom
the necessity of cause and effect and the moral necessity of
obligation have a meaning. In the sphere of knowledge Kant
had achieved a solution, to his own satisfaction. And what
made it possible for him to conceive that the very idea of law
determines the will of man was his belief, confirmed by study,
that there is an analogous role of law in the sphere of human
knowledge. The mind in all its workings seems to be des-
tined to make all things, its own acts included, conform to
law as a norm or ideal. It knows Nature in the form of law;
when it takes to voluntary action it is true to itself only when
this will realizes the form of law. Morality and science to-
gether reveal the idea of law to be a superior determinant
for human reason. And so there must be a whole philosophy
of pure reason, the theoretical reason and the practical rea-
son. The vision of all this as one system of truth discovers

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 293

Kant as a great imaginative genius despite the rationalistic
manner of his expression.

A Weltanschauung, then, is involved in Kant's theory
of moral obligation. Where Rousseau in the beginning, and
others at a later time, saw obligation as pertaining only to
man's historical life in society, Kant regarded it in a setting
of far vaster significance than politics or society. Hence it
followed that the freedom of man acquires a larger meaning
than the self-determination of individuals in their political
societies; in moral duty man is revealed as a being free from
all compulsions of Nature, both within and without himself,
and free in a grand and positive sense, to legislate for all
Nature. And to complete this picture, for it is that, quite
as much as anything Rousseau ever delineated, there is
the Kingdom of Ends, a cosmic republic, as it were, of the
immortal souls of virtuous men, and above all, God the
Supreme Being. " Postulates," these were called by Kant,
but without them he could not have told the meaning of
obligation in the moral life. There must be such ideals di-
vined through imagination if human experience is to be ren-
dered intelligible.

The intelligible world is, nevertheless, a changing world,
where the change counts for something. This evolutionary
aspect has become inseparable from the contemporary im-
agination, so that whether we intend to innovate or not,
we inevitably revise the idealism of the past.

If process is essential to reality, then those processes
whereby we know and deal with each other and with Nature
are all ingredients of the real. Our experience is not merely
"appearance" it enters into the very essence of things.
Hence we no longer expect the ideal of law, that is to say,
the norm of right, to shine clearly in the "pure reason" of
every individual by its own power alone: men find the ideal,
in being able to meet and transact business together and
come to agreement about certain things as good or right for
them universally. This social process of discovery is not a
mere psychological incident, indifferent to the ideal, as

294 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

people oftentimes think the finding of the poet's language
is to his vision. It is the democratic procedure itself which
makes the law real and therefore effectual for the human
beings to whose lives it applies. So idealistic ethics is com-
mitted to democracy.

"Fixed-species" is, today, an alien concept, whether it be
thought of in regard to the fprms of the human mind or the
outward forms of living Nature. Even the categories of the
human understanding seem to have an evolution and to be
but relatively fixed, that is, valid only for the kind of experi-
ence which they happen to organize and reveal. As experi-
ence takes on new phases, it requires modes of interpretation
suited thereto. And, in fact, it often contributes to the pro-
ducing of these ways of thought, through that stimulating
interaction of fact with theory of which the pragmatists
have told the mutable tale. All ideas, then, appear relative
to men, manners, and circumstances. And this is nowhere
better illustrated than in the foregoing story of modern
thinking in politics and ethics. " Authority," "sovereignty,"
"the general will," all have had a history, and each one,
its own day and use. "Obligation" has developed in their
place, and, presumably, it will sooner or later serve its pur-
pose and become a matter of record with the other ideas.
Once it was conceived only as the tie between men taking
a certain action according to law, but it has come to be
thought of as the moral bond on which all laws, institutions,
and political actions must rest in order to be solid and effec-
tive. For us now, with our particular experience and history,
this idea is indispensable and absolute. It is the most signifi-
cant idea in modern ethics, without which we could not ex-
press to ourselves the ideal meaning which life seems to have.

The presence of this ideal character in our experience dis-
closes, however, where idealism must take a stand. While
all specific ideas, like sovereignty, the general will, and obli-
gation, are pragmatic, the ideal form in virtue of which they
have their significance and value at any time and place is it-
self not so. Ideals are not derived from experience, nor from
the mind. They only define themselves there, in the history

THE MEANING OF OBLIGATION 295

and the spirit of man. The norm of right appears to work
its way in the course of events and to fix the minds of men
upon this or that particular idea as important or meaningful,
as, for example, "moderation" was to the Greeks, and " ob-
ligation " is to the moderns. These particular and definite
ideas with which men work in the contingencies of social life
and argument are things of changing value. But men cannot
use or work with their ideals. Rather, they are possessed and
commanded by them. Hence, in the order of human experi-
ence, ideals seem to be before they exist. They have a reality
operative in affairs before they have any well-defined part
in our experience. Because they are prior and of supreme
meaning, we cannot but think of them as "eternal." On the
other hand, we are not forgetful of the process whereby
ideals exist, that they have no place or value in our world
apart from the cooperative thought and will and action of
human persons. This means that, though men have their
day and use, as all other beings of Nature, they also have,
through their realizing of ideals, a future of lasting signifi-
cance, which is what we mean by "immortality."

XII

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM IN THE
UNITED STATES

R. F. ALFRED HOERNLE
University of Witwatersrand

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM IN THE
UNITED STATES

R. F. Alfred Hoernlt

My contribution to this volume may fitly begin on a per-
sonal note. When Professor Barrett and his collaborators
honored me by asking me to join in their enterprise, they
said, in effect, "You are one of us." My feeling leaped to
answer theirs. For, six-and-a-half years of philosophical
teaching at Harvard, followed by two later teaching visits
to two other American Universities, have established be-
tween many of my fellow-philosophers in the United States
and myself a bond of friendship and of mutual understanding
which seemed to me to justify my acceptance of the invita-
tion extended to me.

Moreover, in writing this article on "The Revival of
Idealism," I feel that I am doing a little to repay the debt
which I owe to my philosophical colleagues in the United
States. I reckon the years which I spent among them as,
next to my Oxford student days, and my association with
Bernard Bosanquet in the University of St. Andrews, the
third formative period in my philosophical development.
Nor is my debt confined to thinkers of one school. I am
conscious of having learned no less from Realists, like R. B.
Perry, W. P. Montague, R. W. Sellars, than from Idealists,
like M. W. Calkins, W. E. Hocking, G. W. Cunningham.
And there are others H. B. Alexander, J. E. Boodin, M. R.
Cohen, A. O. Lovejoy, C. I. Lewis: I name but a few at ran-
dom and, above all, John Dewey in his most recent books,
from whom varied and powerful impulses have come to shape
the course of my thinking.

Least of all, may I forget to commemorate on this occa-
sion the fact that the earlier years of my Harvard period

300 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

overlapped with the closing years of Royce's life. Illness
had by then left its mark upon him, and he was but a shadow
of the brilliant self of his great days. Even so, I felt enough
of his influence to enable me to appreciate why so many of
his pupils, as is shown by the personal statements in the two
volumes of Contemporary American Philosophy, broke away
from his Absolutism. The very power of his dialectic, the
very masterfulness of his mind, were a challenge to them to
seek emancipation and to recover, or preserve, their own
individuality as thinkers. If Idealism in the United States
has suffered a reaction, and in certain quarters even an
eclipse was not William James himself the first of the
rebels? this is due, in part at least, to the very force and
distinctiveness of Royce's thinking. Lesser men among his
pupils could not effectively copy or repeat his methods,
though they might regurgitate his phrases. The stronger
minds were necessarily provoked into either challenging
his fundamental principles or else trying to rethink them
in their own ways. Men had to break Royce's spell in order
to be themselves.

Towards the end of his life, in moments of weariness,
Royce would sometimes express doubts about his own effec-
tiveness as a teacher, because so many of the doctrines which
he regarded as most distinctively original his argument
that the very existence of error implies the Absolute; his
distinction of the external and the internal meaning of ideas;
his use of the mathematical concept of the infinite to illus-
trate the structure of the Absolute; his analysis of morality
in terms of loyalty and of loyalty to loyalty; his concepts of
interpretation and of the beloved community; his proposal
to apply the principle of insurance to the prevention of war
seemed to him to have been still-born in the sense of having
been received at best with barren respect, instead of being
accepted, expounded, developed. He felt, I think, towards
the end a growing isolation, as of one whose voice is still
heard but is no longer listened to. If it is death to a philos-
ophy to become a still backwater, whilst the main stream of
thought is carving out fresh channels for itself, then that

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 301

death seemed at times to be threatening Royce's own philos-
ophy. Yet, if it is the test of a philosophical teacher to be
the cause of vigorous and independent philosophizing in
others, then Royce was indeed a great teacher in his own
generation. Nor in his own generation only: he will continue
to be a fountain of philosophical life to all who are striving
to learn the art of philosophizing by rethinking the thoughts
of a master. To any young American student of philosophy
who rejects Absolute Idealism I would say that he has no
right to dissent or condemn, unless he has first earned that
right by a thorough study and understanding of Royce.

I

A. N. WHITEHEAD AS A "NEW" IDEALIST

To speak of a "revival" of Idealism implies both that
there has been a diminution or eclipse, and that now there
is a reconstruction or restatement.

The eclipse I am speaking with reference to the American
scene is too familiar to require lengthy documentation.
The most alive philosophical movements in the United
States during the last twenty-five years have fought under
such banners as Naturalism, Realism, Pragmatism, Instru-
mentalism. However much they may have differed, one
from the others, in their opposition to some, if not all, the
most characteristic doctrines of Idealism, especially as formu-
lated by Royce, they have been united. The concept of the
"Absolute" has been rejected by all these movements alike,
and though they have not agreed on the place and function
of mind in the universe, they have agreed also on denying to
mind the central position assigned to it in Idealistic systems.
A canvass of the names of the outstanding philosophical
thinkers of the present day in the United States, as repre-
sented by the two volumes on Contemporary American Phi-
losophy, shows a mere handful who would agree to be labeled
"Idealist," and even then only on a very elastic definition
of this long-suffering term. Of self-confessed and unrepent-
ant Absolutists there is only one Mary Whiton Calkins,

302 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

though Hocking (who does not use the word) must, I think,
be classed with her. Whether Cunningham would call him-
self an "Absolutist," I do not know: at any rate his Abso-
lutism is not of the forthright type of Miss Calkins, but
an Absolutism profoundly qualified by a consciousness of
difficulties.

The eclipse, then, may be taken as conceded. What, on
the other hand, are the evidences of a revival?

By a "revival" I do not mean a mere repetition of doc-
trines weighed and found wanting, but a genuine restate-
ment and reconstruction. But a reconstruction of what?

Clearly, this question cannot be answered, without saying
what, for the purposes of this argument, we are to regard as
essentially "Idealistic" positions, the restating or rearguing
of which may fairly be adduced as evidence of revival.

I shall answer this question by concentrating on one
thinker A. N. Whitehead, and one book his Process and
Reality: An Essay in Cosmology. Here I find the most strik-
ing illustrations of the rethinking of Idealistic positions, all
the more striking for the fact that Whitehead sets about
the business of constructing a cosmology without troubling
to label himself an "Idealist" rather than anything else.

I. I begin with Whitehead's magnificent and courageous
defense of "speculative philosophy" (Ch. i) of the possi-
bility of constructing, and the legitimacy and reasonableness
of the effort to construct, a "complete cosmology" (p. vi);
of the search for that "essence of the universe which forbids
relationships beyond itself, as a violation of its rationality"
(p. 4); or, more modestly, of the search for "metaphysical
categories," in the sense of "tentative formulations of the
ultimate generalities" (p. n).

True, this is, so far, merely a defense of metaphysics in
general, and not yet a defense of Idealistic metaphysics in
particular. And it would certainly be a petitio on my part
if I were, at this stage, to exploit these programmatic state-
ments of Whitehead's as meaning that there can be no meta-
physics except as some form of Idealism. Realists would be
justified in demurring and claiming that they are meta-

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 303

physicians too, and that the very point at issue is whether
the universe is to be construed Idealistically or Realistically.

I have no intention of prejudging this issue here: I shall
return to it below. My purpose is rather to emphasize the
continuity in metaphysical temper between the new Idealism
and the old, the striking similarity in the way in which both
conceive the task and method of metaphysics. Whitehead's
argument is an arresting challenge to two kinds of philoso-
phizing which, by contrast with it, may not unfitly be de-
scribed as half-hearted. There is, first, the philosophizing
which is definitely anti-metaphysical and treats propositions
about ultimate generalities, or the essence of the Universe,
or Reality as a whole, as meaningless, or at least unverifi-
able. And there is, secondly, the philosophizing which, whilst
acknowledging the attraction of the larger task, despairs
of success in it and concentrates on problems of detail which,
it claims, can be isolated and which in this detachment offer
some prospect of being solved exhaustively and finally.
Space forbids illustrations of the diverse nuances of this anti-
metaphysical temper in present-day philosophy, in either of
these two forms the former, negative: rejecting metaphysics
as such; the latter, positive: defining a more limited task.

In reasserting the legitimacy and importance of meta-
physical ventures, Whitehead argues in the very spirit of
the great Idealists. For, Idealists have always been meta-
physicians. From Berkeley, who under the title of Principles
of Human Knowledge offers, first, a theory of "existence"
in the abstract, and then, on the basis of this, a theory of
the existent Universe in the concrete as a society of spirits,
to Hegel, Royce, Bradley, Bosanquet, McTaggart, and
others, Idealists have stood for the faith that it is possible
to think out the general nature and structure of the Uni-
verse. Even Kant's "Critical Idealism" is but an apparent
exception to this rule. For, though Kant affirms that meta-
physics is impossible as "theory," he also defends the ac-
ceptance of metaphysical propositions on grounds of "prac-
tical " reason, to say nothing of the hints which he throws
out in his Critique of Judgment concerning a possible sur-

304 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

mounting of this antithesis of theoretical and practical
reason. If one surveys the history of Idealism as a whole,
from Berkeley and Spinoza to the present day, it is plain
that Kant is an eddy, so to speak, in the stream of meta-
physical speculation a momentary checking of the stream
which is, as it were, made to turn upon itself in the form of
speculation ("critical reflection") on the possibility of specu-
lation about ultimate questions. The result has been both
an enrichment and a diversification of the stream as it leaped
forward with fresh impulsiveness after the critical check
an enrichment in the concentration on the systematic analy-
sis of "categories," a diversification in the fuller emphasis
on non-theoretical (= non-scientific) modes of experience
and thought, with the recognition that will and feeling, too,
have their principles of "reason," or, differently put, that
the Universe as revealing itself in will and feeling has a logi-
cal structure no less than as revealing itself in scientific
thought; that, in short, there is no mode of experience which
the metaphysician dare ignore, if he would use all the avail-
able evidence in his search for the essential nature of the
Universe.

Whitehead, unmistakably, belongs to this tradition. His
use of "speculative philosophy" to describe his aim and
outlook coincides with Bosanquet's use of the same term for
the same purpose in his later years. The fact that Whitehead
characterizes his "philosophy of organism" as a "recur-
rence to pre-Kantian modes of thought" (p. vi), should
not blind us to the essential affiliations of his thinking.
Whitehead's "pre-Kantianism" is, no doubt, justified by
the part which Descartes' cogitationes, Locke's ideas > Spin-
oza's conatus, Leibniz's monads, play in providing starting-
points for his own constructions. Still, it must be taken in
a somewhat Pickwickian sense. For, a pre-Kantianism
which can also acknowledge, and with manifest justice, great
obligations to Bergson, James, Dewey; which in its "final
outcome is after all not so greatly different" from F. H.
Bradley's Absolutism; which, in fact, can also describe itself
as a "transformation of some main doctrines of Absolute

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 305

Idealism on to a realistic basis" (p. vii), is clearly a highly
sophisticated kind of pre-Kantianism. Apart from the posi-
tive stimuli, just mentioned, the reason why Whitehead
calls himself a pre-Kantian is that he rejects "the Kantian
doctrine of the objective world as a theoretical construct
from purely subjective experience" (p. viii). But, in this
rejection, he is, of course, at one with Hegel and with every
post-Kantian Idealist, except those who, vainly, have tried
to reoccupy the "critical" position with its inherently
unstable equilibrium. If the rejection of the above doctrine
makes a thinker pre-Kantian, then all the great post-Kan-
tians are in this sense pre-Kantians which is but a para-
doxical way of saying that they are all alike metaphysicians.
Whitehead is of their company: like them, he embraces the
task of speculative philosophy with a fresh and inspiring
appreciation of the resources at the command of this manner
of philosophizing.

2. Moreover, when we turn from the defense of meta-
physics, or "cosmology," in general terms to the methods
which Whitehead employs in detail, we find that he re-
affirms a number of positions the adoption of which distin-
guishes Idealists characteristically from Realists and other
critics.

This may be abundantly illustrated from the opening
chapters of Process and Reality.

Thus, we find there laid down on the very first page the
doctrine of "coherence" as meaning "that the funda-
mental ideas, in terms of which the scheme is developed,
presuppose each other so that in isolation they are meaning-
less" (p. 3). Again, "it is the ideal of speculative philosophy
that its fundamental notions shall not seem capable of ab-
straction from each other. In other words, it is presupposed
that no entity can be conceived in complete abstraction
from the system of the universe, and that it is the business
of speculative philosophy to exhibit this truth" (ibid.}. A
little later, the impossibility of "tearing a proposition from
its systematic context in the actual world" is vigorously re-
affirmed (p. 15). The contentions that modern philosophy

306 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

has "been misled by the example of mathematics" (p. 10);
that it is one of the aims of philosophy "to challenge the
half-truths constituting the scientific first principles" (p. 13);
that "the logician's rigid alternative, 'true or false,' is
largely irrelevant for the pursuit of knowledge" (p. 15), all
belong to the same characteristic method of philosophizing.

From this doctrine and its corollaries most Realists dis-
sent: they make an idol of mathematical method; they hold
to the principle of external relations and, therefore, believe
it to be possible to abstract entities from their setting in
the context of the Universe and to analyze them adequately,
as so isolated; they want to accept scientific theories as
the solid bases on which to erect their philosophical cos-
mologies.

Many of them, too, if not most, would also dissent from
such a synoptic program for a complete cosmology as White-
head outlines in his Preface, when he demands "a system of
ideas which bring the aesthetic, moral, and religious in-
terests into relation with those concepts of the world which
have their origin in natural science" (p. vi). Or, even if
they are prepared to assent to a synoptic program in prin-
ciple, they would not agree to Whitehead's estimate of the
metaphysical importance of religion which leads him to
demand of philosophy that it should "fuse religion and
science into one rational scheme of thought" (p. 21). It
is not too much to say that, for Whitehead, religion is
not merely one of "the data of experience which philosophy
must weave into its scheme" (ibid.), but that it is the truth
of philosophy translated into a particular way of life in
which it finds appropriate emotional practical expression.
This, at least, I take to be the meaning of the challenging
statements that "religion should connect the rational gen-
erality of philosophy with the emotions and purposes spring-
ing out of existence in a particular society, in a particular
epoch, and conditioned by particular antecedents"; and
that we "require a reconciliation in which emotional ex-
periences illustrate a conceptual justification, and concep-
tual experiences find an emotional illustration" (ibid.).

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 307

Above all, Whitehead is marked as an Idealist by his re-
jection of what he has christened the principle of " vacuous
actuality" (e.g-, pp. viii and 39). The adoption of this
principle is for him the root-error of all Realism. It rests
on a false analysis of presentational immediacy. It is largely
responsible for the misapplication, as a fundamental meta-
physical category, of the concept of quality-inhering-in-
substance. It commits the error of trying to conceive a res
vera as devoid of subjective immediacy. Clearly, the re-
jection of vacuous actuality is Whitehead's equivalent of
Berkeley's esse est percipi principle. I say "equivalent,"
because the rejection of vacuous actuality (or, put positively,
the affirmation that the " actual occasions," or "actual
entities," of which the Universe in last analysis consists,
are "actual experiences" which can never lack the charac-
ter of subjective immediacy, or "feeling," in the sense in
which F. H. Bradley uses this term) plays the same part
in Whitehead's philosophy that is played by the esse est per-
dpi principle in Berkeley's philosophy. I do not say they
are identical, for there is a world of difference between
Berkeley's analysis of an experience into an act of per-
ceiving (implying a "spirit") and an "idea," and White-
head's elaborate apparatus of eight categories of existence,
twenty-seven categories of explanation, and nine categoreal
obligations. It is not for nothing that Whitehead has learned
from Bergson, James, Bradley how complex actual experi-
ence is, to say nothing of the detail of logical structure which
Kant's and Hegel's doctrines of categories have contributed
to modern philosophical heritage. We have long lost the
simple-minded innocence of Berkeley in our dealings with
experience.

3. In the light of all this, what becomes of the "realistic
basis " on to which, as we had seen above, Whitehead claims
to have transformed some of the main doctrines of Absolute
Idealism? I find it, frankly, very difficult to guess in what
sense Whitehead supposes himself to be "realistic" in dis-
tinction from other Idealists. If he is a Realist, then in that
sense every other Idealist is a Realist, too. And this sense

308 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

I can only suppose to be the sense in which all Idealists ac-
knowledge a Reality the nature of which they seek to inter-
pret, using as clues to such interpretation whatever data
their experience offers, and therefore presupposing that every
experience is a part of Reality, determined by the whole of
which it is a part and in its turn contributing its note to the
making the whole just what it is. This general principle ob-
viously covers also those experiences which, as "reflective,"
constitute this very interpretation of the nature of Reality,
this very use of (other) experiences as clues to the nature
of the Real. It is no denial of the freshness and originality
of Whitehead's analysis of the Universe as revealing itself
in any and all experiences to say that it moves within the
general framework of such a statement as this.

But, if this is true, then it follows that Whitehead can-
not call himself a "Realist" in the sense in which that term
has been used by certain contemporary thinkers to charac-
terize the basis of their criticisms of all Idealisms as such,
and as the name for the positive counter-scheme of cos-
mology propounded by them. He is not a Realist, either
"New" or "Critical." He is divided from the former by
his rejection of vacuous actuality. He is separated from
the latter because in his analysis of experience existence is
not divorced from essence. I conclude that, when we give
to the terms "Realist" and "Idealist" the senses which they
bear in the familiar contemporary controversies, White-
head is not a Realist in any of these senses. If he is to be
labeled, he must be treated as what I am treating him in
this paper, viz., a New Idealist, and a very challenging and
stimulating one at that.

Is there, then, no meaning to Whitehead's "realistic
basis"? Very hesitatingly, and fully aware that my
guess may be wrong, I venture to suggest that the phrase
may refer to the comparatively subordinate position
which, in common with many other present-day thinkers,
Whitehead assigns to "consciousness" in his cosmological
scheme.

It is interesting to place Whitehead's view of conscious-

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 309

ness in the context of contemporary thought so as to il-
lustrate at once its distinctive originality and its affiliations
with a certain general type of theory.

Two lines of thought in contemporary philosophy are
relevant here. First, there is the view that mind is a late-
comer in the evolution of the Universe, an "emergent"
in an up-to-then mind-free Universe. Secondly, there is
the view that consciousness is a late development in the
evolution of mind, being preceded by unconscious types and
levels of mind.

These two lines of thought may be added to one another
and treated as cumulative: consciousness belongs to a late
stage in the evolution of mind, and mind belongs to a late
stage in the evolution of living beings which, in turn, are
late-comers in the evolution of the Universe. Or, rejecting
the concept of unconscious minds and unconscious levels of
minds, we may identify mind and consciousness and then
treat conscious mind as the late evolutionary arrival in
a previously mind-free Universe. Or, lastly, we may accept
the distinction between conscious and unconscious minds
or levels of mind as fundamental and, on this basis, con-
strue the evolution of the actual Universe as an evolution
of mind, or minds, in which consciousness belongs to a late
phase.

This latter is clearly the type of theory to which White-
head's belongs. Of this there can be no doubt when we sub-
stitute for "mind" the equivalent terms "experience" or
"feeling" which Whitehead uses by preference. Res verae,
or actual existents, are, for him, without exception experi-
ences or feelings, and we shall, therefore, expect that con-
scious experiences or feelings are but a special group, belong-
ing to a developed phase. Thus, we read: "The organic
philosophy holds that consciousness only arises in a late
derivative phase of complex integrations" (p. 226). "Con-
sciousness is the feeling of negation. . . . Consciousness is
the subjective form involved in feeling the contrast between
the 'theory' which may be erroneous and the fact which is
'given'" (pp. 225, 226). And, finally, summing up, "(i)

310 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

Consciousness is a subjective form arising in the higher phases
of concrescence. (2) Consciousness primarily illuminates the
higher phases in which it arises, and only illuminates earlier
phases derivatively, as they remain components in the higher
phase. (3) It follows that the order of dawning, clearly and
distinctly, in consciousness is not the order of metaphysical
priority" (p. 227).

We must resist the temptation to examine this extraor-
dinarily interesting theory of consciousness on its merits.
Here we are only concerned with its general character as
assigning consciousness to a late, or "high," level of mental
development and making it an attribute of complex mental
processes. The main point is that there are mental activities
so primitive, low, simple, that they are not yet "illuminated"
by consciousness, though they may enter as components
into the complexes which are characterized by conscious-
ness, and, as so entering, may be consciously discerned in a
"derivative" manner. Thus, in this respect, Whitehead's
theory is one of a class of contemporary theories which,
whilst differing enormously among themselves in the way
in which they distinguish the conscious from the non-
conscious levels and acts of mind, yet agree in the general
conclusion that consciousness is not coextensive with mind,
that it is a late development, and that, though it may be
first in the order of reflection, it is not first in the order of
existence. It is obvious, of course, that this limitation of
consciousness to certain late phases of mental development
makes possible a vast generalization of the concept of mind
(or of "experience," "feeling"), by which it can be extended
not only to ranges of the natural world to which we should
deny mind in the sense of conscious mind, e.g., plants and
inorganic objects, but by which it can also be employed
metaphysically as the stuff, so to speak, or essential nature
of all res verae or actual existents.

In this context, too, we can best understand how White-
head reaches his concept of "prehensions" through a gen-
eralization of Descartes' mental "cogitations" or Locke's
"ideas." For, there can be no doubt that, with the excep-

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 311

tion of Leibniz's doctrine of petites perceptions all the pre-
Kantian thinkers analyzed conscious experience, and that,
therefore, their cogitations, ideas, impressions refer to con-
scious thoughts and perceptions. Thus, conscious mental
processes supply the pattern from which Whitehead obtains,
by the omission of consciousness, a generalized concept of
mental process or "experience."

Applying this result to Whitehead's claim to a "realistic
basis," I venture the suggestion that Whitehead calls his
doctrine "realistic" because it recognizes actual entities
devoid of consciousness but not devoid of "subjective im-
mediacy." Of such entities it will be true that consciousness
has nothing to do with their being, or with their being just
what they are. This may be compared with the Realists'
criticism of Berkeley's esse est percipi principle. Taking
Berkeley's percipere, as I think we must, as meaning con-
scious perceiving, the Realists deny that the being or nature
of objects can be identical with, or depend on, their being
consciously perceived. For an object to be "real" means,
for them, precisely to be independent, in existence and na-
ture, of being consciously perceived. Now, Whitehead, too,
recognizes actual entities with the occurrence and nature
of which consciousness has nothing to do, and in this sense,
therefore, he appears to agree with the Realists. But the
agreement is wholly superficial and indeed purely verbal.
For, the Realists' principle of the independence of the ob-
ject implies what for Whitehead is the fallacy of vacuous
actuality, {.<?., it is of the essence of the Realist contention
that a real object is something quite other than a feeling,
experience, or mental process, whereas it is of the essence
of Whitehead's contention that every actual existent is an
experience or feeling, whatever else may also be true about
it. Thus, behind the verbal similarity of the statements
recognizing actual existences in the being and nature of
which consciousness has no share, lies a profound divergence
on fundamentals a divergence so profound that on the es-
sential point it aligns Whitehead with all Idealists and op-
poses him to all Realists.

312 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

II

EXPERIENCE AS THE "ULTIMATE." THE FIRST-AND-LAST,
FOR METAPHYSICS

Whitehead's identification of actual existents with actual
experiences suggests two problems both of which are inti-
mately bound up with Idealism.

The first is the sense in which experience may be taken as
"ultimate," and our whole theory of the Universe erected
on that basis. The other is whether experience implies an
experiencer, i.e., whether experiences occur only as consti-
tuting the life-tissue of self-identical spirits, subjects, or
persons.

First, then, experience as metaphysically ultimate: the
issue here is between two ways of thinking and speaking
about experience, two contexts in which "experience," and
its allied term "mind," may be employed.

The one way may be defined by the task which Profes-
sor Samuel Alexander assigns to Realism, viz., "to order mind
to its place in Nature." It treats experience as a natural
phenomenon in the context of other natural phenomena,
and as conditioned in its occurrence and character by its
relations to these other phenomena. The ultimate for this
view is Nature, and within this context it distinguishes ex-
periences from what are not experiences, minds from bodies,
subjects from objects, etc. More precisely, it treats experi-
ences or mental processes sensings, feelings, perceivings,
thinkings, desirings, etc. as adjectives (predicates) of cer-
tain subjects, or, in non-logical language, as what certain
bodies have or do, and other bodies lack. Thus, in this con-
text, "experience" or "mind" are names for a natural func-
tion, or for a class of natural functions, empirically found
associated with organisms of a certain structure, and quali-
fying certain responses of these organisms to their environ-
ment. The theory of the dependence of mental processes on
physiological and neural processes fits into this scheme; and,
by bringing in the evolutionary point of view, mental phe-
nomena may be further treated as "emergents" at a late

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 313

period on the basis of prior complex structures in themselves
non-mental.

This treatment of experience as a natural phenomenon
we may call equally well the "Realistic" or the "Natural-
istic" way, for at this point Realism and Naturalism coin-
cide. The essence of this way is to distinguish experience (or
mind) from what is not experience (or mind), and to assign
to the factors so distinguished their respective places within
the context, or whole, within which they have been dis-
criminated and which, in this very act of distinguishing
parts within it, is taken as ultimate relatively to these parts.

The other_way is to take experience as "ultimate," i.e.,
as itself the context or whole within which all differences are
found. This is the way of Idealism, as it is also the way of
Phaenomenology in HusserPs sense. Thus, instead of ex-
perience being a factor within Nature, Nature will be a factor
within experience.

I hope I shall not be considered to be taking a mean verbal
advantage, if I quote certain passages from Professor Dew-
ey's Experience and Nature to illustrate this standpoint.
My excuse must be that I know in recent philosophical liter-
ature no clearer expression of the point of view which takes
experience as ultimate than his. And this is not, after all,
to be wondered at when we remember that Professor Dewey,
though no doubt he would not call himself an Idealist, was
once steeped in Idealism; and that his study of the great
Idealists has left indelible marks upon his thinking, even in
the very originality of his revolt against some of their prin-
ciples. The passages * to which I refer are these: " 'Experi-
ence' denotes the planted field, the sowed seeds, the reaped
harvests, the changes of night and day, spring and autum n
wet and dry, heat and cold, that are observed, feared, longed
for; it also denotes the one who plans and reaps, who works
and rejoices, hopes, fears, plans, invokes magic or chemistry
to aid him, who is downcast or triumphant. It is * double-
barrelled' in that it recognizes in its primary integrity no
division, between act and material, subject and object, but

1 Quoted by permission of The Open Court Pub. Co.

314 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

contains them both in unanalyzed totality. . . . Now em-
pirical method is the only method which can do justice to
this inclusive integrity of experience. ' It alone takes this in-
tegrated unity as the starting-point for philosophic thought.
Other methods begin with results of a reflection which has
already torn in two the subject-matter experienced and the
operations and states of experiencing. The problem then is
to get together again what has been sundered. . . . For
empirical methods the problem ... is to note how and
why the whole is distinguished into subject and object, na-
ture and mental operations (op. cit., pp. 8, 9)."

What Dewey here calls his own empirical method is, in
spirit and principle, if not in the actual details of its execu-
tion, identical with the idealistic method, especially when
one adds, from Dewey's Preface the references to "faith in
experience when intelligently used as a means of disclosing
the realities of nature," and to the character of human ex-
perience as "a growing progressive self-disclosure of nature
itself" (op. cit.j p. iii). If in these utterances we substitute for
"nature" simply "Reality," or even the "Absolute," they
might have been written by any true-blue Idealist. Or, again,
Dewey's suggestion that the distinction within experience
between subject and object, nature and mental operations,
must be understood and evaluated in the light of its practical
effects, cannot but evoke recollections of F. H. Bradley's
treatment of all distinctions within experience as "ideal
constructions" which are "practical makeshifts." In other
words, on the practical usefulness of these distinctions (con-
structions, abstractions) Dewey and Bradley are agreed,
but in their evaluations of them they differ. Bradley treats
them dialectically and condemns them by the standard of in-
tellectual consistency, whereas Dewey accepts them in order
to emphasize their function in enriching and improving ex-
perience itself. "To distinguish in reflection the physical
and to hold it in temporary detachment is to be set upon the
road that conducts to tools and technologies, to construction
of mechanisms, to the arts that ensue in the wake of the
sciences. That these constructions make possible a better

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 315

regulation of the affairs of primary experience is evident "
(op. a*., p. 10). The difference between Bradley and Dewey
is the difference between the detached don who, like the god
of Aristotle, is engaged in "thought thinking itself" and,
incidentally, finding itself wanting by the standard of its
own inherent ideal, and the reformer who, demanding from
thought that it make action foreseeing and intelligent, iden-
tifies himself with the dominant tendencies of contemporary
civilization, and seeks through reflection at once to under-
stand the methods and ideals of this civilization and also
to raise it to new heights of achievement.

Indeed, one of the main interests of contemporary philos-
ophy is just the way in which, from a common basis in ex-
perience as ultimate, a variety of theoretical paths can be
pursued to the common aim of a deeper understanding of
the Universe and of man's place in it. In principle, all these
ways are metaphysical, but some are thinly dialectical
(though not for that reason wholly without value), whilst
others are charged with a vivid sense of the concrete mean-
ings and values, and the conflicts of these meanings and
values, in experience. "It takes," as Bosanquet used to say,
"all sorts to make a world." It takes certainly all sorts of
philosophizings to exhaust the self-disclosure of the world
in experience.

Thus, e.g., we may, Kant-wise, analyze experience into
"matter" of sensations and "forms" of pure thought, with
the individual percipient or thinker generalized into a "syn-
thetic unity of apperception." Or, we may, with James and
others, distinguish data, here and now apprehended, from
their meanings in terms of other possible experiences to be
had by appropriate action, so that the present datum, inter-
preted with the help of memory of past experiences, becomes
a clue to future experiences and a basis for a plan of future
action. Or, yet again, we may, with Bergson, contrast the
Universe as conceived by the intellect with the Universe as
grasped by intuition; or, with James Ward, distinguish
in every experience an object and a subject and then, via
interpreting the object as another subject, reach a spiritual

316 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

pluralism as our theory of the Universe. Or, finally, we may
take experience more concretely as science, art, morality,
religion each of these terms understood to be an abbrevia-
tion for the Universe as disclosed to scientific thought, as
conceived from the aesthetic, moral, religious point of view.
In all these, and many other, forms of philosophizing, ex-
perience is the ultimate: the total context which is taken
for granted and within which all distinctions fall. And ex-
perience, thus taken as ultimate, is identical with the Uni-
verse because this term is meaningless apart from experience,
or with experience delimited within it as a specialized item,
a particular phenomenon among other phenomena.

This assertion will be challenged by Realists and Natural-
ists. Like all fundamental positions, it cannot be proved:
it can only be exhibited as self-evident. Argument cannot
demonstrate it, but only lead the mind to the point where
the principle is intuited or seen to be obvious. As between
thinkers of different schools, the difficulty of such arguments
is to secure the required identity of meanings with which
what is essentially an experiment in thinking has to be con-
ducted. All that we can actually make sure of is merely the
identity of the words employed as vehicles of meaning.
Speech-habits and, with them, the underlying thought-
habits or meaning-habits differ, and in the end the only safe-
guard against otherwise inevitable misunderstanding is to
familiarize oneself with the diverse contexts in which the
words and meanings of philosophers function. This is
only the first step, avoiding actual misunderstanding. The
real argument, which is a dialectical comparison of systems
of meanings from the point of view of their internal con-
sistency is still to follow. Moreover, the argument is not
about the consistency of meanings in the abstract. On the
contrary, seeing that the subject of the whole experiment
is experience in the concrete, the meanings which are be-
ing experimented with are taken to be meanings which are
realized or fulfilled in experience, meanings which apply.

To illustrate: it may be said, "Granted that all distinc-
tions are made within a context or whole which, relatively

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 317

to the details discriminated within it, is ultimate, why quar-
rel whether this whole is more appropriately named "Na-
ture" or "Experience"? A rose by any other name smells
just as sweet: the whole is what it is and what we find it to
be, whatever name we may give it." The objection has
point so long as the terms are taken in denotation. As meta-
physicians, we are all discussing the same thing denotatively
the All let us say, to use the least committal term we can
find. But our real differences are over the connotation
the "what," or nature, or character, of the All. And so
taken, the point of the dispute is not merely verbal. Be-
tween saying that Experience is a factor within Nature, and
saying that Nature is a factor within Experience, there is a
significant difference in the meanings which we assert as
qualifying, or claim to find fulfilled or realized in, the com-
mon subject of discussion.

Our choice between such systems of meanings must be
determined by experiments in thinking which exhibit the
consistency of details within the system whilst at the same
time exhibiting its self-evidence as realized in experience.
It is only for convenience in dialectical treatment that the
system as a whole is concentrated into some one general
proposition, such as that Experience is ultimate and Nature
a factor within it, or that Nature is ultimate and Experience
a factor within it. These statements do not carry their whole
meaning within the four corners, so to speak of these words,
but are abbreviations, or, better, concretions, of whole mean-
ing-systems. The situation may be exemplified by Schopen-
hauer's famous statement that the whole argument of the
two volumes of The World as Will and as Idea is the exhibi-
tion in detail of the single principle that the World is Will.
Into this proposition the whole system can be concentrated,
viz., for those for whom the meaning of the words in which
this proposition is expressed is determined by their acquaint-
ance with the details of the whole system. Taken apart
from this context, e.g., in their ordinary everyday meaning,
the words of the proposition are barely intelligible and their
truth anything but self-evident.

318 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

The point is sufficiently important to bear repetition:
Fundamental issues can be decided (and the decision will
always be an individual one for the thinker making the ex-
periment for himself) only by dialectical experiments, i.e.,
by experiments with meanings which are tested at once in
respect of their internal coherence and their realization in
the subject with which thought is denotatively concerned.
And the result, if the experiment is ideally successful, will
be that the whole system will be seen to be self-evident in
the double sense of being coherent within itself and obviously
realized in ("true of") the subject of which it is the nature or
"what."

Thus, Berkeley was right in method when he challenges
his readers, in order to convince themselves of the self-
evidence of his esse est percipi principle, to make some "easy
trials," i.e., some experiments in reflection on the meanings
of the terms "to be" and "to be experienced," as applied
to actual acts of perceiving objects. He is at fault, not in
his method, but in the meanings with which he experiments,
in that he reads into the act of perceiving at once a perceiv-
ing substance, or "spirit," and in that he treats objects
as clusters of atomic sense-data ("ideas"). Similarly, most
arguments between Realists and Idealists consist of dialec-
tical experiments, whether the point at issue be Perry's
ego-centric predicament, or the internality-externality of
relations, or the logical independence of the meanings of
"to be" and "to be perceived by a mind."

I will briefly sketch an experiment which I have found
illuminating whenever I have tried it. Take any experience
at random, the simpler, the better this noise, for example.
Compare the series : this noise hearing-this-noise my-
hearing-this-noise. Denotatively, the same experience is
referred to throughout; connotatively, the more complex
phrase expresses a more complex meaning, corresponding
to a more complete analysis of the nature of that experience.
Nothing, so far, has been said, or thought, concerning what
the noise is of, what it indicates, what inferences it permits
(e.g., the noise of a bursting high-explosive shell, presaging

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 319

an attack by the enemy); nor of what "I" am and what
feelings, thoughts, actions the hearing of this noise arouses
in me, interrupting other feelings, thoughts, acts. Yet all
this and much more might be taken as constituting the self-
same experience with which we began the experiment.
Anyhow, whether taken widely or narrowly, the experience,
even as expressed in the ordinary language of unreflective in-
tercourse, is clearly a complex event containing distinguish-
able features. Let now reflection supervene, not only making
explicit the details which it distinguishes, but generalizing
them at the same time. This noise becomes to be con-
trasted with the hearing of it; it is classed with other noises as
against other acts of hearing; noises are grouped with sights
and other objects; hearings with seeings and other sorts
of perceivings; and, presently, it all sums up into the grand
pattern of Object versus Subject, or Object versus Act.

This is stage one. Stage two is reached with a further
turn of reflection: All this elaborate development, this
very pattern of Object versus Subject, is, in its turn, the
object of reflection at a higher level, so to speak. And that
this is so, is yet once again an object apprehended by a yet
further act of reflection. Clearly, there is no end to this
process: experience proliferates the pattern of its struc-
ture repeating itself at each new turn or level of reflection.

The lesson which I derive from this experiment in reflec-
tion is that the standpoint from which it is made is not the
Naturalistic one. For, the paradigm of Naturalistic analy-
sis is the animal (or human) body whose acts or perceiving
lie for me, as spectator, equally with their objects in the
same plane of observation. I see the thing at which the
animal is looking, sniffing, etc., and I see the animal's
looking and sniffing as a behavior of its body exactly as I
see the object to which these acts are directed. I can gen-
eralize this finding to include myself by saying that what
is true of the behavior observed by me is true of my own
behavior in observing, and would be so verified by another
observer in whose object-field I (my body) am an object
reacting to other objects, in the same way as the percipients

320 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

observed by me are objects reacting to other objects in
my object-field. Thus, the Naturalistic analysis can be
completed on this single plane of stimulus and response,
in abstraction from, i.e., with systematic avoidance of,
reflection on my own spectatorship.

So soon as I reflect on my spectator point of view and,
further, reflect on this reflection, I switch on to a different
plane, or to a different point of view, where reflection pro-
liferates from plane to plane, yielding as it does so, not an
ego-centric predicament, but the recognition of the syste-
matic abstraction practiced in maintaining the Naturalis-
tic point of view. It brings to attention a factor omitted from
view on the Naturalistic plane, but now seen to be inelimin-
able from the total fact called an "experience." Thus it
leads to the recovery of that "inclusive integrity of experi-
ence," as Dewey calls it, which compels us to take experi-
ence as ultimate and forbids our inserting it as a factor in
any context wider than itself.

It would take me too far to show here how the dialectic
of "self-consciousness" in the writings of the Hegelians
has grown out of this sort of experiment. But it is relevant
to add an argument leading to the same conclusion by a
different route. If we are in earnest about experience be-
ing, in Dewey's words quoted above, "the progressive self-
disclosure of nature itself," we are committed to taking
experience as ultimate because self-disclosure is, on this
view, essential to Nature. We shall misconceive the nature
of Nature (if I may use this phrase), if we think of it as
complete in itself without self-disclosure, and regard the
latter only as an occasional luxury in which Nature indulges
through human minds, but which it can very well do with-
out. Nature without self-disclosure, i.e.. Nature conceived
in abstraction from experience, is simply not Nature com-
plete.

I will conclude this section by returning to Whitehead's
Process and Reality.

Into the details of his account of experience in terms of
"prehensions" it is not necessary to enter for the purpose

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 321

of this argument. Indeed, some of the details of his position
I do not yet understand sufficiently to be able to discuss
them profitably. But the principle of his position in rejecting
the doctrine of "vacuous actuality," and in identifying
every actual occasion or entity with an actual experience,
is unmistakably identical with the position taken up in
this section. It is enough, in support of this contention,
to quote Whitehead's own statement of his " reformed sub-
jectivist principle," viz., "subjective experiencing is the
primary metaphysical situation which is presented to meta-
physics for analysis. . . . Accordingly, the notion 'this
stone is grey' is a derivative abstraction, necessary indeed
as an element in the description of the fundamental experi-
ential feeling, but delusive as a metaphysical starting-point "
(p. 224). This acceptance by Whitehead of experience as
the metaphysical ultimate, combined with his fresh analysis
of experience in which he replaces the substance-quality
concept by the distinction between actual entities and
eternal objects, is the best evidence for the contention that
in Process and Reality we have a highly original working
out of a position fundamentally Idealist. It may well be
that Whitehead's book will do for twentieth-century philos-
ophy what Kant's Critique of Pure Reason did for nine-
teeth-century philosophy.

Ill
EXPERIENCE AND A PERSONAL SUBJECT

I turn to the concluding topic, viz., the problem of whether
experience essentially involves a personal subject of which
it is the activity.

It is a commonplace that the Idealistic systems of the
past have differed, one from the other, in the metaphysical
status assigned to the category of personality. Some have
treated personality as the highest category, i.e., as the most
adequate characterization of the Universe in the light of
systematic reflection on its nature as revealed in experience.
Others have treated it as inadequate for this purpose and
rather thought of the Universe as non-personal or supra-

322 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

personal it comes to the same in this context. The former
thinkers have further differed among themselves in being
either Pluralists or Monists, the Pluralists seeing in the
Universe a Society of Selves of different degrees and rank,
with God as the highest and, in a sense, the all-sustaining
spirit; the Monists emphasizing, in their identification of
the Absolute with a personal God, the singleness of the
ultimate spirit in whom all lesser spirits, like human minds,
are somehow included in a dependence which, in technical
language, makes them "adjectival" to the "substantiality"
of the all-inclusive One.

The difference between Personalists and Impersonalists
among Idealists may also be described in another, and
perhaps more illuminating, way by saying that to the de-
fenders of personality, whether Pluralists or Monists, the
focusing of experience in one or more individual centers,
or subjects, is the highest metaphysical value, in the sense
that an individual spirit, or person, is to them an "end in
itself," as Kant would have said. It is through this focusing
or concretion of itself in individual spirits that the Universe
approves itself to these thinkers. For them, all other values,
Truth, Beauty, Goodness, Love, Creativity, achieve their
fullest consummation only through the part they play in
the lives, i.e., the experience-contexts, of individual spirits.
The other school of Idealists reverses this emphasis: in-
dividual spirits or persons, for it, rank in value according
as they are the temporary vehicles of these supra-individual
and supra-personal values. What matters from this point
of view is not the abstract form of personality, the individ-
uality of each focus as distinct from all other foci, but the
degree in which a given individual during its existence
realizes these supra-individual values in his life.

Again, it is a commonplace that these rival evaluations
of personality by different Idealists rest on a basis of agree-
ment, viz., the agreement that of all modes of experience
religious experience is the most relevant to this issue. In-
deed, it is, in the main, as alternative ways of using the
evidence of religious experience in metaphysics that these

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 323

conflicting views have been formulated. If Pluralistic Spirit-
ualism stands nearest to theological orthodoxy and reflects
the social organization of religion in churches, Monistic
Spiritualism and the Impersonal Absolute (which regards
the Universe as the realization of supra-personal values)
stand nearest to the mystic temper without a strain of which
religion is, admittedly, impoverished.

Now, it is when one tries to determine Whitehead's position
relatively to these issues that the originality of his thinking
becomes conspicuous in the way in which he transforms these
time-honored problems, and effects a fresh synthesis of
these familiar lines of thought.

That Whitehead accepts religion as one of the most im-
portant data for metaphysics, we have seen already; and
that his Process and Reality should culminate, in the con-
cluding chapter on "God and the World," in an effort to
interpret religion in the light of his metaphysical principles,
and thereby, conversely, to bring religion to the support
of these principles, was only to be expected. But when we
come to. details, it appears that the concept of individual
subject, or person, plays a very minor part in Whitehead's
theory. To the question, "Does Whitehead conceive God
as a person?" I do not know what answer to give, and I
strongly suspect that Whitehead himself would answer
that the question implies assumptions utterly irrelevant
to his conception of God. At any rate, according to the
index, which lists "personal order," but not "person,"
the term does not occur after p. 225 (the whole book has
close on 500 pages) and, therefore, not in the chapter on God.
In this, the index is at fault. For, at the very end of the
chapter, on p. 496, there occurs this passage: "Each actuality
in the temporal world has its reception into God's nature.
The corresponding element in God's nature is not temporal
actuality, but is the transmutation of that temporal actual-
ity into a living, ever-present fact. An enduring person-
ality in the temporal world is a route of occasions in which
the successors with some peculiar completeness sum up
their predecessors. The correlate fact in God's nature is

324 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

an even more complete unity of life in a chain^of elements
for which succession does not mean the loss of immediate
unison. This element in God's nature inherits from the
temporal counterpart according to the same principle as
in the temporal world the future inherits from the past.
Thus in the sense in which the present occasion is the per-
son now, and yet with his own past, so the counterpart in
God is that person in God."

The language of this passage, with its obvious echoes of
Bradley's terms, does not suggest either a society of spirits
or a personal God. It conveys rather an impersonal Ab-
solute in which persons are "completed" and "perfected"
by "transmutation." It does not seem to me that we can
find here any use of personality as the highest category:
we find only an illustration of Whitehead's metaphysical
principles by application to human persons. Whitehead
does not say that the Universe is an all-inclusive person or a
society of persons: he merely says that human persons and
God exhibit the same metaphysical principles. Personality
is not one of his fundamental categories.

None the less, all that Whitehead says about God is in-
stinct with deep and genuine religious feeling: no attentive
reader can mistake this. At the same time, it is feeling which,
thanks to philosophy, has emancipated itself from traditional
theology, whilst remaining colored by traditional termi-
nology. God remains God denotatively: connotatively,
however, Whitehead's God is conceived very differently from
the traditional way. No summary can do justice to the
freshness or the sincerity of what Whitehead has to say,
and I shall therefore confine myself to a bare discussion of
a few points which will support my contention, above,
that Whitehead shows the originality of his thought in this
field by the way in which he makes the old difficulties drop
out of sight by the new pattern in which he arranges familiar
elements.

Fundamental, as I see it, is the position taken up in the
following passage: "God and the World stand over against
each other, expressing the final metaphysical truth that

THE REVIVAL OF IDEALISM 325

appetitive,, vision and physical enjoyment have equal claim
to priority in creation. But no two actualities can be torn
apart: each is all in all. . . . God is the infinite ground of
all mentality, the unity of vision seeking physical multi-
plicity. The World is the multiplicity of the finities, actuali-
ties seeking a perfected unity. Neither God, nor the World,
reaches static completion" (p. 493).

So far the qualification is important, for there is &
further step to come Whitehead's position is clearly
Spinozistic. If God and the World are each all in all, then
we can say with Spinoza, Deus sive Natura. And if, within
this fundamental identity, we still wish to maintain some
connotative difference between the terms, we can only do
so by taking each as characterizing the All but with a dif-
ference of complementary emphasis like Spinoza's Natura
nalurans and Natura naturata according as we throw the
weight for the moment on unity or on multiplicity, on per-
manence or on flux, on harmony or on discord. This shift of
attention from one aspect to its complementary, especially
when intensified by the impossibility of saying all things
at once, may give rise to the illusory appearance of an ab-
stract sundering of what is meant to be merely discriminated
within a concrete unity. This remark applies more particu-
larly to the distinction between the "primordial" and the
"consequent" nature of God, these terms understood not in
a temporal, but, again Spinoza-wise, in a logical sense.
God's primordial nature, as "the unconditioned actuality
of conceptual feeling at the base of things" (p. 486), is the
ground of God's consequent nature, as the concrete realiza-
tion, or embodiment, of conceived possibilities in "physical
feelings." Either side, taken in abstraction from the other,
is less than the whole fact to be understood.

What is non-Spinozistic in Whitehead's position is the
further and, for him, most fundamental contention that
"creative advance into novelty" is the ultimate metaphysi-
cal ground (p. 494). Thus Whitehead's God is no static
Absolute, eternally self-complete and enjoying everlastingly
the contemplation of its own perfection; his experience is

326 CONTEMPORARY IDEALISM IN AMERICA

not Roycean totum simul in which past and future are but
enrichments of an infinitely extended specious present. At
this point Whitehead is a modern of moderns, incorporating
in his metaphysical vision the lessons which he has learned
from James, from Bergson, from Samuel Alexander from
all, in short, who have felt that the Absolutes of the older
Idealists did less than justice to the character of inexhaust-
ible novelty and creative fecundity in the Universe. A sum-
marizing phrase must be generously understood if it is not
to be misleading, but, subject to this caution, one may not
unfairly say that Whitehead substitutes a creative Absolute
for the static Absolute of his Idealist predecessors.

"There is nothing here in the nature of proof," confesses
Whitehead himself (p. 486). And, earlier, he warns us that,
in reflection on the plane, "however far our gaze penetrates,
there are always heights beyond which block our vision"
(p. 484). Still, if in trying to render in rational reflection the
lessons of religious experience concerning the nature of
the universe, Whitehead has to push thought to the limits
of the thinkable, he once more but illustrates his kinship
with the efforts of the great Idealists and indorses their
final findings. In his theory, the theories of his Idealist
predecessors achieve what he himself would call their "ob-
jective Immortality," and thereby a new and vigorous re-
incarnation.