LIBRARY
-r
LOTZE'S SYSTEM OF PHILOSOPHY
PART II
METAPHYSIC
VOL. rt
Honfcon
HENKY FKOWDE
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS WAREHOUSE
AMEN CORNER
press
METAPHYSIC
IN THREE BOOKS
ONTOLOGY, COSMOLOGY, AND PSYCHOLOGY
BY
HERMANN LOTZE
ENGLISH TRANSLATION
EDITED BY
BERNARD BOSANQUET, M.A,
FELLOW OF UNIVERSITY COLLEGE, OXFORD
©xfotlr
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1884
[ All rights reserved ']
17
^-* -
•2%lJffsqt
AUTHOR'S PREFACE.
THE publication of this second volume has been delayed
by a variety of hindrances, which caused a lengthened inter
ruption of its passage through the press. In the meantime
several works have appeared which I should have been glad
to notice ; but it was impossible, for the above reason, to
comment upon them in the appropriate parts of my book ;
and I therefore reserve what I have to say about them.
I can promise nothing in respect of the third volume but
that, should I have strength to finish it, it will be confined
to a discussion of the main problems of Practical Philosophy,
Aesthetic, and the Philosophy of Religion. I shall treat
each of these separately, and without the lengthiness which
was unavoidable in the present volume owing to a diver
gence from prevalent views.
THE AUTHOR.
GOTTINGEN: December 23, 1878.
EDITOR'S PREFACE.
THE Translation of the Metaphysic has been executed, like
that of the Logic, by several hands. The whole of Book I
(Ontology) and the chapter * Of Time ' (Book II, ch. iii) were
translated by the late Mr. T. H. Green, Whyte's Professor
of Moral Philosophy at Oxford ; chapters i, ii, and iv, of
Book II by Mr. B. Bosanquet, Fellow of University College,
Oxford ; chapters v-viii (inclusive) of Book II by the Rev.
C. A. Whittuck, Fellow of Brasenose College, Oxford ; and
the whole of Book III by Mr. A. C. Bradley, Fellow of Balliol
College, Oxford. The Index and Table of Contents were
added by the Editor.
The entire translation has been revised by the Editor, who
is responsible in every case for the rendering finally adopted.
The Editor has to thank Mr. J. C. Wilson, of Oriel College,
Oxford, for ample and ready assistance when consulted on
passages involving the technical language of Mathematics
or Physics ; if the Author's meaning in such places has been
intelligibly conveyed, this result is wholly due to Mr. Wilson's
help.
In conveying his assent to the proposal of an English
translation, the Author expressed a wish to work out Book III
of the Metaphysic (the Psychology) more fully, but had not
time to carry out his intention. For the third volume
of the Author's ' System of Philosophy,' alluded to in the
Preface, no materials were found after his death sufficiently
advanced for publication, excepting a paper subsequently
published in ' Nord und Slid ' (June 1882), under the title
| Die Principien der Ethik.' The Author's views on the sub
jects reserved for the volume in question may be gathered in
part from his earlier work ' Mikrokosmus,' which will soon,
it may be hoped, be made accessible to English readers, and
more fully from his lectures recently published under the
titles 'Grundfiige der Aesthetik,' 'der Praktischen Philosophic,'
and ' der Religionsphilosophie.'
TABLE OF CONTENTS.
BOOK I.
On the Connexion of Things.
INTRODUCTION.
PAGE
Section I. Reality, including Change, the subject of Metaphysic . . . i
„ II. Origin of expectations which conflict with experience ... 2
„ III. The foundation of experience . . ....--. . .2
„ IV. Consistent and inconsistent scepticism . " 3
„ V. Probability depends on the assumption of connexion according to
Law 4
* „ VI. Relation of Metaphysic to experience 6
„ VII. The method of Metaphysic not that of Natural Science ... 7
„ VIII. In what sense the Essence of Things is unknowable ... 9
„ IX. Metaphysic the foundation of Psychology, not vice versa . .11
„ X. Idea of Law and of Plan. Metaphysic must start from the former 14
„ XI. No clue to be found in the Dialectic Method . . . . 16
„ XII. No clue to be found in the forms of Judgment . , . .17
„ XIII. Divisions of the subject .20
„ XIV. The natural conception of the universe . . . . . .21
CHAPTER I.
ON THE BEING OF THINGS.
1. Real and unreal 23
2. Sensation the only evidence of Reality? . 24
3. Sensation gives assurance of nothing beyond itself . . . . -24
4. Being of Things apart from Consciousness. Their action on each other . 25
5. Questions of the origin and the natiire of reality distinguished . 27
6. Objective relations presuppose the Being of Things 28
7. Being apart from relations meaningless 29
8-9. Pure Being a legitimate abstraction, but not applicable to Reality . . 30
10. 'Position' and 'Affirmation' meaningless apart from relations . . 31
11. ' Position ' appears to involve the difficulties attaching to creative action . 33
12. Herbart's ' irrevocable Position ' 35
13. Herbart's indifference of Things to relations, inconsistent with their en
tering into relations 36
14. The isolation of Things a mere abstraction 38
viii Table of Contents.
CHAPTER II.
OF THE QUALITY OF THINGS.
PAGE
15. The essence of Things 4°
16. A Thing is taken to be more than its qualities 41
17. Herbart's conception of the essence of a Thing as a 'simple Quality' . 42
18. A Quality need not be abstract nor dependent on a subject . . -44
19. How can what is simple have varying ' states ' ? 46
20. The common element in sensations of colour 48
21. Things only vary within certain limits 50
22. The movement of consciousness not analogous to the variations of a
'simple Quality1 51
23. 'Simple Qualities' represented by compound expressions (Herbart) . 52
24. If there are Things, they must be capable of change, as the soul is . . 53
CHAPTER III.
OF THE REAL AND REALITY.
25. Things not of the nature of 'simple Qualities' ..... 57
26. Things commonly described by their states . . . . . -57
27. A complete conception would include past and future history of Thing . 59
28. Matter as imparting reality to Qualities 60
29. Matter which has no Qualities can receive none 61
30. Matter explains nothing if it is mere ' Position ' 62
31. 'Real' is a predicative conception, not a subject 64
32. A Thing as a Law 67
33. A Law need not be General ? 68
34. What is that which conforms to the Law? 70
36. Danger of the antithesis between the world of Ideas and Reality . . 72
36. Difficulty of expressing the notion of a Law or Idea which is naturally
real 74
CHAPTER IV.
OF BECOMING AND CHANGE.
37. Substance a mode of behaviour of Things, not a mysterious nucleus . 76
38. How is change subject to certain limits, to be conceived? . . 77
39. Law of Identity does not even prove the continuous existence of Things . 7$
40. Resolution of all permanence into Becoming 80
41. Svvapis and tvepyfia in two senses .... , 81
42. Why are consequences realised ? ... ,82
43. The Things must be such realisations ........ 84
44. This would only explain development, not causation . . . .86
). In 'transeunt' action changes in the agent must be 'noticed' by the patient 87
46. 'Immanent' action usually assumed as obvious 87
47. Notion of Becoming compared with notion of '-tfates of a persistent Thing 88
48. Quantitative comparability of factors in every effect . . . .90
49. Degrees of Intensity of Being 9I
Table of Contents. ix
CHAPTER V.
OF THE NATURE OF PHYSICAL ACTION*
PAGE
50. No effect due to a single active cause 93
51. -Cause, Reason, and the Relation which initiates action .... 95
52. Modification of Causes and Relation by effect . . • • .96
53. ' Occasional Causes ' and ' Stimuli ' . . . ...» -97
54. Must the relation which initiates action be contact? . « . • 99
55. A ' causa transiens ' is only preliminary to action toi
56. Difficulty of conceiving the passage of a force or state from A to B . 103
57. Origin of erroneous idea that cause and effect must be equal and like . 104
58. Relation of consequence to ground may be synthetic as well as analytic . 106
59. How far must Things be homogeneous in order to react upon each other? 107
60. Desire to explain all processes as of one kind. 'Like known only by like ' 109
61. Attempt to dispense with ' transeunt ' action. Occasionalism . . no
62. Neither mere ' Law ' nor mere • relation ' can explain interaction of two
Things . .in
63. Leibnitz's ' Pre-established Harmony ' . .. .. .. . . . 113
64. What his completely determined world gains by realisation . . .115
65. Complete determinism incredible n6
66. Corresponding states of different Monads. Illustration of the two clocks 118
67. Operation according to general laws necessary for active causation . I 20
CHAPTER VI.
THE UNITY OF THINGS.
68. What is involved in the idea of ' transeunt ' operation . . . .123
69. Pluralism and Monism , . . . . * . . . .124
70. Separate Things not really independent of each other . . \. .126
71. Unity of Things analytically involved in reciprocal action . . .127
72. How their unity is consistent with apparent degrees of independence . 128
73. The relation of the One to the Many cannot be exhibited to Perception . 129
74. Alleged contradiction of regarding the One as the Many . . .130
75. The Logical copula inadequate to the relation between the One and the
Many 131
76. Reality subject to Law of Identity in form but not in fact . . . 134
77. The One and the Many illustrated by Herbart's ' accidental views' . 135
78. Herbart admits multiplicity in the nature of individual Things . . 137
79. Leibnitz' world, when ceasing to be immanent in God, has no unity . 138
80. Relations between the contents of ideas can only exist for Thought . 140
81. Variable Relations between Things must be modifications in the things . 142
CHAPTER VII.
CONCLUSION.
82. Real Relations are the reciprocal actions of Things conditioned by the
unity which includes them 145
83. We have not to account for the origin of Motion 146
x Table of Contents.
PAGE
84. The assumption of Motion is not the same thing as the assumption of
Life (as spiritual existence) . . . . . . . .149
85. The dominant principles of any real world are prescribed by its nature
and are not prior to it 149
86. The reference to 'any' real world, other than that which exists, is
imaginary and illustrative . -151
87. Consistency of causation has no meaning apart from the comparison of
cases within the actual world 152
88. Hegel, Schelling, Weisse, — Necessity and Freedom . . . .154
89. Necessity as an appearance produced within reality. Idealism and
Realism 157
90. The Idea must have a concrete content . . . . . .157
91. The Phases of the Idea must be causally connected . . . .158
92. The Idea generates a mechanical system by which it is realised . . 161
93. Realism recognises the necessity of regressive interpretation . .163
94. Subjectivity in relation to the possibility of Knowledge . . .165
95. Fichte on the world of Spirits and the world of Things . . .166
96. A spiritual nature seems necessary for Things //"they are to be subjects
of states 167
97. Need Things exist at all ? 169
98. As mere media of effects, they can hardly be said to exist . . .171
BOOK II.
Cosmology.
CHAPTER I.
OF THE SUBJECTIVITY OF OUR PERCEPTION OF SPACE.
99. The genesis of our idea of Space no test of its validity . . . 1 74
100. Euclidean Space is what we have to discuss 175
101. Space is not a Thing, Property, or Relation . . . . . 176
102. Space not merely a Genus-concept 177
103. Kant on empty Space 170
104. Kant on Space as given 180
105. Why Kant denied the reality of Space 181
106. Finiteness or Infinity of World do not decide the question . . .182
107. Nor does Infinite divisibility of real elements, or the reverse . . 184
108. Real difficulties. What is Space, and how are things in it ? . . 186
109. Reality of Space does not explain its properties 186
110. Do the points of real Space act upon each other? . . . .187
11. Constructions of Space out of active points 190
12. Constructions of real Space and hypothesis of subjective Space . . 191
113. Nothing gained by the independent reality of Space .... 194
14. Things in Space ; on hypothesis of its being subjective . . .195
15. Things in an independently existing Space 197
16. Relations between things and reactions 0/ things 198
117. The movability of things 200
Table of Contents. xi
CHAPTER II.
DEDUCTIONS OF SPACE.
PAGE
118. Spinoza on Consciousness and Extension . . . . , , 202
119. Schelling on the two factors in Nature and Mind . . . . 203
120. Limit of what can be done by speculative construction. Hegel and
Weisse . 204
121. Deductions of the three dimensions . . . . '." . . 205
122. Three questions involved in 'Psychological' Deductions of Space . 206
123. Alternatives suggested by idea of subjective Space .... 209
124. Can any Space represent what our Space will not ? . . . .210
125. Symbolical spatial arrangements, of sounds, etc. . . . . .211
126. No Space will represent disparate qualities 212
127. Other Spaces than common Space in what sense possible . . .214
128. Geometry dependent on its data » 215
129. All constructions presuppose the Space-perception . . . .217
130. Constructions of straight line, plane, etc. presuppose them . . .218
131. The sum of the angles of a triangle . . . . . . .220
132. Helmholtz on the possible ignorance of a third dimension . ; .222
133. Dwellers on a sphere-surface and parallel lines 225
134. Analogy from ignorance of third dimension to ignorance of fourth . 226
135. There cannot be four series 'perpendicular' to each other . . .229
136. Extension must be homogeneous . .' 232
137. Riemann's 'multiplicities' are not Space unless uniform . , . 235
CHAPTER III.
OF TIME,
138. Spatial representations of Time 238
139. The conception of empty Time 239
140. The connexion of 'Time' with events in it 241
141. Kant's view of Time as subjective 242
142. Kant's proof that the world has a beginning in Time . . . .242
143. The endlessness of Time not self-contradictory ..... 243
144. The past need not be finite because each event is finished . . . 245
145. An infinite series may be 'given' . . . . ... 247
146. Time as a mode of our apprehension 248
147. Empty Time not even a condition of Becoming . . . . .250
148. Time as an abstraction from occurrence . . . . . .252
149. Time as an infinite whole is Subjective 253
150. No mere systematic relation explains ' Present ' and 'Past' . . . 254
151. Indication of 'Present' to a Subject 255
152. Subjective Time need not make the Past still exist . . . .258
153. Absence of real succession conceivable by approximation . . . 260
154. Even thought cannot consist of a mere succession .... 261
155. But Future cannot become Present without succession .... -263
156. Empty 'Time' Subjective, but succession inseparable from Reality . 265
157. Existence of Past and Future 268
xii Table of Contents.
CHAPTER IV.
OF MOTION.
PAGE
158. Law of Continuity 27°
159. Continuity essential to Becoming 27*
160. Grounds for the Law of Persistence 273
161. The Persistence of Rest 275
162. The Persistence of Motion 2?6
163. Motion inconceivable without Law of Persistence . . . .278
164. Possibility of absolute Motion, on doctrine of real Space . . . 279
165. Possibility of absolute Rotation 2Sl
166. Amount and direction of Motion to be accepted like any constant . 282
167. Difficulty of alleged indifference of Things to change of place . . 283
168. On view of phenomenal Space percipient subject with organism is essen
tial to occurrence of Motion 285
169. Solitary Motion possible, if observer is granted 288
170. 'State' corresponding to a Persistent Motion ..... 289
171. Motion is not the same as the Measure of Motion .... 290
172. Parallelogram of Motions akin to Law of Persistence . . . .291
173. Parallelogram necessarily true if only motions are considered . . 293
CHAPTER V.
THE THEORETICAL CONSTRUCTION OF MATERIALITY.
174. Matter homogeneous, or heterogeneous with common properties? . 296
175. Limitation of the problem 297
176. Descartes and Spinoza on Consciousness and Extension . . . 298
177. Schelling and Hegel ; problems attempted by the latter . . . 301
178. Kant does not connect his views of Matter and of Space . . . 302
179. Why Kant explained Matter by Force 304
180. ' Force ' involves relation between things 306
181. 'Force' as a property of one element a figure of speech . . . 308
182. Kant rightly implies activity on the part of Things, not mere sequence
according to Law 311
183. Kant's two forces a mere analysis of the position of a thing . . . 313
184. Still a mechanical system offerees essential, and several may attach to
each element 315
185. Force can only act at a distance 316
186. Idea of ' communication ' of Motion 318
187. Space no self-evident hindrance to action 321
CHAPTER VI.
THE SIMPLE ELEMENTS OF MATTER.
88. Prima facie grounds in favour of Atomism 324
189. Lucretius, — differences in the Atoms 326
190. Consequences of the Unity of an extended Atom 328
Table of Contents. xiii
PAGE
191. Notion of unextended Atoms— Herbart 331
192. Herbart's view modified— the Atoms not independent of each other . 333
193. Is Matter homogeneous or of several kinds ? '. ... . . 335
194. Homogeneous Matter not proved by constancy of Mass . . . 337
195. Connexion of the elements with each other in a systematic unity . . 339
196. Plurality in space of identical elements merely phenomenal . . . 340
197. Self-multiplication of Atomic centres conceivable .... 343
CHAPTER VII.
THE LAWS OF THE ACTIVITIES OF THINGS.
198. The square of the distance,— difficulties in the radiation of Force . 345
199. No mechanical deduction of a primary Force 348
200. Alleged infinite attraction at no distance 348
201. Herbart's view of the ' Satisfaction ' of Force, not conclusive . . 350
202. Philosophy desires one primary law of action . . . . K . 352
203. Affinity would naturally correspond to the Distance itself . . . 353
204. Attempt to account for Square of Distance 355
205. Can Force depend on motions of acting elements ? .... 357
206. Does Force require time to take effect at a distance ? . ... 358
207. Causation and Time— Reciprocal action .... . 360
208. Idealism admits no special Laws as absolute ..... 362
209. Conservation of Mass 363
210. Constancy of the Sum of Motions 364
211. Absorption of Cause in Effect 366
212. Not self-evident that there can be no gain in physical action . . 366
213. Equality and Equivalence distinguished 369
214. Equivalence does not justify reduction to one process .... 371
215. ' Compensation ' in interaction of Body and Soul 372
216. The Principle of Parsimony 373
CHAPTER VIII.
THE FORMS OF THE COURSE OF NATURE.
217. Deductions of the forms of reality impossible 378
218. Possibility of explaining natural processes in detail on the view of
subjective Space 380
219. Success the test of the methods of physical science .... 381
220. Mechanism the action of combined elements according to general laws 383
221. Mechanism as a distinct mode of natural activity — a fiction . . . 385
222. The planetary system, light and sound 388
223. Electricity and Chemistry should not be sharply opposed to Mechanism 390
224. Motives for forming the conception of a Vital Force .... 392
225. Vital Force could not be one for all Organisms 393
226. Difference between organic and inorganic substances proves nothing
about Vital Force 394
227. A ' Life-principle ' would have to operate mechanically . . . 395
228. Mechanical aspect of Organisms 397
229. Mechroiical view indispensable but not exhaustive .... 399
xiv Table of Contents.
PAGE
230. Purpose implies a subject — God, the soul 400
231. Von Baer on purpose in ' Nature ' 402
232. Unity of world determines all modes of action 404
233. The mechanical order need not exclude progress 405
234. Is there a fixed number of Natural Kinds ? 408
235. Criticism of the question 'Is real existence finite or infinite?' . . 409
236. Development of the Cosmos— only its general principles a question for
Metaphysic 414
237. Actual development of life a question for Natural History. Conclusion 415
BOOK III.
Psychology.
CHAPTER I.
THE METAPHYSICAL CONCEPTION OF THE SOUL.
Introductory. Rational and Empirical Psychology . . . .418
238. Reasons for the belief in a 'Soul/ — i. Freedom is no reason . . 420
239. 2. Mental and physical processes disparate 421
240. Disparateness no proof of separate psychical substance . . . 422
241. 3. Unity of Consciousness 423
242. Unity of the conscious Subject 424
243. The subject in what sense called ' substance ' 426
244. Kant on the Substantiality of the Soul 427
245. What the Soul is; and the question of its immortality . . . 430
246. Origin of the Soul may be gradual * . 432
247. Ideas of psychical and psycho-physical mechanism .... 435
248. Interaction between Body and Soul 436
249. Idea of a bond between Body and Soul 438
250. The Soul not a resultant of physical actions 439
251. Meaning of explaining the Soul as a peculiar form of combination
between elements 441
252. Consciousness and Motion in Fechner's ' Psycho-Physik ' . . . 442
CHAPTER II.
SENSATIONS AND THE COURSE OF IDEAS.
253. The physical stimulus of sensation 445
254. The physiological stimulus of sensation 446
255. The conscious sensation 448
256. Adequate and inadequate stimuli of sense 450
257. The connexion of various classes of sensation 451
258. Weber's Law 453
259. Hypotheses as to the reason of Weber's Law 455
260. The so-called chemistry of ideas 456
Table of Contents. xv
PAGE
261. The disappearance of ideas from consciousness. The checking of ideas 459
262. The strength of ideas . . . . . . . . .460
263. Dim ideas , . , , • . . 462
264. The more interesting idea conquers . . . • •'•-. , - • . 463
265. Association of ideas v- , • ... . . 465
266. Herbart's theory respecting the reproduction of a successive series of
ideas , . 467
CHAPTER III.
ON THE MENTAL ACT OF 'RELATION.'
267. Simple ideas and their relations 470
268. The necessary distinction between them 471
269. Psycho-physical attempts to explain ideas of relation .... 472
270. Herbart's theory of the psychical mechanism ..... 474
271. The truer view respecting simple ideas and ideas of relation expressed
in Herbartian language 476
272. The referring activity as producing universal conceptions . . -477
273. Attention as an activity of reference 478
274. Attention and the ' interest ' possessed by ideas 479
CHAPTER IV.
THE FORMATION OF OUR IDEAS OF SPACE.
275. The subjectivity of our perception of Space 481
276. How is the perception of spatial relations possible ? .... 482
277. Distinctions depending on Space cannot be preserved as such in the Soul 484
278. A clue needed for the arrangement of impressions by the Soul . . 485
279. The 'extra- impression' as a clue or ' local sign"* ..... 486
280. Does the 'local sign' arise in the same nerve-fibre as the main impression? 488
281. ' Local signs ' must be not merely different but comparable . . . 490
282. ' Local signs ' must be conscious sensations 491
283-7. On the local signs connected with visual sensations .... 493
288-9. Local signs connected with the sense of touch ..... 503
290. How these feelings are associated with movement .... 506
CHAPTER V.
THE PHYSICAL BASIS OF MENTAL ACTIVITY.
291. The 'seat' of the Soul 509
292. The Soul not omnipresent within the body ...... 510
293. No reason to suppose that it has an action graduated according to dis
tance 511
294. No suitable place can be found for it on the hypothesis that it acts by
contact only 512
295. It must act directly and independently of Space, but only at certain
necessary points 513
xvi Table of Contents.
PAGE
296. Which these points are is determined from time to time by the activities
which go on in them -515
297. Our ignorance of the special functions of the central nervous organs . 517
298. Ideas of a ' Sensorium commune'' and ' Motorium commune' . .518
299. The organ of language 519
300. How the soul initiates action 521
301. Reproduction of the right concomitant feeling . -. . . -. 522
302. Application of this view to the organ of language . . . . 523
303. Phrenology . . 524
304. The connexion of Consciousness with bodily states .... 526
305. Does memory depend on physical traces left in the brain ? . . .529
306. Loss of memory 531
307. Existence of the soul during unconsciousness . . . , . . 533
Conclusion 535
INDEX
537
BOOK I.
ON THE CONNEXION OF THINGS.
INTRODUCTION.
I. REAL is a term which we apply to things that are in opposition
to those that are not ; to events that happen in distinction from those
that do not happen ; to actually existing relations in contrast with
those that do not exist. To this usage of speech I have already had
occasion to appeal. I recall it now in order to give a summary
indication of the object of the following enquiries. It is not the
world of the thinkable, with the inexhaustible multiplicity of its inner
relations — relations which are eternally valid — that here occupies us.
Our considerations are expressly directed to this other region, of
which the less palpable connexion with that realm of ideas, ever
since the attention of Plato was first fastened upon it, has remained
( the constantly recurring question of Philosophy. It is a region that
has been described in opposite terms. It has been called a world
of appearance, of mere phenomena — and that in a depreciatory sense
— by men who contrasted the variable multiplicity of its contents with
the imperturbable repose and clearness of the world of ideas. To c
others it presented itself as the true reality. In its unfailing move
ment, and in the innumerable activities pervading it, they deemed
themselves to have a more valuable possession than could be found
in the solemn shadow-land of unchangeable ideas. This diversity
of appellation rests on a deep antithesis of conception, which will
attract our notice throughout all philosophy. My only reason for
mentioning it here is that the two views, while wholly different in their
estimates of value, serve equally to bring to light Jhe centre round
which metaphysical enquiries, so far as their essence is concerned,
will always move ; i. e. the fact of change. While predicable only by !
metaphor of anything that is merely object of thought, change coin-
** VOL. I. B
2 Introduction. [BOOK i.
pletely dominates the whole range of reality. Its various forms-
becoming and decay, action and suffering, motion and development
—are, as a matter of fact and history, the constant occasions of those
enquiries which, as forming a doctrine of the flux of things in
opposition to the permanent being of ideas, have from antiquity been
united under the name of Metaphysic.
II. It is not that which explains itself but that which perplexes us
that moves to enquiry. Metaphysic would never have come into
being if the course of events, in that form in which it was presented
by immediate perception, had not conflicted with expectations, the
fulfilment of which men deemed themselves entitled to demand from
whatever was to be reckoned as truly existing or truly taking place.
These expectations might be accounted for in various ways. They
might be held to be innate to the intelligent spirit. If that were true
of them, it would follow that, in the form of necessary assumptions
as to the mode of existence and connexion of anything that can
possibly be or happen, they determine our judgment upon every
occurrence with which observation presents us. Or they might be
taken to consist in requirements arising in the heart out of its needs,
hopes, and wishes; in which case their fulfilment by the external
world, as soon as attention was recalled to it, would be no less
strongly demanded. Or finally it might be held that, without carrying
any intellectual necessity in their own right, they had arisen out of the
de facto constitution of experience as confirmed habits of apprehension,
suggesting that in every later perception the same features were to be
met with as had been found in the earlier. The history of philosophy
may convince us of the equally strong vivacity and assurance, with
which these different views have asserted themselves. The tendency
of the present day, however, is to deny the possession of innate cog
nition, to refuse to the demands of the heart every title to a share in
the determination of truth, to seek in experience alone the source of
j that certain knowledge which we would fain acquire in regard to the
connexion of things.
' III. Philosophy has been too painfully taught by the course of its
history how the neglect of experience avenges itself, for any fresh
reminder of its indispensableness to be required. Taken by itself,
however, and apart from every presupposition not furnished by itself,
experience is not competent to yield the knowledge which we seek.
For our wish is not merely to enumerate and describe what has
happened or is happening. We also want to be able to predict what
under definite circumstances will happen. But experience cannot
BOOK I.]
Experience and Knowledge.
show us the future ; and cannot even help us to conjecture what it
will be unless we are certain beforehand that the course of the world is
bound to follow consistently, beyond the limits of previous observation,
the plan of which the beginning is presented to us within those limits.
An assurance, however, of the validity of this supposition is what
experience cannot afford us. Grant as much as you please that
observation in its ceaseless progress had up to a certain moment only
lighted on cases of conformity to the rules which we had inferred from
a careful use of earlier perceptions : still the proposition that this
accumulation of confirmatory instances, which has so far gone on with
out any exception being met with, has increased the probability of a
like confirmation in the future, is one that can only be maintained on
the strength of a previous tacit admission of the assumption, that the
same order which governed the past course of the world will also
determine the shape to be taken by its future. This_one supposition, 3
accordingly, of there being a universal inner connexion of all reality
as such which alone enables us to argue from the structure of any
one section of reality to that o? the rest, is tlieTTbundation of every
attempt to arrive at knowledge by means of experience, and is not
derivable from experience itself. Whoever casts doubt on the suppo- '
sition, not only loses the prospect of being able to calculate anything
future with certainty, but robs himself at the same time of the only fe
basis on which to found the more modest hope of being able under
definite circumstances to consider the occurrence of one event as
more probable than that of another.
IV. There have been philosophers of sceptical tendency who have^ ftv****
shown themselves well aware of this. Having once given up the
claim to be possessors of any such innate truth as would also be the
truth of things, they have also consistently disclaimed any pretension
from a given reality to infer a continuation of that reality which was
not given with it. Nothing in fact was left, according to them, in the
way of knowledge but the processes of pure Mathematics, in which
ideas are connected without any claim being made that they hold good
of reality, or history and the description of what is or has been. A
science of nature, which should undertake from the facts of the present
to predict the necessity of a future result, they held to be impossible.
j It was only in practical life that those who so thought relied with as
! much confidence as their opponents on the trustworthiness of those
physical principles, which within the school they maintained to be
quite without justification. The present professors of natural science,
who by their noisy glorification of experience compel every meta-
B 2
4 Introduction. [BOOK i.
physical enquiry at the outset to this preliminary self-defence, appear
to be only saved by a happy inconsistency from the necessity of a like
disclaimer. With laudable modesty they question in many individual
cases whether they have yet discovered the true law which governs
some group of processes under investigation : but they have no doubt
[in the abstract as to the presence of laws which connect all parts of
the world's course in such a way that, if once complete knowledge had
Ibeen attained, infallible inferences might be made from one to the
other. Now experience, even if it be granted that in its nature it is
capable of ever proving the correctness of this assumption, certainly
cannot be held to have yet done so. There still lie before us vast
regions of nature, as to which, since we know nothing of any con
nexion of their events according to law, the assertion that they are
throughout pervaded by a continuous system of law cannot rest on
ithe evidence of experience, but must be ventured on the ground of a
conviction which makes the systematic connexion of all reality a
primary certainty.
V. There are various ways of trying to compromise the difficulty.
Sometimes the admission is made that the science of nature is only
an experiment in which we try how far we can go with the arbitrary
assumption of a law regulating the course of things ; that only the
favourable result which experience yields to the experiment convinces
us of the correctness of the assumption made. Upon this we can in
fact only repeat the remark already made, and perhaps it will not be
useless actually to repeat it. If a question is raised as to the nature
of the connexion between two processes, of which the mutual de
pendence is not deducible from any previously known truth, it is
usual no doubt to arrive at the required law by help of an hypothesis,
of which the proof lies in the fact that no exception can be found to
its application. But in truth an hypothesis thus accredited is intrin
sically after all nothing more than a formula of thought in which we
have found a short expression for the common procedure which has
been observable in ail instances, hitherto noticed, of the connexion in
question. The character of a law is only imparted to this expression
by the further thought, which experience cannot add, but which we
add— the thought that in the future members of this endless series of
instances the same relation will hold good which, as a matter of ex
perience, we have only found to hold good between the past members
of the series.
It is again only by a repetition of what I have already said that I
can reply to the further expansion of the view referred to. It may
BOOK i.) Probability and the Idea of Law. 5
readily be allowed that the observation of the same connexion between
two occurrences, when constantly repeated without an instance to the
contrary, gives an ever increasing probability to the assumption of a
law connecting them and renders their coincidence explicable only
on this assumption. But on what after all does the growing power of
this surmise rest? If to begin with we left it an open question
whether there is any such thing as law at all in the course of things,
we should no longer be entitled to wish to find an explanation for a
succession of events, and in consequence to favour the assumption
Avhich makes it explicable. For every explanation-is in the last resort) /^
( notmng but the reduction of a mere coincidence between two facts toV/*P*
\an inner relation of mutual dependence according to a universal law.
Every need of explanation, therefore, and the right to demand it, rests
on the primary certainty of conviction that nothing can in truth be
or happen which has not the ground of its possibility in a connected
universe of things, and the ground of its necessary realisation at a definite
place and time in particular facts of this universe. If we once drop this
primary conviction, nothing any longer requires explanation and nothing
admits of it ; for that mutual dependence would no longer exist which
the explanation consists in pointing out. Or, to employ a different
expression : if we did not start from the assumption that the course of
things was bound by a chain of law, then and for that reason it would
not be a whit more improbable that the same processes should always
occur in a uniform, and yet perfectly accidental, connexion, than that
there should be the wildest variety of the most manifold combinations.
And just because of this the mere fact of a constantly repeated coin
cidence would be no proof of the presence of a universal law, by the
help of which a further forecast might become possible as to the yet
unobserved cases that lie in the future. It is not till the connexion of
manifold facts according to law is established as a universal principle
that any standard can exist for distinguishing a possible from an impos
sible, a probability from an improbability. Not till then can the one
case which has been observed to occur, to the exclusion of the multi
tude of equally possible cases, warrant us in assuming the persistency
of a special relation, which in accordance with the universal reign of
law yields this one result and excludes other results that are in them
selves equally possible.
All experience accordingly, so far as it believes itself to discover a
relation of mutual dependence between things according to law, is in
this only confirming the supposition, previously admitted as correct,
of there being such a relation. Ifjhe_supposition is still left in doubt,
r
6 Introduction. [BOOK i.
experience can never prove it. And the actual procedure of physical
enquiry is in complete harmony with this slate of the case Even
where the processes observed seem to contradict every thought of a
uniting law, the investigator never takes himself to have found in
these experiences a disproof of the supposition stated, such as would
render further effort useless. He merely laments that a confirmation
of it is not forthcoming, but never despairs of arriving at such a con
firmation by further research.
VI. If then we enquire not so much into ostensible principles, which
are generally drawn up for contentious purposes, as into those which
without being put into words are continually affirmed by practice, we
may take the prevalent spirit of the natural sciences to be represented
1 by the confession that the certainty of there being a relation of mutual
dependence between things according to law is independent of expe-
: rience. Nay, it is common in these sciences to take that relation for
granted in the particular form of a relation according to universal law
with an exclusiveness which philosophy cannot accept off-hand. But
Cm this admission that there are laws the investigator of nature still
^n believes that all he has done has been to admit a general point of
^view. The question what the laws of reality are, which in fact includes
i; every object of further enquiry, he reserves as one that is to be dealt
with exclusively by the elaboration of experience. He denies the
necessity or possibility of any metaphysical enquiry which in this region
might aspire to add anything to the results that experience may give.
/ Against such claims the only adequate defence of Metaphysic would
consist in the complete execution of its aims ; for it would only be in
detail that it could be made intelligible how the manipulation, which
experience must undergo in order to yield any result, is impossible,
unless by the aid of various definite intermediary ideas, which contain
much that does not arise out of the mere general idea of conformity
to law, as such, and of which, on the other hand, the certainty cannot
in turn be founded on empirical evidence.
For the present this brief hint on the subject may be taken to suffice
—the more so as it is to be immediately followed by a comprehensive
concession to our opponents. In our view Metaphysic ought not to
repeat the attempt, which by its inevitable failure has brought the
^A i science into disrepute. It is not its business to undertake a demon-
W stration of the special laws which the course of things in its various
^directions actually follows. On the contrary, while confining itself
to an enquiry into the universal conditions, which everything that
is to be counted as existing or happening #t all must, according to it,
BOOK L] Metaphysic and Natural Science. 7
be expected to fulfil, it must allow that what does in reality exist or
happen is a thing which it cannot know of itself but can only come to
know by experience. But it is only from this final knowledge of fact
that those determinate laws of procedure could be derived, by which
this particular reality satisfies those most general requirements which
/ hold good for every conceivable reality. Metaphysic accordingly will
( only be able to unfold certain ideal forms (if that expression may be
allowed), to which the relations between the elements of everything
(l real must conform. It can supply none of those definite proportions,
constant or variable, by the assignment of which it might give to
those forms the special mathematical construction necessary to their
applicability to a real world that is throughout determined in respect
of quality, magnitude, number, and sequence. All this Metaphysic
leaves to experience. It will still, however, continue to demand that
the results at which experience arrives should admit of being so inter
preted as to fit these ideal forms and to be intelligible as cases of their
application ; and to treat as fictions or as unexplained facts those
which remain in contradiction with them.
-, VII. There would be nothing then to forbid us from identifying
Metaphysic with the final elaboration of the facts with which the
sciences of experiment and observation make it acquainted — but an
elaboration distinguished from such sciences by the pursuit of other
aims than those towards which they are directed with such laudable
and unremitting energy. Natural science, while employing the con-"\
ceptions of certain elements and forces most effectually for the acqui- /
sition of knowledge, foregoes the attempt to penetrate to the properf
nature of those elements and forces. In a few cases important dis
coveries, leading to rapid progress in further insight, have been made
by application of the calculus to certain assumed processes, at any
possible construction of which science itself has been unable to
arrive. We therefore do not injustice to science in taking its object
to consist in a practical command over phenomena ; in other words,
the capability, however acquired, of inferring from given conditions of
the present to that which either will follow them, or must have pre
ceded them, or must take place contemporaneously with them in parts
of the universe inaccessible to observation. That for the acquisition
of such command, merely supposing a mutual dependence of pheno
mena according to some law or other, the careful comparison of
phenomena should to a great extent suffice, without any acquaintance
with the true nature of what underlies them, is a state of thirfgs intel-
t ligible in itself and of which the history of science gives ample evidence.
if
8 Introduction.
[BOOK I.
That the same process should always suffice for the purpose is not so
easy to believe. On the contrary, it seems likely that after reaching a
certain limit in the extent and depth of its enquiries, natural science
will feel the need, in order to the possibility of further progress, of
reverting to the task of denning exhaustively those centres of rela
tion, to which it had previously been able to attach its calculations
while leaving their nature undetermined. ^ In that case it will either
originate a new Metaphysic of its own or it will adopt some existing
system. So far as I can judge, it is now very actively engaged in
doing the former. Its efforts in that direction we observe with great
interest but with mixed feelings. The enviable advantage of having
acquired by many-sided investigation an original knowledge of facts,
for which no appropriation of other men's knowledge can form a per
fect substitute, secures a favourable judgment in advance for the^s
experiments of naturalists: and there is the more reason that this
should be so, since the philosophical instinct, which is able to ensure
their success, is not the special property of a caste, but an impulse of
the human spirit which finds expression for itself with equal intensity
and inventiveness among those of every scientific and practical calling.
! But there is a drawback even here. It arises from the involuntary
limitation of the range of thought to the horizon of the accustomed
i occupation, to external nature, and from the unhesitating transference
I of methods which served the primary ends of natural science correctly
enough, to the treatment of questions bearing on the ulterior relations
of the facts of which mastery has been obtained, and on their less
palpable dependence upon principles to which reference has been
studiously avoided in the ascertainment of the facts themselves.
Of course it is not my intention to indicate here the several points
at which, as it seems to me, these dangers have not been avoided. I
content myself with referring on the one hand to the inconsiderate
habit of not merely regarding the whole spiritual life from the same
ultimate points of view as the processes of external nature, but of
applying to it the same special analogies as have determined our con
ception of those processes ; and secondly to the inclination to count
any chance hypothesis of which the object is one that admits of being
presented to the mind, or, failing of this, of being merely indicated in
words, good enough to serve as a foundation for a wholly new and
paradoxical theory of the world. I do not ignore the many valuable
results that are due to this mobility of imagination. I know that man
must make trial of many thoughts in order to reach the truth, and that
a happy conjecture is apt to carry us further and more quickly on our
BOOK i.] Method of the Treatise. 9
way than the slow step of methodical consideration. Still there can be
no advantage in making attempts of which the intrinsic impossibility
and absurdity would be apparent if, instead of looking solely at the
single problem of which the solution is being undertaken, we carried
our view to the entire complex of questions to which the required
solution must be equally applicable. I do not therefore deny that the
metaphysical enterprises of recent physical investigators, along with
the great interest which they are undoubtedly calculated to excite,
make pretty much the same impression on me, though with a some
what different colouring, as was made on the votaries of exact science
,by the philosophy of nature current in a not very remote past.
Our business, however, is not with such individual impressions. I
only gave a passing expression to them in order to throw light on the
purpose of the following dissertation. The qualification of being
conducted according to the method of natural science, by which it is
now the fashion for every enquiry to recommend itself, is one which
I purposely disclaim for my treatise. Its object is indeed among
other things to contribute what it can to the solution of the difficult
problem of providing a philosophical foundation for natural science ;
but this is not its only object. It is rather meant to respond to the
interest which the thinking spirit takes, not merely in the calculations
by which the sequence of phenomena on phenomena may be foretold, '
but in ascertaining the impalpable real basis of the possibility of all
phenomena, and of the necessity of their concatenation. This interest,
reaching beyond the region on which natural science spends its
labour, must necessarily take its departure from other points of view
than those with which natural science is familiar, nor would I disguise
the fact that the ultimate points of view to which in the sequel it will
lead us will not be in direct harmony with the accustomed views of
natural science.
VIII. There is a reproach, however, to which we lay ourselves
open in thus stating the problem of Metaphysic. It is not merely that
experience is vaunted as the single actual source of our ascertained
knowledge. Everything which cannot be learnt from it is held to be
completely unknowable : everything which in opposition to the ob
servable succession of phenomena we are apt to cover by that com
prehensive designation, the essence of things. The efforts, therefore,
to which we propose to devote ourselves will be followed with the
pitying repudiation bestowed on all attempts at desirable but im
practicable undertakings. Beyond the general confidence that there
is such a thing as a connexion of things according to law, the human
io Introduction.
spirit, it is held, has no source of knowledge, which might serve the
purpose of completing or correcting experience. It would be a mere
eccentricity to refuse to admit- that a confession of the inscrutability
of the essence of things, in a certain sense, must at last be elicited from
every philosophy; but what if the more exact determination of this
1 sense, and the justification of the whole assertion of such inscrutability,
should be just the problem of Metaphysic, which only promises to
•enquire, but does not fix beforehand the limits within which its
enquiry may be successful? And it is clear that the assertion in
question, if prefixed to all enquiry, is one that to a certain extent con-
• tradicts itself. So long as it speaks of an essence of things, it speaks
of something and presupposes the reality of something as to the
existence of which according to its own showing experience can teach
nothing. As soon as it maintains the unknowability of this essence,
it implies a conviction as to the position in which the thinking spirit
stands to the essence, which, since it cannot be the result of experience,
must be derived from a previously recognized certainty in regard to
that which the nature of our thought compels us to oppose, as the
essence of things, to the series of phenomena. But it is just these
tacit presuppositions, which retain their power over us all the time that
we are disputing our capacity for knowledge, that stand in need of that
explanation, criticism, and limitation, which Metaphysic deems its
proper business. Nor have we any right to take for granted that the
business is a very easy one, and that it may be properly discharged by
some remarks well-accredited in general opinion, to be prefixed by
way of introduction to those interpretations of experience from which
alone a profitable result is looked for. When we assume nothing but
conformity to law in the course of things, this expression, simple
itself, seems simple in its signification : but the notions attached to it
turn out to be various and far-reaching enough, as soon as it has to
be employed in precisely that interpretation of experience which is
opposed to Metaphysic.
I will not enlarge on the point that every physical enquiry employs
the logical principles of Identity and Excluded Middle for the attain
ment of its results : both are reckoned as a matter (tf course among
the methods which every investigation follows. But meanwhile it is
forgotten that these principles could not be valid for the connected
series of phenomena without holding good also of the completely un
known basis from which the phenomena issue. Yet many facts give
sufficient occasion for the surmise that they apply to things themselves
and their states in some different sense from that in which they apply
BOOK L] Assumptions of Natural Science. TI
to the judgments which are suggested to us in thinking about these
states. We show as little scruple in availing ourselves of mathematical
truths, in order to advance from deduction to deduction. It is tacitly
assumed that the unknown essence of things, for one manifestation of
which we borrow from experience a definite numerical value, will
never out of its residuary and still unknown nature supply to the con
sequence which is to be looked for under some condition an in
calculable coefficient, which would prevent the correspondence of our
mathematical prediction with the actual course of events.
Nor is this all. Besides these presumptions which are at any rate
general in their character and which are all that can be noticed at the
outset, in the actual interpretation of experience there are implied
many unproven judgments of a more special sort, which can only be
noticed in the sequel. For logical laws hold good primarily of
nothing but the thinkable content of conceptions, mathematical laws
of nothing but pure quantities. If both are to be applied to that
which moves and changes, works and suffers, in space and time, they
stand in constant need of fresh ideas as to the nature of the real,
which as connecting links make it possible to subordinate to the
' terms of those laws this new region of their application. It is vainl
for us therefore to speak of a science founded on experience that J
shall be perfectly free from presuppositions. While this science
thinks scorn of seeking support from Metaphysic and disclaims all
knowledge of the essence of things, it is everywhere penetrated by
unmethodised assumptions in regard to this very essence, and is in
the habit of improvising developments, as each separate question sug
gests them, of those principles which it does not deem it worth while
to subject to any systematic consideration.
IX. In making these remarks I have no object in view but such as
may properly be served by an introduction. I wish to prepossess
that natural feeling of probability, which in the last instance is the
judge of all our philosophical undertakings, in favour of the project of
putting together in a systematic way the propositions in regard to the
nature and connexion of what is real, which, independently of ex
perience and in answer to the questions with which experience chal
lenges us, we believe ourselves to have no option but to maintain.
I expressly disclaim, however, the desire to justify this belief, from
which as a matter of fact we are none of us exempt, by an antecedent
theory of cognition. I am convinced that too much labour is at
present spent in this direction, with results proportionate to the
groundlessness of the claims which;, such theories make. There is
12
Introduction. [BOOK i.
something convenient and seductive in the plan of withdrawing at
tention from the solution of definite questions and applying oneself to
general questions in regard to cognitive capacities, of which any one
could avail himself who set seriously about it. In fact, however, the
history of science shows that those who resolutely set themselves to
mastering certain problems generally found that their cognisance of
the available appliances and of the use of them grew keener in the
process; while on the other hand the pretentious occupation with
theories of cognition has seldom led to any solid result. It has not
itself created those methods which it entertains itself with exhibiting
but not employing. On the contrary, it is the actual problems that
have compelled the discovery of the methods by which they may be
solved. The constant whetting of the knife is tedious, if it is not
proposed to cut anything with it.
I know that such an expression of opinion is in unheard-of opposi
tion to the tendency of our time. I could not, however, repress the
conviction that there is an intrinsic^ unsoundness in the efforts made
to found a Metaphysic on a psychological analysis of our cognition.
The numerous dissertations directed to this end may be compared to
the tuning of instruments before a concert, only that they are not so
necessary or useful. In the one case it is known what the harmony
is which it is sought to produce: in the other case the mental
activities which are believed to have been discovered are compared
with a canon which the discoverers profess that they have still to
find out. In the last resort, however, every one allows that as to the
truth of our cognition and its capability of truth no verdict can be
compassed which is independent of that cognition itself. It must
, itself determine the limits of its competence. In order to be able to
: do this — in order to decide how far it may trust itself to judge of the
\ nature of the real, it must first arrive at a clear notion of the proposi-
I tions which it is properly obliged — obliged in thorough agreement
with itself — to assert of this real. It is by these assumptions, which
are simply necessary to Reason, that the conception of the real which
is supposed to be in question is determined ; and it is only their con
tent that can justify Reason, when the question is raised, in forming
any judgment with regard to its further relation to this its object —
either that is in maintaining the unknowability of its concrete na
ture, or in coming to the conclusion as the only one compatible with
the reconciliation of all its thoughts, that the conception of things
which it generates has no independent object, or in persistently re
taining a belief in such an object in some sense which reason itself
Metaphy sic and Psychology. 13
determines — a belief which, because of such a nature, neither requires
nor admits further proof. On the other hand it strikes me as quite
unjustifiable to treat the most obscure of all questions, that of the
psychological origin of knowledge and the play of conditions which
co-operate in producing it, as a preliminary question to be easily dealt
with, of which the issue might settle decisively the validity or invalidity
collectively or severally of the utterances of reason. On the contrary
the psychological history of the origin of an error only conveys a
proof that it is an error on supposition that we are previously ac
quainted with the truth and can thus be sure that the originating
condition of the error involved a necessary aberration from that
truth.
Thus the doctrine which I would allege rests not on any conviction
which has previously to be admitted as to the psychological roots of
j our knowledge, but simply on an easily recognisable fact, of which
: the admission is implied by the very act of disputing it. Every one,
evade it as he will, must in the last instance judge of every proposi
tion submitted to him and of every fact with which experience pre-
! sents him upon grounds of which the constraining force presses itself
upon him witbLaa. jmmediate assurance. I say, ' in the last instance,^
for even when he undertakes to examine this self-evidence, his final
affirmation or denial of it must always rest on the like self-evidence as
belonging to his collected reasons for deciding on the matter. In
regard to that which this self-supported reason must affirm, now that
by the space of centuries it has, in sequence on experience, reflected
on itself, a comprehensive consciousness may be obtained or at least
sought. But how all this takes place in us, and how it comes about
that those fundamental truths which are necessities of our thought ac- ^
quire their self-evidence — these are points on which enlightenment, if
possible at all, can only be looked for in a remote future. But when
ever it may come, it can only come after the first question has been
j answered. The process of our cognition and its relations to objects
\must, whether we like it or no, be subject to those judgments which A
lour reason passes as necessities of thought upon every real process
and on the effect of every element of reality upon every other. These
declarations are not in the least at war with the high interest which
we take in psychology as a proper region of enquiry. They only
amoun! to a repetition of the assertion which every speculative
philosophy must uphold, that while Psychology cannot be the founda
tion of Metaphysic, Metaphysic must be the foundation of Psy
chology.
1 4 Introduction. tsooKi.
X. It is time, however, for some more precise statements as to the
line which it is proposed to take in the following enquiry. In re
ferring to the supposition of a universal relation of mutual dependence
between all things real as the common foundation of all scientific
investigation, I at the same time indicated a doubt with reference to
the exclusive form to which in the present stage of scientific culture
it is the fashion to reduce this relation — the form of conformity to
universal law. This form is neither the only one nor the oldest
under which the human spirit has presented to itself the connexion
of things. It was emphatically not as instances of a universal rule
but as parts of a whole that men first conceived things : as related to
each other not primarily by permanent laws but by the unchangeable
purport of a plan, of which the realisation required from the several
elements not always and everywhere an identical procedure, but a
changeable one. In this conviction originated the dazzling forms of
the idealistic constructions of the universe. Starting from a supreme
idea, into the depths of which they claimed to have penetrated by im
mediate intuition, the authors of these schemes thought to deduce the
manifold variety of phenomena in that order in which the phenomena
were to contribute to the realisation of the supposed plan. It was
not the discovery of laws that was their object, but the establishment
of the several ends which the development of things had gradually to
attain and of which each determined all habits of existence and be
haviour within the limits of that section of the universe which it
governed. The barrenness of these schemes is easily accounted for.
They failed in that in which men always will fail, in the exact and ex
haustive definition of that supreme thought, which they held in
honour. Now any shortcoming in this outset of the theory must be
a source of constantly increasing defect in its development, as it
descends to particulars. If ever a happy instinct led it to results
that could be accepted, it was only an aesthetic satisfaction that such
guesses yielded, not any certainty that could meet doubt by proof.
Yet the general conviction from which the speculations in question
set out does not yield in any way, either as less certain or as less
admissible, to the supposition of universal conformity to law, which
in our time is deemed alone worthy of acceptance. For my part
therefore — and I wish there to be no uncertainty on the point — I
should reckon this theory of the universe, if it could be carried out in
detail, as the completion of philosophy; and though I cannot but
deem it incapable of being thus carried out, I yet do not scruple to
allow to the conviction, that its fundamental thought is virtually cor-
BOOK u Idealism and notion of Law. 1 5
rect, all the influence which it is still possible for it to retain on the
formation of my views.
But from among the objects of the enquiry before us, this theory, at
least as carrying any immediate certainty, remains excluded. For w(
are not to employ ourselves upon the world of ideas itself, with its'
constituents arranged in an order that holds good eternally and is
eternally complete, but upon the given world, in which the process of/
realisation of the ideas is supposed to be visible. Now it is not once
for all nor in a systematic order that this real world unfolds ectypes of
the ideas. In that case it would scarcely be possible to say in what
respect the series of the ectypes is distinguishable from that of the
archetypes. But the world of reality presents innumerable things and
occurrences distributed in space and time. It is by shifting relations
of these that the content of the ideas is realised in manifold instances
and with degrees of completeness or incompleteness — is so realised
only again to disappear. However then we may think on the obscure
question of the position in which the ideas stand to the world of
phenomena and of the regulation of this world by them, it is certain
that as soon as their realisation becomes dependent on the changing
connexion between a number of points brought into relation, there
must arise a system of universal laws, in accordance with which in all
like cases of recurrence a like result necessarily follows, in unlike
cases an unlike result, and a certain end is attained in one case,
missed in another. Accordingly, even the idealistic theory of the
world, which believes reality to be governed by ends that belong to a
plan, if it would render the process of realisation of these ends in
telligible, necessarily generates the conception of a universal con
nexion of things according to law as a derived principle, though it
may refuse it the dignity of an ultimate principle. It will find no
difficulty in admitting further that the human spirit does not possess
any immediate revelation as to an end and direction of the collective
movement of the universe, in which according to its own supposition
that spirit is a vanishing point. Having for its vocation, however, to
work at its limited place in the service of the whole according to the
same universal laws which hold good for all the several elements of
the whole, the human spirit will more easily possess an immediate
consciousness of this necessity by which it like everything else is de
termined.
Considerations of this sort settle nothing objectively: but they
suffice to justify the abstract limitation of our present problem.
Metaphysic has merely to show what the universal conditions are
1 6 Introduction.
[BOOK I.
which must be satisfied by anything of which we can say without
contradicting ourselves that it is or that it happens. The question
remains open whether these laws, which we hope to master, form the
ultimate object which our knowledge can reach, or whether we may
succeed in deducing them from a highest thought, as conditions of its
realisation which this thought imposes on itself.
XI. In order to the discovery of the truths we are in search of it
would be desirable to be in possession of a clue that could be relied
on. The remarks we have just made at once prevent us from avail
ing ourselves of a resource in which confidence was placed by the
philosophers of a still recent period. The followers of the idealistic
systems to which I last referred imagined that in their dialectic
method they had security for the completeness and certainty of the
formulae in which they unfolded the true content of the universe.
They directed their attention but slightly to the riddles of experience.
To a much greater degree they had allowed themselves to be affected
by the concentrated impression of all the imperfections by which the
world outrages at once our knowledge our moral judgment, and the
wishes of our hearts. In opposition to that impression there arose in
their minds with great vivacity but, as was not denied, in complete
obscurity the forecast of a true being, which was to be free from these
shortcomings and at the same time to solve the difficult problem of
rendering the presence of the shortcomings intelligible. This fore
cast, into which they had gathered all the needs and aspirations of
the human spirit, they sought by the application of their method to
unfold into its complete content. In their own language they sought
to raise that into conception l which at the outset had been appre
hended only in the incomplete form of imagination 2.
I do not propose to revert to the criticism of this method, on the
logical peculiarity of which I have enlarged elsewhere. It is enough
here to remark that in accordance with the spirit of the theories in
which it was turned to account, it has led only to the assignment of
certain universal forms of appearance which cannot be absent in a
world that is to be a complete ectype of the supreme idea. It has
not led to the discovery of any principles available for the solution of
questions relating to the mutual qualification of the several elements,
by which in any case the realisation of those forms is completely or
incompletely attained. The method might conceivably be trans
formed so as to serve this other end, for its essential tendency, which
is to clear up obscure ideas, will give occasion everywhere for its use.
1 [Begriff.] a [Vorstellung.]
BO K i.] The Dialectic Method. 1 7
But in this transformation it would lose the most potent part of that
which formerly gave it its peculiar charm. Its attraction consisted in
this, that it sought in a series of intuitions, which it unfolded one out
of the other, to convey an immediate insight into the very inner
movement which forms the life of the universe, excluding that labour
of discursive thought which seeks to arrive at certainty in roundabout
ways and by use of the most various subsidiary methods of proof.
As making such claims, the method can at bottom only be a form of
that process of exhibiting already discovered truths which unfolds
them in the order which after much labour of thought in other direc
tions comes to be recognised as the proper and natural system of
those truths. If however the method is to be employed at the same
time as a form of discovering truth, the -process, questionable at best,
only admits of being in some measure carried out in relation to those
universal and stable forms of events and phenomena, which we have
reason for regarding as an objective development of the world's
content or of its idea. In regard to the universal laws, by which
the realisation of all these forms is uniformly governed, we certainly
cannot assume that they constitute a system in which an indisputable
principle opens out into a continuous series of developments. We
cannot in this case ascribe the development to the reality 1 as ob
jective, but only to our thoughts about the reality1 as subjective.
The Dialectic method would therefore have to submit to conversion
into that simpler dialectic, or, to speak more plainly, into that mere
process of consideration in which the elementary thoughts that we
entertain as to the nature and interconnection of the real are com
pared with each other and with all the conditions which warrant a
judgment as to their correctness, and in which it is sought to replace
the contradictions and shortcomings that thereupon appear by better
definitions. Nothing is more natural and familiar than this mode of
procedure, but it is also obvious that it does not of itself determine
beforehand either the point of departure for the considerations of
which it consists or in detail the kind of progress which shall be
made in it.
XII. Other attempts at the discovery of a clue have started from
1 ['Sache ' in this work means whatever a name can stand for, is coextensive with
' Vorstellbarer Inhalt ' (a content which can be presented in an idea), Logic, sect.
342, and therefore has ' objectivity ' (Objectivitat), Logic, sect. 3 ; on the other
hand it is much wider than ' Ding ' (a thing), which has not only * Objectivitat ' but
also ' Wirklichkeit ' (concrete external reality); cp. Logic, sect. 3. There is no
exact English equivalent for ' Sache ' in this sense.]
VOL. I. C
1 8 Introduction.
[ BOOK I.
a conception of classification. There lies a natural charm in the as
sumption that not only will the content of the universe be found to
form an ordered and rounded whole according to some symmetrical
method, but also that the reason, of which it is the vocation to know
it, possesses for this purpose innate modes of conception in organised
and completed array. The latter part of this notion, at any rate, was
the source of Kant's attempt by a completion of Aristotle's doctrine
of Categories to find the sum of truths that are necessities of our
thought. In the sense which Aristotle himself attached to his Cate
gories, as a collection of the most universal predicates, under which
every term that we can employ of intelligible import may be sub
sumed, they have never admitted of serious philosophical application.
At most they have served to recall the points of view from which
questions may be put in regard to the objects of enquiry that present
themselves. The answers to those questions always lay elsewhere —
not in conceptions at all, but in fundamental judgments directing the
application of the conception in this way or that. Kant's reformed
table of Categories suffers primarily from the same defect ; but he
sought to get rid of it by passing in fact from it to the ' principles of
Understanding' which, as he held, were merely contracted in the
Categories into the shape of conceptions and could therefore be again
elicited from them. The attempt is a work of genius, but against the
reasoning on which it is founded and the consequences drawn from
it many scruples suggest themselves. Kant found fault with Aristotle
for having set up his Categories without a principle to warrant their
completeness. On the other hand, plenty of people have been forth
coming to point out the excellence of the principles of division which
Aristotle is supposed to have followed. I do not look for any result
from the controversy on this point. Given a plurality of unknown
extent, if it is proposed to resolve it not merely by way of dichotomy
into M and non-J/ but ultimately into members of a purely positive
sort, M, N, 0, P, <2, there can be no security in the way of method
for the completeness of this disjunctive process. From the nature of
the case we must always go on to think of a residuary member R, of
which nothing is known but that it is different from all the preceding
members. Any one who boasts of the completeness of the division
is merely saying that for his part he cannot add a fresh member R.
Whoever denies the completeness affirms that a further member R
has occurred to him which with equal right belongs to the series.
Aristotle may have had the most admirable principles of division ; but
they do not prove that he has noticed all the members which properly
BOOK i.] The method of Classification. 19
fall under them. But the same remark holds equally good against
Kant. It may be conceded to him that it is only in the form of the
judgment that the acts of thought are performed by means of which
we affirm anything of the real. If it is admitted further as a con
sequence of this that there will be as many different primary pro
positions of this kind as there are essentially different logical forms of
judgment, still the admission that these different forms of judgment
have been exhaustively discovered cannot be insisted on as a matter,
properly speaking, of methodological necessity. The admission will
be made as soon as we feel ourselves satisfied and have nothing to
add to the classification ; and if this agreement were universal, the
matter would be practically settled, for every inventory must be
taken as complete, if those who are interested in its completeness
can find nothing more to add to it. But that kind of theoretical
security for an unconditional completeness, which Kant was in quest
of, is something intrinsically impossible.
These however are logical considerations, which are not very
decisive here. It is more important to point out that the very
admission from which we started is one that cannot be made. The
logical forms of judgment are applied to every possible subject-
matter, to the merely thinkable as well as to the real, to the doubt- !
ful and the impossible as well as to the certain and the possible.
We cannot therefore be the least sure that all the different forms,
which are indispensable to thought for this its wide-reaching em
ployment, are also of equal importance for its more limited ap
plication to the real. So far however as their significance in fact
extends also to this latter region, it is a significance which could
not be gathered in its full determination from that general form in
which it was equally applicable to the non-real. The categorical
form of judgment leaves it quite an open question, whether the
subject of the judgment to which it adds a predicate is a simple
' nominal essence * ' remaining identical with itself, or a whole which
possesses each of its parts, or a substance capable of experiencing a
succession of states. The hypothetical form of judgment does not
distinguish whether the condition contained in its antecedent clause is
the reason of a consequence, or the cause of an effect, or the de
termining end from which the fact stated in the consequent proceeds
as a necessary condition of its fulfilment. But these different con
ceptions, which are here presented in a like form, are of different im
portance for the treatment of the real. The metaphysical significance
1 [• Einfacher Denkinhalt.']
C 2
2O Introduction.
[ BOOK I.
of the Categories is, therefore, even according to Kant's view, only
a matter of happy conjecture, and rests upon material considerations,
which are unconnected with the forms of judgment, and to which
the systematisation of those logical forms has merely given external
occasion. It is only these incidentally suggested thoughts that have
given to the Categories in Kant's hands a semblance of importance
and productiveness, which these playthings of philosophy, the object
of so much curiosity, cannot properly claim. This roundabout road
of first establishing a formal method affords us no better security
than we should have if we set straight to work at the thing — at the
matter of our enquiry.
XIII. We are encouraged to this direct course by the recollection
that it is not a case of taking possession for the first time of an
unknown land. Thanks to the zealous efforts of centuries the objects
we have to deal with have long been set forth in distinct order, and
the questions about them collected which need an answer. Nor had
the philosophy which has prepared the way for us itself to break
wholly new ground. In regard to the main divisions of our subject
it had little to do but to repeat what everyone learns anew from his
own experience of the world. Nature and spirit are two regions so
different as at first sight to admit of no comparison, and demanding
two separate modes of treatment, each devoted to the essential
character by which the two regions are alike self-involved and sepa
rate from each other. But on the other hand they are destined to
such constant action upon each other as parts of one universe, that
they constrain us at the same time to the quest for those universal
forms of an order of things which they both have to satisfy alike in
themselves and in the connexion with each other. It might seem as
if this last-mentioned branch of its enquiry must be the one to which
early science would be last brought. As a matter of history, however,
it has taken it in hand as soon as the other two branches, and has
long devoted itself to it with greater particularity than, considering
the small progress made in the other branches, it could find conducive
to success. But whatever may be the case historically, now at least
when we try to weigh the amount of tenable result which has been
won from such protracted labour, we are justified in beginning with
that which is first in the order of things though not in the order
of our knowledge ; I mean with Ontology, which, as a doctrine
of the being and relations of all reality, had precedence given to
it over Cosmology and Psychology — the two branches of enquiry
which follow the reality into its opposite distinctive forms. It is
BOOK i.] The divisions of Metaphysic. 2 1
to this division of the subject that with slight additions or omissions,
Metaphysic under every form of treatment has to all intents and
purposes returned. The variety in the choice of terms occasioned
by peculiar points of view adopted antecedently to the consideration
of the natural division of the subject, has indeed been very great.
But to take any further account of these variations of terminology,
before entering on the real matter in hand, seems to me as useless as
the attempt to determine more exactly that limitation of the problems
before us which metaphysicians have had before them in promising
to treat only of rational cosmology and psychology, as opposed in a
very intelligible manner to the further knowledge which only ex
perience can convey.
XIV. No period of human life is conceivable in which man did
not yet feel himself in opposition to an external world around him.
Long in doubt about himself, he found around him a multitude of
perceptibly divided objects, and he could not live long without
having many impressions forced upon him as to their nature and
connexion. For none of the every-day business that is undertaken
for the satisfaction of wants could go on without the unspoken con
viction that our wishes and thoughts have not by themselves the
power to make any alteration in the state of the outer world, but that
this world consists in a system of mutually determinable things, in
which any alteration of one part that we may succeed in effecting is
sure of a definite propagation of effects on other parts. Moreover
no such undertaking could be carried out without coming on some
resistance, and thus giving rise to the recognition of an unaccountable
independence exercised by things in withstanding a change of state.
I All these thoughts as well as those which might readily be added on
/ a continuation of these reflections, were primarily present only in the
I form of unconsciously determining principles which regulated actions
and expectations in real life. It is in the same form that with almost
identical repetition they still arise in each individual, constituting the
natural Ontology with which we all in real life meet the demand for
judgments on events. The reflective attempt to form these assump
tions into conscious principles only ensued when attention was called
to the need of escaping contradictions with which they became em
barrassed when they came to be applied without care for the con
sequences to a wider range of knowledge.
It was thus that Philosophy, with its ontological enquiries, arose.
In the order of their development these enquiries have not indeed
been independent of the natural order in which one question suggests
22 Introduction.
another. Still owing to accidental circumstances they have often
drifted into devious tracks ; have assumed and again given up
very various tendencies. There is no need, however, in a treatise
which aims at gathering the product of these labours, to repeat this
chequered history. It may fasten directly on the natural conception
of the universe which we noticed just now — that conception which
finds the course of the world only intelligible of a multiplicity of per
sistent things, of variable relations between them, and of events
arising out of these changes of mutual relation. For it is just this
view of the universe, of which the essential purport may be thus sum
marised, which renews itself with constant identity in every age.
Outside the schools we all accommodate ourselves to it. Not to us
merely, but to all past labourers in the field of philosophy, it has
presented itself as the point of departure, as that which had either to
be confirmed or controverted. Unlike the divergent theories of spe
culative men, therefore, it deserves to be reckoned as itself one of the
natural phenomena which, in the character of regular elements of
the universe, enchain the attention of philosophy. For the present
however all that we need to borrow from history is the general con
viction that of the simple thoughts which make up this view there is
none that is exempt from the need of having its actual and possible
import scientifically ascertained in order to its being harmonised with
all the rest in a tenable whole. No lengthy prolegomena are needed
to determine the course which must be entered on for this purpose.
We cannot speak of occurrences in relations without previously think
ing of the things between which they are supposed to take place or to
subsist. Of these things, however — manifold and unlike as we take
them to be — we at the same time affirm, along with a distinction in
the individual being of each, a likeness in respect of that form of
reality which makes them things. It is with the simple idea of this
being that we have to begin. The line to be followed in the sequel may
be left for the present unfixed. Everything cannot be said at once.
That natural view of the world from which we take our departure,
simple as it seems at first sight, yet contains various interwoven
threads ; and no one of these can be pursued without at the same time
touching others which there is not time at the outset to follow out on
their own account and which must be reserved to a more convenient
season. For our earlier considerations, therefore, we must ask the
indulgence of not being disturbed by objections of which due account
shall be taken in the sequel.
CHAPTER I.
On the Being of Things.
1. ONE of the oldest thoughts in Philosophy is that of the oppo
sition between true being and untrue being. Illusions of the senses,
causing what is unreal to be taken for what is real, led to a perception
of the distinction between that which only appears to us and that
which is independent of us. The observation of things taught men
to recognise a conditional existence or a result of combination in that
which to begin with seemed simple and self-dependent. Continuous
becoming was found where only unmoving persistent identity had
been thought visible. Thus there was occasioned a clear conscious
ness of that which had been understood by ' true being/ and which
was found wanting in the objects of these observations. Independ
ence not only of us but of everything other than itself, simplicity and
unchanging persistence in its own nature, had always been reckoned
its signs. Its signs, we say, but still only its signs ; for these charac
teristics, though they suffice to exclude that of which they are not
predicable from the region of true being, do not define that being
itself. Independence of our own impressions in regard to it is what
we ascribe to every truth. It holds good in itself, though no one \
thinks it. Independence of everything beside itself we affirm not
indeed of every truth, but of many truths which neither need nor
admit of proof. Simplicity exclusive of all combination belongs to
every single sensation of sweetness or redness ; and motionless self-
subsistence, inaccessible to any change, is the proper character of
that world of ideas which we oppose to reality on the ground that
while we can say of the ideas that they eternally hold good we cannot
say that they are. It follows that in the characteristics stated of Being
not only is something wanting which has been thought though not
expressed but the missing something is the most essential element of
that which we are in quest of. We still want to know what exactly *
that Being itself is to which those terms may be applied by way of j
24 On the Being of Things. [BOOK i.
distinguishing the true Being from the apparent, or what that reality
consists in by which an independent simple and persistent Being
distinguishes itself from the unreal image in thought of the same
independent simple and persistent content.
2. To this question a very simple answer may be attempted. It
seems quite a matter of course that the thinking faculty should not be
able by any of its own resources, by any thought, to penetrate and
exhaust the essential property of real Being, in which thought of itself
recognises an opposition to all merely intelligible existence. The r
most that we can claim, it will be said, is that real Being yields us a
living experience of itself in a manner quite different from thinking,
and such experiences being once given, a ground of cognition with
reference to them thereupon admits of being stated, which is necessary
not indeed for the purpose of inferring that presence of real Being
which is matter of immediate experience but for maintaining the truth
of this experience against every doubt. Upon this view no pretence
is made of explaining by means of conceptions the difference of real
Being from the conception of the same, but immediate^ sensaiiori 1
has always been looked upon as the ground of cognition which is our \
warrant for the presence of real Being. Even after the habit has
been formed of putting trust in proofs and credible communications,
we shall still seek to set aside any doubt that may have arisen by
rousing ourselves to see and hear whether the things exist and the
occurrences take place of which information has been given us ; nor
does any proof prove the reality of its conclusion unless, apart from
the correctness of its logical concatenation, not merely the truth of
its original premisses, as matter of thought, but the reality of its
content is established — a reality which in the last resort is given only
by sensuous perception. It may be that even sensation sometimes
deceives and presents us with what is unreal instead of with what is
real. Still in those cases where it does not deceive, it is the only
possible evidence of reality. It may in like manner be questioned
whether sensation gives us insight into the real as it is. Still of the
fact that something which really is underlies it, sensation does not
seem to allow a doubt.
3. The two objections just noticed to the value of sensation cannot
here be discussed in full, but with the second there is a difficulty con
nected which we have to consider at once. The content of simple
sensations cannot be so separated from the sensitive act as that
detached images of the two, complete in themselves, should remain
1 [' Sinnlichen Empfindung.'J
CHAPTER i.] Being and Sensation. 25
after the separation. We can neither present redness, sweetness,
and warmth to ourselves as they would be if they were not felt, nor
the feeling of them as it would be if it were not a feeling of any
of these particular qualities. The variety, however, of the sensible
qualities, and the definiteness of each single quality as presented to the
mind's eye, facilitate the attempt which we all make to separate in
thought what is really indivisible. The particular matter which we
feel, at any rate, appears to us independent of our feeling, as if it
were something of which the self-existent nature was only recognised
and discovered by the act of feeling.
But we do not succeed so easily in detaching the other element —
that real being, of which, as the being of this sensible content, it was
the business of actual sensation in opposition to the mere recollection
or idea of it to give us assurance. It cannot be already given in this
simplest affirmation or position which we ascribed to the sensible con
tents, and by which each of them is what it is and distinguishes itself
from other contents. Through this affirmation that which is affirmed
only comes to hold good as an element in the world of the thinkable.
It is not real merely because it is in this sense something, as opposed
to nothing void of all determination. In virtue of such affirmation
Red is eternally Red and allied to Yellow, not allied to what is warm
or sweet. But this identity with itself and difference from something
else holds good of the Red of which there is no actual sensation as of
that of which there is actual sensation. Yet it is only in the case of
the latter that sensation is supposed to testify to real existence. Apart
from that simplest affirmation, however, the various sensible qualities
in abstraction from the sensitive act which apprehends them have
nothing in common. If therefore we assert of them, so far as they
are felt, a real Being different from this affirmation, this Being is not
anything which as attaching to the nature of the felt quality would
merely be recognised and discovered by the sensitive act. On the
contrary, it lies wholly in the simple fact of being felt, which forms
the sole distinction between the actual sensation of the quality that
is present to sense and the mere idea of quality which is not so
present. Thus it would appear that the notion with which we started \
must be given up ; for sensation is not a mere ground of cognition
of a real Being which is still something different from it and of which
the proper nature has still to be stated ; and the being which on the
evidence of sensation we ascribe to things consists in absolutely (
nothing else than the fact of their being felt
4. This assertion, however, can only be hazarded when certain
26 On the Being of Things. [BOOK i.
points of advanced speculation have been reached, which we shall
arrive at later. The primary conception of the world is quite remote
from any such inference. According to it sensation is certainly the
only ' causa cognoscendi ' which convinces us of Being, and just
because it is the only one, there easily arises the mistake of supposing
that what it alone can show consists only of it ; whereas in fact Being
is, notwithstanding, independent of our recognition of it, and all
things, of which we learn the reality, it is true, only from sensation,
will continue to be, though our attention is diverted from them and
they vanish from our consciousness. Nothing indeed appears more
self-evident than this doctrine. We all do homage to it. Yet the
question must recur, what remains to be understood by the Being of
things, when we have got rid of the sole condition under which it is
cognisable by us. It was as objects of our feeling that things were
presented to us. In this alone consisted as far as we could see
what we called their Being. What can be left of Being when we
abstract from our feeling ? What exactly is it that we suppose our
selves to have predicated of things, in saying that they are without
being felt ? Or what is it that for the things themselves, by way of
proof, confirmation, and significance of their being, takes the place of
that sensation which for us formed the proof, confirmation, and signi
ficance of their being.
The proper meaning of these questions will become clearer, if I
pass to the answers which the natural theory of the world gives to
them ; for it must not be supposed that this theory makes no effort to
remedy the shortcoming which we have noticed. Its simplest way
of doing so consists in the reflection that on the disappearance of our
own sensation that of others takes its place. The men whom we
leave behind will remain in intercourse with others. Places and
objects, from which we are removed, will be seen by others as
hitherto by us. This constitutes their persistency in Being, while
they have vanished from our senses. Everyone, I think, will find
traces in himself of this primary way of presenting the case. Yet it
helps us rather to put off the question than to answer it. It is sure
to repeat itself at once in another form. Being was said to be\
independent of any consciousness on the part of a sentient subject.!
What then if consciousness is extinguished out of the entire universe
and there is no longer any one who could have cognisance of the
things that are supposed to exist ? In that case, we answer, they will
continue to stand in those relations to each other in which they stood
when they were objects of perception. Each will have its place in
CHAPTER i.] Being as real relations. 27
space or will change it. Each will continue to exercise influences on
others or to be affected by their influence. These reciprocal agencies
will constitute that in which the things possess their being indepen
dently of all observation. Beyond this view of the matter the natural
theory of things scarcely ever goes. In what respect it is unsatisfac
tory and in what it is right we have now to attempt to consider.
5. There is one point on which it is held to be defective, but un
fairly, because its defect consists merely in its inability to answer an
improper question, which we have simply to get out of the habit of
putting. The question arises in this way. All those relations, in
which we just now supposed the reality of things to consist, may be
thought of equally as real and as unreal. But they must be actually
real and not merely thought of as real, if they are to form the Being
of things and not merely the idea of this Being. In what then, we
ask, consists this reality of that which is in itself merely thinkable,
and how does it arise? That this question is unanswerable and self-
contradictory needs no elaborate proof. In what properly consists
the fact — how it comes about or is made — that there is something
and not nothing, that something and not nothing takes place ; this it
is eternally impossible to say. For in fact, whatever the form of the
question in which this curiosity might find expression, it is clear that
we should always presuppose in it as antecedent to that reality of
which we seek an explanation, a prior connected reality, in which
from definite principles definite consequences necessarily flow, and
among them the reality that has to be explained. And the origin of
this latter reality would not be like that of a truth which arises as a
consequence out of other truths but which yet always subsisted along
with them in eternal validity. The origin in question would be ex
pressly one in which a reality, that was previously itself unreal, arises
out of another reality. Everything accordingly which we find in the
given reality — the occurrence of events, the change in the action of
things upon each other, the existence of centres of relation between
which such action may take place — all this we must assume to begin
with in order to render the origin of reality intelligible.
This obvious circle has been avoided by the common view. Nor
can it be charged with having itself fallen into another circle in re
ducing the real Being of things to the reality of those relations the
maintenance of which it supposed to constitute what was meant by
this Being. For it could not be intended to analyse this most general
conception of reality, of which the significance can only be conveyed
in the living experience of feeling. All that could be meant by
28 On the Being of Things. [BOOK i.
definitions of Being in the common theory was an indication of that
which within this given miracle of reality is to be understood as the
Being of the Things in distinction from other instances of the same
reality, from the existence of the relations themselves and from the
occurrence of events. Whether the common theory has succeeded
in this latter object is what remains to be asked.
6. Philosophy has been very unanimous in denying that it has.
How, it is asked, are we to understand those relations, in the sub
sistence of which we would fain find the Being of the Things ? If
they are merely a result of arbitrary combinations in which we
present things to our minds, we should equally fail in our object
whether the things ordered themselves according to this caprice of
ours or whether they did not. In the former case we should not find
the Being independent of ourselves which we were in search of. If
the latter were the true state of the case, it would make it still more
plain that there must be something involved in the Being of things
which our definition of this Being failed to include — the something in
virtue of which they are qualified to exist on their own account, not
changing with and because of our changeable conception of their
Being. We cannot be satisfied therefore without supposing that the
relations, of which we assume the existence, exist between the things
themselves, so as to be discoverable by our thought but not created
by or dependent on it. The more, however, we insist on this ob
jective reality of relations, the more unmistakeable we make the
dependence of the Being of everything on the Being of everything
else. No thing can have" its place among the other things, if these
are not there to receive it among them. None can work or suffer,
before the others are there to exchange impressions with it. To put
the matter generally; in order to there being such a thing as an action
of one thing upon another, it would seem that the centres of relation
between which it is to take place must be established in independent
/ reality. A Being in things, resting wholly on itself and in virtue of
/ this independence rendering the relations possible by which things
are to be connpcted, must precede in thought every relation that is to
be taken for real. This is the pure Being, of which Philosophy has
so often gone in quest. It is opposed by Philosophy, as being of
the same significance for a^J things, to the empirical Being which,
originating in the various relations that have come into play between
things, is different for every second thing from what it is for the third,
and which Philosophy hopes somehow to deduce as a supervening
result from the pure Being.
CHAPTER i.] Pure Being strictly meaningless.
29
7. I propose to show that expectation directed to this metaphysical
use of the conception of pure Being is a delusion, and that the,A
natural theory of the world, in which nothing is heard of it, is on this^
point nearer the truth than this first notion of Speculation. Every
conception, which is to admit of any profitable application, must
allow of a clear distinction between that which is meant by it and that
which is not meant by it. So long as we looked for the Being of
things in the reality of relations in which the things stand to each
other, we possessed in these relations something by the affirmation of
which the Being of that which is, distinguishes itself from the non-
Being of that which is not. The more we remove from the concep
tion of Being every thought of a relation, in the affirmation of which
it might consist, the more completely the possibility of this distinc
tion disappears. For not to be at any place, not to have any posi
tion in the complex of other things, not to undergo any operation
from anything nor to display itself by the exercise of any activity
upon anything ; to be thus void of relation is just that in which we
should find the nonentity of a thing if it was our purpose to define it.
It is not to the purpose to object that it was not this nonentity but
Being that was meant by the definition. It is not doubted that the
latter was the object of our definition, but the object is not attained,
so long as the same definition includes the opposite of that which we
intended to include in it.
No doubt an effort will be made to rebut this objection in its turn.
It will be urged that if, starting from the comparison of the multiform
Being of experience, we omit all the relations on which its distinction
rests, that which remains as pure Being is not the mere privation of
relations but that of which this very unrelatedness serves only as a
predicate, and which, resting on itself and independent, is distin
guished by this hardly to be indicated but still positive trait from that
which is not. Now it is true that our usage is not to employ these
and like expressions of that which is not or of the nothing, but the
usage is not strictly justifiable so long as we apply the expressions to
this pure Being. They only Jiave an intelligible sense because we
already live in the thought of manifold relations, and within the
sphere of these the true Being has opportunity of showing by a
definite order of procedure what is the meaning of its independence
and self-subsistence. Once drop this implication, and all the above
expressions, in the complete emptiness of meaning to which they
thereupon sink, are unquestionably as applicable to Nothing as they
are to Being, for in fact independence of everything else, self-sub-
3<D On the Being of Things. t BOOK i.
sistence and complete absence of relation are not less predicable of
the one than of the other.
8. We may expect here the impatient rejoinder — 'There still re
mains the eternal difference that the unrelated Being is while the
unrelated non-Being is not : all that comes of your super-subtle
^ investigation is a contradiction of your own previous admission.
For the meaning of Being, in the sense of reality and in opposition
to not-being, is as you say undefinable and only to be learnt by actual
living. The cognition thus gained necessarily and rightfully pre
supposes the conception of pure Being, as the positive element in
the experienced Being. We have not therefore the problem of dis
tinguishing Being from not-Being any longer before us. That is
settled for us in the experience of life. Our problem merely is
within real Being by negation of all relations to isolate the pure
Being, which must be there to begin with in order to the possibility
of entrance into any relations whatever. In forming this conception
of pure Being therefore, Thought is quite within its right, although
for that which it looks upon as the positive import of the conception
it can only offer a name, of which the intelligibility may be fairly
reckoned on, not a description.'
Now by way of reply to these objections I must remind the reader
that what I disputed was not at all the legitimacy of the formation of
^ the idea in question but only the allowability of the metaphysical use
which it is sought to make of it. The point of this distinction I will
endeavour first to illustrate by examples. Bodies move in space with
various velocities and in various directions. No doubt we are justi
fied as a matter of thought in fixing arbitrarily and one-sidedly now
on one common element, now on another, in these various instances,
and thus in forming the conception of direction without reference to
velocity, that of velocity apart from direction, that of motion as the
conception of a change of place, which leaves direction and velocity
unnoticed. There is nothing whatever illegitimate in the formation
of any of these abstractions. Nor is it incompatible with the nature
of the abstractions that instances of each of them should be so con
nected in thought as to yield further knowledge. None of them,
however, immediately and by itself allows of an application to reality
Vithout being first restored to combination with the rest from which
our Thought, in arbitrary exercise of its right of abstraction, had
detached them. There will never be a velocity without direction;
never a direction ab in the proper sense of the term without a velocity
leading from a to b, not from b to a. There will never be a motion
CHAPTER i.] Pure Being by itself unreal. 3 1
that is a mere change of place, as yet without direction and velocity
and waiting to assume these two qualifications later on. That which
we are here seeking to convey is essentially, if not altogether, the
familiar truth that general ideas are not applicable to the real world
in their generality, but only become so applicable when each of their
marks, that has been left undetermined, has been limited to a com
pletely individual determinateness, or, to use an expression more
suited to the case before us, when to each partial conception neces
sary to the complete definition there has been again supplied in case
it expresses a relation, the element to which the relation attaches.
9. We take the case to be just the same with the conception of
pure Being. It is an abstraction formed in a perfectly legitimate -
way, which aims at embracing the common element that is to be
found in many cases of Being and that distinguishes them from not-
Being. We do not value this abstraction the less because the sim
plicity of what it contains is such that a verbal indication of this
common element, as distinct from any systematic construction of it,
is all that is possible. Still, like those to which we compared it, it
does not admit, as it stands, of application to anything real. Just as
an abstract motion cannot take place, just as it never occurs but in
the form of velocity in a definite direction, so pure Being cannot in
reality be an antecedent or substance of such a kind as that empirical
existence with its manifold determinations should be in any sort a
secondary emanation from it, either as its consequence or as its
modification. It has no reality except as latent in these particular
cases of it, in each of these definite forms of existence. It is merely
in the system of our conceptions that these supervene upon it as
subsequent and subordinate kinds. There was a correct feeling of
this in what I call the natural theory of the world. It was quite
aware of the intellectual possibility of detaching the affirmation that
is the ^me in all cases from the differences of the manifold relations
which are affirmed by it in the different cases of Being, just as the
uniform idea of quantity can be detached from the different numbers
and spaces which are subordinate to it. But it rightly held to the
view that the pure Being thus constituted has not reality as pure but
only in the various instances in which it is a latent element ; just as
is the case with quantity, which never occurs as pure Quantity but
only as this or that definite Quantum of something.
10. The length of this enquiry, which leads to a result seemingly
so simple, must be justified by the sequel. It may be useful, I think, \
to repeat the same thought once again in another form. There are
32 On the Being of Things.
other terms which have been applied to pure Being, in the desire to
make that which admits of no explanatory analysis at least more
intelligible by a variety of signs.Jj^Thus it is usual to speak of it as an
I unconditional and irrevocable Position l or Putting. It will be readily
4- noticed that as so applied, each of these terms is used with an ex
tension of meaning in which it ceases to represent any complete
thought. They alike tend to give a sensuous expression to the idea
in question by recalling the import in which they are properly used ;
and when that on which their proper meaning rests has again to
be expressly denied the result is obscurity and confusion. We
cannot speak of a putting or Position in the proper sense of the
term without stating what it is that is put. And not only so, this
must be put somewhere, in some place, in some situation which is
the result of the putting and distinguishes the putting that has taken
place from one that has not taken place. Any one who applied this
term to pure Being would therefore very soon find himself pushed
back again to a statement of relations, in order to give to this ' Posi
tion' or pure Being the meaning necessary to its distinction from the
not-putting, the pure non-Being. The notion which it is commonly
attempted to substitute for this — that of an act of placing pure and
simple, which leaves out of sight every relation constituted by the act
— remains an abstraction which expresses only the purpose of the
person thinking to think of Being and not of not-Being, while on the
other hand it carefully obliterates the conditions under which this
purpose can attain its end and not the precise opposite of this end.
Nor would it be of any avail to be always reverting to the proposition
that after all it is by this act of putting that there is constituted the
very intelligible though not further analysable idea of an objectivity
which can be ascribed only to that which is, not to nothing. For,
apart from every other consideration, if we in fact not merely per
formed the act of mere putting, as such, but by it put a definite
content, without however adding what sort of procedure or what
relations were to result to the object from this act of putting, the
consequence would merely be that the thing put would be presented
to our consciousness as an essence which signifies something and
distinguishes itself from something else, but not as one that is in
opposition to that which is not. Real Being, as distinct from the
mere truth of the thinkable, can never be arrived at by this bare act
1 [' Position oder Setzung.' It seems unavoidable that the English word ' Posi
tion ' should be used, though it has of course no active meaning such as belongs to
' Position ' and ' Setzung.']
CHAPTER i.j Being as ' Position ' or Affirmation. 33
of putting, but only by the addition in thought of those relations,
to be placed in which forms just the prerogative which reality has
over cogitability.
The other general signification, which the expressions 'Position'
and 'putting' have assumed, illustrates the same state of the case.
We cannot affirm simply something, we can only affirm a proposition) jj
— not a subject, but only a predicate as belonging to a subject. Now'
it is psychologically very intelligible that from every act of affirmation
we should look for a result, which stands objectively and permanently
before thought, while all negation implies the opposite expectation,
that something will vanish which previously thus stood before it. It
is quite natural therefore that we should fall into the delusion of
imagining that in the purpose and good will to affirm there lies a
creative force, which if it is directed to no definite predicate but
exercised in abstraction would create that universal and pure Being
which underlies all determinate Being. In fact however the affirma
tion does not bring into Being the predicate which forms its object,
and it could just as well, though for psychological reasons not so
naturally, assert the not-Being of things as their Being. The Being
of things, therefore, which is in question, cannot be found in the
1 affirmation of them merely as such but only in the affirmation of
their Being. We are thus brought back to the necessity of first ^
determining the sense of this Being in order totiie presence of a •
possible object of the affirmation, and this determination we have, so
far at least, found no means of carrying out except by presupposition
of relations, in the reality of which the Being of that which is consists
in antithesis to the not-Being of that which is not.
11. There is a further reason for avoiding the expression which
I have just been examining. 'Position' and 'putting forth' are alike
according to their verbal form terms for actions1. Now it may seem
trifling, but I count it important all the same, to exercise a precaution
in the choice of philosophical expressions and not to employ words
which almost unavoidably carry with them an association which has a
disturbing influence on the treatment of the matter expressed. In the
case before us the prejudicial effects apprehended have not remained
in abeyance. It has not indeed been believed possible to achieve
a putting forth which should create Being : but there was always
associated with the application of the word the notion that it has been
by a corresponding act, from whomsoever proceeding, that this Being
so unaccountably presented to us has originated and that we then
1 [v. note on p. 32.]
VOL. I. D
34 Of the Being of Things. [BOOK i.
penetrate to its true idea when we repeat in thought this history of its
origin. We shall find the importance of this error, if we revert to the
reproach brought against the natural theory of the world. It is
j objected that in looking for the Being of every thing in its relations to
l other things, it leaves no unconditioned element of reality — none
that would not have others for its presupposition. If a can only
exist in relation to b, then, it is said, b must be there beforehand ;
if b exists only in relation to <r, then c must be its antecedent. And if
perchance there were a last element z dependent not on any further
elements but on the first a, this, it will be urged, would only make
still more apparent the untenability of a construction of reality which
after all has to make the being of a itself the presupposition of this
Being. But this whole embarrassment could only be incurred by one,
whose problem it was to make a world ; nor would he incur it, unless
a limitation on his mode of operation interfered with the making of
many things at the same time and compelled him to let an interval of
time elapse in passing from the establishment of the one element to
that of the other : for undoubtedly, if Being consists only in the reality
of relations, a could not stand by itself and therefore could not exist
till the creating hand had completed the condition of its being by the
after-creation of b. But what could justify us in importing into the
notion of this productive activity this habit of our own thinking faculty,
which does, it is true, in presenting relations to itself pass from one
point of relation to another ? Why should we not rather assume that
the things as well as the relations between them were made in a
single act, so that none of them needed to wait, as it were hung in
the air during a certain interval, for the supplementary fulfilment of the
conditions of its reality? We will not attempt however further to
depict a process, which cannot be held to be among the objects of
possible investigation. It is not our business to discover in what way
'/' the reality of things has been brought about, but only to show what it
is that it must be thought of and recognised as being when once in
some way that we cannot conceive it has come to be. We have not
to make a world but so to order our conceptions as that they may
correspond without contradiction to the state of the given world as
it stands. Such a contradiction we may be inclined to think is
involved in the thought of a creative ' Position,' which could only put
forth things that really are under the condition of their being mutually
related, yet on the other hand could only put them forth one after
the other. But there is no contradiction in the recognition of a
present world of reality, of which the collective elements are as a
\
CHAPTER i.j Meaning of 'irrevocable Position' 35
matter of fact so conditioned by the tension of mutual relatedness
that only in this can the meaning of their Being and its distinction ^
from not-Being be recognised.
12. The foregoing remarks contain an objection to the metaphysi
cal doctrine of Herbart, which requires some further explanation. It
need not be said that Herbart never entertained the unphilosophical
notion that the irrevocable 'position,' in which he found the true
Being of things, was an activity still to be exercised. He too looked
on it as a fact to be recognised. As to how the fact came to be so it
was in his eyes the more certain that nothing could be said as, being
unconditioned and unchangeable according to his understanding of
those terms, it excluded every question in regard to origin and source.
But a certain ambiguity seems to me to lie in the usage of this ex
pression of an irrevocable ' position.'
There are two demands which may no doubt be insisted on. In
the first place, assuming that we are in undoubted possession of the
true conception of Being, we should be bound to be on our guard in
its application against attaching it to qualities which on more exact
consideration would be found to contradict it. Nothing can then
compel us on this assumption to revoke the affirmation or ' position/
as an act performed by ourselves, by which we recognised the
presence in some particular case of that 'position,' not to be per
formed by us, in which true Being consists. If on the other hand
instead of being in possession of the correct conception of Being, we
are only just endeavouring to form it, intending at a later stage to look
about for cases of its application, in that case we have so to construct
it as to express completely what we meant, and necessarily meant, to
convey by it. Nothing therefore ought to be able to compel us again
to revoke the recognition that in the characteristics found by us there
is apprehended the true nature of that position which we have not to
make but to accept as the Being presented to us. Here are two sorts
of requirement or necessity, but in neither case have we to do with
anything except an obligation incumbent on our procedure in think
ing. The proposition — Being consists in so and so, and the proposi- /
tion — this is a case of Being, ought alike to be so formed as that we I
shall not have to revoke either as premature or incorrect. But as to /
the nature of Being itself nothing whatever is settled by either require
ment and it is not self-evident that the 'position' which constitutes
Being and which is not one that waits to be performed by us,
is in itself as irrevocable as our thoughts about it should be. The
common view of the world does not as a matter of fact, at least at the
D 2
36 Of the Being of Things. [BOOK i.
beginning, make this claim for Being. The fixedness of Being, which
it ascribes to things, only amounts to this, that they serve as relatively
persistent points on which phenomena fasten and from which occur
rences issue. But according to this view if once reason had been
found to say of a thing, ' It has been,' it would in spite of this revoca
tion of its further persistence still be held that, so long as it has been,
it -has had full enjoyment of the genuine and true Being, beside
which there is no other specifically different Being.
The question whether such a view is right or wrong I reserve for
the present. Herbart decided completely against it. True Being
according to him is only conceived with irrevocable correctness, if it
is apprehended as itself a wholly irrevocable ' position.' This necessary
requirement, however, with him involved the other — the requirement
that every relation of the one thing to another, which could be held
necessary to the Being of the Thing, should be excluded, and that
what we call the true Being should be found only in the pure ' position,'
void of relation, which we have not to exercise but to recognise. No
doubt it is our duty to seek such a cognition of the real as will not
have again to be given up. But. I cannot draw the deduction that
the object of that cognition must itself be permanent, and therefore
I cannot ascribe self-evident truth to this conviction of Herbart's.
It is a Metaphysical doctrine in regard to which I shall have more
frequent opportunity later on of expressing agreement and hesitation,
and which I would now only subject to consideration with reference
to the one point, with which we are specially occupied. In order to
preserve the connexion of our thoughts, I once again recall the point
that the conception of a pure, completely unrelated Being turned out
to be correctly formed indeed, but perfectly inapplicable. We were
able to accept it only as an expression or indication of that most
general affirmation, which is certainly present in every Being, and
distinguishes it from not-Being. But we maintained that it is never
merely by itself, but only as having definite relations for its object, that
this affirmation constitutes the Being of the real ; that thus pure Being
neither itself is, nor as naked 'Position' of an unrelated content forms the
reality of that content, nor is rightly entitled to the name of Being at all.
13. On the question how determinate or empirical Being issues
from pure Being, the earlier theories, which started from the indepen
dence of pure Being, pronounced in a merely figurative and incomplete
manner. The wished for clearness we find in Herbart. According to
his doctrine pure Being does not lie behind in a mythical past. Each
individual thing enjoys it continuously, for each thing is in virtue of a
CHAPTER i.] Her fyart on Being and Relations. 3 7
' position ' which is alien to all relations and needs them not. It is just
the complete indifference of things to all relations, and it alone, that
makes it possible for them to enter into various relations towards each
other, of which in consequence of this indifference none can in any
way add to or detract from the Being of the things. From this com
merce between them, which does not touch their essence, arises the
chequered variety of the course of the given world.
I cannot persuade myself that this is an admissible way of pre
senting the case. Granting that there really is such a thing as an
element a in the enjoyment of this unrelated 'Position' of being
unaffected by others and not reacting upon them, it does not indeed
contradict the conception of this Being that ideas of relation should
afterwards be connected with it. But in reality it is impossible for
that to enter into relations which was previously unrelated. For a
could not enter into relations in general. At each moment it could
only enter into the definite relation m towards the definite element £,
to the exclusion of every other relation /u towards the same element.
There must therefore be some reason in operation which in each
individual case allows and brings about the realisation only of m, not
that of a chance /*. But since a is indifferent towards every relation,
there cannot be contained in its own nature^either the reason for this
definite m, nor even the reason why it should enter into a relation,
that did not previously obtain, with b and not rather with c. That
which decided the point can therefore only be looked for in some
earlier relation /, which however indifferent it might be to a and <5, in
fact subsisted between them. If a and b had been persistently
confined each to its own pure Being, without as yet belonging at all A
to this empirical reality and its thousandfold order of relations, they
would never have issued from their ontological seclusion and been
wrought into the web of this universe. For this entry could only have
taken place into some region in space, at some point of time, and in
a direction somewhither ; and all this would imply a determinate
place outside the world, which the things must have left in a deter
minate direction. Therefore, while thus seemingly put outside the
world into the void of pure Being, the Things would have already
stood, not outside all relations to the world, but only in other and
looser relations instead of in the closer ones, which are supposed to
be established later. And just as it would be impossible for them to |
enter into relations if previously unrelated, so it would be -impossible
for them wholly to escape again from the web of relations in which
they had once become involved.
38 Of the Being of Things. [BOOK i.
It may indeed be urged with some plausibility that, since we take
the relations of things to be manifold and variable, Being can attach
to no single one of them, and therefore to none at all : that therefore
it cannot be Being which the Thing loses, if we suppose all its rela
tions successively to disappear. But this argument would only be a
repetition of the confusion between the constancy of a general idea
and the reality of its individual instances. Colour, for instance, is not
necessarily green or red, but it is no colour at all if it is none of these
different kinds. Were it conceivably possible that all relations of a
thing should disappear without in their disappearance giving rise to
new ones — a point of which I reserve the consideration — we could not
look upon this as the return of the thing into its pure Being, but only
as its lapse into nonentity. A transition, therefore, from a state of un-
relatedness into relation, or vice versa, is unintelligible to us. All that
is intelligible is a transition from one form of relation to another.
And an assumption which would find the true Being of Things in
their being put forth without relations, seems at the same time to make
the conception of these things unavailable for the Metaphysical ex
planation of the universe, while it was only to render such explanation
possible that the supposition that there are Things was made at all.
14. There is yet one way out of the difficulty to be considered. ' In
itself/ it may be said, * pure Being is foreign to all relations, and no
Thing, in order to be, has any need whatever of relations. But just
because everything is indifferent to them, there is nothing to prevent
the assumption that the entry of all things into relations has long
ago taken effect. No thing has been left actually to enjoy its pure
Being without these relations that are indifferent to it, and it is in this
shape of relatedness that the sum of things forms the basis of the
world's changeable course.' Or, to adopt what is surely a more
correct statement — ' It has not been at any particular time in the past
that this entry into relations has taken place, which, as we pointed
out, is unthinkable. Every thing has stood in relations from eternity.
None has ever enjoyed the pure Being which would have been possible
for its nature.' In this latter transformation, however, the thought
would essentially coincide with that which we alleged in opposition to
it. It would amount simply to this, that there might be a pure Being,
in which Things, isolated and each resting on itself, without any
mutual relation, would yet be ; that there is no such Being, however,
but in its stead only that manifoldly determined empirical Being, in
each several form of which pure Being is latently- present. Between
the view thus put and our own there would no longer be any
CHAPTER i.] Can Things enter into Relations ? 39
difference, except the first part of the statement, supposing it to be
adhered to. A Being, which might be but is not, would for us be no
Being at all. The conception of it would only purport to be that of a
possibility of thought, not the conception of that reality of which alone
Metaphysic professes to treat. We should certainly persist in denying
that this pure Being so much as could be elsewhere than in our
thoughts. We take the notion of such Being to be merely an abstrac
tion which in the process of thinking, and in it only, separates the
common affirmation of whatever is real from the particular forms of
reality, as applied to which alone the affirmation is itself a reality.
CHAPTER II.
Of the Qitality of Things.
15. ACCORDING to the natural theory of the world, as we have so
far followed it, the Being of Things is only to be found in the reality
\ of certain relations between one and another. There are two directions
therefore in which we are impelled to further enquiry. We may ask
in the first place, what is the peculiar nature of these relations, in the
affirmation of which Being is supposed to lie ? In that case its defi
nition would assign a number of conditions, which whatever is to be a
Thing must satisfy. We feel, secondly, with equal strength the need
(of trying to find first in the conception of the Thing the subject which
£would be capable of entering into the presupposed relations. The
order of these questions does not seem to me other than interchange
able, nor is it indeed possible to keep the answers to them entirely
apart. It may be taken as a pardonable liberty of treatment if I give
precedence to the second of the mutually implied forms of the problem.
It too admits of a double signification. For if we speak of the essence
of Things, we mean this expression to convey sometimes that by
which Things are distinguished and each is what it is, sometimes that
in virtue of which they all are Things in opposition to that which is
not a Thing. These two questions again are obviously very closely
connected, and it might seem that the mention of the first was for us
superfluous. For it cannot be the business of ontology to describe
the peculiar qualities by which the manifold Things that exist are really
distinguished from each other. It could only have to indicate generally
what that is on the possible varieties of which it may be possible for
distinctions of Things to rest. But this function it seems to fulfil in
investigating the common structure of that which constitutes a Thing
as such ; for this necessarily includes the idea and nature of that by
particularisation of which every individual Thing is able to be what it
is and to draw limits between itself and other Things. The sequel of
our discussion may however justify our procedure in allowing ourselves
Things as Subjects of Predicates. 41
to be driven to undertake an answer to this second question by a pre
liminary attempt at answering the first.
16. What the occasions may be which psychologically give rise in
us to the idea of the Thing, is a question by which the objects of our
present enquiry are wholly unaffected. The idea having once arisen, .
and it being impossible for us in our natural view of the world to get
rid of it, all that concerns us is to know what we mean by it, and.
whether we have reason, taking it as it is, for retaining it or for giving
it up. As we have seen, sensation is our only wammj for the
certainty that something is. It no doubt at the same time warrants
the certainty of our own Being as well as that of something other than
ourselves. It is necessary, however, in this preliminary consideration
to forget the reference to the feeling subject, just as the natural view
of the world at first forgets it likewise and loses itself completely in
the sensible qualities, of which the revelation before our eyes is at the
supposed stage of that view accepted by it as a self-evident fact. It is
only in sensation therefore that it can look, whether for the certainty
of there being something, or, beyond this, for the qualities of that
which is. Yet from its very earliest stage it is far from taking these
sensible qualities as identical with that which it regards as the true
Being in them. Not till a later stage of reflection is it attempted to
maintain that what we take to be the perception of a thing is never
more than a plurality of contemporary sensations, held together byjj i
nothing but the identity of the place at which they are presented toj\ ™
us, and the unity of our consciousness which binds them together i
its intuition. The natural theory of the world never so judges. Un
doubtedly it takes a thing to be sweet, red, and warm, but not to be
sweetness, redness, and warmth alone. Although it is in these sensible
qualities that we find all that we experience of its essence, still this
essence does not admit of being exhaustively analysed into them. In
order to convey what is in our minds when we predicate such qualities
of a Thing, the terms which connote them must, in grammatical
language, be construed into objects of that ' *>,' understood in a tran
sitive sense, which according to the usage of language is only intran- j
sitive. The other ways of putting the same proposition, such as ' the
thing tastes sweet,' or * it looks red/ help to show how in the midst
of these predicates, as their subject or their active point of departure,
the Thing is thought of and its unity not identified with their
multiplicity. This idea, however far it may be from being wrought
out into clear consciousness, in every case lies at the bottom of our
practical procedure where we act aggressively upon the external world,
42 Of the Quality of Things.
seeking to get a hold on things, to fashion them, to overcome their
resistance according to our purposes.
I need not dwell on the occasions — readily suggesting themselves
to the reader — which confirm us in this conception, while at the same
time they urgently demand a transformation of it which will make
good its defects. Such are the change in the properties in which the
nature of a determinate thing previously seemed to consist, and the
observation that none belongs to the thing absolutely, but each only
under conditions, with the removal of which it disappears. The more
necessary the distinction in consequence becomes between the thing
itself and its changeable modes of appearance, the more pressing
becomes the question, what it is that constitutes the thing itself, in
abstraction from its properties. But I do not propose to dwell on the
more obvious answers to this question any more than on the occa
sions which suggest it. Such are the statements that the Thing itself
is that which is permanent in the change of these properties, that it is
the uniting bond of their multiplicity, the fixed point to which changing
states attach themselves and from which effects issue. All this is no
doubt really involved in our ordinary conception of the Thing, but all
this tells us merely how the true Thing behaves, not what it is. All
that these propositions do is to formulate the functions obligatory on
that which claims to be recognised as a Thing. They do not state
i what we want to know, viz. what the Thing must be in order
I to be able to perform these required functions. I reserve here the
question whether and how far we may perhaps in the sequel be com
pelled, by lack of success in our attempts, to content ourselves with
this statement of postulates. The object of ontological thinking
is in the first instance to make the discovery on which the possi
bility of fulfilling the ontological problem depends — to discover the
nature of that to which the required unity, permanence, and stability
belong.
17. It is admitted that sensation is the single source from which
we not only derive assurance of the reality of some Being, but which
by the multiplicity of its distinguishable phenomena, homogeneous and
heterogeneous, first suggests and gives clearness to the idea of a par
ticular essence * which distinguishes itself from some other particular
essence. It is quite inevitable therefore that we should attempt to
think of the required essence 2 of things after the analogy of this sen
sible material, so far at any rate as is compatible with the simultaneous
1 [' Die Vorstellung eines Was, das von einem andern Was sich unterscheidet.']
2 ['Was.']
CHAPTER ii.] Herbart' s ' Simple Qualities' 43
problem of avoiding everything which would disqualify sensations for
adequately expressing this essence *.
This attempt has been resolutely made in the ontology of Herbaria
To insist on the mere unity, stability, and permanence of Things, was
a common-place with every philosophy which spoke of Things at all.
It was then left to the imagination to add in thought some content to
which these formal characteristics might be applicable. Herbart -
defines the content. A perfectly simple and positive quality, he holds,
is the essence of every single thing, i. e. of every single one among
those real essences, to the combinations of which in endless variety
we are compelled by a chain of thought, of which the reader can
easily supply the missing links, to reduce the seemingly independent
' Things ' of ordinary perception. Now if Herbart allows that these
simple qualities of Things remain completely unknown to us ; that
nothing comes to our knowledge but appearances flowing from them
as a remote consequence, then any advantage that might otherwise be
derived from his view would disappear unless we ventured to look for
it in this, that his unknown by being brought under the conception
and general character of quality would at least obtain an ontological
qualification, by which it would be distinguished from a mere postu
late, as being a concrete fulfilment of such postulate.
If however we try to interpret to ourselves what is gained by this
subordination, we must certainly confess that Quality in its proper
sense is presented to us exclusively in sensations, and in no other
instances. Everything else which in a looser way of speaking we so
call consists in determinate relations, which we gather up, it is true, in
adjectival expressions and treat as properties of their subjects, but of
which the proper sense can only be apprehended by a discursive
comparison of manifold related elements, not in an intuition. There
would be nothing in this, however, to prevent us from generalising
the conception of Quality in the manner at which, to meet Herbart's
view, we should have to aim. Our own senses offer us impressions
which do not admit of comparison. The colour we see is completely
heterogeneous to the sound we hear or the flavour we taste. Just as
with us, then, the sensations of the eye form a world of their own,
into which those of the ear have no entry, so we are prepared to hold
of the whole series of our senses that it is not a finished one, and to
ascribe to other spirits sensations which remain eternally unknown to
us, but of which, notwithstanding, we imagine that to those who are
capable of them they would exhibit themselves with the same
1 ['Wesen.']
44 Of the Quality of Things. t BOOK i.
character of being vividly and definitely pictured, with which to
us the sensations of colour, for instance, appear as revelations of
themselves.
It is always difficult in the case of the simplest ideas by the help of
words about them to represent the characteristic trait, scarcely ex
pressible but by the ideas themselves, in virtue of which they satisfy
certain strongly felt needs of thought. Still I trust to be sufficiently
intelligible if I find in the character, just mentioned, of being present
able as a mental picture or image immediately without the help of a
discursive process, the reason of our preference for apprehending
the essence of a thing under the form of a simple quality. Just as
the colour red stands before our consciousness, caring, so to speak, to
exhibit nothing but itself, pointing to nothing beyond itself as the
condition of its being understood, not constituting a demand that
something should exist which has still to be found out, but a complete
fulfilment ; so it is thought that the super-sensible Quality of the
Thing, simple and self-contained, would reveal its essence, not as
something still to be sought for further back, but as finally found and
present. And even when further reflection might be supposed to
have shaken our faith in the possibility of satisfying this craving for
an intuitive knowledge and limited us to laying down mere forms of
thinking which determine what the essence of things is not ; even
then we constantly revert to this longing for the immediate present-
ability of this essence, which after all can only be satisfied with the
likeness of the quaesitum to a sensible quality. We may have to
forego intuition ; but we feel its absence as an abiding imperfection of
our knowledge.
18. That the demand in question must really be abandoned is not
in dispute. Whatever eternal simple and super-sensible Quality We
may choose to think of as the essence of the Thing, it will be said
that, as a Quality, it always remains in need of a subject, -to which it
may belong. It may form a How, but not the What of the Thing. It
will be something which the Thing has, not which it is.
This objection, familiar as it is to us all, with the new relation which
it asserts between Subject and Quality, rests meanwhile on two
grounds of which the first does not suffice to render impossible - the
previously assumed identity of the Thing with its simple quality. In
our thought and in its verbal expression, the Qualities — red, sweet,
wrarm — appear as generalities, which await many more precise deter
minations, in the way of shade, of intensity, of extension, and of form,
from something which belongs to the nature of the individual case in
CHAPTER iL] A Quality need not be general. 45
which they are sensible, and thus not to the qualities themselves. We
thus present them to ourselves in an adjectival form, as not themselves
amounting to reality but as capable of being employed by the real,
which lies outside them, through special adjustment to clothe its
essence ; as a store of predicable materials, from which each thing
may choose those suitable to the expression of its peculiar nature.
Then of course the question is renewed as to the actual essence which
with this nature of its own lies behind this surface of Quality.
But we must be on our guard against repeating in this connexion a
question which in another form we have already disclaimed. We gave
up all pretension of being able to find out how things are made and
we confessed that the peculiar affirmation or • position,' by which the
real is eternally distinguishable from the thinkable, may indeed be
indicated by us — but that we cannot follow its construction as a
process that is taking place. But it is precisely this objection that
may now be brought up against us, that we are illegitimately attempt
ing to construe that idea of the Thing, which must comprehend the
simple supra-sensible Quality along with its reality, into the history of
a process by which the two constituent ideas which make up the idea
of the Thing — or rather the objects of these ideas — have come to
coincide. For if we maintain the above objection in its full force —
[the objection founded on the distinction between the Quality of the
Thing and the Thing itself] and refuse to keep reverting to the sup
position that some still more subtle quality constitutes the Thing
itself, while a quality of the kind just objected to merely serves as a
predicate of the Thing, the result will be that we shall have on the one
side a Quality still only generally conceived, unlimited, and unformed,
as it presents itself merely in thought and therefore still unreal ; on
the other side a ' position ' which is still without any content, a reality
which is as yet no one's reality. It would be a hopeless enterprise to
try to show how these two — such a quality and such a ' position ' —
combine, not in our thought to produce an idea of the Thing, but in
reality to produce the Thing itself.
This however was not what was meant by the view, which sought to
identify the essence of the Thing with its simple supra-sensible Quality.
It was emphatically not in the form of a still undetermined generality
— not as the redness or sweetness which we think of, but obviously
only in that complete determination, in which red or sweet can be the
object of an actually present sensation — it was only in this form that
the Quality, united with the ' position ' spoken of, was thought of as
identical with the essential Being (the TI e<m) of Things. It was not
46 Of the Quality of Things. t BOOK i.
supposed that there had ever been a process by which the realities
signified by these two constituent ideas had come to be united, or by
which the complete determinateness of the Quality as forming the
essential Being of the Thing, had been elaborated as a secondary
modification out of the previous indeterminateness of a general
Quality. It is true, that in our usage of terms there unavoidably
attaches to the word ' Quality' a notion of dependence, of its requiring
the support of a subject beyond it ; and it is this notion which occa
sions ' Quality ' to be treated as synonymous with the German
' Eigenschaft V But in truth this impression of its dependence issues
only from the general abstraction of Quality, which we form in
thought, and is improperly transferred to those completely determined
qualities, which form the content of real feelings and constitute the
occasions of these abstractions.
19. But, true as this defence of the view referred to may be, we
still gain nothing by it. Undoubtedly, if a quality in the complete
determinateness which we supposed, simple and unblended with any
thing else, formed an unchangeable object of our perception, we should
have no reason to look for anything else behind it, for a subject to
which it attached. But if we just now took this in the sense that this
quality might in that case pass directly for the Thing itself, we must
now subjoin the counter-remark that in that case, if nothing else were
given, we should have no occasion at all to form the conception of a
Thing and to identify that quality with it. For the impulse to form
the conception and the second of the reasons which forbid the identi
fication of the simple quality with the Thing, lie in the given change.
"he fact that those qualities which form the immediate objects of our
perception, neither persist without change nor change without a prin-
iciple of change, but always in their transition follow some law of
consecutiveness, has led to the attempt to think of the Thing as the
persistent subject of this change and of the felt qualities merely as
predicates of which one gives place to the other. Whether this
"attempt is justified at all — whether an entirely different interpretation
of the facts of experience ought not to be substituted for it — is a
question which we reserve as premature. For the present our business
is only to consider in what more definite form this assumption of
Things, in case it is to be retained, must be presented to thought, if
it is to render that service to our cognition for the sake of which it is
made; if, i.e., it is to make the fact of change thinkable without
contradiction.
1 [lit. • Property.']
CHAPTER ii.] The Thing and its ( states' 47
And in regard to this point I can only maintain that speculative philo
sophy, while trying to find a unity of essence under change, was wrong
in believing that this unity was to be found in a simplicity, which in
its nature is incapable of being a unity or of forming the persistent
essence of the changeable. Change of a thing is only to be found
where an essence a, which previously was in the state a1, remains
identical with itself while passing into the state a2. In this connexion I
still leave quite on one side the difficulties which lie in the conception,
apparently so simple, of a state. For the present it may suffice to
remark that we are obliged by the notion we attach to the term ' state '
to say not that the essence is identically like 1 itself, but only that it is
identical with itself, in its various states. For no one will deny that a,
if it finds itself in the state a1, cannot be taken to be exactly like a2,
without again cancelling the difference of the states, which has been
assumed. All that we gain by the distinction, however, is, to begin
with, two words. For the question still remains : In what sense can
that at different moments remain identical with itself, which yet in one
of these moments is not identically like itself as it was in the other ?-
It is scarcely necessary to remark how entirely unprofitable the
answers are which in the ordinary course of thought are commonly
given to this question; such as, The essence always remains the
same with itself, only the phenomenon changes ; the matter remains
the same, the form alters ; essential properties persist, but many un
essential ones come and go ; the Thing itself abides, only its states
are variable. All these expressions presuppose what we want to
know. We have here pairs of related points, of which one term cor
responds in each case to the Thing a, the other is one of its states
a1, a2. How can the first member a of these pairs be identical with
itself, if the several second members are not identical with each
other, and if, notwithstanding, the relation between the two members
of each pair is to be maintained, in the sense that the second member,
which is the Form, the Phenomenon, the State, is to be Form, Phe
nomenon, or State of the first member ?
So long as we are dealing with the compounded visible things of
1 ['Gleichheit,' used here, and in §§ 59 and 268, with a strict insistance on all
that is involved in its meaning of equality; viz. on the qualitative likeness, without
which comparison by measurement is impossible. Thus in the places referred to
the terms which are ' gleich ' are a and a, and neither ' equal ' nor ' like ' translates
'gleich' adequately; it includes both. 'Identity' was used in Logic, § 335 ff.,
but will not do here, because of the contrast with the continued identity, 'Identitat,'
imputed to a "
48 Of the Quality of Things. t BOOK i.
common perception, the pressure of this difficulty is but slight. In
such cases we look upon a connected plurality of Predicates pqr, as
the essence of a thing. This coherent stock may not only assume
and again cast off variable additions, s and /, but it may in itself by
the internal transposition of its components in qrp, rpq,prq, experience
something which we might call its own alteration in opposition to the
mere variation of those external relations. Or finally it may be the form
of combination that remains the same, while the elements themselves,
p q and r, vary within certain limits. In these cases the imagination
still finds the two sides of its object before it, and can ascribe to one
of them the identity1, to the other the difference2. What justifies it
in understanding the fluctuations of that which does not remain
exactly like itself as a series of states of the Identical, is a question
which is left to take care of itself. The difficulty involved in it comes
plainly into view if we pass from the apparent things of perception
to those which we might in truth regard as independent elements in
the order of the Universe, and we think of each of these as deter
mined by a simple quality, a. The simple, if it alters at all, alters
altogether, and in the transition from a to <5, there remains nothing
over to which the essence would withdraw, as to the kernel that
remains the same in the process of change. Only a succession, abc,
of different essences — one passing away, the other coming into
being — would be left, and with this disappearance of all conti
nuity between the different appearances there would disappear the
only reason which led us to regard them as resting on subject
Things.
20. This inference cannot be invalidated by an objection which
readily suggests itself and which I have here other reasons for
noticing. It is to the instance of sensations that we must constantly
revert, if we would explain to ourselves what supra-sensible Qualities
really mean to us when we combine them with sensations under the
common idea of Quality. Let us then take a simple Red colour, a,
in which we find no mixture with other colours, still less a combination
of other colours, as representing the manner in which the simple
quality, a, of an essence would appear to us, if it were perceivable by
the senses. It will then be argued as follow : If this Red passes into
an equally simple Yellow, there still undoubtedly remains a common
element, which we feel in both colours, though it is inseparable from
a and <5, the universal C of colour. Neither the redness in the red,
nor that which makes the yellow what it is, has any existence either in
1 [' Identitat.'] 3 [' Ungleichheit.']
CHAPTER ii.] The common element in sensations. 49
fact or in thought apart from the luminous appearance in which the
nature of colour consists, nor has this appearance any existence of its
own other than in the redness or yellowness. On the contrary its whole
nature shows itself now in one colour, now in the other. In the same
way the essence of the thing will now be the perfectly simple a, now
the equally simple b, without this implying a disappearance of the com
mon C, the presence of which entitles us to regard a and b merely as
its varying states or predicates. It would be idle to meet this argument
by saying that the common element C of colour is only a product of 1
our intellectual process of comparison ; nay, not even such a product, I
but merely the name for the demand, simply unrealisable, which we
make upon our intellect to possess itself of this common element
presumed to be present in red and yellow, in detachment from both
colours. For the fact, it might be replied, would still remain that we
should not make this impracticable demand, if it were not felt in the
perception of red and yellow, ' There is something there, which we
look for though we do not find it as anything perceivable or separate,
this common C, for which we have made the name colour.'
Now since we readily forego the pretension of apprehending the
essence of things in the way of actual intuition, and confine ourselves
to enquiring for the form of thought under which we have to conceive
its unknown nature, we might certainly continue to look upon the
comparison just stated as conveying the true image of the matter in
hand, i.e. the image of that relation, in which the simple essence
stands to its changeable states. We might at the same time regard
this analogy of our sensations as a proof of the fact that the demand
which we make upon the nature of things for an identity within the
difference does not, as such, transgress the limits of the actually
possible. In more detail the case might be put thus : What may be
the look of that persistent C, which maintains itself in the change of
the simple qualities of the Thing, of this it is true we have no know
ledge, and we as little expect to know it as we insist on seeing the
general colour C, which maintains itself in the transition from Red
to Yellow. The mere fact, however, that in order to render this
transition possible the continuous existence of this universal is not
merely demanded without evidence by our thought, but is immediately
testified to by sensation as plainly present though not separable from
particular sensible objects — this proves to us that the continuance of a
common element in a series of different and absolutely simple members
is at any rate something possible, and not a combination of words to
which no real instance could correspond.
VOL. r. E
50 Of the Quality of Things.
21. The above will, I hope, have made plain the meaning of this
rejoinder. I should wish ultimately to show that it is inapplicable,
but before I attempt this, I may be allowed to avail myself of it for
the purpose of more exactly defining certain points so as to save the
necessity of enlarged explanations further on. When in our com
parison we chose to pass from the simple quality red to another
equally simple, to point to yellow as this second quality seemed a
selection which might be made without hesitation. But sour or sweet
might equally have presented themselves. It was only the former
transition, however, (from red to yellow) which left something actually
in common between the different members ; while the second on the
contrary (from red to sweet) would have left no other community than
that which belongs to our subjective feeling as directed to those
members. Our selection therefore was natural, for we knew what
I the point was at which we wished to arrive and allowed ourselves to
/ be directed by this reference. The fact however that the other order
of procedure is one which we can equally present to ourselves reminds
us that the transition from one simple quality to another is not in
every case possible without loss of the common element C. This
however is no valid objection. It will be at once replied that in
speaking of change it has always been understood that its course was
thus limited to certain definite directions. No one who takes the
essence of a thing to admit of change can think of it as changeable
without measure and without principle. To do so would be again to
abolish the very reason that compelled us to assign the succession of
varying phenomena to a real subject in the Thing ; for that reason
lay merely in the consecutiveness with which definite transitions take
place while others remain excluded. The only sense therefore that
r has ever attached to the conception of change, the only sense in
\ which it will be the object of our further consideration, is that in
*y which it indicates transformations or movements of a thing within a
/ limited sphere of qualities. Beyond this will be another equally
v limited sphere of qualities, forming the range within which another
essence undergoes change, but it is understood that in change the
thing never passes over from one sphere into the other. As regards
the more precise definition of these spheres, our comparison with
colours can only serve as a figure or illustration. As colour shifts to
and fro from one of its hues to another, without ever approximating
to sounds or passing into them, it serves well as a sensible image of
that limitation of range which we have in view. But this does not
settle the question whether the various forms a1 a2 a3..., into which
CHAPTER ii.] Things must be changeable 5 1
the essence a might change now and again, are kinds of a common
C only in the same sense in which the colours are so, or whether
they are really connected with each other in some different form,
which logical subordination under the same generic idea does not
adequately symbolise.
22. It is time, however, to show the unsatisfactoriness of this
attempt to justify a belief in the capacity for change on the part of
a Thing, of which the essence was confined to a perfectly simple
Quality. If our imagination ranges through the multiplicity of sen
sible qualities, it finds certain groups of these within which it succeeds
in arresting a common element C, while beyond them it fails to do so.
This was the point of departure of our previous argument. Passing
from this consideration of an intellectual process to consideration of
the Thing, we said; 'z/"the essence of a thing changes, the limitation
within itself of such a sphere of states affords it the possibility of
completing its change within the sphere without loss of its abiding
nature C. Only if it passed beyond these limits would all continuity
disappear and a new essence take its place.' Very well ; but what
correspondence is there between these two ' if V which we allowed to
follow each other as if completely homogeneous ? The former refers
to a movement of our intellect. Meanwhile the object presented to the
intellect stands before it completely unmoved. The general colour,
of which we think, is not sometimes Red, sometimes Yellow, but is
always simultaneously present in each of these colours and in each of
the other hues, which we class together as equally external primary
species of colour. In the Thing, however, the supposed C cannot
be made so simply to stand towards the manifold a1 a2 a3 in the rela
tion of a universal kind to its species. Even were it the case that in
respect of their nature a1 a2 a3 admit of being regarded as species of C,
still, if the thing changes, they are not contained in it, as in a uni
versal C, with the eternal simultaneity of species that exist one along
with the other. They succeed each other, and the essence a, if it is
a1, for that reason excludes from itself a2 and a3. Thus it is just this
that remains to be asked, how that second z/~can be understood ; how^
we are to conceive the state of the case by which it comes about that
the thing moves — moves, if you like, within a circumscribed sphere of
qualities a1 a2 a3. . ., but still within it does move, and so passes from
one to the other of the qualities as that, being in the one, it excludes
the others ; how it is that it so moves while yet these qualities are the
species of a universal C, eternally simultaneous and only differing as
parts of a system. And, be it observed, we are at present not enquiring
£ 2
52 Of the Quality of Things.
for a cause which produces this motion, but only how the essence a is
to be thought of, in case the motion, takes place. This question we
\ || cannot answer without coming to the conclusion that the change is
not reconcilable with the assumption of a simple quality, constituting
this essence. At the moment when a has the form a1 and in conse
quence excludes the forms a2 and a3, it cannot without reservation be
identified with a C, which includes a1 a2 a3 equally in itself. It would
have to be Cl in order to be a1, C2 in order to be a2, and the same
course of changes which we wished to combine with a persistent
simple quality would find its way backwards into this quality itself.
23. I could not avoid the appearance of idle subtlety if I pursued
this course of thought without having shown that it is forced upon us.
Why, it will be asked, do we trouble ourselves, out of obstinate
partiality for the common view, to give a shape to the idea of the
Thing in which it may include the capacity of change ? Why do we
f not follow the enlightened view of men of science which finds no
\ difficulty in explaining the multiplicity of phenomena by the help of
/ changeable relations between unchangeable elements ? There is the
/ more reason for the question since this supposition not only forms
/ the basis of the actual procedure of natural science but is precisely
that for which Herbart has enforced respect on the part of every
V metaphysical enquirer.
Let us pursue it then in the definite form which this philosopher
has given to it. According to him, not only as a matter of fact do
elements, which undergo no change in the course of nature, underlie
phenomena, but according to their idea the real essences, the true
things which we have to substitute for the apparent things of percep
tion, are unchangeably identical with themselves, each resting on
itself, standing in need of no relation to each other in order to their
Being, but for that reason the more capable of entering into every
kind of relation to each other. Of their simple qualities we have no
knowledge, but undoubtedly we are entitled to think of them as
different from each other and even as opposed in various degrees
without being obliged in consequence to transfer any such predicates,
supposing them to be found by our comparison, to the qualities
themselves as belonging to their essence ; as if, that is, some of the
qualities were actively negated by others, and some were presupposed
by and because of others. This admission made, let us suppose that
two essences, A and B, come into that relation M to each other
which Herbart describes as their being together. I postpone my
remarks about the proper sense of this ' together.' All that we now
CHAPTER ii.] Herbarf s ' self -maintenance of Things! 53
know of it is that it is the condition under which what Herbart con
siders to be the indifference of essences towards each other ceases.
Supposing them then to be ' together] it might happen that A and B
without detriment to their simplicity might yet be representable by the
compound equivalent expressions a + y and /3 — y. In that case the
continuance of this state of being ' together ' would require the simul
taneous subsistence of +y and — y; i.e. the continuance of two
opposites, which if we put them together in thought, seem necessarily
to cancel each other. But they cannot really do so. Neither are the
simple essences A and B according to their nature accessible to a
change, nor are the opposite elements which our Thought, in its
comparing process, might distinguish in them, actually separable from
the rest, in combination with which they belong to two absolutely
simple and indivisible Qualities.
* But, if this be so, nothing happens at all and everything remains
as it is ! ' This is the exclamation which Herbart expects to hear,
but he adds that we only use such language because we are in full
sail for the abyss which should have been avoided. I must however
repeat it. What has taken place has been this. We, the thinkers,
have imagined that from the contact of opposites there arose some
dangerVor the continuance of the real essences.. We have then re
minded ourselves that their nature is inaccessible to this danger.
Thus it has been we who have maintained the conception of the real
essence in its integrity against the falsification which would have
invaded it in every attempt to account its object capable of being
affected by any disturbance from without. This has taken place in
our thought, but in the essence itself nothing has in fact happened.
The name of self-maintenance, which Herbart gives to this behaviour
on the part of the Things, can at this stage of his theory as yet mean
nothing but the completely undisturbed continuance of that which in
its nature is inaccessible to every disturbance that might threaten it.
An activity issuing from the essences, a function exercised by them,
it indicates as little as a real event which might occur to them. And
just for this reason the multiplicity of kinds and modes, in which
Herbart would have it that this self-maintenance takes effect, cannot
really exist for it. The undisturbed continuance is always the same,/
and except the variation of the external relations, through which the
so-called ' being together ' of the essences is brought about and again
annulled, nothing new whatever in consequence of this being 'to
gether ' happens in the universe.
24. Quite different from this sense of self-maintenance, which
54 Of the Quality of Things.
Herbart himself expressly allows in the Metaphysic, is that other
sense in which he applies the same conception in the Psychology.
Only the investigator of Nature could have satisfied himself with the
conclusion just referred to. For him the only concern is to ascertain
the external processes, on which for us the change in the qualita
tively different properties of things as a matter of fact depends. It
is no part of his task to enquire in what way these processes, sup
posing them to take place, bring it about that there is such a thing as
an appearance to us. If it is the belief of the students of Natural
Science that the theory, which regards all those processes as mere
changes in the relations of elements themselves unchangeable, is
adequate for its purpose — though in the sequel I shall have to deny
that according to this way of presenting the case any but an incom
plete view even of the course of external nature is possible — yet for
the present I am ready to allow that there may be apparent success
upon this method in the attempt to eliminate all changes on the part
of the real itself from the course of the outer world.
But this only renders the admission of change a yet more in
evitable necessity, if we bear in mind that the entire order of the
universe which forms the object of Metaphysical enquiry includes the
origin of the phenomenon in us no less than the external processes
which are its de facto conditions. Thus, if the physical investigator
explains the qualitative change of things as mere appearance, the
metaphysician has to consider how an appearance is possible. Her
bart is quite right — and I do not for the present trouble myself with
the reproaches which might be brought against this point of his
doctrine — in assuming the simple real essence of the soul as the in
dispensable subject, for which alone an appearance can arise.
Whereas in regard to no other real essence do we know in what
its self-maintenance consists, this, according to him, is clear in regard
to the soul. Each of its primary acts of self-maintenance, he holds,
has the form of an idea, i. e. of a simple sensation. Between these
aboriginal processes there take place a multitude of actions and
reactions, from which is supposed to result, in a manner which we
need not here pursue in detail, the varied whole of the inner life.
These acts of self-maintenance on the part of the soul, however — con
sisting at one time in a sensation, at another in the hearing of a
sound ; now in the perception of a flavour, now in that of warmth —
are manifestly no longer simple continuations of the imperturbable
essence of the soul. Taking a direction in kind and form according
to the kind and form of the threatening disturbance, they are func-
CHAPTER ii.] Change in the soul indispensable. 55
tions, activities, or reactions of the soul, which are not possible to an
unchangeable but only to a changeable Being. For it is not in a
merely threatened disturbance but only in one which has actually
taken effect that the ground can lie of the definite reaction, which
ensues at every moment to the exclusion of many others that, as far
as the nature of the soul goes, are equally possible for it. In order
to be able to meet the threatened disturbance a by an act of self-
maintenance a, the other disturbance b by another act £, the soul
must take some note of the fact that at the given moment it is a
and not b, or b and not a, that demands the exercise of its activity.
It must therefore itself suffer in both cases, and differently in one case
from the other. This change on its own part — I say change, for it
would be useless to seek to deny that various kinds of suffering are
inconceivable without various kinds of change on the part of the
subject suffering — cannot be replaced by the mere change in the
relations between the soul unchanged in itself, and other elements.
Any such relation would only be a fact for a second observer, which
might awaken in him the appearance of a change taking place in the
observed soul, which in reality does not take place : but even for this
observer the appearance could only arise, if he on his own part at
least actually possessed that capability of change which in the ob
served soul he holds to be a mere appearance.
It is therefore quite impossible entirely to banish the inner liability
to change on the part of the real from an explanation of the course
of the universe. If it were feasible to exclude it from a theory of the
outer world, it would belong the more inevitably to the essence of
that real Being, for which this outer world is an object of perception.
But, once admitted in this position, it cannot be a self-evident im
possibility for the real elements, which we regard as the vehicles of
natural operations. That, on the contrary, it is a necessity even for
these, we shall try to show later on.
Our consideration of the question, however, so far rests on a cer
tain supposition ; on the necessity, in order to render the fact of ,
appearance intelligible, of conceiving a simple real subject, the soul, j l
There is no need for me here to justify this assumption against the
objections which are specially directed against it. It is no object
of our enquiry, so far, to decide whether the conception of Things is
tenable at all; whether it does not require to be superseded by
another conception. I repeat ; it is only in case Things are to be
taken to exist and to serve to make the v/orld intelligible, that we
then enquire in what way they must be thought of. And to that
56 Of the Quality of Things.
question we have given the answer that Essence, Thing or Substance,
can only be that which admits of Change. Only the predicates of
Things are unchangeable. They vary indeed in their applicability to
Things, but each of them remains eternally the same with itself. It
is only the Things that change, as they admit of and reject now one
predicate, now another. This thought indeed is not new. It has
already been expressly stated by Aristotle. For us, however, it neces
sarily raises at once questions that are new.
CHAPTER III.
Of the Real and Reality.
25. THE changes which we see going on, and the consecutiveness •
which we believe to be discoverable in them, compelled us to assume
the existence of Things, as the sustainers or causes of this continuity. ;
The next step was, if possible, to ascend from that which needs ex-ja
planation to the unconditioned, in regard to which only recognition is •
possible. For this purpose we tried to think of the Thing as un
changeably the same with itself, and, impressed with the need of
assimilating the idea of it as much as possible to what is contained in
sensation, since sensation alone actually gives us an independent
something instead of merely requiring it, we took its nature to consist
in a simple quality. We convinced ourselves, however, that an un
changeable and simple quality is not thinkable as a subject of change
able states or appearances, and thus we are compelled to give up the
claim to any such immediate cognition as might reveal the essence of
Things to us in a simple perception. I do not mean to imply by
this that we should have hoped really to attain this perception. But
we indulged the thought that, for such a spirit as might be capable of
it, there would be nothing in the essence of Things incompatible
with their being thus apprehended. This conviction in its turn we
have now to abandon. In its very nature that which is to be a Thing
in the sense of being a subject of change would repel the possibility y
of being presented as an unmoving object of any intuition. A new /
form has therefore to be sought for that which is to be accounted the/
essence of any Thing; and in order to find it we again take our\
departure from that natural theory of the world which without doubt \
has tried answers of its own to all these questions that are constantly \
reasserting themselves with fresh insistance. J
26. In regard to the common objects of perception we answer the
question, What are they? in two ways, of which one soon reduces
itself to the other. Products of art, which exhibit a purpose on the
58 Of the Real and Reality. [BOOK i.
part of a maker, we denote by reference to the end for which they are
intended, setting aside the variety of forms in which they fulfil that
end. The changeable products of nature, in the structure of which a
governing purpose is more or less obscure to us, we characterise
according to the kind and order of phenomena into which they
develope of themselves or which could be elicited from them by
external conditions. In both cases by the essence of the thing
that we are in quest of we understand the properties and modes of
procedure, by which the Thing is distinguished from other things.
The other series of answers, on the contrary, exhibits as this essence
the material out of which the things are made, overlooking the various
kinds of behaviour and existence to which in the case of each thing
the particular formation of this material gives rise. Yet after all this
second mode of answering the question ultimately passes over into
the former. It satisfies only so long as it consists in a reduction of a
compound to more simple components. Supposing us to have dis
covered this simple matter, how then do we answer the question,
What after all is the simple matter itself? What for instance is the
Quicksilver, of which we will suppose ourselves to have discovered
that something else consists of it ? So long as our concern was to
reduce this other thing to it, it was taken for something simple. But
itself in its simplicity, what is it ? We find it fluid at our ordinary
temperatures, fixed at lower temperatures, vaporous at higher ones ;
but we could not say what it is in itself, supposing it not to be acted
on by any of these external conditions or by any of the other con
ditions, under which its phenomenal properties change in yet other
ways.
We can in fact only answer, that it is in itself the unassignable
something, which under one condition appears as a1, under another
as a2, under a third as a3, and of which we assume that, if these con
ditions succeed each other in reverse order, it will pass again from a3
into a2 and a1, without ever being converted into /31, /32 or /33 — forms
which in a like mutual connexion exhibit the various phenomena of
/"another thing, say Silver. Thus, it may be stated as a general truth,
/ that our idea of that which makes a Thing what it is consists only in
\ the thought of a certain regularity with which it changes to and fro
\ within a limited circle of states whether spontaneously or under
°j visible external conditions, without passing out of this circle, and
/ without ever having an existence on its own account and apart from
L/any one of the forms which within this circle it can assume. This
way of presenting the case, while fully sufficient for the needs of
CHAPTER III.] Marks dud L(lW. 59
ordinary judgment, has given occasion to various further metaphysical
experiments.
27. If attention is directed to the qualities by which one Thing
distinguishes itself from another, its essence in this sense cannot any
longer be thought of as object of a simple perception, but only in the
logical form of a conception, which expresses the permanently uni
form observance of law in the succession of various states or in the
combination of manifold predicates. From this point a very natural
course of thought leads us to two ways of apprehending the Thing.
We may define it first by the collective marks, which at a given mo
ment it exhibits, in their de facto condition. This gives us a state
ment of what the essence is, TO ri eon according to Aristotle's ex
pression. But it would be conceivable that, like two curves which
have an infinitely small part of their course in common, so two
different things, A and B, should coincide in the momentary con
dition of their marks, but should afterwards diverge into paths of
development as different as were the paths that brought them to the
state of coincidence. In that case the essence of each will be held
only to be correctly apprehended, if the given condition of each is
interpreted as the result of that which it previously was, and at the
same time as the germ of that which it will be. This seems the
natural point of departure from which Aristotle arrived at the for
mula TI TIV clvai. He did not complete it by the other equally valuable
T/ eVrai dvai, though the notion that might have been so expressed
was not alien to his way of thinking. In practice, it must be ad
mitted, these determinations of the idea of the Thing, which theoreti
cally are of interest, cannot be carried through. Even the actual
present condition of a Thing would not admit of exhaustive analysis,
without our thinking of the mutual connexion between the manifold
phenomena which it exhibits, as already specifically ordered according
to the same law which would appear still more plainly upon a con
sideration of the various states, past and to be expected, of the
Thing. The second formula therefore only gives general expression
to the intention of constantly gaining a deeper view of the essence of
the Things, in a progression which admits of indefinite continuance,
while a fuller regard is for ever being paid to the multiplicity of the
different ways, in which the Thing behaves under different conditions,
to its connexion with the rest of the world, and lastly — according
to a direction of enquiry very natural, though still out of place in this
part of Metaphysics — to the final purpose of which the fulfilment is
the Thing's vocation in the universe. As a means of setting aside the
60 Of the Real and Reality. [ BOOK i.
difficulties, which beset us at this point, the expressions referred to
have not in fact been used, nor do they seem at all available for the
purpose.
28. We proceed to particularise some of these. Had we succeeded
in making the essential idea of a thing so completely our own, that
all modes of procedure of the thing under all conditions would flow
from the idea self-evidently as its necessary consequences, we
\ should after all in so doing have only attained an intellectual image
of that by which as by its essentia the Thing is distinguished from
everything else. The old question would repeat itself, what it is
which makes the thing itself more than this its image in thought, or
what makes the object of our idea of the thing more than thinkable,
and gives it a place as a real thing in the world. Just as the Quality
demanded a Subject to which it might attach, so still more does the
idea, less independent than the quality, seem to require a fixed kernel
to give its matter that reality which, as the material contained in an
idea, it does not possess. If we have once forbidden ourselves to
look for the essence of the Thing in a simple uniform quality that
may be grasped in perception ; if we resolved rather to find an ex
pression for it in the law which governs the succession of its pheno
mena ; then that which we are in quest of has to fulfil for all things
the same indistinguishable function. Itself without constituent quali
ties it has to give reality to the varying qualities constituent of things.
We are thus brought to the notion of a material of reality, a Real
pure and simple, which in itself is neither this nor that, but the prin
ciple of reality for everything.
The history of Philosophy might recount numerous forms under
which this notion has been renewed ; but it is needless to treat them
here in detail. The natural requirements of the case have always led,
when once this path has been entered on, to the same general deter
minations as Plato assigned to this vXrj. The consideration that ob
servation presents us with an indefinite number of mutually independent
Things, permanent or transitory, caused this primary matter of all
things to be regarded by the imagination as divisible, in order that
there might be a piece of it in each single thing, sufficient to stiffen
the thing's ideal content into reality. But this conception of divisi
bility in its turn had to be to a certain extent withdrawn. For it would
imply that before its division the matter has possessed a continuity,
and this would be unthinkable without the assumption of its having
properties of some kind, by which it would have been possible for
this material of reality to be distinguished from other thinkable mate-
CHAPTER in.] Matter as the Real. 61
rials. But thus understood, as already definitely qualified, it would
not have disposed of the metaphysical question which it was meant to
solve. For the question was not, what quality of primary matter as a ,
matter-of-fact formed the basis of the individual things that fashion
themselves out of it, but what it is that is needed to help any and
every thinkable quality to be more than thinkable, to be real. If!
therefore the imagination did notwithstanding, as we do not doubt
that it did, present this ultimate Real to itself mainly as a continuous
and divisible substance, this delineation of it, occasioned by reference
to the observation of natural objects, strictly speaking went beyond
that which in this connexion it was intended to 'postulate. All that
had to be supposed was the presence in every single thing, however
many things there might be, of such a kernel of reality, wholly void
of properties. There were therefore according to this notion an
indefinite number of instances of this conception of the real, but they
did not stand in any connexion with each other any more than in any
other case many instances of a general idea, merely because they are
all subordinate to that idea, stand in any actual connexion with each
other. But I will not continue this line of remark ; for the obscurity
of this whole conception is not to be got rid of by criticism, but
by pointing out its entire uselessness.
29. It is manifest that a representation which has its value in the,
treatment of ordinary objects of experience, has been applied to a ^
metaphysical question, which it is wholly insufficient to answer. In
sensuous perception we are presented with materials, which assume
under our hands such forms as we will, or are transformed by ope
rations of nature into things of the most various appearance. But
a little attention informs us that they are but relatively formless and
undetermined. The possibility of assuming new forms and of manifold
transmutation they all owe to the perfectly determinate properties
which they possess, and by which they offer definite points of contact
to the conditions operating on them. The wax, which to the ancients
represented the primary matter on which the ideas were supposed to
be impressed in order to their realisation, would not take this im
pression, and would not retain the form impressed on it but for the
peculiar unelastic ductility and the cohesion of its minute parts, and
any finer material which we might be inclined to substitute for it,
though it might possess a still more many-sided plasticity, would at
the same time be still less capable of preserving the form communi
cated to it.
It is therefore a complete delusion to hope by this way of ascent b
62 Of the Real and Reality. [BOOK i.
\to arrive at something which, without any qualification on its own
/part, should still bear this character of pure receptivity, necessary to
) the Real we are in quest of. After all we should only arrive at a
barren matter R, which would be equally incapable of receiving a
definite shape, and of duly retaining it when received. For that which
was without any nature of its own different from everything else, could
not be acted on by any condition p at all, nor by any condition p
otherwise than by another q. No position of circumstances therefore
would ever occur under which that indeterminate subject R could be
any more compelled or entitled to assume a certain form TT rather
than any other we like, K. If we supposed however this unthinkable
event to come about and R to be brought into the form TT, there would
be nothing to move it to the retention of this form to the exclusion of
any other, K, since every other would be equally possible and equally
indifferent to it. In this absence of any resistance, which could only
rest on some nature of R's own, every possibility of an ordered course
of the world would disappear. In every moment of time everything
that was thinkable at all would have an equal claim to reality, and
there would be none of that predominance of one condition over
another which is indispensable to account for any one state of things
or to bring about a determinate change of any state of things. But
not only would any origin or preservation of individual forms be re
duced to nothing by the complete absence of qualities on the part of
the Real. The relation itself, which at each moment must be sup
posed to obtain between it and the content to which it gives reality,
would from a metaphysical point of view be unmeaning. Words no
doubt may be found by which to indicate it metaphorically. We
speak of the properties which constitute the whole essence of a Thing,
as inhering in the unqualified substance of the Real, or as attaching
to it, or as sustained by it. But all these figurative expressions with
the use of which language cannot dispense, are in contradiction with
the presupposed emptiness and formlessness of the matter. Nothing
can sustain anything, or allow it to attach to or depend upon itself,
which does not by its own form and powers afford this other points
of contact and support. Or, to speak without a figure, it is impos
sible to see what inner relation could be meant, if we ascribed to a
certain Real a property n or a group of properties TT as its own.
R would be as void of relation to the property or group of properties,
as alien to it, as any other R 1.
30. These shortcomings on the part of the conception of the Real
would make themselves acutely felt as soon as an attempt was made,
CHAPTER in.] Matter by itself is nothing. 63
not merely to set it up in isolated abstraction, but to turn it to account
for the actual explanation of the course of things. It would then
become evident that nothing could be built on it which had any
likeness to a Static or Mechanic of change. But it will be objected
that we are fighting here against ghosts raised by ourselves, so long
as we speak of processes by which the connexion of the real with the
qualities it contains is supposed for the first time to have crfme about.
This, however, it will be said, is what has never been meant. Even
the ancients, who originated the conception of matter in question, we
find were aware that at no place or time did the naked and unformed
matter exist by itself. It had existed from eternity in union with the
Forms, by means of which the different Things, now this, now that,
had been fashioned out of it. In the plainest way it was stated that,
taken by itself, it was rather without being, a ^ w, and that Being
first arose out of its indefeasible union with the qualitative content
supplied by the Ideas. This may be fairly urged, and in this ex
planation we might perfectly acquiesce, if it were one that really
admitted of being taken at its word. If it were so taken, it would
amount simply to a confession that what the theory understood and
looked for under the designation of the Real is nothing more than
the * Position,' throughout inseparable from the constituent qualities
of Being, by which these qualities not merely are thought of but are ;
and that consequently it would be improper for this ' Position/ which
only in thought can be detached as the uniform mode of putting
forth from that which is put forth by it, to be regarded in a sub
stantive character as itself a something, a Real, the truly existing
Thing ; improper that, compared with it, everything which on other
grounds we took to form the essence of the Thing, should be forced
into the secondary position of an unessential appendage.
The doctrines, however, which speak of the real material of Being,
are far from conveying this unreserved admission even in the ex
planation adduced. On the contrary, they continue to interpret the
distinction between the principle that gives reality and the real itself
as if it represented something actual. When they ascribe to the
matter, which has no independent existence, successive changes of
form, they do not merely mean by this that the inexplicable ' Position '
passes from the content IT to the other content K. In that case all
that would be attained would be a succession, regulated or unregu
lated, of states of fact without inner connexion. Their object rather
is to be able to treat the matter R as the really permanent connecting
member which experiences TT and *, or exchanges the one for the
64 Of the Real and Reality. \ BOOK i.
other, as states of itself, and which, in virtue of its own nature, forbids
the assumption of other phenomena </> and \^, or the realisation of
another order of succession. Without this last addition the conception
of the Real R would not, upon this view any more than upon other,
have any value. For I repeat, it is only under the obligation of ex
plaining a particular consecutiveness in the course of the world,
which does not allow any and every thinkable variation in the
state of facts, that we are constrained, instead of resting in the
phenomena, to look for something behind them under the name
of the Real, however that is to be conceived. A flux of absolute
becoming without any principle, once allowed, demands no explana
tion and needs no assumption to be made which could lead to such an
explanation, intrinsically impossible, as the one given. The doctrines
in question, therefore, under the guidance of this natural need which
they think to satisfy by the supposition of the Real pure and simple,
do not in fact make the admission which they seem to make. Al
though their ' matter ' R nowhere exists in its nakedness, this is, so to
speak, only a fact in the world's history, which need not follow from
the idea of R. Although as a matter of fact everywhere imprisoned
in variously qualified forms, still in all those forms R continues to
exist as the single self-subsistent independent Being and imparts its
own reality to the content which changes in dependence on it. Thus
the matter, considered by itself and in detachment from the forms in
which it appears, is still not properly, as it is called, a ^ 6v, but
according to the proper sense even of the doctrines which so designate
it, merely an OVK ov, if weight may be laid on the selection of these
expressions. And against this permanent residuum of the doctrine of
the vXr; the objections already made retain their force. It is impossible
to transfer the responsibility of providing for the reality of the deter
minate content to a Real without content, understood in a substantive
sense, for none of the connecting thoughts are possible which would
be needed in order to bring this Real into the desired relation with
the qualities assigned to it.
31. I cannot therefore believe that interpreters, as they went deeper
into this ancient notion of an empty Real as such, of an existing
nothing which yet purports to be the ground of reality to all definite
Being, would find in it a proportionately deeper truth. To us it is
only an example of an error of thought, which is made too often and
too easily not to deserve an often-repeated notice. If we ask whence
the colour of a body proceeds, we usually think at first of a pigment
which we suppose to communicate the colour to it. And in this we
CHAPTER in.] The communication of Reality. 65
are often right ; for in compound things it may easily be that a pro
perty, which seems to be spread over the whole of them, attaches
only to a single constituent. But we are wrong already in as far as
our phrase implies that the pigment communicates its colour to the
whole body. Nothing of the sort really happens, but a combination
of physical effects brings it about that in our sensation the impression
of colour produced by the pigment completely disguises the other
impression, which would have been produced by the other constituents
of the body, that have throughout remained colourless. But when we
repeat our question, it appears that the same answer cannot always
be repeated. The pigment cannot owe its colour to a new pigment.
Sooner or later the colouring must be admitted as the immediate
result of the properties which a body possesses on its own account
as its proper nature, and does not borrow from anything else.
Our procedure has been just the same with reference to the things
and their reality. We desired to know whence their common pro
perty of reality is derived, and in imagination introduced into each of
them a grain of the stuff of reality which we supposed to communi
cate to the properties gathered about it the fixedness and consistency
of a Thing. What actual behaviour, however, or what process this
expression of ' communication ' so easily used, is to signify, remained
more than we could say. In fact, just as little as a pigment would
really convey its colouring to anything else, could the mere presence
of the Real convey the reality, which is emphatically held to be
peculiar to it, to an essence in the way of qualities, which, we are to
suppose, have somehow grouped themselves around it. Indeed, the
metaphysical representation is in much worse case than that which
we made use of in the example just instanced. For of the pigment
we did not dream that it was itself not merely colourless, but in its
nature completely indifferent to the various colours that may be
thought of, and that it proceeded to assume one of them as if the
colours, before they were properties of a thing, already possessed a
reality which enabled them to enter into a relation to bodies and to
let themselves be assumed by bodies. In this case we were aware
that the Redness, which we ascribe to the pigment, is the immediate
result of its own nature under definite circumstances ; that it could
not exist, that nothing could have it, until these circumstances acted
on this nature, and that it would change if the body, instead of being
what it is, were another equally determinate body. But in our meta
physical language, when we spoke of the properties in opposition to
the real essence of things, we in fact spoke as if the thinkable quali-
VOL. i. F
66 Of the Real and Reality. [BOOK i.
ties, by which one thing is distinguished from another, before they
really existed as qualities of a Thing might already possess a reality
which should enable them to enter into a definite relation to an empty
Real — a relation by which, without having any foundation more than
all other qualities in the nature of this Real, it was possible for them
to become its properties.
I leave this comparison, however, to be pursued on another occa
sion. Apart from figure, our mistake was this. We demanded to
know what it is on which that Being of Things which makes them
Things rests. By way of answer we invented the Substantive con
ception of the Real pure and simple, and believed that by it we had
represented a real object, or rather the ultimate Real itself. In fact
however real is an adjectival or predicative conception, a title belong^
ing to everything that in some manner .not yet explained behaves as a
Thing — changes, that is to say, in a regular order, remains identical
with itself in its various states, acts and suffers ; for it is this that we
assumed to be the case with Things, supposing that there are Things.
The question was, on what ground this actual behaviour rests. It is
a question that cannot be settled by thinking of our whole require
ment as satisfied in general by the assumption of a Real as such, of
which after all, as has been shown, we could not point out how in
each single case it explains the reality which itself is never presented
to us as universal and homogeneous, but only as a sum of innumer
able different individual cases.
The conception of the Real therefore is liable to a criticism similar
to though somewhat different from that which is called for by the con
ception of pure Being. This latter we found correctly formed, but
inapplicable, so long as the definite relations are not made good
again, which had been suppressed in it by the process of abstraction.
, Of the conception of the Real on the contrary it may be maintained
that it is untruly formed. That which is conceived in this conception
everywhere presupposes the subject to which it may belong, and
cannot itself be subject. For this reason it cannot be spoken of in
substantive form as the Real, but only applied adjectivally to all that
; is real. It would be well if the usage of language favoured this way
of speaking, more lengthy though it is, in order to keep the thought
constantly alive that it is not through the presence of a Real in them
that Things become or are real, but that primarily they are only called
x real if they exhibit that mode of behaviour which we denominate
reality. In regard to this we have stated what we mean by it. The
mode under which it may be thinkable has still to be ascertained.
CHAPTER in.] The Thing as a Law. 67
32. With a view to answering the above question we are naturally ^
led to the opposite path to that hitherto pursued. Let us see how \
far it will take us. The two incomplete ideas, by the union of which
we form the conception of the Thing — that of the content by which it
is distinguished from other things and that of its reality — cannot be any
longer taken to represent two actually separable elements of its Being.
The Reality must simply be the form in which the content actually exists,
and can be nothing apart from it. But the requirement that this should
be so meets at once with a serious objection. So long as we could
answer the question What the Thing is by calling it a simple quality, we
had a uniform content, apprehensible in intuition, before us, to which
it seemed, to begin with at least, that the ' Position ' of reality might
be applied without contradiction. We have now decided that this
essence is only to be found in a law, according to which the changeable
states, properties or phenomena, a1 a2 a3 of the thing, are connected
with each other. But how could a law be that which, if simply endowed
with reality, would constitute a thing ? How could it be gifted with
those modes of behaviour which we demand of whatever claims to be
a Thing ?
This question involves real difficulty, but it also expresses doubts
which merely arise from a scarcely avoidable imperfection in our
linguistic usage. The first of these doubts is analogous to that
which we raised against the simple Quality as essence of the Thing,
and which we found to have no justification. As long as we thought
of the Quality in the way presented to us in language by adjectives,
as a generality abstracted from many instances, distinct indeed from
other qualities but undetermined in respect of intensity, extent and
limitation ; . so long it could not be accepted as the essence of a
Thing. After all the determinateness still lacking to it had been made
good, it might have been so accepted, if the necessary requirement of v
capability of change had not prevented this. In like manner the con
ception of law is at the outset understood in a similar general sense.
Abstracted from a comparison between the modes of behaviour of
different things, it represents primarily the rule, according to which
from a definite general class of conditions a definite class of results
is derived. The rule indeed is such that there is a permanent propor
tion according to which definite changes in the results correspond to
definite changes in the conditions ; but the cases in which the law will
hold good, and the determined values of the conditions which give rise
in each of these cases to equally determined values on the part of
the effects— these are not contained in the law itself or contained in
F 2
68 Of the Real and Reality. [BOOK i.
it only as possibilities which are thought of along with it, but of
\vhich it asserts none as a fact. In this shape a law cannot be that of
which the immediate reality, even if it were thinkable, would form a
Thing. But this is not what is meant by the theories which employ
such an expression [which identify thing and law]. What they have in
["view, to put it shortly, is no£ a general law but an instance of its
application. This latter expression, however, needs further explana
tion and limitation.
33. If in the ordinary general expression of a law. for all quantities
left indefinite, we substitute definite values, it is not our habit, it is
true, to call the individual instance thus obtained any longer a law at
all, because unless we revert to the general form of which it is an
application it is no longer fitted to serve as a ground of judgment
upon other like cases, and this assistance in reasoning is the chief
service which in ordinary thinking we expect from a law. Intrin
sically, however, there is no such real difference between the in
dividual instance and the universal as would forbid us from sub
suming the former under the name of Law. On the contrary, it is
itself what it is in respect of its whole nature only in consequence of
the law, and conversely the law has no other reality but in the case of
its application. It is therefore a legitimate extension of the usage of
terms, if we apply the name of a law to the definite state of facts
itself, which includes a plurality of relations between elements which
are combined according to the dictates of the general law. It may
be the general law of a series of quantities that each sequent member
is the wth power of the preceding one. It is not, however, in this
general form that the law forms a series. We have no series
till we introduce in place of n a definite value, and at the same
time to give to some one of the members, say the first, a definite
quantitative value. Applying this to our present case, the general law
would correspond only to the abstract conception of a Thing as such;
the actual series on the other hand, which this laws governs, to the
conception of some individual Thing. And it is only in this latter
sense as corresponding to the actual series that it can be intended to
represent a law as being the essence to which ' Position ' as a Thing
belongs.
Upon this illustration two remarks have to be added. In our
parallel the definite series appears as an example of a general law,
of which innumerable other examples are equally possible. It may
turn out in the sequel that this thought has an equally necessary place
in the metaphysical treatment of things ; but at this point it is still
CHAPTER in.] A law need not be general. 69
foreign to our enquiry. It does not belong to that essence of a thing
of which we are here in quest, that the law which orders its content should
apply also to the content of other things. On the contrary, it is
completely individual and single of its kind, distinguishing this thing
from all other things. On this point we are often in error, misled by
the universal tendency to construct reality out of the abstractions,
which the reality itself has alone enabled us to form. The course,
which investigation cannot avoid taking, thoroughly accustoms us to
look on general laws as the Pn'us, to which the manifold facts of the
real world must afterwards, as a matter of course, subordinate them
selves as instances. We might, however, easily remind ourselves that
as a matter of fact all general laws arise in our minds from the com
parison of individual cases. These are the real Prius, and the I
general law which we develope from them is primarily only a product l
of our thought. Its validity in reference to many cases is established
by the experiences from the comparison of which it has arisen, and
is established just so far as these confirm it. Had our comparison,
instead of being between one thing and other things, been a com
parison of a thing with itself in various states — and that is the sort
of comparison to which alone our present course of enquiry would
properly lead — then it would by no means have been self-evident that
the consecutiveness and conformity to law, which we had found to
obtain between the successive states of the one thing, must be trans
ferable to the relations between any other elements whatever they
might be, and thus to the states and nature of another thing. We
should have no right therefore to regard the essence of the Thing as
an instance of a universal law to which it was subject. At the same
time it is obvious that this law of the succession of states in a single
thing, wholly individual as it is, if it were apprehended in thought,
would continue logically to present itself to us as an idea, of which
there might be many precisely similar copies. It is quite possible to
attempt to make plurals even of the idea of the universe and of the
supreme Being. It is considerations in a different region, not logical
but material, that alone exclude the possibility of there being such
plurals; and it is these alone which in our Metaphysic can in the
sequel decide for or against the multiplicity of precisely similar things,
for or against the validity of universal laws which they have to obey.
To make my meaning clearer, I will supplement the previous illus
tration of a numerical series by another. We may compare the
essence of a thing to a melody. It is not disputed that the successive
sounds of a melody are governed by a law of aesthetic consecutive-
70 Of the Real and Reality. [Booic i.
ness, but this law is at the same lime recognised as one perfectly
individual. There is no sense in regarding a particular melody as a
kind, or instance of the application, of a general melody. Leaving
to the reader's reflection the task, which might be a long one, of
making good the shortcomings from which this illustration, like the
previous one, suffers, I proceed to the second supplementary remark
\vhich I have to make.
If we develope a general law from the comparison of different
things under different circumstances, two points are left undeter
mined—one, the specific nature of the things, the other, the par
ticular character of the conditions under which the things will behave
in one way or in another. Let both points be determined, and we
arrive at that result, identical with itself and unchangeable, which we
represented by comparison with a definite series of quantities, but
\ which cannot answer our purpose— the purpose of apprehending that
I essence of the Thing which remains uniform in change. We have
^ therefore, as already remarked, only to carry out the comparison of a
thing with itself in its various states. The consecutiveness and con
formity to law, that would thus appear, would be the individual-law or
essence of the Thing in opposition to the changeable conditions that
have now to be left undetermined. One more misunderstanding I
should like to get rid of in conclusion. It is no part of our present
question whether and how this comparison and the discovery of the
abiding law is possible for us with reference to any particular thing.
j Our problem merely is to find the form of thought in which its
} essence could be adequately apprehended supposing there to be no
' hindrance in the nature of our cognition and in its position towards
Things to the performance of the process. The same reserve is made
by every other metaphysical view. Even the man who looks for the
essence of the Thing in a simple Quality does not expect to know
that Quality and therefore satisfies himself with establishing the
general form in which it would appear to him, but denies himself
the prospect of ever looking on this appearance.
34. So much for those objections to the notion of a law as con
stituting the essence of the Thing, which admit of being set aside by
an explanation of our meaning. In fact, if we thought of the
Position' which conveys reality as lighting upon this individual law,
it would form just that permanent yet changeable essence1 of a Thing
which we are in search of. The reader, however, will find little satis
faction in all this. The question keeps recurring whether after all
1 [' Das bestandige und dennoch veranderliche Was.']
CHAPTER III.]
Conformity to Law. 71
that 'Position' of reality, applied to this content, can in fact ex
haustively constitute the essence of a real Thing ; whether we have
not constantly to search afresh for the something which, while fol
lowing this law, would convey to it — convey to what is in itself a
merely thinkable mode of procedure— reality ? In presence of this
constantly recurring doubt I have no course but to repeat the answer
which I believe to be certainly true. Let us, in the first place, recall
the fact that in what we are now asking for there is something in
trinsically unthinkable. We are not satisfied with the doctrine that
the Thing is an individual law. We believe that we gain something
by assuming of it that in its own nature it is something more and
other than this, and that its conformity to this law, by which it dis
tinguishes itself from everything else, is merely its mode of procedure.
Can we however form any notion of what constitutes the process
which we indicate by this familiar name of conformity to law? If
this nucleus of reality, which we deem it necessary to seek for, pos
sessed a definite nature, alien to that which the law enjoins, how
could it nevertheless come to adjust itself to the law ? And if we
would assume that there are sundry conditions of which the operation
upon it might compel it to such obedience, would this compulsion be
itself intelligible, unless its own nature gave it the law that upon these
conditions supervening it should obey that other law supposed to be
quite alien to its nature ? In any case that which we call conformity
to law on the part of a Thing would be nothing else than the proper
being and behaviour of the Thing itself. On the other side : What
exactly are we to take the laws to be before they are conformed to ?
What sort of reality, other than that of the Things, could belong to
them, such as they must certainly have if it is to be possible for a
nature of Things, assumed hitherto to lie beyond them, to adjust
itself to them ? There is only one answer possible to these questions.
It is not the case that the things follow a mode of procedure which . p
would in any possible form be actually separable from them. Their ^
procedure is whatever it may be, and by it they yield the result which
we afterwards, upon reflective comparison, conceive as their mode of
procedure and thereupon endow in our thought with priority to the
Things themselves, as if it were the pattern after which they had
guided themselves. If we would avoid this conclusion by denying to
the required nucleus of the Thing any nature of its own, we should
be brought back to that conception of the absolute Real, R, which
we have already found so useless. Even if this real Nothing were
itself thinkable, it would certainly not be capable of distributing the
72 Of the Real and Reality. [BOOK i.
reality, which it is supposed to have of its own, over the content
which forms the essence of a determinate Thing. It could not there
fore represent our quaesitum, the something of which we require a
so-called conformity to a determinate mode of procedure. There is
therefore, it is clear, nothing left for us but to attempt to defend the
- proposition, that the real Thing is nothing but the realised individual
law of its procedure.
35. I shall be less wearisome if I connect my further reflections on
the subject with an historical antithesis of theories. Idealism and
Realism have always been looked upon as two opposite poles of the
movement of philosophical thought, each having different though
closely connected significations, according as the enquiry into what
really is, or the reference to that which is to be valued and striven
after in life, was the more prominent. The opposition was in the
first instance occasioned by the question which now occupies us. In
the inexhaustible multiplicity of perceivable phenomena Plato noticed
the recurrence of certain uniform Predicates, forming the permanent
store from which, in endless variety of combination, all things derive
their particular essence or the nature by which one distinguishes itself
from the other and each is what it is. And just as the simple elements,
so the real combinations of these which the course of nature ex
hibited, were no multiplicity without a Principle, but were subject on
their own part to permanent types, within which they moved.
Further, the series of relations, into which the different things might
enter with each other — ultimately even the multiplicity of that world
which our own action might and should institute — testified no less to
this inner order of all reality. The case was not such as the Sophists,
his predecessors in philosophy, had tried to make it out to be. It
was not the case that a stream of Becoming, with no check upon its
waves, flowed on into ever new forms, unheard of before, without
obligation to return again to a state the same with or like to that
from which it set out. On the contrary, everything which it was to
be possible for Reality to bring about was confined within fixed
limits. Only an immeasurable multiplicity of places, of times, and of
combinations remained open to it, in which it repeated with variations
this content of the Ideal world.
The full value of this metaphysical conception I shall have to bring
out later. For the present I wish to call attention to the misleading
path, never actually avoided, into which it has drawn men astray. It
was just the multiplicity in space and time of scattered successive and
intersecting phenomena— the course of things— that properly consti-
CHAPTER in.] Ideas are subsequent to Reality. 73
tuted the true reality, the primary object given us to be perceived and
known. That world of Ideas, on the other hand, which compre
hended the permanent element in this changing multiplicity and the
recurrent forms in the transmutation of the manifold, was in contrast
with it something secondary, having had its origin in the comparisons
instituted by our thought, and, so far as of this origin, neither real
nor calculated to produce in turn any reality out of itself. However
great the value of the observation that Reality is such as to enable us
by the connexion of those ideas of ours to arrive at a correspondence
with its course ; still it was wrong to take this world of ideas for any
thing else than a system of abstractions or intellectual forms, which
only have reality so far as they can be considered the modes of pro
cedure of the things themselves, but which could in no sense be
opposed to the course of things as a Prius to which this course
adjusts itself, completely or incompletely, as something secondary.
In order to make my meaning quite clear, I must emphasize the
proposition that the only reality given us, the true reality, includes as
an inseparable part of itself this varying flow of phenomena in space
and time, this course of Things that happen. This ceaselessly ad
vancing melody of event — it and nothing else — is the metaphysical
place in which the connectedness of the world of Ideas, the multi
plicity of its harmonious relations, not only is found by us but alone
has its reality. Within this reality single products and single occur
rences might be legitimately regarded as transitory instances, upon
which the world of ideas impressed itself and from which it again
withdrew : for before and after and beside them the living Idea re
mained active and present in innumerable other instances, and while
changing its forms never disappeared from reality. But the whole of
reality, the whole of this world, known and unknown together, could
not properly be separated from the world of Ideas as though it were
possible for the latter to exist and hold good on its own account
before realising itself in the given world, and as though there might
have been innumerable equivalent instances — innumerable other
worlds — besides this, in which the antecedent system of pure Ideas
might equally have realised itself. Just as the truth about the in
dividual Thing is not that there is first the conception of the Thing
which ordains how it is to be, and that afterwards there comes the
mere unintelligible fact, which obeys this conception, but that the
conception is nothing more than the life of the real itself; so none
of the Ideas is an antecedent pattern, to be imitated by what is.
Rather, each Idea is the imitation essayed by Thought of one of the
74 Of the Real and Reality. [BOOK i.
traits in which the eternally real expresses itself. If the individual
Ideas appear to us as generalities, to which innumerable instances
correspond, we have to ascribe this also to the nature of that supreme
Idea, into which we gather the individual Ideas. The very meaning
of there being such an Idea is that a stream of phenomena does not
whirl on into the immeasurable with no identity in successive
moments, without ever returning to what it was before and without
relationship between its manifold elements. The generality of the
Ideas therefore is implied in the systematic character of what fills
the universe, in the inner design of the pattern, of which the un
broken reality and realisation constitute the world. It is completely
misinterpreted as an outline-sketch of what might be in impeachment
of what is — of a possibility which, in order to arrive at reality, would
require the help of a second Cosmos, of a real and of movements of
the real that are no part of itself.
36. I shall have frequent opportunity in the sequel of dwelling
again on this system of thought ; nor in fact can I hope to make it
perfectly clear till I shall have handled in detail the manifold diffi
culties which oppose a return to it. I say expressly — a return to it ;
for to me it seems the simplest and most primary truth, while to re
presentatives of the present intricate phase of scientific opinion it
usually appears a rash and obscure imagination. Psychologically it
is almost an unavoidable necessity that the general laws, which we
have obtained from comparison of phenomena, should present them
selves to us as an independent and ordaining Prms, which precedes
the cases of its application. For in relation to the movement of our
cognition they are really so. But if by their help we calculate a future
result beforehand from the given present conditions, we forget that
what comes first in our reflection as a major premiss is yet only the
expression of the past and of that nature of its own which Reality in
the past revealed to us. So accustomed are we to this misunder
standing, so mastered by the habit of first setting what is in truth the
essence of the Real over against the Real, as an external ideal for it
to strive after, and of then fruitlessly seeking for means to unite what
has been improperly separated, that every assertion of the original
unity of that which has been thus sundered appears detrimental to the
scientific accuracy to which we aspire. True, the need of blending
Ideal and Real, as the phrase is, has at all times been keenly felt;
but it seems to me that the attempts to fulfil this problem have some
times promoted the error which they combated. In demanding a
special act of speculation in order to achieve this great result, they
CHAPTER in.] T/ic Law real, no t realised. 75
maintain the belief in a gulf, not really there, which it needs a bold
leap to pass.
For the present, however, I propose to drop these general con
siderations, and, if possible, to get rid of the obscurity and apparent
inadmissibility of the result just arrived at. One improvement is
directly suggested by what has been said. We cannot express our
Thesis, as we did just now, in the form : ' The Thing is the realised ^
individual law of its behaviour/ This expression, if we weigh its
terms, would contain all the false notions against which we were
anxious to guard. Instead of the 'realised law' it would clearly be
better to speak of the law never realised, but that always has been real.
But no verbal expression that we could find would serve the purpose
of excluding the suggested notion which we wish to be expressly
excluded. For in speaking of a law, we did not mean one which,
though real as a law, had still to wait to be followed, but one followed
eternally ; and so followed that the law with the following of it was
not a mere fact or an event that takes place, but a self-completing
activity. And this activity, once more, we look upon not in the nature >
of a behaviour separable from the essence which so behaves, but as
forming the essence itself — the essence not being a dead point behind ',
the activity, but identical with it. But however fain we might be to I ;
speak of a real Law, of a living active Idea, in order the better to
express our thought, language would always compel us to put two
words together, on which the ordinary course of thinking has stamped
two incompatible and contradictory meanings. We therefore have
to give up the pretension of remaining in complete accord with the
usage of speech.
CHAPTER IV.
c_ Of Becoming and Change. o
37. WHEN I first ventured, many years ago, on a statement of
metaphysical convictions, I gathered up the essence of the thoughts,
with which we were just then occupied, in the following proposition :
1 It is not in virtue of a substance contained in them that Things are ;
they are, when they are qualified to produce an appearance of there
being a substance in them.' I was found fault with at the time on two
grounds. It was said that the proposition was materially untrue, and
that in respect of form the two members of the proposition appeared
not to correspond as antitheses. The latter objection would have
been unimportant, if true : but I have not been able to convince
myself of its truth, or of the material incorrectness of my expression.
^According to a very common usage the name ' Substance ' was
employed to indicate a rigid real nucleus, which was taken, as a
self-evident truth, to possess the stability of Reality — a stability which
could not be admitted as belonging to the things that change and
differ from each other without special justification being demanded of
its possibility. From such nuclei the Reality was supposed to spread
itself over the different properties by which one thing distinguishes
itself from another. It was thus by its means, as if it was a coagu-
lative agent, which served to set what was in itself the unstable
fluid of the qualitative content, that this content was supposed to
acquire the form and steadfastness that belong to the Thing. It was
matter of indifference whether this peculiar crystallisation was thought
of as an occurrence that had once taken place and had given an
origin in time to Things, or whether the solidifying operation of the
substance was regarded as an eternal process, carried on in things
equally eternal and without origin in time as an essential characteristic
of their nature. In either case the causal relation remained the same.
It was by means of a substance empty in itself that Reality, with its
fixedness in the course of changes, was supposed to be lent to the
determinate content.
The appearance of substance.
77
I believe myself to have shown that no one of the thoughts involved
in this view is possible. In going on, however, to supplement the
conclusion that it is not in virtue of a substance that Things are, by
the further proposition that, if they are qualified to produce an
appearance of the substance being in them, then they are, I did not
intend any correspondence between this and the other member of the
antithesis in the sense of opposing to the rejected construction of that
which makes a Thing a Thing another like construction. What I in
tended was to substitute for every such construction (which is an im
possibility) that which alone is possible, the definition of what constitutes
the Thing. The notion which it was sought to convey could only be
this, that when we speak of something that makes a Thing, as such
('die Dingheit'), we mean the form of real existence belonging to a
content, of which the behaviour presents to us the appearance of a
substance being present in it; the truth being that the holding-
ground which under this designation of substance we suppose to be
supplied to Things is merely the manner of holding itself exhibited by
that which we seek to support in this impossible way.
38. There was no great difficulty in showing the unthinkableness of
the supposed real-in-itself. The denial is easy, but is the affirmation
of a tenable view equally easy? Setting aside the auxiliary conception
just excluded, have we other and better means — are we left with
means that still satisfy us— of explaining the functions which we
cannot but continue still to expect of Things, if the assumption of
their existence is to satisfy the demands for the sake of which it was
made? On this question doubts will arise even for a man who
resolves to adopt by way of experiment the result of the previous
considerations. I repeat : A world of unmoved ideal contents, if it
were thinkable without presupposing motion at least on the part of
him to whom it was object of observation, would contain nothing to
occasion a quest for Things behind this given multiplicity. Nor is it
the mere variety of these phenomena, but only the regularity of some
kind perceived or surmised in it, that compels us to the assumption of!
persistent principles by which the manifold is connected.
Common opinion, under a mistake soon refuted, had thought to
find these subjects of change in the Things perceivable by the senses.
For these we substituted supra-sensible essences of perfectly simple
quality. But the very simplicity of these would have made any
alternative but Being or not-Being impossible for them, and would
thus have excluded change. Yet change must really take place
somewhere, if only to render possible the appearance of change some-
7 8 Of Becoming and Change.
where else. Then we gave up seeking the permanent element of
Things in a state of facts always identical with itself, and credited
ourselves with finding it in the very heart of change, as the uniform
import of a Law, which connects a multiplicity of states into one
rounded whole. Even thus, however, it seemed that only an ex
pression had been gained for that in virtue of which each Thing is
what it is, and distinguishes itself from what it is not. As to the
question how an essence so constituted can partake of existence in
the form of a Thing, there remained a doubt which, being insufficiently
silenced, evoked the attempt to represent the real-in-itself as the un
yielding stem to which all qualities, with their variation, were related
as the changeable foliage. The attempt has failed, and leaves us still
in presence of the same doubt. The first point to be met is this : If
we think of change as taking place, then the law which comprehends
its various phases as members of the same series will serve to
represent the constant character of the Thing which persists through
out the change ; but how can we think the change itself, which we
thus presuppose ? How think its limitation to these connected
members of a series ? And then we shall have to ask : Would the
regularity in the succession of the several states a1, a2, a3 ... really
amount to that which, conceived as persistence of a Thing, we believe
it necessary to seek for in order to the explanation of phenomena ?
These questions will be the object of our next consideration.
39. Under the name ' change,' in the first place, there lurks a
difficulty, which we must bring into view. It conveys the notion that
the new real, as other than something else, is only the continuation of
a previous reality. It tends to avoid the notion of a naked coming
into being, which would irrfply the origin of something real out of a
complete absence of reality. Yet after all it is only the distinctive
nature of the new that can anyhow be thought of as contained in the
previously existing. The reality of the new, on the other hand, is not
contained in the reality of the old. It presupposes the removal of that
reality as the beginning of its own. It thus beyond a doubt becomes
(comes into being) in that sense of the term which it is sought to
avoid. It is just this that constitutes the distinction between the
object of Metaphysic and that world of ideas, in which the content of
a truth a is indeed founded on that of another bt but, far from arising
out of the annihilation of b, holds good along with it in eternal
validity.
If now we enquire, how this becoming, involved in every change, is
to be thought of, what we want to know, as we naturally suppose, is
CHAPTER iv.] Becoming and the Law of Identity. 79
not a process by which it comes about. The necessity would be too
obvious of again assuming the unintelligible becoming in this process
by which we would make it intelligible. Nor can even the notion of
becoming be represented as made up of simpler notions without the
same mistake. In each of its forms, origination and decay, it is easy
to find a unity of Being and not-Being. But the precise sense in
which the wide-reaching term ' Unity' would have in this connexion
to be taken, would not be that of coincidence, but only that of
transition from the one to the other, and thus would already include
the essential character of becoming. There is no alternative but to
give up the attempt at definition of the notion as well as at construc
tion of the thing, and to recognise Becoming, like Being, as a given
perceivable fact of the cosmos.
Only on one side is it more than object of barren curiosity. It may
appear to contain a contradiction of the law of Identity, or at least of
the deductions thought to be derivable from this law. No doubt this
law in the abstract sense, which I previously stated ', holds good of
every object that can be presented to thought, a will never cease to
= a till it ceases to be. That which is, never is anything that is not,
so long as it is at all. On the same principle that which becomes,
originates, passes away, is only something that becomes so long as it
is becoming, only something that originates so long as it originates,
only something that passes away so long as it passes away. There
does not therefore follow from the law of Identity anything whatever
in regard to the reality of any m. Let m be what it will, it will be = m,
in case it is and so long as it is. But whether it is, and whether, once
being, it must always be, is a point on which the principle of Identity
does not directly decide at all. Yet such an inference from it is
attempted. Because the conception of Being, like every other
conception, has an unchangeable import, it is thought that the reality,
which the conception indicates, must belong as unchangeably to that
to which it once belongs. The doctrines of the irremoveability and
indiscerptibility of everything that truly is are thus constantly re
current products of the movement of metaphysical thought.
But this inference is limited without clear justification to the sub
sistence of the Things on which the course of nature is supposed to
rest. That relations and states of Things come into Being and pass
away is admitted without scruple as a self-evident truth. It is true
that without this admission the content of our experience could not
be presented to the mind at all. If, however, it were the principle of
1 [Logic, § 55.]
8o Of Becoming and Change. [BOOK i.
Identity that required the indestructibility of Things, the same
principle would also require the unchangeableness of all relations
and states. For of everything, not merely of the special form of
reality, it demands permanent equality with itself. This consideration
might lead us to repeat the old attempts at a denial of all Be
coming, or — since it cannot be denied — to undertake the self-contra
dictory task of explaining at least the becoming of the appearance of
an unreal becoming. But if we refuse to draw this inference from the
principle of Identity, then that persistency in the Being of Things,
which we hitherto tacitly presupposed, needs in its turn to be
established on special metaphysical grounds, and the question arises
whether the difficult task of reconciling it with the undeniable fact of
change cannot be altogether avoided by adopting an entirely opposite
point of view.
40. This question has in fact already been often enough answered
in the affirmative. Theories have been advanced in the history of
Thought, which would allow of no fixed Being and reduced everything
to ceaseless Becoming. They issued, however, — as the enthusiasm
with which they were generally propounded was enough to suggest —
from more complex motives than we can here examine. We must
limit ourselves to following the more restricted range of thoughts
within which we have so far moved. Still, we too have seen reason to
hold that it is an impossible division of labour to refer the maintenance
of the unity which we seek for in succession to the rigid unalterable-
ness of real elements, and the production of succession merely to the
fluctuation of external relations between these elements. Change
\ must find its way to the inside of Being. We therefore agree with
the last-mentioned theorists in thinking it worth while to attempt the
resolution of all Being into Becoming, and in the interpretation of its
permanence, wherever it appears, as merely a particular form of
Becoming ; as a constantly repeated origination and decay of Things
exactly alike, not as a continuance of the same Thing unmoved. But
it would be useless to speak of Becoming without at the same time
adding a more precise definition. Neither do we find in experience
an origination without limit of everything from everything, nor, if we
did find it, would its nature permit it to be the object of scientific
enquiry, or serve as a principle of any explanation. Even those
theorists who found enthusiastic delight in the sense of the un
restrained mobility enjoyed by the Becoming which they held in
honour as contrasted with the lifeless rigidity of Being— even they,
though they have set such value on the inexhaustible variety of
CHAPTER iv.] Becoming must have its Laws. 8 1
Becoming, and on its marvellous complications, have yet never held
its eternal flux to be accidental or without direction. Even in
Heraclitus \ve meet with plain reference to inexorable laws which
govern it. It is only, then, as involving this representation of a
definite tendency that the conception of Becoming merits further
metaphysical examination.
41. The thought just stated first had clear expression given it by
Aristotle in his antithesis of dvvafjus and eWpy«a. The undirected
stream of event he encloses, so to speak, within banks, and determines
what is possible and what is impossible in it. For what he wishes to
convey is not merely the modest truth, that anything which is to be
real must be possible. It is of this possibility rather that he maintains
that it cannot be understood as a mere possibility of thought, but must
itself be understood as a reality. A Thing exists 8uwi/i« when the
conditions are really formed beforehand for its admission as an
element of reality at some later period, while that alone can exist
(vepydq, of which a dvvapis is contained in something else already
existing eWpy«a. Thus all Becoming is characterised throughout by? ,;
a fixed law, which only allows the origination of real from real, nay
more, of the determinate from the determinate. We have here the
first form of a principle of Sufficient Reason, transferred from the con
nected world of Ideas to the world of events. The first conscious
assertion of a truth, which human thought has made unconscious use
of from the beginning, is always to be looked on with respect as a
philosophical achievement, even if it does not offer the further fruits
which one would fain gather from it. Barren in detail, however,
these two Aristotelian conceptions certainly are, however valuable the
general principle which they indicate. They would only be applicable
on two conditions ; if they were followed by some specific rule as to
what sequent can be contained dwd^i in what antecedent, and if it
could be shown what is that C which must supervene in order to give
reality to the possible transition from dvvapis into eVe'pyeia.
To find a solution of the first problem has been the effort of
centuries, and it is still unfound. On the second point a clearer
explanation might have been wished for. The examples of which
Aristotle avails himself include two cases which it is worth while to
distinguish. If the stones lying about are dvpd/m the house, or the
block of marble Swapti the statue, both stones and marble await the
exertion of activity from without, to make that out of them eWpyeta
which indeed admits of being made out of them but into which they
do not develope themselves. They are possibilities of something
VOL. I. G
82 Of Becoming and Change. IB<X>KI.
future because they are available for that something if made use of by
a form-giving motion. On the other hand, if the soul is the activity
of the living body, it is in another sense that the body is dwd^i the
soul. It does not wait to have the end to which it is to shape itself
determined from without, as the stone waits for external handling to
be worked into a house or into a statue. On the contrary it involves
in itself the necessary C, the active impulse which presses forward to
the realisation of that single end, of which the conditions are involved
in it to the exclusion of all other ends. Each case is metaphysically
important. The first is in point where we have to deal with the
connexion between different elements of which one acts on the other
and with the conveyance of a motion to something which as yet is
without the motion. The second case apart from anything else
involves the question, on which we propose to employ ourselves in the
immediate sequel : granted that a thing a, instead of awaiting from
without the determination of that which it is to become, contains in
its own nature the principle of a and the principle of exclusion of
every /3, how comes it about that this is not the end of the matter but
that the a of which the principle is present proceeds to come into
actual being, and ceases to exist merely in principle ?
42. I shall most easily explain at once the meaning of this question
and the reason for propounding it, by adducing a simple answer,
which we might be tempted to employ by way of setting the question
aside as superfluous. It is self-evident, we might say, that a proceeds
from a because a conditions this a and nothing but this o, not any /3.
Now it is obvious that this answer is only a repetition of the question
able supposition which we just made. The very point we wanted to
ascertain was, what process it is in the thing that in reality compels
the conditioned to issue from that which conditions it, as necessarily as
in our thought the consciousness of the truth of the proposition which
asserts the condition carries with it the certainty of the truth of that
which asserts the conditioned. We do not in this case any more
than elsewhere cherish the unreasonable object of finding out the
means by which in any case a realised condition succeeds further in
realising its consequence. But to point to it as a self-evident truth
that one fact should in reality call another into being, if to the eye of
thought they are related as reason and consequence, is no settlement
of our question. I reserve for the present the enquiry into the manner
in which we think in any case of the intelligible nature of a conse
quence F as contained in the nature of its reason G1. Whatever
1 [G and F refer to the German words used here ' Grund ' and ' Folge.']
CHAPTER iv.] Reason and Consequent. 83
this relation may be, the mere fact that it obtains does not suffice to
make the idea of F arise out of G even in our consciousness. Were
it so, every truth would be immediately apparent to us. No round
about road of enquiry would be needed for its discovery, nor should
we even have a motive to seek for it. The universe of all truths
connected in the way of reason and consequent would stand before
our consciousness, so long as we thought at all, in constant clearness.
But this is not the case. Even in us the idea of the consequence F
arises out of that of its reason G only because the nature of our soul,
with the peculiar unity which characterises it, is so conditioned by
particular accompanying circumstances, />, that it cannot rest in the
idea of G and, supposing no other circumstances, q, to condition it
otherwise, cannot but pass on account of its own essence to the idea
of F— to that and no other. In the absence of those accompanying
conditions, /, which consist in the whole situation of our soul for the
moment, the impulse to this movement is absent likewise; and for
that reason innumerable ideas pass away in our consciousness without
evoking images of the innumerable consequences, Ft of which the
content is in principle involved in what these ideas contain. If
instead of the conditions, />, those other circumstances, q, are present
— consisting equally in the general situation of the soul for the
moment — then the movement may indeed arise but it does not
necessarily issue in the idea of F. It may at any moment experience
a diversion from this goal. This is the usual reason of the distraction
and wandering of our thoughts. It is never directly by the logical
affinity and concatenation of their thinkable objects that their course
is determined but by the psychological connexion of our ideas, so
far as these are the momentary states of our own nature. Of the
connexion of reason and consequence in Things we never recognise
more than just so much as the like connexion on the part of our own
states enables us to see of it.
It is not enough therefore to appeal to the principle, that the
content of G in itself, logically or necessarily, conditions that of F,
and that therefore in reality also F will ensue upon G. The question
rather is why the Things trouble themselves about this connexion
between necessities of thought ; why they do not allow the principle
G which they contain to be for ever a barren principle, but actually
procure for it the consequence F which it requires ; in other words,
what addition of a complementary C must be supposed in order that
the Things in their real being may pass from G to F just as our
G 2
84 Of Becoming and Change. [BOOK i.
thought — not always or unconditionally — passes from the knowledge
of G to the knowledge of F.
43. We are thus brought back to a proposition which I shall often
in the sequel have occasion to repeat : namely that the error lies just
in this, in first setting up in thought an abstract series of principles
and consequences as a law-giving power, to which it is supposed that
every world that may possibly be created must be subject, and in then
adding that, as a matter of self-evidence, the real process of becoming
can and must in concrete strike only into those paths which that ab
stract system of law has marked out beforehand. It will never be
"intelligible whence the conformity of Things to rules of intellectual
[necessity should arise, unless their own nature itself consists in such
'conformity. Or, to put the matter more correctly, as I stated in
detail above (34) ; it is just this real nature of things that is the First
in Being — nay the only Being. Those necessary laws are images in
thought of this nature, secondary repetitions of its original procedure.
It is only for our cognition that they appear as antecedent patterns
which the Things resemble. It is therefore of no avail to appeal to
the indefeasible necessity, by which Heraclitus thought the waves of
Becoming to be directed. Standing outside the range of Becoming,
this 'AvdyKT) would have had no control over its course. It became
inevitable that Becoming should be recognised as containing the
• principle of its direction in itself, as soon as we admitted the necessity
of substituting its mobility for the stationariness of things. Now if
we attempt to find the necessity in the Becoming, one thing is clear.
Between the extinction of the reality of m and the origin of the new
reality of /A, no gap, no completely void chasm can be fixed. For the
mere removal of m would in itself be exactly equivalent to the removal
of anything else, / or q, that we like to imagine. Any other new
reality therefore, ?r or K, would have just as much or as little right to
follow on the abolished m, as that p ; and it would be impossible that
definite consequents should flow from definite antecedents. It is
impossible therefore that the course of nature should consist in
successive abolitions of one and originations of another reality. Every
effort to conceive the order of events in nature as a mere succession
of phenomena according to law, can only be justified on the ground
that it may be temporarily desirable for methodological reasons to
forego the search for an inner connexion. As a theory of the true
constitution of reality it is impossible.
But the theory of Becoming might with perfect justification admit
all this and only complain of a misinterpretation of its meaning.
CHAPTER iv.] Becoming may include Persistence. 85
Just as motion, it will be said, cannot be generated by stringing
together moments of rest in the places a, b, c, so Becoming cannot be
apprehended by supposing a succession of realities a, b, c, of which each
is .detached from the rest and looked upon as a self-contained and—
for however brief an interval — motionless Being. On the contrary, to
each single one of these members the same conception of Becoming
must be applied as to the series, and just as the definitely directed
velocity, with which the moving object without stopping traverses its
momentary place a, necessarily carries it over into the place b and
again through it into another, so the inner Becoming of the real #,
as rightly apprehended, is the principle of its transition into b and into b
only. For this is self-evident : that, just as it is not Being that is,
but Things that are, so it is not Becoming that becomes, but the
particular becoming thing ; and that consequently there is no lack of
variety in the qualities a,&,c, which at each moment mark out in advance
the direction in which the Becoming is to be continued.
I do not doubt that this defence would have expressed the mind of
Heraclitus, with whose more living thought that modern invention of
the schools which explains Becoming as a mere succession of pheno
mena stands in unfavourable contrast. And we might go further in
the same spirit. ' You,' we might say, ' who treat a motionless content
as existing, have certainly no occasion to contemplate its change ; but
for all that we have nothing but your own assurance for it that the
"Position" by which you suppose a to have been once constituted will
endure for ever. In reality you can assign no reason why such should
be the case with it, unless you look upon the a of one moment as the
condition of a in the next moment and thus after all make a become
a. But in the nature of reality there may be contained the springs of
movement which are lacking to mere thought. If we think of an <z,
of which the essence consists only in the motion to b, we are indeed
as little able to state how this a and its efflux is made, as you would
be to state how your a and its rest is made. But your conception has
no advantage over ours. For the motion, which (as extended to
Things themselves) you find fault with, you after all have to allow in
regard to the external relations of your Things, where you are as little
able to construct it as in the inner nature of Things. To us, however,;
if admitted (within Things) as a characteristic of the real, it affords r
the possibility of explaining not merely the manifold changes in the •'
course of nature but also as a special case that persistency in it which
you are fond of putting in the foreground, without going into particu
lars, as something intelligible of itself, but which at bottom you present
86 Of Becoming and Change. [BOOKI.
to yourselves merely as an obstruction to your own thoughts. Your
law of Identity, moreover, would be equally suited by our assumption.
We could not indeed suppose a to become b and c in three successive
moments, unless it were precisely b in the second moment and c .in
the third — thus at each moment exactly what it is. More than this—
more than the equality with itself of each of these momentary forms — -
cannot be required by the law of Identity. That the reality of the
one moment should be the same as that of the other, could not be
more properly demanded as a consequence of this law than could the
exact opposite of its meaning; namely that everything should be
simply identical with everything else/
44. If the view just stated were the true meaning of the theories
\vhich maintained the sole reality of Becoming, their fundamental
thought would not be exactly expressed either by this conception of
Becoming or by that of Change. It would not be expressed by the
former, because when in connexion with such speculations we oppose
Becoming to Being we do not commonly associate with it in thought
any such continuity as has been described ; a continuity according to
which every later phase in the becoming, instead of merely coming
into being after the earlier, issues out of it. It would not be expressed
by the conception of change, because in it the later does in fact arise
out of the complete extinction of the earlier; because b is conse
quently another than a and, apart from that constancy of connexion,
there is no thought of a permanent residuum of a which would have
undergone a change in adopting b as its state.
We may go on to remark that, however much of the interpretation
given we may take to be of use, it is at once apparent that the theory
is insufficient to explain everything which we believe to be presented
to us in experience. It would be convincingly applicable only to the
case of a development which, without any disturbance from without,
gradually exhibited the phases 3, c, d, lying in the direction of *the
moving a. In reality, however, we find no unmistakeable instance of
such development. None but an artificial view, which we must
notice later, has attempted to explain away what seems to be an
obvious fact — the mutual influence of several such developments on
each other, or the change that proceeds from the reciprocal action of
different things. The next point for our consideration will therefore
be, what we have to think in order to apprehend this mutual influence,
taking it for the present to be matter of indifference how we judge of
the metaphysical nature of the Things between which the influence is
exchanged.
CHAPTER iv.] * Transeunt ' Action. 87
45. In the first instance we only find occasion for assuming the
exercise of an influence by one element a over another b in a change
to /3 which occurs in b when a having been constantly present incurs
a change into a. It is not merely supposed that the contents of a and #,
as they exist for thought, stand to each other once for all in the rela
tion of reason and consequence ; but that a sometimes is, sometimes
is not, and that in accordance with this changeable major premiss the
change from b into /3 sometimes will ensue, sometimes will not.
Now we know that it might be ordained by a law external to a and
b that b should direct its course according to these different circum
stances : but it would only obey this ordinance if it were superfluous
and if its own nature moved it to carry out what the ordinance con
tains. In order to the possibility of this that difference of conditions,
consisting in the fact that at one time a is, at another is not, must
make a difference for b itself, not merely for an observer reflecting on
the two. b must be in a different state, must be otherwise affected,
must experience something different in itself, when a is and when a
is not : or, to put it in a short and general form ; if Things are to take
a different course according to different conditions, they must take note
whether those conditions exist or no. Two thoughts thus unite here.i
In order that a may be followed by 0 not by /31 or j32, a and /3 must/
stand in the relation of principle or ratio sufficiens and consequence.^
But in order that /3 may actually come into being and not remain the
for ever vainly postulated consequence of a, the ratio sufficiens musti
become causa cfficiens, the foundation in reason must become a pro-)
ductive agency : for the general descriptive conception of the agency of.
one thing on another consists in this that the actual states of one essence
draw after them actual states of another, which previously did not exist.
Now how it can come about that an occurrence happening to the one
thing a can be the occasion of a new occurrence in the thing b, is just
what constitutes the mystery of this interference or 'transeunt' action,
with which we shall shortly be further occupied. We introduce it
here, to begin with, only as a demand, which there must in some way
be a possibility of satisfying, if an order of events dependent on con
ditions is to be possible between individual things.
46. Supposing us however to assume that this unintelligible act has
taken place, from the impression which b has experienced as its own
inner state we look for after effects within itself; a continuation of its
Being or of its Becoming different from what it would have been
without that excitement. To determine in outline the form of this
continuation is a task which we leave to the sequel. As regards the
88 Of Becoming and Change.
question of its origin, we are apt to look on our difficulties as got rid
of when this point is reached. This immanent operation, which de
velops state out of state within one and the same essential Being, we
treat as a matter of fact, which calls for no further effort of thought.
That this operation in turn remains completely incomprehensible in
respect of the manner in which it comes about, we are meanwhile
' very well aware. For how a state a1 of a thing a begins to bring
about a consequent state, a2, in the same thing, we do not understand
at all better than how the same a1 sets about producing the con
sequence /31 in another being b. It is only that the unity of the
essence, in which the unintelligible process in this case goes on,
makes it seem superfluous to us to enquire after conditions of its
possibility. We acquiesce therefore in the notion of immanent opera
tion, not as though we had any insight into its genesis, but because
we feel no hindrance to recognising it without question as a given
fact. Conditions of the same subject, we fancy, must necessarily
have influence on each other : and in fact if we refused to be guided
by this fundamental thought, there would be no hope left of finding
means of explanation for any occurrence whatever.
47. Towards these notions the two theories as to the essence of
things, which we have hitherto pursued, stand in different relations.
On the preliminary question how it comes about that the inwardly
moving a attains an influence over the equally passing b the doctrine
of Becoming must like every other admit ignorance for the present.
But supposing this to have come about, it will look for the operation
of this influence only in an altered form of Becoming, which a strives
to impress on b. The next-following phase of b will consequently
not be /3, but a resultant compounded of /3 and the tendency imparted
from without. Henceforth this new form would determine the pro
gressive Becoming of that original b, if it continued to be left to
itself: but every new influence of a c would alter its direction anew.
If each of these succeeding phases is called a Thing, on the ground
that it is certainly capable of receiving influences from without and
of exerting them on its likes, then Thing will follow Thing and in its
turn pass away, but it will be impossible to speak of the unity of a Thing
which maintains itself under change. It is possible that the residuary
effects of an original b in all members of the series may far outweigh
the influence of action from without. In that case they would all,
like different members of a single pedigree, bear a common family
characteristic in spite of the admixture of foreign blood, but they
would be no more one than are such members. It is another possible
CHAPTER iv.j Continuity explained by Essence ? 89
case that b without disturbance from without should develope itself
into its series b, /31, /32. Its members would then be comparable to
the successive generations of an unmixed people, but again would
form a real unity as little as do these. Even if b reproduced itself
without change, each member of the series b b b would indeed be as
like the preceding one as one day is like another, but would as little
be the preceding one as to-day is yesterday.
This lack of unity will afford matter of censure and complaint to
the theory which treats the Thing as persistent; but it is time to
notice that this theory has itself no unquestionable claim to the pos
session of such unity. Those who profess the theory rightly reject
the notion which would represent the vanishing reality of one thing
as simply followed by the incipient reality of the other without con
necting the two by any inward tie ; but they think scorn of recog
nising this continuity in an actual, though unintelligible, becoming of
the one outofihz other and hope to make it intelligible by the inter
polation of the persistent Essence. But this implies that they are in
fact reduced simply to the impossibility, on which we have already
touched, of attaining the manifold of change by a merely outward tie
to the unchangeable stock of the Thing. This is merely disguised
from them by the power of a word, the use of which we have found
it impossible to avoid but are here called upon to rectify. When we
called a1, a2, a3 states of a, we could reckon only too well on the
prospect that this expression would remain unchallenged and would
be thought to contain the fulfilment of a demand, for which it merely
supplies a name. Quite of itself this expression gives rise incidentally
to the representation of an essence which is of a kind to sustain these
states, to cherish them as its own and thus to maintain itself as
against them. But what does this mean, and how can that be, which
— under the impression that we are saying something that explains
itself — we call the state of an essence? And in what does that
relation consist — a relation at once of inseparableness and difference —
which we indicate by the innocent-seeming possessive pronoun ?
So long as we maintain the position that a as in the state a1 is some
thing other than what it is as in the state a2 ; so long again as we
forego the assumption that there is present an identical residuum
of a in a1 and a2, on which both alike might have a merely external
dependence ; so long as we thus represent a as passing in complete
integrity into both states — while this is so, the expressions referred to
convey merely the wish or demand, that there should be something
which would admit of being adequately expressed by them, or which
90 Of Becoming and Change. [BOOK i.
would satisfy this longing after identity in difference, after perma
nence in change. They do not convey the conception of anything
which would be in condition to satisfy this demand.
In saying this I must not be understood to take it as settled that
this Postulate cannot be fulfilled, only as unproven that it can be.
Reality is richer than Thought, nor can Thought make Reality after
it. The fact of Becoming was enough to convince us that there is
such a thing as a union of Being and not-Being, which we even when
it lies before us are not able to reconstruct in thought, much less
could have guessed at if it had not been presented to us. It is
possible that we may one day find a form of reality which may teach
us by its act how those unreconcilable demands are fulfilled, and prove,
in doing so, that in their nature they are capable of fulfilment, and that
the relation, seemingly so clear, between Thing and state is other than
an empty combination of words, to which nothing in reality corre
sponds. It will not be till a very late stage in these enquiries that we
shall have opportunity of raising this question again. For the present
we take the real permanent unity of the Thing under change of states
to be a doubtful notion, which is of no value for the immediate objects
of our consideration.
48. If a or a is to act on <$, b must in all cases be differently
affected by the existence of a and by its non-existence. The 'tran-
seunt' action of a on b would thus lead back to an operation 'imma
nent' in b. The proximate condition which brings about the change
of b, must have lain in b itself. We usually distinguish it as an impres
sion from the reaction — a usage of speech on which we may have to
dwell below. For the present we satisfy ourselves with the reflection
that anything which b is to experience through the action of a must
result from the conflux of two principles of motion ; from that which
a ordains or strives to bring about and from that which b, either in
self-maintenance or in self-transformation, would seek to produce, if
a were not. Two principles are thus present in b, of which in general
the one conditions something else than what the other conditions.
Neither of these two commands therefore could realise itself, if each
of them were absolute. For neither the one nor the other of
them would have any prerogative, both being, to revert to the old
phrase, states of the same essence, b. A determinate result is
only possible on supposition that not only a third general form of
consequence is thinkable, into which both impulses may be blended,
but that also the two principles have comparable quantitative values.
In the investigations of natural science it is not doubted that the deter-
CHAPTER iv.] Intensities of Being. 9 1
mination of a result from various coincident conditions always pre
supposes, over and above the assignment of that which each condition
demands, the measure of the vivacity with which it demands it. It is not
merely in nature, however, but in all reality that something goes on
which has no place in the syllogistic system formed by the combina
tion of our thoughts. In the latter, of two opposite judgments only
one can be valid. In reality different or opposite premisses confront
each other with equal claim to validity and both ask to be satisfied on
the ground of a common right. I am therefore only filling a gap
which has hitherto been left unfilled in Metaphysic, when I seek to
bring out the necessity of this mathematical element in all our judg
ments of reality, leaving its further examination to the sequel.
49. ' Quo plus realitatis aut esse unaquaeque res habet, eo plura
attributa ei competunt.' So says Spinoza1; and nothing seems to
forbid the converse proposition, that a greater or less measure of
Being or of reality belongs to things according to the degree of their
perfection. I cannot share the disapproval which this notion of there
being various degrees of strength of Being has often incurred. It is
no doubt quite correct to say that the general conception of Being,
identical with itself, is applicable in the same sense wherever it is
applicable at all, and that a large thing has no more Being in being
of large size than a little thing in being of small size. I do not find
any reason, however, for emphasizing in Metaphysic this logical equality
of the conception of Being with itself, since Metaphysic is concerned
with this conception not as it is by itself but in its application to
its content — to the things that are. But in this application it should
not, as it seems to me, be looked upon as if the 'Position' which it
expresses remained completely unaffected by the quantity of that
on which the 'Position' falls. In the same way motions, the slowest
as well as the quickest, all enjoy the same reality. We cannot say
that they are, but they all fake place, one as much as another. Neither
in their case does this reality admit of increase or diminution for any
single one of them. The motion with the velocity C cannot, while
retaining this velocity, be taking place either more or less. But for
all that the velocity is not matter of indifference in relation to the
motion. When it is reduced to nothing the motion ceases ; and con
versely no motion passes out of reality into unreality otherwise than
by the gradual reduction of velocity.
Now that which we admit in the case of the extreme limit — the
connexion of Being, or in this case of taking place, with that which is
1 [Eth. i. Prop, ix.]
9 2 Of Becoming and Change.
or happens — why should we not allow to hold good within that
interval, in which this quantity still has a real value ? Why should we
look on the velocity as a secondary property, only accidentally attach
ing to that character of the motion which consists in its being some
thing that occurs, when aftei all it is just so far as this property
vanishes that the motion continuously approximates to the rest in
which nothing occurs ? The fact is that the velocity is just the degree
of intensity with which the motion corresponds to its own Idea, and
the occurrence of the quicker motion is the more intensive occur
rence. If now we apply the term ' Being/ as is proper in Metaphysic,
not to the empty 'Position' which might fall upon a certain content,
but to the filled and perfectly determinate reality as already including
that on which the ' Position' has actually fallen, I should in that case
have no scruple about speaking of different quantities or intensities of
the Being of Things, according to the measure of the power with
which each thing actively exerts itself in the course of change and
resists other impulses. Nor in this argument am I by any means
merely interested in rescuing a form of expression that has been
assailed. I should seriously prefer this expression for the reason that
it helps to keep more clearly in mind what I take to be the correct
view; viz. that Being is really a continuous energy, an activity or
function of things, not a doom thrust upon them of passive ' posi
tion'1. The constant reminder of this would be a more effectual
security against shallow attempts to deduce the Real from the co
incidence of a still unreal essence with a ' Position ' supposed to be
foreign to this content and the same for all Things indifferently.
1 [' Passivischer Gesetzheit.']
CHAPTER V.
Of the Nature of Physical Action.
OUR concern so far has been to give to the conception of Becoming
a form in which it admits of being applied to the Real. In seeking
to do so we were led to think that the connexion between a cause
and its effects must be more than a conditioning of the one by the
other ; that it must consist in an action on the part of the cause,
or require such an action for its completion. Only thus could it be
come intelligible that effects, which in a world of ideas are conse
quences that follow eternally from their premisses — premisses no less
eternally thinkable, should in the world of reality sometimes occur,
sometimes not. Many and various have been the views, as the history
of Philosophy shows, which have been successively called forth by
the need of supplying this complement to the idea of cause and by
the difficulty of doing so without contradiction. Many of them, how
ever, are for us already excluded, now that it becomes our turn to
make the same attempt, by the preceding considerations.
50. In the first place we meet at times with a disposition — no
longer indeed admitted among men of science but still prevalent in
the untutored thoughts of mankind — to ascribe the nature and reality
of a consequent wholly and exclusively to some one being, which is
supposed to be the cause, the single cause, of the newly appearing
event. The unreasonableness of this view is easily evinced. It con
denses all productive activity into a single element of reality, while at
the same time it deems it necessary that the results of the activity
should be exhibited in certain other elements, which stand to the
exclusively causal element in the relation of empty receptacles for
effects with the form and amount of which they have nothing to do.
As we have already seen, everything which we can properly call a
receptivity consists, not in an absence of any nature of a thing's own,
but in the active presence of determinate properties, which alone
make it possible for the receptive element to take up into itself the
94 <y the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK- i.
impressions tendered to it and to convert them into states of its own.
Deprived of these qualities or condemned to a constant inability of
asserting them, the elements in which the ordinance of the active
cause is supposed to fulfil itself, would contribute no more to its
realisation by their existence than by their non-existence. Instead of
something being wrought by the cause, it would rather be created by
it in that peculiar sense in which, according to a common but singular
usage, we talk of a creation out of nothing. I call it a singular usage
because we should properly speak simply of creation, to which we
might add, merely in the way of negation, that the creation does not
take place out of anything in particular. Trained by experience,
however, to look upon new states merely as changes of what is
already in existence, our imagination in this case gives an affirmative
meaning even to the ' nothing ' as the given material out of which
something previously unreal is fashioned.
The same extraordinary process is repeated in that manner of con
ceiving the action of a cause of which I have just spoken. The sup
position is allowed to stand of things which the active cause requires
in order to fulfil its active impulse in them : but as these according
to the conception in question contribute nothing to the nature of the
new event, they are in fact merely empty images which serve to meet
the requirements of our mental vision. They represent imaginary
scenes upon which an act, wholly unconditioned by these scenes of
its exhibition, originates, out of nothing and in nothing, some new
reality. I reserve the question whether this conception of creation
admits any application at all and, if so, in what case. It is certainly
inapplicable in studying the course of the already existing universe ;
inapplicable when the fact that requires explanation is this, that indi
vidual things in their changing states determine each other's be
haviour. Were it possible for one of these finite elements, A or B> to .
realise its will, a or /3, in other elements after this creative manner,
without furtherance or hindrance from the co-operation of any nature
which these other elements have of their own, there would be nothing
to decide upon the conflicting claims which any one of these omni
potent beings might make on any other. The ordinances, a or £ or y,
would be realised, with equal independence of all conditions, in all
beings C, D, E. This notion, if it were possible to carry it out in
thought, would at any rate not lead to the image of an ordered course
of the universe, in which under definite conditions different elements
are liable to different incidents, while other incidents remain impos
sible to them. Any assumption that A or B can only give reality to
CHAPTER V.] CdltSC CUld RcdSOH. 95
its command upon C or D, not upon E or F, would force us back
upon the conception that C or D are not only different from E and F,
but that in virtue of their own nature they are joint conditions of the
character and reality of the new occurrence, which we previously
regarded as due to a manifestation of power on one side only, to a
single active cause.
51. Natural science, so long as it maintains its scientific character,
is constrained by experience to recognise this state of the case. It
has reduced it to the formula that every natural action is a reciprocal
action between a plurality of elements. It was apt to be thought,
however, that the proposition in this form expressed a peculiarity of
natural processes, and it was a service rendered by Herbart to point
out its universal validity as a principle of Metaphysics in his doctrine
that every action is due to several causes. Though these things are
ultimately self-evident, the mere establishment of a more exact
phraseology calls for some enquiry. In the first place Reasons * and
Causes2 will have to be distinguished more precisely than is done in
ordinary speech. By ' causes,' consistently with the etymology of the
German term « Ursache,' we understood all those real things of which
the connexion with each other— a connexion that remains to be
brought about — leads to the occurrence of facts that were not pre
viously present. The complex of these new facts we call the effect,
in German 'Wirkung' — an ambiguous term which we shall employ
to indicate not the productive process but only the result produced.
Wherever it shall appear necessary and admissible to take notice of
this distinction, we shall reserve the infinitive ' Wirken ' to express the
former meaning. The * Reason ' on the other hand is neither a thing
nor a single fact3, but the complex of all relations obtaining between
things and their natures ; relations from which the character of the
supervening effect is deducible as a logically necessary consequence.
Now just because we do not think of the new event as issuing from
a creative activity independent of conditions, the explanation of any
effect would require us, besides assigning the causes (Ursachen) to show
the reason (Grund) which entitles the causes to be causes of just this
effect and no other. Further, just because several constituents of this
reason (Grund) are not merely given as possible in thought, but are
embodied or realised in the^form of real properties of real things and
of actually subsisting relations between them, the consequence does
not merely remain one logically necessary which we should be en
titled to postulate, but becomes a postulate fulfilled, an actual effect
1 ['Griinde.'] 2 ['Ursache.'] 3 [' Nicht Ding noch Sache.']
96 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
instead of an unreal necessity of thought. Finally, observation con
vinces us that things, without changing their nature, yet sometimes do,
sometimes do not, exercise their influence on each other. It appears
therefore that it is not the relations of similarity * or contrast between
the things — relations which upon comparison of their natures would
always be found the same — that qualify them to display their pro
ductive activity, but that, as a condition of this activity, there must
besides supervene a variable relation, C. I reserve the question
whether we are right in thinking of this relation as other than one of
those included in what we meant to be understood by the complete
Reason (Grund) of the effect. A doubt being possible on this point,
which will demand its own special investigation, we will provisionally
conform to the ordinary way of looking at the matter and speak of C
as the condition of the actual production of the effect — a condition
which is something over and above the Reason (Grund) that deter
mines the form of the ensuing effect.
52. According to this usage of terms the causes (Ursachen) of a
gunpowder-explosion are two things or facts, viz. the powder A and
the heated body which forms the spark B. The condition, C, of their
action upon each other is presented to us in this case as their
approximation or contact in space. The reason (Grund) of the effect
lies in this, that the heightened temperature and the expansiveness of
the gaseous elements condensed in the powder are the two premisses
from which there arises for these elements a necessity of increase in
their volume as effect. The final question, how in this case the
efficient act takes place, we do not profess to be able to answer. Of
whatever conjecture as to the nature of heat we may avail ourselves
for the purpose, we find it impossible in the last resort to state how it
is that the heightened temperature operates in bringing about in the
expansive materials the movement of dilatation which they actually
undergo. It is only the effect, the result brought about, which in this
case is not a motionless state but itself a movement, that is open to
our observation.
In one respect this instance is unsatisfactory. In the case supposed
we have no experience as to what becomes of the spark which was
supposed to form one of the two causes of the total event. If on the
other hand we throw a red-hot body, B, into some water, A, we
notice, over and above the sudden conversion of water into steam,
which in this instance corresponds to the explosion of the powder in
the other, the change which B has undergone. Lowered in its tem-
1 ['Aehnlichkeit.']
CH AFTER v.i Contributory Causes. 97
perature, perhaps with its structure shattered, or itself dissolved in what
is left of the water, there remains what was previously the heated body.
Thus even the effect in this case consists of several different changes
which are shared by the different concrete causes (Ursachen) that have
been brought into contact. Finally, since the evaporating water dis
sipates itself in the air, leaving behind it the cooled motionless body,
that contact between the two which previously formed the condition
of their effect upon each other, has changed into a new relation in
space between the altered bodies. Combining all these circumstances,
we may say that, where a definite relation, C, gives occasion to an
exercise of reciprocal action between the things A and J5, A passes
into a, B into ft and C into y.
53. The particular forms and values which these transitions A — a,
B — ft C — 7, take in individual cases, can only be determined by so
many special investigations, and these would be beyond the province
of Metaphysics. Even the task of merely showing that all kinds of
causation adjust themselves in general to the formula just given would
be one of inordinate length, and must be left to be completed by the
attentive reader. The only point which I would bring into relief is
this, that alike the contributions which the several ' causes ' (Ursachen)
make to the form of the effect, and the changes which they themselves
undergo through the process of producing it, admit of variation in a
very high degree. In view of this variety the usage of speech has
created many expressions for states of the case, of which the distinc
tion is well-founded and valuable for the collective estimate of the
importance of what takes place but which do not exhibit any distinc
tions that are fundamental in an ontological sense. If elastic bodies,
meeting, exchange their motions with each other wholly or in part,
we have no doubt about the necessity of regarding both as meta
physically equivalent causes of this result. They both contribute
alike, though in different measure, to determine the form of the result,
and the effect produced visibly divides itself between the two.
It is otherwise in the instance of the exploding powder. Here
everything that conditions the form of the result appears to lie on one
side, viz. in the powder, in the capability of expansion possessed by
the elements condensed in it. The spark contributes nothing but an
ultimate complementary condition — the high temperature, namely,
which is the occasion of an actual outburst on the part of the pre
viously existing impulse to expansion, but which woulcf not be qualified
to supply the absence of that impulse. For this reason we look upon
these two causes of the effect in different lights. It is not indeed as
VOL. i. H
98 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
if, in accordance with the reason given, we assigned the designation
' cause ' par excellence to the powder. On the contrary this designation
is assigned by ordinary usage rather to the spark, which alone pre
sents itself to our sensuous apprehension as the actively supervening
element in contrast with the expectant attitude of the powder. But
this usage at least we are ready to modify when we enter upon a more
scientific consideration of the case ; we then treat the spark as merely
an occasional cause which helps an occurrence, for which the prelimi
naries were otherwise prepared, actually to happen. Though it is
undoubtedly important, however, to note that peculiarity of the case
which is indicated by the expression ' occasional cause,' yet from the
ontological point of view the spark, even in its character as occasional
cause, falls completely under the same conception of cause under
? which we subordinate the powder. For whatever tendency to expan
sion we may ascribe to the elements united in the powder, taken by
itself this merely suffices to maintain the present state of things. It
is only the introduction of a heightened temperature that produces
the necessity of explosion. The ' occasional cause ' therefore brings
about this result, not in the sense of giving to an event, for which the
reason (Grund) was completely constituted, but which still delayed to
happen, the impulse which projected it into reality, but in the sense
of being the last step in the completion of that * reason ' of the event
which was incompletely constituted before. Similar reflections will
have to be made in all those cases where one ' cause ' seems only to
remove a hindrance which impedes the other causes in actually bring
ing about an effect for which the preliminary conditions are completely
provided by them. The setting aside of an obstruction can only be
understood as the positive completion of that which the obstruction
served to cancel in the complete ' Reason/
Phenomena such as occur in the processes of life call for still
further distinctions of this kind. The same occasional causes, Light,
Warmth, and Moisture, excite the seeds of different plants to quite
different developments. In whatever amounts we combine these ex
ternal forces, though we may easily succeed in destroying the power of
germination in any given seeds, we never succeed in eliciting different
kinds of plants from them. The same remark applies to the behaviour
of living things at a later stage, when fully formed. The form of
action which they exhibit, upon occasion being given from without, is
completely determined by their own organization, and we look upon
the occasional causes in this case as mere stimuli, necessary and fitted
to excite or check reactions of which the prior conditions are present
within the organism, but with no further influence on the form which
CHAPTER v.] Occasional Causes, and StimnH. 99
the reactions take. I do not pause to correct any inexactness that
may be found in this last expression, nor do I repeat remarks which I
have previously made and which would be applicable here. It is
enough to say that, in a natural history of the various forms which
the process of causation may assume, all those that have been just
referred to, as well as many others, fully deserve to be distinguished
by designations of their own and to have their peculiarity exhibited in
full relief. It is the office of ontology, on the contrary, to hold fast
the general outline of the relation of reciprocal action, in respect of
which none of these forms contain any essential difference. In the
view of ontology all causes of an effect are just as necessary to its pro
duction the one as the other. However great or small the share may
be which each of them has in determining the form of the effect, no
one of them will be wholly without such a share. Each of them is a
contribution without which the complete 'reason' (Grund) of the
actual effect cannot be constituted. No one of them serves as a mere
means of converting into fact a possibility already, without it, com
pletely determined in kind and quantity. It is exclusively with this
ontological equivalence of the manifold causes of a fact that we are
here concerned. It will only be at a later stage that it will become
necessary to refer to those other characteristics of the causal relation
of which the existence might even at this stage easily be established
by the farther consideration of the instances already given. Such
would be the fact that the effect produced does not attach itself ex
clusively to any one of the co-operative causes but rather distributes
itself among them all, and, finally, the change, after the resulting action
has been exerted, of the relation which served to initiate it.
54. After all these remarks, however, the proper object of enquiry
has still been left untouched. How is this relation C, of which the
establishment was necessary to elicit the effect, to be understood
metaphysically? The need in which this question stands of special
consideration is most readily apprehended if we transfer ourselves
to the ontological position of Herbart. His theory started expressly
from the supposition of a complete mutual independence on the part
of the real Beings, of their being unconcerned with any Relation.
If it allows the possibility of their falling into relations with each
other, the readiness to make this admission rests simply on the sup
position that they remain unaffected by so doing. At the same time
this metaphysical theory recognises a relation, under the name of the
coexistence * of the real Beings, which does away with their complete
1 [' Zusammen,' lit. ' together.']
H 2
TOO Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
indifference towards each other, and compels them to acts of mutual
disturbance and of self-maintenance.
In what, however, does this 'coexistence/ so pregnant with con
sequences, consist? So long as we confine ourselves to purely
ontological considerations, we can find in this expression merely that
indication of a postulate, not the indication of that by which this
postulate is fulfilled. The 'coexistence' is so far nothing but that
relation, as yet completely unknown, of two real Beings, upon the
entry of which their simple qualities can no longer remain unaffected
by each other but are compelled to assert an active reciprocal in
fluence. Thus understood, let us call the ' coexistence ' r. The
term ' coexistence/ however, with its spatial associations, having once
been chosen for this Quaestlum, appears to have been the only source
of Herbart's cosmological conviction that, as a self-evident truth, the
only form in which the ontological ' coexistence ' r, the condition of
efficient causation, can occur in the world, is that of coincidence in
space. At least I do not find any further proof of the title to hold
that the abstract metaphysical postulate r admits of realisation in
this and in no other imaginable x form. I shall have occasion below
to express an opinion against the material truth of this assumption ;
against the importance thus attached to contact in space as a con
dition of the exertion of physical action. Here we may very well
concede the point to the common opinion, if appeal is made to
the many instances in which, as a matter of fact, the approximation
of bodies to each other presents itself to us as a necessary pre
liminary to their action upon each other. Assuming, then, that con
tact can be shown universally to be an indispensable preliminary
condition of physical action, even then we should only have dis
covered or conjectured the empirical form C under which as a matter
of fact that metaphysical r, the true ground of all physical action,
presents itself in the world. The question would remain as to the
law which entitles this connexion in space to make that possible
and necessary which would not occur without it.
We are all at times liable to the temptation of taking that in the last
resort to explain itself, of which continued observation has presented
us with frequent instances. It cannot, therefore, be matter of surprise
to me if younger and consequently keener intellects undertake to
teach me that in this case I do not understand myself. Whatever my
error may be, I cannot get rid of it. I must repeat that, so far as
I can see, there is no such inner connexion between the conception
1 [' Anschaulich.']
CHAPTER V.] Contact the COndltlOH of aCtlOU ? IOI
of contact in space and that of mutual action as to make it self-
evident that one involves the other. Granted that two Beings, A and
JB, are so independent of each other, so far removed from any mutual
relation that each could maintain its complete existence without regard
to the other, as it were in a world of its own ; then, though it may be
easy to picture the two as ' coexisting ' in the same point of a space,
it seems to me impossible to show that for this reason alone the
indifference to each other must disappear. The external union of
their situations which we present to our mind's eye must remain for
them as unessential as previously every other relation was. Inwardly
their several natures continue alien to each other, unless it can be
shown that this ' coexistence ' in space, C, is more than a ' coex
istence' in space, that it includes precisely that metaphysical co
existence, which renders the Beings that would otherwise be self-
sufficing, susceptible and receptive towards each other. Not believing
myself in the correctness, as a matter of fact, of this theory of contact,
I have naturally no reason to attempt such a proof, which, moreover,
would carry us prematurely beyond the province of ontology. As a"
question of ontology, it only remains to ask what the r is, i. e. what
is the condition which we must suppose fulfilled, if in any relation C,
whether it be out of contact in space or of some wholly different
form, we suppose things previously indifferent to each other to
become subject to the necessity of having respect to each other and
of each ordering its states according to the states of the other. This"7
question is the starting-point of the various views that have been held
on the problem, how one thing comes to act on another. None of
them could avoid enquiring for a mode of transition of some sort or
other from the state which is not one of coexistence to one that is so.
It is according as they claim to have discovered the mode of transi
tion or to be entitled to deny that there is any such transition, that they
have resulted in notably divergent conceptions of the course of the
universe.
55. The transfer of an influence, E, is the process by which accord
ing to the common view it is sought to explain the excitement of
Things, previously unaffected by each other, to the exercise of their
active force : and the process is generally conceived in a one
sided way as an emanation proceeding from an active Being only,
and directed upon a passive Being. That this representation only
serves to indicate the fact of which an explanation is sought, becomes
at once apparent if we attempt to define the proper meaning and
nature of that to which, under the figurative name of influence, we
IO2 Of the Natiire of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
ascribe that transition from the one Being to the other. Only one
supposition would make the matter perfectly clear ; the supposition,
namely, that this E which makes the transition is a Thing, capable of
independent reality, which detaches itself from its former connexion
with A and enters into a similar or different connexion with some
thing else B. But precisely in this case unless something further
supervened, there would be no implication of that action of one thing on
another, which it is sought to render intelligible. If a moist body A,
becoming dry itself, makes a dry body B, moist, it is the palpable water
E which here effects this transition. If, however, what we under
stood by moisture was merely the presence of this water, at the end
of the transition neither A nor B would have undergone a change of
its own nature, such a change as it was our object to bring under the
conception of an effect attained by an active cause. The transition
itself is all that has taken place.
True, the withdrawal of the water alters the drying body, its ac
cession alters the body that becomes moist. The connexion between
the minutest particles changes as the liquid forces its way among
them. As they are forced asunder, they form a larger volume and
the connexion between them becomes tougher, while the drying
body becomes more brittle as it shrinks in extent. These are effects
of the kind which we wish to understand, but the supposed transition
of the water does not suffice for their explanation. After the water
has reached its new position in the. second body B, the question
arises completely anew what the influence is which, so placed, it is
able to exercise — an influence such that the constituents of B are
compelled to alter their relative positions. In like manner the ques
tion would arise how the removal of the water from A could become
for this body a reason for the reversal of its properties. This illus
tration will be found universally applicable. Wherever an element E,
capable of independent motion, passes from A to B — thus in all
cases where we observe what can properly be called a ' causa transiens'
— there universally this transition is only preliminary to the action * of
one body on another. This action follows the transition, beginning
in a manner wholly unexplained only when the transition is com
pleted. Nor would it be of the slightest help if, following a common
tendency of the imagination, we tried to sublimate the transeunt ele
ment into something more subtle than a ' thing.' Whatever spiritual
entity we might suppose to radiate from A to B, at the end of its
journey it would indeed be in B, but the question how, being there,
1 ['Wirkung.'J
CHAPTER v.] The ' transeunt' element. 103
it might begin to exert its action upon constituents different from it,
would recur wholly unanswered.
56. This difficulty suggests the next transformation of the com
mon view. Instead of the causative thing (Ursache), we suppose a
force, an action, or a state, E, to pass from A to B. We may sup
pose these various expressions, which are to some extent ambiguous,
to have so far a clear notion attached to them that they denote some
thing else than a thing. They thus avoid the question how the
thing acts on other things after its transition has been effected. But
in that case they are liable to the objection, familiar to the old Meta-
physic : « attributa non separantur a substantiis.' No state, E, can so
far detach itself from the Thing A, of which it was a state, as to subsist
even for an infinitesimal moment between A and B, as a state of
neither, and then to unite itself with B in order to become its state.
The same remark would apply if that which passed from A to B
were supposed, by a change of expression, to be an action, and thus
not a state but an event. No event can detach itself from the A,
in a change of which it consists, and leave this A unchanged behind
it in order to make its way independently to B. According to this
conception of it, so far as it is a possible conception at all, the action
thus supposed to transfer itself would simply be the whole process of
efficient causation which it is the problem to explain, not a con
dition, in itself intelligible, which would account for the result being
brought about.
And after all these inadmissible representations would not even
bring the advantage they were meant to bring. As in regard to the
transition of independent causative things, so in regard to the transi
tion of the state or event E from A to B the old question would
recur. Granting that E could separate itself from A, what gave it its
direction at the particular moment to B, rather than to C ? If we as
sume that A has given it this direction, we presuppose the same
process of causative action as taking place between A and E for
which we have not yet found an intelligible account as taking place
between A and B. Nor is this all. Since it will not be merely on
B and C, but presumably on many other Beings that A will put
forth its activity, we shall have to ask the further question what it is
that at a given moment determines A to impart to E the direction
towards B and not towards C, or towards C and not towards B. An
answer to this question could only be found in the assumption that
already at this moment A is subject to some action of B, and not at
the same time to any action of C, and that there thus arises in it the
IO4 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
counter-action, in the exercise of which it now enjoins upon E the
transition to B and not to C. Thus for the second time we should
have to presuppose an action which we do not understand before we
could present to ourselves so much as the possibility of that con
dition which is no more than the preliminary to a determinate action.
Finally it is important to realise how completely impossible is the
innocent assumption that the transferred E will all of a sudden be
come a state of B, when once it has completed its journey to B.
Had this homeless state once arrived at the metaphysical place which
B occupies, it would indeed be there, but what would follow from
that ? Not even that it would remain there. It might continue its
mysterious journey to infinity and, as it was once a no-man's state, so
remain. For the mere purpose of keeping it in its course, we must
make the yet further supposition of an arresting action of B upon it.
And given this singular notion, it would still be a long way to the
consequence that E, being an independent state, not belonging to
anything in particular, should not only somehow attach itself to the
equally independent being B> but should become a state of this B
itself, an affection or change of B. These accumulated difficulties
make it clear that the coming to pass of a causative action can never
be explained by the transfer of any influence, but that what we call
such a transfer is nothing but a designation of that which has taken
place in the still unexplained process of causation or which may be
regarded as its result.
57. Apart from its being wholly unfruitful, the view of which we
have been speaking has become positively mischievous through pre
judices which very naturally attach themselves to it. It treats the
transmitted effect E as one ready-made, and merely notices the
change on the part of the things of which incidentally it becomes a
state. No doubt there is a tacit expectation that, upon its being
carried over to B, many further incidents will there follow in its train
of which no more explicit account is taken. But in order that the
view may have any sort of clearness, it must in any case assume that
B will afford to ^on its arrival the same possibility of reception and of
existence in it which was offered it by A. There thus arise jointly the
notions that the effect must be the precise counterpart of its cause or at
least resemble1 it, and that all beings, between which a reciprocal action
is to be possible, must be qualified for it by homogeneity of nature.
1 [' Gleich oder doch ahnlich sein miisse.' Cp. note on ' Gleichheit,' § 19 supra.
Sect 59 makes it clear that the term 'gleich' does not merely refer to the alleged
equality of cause and effect.]
CHAPTER v.] Are Causes and Effect equal f 105
Our previous considerations compel us to contradict these views at
every point. No thing is passive or receptive in the sense of its being
possible for it to take to itself any ready-made state from without
as an accession to its nature. For everything which is supposed to
arise in it as a state, there is some essential and indispensable co
operating condition in its own nature. It is only jointly with this
condition that an external impact can form the sufficient reason which
determines the kind and form of the resulting change. So long as
there is speaking generally a certain justification, owing to that pecu
liarity of the cases contemplated which we mentioned above, for
treating one thing A par excellence as the cause, a second B as the
sustainer of the effect or as the scene of its manifestation, in such
cases we shall even find that the form of the effect produced by A
depends in quite a preponderating degree on the nature of the B,
which suffers it. It is only to forms of occurrence which are pos
sible and appropriate to this its nature that B allows itself to be con
strained by external influences. It is little more than the deter
mination of the degrees in which these occurrences are to present
themselves that is dependent on corresponding varieties in the ex
ternal exciting causes. This is the case not only with living beings,
but with inanimate bodies. Upon one and the same blow one
changes its form yieldingly, another splits into fragments, a third falls
into continuous vibrations, some explode. What each does is the
consequence of its completely determinate structure and constitution
upon occasion of the outward excitement.
This being so, if it is improper to speak of a transmission of a
ready-made effect, it is still more so to speak of a universal identity
in kind and degree1 of cause with effect. It would in itself be an
inexactness, to begin with, to try to establish an equation between the
' cause ' (Ursache), which is a Thing, and the effect which is a state
or an occurrence. All that could be attempted would be to maintain
that what takes place in the one ' cause ' considered as active is
identical with that which will take place in the other considered as
passive; or, to put the proposition more correctly, considering the
number of objects which are equally entitled to be causes, each
will produce in the other the same state in which it was itself. Ex
pressed in this form, we might easily be misled into looking upon it
as in fact a universal truth. The science of mechanics, at least, in
the distribution of motions from one body to another, puts a number
of instances at command which would admit of being reduced to this
1 [' Gleichheit,' v. note on p. 104.]
io6 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
point of view and which might awaken the conjecture that other
occurrences of a different kind would upon investigation be found
explicable in the same way. Against this delusion I must recall the
previous expression of my conviction ; that even in cases where as a
matter of fact a perfectly identical reciprocal action, Z, is exercised
between A and B> it yet cannot arise in the way of a transmission of
a ready-made state,. Z\ that what takes place in A and B is even in
these cases always the production anew of a Z, conformably with the
necessity with which Z under the action of B arises out of the nature
of A, and under the action of A arises out of the nature of B\ that,
while it is a possible case, which our theory by no means excludes,
that these two actions should be the same ; their equality is not a
universal condition which we are to consider in the abstract as essen
tial to the occurrence of any reciprocal action.
58. The fatal error, on which we have been dwelling, is not one to
be lightly passed over. The conviction must be established that of
the alleged identity between cause and effect nothing is left but the
more general truth with which we are familiar. This truth is that
the natures of the Things which act on each other, the inner states in
which for the moment they happen to be and the exact relation
which prevails between them — that all this forms the complete
' reason ' from which the resulting effect as a whole issues. Even
that this consequence is contained in its reason is more than we should
be entitled to say, unless we at least conceive as immediately involved
in the nature of the things and already in living operation those
highest grounds of determination, according to which it is decided
what consequence shall follow from what reason in the actual world.
And this tacit completion of our thought would emphatically not lead
back to the view which we are here combating. For of what is con
tained in those highest conditions which determine what shall
emanate from what, in the actual world, as consequent from cause or
reason, we have not in fact the knowledge which we might here be
inclined to claim. There is nothing to warrant the assurance that it
is exclusively by general laws, the same in innumerable instances of
their application, that to each state of facts, as it may at any time
stand, the new state, which is to be its consequence, is adjusted. It
is an assurance in which the wish is father to the thought. It
naturally arises out of our craving for knowledge, for it is doubtless
only upon this supposition that any consequence can be derived
analytically from its ' reason ' or be understood as an instance of a
general characteristic.
CHAPTER v.] Ultimate Laws Synthetic. 107
But what is there to exclude ' in limine' the other possibility; that
some one plan, which in the complex of reality only once completes
itself and nowhere hovers as a universal law over an indefinite
number of instances, should assign to each state of facts that con
sequence which belongs to it as a further step in the realisation of
this one history— so belongs to it, however, but once at this definite
point of the whole, never again at any other point ? On that suppo
sition indeed our knowledge would no longer confront reality with
the proud feeling that it can easily assign its place to everything that
occurs in it, as a known instance of general laws, and can prede
termine analytically the consequence which must attach to it. The
series of events would unfold itself for us synthetically; an object of
wondering contemplation and experience, but not an object of actual
understanding till we should have apprehended the meaning of the
whole, as distinguished from that which repeats itself within the whole
as a general mode of connexion between its several members.
59. We will not, however, pursue these ultimate thoughts. I
merely hint at them here in order to dislodge certain widely-spread
prejudices from their resting-place, but cannot now work them out.
We will take it for granted that every effect in the world admits of
being apprehended in accordance with the requirements of know
ledge as the conclusion of a syllogism, in which the collective data of
a special case serve as minor premiss to a major premiss formed by
a general law. Even on this supposition it would still be an un
warrantable undertaking to seek to limit the content of that general
law itself and that relation between its constituent members which is
supposed to serve as a model for the connexion between the facts
given in the minor premiss. Supposing this content of the law to be
symbolised by a + £=/; we are not to go on for ever attempting to
deduce the title of a + /3 to be accepted as the reason of/ from higher
and more general laws. Each of these higher laws which we might
have reached would repeat the same form ^.+ ^=7; and would com
pel us at last to the confession that while undoubtedly a conception
of the individual admits of being derived analytically from the general,
the most general laws are given synthetic relations of reason and con
sequent, which we have simply to recognise without in turn making
their recognition dependent on the fulfilment of any conditions
whatever. No doubt, in the plan of the world as a whole these given
relations are not isolated, unconnected, data. Any one who was able
to apprehend and express this highest idea would find them bound
together, not indeed necessarily by a logical connexion ; but by an
io3 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK r.
aesthetic necessity and justice. From finite knowledge this actual
system of reality is hidden. It has no standard at command for
deciding with what combination a + /3 this system associates a con
sequence /, to what other combination ax + /3X it forbids every con
sequence. In judging of particular phenomena the natural sciences
conform to this sound principle. It is to experience alone that they
look for enlightenment as to all those simplest and most primary
modes of action of bodies upon each other, to which by way of ex
planation they reduce the individual characteristics of the given cases.
This makes us wonder the more at the general inclination to ven
ture recklessly, just at this most decisive point, upon an a priori
proposition of a kind from which science would shrink if it were a
question of the primary laws of matter and motion, and to make the
possibility of any reciprocal action depend on identity of kind and
degree \ comparability or likeness on the part of the agents between
which it is to take place. Where this identity really exists, it does
not help to explain anything — neither the nature of the effect nor the
manner in which it is brought about. For our minds, no doubt, a
and a upon coming together form the sum 2a, but how they would
behave in reality — whether one would add itself to the other, whether
they would fuse with each other, would cancel, or in some way alter
each other — is what no one can conjecture on the ground of this
precise likeness between them. As little can we conjecture why
they should act upon each other at all and not remain completely
indifferent. In spite of this likeness they were, on the supposition,
two mutually independent things before they came together. Why
their likeness1 should compel them to become susceptible to each
other's influence is far less immediately intelligible than it would be
that difference and opposition should have this effect. These at
least imply a demand for an adjustment to be effected by a new event,
whereas from an existing likeness the absence of any reciprocal
action would seem the thing to be naturally looked for. Such con
siderations however simply settle nothing. All that we can be certain
of is the complete groundlessness of every proposition which connects
the possibility of reciprocal action, between things with any other
homogeneity on the part of the things than that which is guaranteed
by the fact of this reciprocal action. To connect the reciprocal action
with this homogeneity is an identical proposition. If the things act
upon, and are affected by, each other, they have just this in common
that they fall under the conception of substance, of which the essence
1 [' Gleichheit,' v. note on § 57. ' Equality' would not suit the argument here.]
CHAPTER v.] A ssumption of Homogeneity. 1 09
is determined merely by these two predicates. But there is no other
obligation to any further uniformity on their part in order to their
admitting of subsumption under this conception of substance.
60. There have been two directions in which the mischievous
influence of the prejudices we have been combating has chiefly
asserted itself. One of its natural consequences was the effort to
reduce whatever happens to a single common denomination, to
discover perhaps in spatial motion, at present, for instance, in the
favourite form of vibration, not one kind of event, but that in which
all events, as such, consist ; the primary process, variations of which —
none of them being more than variations in quantity — had not only
to afford to all other events, differing in kind and form, the occasions
for their occurrence, but to produce them as far as possible entirely
out of themselves, as an accession to their own being, though indeed
an unintelligible one. This impoverishment of the universe, by re
duction of its whole many-coloured course to a mere distribution of
a process of occurrence which is always identical, was in fact scarcely
avoidable if every effect in respect of all that it contained was to be
the analytical consequence, of its presuppositions. It is enough here
to have raised this preliminary protest against the ontological prin
ciples on which this reduction is founded. There will be occasions
later for enlarging further upon the objections to it.
The other equally natural consequence of the prejudice in question
was the offence taken at the manifold variety in the natures of things.
This has been at the bottom of views now prevalent on many ques
tions, and especially on that of the reciprocal action between soul and
body. On this point ancient philosophy was already under the in
fluence of the misleading view. That * like can only be known by
like was an established superstition to which utterance had been given
before the relation of causality and reciprocal action became an object
of enquiry in its more general aspect. What truth there may be in
this ancient view is one of the questions that must be deferred for
special investigation ; but I can scarcely pass it over at once, for do
I not already hear the appeal, * If the eye were not of the nature of
the sun, how could it behold the light2?' But the finest verses do *
not settle any metaphysical question, and this greatly misapplied
utterance of Goethe's is not an exception. To the logical analyst, in
search for clearness, it conveys another impression than to the sensi-
1 ['Gleich.']
a [' War nicht das Auge sonnenhaft
Wie konnte es das Licht erblicken?' — Zahme Xenien IV.]
T T o Of the Nature of Physical A ction. [BOOK i.
bility that demands to be excited. It is not the eye at all that sees
the sun : the soul sees it. Nor is it the sun that shines, but the seen
image *, present only in the soul, that yields to the soul the beautiful
impression of illumination. Light in that sense in which it really
issues from the sun — the systematic vibratory motions of the ether —
we do not see at all, but there supervenes upon it owing to the nature
of our soul the new phenomenon, wholly incomparable with it, of
luminous clearness. What confirmation then could there be in Goethe's
inspired lines for the assumption that like can only be known by like,
kin by kin ? To the poet it is no reproach that he should have seized
and expressed a general truth of great interest in a beautiful form,
though the persuasive force of that form of expression lies less in its
exactness than in the seductive presentation to the mind's eye of a
fascinating image. Perhaps this poet's privilege has been somewhat
too freely used in these charming verses, of which the matter is false
in every single fibre ; but we must candidly confess what we all feel,
that at all events they express forcibly and convincingly the pregnant
thought of a universal mutual relativity which connects all things in
the world, and among them the knowing spirit with the object of its
knowledge, and which is neither less real nor less important if it is
not present in the limited and one-sided form of a homogeneity of
essence. The truth on the contrary is that there is no limit to the
possible number and variety of the ties constituted by this relativity,
by the mutual susceptibility and reciprocal action of things. The
metaphysician, who stands up for this wealth of variety against every
levelling prejudice which would attenuate it without reason, is cer
tainly in deeper sympathy with the spirit of the great poet than are
those who use this utterance, itself open to some objection, as a
witness in favour of a wholly objectionable scientific mistake.
61. So much by way of digression. Let us return to the object
before us. It was impossible, we found, in the case of two causes
operating on each other, to represent anything as passing from each
to the other which would explain their reciprocal influence. Yet
it appeared to be only under this condition that the conception of
causal action was applicable. The only alternative left, therefore, is
to render the course of the universe explicable, without presupposing
this impossible action.
The first attempt in this direction is the doctrine of Occasionalism —
1 [I know of no other word than ' image ' by which ' Bild ' can here be rendered,
but it must be understood that no meaning of ' likeness ' attaches to the word in
this connexion.]
CHAPTER v.] Occasionalism not a complete theory. \ 1 1
the doctrine which would treat a relation C arising between A and B
only as the occasion upon which in A and B, without any mutual
influence of the two upon each other, those changes take place into
a and /3, which we commonly ascribe to reciprocal action between
them. In this simple form there would be little in the doctrine to
excite our attention. It is easy to see that an occasion which cannot
be used is no occasion. But in order to be used, it must be observable
by those who are to make use of it. If A and B, upon an occasion C,
are to behave otherwise than they would have done upon an occasion
y, they must already in case C be otherwise affected than they would
have been in case y. That this should be so is only thinkable on
supposition that some action, wherever it may have come from, has
already taken effect upon them. The occasion, accordingly, which
was to make it possible for the active process to be dispensed with,
presupposes it on the contrary as having already taken place. Other
wise the occasion could not serve as an occasion for a further reaction.
Occasionalism therefore cannot be accepted as a metaphysical theory.
The notion that it can is one that has only been ascribed to me by a
misinterpretation which I wish expressly to guard against. As I re
marked above, I can only regard 'Occasionalism' as a precept of
Methodology, which for the purpose of definite enquiries excludes an
insoluble question— one at any rate which does not press for a solu
tion — in order to concentrate effort upon the only attainable, or only
desirable, end. If it is a question of the reciprocal action between
soul and body, it is of importance to investigate the particular spiritual
processes that are in fact so associated with particular bodily ones
according to general rules that the manifold and complex occurrences,
presented to us by our inner experience, become reducible to simple
fundamental relations, and thus an approximate forecast of the future
becomes possible. On the other hand, it is for this purpose a matter
of indifference to know what are the ultimate means by which the
connexion between the two series of events is brought about. Thus
for this question as to body and soul— and it was this that, as a mat
ter of history, the doctrine of Occasionalism was framed to meet— it
may be as serviceable as for Physics, which itself is content to enquire
in the first instance into the different modes of connexion between
different things, not into the way in which the connexion is brought
about. Metaphysics, however, having this latter problem for its ex
press object, cannot be satisfied with passing it over, but must seek
its solution.
62. Meanwhile I may mention a special expression of this view,
1 1 2 Of the Nat^ire of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
which is not without some plausibility. ' Why,' it will be asked, ' if it
is once allowed that the relation C between A and B is the complete
reason of a definite consequent F, do we go on to seek for some
thing further by which the sequence of this consequent is to be con
ditioned ? What power in the world could there be which would be
able to hinder the fulfilment of a universal law of nature, if all con
ditions are fulfilled to the realisation of which the law itself attaches
the realisation of its consequent?' Such is the argument that will be
used, and it may be supplemented by a previous admission of our
own, that whenever there is an^ appearance as if the occurrence of
a consequent, of which all the conditions are present, were yet de
layed, pending a final impulse of realisation, it will always be found
on closer observation that in fact the sum of conditions was not com
pleted and that it was for its completion, not for the mere realisation
of something of which the cause was already completely given, that
the missing detail required to be added *.
This argument, however, is only a new form of an old error, and
our rejoinder can do no more than repeat what is familiar. The
assertion that there obtains a general law, which not only connects
necessary truths with each other but reality with reality, is simply an
expression of the recollection, observation, and expectation that in all
cases where the condition forming the hypothesis of the law has been,
is, or will be realised, the event forming its conclusion has occurred,
is occurring, or will occur. We are therefore not entitled to treat the
validity of the law as an independently thinkable fact, to which its
supervening fulfilment attaches itself as a necessary consequence.
Rather it is simply the observed or expected fulfilment itself, and we
should have to fall back on the barren proposition that wherever the
law fulfils itself it does fulfil itself, while the question how this result
comes about would remain wholly unanswered. Or, to express the
same error in another way ; were we really to conceive the law to be
valid merely as a law, it would follow that it was only hypothetically
valid, and was not in a state of constant fulfilment : for in the latter
case it would be no law, but an eternal fact. Even on this supposition
it will only fulfil itself when the conditions involved in its antecedent,
which form the sole legitimation of its conclusion, have been actually
realised. If then the force compelling the realisation proceeded from
the law, this must be incited to the manifestation of its force by the
given case of its application, which implies that it must itself be
otherwise affected in that case than in the case where it is not
1 [Cp. § 53-]
CHAPTER V.] A ' Lo,W* U0t d CaUSC. II*
applicable. We should thus be clearly presupposing an action exer
cised upon the law itself in order, by help of the power of the law, to
dispense with the action of the things upon each other.
If, then, we decide to give up these peculiar views in which the law
is treated as a thing that can act and suffer ; if we allow that, whatever
be the ordinance of the law, it must always be the things that take
upon themselves to execute it, then A and £, at the moment when
they find themselves in the relation C, must be in some way aware of
this fact and must be affected by it otherwise than they would be by
any other relation y, not at present obtaining. The upshot of these,
considerations is that neither the validity of a general law nor the
mere subsistence of a relation between two things is enough to ex
plain the new result thereupon arising without the mediation of some
action. On the contrary, what we call in this connexion the action
supervening in consequence of the relation, is in fact only the reaction
upon another action that precedes it and to which the things had
already been subject from each other. It was our mistake to look
upon this as a relation merely subsisting but not yet operative, a
relation merely introducing and conditioning the causative action.
The recognition of this truth is of fundamental importance. We
shall be often occupied in the sequel with its further exposition.
This preliminary statement of it may serve to throw light on the
complete untenableness of Occasionalism even in this refined form
and to show that it can as little dispense as can any other theory with
the problematical process of causative action, by help of which alone
it can explain how it is that a law is alternately fulfilled and not
fulfilled according as its conditions are fulfilled or no.
63. Another series of kindred attempts may be grouped under the
name given by Leibnitz to the most elaborate of them, that of the
' Pre-established Harmony.' In laying down the principle that ' the
Monads are without windows,' Leibnitz starts from the supposition of
a relation of complete mutual exclusion between the simple essences
on which he builds his universe. The expression is one that I cannot
admire, because I can find no reason for it, while it summarily excludes
a possibility as to which- at any rate a question still remained to be
asked. That Monads, the powers of which the world consists, are
not empty spaces which become penetrated by ready-made states
through openings that are left in them, was a truth that did not need
explanation, but this proved nothing against the possibility of a less
palpable commerce between them, to which the name 'reciprocal
action ' might have been fitly applied. It would not therefore have
VOL. i. i
1 1 4 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
caused me any surprise if Leibnitz had employed the same figure in
an exactly opposite way and had taught that the Monads had windows,
through which their inner states were communicated to each other.
There would not have been less reason, perhaps there would have
been more, for this assertion than for that which he preferred. To
let that pass, however, when once reciprocal action had been rejected,
theje was nothing left for explanation of the de facto correspondence
which takes place between the states of things but an appeal to a
higher all-encompassing bond, to the deity which had designed their
developments. Before the understanding of God there hover innu
merable images of possible worlds : each of them so ordered in the
multitude of its details as is required with consistent necessity by
certain eternal laws of truth, binding for God himself and not alter
able at his pleasure. In this inner arrangement of each world God
can alter nothing. If in the various worlds his wisdom finds
various degrees of perfection, he yet cannot unite their scattered
superiorities into one wholly perfect world. His will can only grant
for that one which is relatively most perfect, just as it is, admission
to reality.
The further elaboration of the doctrine might be looked for in
either of two different directions. It might have been expected either
to take the line of confining the original determination to the general
laws governing the world that has been called into existence, as
distinct from the sum of the cases in which these laws may be applied,
or that of supposing these cases of their application also to have been
once for all irrevocably determined. The first assumption would only
have led back to the embarrassments of Occasionalism just noticed.
Leibnitz decided unhesitatingly for the second. Just as in our first
parents the whole series of descendants is contained, with all details
of their individuality, with their acts and destinies, so is every natural
occurrence, down to the direction which the falling rain-drop takes
to-day in the storm, completely predetermined. But this is not to be
understood as if the manifold constituent agents of the world by their
co-operation at each moment brought about what is contained in the
next moment of the world's existence. For each single constituent
the series of all its states is established from the beginning, and the
inner developments of all take place after the manner of a parallel
independent course, without interference with each other. The cor
respondence which is nevertheless maintained between them is the
unavoidable consequence of their first arrangement, if we consider the
world as a creation of the divine design, or simply their de facto
CHAPTER v.j Determinism of Leibnitz. 1 1 5
character, if we consider it merely as an unalterable object of the
divine intellect.
64. This notable theory impresses us in different ways, according
as one or other of its features is put in clearer relief. The doctrine
of a thorough mutual relation between all elements of the universe,
and the other doctrine of the independence of those elements, are in
it alike carried to a degree of exaggeration at which both conceptions
seem to approach the unintelligible. The whole content of the
Universe and of its history is supposed to be present to the divine
understanding at one and the same time as a system of elements
mutually and unalterably conditioned in manifold ways, so that what
appears in time as following an antecedent is not less the condition of
that antecedent than is any antecedent the condition of that which it
precedes. Thus Leibnitz could say that not merely do wind and
waves impel the ship but the motion of the ship is the condition of the
motion of wind and waves.. The immediate consequence of thus
substituting the connexion of a system of 'consistent ideas for a
connexion in the way of active causation is to take away all intelli
gible meaning from the Reality which God is supposed to have vouch
safed to this world, while he denied it to the other imaginary worlds
which were present to his intellect as consistent articulations of what
was contained in other ideas. The development in time adds nothing
to the eternally predetermined order. It merely presents it as a
succession. What new relation then is constituted for God or the
world by this reality, so that it should count for something more and
better than the previous presentation of the idea of a world to the
mind of God? It is of no avail to say that then the world was
merely thought of, whereas now it is. It is not open to us con
sistently with the system of Leibnitz, as it might be elsewhere, simply
to recognise this antithesis as one that is given, however hard to define.
When the supposition is that of a wise will, which had the alternative
of allowing reality to an idea or of refusing it, the question, what new
Good could arise merely by the realisation of what previously was
present to Thought, must be plainly answered.
If the artist is not satisfied with the completed image of the work,
which hovers before his mind's eye, but wishes to see it in bodily form
with the bodily eye ; or if the hearer of a tale betrays his interest by
enquiring whether it is true ; what is the source of the craving for
reality in these two cases, which we may compare with the case in
question ? In the first case, I think, it is simply this, that there is a
tacit expectation of some growth in the content of the work of art
I 2
1 1 6 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
arising from its realisation. To walk about in the building as actually
built is something different from the range of imagination through the
details of the plan. Not only the materials of the building, but the
world outside it, among the influences of which — influences subject to
incalculable change — the work, when realised, is placed, create a
multitude of new impressions, which the inventive fancy might indeed
hope for but without being able to create the impressions themselves.
This advantage of realisation is one that Leibnitz could not have had
in view since his theory of the Pre-establishment of all that is con
tained in the world had excluded the possibility of anything new as
well as the reciprocal action from which alone anything new could
have issued. The other wish — the wish that a story heard may be
true or (in other cases) that it may not be true, arises from the interest
which the heart feels in the depicted relations of the figures brought
on the scene. It is not enough that every happy moment of spiritual
life should merely be a thought of the Poet and an enjoyment im
parted to the hearer, of which the exhibition of unreal forms is the
medium. We wish these forms themselves to live, in order that it
might be possible for them also to enjoy the good which delights us
in the imaginary tale. In like manner we console ourselves with the
unreality of what we hear or read, if we are distressed by the images
presented to us of unhappiness or wrong.
This line of thought was not excluded by the conception with which
Leibnitz began, but it could only be worked out on one supposition.
To give reality to an idea of a world was only worth doing if the sum
of the Good was increased by the sum of those who might become
independent centres of its enjoyment ; if, instead of that which was
the object of God's approval remaining simply His thought, the
beings, of whom the image and conception were included in the
approved plan of a world, were enabled themselves to think it and
have experience of it in their lives. I reserve the question how far
this view corresponds with Leibnitz' theory. Alien to him it was not.
Something at least analogous to spiritual life was accepted by him, for
whatever reason, as the concrete import of the being which his
Monads possessed.
65. This line of thought, however, which alone seems to me to
correspond to the notion of an admission to reality of a world other
wise only present in idea to God, is scarcely consistent with the com
plete pre-establishment of all events. When we turn to the implications
of natural science, we find that it too, if it allows no limits to its
principle of causality and denies the possibility of any new starting-
CHAPTER v.] Determinism how far implied in Science. 1 1 7
point for events, cannot avoid the conclusion that every detail in the
established course of the universe is a necessary consequence of the
past, and ultimately, though this regress can never be completed, of
some state of the universe which it decides to regard as the primary
state. But it does not take this doctrine to mean that the sum of all
these consequences has been fixed in some primary providential
computation. The consequences are supposed really to come into
being for the first time, and the validity of universal laws is taken to
be sufficient to account for their realisation without any such pre-
arrangement. These laws are enough to provide for limitation to a
definite direction in the development of the new out of the old. In
their ultimate consequences the two doctrines coincide so far as this,
that they lead to the belief in an irrevocable arrangement of all events.
Yet in the actual pursuit of physical investigations something else
seems to me to be implied. We shrink from surrendering ourselves
to this last deduction from the causal nexus. No natural law, as
expressed by a universal hypothetical judgment, indicates by itself the
cases in which it comes to be applied. It waits for the requisite
points of application to be supplied from some other quarter.
We know, of course, that upon supposition of the universal
validity of the causal nexus neither accident nor freedom is admis
sible ; that accordingly what remains undetermined in our conception
of the law cannot be really undetermined ; that thus every later point
of application of a law is itself only a product of earlier applications.
This is admitted without qualification in reference to every limited
section of reality, since behind it one still uninvestigated may be con
ceived in the past, as to which silence may be kept. But with every
inclination to treat the spiritual life in its turn according to like
principles, we shrink from pronouncing flatly that the whole of
reality, including the history of spirits, is only the successive unfold
ing of consequences absolutely predetermined. That in the real
passage of events something should really come to pass, something
new which previously was not ; that history should be something more
than a translation into time of the eternally complete content of an
ordered world ; this is a deep and irrepressible demand of our spirit,
under the influence of which we all act in life. Without its satis-
faction the world would be, not indeed unthinkable and self-contradic-
tory, but unmeaning and incredible. When we admit the universal
validity of laws, it is at bottom only in the tacit hope that, among the
changing points of application which are presented to those la\\ s in
the course of events, there may turn out to be new ones introduced
1 1 8 Of the Nature of Physical A ction. [BOOK i.
from which the consequences of the laws may take directions not
previously determined. Natural sympathy, therefore, is what the
Pre-established Harmony does not command. Even if it fulfilled its
metaphysical purpose, this hypothesis of Leibnitz would have an
artificiality which would prevent it from commending itself to our
sense of probability. I admit that this repugnance rests more upon
feeling than upon theoretical reasons ; more at any rate than upon
such reasons as fall within the proper domain of Metaphysics. It
remains, therefore, for us to enquire how far this view serves the pur
pose of a theoretical explanation of the universe.
66. In each single Monad, according to Leibnitz, state follows
upon state through an immanent action, which is accepted as a fact,
unintelligible indeed but free from contradiction. It was only
' transeunt ' action of which the assumption was to be avoided. If
this exclusion of transeunt action is to accord with the facts, the two
states a and /3 of the Monads A and B, which observation exhibits
to us as apparent products of a reciprocal action, must occur in the
separate courses of development of the two beings at the same
moment. If we had a right to assume that a was separated from a
previous state a of A by as many intervening phases as /3 from
a state b corresponding to a, we should not need to ascribe anything
but an equal velocity to the progress of the development of all
Monads. But since a may be removed from a by a larger number
of phases than /3 from £, we should be obliged to attribute to every
single Monad its special velocity of development in order to under
stand the coincidence of the corresponding states. This assumption
does not seem to me in contradiction with the fundamental view
which governs the theory in question. As was above remarked, the
thought of Leibnitz approximates to that interpretation of becoming
which we conceived to be the pre-supposition of Heraclitus : once
grant that the being of every Thing, if the name ' Thing ' is to be
accepted for a closed cycle of phases, consists in a constant effort to
pass from one state to another, then it is natural that different things
should be distinguished from each other not merely by the direction
but also by the velocity of their becoming, i.e. by an intensity of their
being or reality which, if it is to express itself subject to the form of
time, will appear partly at least as velocity.
I cannot recall any explanation given by Leibnitz on this point.
He might have refused any answer. He might have said that the
hidden rationality, without which no image of a world would have
been possible at all, had provided for this correspondence of all
CHAPTER V.]
Monads and Clocks. 1 19
occurrences that go together. Only in that case it would be difficult
to say how the whole doctrine was distinguished from the modest
explanation, that everything is from the beginning so arranged that
the universe must be exactly what it is. The feeling which Leibnitz
had of the necessity of accounting in some way for the correspond
ence is betrayed, I think, by his reference to the example, borrowed
from Geulinx, of the two clocks which keep the same time ; for it
was scarcely required as a mere illustration of the meaning of his
assertion, which is simple enough. As an explanation, however, this
comparison is of no avail. Mutual influence, it is true, the two clocks
do not exercise. But in order that they should at every moment
point to the same time, it was not enough that the artificer ordered it
so to be. And on the other hand the mechanism, which he had to
impart to them with a view to this end, is according to its idea pre
cisely not transferable to the Monads, shut up in themselves as they
are supposed to be. Each of the two clocks, A and B, is a system
of different, mutually connected parts. The materials of which they
are constructed, as well as the movements which may be imparted to
these, are subject to general mechanical laws, which apply to one as
much as to the other. From them it follows that with reference to a
time, which is measurable according to the same standard for the rate
of motion of A and B, different quantities of matter can be so
arranged that the entire systems, A and B, can pass at the same
moments into constantly corresponding positions, a and b, a. and ft.
But that which in this case carries out the corresponding transition is
nothing but the ' transeunt ' action, which one element by communi
cation of its force and motion exercises on the other. The independ
ence of mutual influence on the part of the two clocks is compen
sated by the carefully pre-arranged influence which the elements of
each of them exercise upon each other. It is merely the placed
therefore, of the 'transeunt' action that is shifted by this comparison./
It is not shown that it can be dispensed with in accounting for they
correspondence of the events.
All this indeed is of little importance. For it must certainly be
admitted that in this case of the clocks, as much as in any other,
Leibnitz would deny the ' transeunt ' action which appears to us to be
discoverable in it. It is not, he would say, that one wheel of the
clock acts motively on the other ; it is of its own impulse that the
latter wheel puts itself in motion — the motion which according to our
ordinary apprehension is the effect of the former wheel. Upon this
it may be remarked that comparisons are usually employed in order
1 20 Of the Nature of Physical Action. [BOOK i.
that some process which, as described generally, seems improbable
or cannot be brought before the mind's eye, may be illustrated by an
instance in which it is presented with a clearness that allows of no
contradiction. The cases therefore which one selects for comparison
are not such as, before they can supply the desired demonstration,
require, like Leibnitz' clocks, to be rendered by an effort of thought
into instances of the process of which a sensible illustration is sought.
Granting all this, however, our enquiry will have shown no more
than what was well known without it, that Leibnitz was never very
happy in his comparisons. The possibility in itself of what he main
tains must nevertheless be allowed.
67. For the complete reconciliation of theory and experience one
thing more is needed. That the connexion of occurrences accord
ing to general laws is intelligible, we may, at least with reference to
all natural events, regard as a fact. It is a fact however which, like
any other, would demand its explanation — not indeed an explanation
of how it comes about, for that would be pre-established like every
thing else, but an explanation of the meaning which its pre-establish-
ment would have in the Leibnitzian theory of the universe taken as a
whole. Images of possible worlds, to which God might vouchsafe
reality, we found distinguished from impossible ones, which must
always remain without reality. The advantage of consistency, which
distinguishes the former sort, we might suppose to lie in this, that
they not merely combine their manifold elements according to a
plan, but that at the same time the elements which, in so doing, they
bring together are such as are really connected with each other
according to general laws. It is obvious, that is to say, that every
imaginary world must appear as a whole, and its development in time
as the realisation of a preconceived plan, in which for all phases of
the internally moved Monads— for a1, a2, a3 ... and /31, /32, /33, as for
the several pieces of a mosaic, their sequence and their coincidence
are prescribed. But there was no necessity for any single one of
these phases to occur more than once in this whole. It was accord
ingly no self-evident necessity that there should be general laws—
laws connecting the repetitions of a with repetitions of /3. Without
any such repetition, these series of events might still be constantly
carrying out a predetermined plan. It is a somewhat arbitrary inter
pretation which I take leave to adopt, since Leibnitz himself gives us
no light on the matter, when I understand that rationality, which
distinguishes the realisable images of worlds from the unrealisable, to
imply not merely an agreement with logical truths of thought, but
CHAPTER v.] Why assume General Laws ? 121
this definite character of conformity to general laws, which in itself
is no necessity of thought : in other words, the fact that the demands
made by the realisation of the world-plan are met by help of a multi
plicity of comparable elements, which fall under common generic
conceptions, and by repetitions of comparable events, which fall
under general laws.
But neither with this interpretation nor without it are we properly
satisfied. If in the last resort it is the greatest perfection which de
termines the divine choice between different rational images of
worlds, is it then self-evident that among the indispensable pre
conditions of the perfection is to be reckoned above all this con
formity to universal law, and that anything which lacked it was not
even open to choice ? For the coherence of our scientific efforts this
conformity to law, which is the sole foundation for our knowledge of \
things, has indeed attained such overpowering importance, that its
own independent value seems to us almost unquestionable. Yet,
after all, is it certain that intrinsically a greater good is attained, if
every a is always followed by the same ft, than if it were followed
sometimes by ft, sometimes by y, sometimes by 6, just as was at each
moment required by the constantly changing residue of the plan still
to be fulfilled ? Might there not be as good reason to find fault
with those general laws as at bottom vexatious hindrances, cutting
short a multitude of beautiful developments which but for their
troublesome intervention might have made the system of the most
perfect world still more perfect ? If we pursue this thought, it be
comes clear what is for us the source of confidence in the necessary
validity of universal laws. In a dream, which needs no fulfilment,
we find a succession possible of the most beautiful events, connected
only by the coherence of their import : and the case would be the
same if a realisation of this dream could come about through the
instantaneous spell of its admission as a whole to reality, without the
requirement by each successive constituent of a labour of production
on the part of the previous ones.
If, on the other hand, we follow our ordinary conception of the
world which finds this labour necessary, the state of the case is differ
ent. Supposing that in the moment / an element a of the world
happened to be in the state a, and supposing it to be indispensable
that, in order to the completion of the plan of the world or to the
restoration of its equilibrium or to consecutiveness in its development,
at the same moment /, b also should pass into the state ft, then the
fact z of this necessity, i.e. the present state of the remaining
122 Of the Nature of Physical A ction.
elements, R, of the world together with the change of a into a, must
exert an action upon b. But in order that only 0 and not any other
consequence may arise in b, z and /3 — therefore also a and /3 — must
merely in respect of their content, without reference to the phase of
development of the universe as a whole, belong together as members
that condition each other : and for that reason in every case of the
repetition of a the same consequence /3 will occur, so far as it is not
impeded by other relations that condition the state of the case for the
moment. Upon this supposition, therefore, which is habitual to us,
that the course of the world is a gradual becoming produced by
active causation, its connexion according to general laws appears to
us to be necessary. But this way of thinking is not reconcileable
with the views of Leibnitz. He looks upon the whole sum of reality
as predetermined in all the details of its course and as coming into
being all at once through that mysterious admission to existence
which he has unhappily done so little to define. No work is left to
be gradually done within it. But if this supposition is granted him,
the limitation of readability to such projected worlds as have their
elements connected according to general laws is an arbitrary assump
tion. Any combination whatever of manifold occurrences — any
dream — might in this way have just as well obtained a footing in
reality. We have here therefore an inconsistency in Leibnitz' doc
trine. If the necessity of general laws was to be saved from dis
appearing, there were only, it would seem, two ways of doing it. He
should either have exhibited them as a condition of that perfection
of the world which renders it worthy of existence — and it is not
improbable that he would have decided for this alternative — or we
should have given up the attempt to substitute for the unintelligible
action of one thing on another an even more unintelligible pre-
establishment of all things.
CHAPTER VI.
The Unity of Things.
68. THERE is only one condition, as we have found, under which
the conception of a ' transeunt ' operation can be banished from our
view of the world and replaced by that of a harmony between indepen
dent inner developments of Things. The condition is that we make
up our minds to a thoroughly consistent Determinism, which regards
all that the world contains as collectively predetermined to its minutest
details. So long, however, as we shrink from this conclusion, and
cling to the hope, for which we have in the meantime no justification
but which is still insuppressible, that the course of Things in which we
live admits of events being initiated, which are not the necessary con
sequence of previous development — so long as this is the case the
assumption of ' transeunt ' operation cannot be dispensed with by
help either of the theory of a predetermined sympathetic connexion,
or by that of an unconditioned validity of universal laws. Our final
persuasion, therefore, might seem to depend on the choice we make
between the two above-mentioned pre-suppositions (that of complete
determinism, and that which allows of new beginnings) — a choice
which theoretical reasons are no longer sufficient to decide. But if
this were really the case — a point which I reserve for later investiga
tion — the option left open to us would be a justification for developing,
in the first place hypothetically, the further conceptions which we
should have to form as to 'transeunt' operation if having adopted the
second of the suppositions stated we maintained the necessity of
assumingvsuch operation. I cannot however apply myself to this
task without once again repeating, in order to prevent misunder
standings, a warning that has already been often given.
My purpose cannot be to give such a description of the process by
which every operation comes about as may enable the reader to
present it to his mind's eye, and thus by demonstrating how it happens
to give the most convincing proof that it can happen. The object in
!24 The Unity of Things. [BOOK i.
view is merely to get rid of the difficulties which make the conception
of a ' transeunt ' operation obscure to us while, although in fact under
standing just as little how an ' immanent' operation comes about, we
make no scruple about accepting it as a given fact. How in any case
a condition, if realised, begins in turn to give reality to its effect, or
how it sets about uprooting a present state of anything and planting
another state in the real world — of that no account can be given.
Every description that might be attempted would have to depict
processes and modes of action which necessarily presuppose the very
operation that has to be explained as already taking place many times
over between the several elements which are summoned to perform
it. Indeed the source of many of the obscurities attaching to our
notion of operation lies in our persistent effort to explain it by images
derived from complex applications of the notion itself, which for that
reason lead necessarily to absurdity if supposed to have any bearing
on its simplest sense. If we avoid these unprofitable attempts, and
confine ourselves to stating that which operation actually consists
in, we must state it simply thus : that the reality of one state is the
condition of the realisation of another. This mysterious connexion
we allow so long as its product is merely the development of one and
the same Being within the unity of that Being's nature. What seems
unthinkable is how it can be that something which occurs to one
Being, A, can be the source of change in another, B.
69. After so many failures in the attempt to bridge a gulf of which
we have no clear vision, in the precise mode demanded by imagina
tion, we can only hope for a better result if we make the point clear
in which the cause of our difficulty lies. In the course of our con-
jsideration of the world we were led, at the outset, to the notion of a
plurality of Things. Their multiplicity seemed to offer the most con
venient explanation for the equally great multiplicity of appearances,
i Then the impulse to become acquainted with the unconditioned
' Being which must lie at the foundation of this process of the con
ditioned was the occasion of our ascribing this unconditioned Being
without suspicion to the very multiplicity of elements which we found
to exist. If we stopped short of assigning to every reality a pure
Being that could dispense with all relations to other Beings, yet even
\ while allowing relations we did not give up the independence of
Things as against each other which we assumed to begin with. It
was as so many independent unities that we supposed them to enter
into such peculiar relations to each other as compelled their self-
sufficing natures to act and react upon each other. But it was im-
CHAPTER vi.] A ssumptwti of Independent Things. 1 2 5
possible to state in what this transition from a state of isolation to
metaphysical combination might consist, and it remained a standing
contradiction that Things having no dependence on each other should
yet enter into such a relation of dependence as each to concern itself
with the other, and to conform itself in its own states to those of the
other. This prejudice must be given up. There cannot be a multi*
plicity of independent Things, but all elements, if reciprocal action is
to be possible between them, must be regarded as parts of a single
and real Being. The Pluralism with which our view of the world
began has to give place to a Monism, through which the ' transeunt '
operation, always unintelligible, passes into an * immanent ' operation.
A first suggestion of the impossibility of that unlimited pluralism
was, strictly speaking, afforded as soon as we felt the necessity of
apprehending the events which form the course of the world, as
Consequents that can be known from Antecedents. If no elements
of the world admitted of comparison any more than do our feelings of
sweet and red, it would be impossible that with the union of the two
A and B in a certain relation C there should be connected a con
sequence F, to the exclusion of all other consequences. For in that
case the relation of A to B, which alone could justify this connexion,
would be the same— the two elements being completely incomparable
and alien to each other — as that between any two other elements, A
and M, B and N, M and N. There would accordingly be no
legitimate ground for connecting the consequence with one rather
than another pair of related elements, or indeed for any definite con
nexion whatever. Hence it appears that the independent elements of
the world, the many real essences which we supposed that there were, (
could by no means have had unlimited licence of being what they
liked as soon as each single one by simplicity of its quality had
satisfied the conditions under which its 'position' was possible.
Between their qualities there would have had to be throughout a com-
mensurability of some kind which rendered them, not indeed members
of a single series, but members of a system in which various series are
in some way related to each other. All however that this primary
unity necessarily implied on the part of the elements of the world was
simply this commensurability. Their origin from a single root, or
their permanent immanence in one Being, it only rendered probable.
It is not till we come to the consideration of cause and effect that wet*
find any necessity to adopt this further view— to hold that Things can 7
only exist as parts of a single Being, separate relatively to our appro- J
hension, but not actually independent.
126 The Unity of Things. [BOOK i.
70. This conclusion of our considerations requires so much to be
added in the way of justification and defence that to begin with my
only concern is to explain it. Let M be the single truly existing sub
stance, A, B, and R the single Things into which, relatively to our
faculties of presentation and observation, the unity of M somehow
resolves itself — A and B being those upon the destinies of which our
attention has to be employed, R the sum of all the other things to
which has to be applied, by help of analogy, all that we lay down
about A and B. Then by the formula M—<^(ABR] we express the
thought that a certain definite connexion of A B and R> indicated by
<f), exhibits the whole nature of M.
If we allow ourselves further to assume that one of the individual
elements has undergone a transition from A into a — however the
excitement to this transition may have arisen— then the former
equation between <£ (a B R] and M will no longer hold. It would only
be re-established by a corresponding change on the part of the other
members of the group, and <$>(abRv) = M would anew express the
whole nature of M. Let us now admit the supposition that the
susceptibility, which we had to recognise in every finite Being — a sus
ceptibility in virtue of which it does not experience changes without
maintaining itself against them by reaction — that this belongs also to
the one, the truly existing M ; then the production of the new states
b and R x in B and R will be the necessary consequence of the change
to a that has occurred in A. But this change a was throughout not
merely a change of the one element A, for such a change would have
needed some medium to extend its consequences to B and R. It was
at the same time, without having to wait to become so, a change of
M, in which alone, in respect of Being and content, A has its reality
and subsistence. In like manner this change of.M does not need to
travel, in order as by transition into a domain not its own, to make its
sign in B and R. It too, without having to become so by such means,
is already a change of B and R, which in respect of what they
contain and are, equally have reality and subsistence only in M. Or —
if we prefer another expression, in which we start from the apparent
independence of A B and R — the only mediation which causes the
changes of B and R to follow on those of A consists in the identity
of M with itself, and in its susceptibility which does not admit a
change a without again restoring the same nature ^by production of
the compensatory change b and R1. To our observation a presents
itself as an event which takes place in the isolated element A ; b as a
second event which befalls the equally isolated B. In accordance
CHAPTER vi.] ' Transeunt 'reduced to 'immanent" operation. 127
with this appearance we call that a ' transeunt ' operation of A upon /
B, which in truth is only an immanent operation of M upon M. A ?
process thus seems to us to be requisite to bring the elements A and
B) originally indifferent towards each other, into a relation of mutual
sympathy. In truth they always stand in that relation, for at every
moment the reality which they simultaneously possess has its con
nexion in the import of M, and A or a is the complement to B and R,
or to b and Rl (as the case may be), required by M in order to the
maintenance of its equality with itself, just as B or b is the comple
ment required to A and R or to a and R*.
Our earlier idea, therefore, of manifold original essences, un
conditionally existing and of independent content, which only came
afterwards to fall together into variable actions and reactions upon
each other, passes into a different idea, that of manifold elements,
of which the existence and content is throughout conditioned by the
nature and reality of the one existence of which they are organic
members ; whose maintenance of itself places them all in a constant
relation of dependence on each other as on it ; according to whose
command, without possibility of offering resistance or of rendering any
help which should be due to their own independent reality, they so
order themselves at every moment that the sum of Things presents a
new identical expression of the same meaning, a harmony not pre-
established, but which at each moment reproduces itself through the
power of the one existence.
71. Before passing to details, let me remark that I would not have
these statements regarded as meant to describe a process which
needed to be hit upon by conjecture, and did not naturally follow
from the metaphysical demand which it was its purpose to satisfy.
Or, to use another expression, I do not imagine myself to have
stated what we have to think in order to render reciprocal action
intelligible, but what we in fact do think as soon as we explain to
ourselves what we mean by it. If we suppose a certain Being A to
conform itself to the state b of another Being B and to fall into the
state a, this thought directly implies the other, that the change b which
at first seemed only to befall B is also a change for the other Being,
A. There may be required investigation of the mode in which b is a
change also for A , but there can be no doubt that it has to be brought
under the same formal conception of a state of A which we at first
only applied to a. But the idea that the states of a Being B are at
the same time states of another Being A, involves the direct negation
of the proposition that A and B are two separate and independent
128 The Unity of Things.
Beings : for a unity of the exclusive kind by which each would set a
barrier between itself and the other, if it is to be more than verbally
maintained — if it is to be measured according to what may be called
its practical value — can only consist in complete impenetrability on
the part of the one against all conditions of the other.
Thus it was not necessary that the unity of all individual Beings
hould be conjectured or discovered as an hypothesis enabling us to
set aside certain difficulties that are in our way. It is, as it seems to
me, a thought which by mere analysis can be shown to be involved in
;he conception of reciprocal action. If we fancy it possible to main
tain that Things are to begin with separate and mutually independent
Unities, but that there afterwards arises between them a relation of
Union in operation, we are describing, not an actual state of Things
or a real process, but merely the movement of thought which begins
with a false supposition and afterwards, under the pressure of problems
which it has itself raised, seeks in imperfect fashion to restore the
correct view which it should have had to start with.
72. Moreover, in the logical requisites of a theory, this view of the
original unity of all Things in M is by no means inferior to the other
view of their changeable combinations. It might be urged indeed
that our view represents all Things too indiscriminately as compre
hended once for all in the unity of Jlft and thus has no place for
the gradations that exist in the intimacy of their relations to each
other ; that the opposite view, by recognising on the one hand the
progress from a complete absence of relation to an ever greater close
ness of relation, and on the other the relaxation of relations that
previously existed, alone admits of due adjustment to experience,
which testifies in one case to a lively action ' and reaction of Things
upon each other, in another to their mutual indifference. In truth the
reverse seems to me to be the case. So far we regard J/as expressing
only the formal thought of the one all comprehensive Being. As to
the concrete content of that which is to occupy this supreme position
of M we know nothing, and therefore can settle nothing as to the
form cp, in which according to its nature it at each moment compre
hends the sum of finite realities. There is nothing, however, against
our assuming the possibility of the various equations ; M— $(AB R\
M= <j>(A£r P), M= <j>(Ap R^\ M— 0 (a 0 R). Of these equations
the second would express the possibility of a change in the sum of the
members R into r — a change which is balanced by a second p, and
therefore does not require a compensatory change on the part of A
and B. This being so, the two latter would appear unaffected by the
CHAPTER vi.] Degrees of Interaction. 129
alteration of the rest of the world in which they are included. Of the
third equation the meaning would be that another change of 7?, viz.
into R\ only requires a change ft in B, to which A would appear in
different ; while the fourth would represent a reciprocal action which
exhausts itself between A and B, leaving the rest of the world un
affected.
It thus appears that our view is not irreconcileable with any of the
gradations which the mutual excitability of the world's elements in
fact exhibits. There would be nothing to prevent us even from
ascribing to the unity, in which they are all comprehended, at various
moments various degrees of closeness down to the extreme cases in
which two elements, having no effect whatever on each other, have
all the appearance of being two independent entities ; or in which, on
the other hand, limited to mutual operation, they detach themselves
from all other constituents of the world as a pair of which each
belongs to the other. But the source of these gradations would not
be that elements originally independent were drawn together by
variable relations ranging in intensity from nought to any degree we
like to imagine. Their source would be that the plan of that unity
which holds things permanently together, obliges them at every
moment either to new reciprocal action of definite kind and degree
or to the maintenance of their previous state, which involves the
appearance of deficient reciprocal action. Thus the reason why
things take the appearance of independence as against each other is
not that the Unity M, in which they are always comprehended,
is sometimes more, sometimes less, real, or even altogether ceases to
be, but that the offices which ^/"imposes on them vary: so that every
degree of relative independence which things exhibit as against each
other is itself the consequence of their entire want of independence
as against M, which never leaves them outside its unity. That rela
tions, on the other hand, which did not previously subsist between
independent things, can never begin to subsist, I have already pointed
out, nor is it necessary to revert to this impossible notion.
73. The next question to be expected is, not indeed what M con
sists in but how, even as a mere matter of logical relation, the
connexion assumed between it, the One, and the multiplicity of
elements dependent on it is to be thought of. We have contented
ourselves with describing these elements as parts of the infjnite M.
We should find no lack of other designations if we cared to notice
all the theories .which the history of philosophy records as having on
various grounds arrived at a similar Monism. We might read of
VOL. i. K
1 30 The Unity of Things. [BOOK i.
modifications of the infinite substance, of its developments and dif
ferentiations, of emanations and radiations from it. Much discussion
and enthusiasm has gathered round these terms. Their variety serves
in some measure to illustrate the variety of the needs by which men
were led to the same persuasion. Stripped of their figurative clothing
— a clothing merely intended to serve the unattainable purpose of
presenting to the mind's eye the process by which the assumed rela
tion between the one and the multitude of finite beings is brought
about — all that they collectively contain in regard to the import of
this relation amounts merely to a negation. They all deny the inde
pendent reality of finite things, but they cannot determine positively
the nature of the bond which unites them.
This inability by itself would not to my mind form any ground of
objection to the view stated. The exact determination of a postulate,
whether effected by means of affirmations or by means of negations,
may claim to be a philosophic result even when it is impossible to
present anything to the mind's eye by which the postulate is fulfilled.
An intuition, however — a presentation to the mind's eye — of that
which according to its very idea is the source of all possibility of
intuition — is what we shall not look for. Neither the One, before its
production of the manifold capable of arrangement in various out
lines, nor the metaphysical process, so to speak, by which that pro
duction is brought about, can be described by help of any figure, for
the possibility of presentation as a figure depends on the previous ex
istence of the manifold, and the origin of the manifold world in the
case before us is just the point at issue. But it does not follow that
there is no meaning in the conception of that relation of dependence
of the many upon the one. Though unable to state what constitutes
the persistent force of the bond which connects individual things in
reality, we can yet seek out the complex modes in which its un
imaginable activity conditions the form of their connexion : and the
general ideas, which I have already indicated on the subject, in their
application to our given experience, warrant the hope, on this side,
of an unlimited growth of our knowledge.
74. In saying this however I do not overcome the objection which
our view excites. It will readily be allowed that the relation of the
One being to the many does not admit of being exhibited in any
positive way. It will be urged however that it ought not to involve
a contradiction if it is to be admitted even as a postulate ; yet how is
it to be conceived that what is one should not only qmse a manifold
to issue out of itself, but should continue to be this manifold ? This
CHAPTER VI.] T/IC OnC Mid the Matty . 1 3 I
question has at all times formed one of the difficulties of philosophy
for the reason that in fact, whatever may have been the point of
departure, a thousand ways lead back to it. I need not go further
back than the latest past of German philosophy. For the idealistic
systems, which ended in Hegel, not merely the relativity of everything
finite, but also the inner vitality of the infinite which projects the full
ness of the manifold out of its unity, was a primary certainty which
forced itself on the spirit with an aesthetic necessity and determined
every other conviction accordingly. It must be allowed that this
prerogative of the so-called reason in the treatment of things, as
against the claims made by the understanding on behalf of an
adherence to its law of identity, has been rather vigorously asserted
than clearly defended against the attacks made on it in the interest
of this law. In the bold paradox, that it is just in contradiction that
there rests the deepest truth, that which had originally been con
ceived as the mystery of things came to be transferred in a very
questionable way to our methods of thought. There ensued in the
philosophy of Herbart a vigorous self-defence on the part of formal
logic against this attack — a defence which no doubt had its use as
restoring the forms of investigation that had disappeared during the
rush and hurry of 'dialectical development,' but which in the last
resort, as it seems to me, can only succeed by presupposing at the
decisive points the actual existence, in some remote distance, of that
unity of the one and the many, which in its metaphysic it was so shy
of admitting. On this whole question, unless I am mistaken, there is
not much else to be said than what is objected by the young Socrates
in the ' Parmenides ' to the assertions of Zeno. ' Is there not one
idea of likeness and another of unlikeness ? And are we not called
like or unlike according as we partake in one or the other? Now
if something partook in each of the opposed ideas, and then had to
be called like and unlike at the same time, what would there be to
surprise us in that ? No doubt if a man tried to make out likeness
as such to be equivalent to unlikeness as such, that would be in
credible. But that something should partake in both ideas and in
consequence should be both like and unlike, that I deem as little
absurd as it is to call everything one on account of its participation
in the idea of unity and at the same time many on account of its
equal participation in the idea of multiplicity. The only thing that
we may not do is to take unity for multiplicity, or multiplicity for
unity.'
• 75. It may seem at first sight as if Socrates had only pushed the
K 2
132 The Unity of Things. [BOOKI.
difficulty a step further back. The possibility, it may be said, of
simultaneous participation in those two ideas is just what the laws of
thought forbid to every subject. With this objection I cannot agree.
I have previously pointed out the merely formal significance of the
principle of identity. All that it says is that A=A; that one is one
and that many are many; that the real is real and the impossible
impossible ; in short, that every predicate is equivalent to itself, and
every subject no less so. By itself it says nothing as to the possibility
of attaching several predicates simultaneously, or even only one, to
a single subject. For that which we properly mean by connecting
two thinkable contents S and P, as subject and predicate — the meta
physical copula subsisting between S and P which justifies this mode
of logical expression — is what cannot itself be expressed or con
structed by means of any logical form. The only logical obligation
is when once the connexion has been supposed or recognised, to be
consistent with ourselves in regard to it. Therefore the law of
if excluded middle in its unambiguous form asserts this, and only this ;
•that of two judgments which severally affirm and deny of the same
'subject 6" the same predicate P only one can be true. For even that
-metaphysical copula, which unites S and P, whatever it may consist
in, must be equivalent to itself. If it is V, it cannot be non-F;
if non- V, it cannot be V. Thus the propositions, S is P, and -5" is
not P, are irreconcileable with each other ; but the propositions, S is
P, and S is non-P, are reconcileable until it is established as a
matter of fact that there is no non-P=Q which can be connected
with S by a copula, W, that is reconcileable with V. No one there
fore disputes the simultaneous validity of the propositions, ' the body
6" is extended PJ and ' S has weight Q.' Logic finds them com
patible. It could not however state the reason of their compatibility,
for the metaphysical copula, V, between S and P — i. e. the real be
haviour on the part of the body which constitutes its extension, or the
mode in which extension attaches to its essence — is as unknown as
the copula W — the behaviour which makes it heavy. Still less could
we show positively how it is possible for V and W to subsist un
disturbed along with each other. That is and remains a mystery on
the part of the thing.
Let us now apply these considerations to the matter in hand. If
M is one, then it is untrue that it is not this unity, P. If it is many,
then it is impossible that it should not be this multiplicity, Q. If it
is at once unity and multiplicity, then it is impossible that either
should be untrue of it. But from the truth of one determination
CHAPTER vi.] Lciiv of Identity merely formal. 133
there is no inference to the untruth of the other. This would only
be the case if it could be shown that the concrete nature of M is
incapable of uniting the two modes of behaviour in virtue of which
severally it would be unity and multiplicity. On the contrary, it might
be held that their reconcileability is logically shown by pointing out
that the apparently conflicting predicates are not applicable to the
same subject, since it was not the one M that we took to be equi
valent to many M, but the one unconditioned M that we took to be
equivalent to the many conditioned ??i. But, although this is correct,
yet the material content of our proposition is inconsistent with this
logical justification. For M was supposed to be neither outside the
many m nor to represent their sum. It was supposed to possess the
same essential being, that of a real existence, which belongs to every
m. Not even the activity which renders it one would, upon our view,
be other than that which renders it many. On the contrary, by the
very same act by which it constitutes the multiplicity, it opposes itself
to this as unity, and by the same act by which it constitutes the unity
it opposes itself to this as multiplicity. Thus here, if anywhere, we
expressly presuppose the essential unity of the subject to which we
ascribe at once unity and multiplicity.
At the same time that other consideration must be insisted on;
that it is quite unallowable to leave out of sight the peculiar significance
of the whole procedure which our theory ascribes to M, and to gene
rate a contradiction by thinking of unity and multiplicity as united
with Mm that meaningless way which the logical schemata of judg
ment express by the bald copula, is. If this word is to have an
unambiguous logical meaning of its own, it can only be the meaning
of an identity between the content of two ideas as such. The various
meanings of the metaphysical copula, on the contrary, it never
expresses— that copula which, as subsisting between one content and
another, justifies us in connecting them, by no means always in the
same sense, but in very various senses, as subject and predicate. While
it cannot be denied, then, that the one is the many, if we must needs
so express ourselves, still in this colourless expression it is impossible
to recognise what we mean to convey. The one is by no means the
many in the same neutral sense in which we might say that it is the
one. It is the many rather in the active sense of bringing it forth
and being present in it. This definite concrete import of our pro
position—the assertion that such procedure is really possible— is
what should have been disputed. There is no meaning whatever in
objections derived from the treatment of unity and multiplicity, in
134 The Unity of Things. [BOOK i.
abstracto, apart from their actual points of relation, as opposite con
ceptions. That they are, and cannot but be so opposed, is self*
evident. Every one allows it the moment he speaks of a unity of
the manifold. For there would be no meaning in what he says if he
did not satisfy the principle of identity by continuing to understand
, unity merely as unity, multiplicity merely as multiplicity. Neither
this principle, then, nor that of excluded middle, is violated by our
^doctrine. On the other hand, they are alike quite insufficient to
decide the possibility of a relation, of which the full meaning cannot
be brought under these abstract formulae. In applying them we fall
into an error already noticed. From the laws which our thought has
to observe in connecting its ideas as to the nature of things, we deem
ourselves able immediately to infer limitations upon what is possible
in this nature of things.
76. I must dwell for a moment longer on this point, which I
previously touched upon. Reality is infinitely richer than thought.
It is not merely the case that the complex material with which reality
is thronged can only be presented by perception, not produced by
thought. Even the universal relations between the manifold do not
admit of being constructed out of the logical connexions of our ideas.
The principle of identity inexorably bids us think of every A as = A.
If we followed this principle alone and looked upon it as an ultimate
limit of that which the nature of reality can yield, we should never
arrive at the thought of there being something which we call Be
coming. Having recognised, however, the reality of becoming, we
persuade ourselves that it at every moment satisfies the principle of
Identity, though in a manner which outrages it in the total result,
and that its proper nature can be comprehended by no connexion,
which Logic allows, of elements identical or not-identical. For
certainly if a passes through the stages a1 a2 a3 into b, it is true that
at each moment a = a, a1=a\ «2=«2, as = a3, b = b, and the principle
of Identity is satisfied ; but, for all that, it remains the fact that the
same a which was real is now unreal, and the b which was unreal is
real. How this comes about — how it is that the reality detaches
itself from one thing, to which it did belong, and attaches itself to
another from which it was absent — this remains for ever inexplicable
by thought, and even the appeal to the lapse of time does not make
the riddle clearer. It is true that between the extremities, a and b, of
that chain, our perception traverses the intermediate links, a1, a2, and
so on. But each of these passes in an indivisible moment into its suc
cessor. If we thought of a2 as broken up into the new chain oa a2 os,
CHAPTER vi.] Reality in what sense contradictory. 135
each of these links in turn would be identical with itself, so long as it
remained in existence, and even if the immediately sequent a4 were
separated by an interval of empty time from a3, still the transition of
a3 from being into not-being would have to be thought of as taking
place in one and the same moment, and could not be expanded into
a new series of transitions.
Undoubtedly therefore, if we want to think of Becoming, we have
to face the requirement of looking upon being and not-being as fused
with each other. This, however, does not imply that the import of
either idea is apprehended otherwise than as identical with itself and
different from the other. How the fusion is to be effected we know
not. Even the intuition of Time only presents us with the de facto
solution of the problem without informing us how it is solved. But
we know that in fact the nature of reality yields a result to us un
thinkable. It teaches us that being and not-being are -not, as we
could not help thinking them to be, contradictory predicates of every
subject, but that there is an alternative between them, arising out of a
union of the two which we cannot construct in thought. This ex
plains how the extravagant utterance could be ventured upon, that it
is just contradiction which constitutes the truth of the real. Those
who used it regarded that as contradictory which was in fact superior
to logical laws — which does not indeed abrogate them in their
legitimate application, but as to which no sort of positive conjecture
could possibly be formed as a result of such application.
77. The like over-estimate of logical principles, the habit of re
garding them as limitations of what is really possible, would oblige us
to treat as inadmissible the most important assumptions on which our
conception of the world is founded. All ideas of conditioning, of
cause and effect, of activity, require us to presuppose connexions of
things, which no thought can succeed in constructing. For thought
occupies itself with the eternally subsisting relations of that which
forms the content of the knowable, not with real existence and with
that which renders this existence for ever something more than the
world of thoughts. In regard, however, to all the rest of these
assumptions the imaginings of ' speculation ' have been busied, though
in our eyes ineffectually, in banishing them from our theory of the
world. It was only Becoming itself that it could not deny, even
after reducing professedly every activity to a relation of cause and
effect, and every such relation to a mere succession of phenomena.
Even if in the outer world it substituted for the actual succession
of events a mere appearance of such succession, it could not but
136 The Unity of Things. [BOOK i.
recognise a real Becoming and succession of events at least in those
beings in and for which the supposed appearance unfolded itself.
It is to this one instance, therefore, of Becoming, that we confine
ourselves in order to convey the impression of how much may exist
in reality without possibility of being reproduced by a logical con
nexion of our thoughts. One admission indeed must be made. Of
the fact of Becoming at any rate immediate perception convinced us.
It cannot similarly convince us that the connexion which we assumed
between the one unconditioned real and the multiplicity of its con
ditioned forms, is more than a postulate of our reflection, that it is a
problem eternally solved in a fashion as mysterious as is Becoming
itself.
This makes it of the more interest to see how this requirement of
the unity of the manifold, in one form or another, is always pressing
itself upon us anew. Even the metaphysic of Herbart, though so
unfavourably disposed to it, has to admit it among those ' accidental '
ways of looking at things, by which it sought to make the perfectly
simple qualities, a and b, of real beings, so far comparable with each
other as to explain the possibility of a reciprocal action taking place
between them. If the simple a was taken to =p-\-x, the no less
simple b to —q — x, these substitutions were to be called ' accidental'
only for the reason that the preference of these to others depended
on the use to which it was intended to put them, not on the nature
of the things. If the object had been the explanation of another
process, a might just as well have been taken to —r^-y in order to
be rendered comparable with (say) c=s— -y. However unaffected,
therefore, by these ' accidental ' modes of treatment the essence of
things might be held to be, their application always involves the pre
supposition that the perfect simplicity of quality, from which any
sort of composition is held to be excluded, may in respect of its con
tent be treated as absolutely equivalent not merely to some one but
to a great number of connected multiplicities.
The ease with which, in mathematics, a complex expression can
be shown to be equivalent to a simple one, has made the application
of this view to the essence of things seem less questionable than it is.
For that which is indicated by those simple mathematical expressions
makes no sort of claim to an indissoluble metaphysical unity of con
tent as do the real essences. On the contrary, the possibility of in
numerable equivalents being substituted for a rests in this case on
the admitted infinite divisibility of a, which allows of its being broken
up, and the fragments recompounded, in any number of forms ; or
CHAPTER vi.] Herbcirt admits Multiplicity. 157
else, in geometry, on the fact that a is included in a system of re
lations of position, which implies the possibility in any given case of
bringing into view those external relations of a to other elements of
space by which it may contribute to the solution of a problem pro
posed without there being any necessity for an alteration in the con
ception of the content of a itself. The essence of things cannot be
thought of in either of these ways. The introduction of mathe
matical analogies could only serve to illustrate, not to justify, this
metaphysical use of ' accidental ' points of view. Whoever counts
it admissible maintains, in so doing, the new and independent pro
position that the unity of the uncompounded quality, by which one
real essence is distinguished from another, is identical with many
mutually connected multiplicities.
78. A further step must be taken. The ' accidental views ' are
not merely complex expressions, by which our thought according to
a way of its own contrives to present to itself one and the same
simple essence ; not merely our different ways of arriving at the
same end. The course of events itself corresponds to them. In the
presentation of a as =p + x and of b as =g— x there was more than
a mere view of ours. In the opposition that we assumed to take
place between + x and — x, which would destroy each other if they
could, lay the active determining cause of an effort of self-mainten
ance on the part of each being, which was not elicited by the
mutually indifferent elements, p and q. Now whether we do or do
not share Herbart's views as to the real or apparent happening of
what happens and as to the meaning of self-maintenance, this in any
case amounts to an admission that not merely the content of the
simple qualities is at once unity and multiplicity, but also that the
things, so far as they are things, in their doing and suffering are at
once one and many. It is only with that element x of its essence
that a asserts itself and becomes operative, which finds an opposite
element in b. But for all that x remains no less in indissoluble con
nexion with p, which for the present has no occasion for activity, and
which would come into play if in another being d it met with a
tendency, — />, opposed to it.
For reasons to be mentioned presently I cannot adopt this way of
thinking. I have only pursued it so far in order to show that it
asserts the unity of the manifold, and that in regard to the real,
though in a different place from that in which it seemed to me
necessary. That which in it is taken to be true of every real essence
is what in our theory is required of the one Real; except that with
138 The Unity of Things.
Herbart that abrupt isolation of individual beings continues in which
we find a standing hindrance to the real exphnation of the course of
the world. Herbart was undoubtedly right in holding that an un
conditioned was implied in the changes of the conditioned. But there
was no necessity to seek this unconditioned straightway in the mani
fold of the elements which no doubt have to be presupposed as
proximate principles of explanation for the course of events. The
experiment is not made of admitting this multiplicity, but only as a
multiplicity that is conditioned and comprehended in the unity of a
single truly real Being. Yet it is only avoided at the cost of admit
ting in the individual real a multiplicity so conditioning itself as to
become one, of the very same kind as that which is ostensibly de
nied to the Real as a whole.
79. I return once more to Leibnitz. He too conceives manifold
mutually-independent Monads as the elements of the world, in an
tithesis, however, to the unity of God, by whose understanding, ac
cording to Leibnitz, is determined the content of what takes place in
the world, even as its reality is determined by his will. If we can
make up our minds to abstain from at once dismissing the supports
drawn from a philosophy of religion, which Leibnitz has given to
his theory, there is nothing to prevent us from going back still
further to an eternally mobile Phantasy on the part of God, the
creative source of those images of worlds which hover before His
understanding. Those of the images which by the rationality of their
connexion justify themselves to this understanding are the possible
worlds the best among which His will renders real. Now so long
as we think of a world-image, A, as exposed to this testing inspec
tion on the part of the divine Being, so long we can understand what
is meant by that truth, rationality or consistency, on which the possi
bility of its realisation is held to depend. It is the state of living
satisfaction on the part of God, which arises out of the felt frictionless
harmony between this image as unfolding itself in God's conscious
ness and the eternal habits of his thought. In this active divine
intelligence which thinks and enjoys every feature of the world image
in its connexions with other features — in it which knows how to
hold everything together — the several lines of the image are com
bined and form not a scattered multiplicity but the active totality
of a world which is possible because it forms such a complete whole.
I have previously noticed the difficulty of assigning any further deter
mination which accrues to this world, already thought of as possible,
if it is not merely thought but by God's will called into reality. How-
CHAPTER vi.] Leibnitz destroys Unity. 139
soever this may be, it could only enjoy this further something which
reality yielded under one of two conditions. It must either continue
within the inner life of God as an eternal activity of his Being, or
enter on an existence of its own, as a product which detaches itself
from him, in an independence scarcely to be defined.
The first of these suppositions — that of the world's Immanence in
God — we do not further pursue. It will lead directly back to our
view that every single thing and event can only be thought as an
activity, constant or transitory, of the one Existence, its reality
and substance as the mode of being and substance of this one Exist
ence, its nature and form as a consistent phase in the unfolding of
the same.
If, on the other hand, we follow Leibnitz in preferring the other
supposition that the real world is constituted By a sum of develop
ments of isolated Monads — developments merely parallel and not inter
fering with each other, in what precise form has this world preserved
the very property on which rested its claim to be called into reality ?
I mean that truth, consistency, or rationality, which rendered it
superior to the unrealisable dreams of the divine Phantasy? What
would be gained by saying that in this world, while none of its members
condition each other, everything goes on as if they all did so ; that
accordingly, while it does not really form a whole, yet to an intelli
gence directed to it, it will have the appearance of doing so ; that, in
one word, its reality consists in a hollow and delusive imitation of
that inner consistency which was pronounced to be, as such, the
ultimate reason why its realisation was possible ? I can anticipate an
objection that will here be made ; doubtless, it will be said, between
the elements of this world there exist reciprocal conditions, though
it may not follow that the elements actually operate on each other in
accordance with these conditions ; they exist in the form of a sum of
actually present relations of all elements to all, but the presence of
these relations does not imply an Intelligence that comprehends
them ; like any truth, they continue to hold though no one thinks of
them.
The substance of what I have to say against the admissibility of
such views I postpone for a moment. Here I would only remind the
reader that all this might equally be said of the unrealised world-
image A as supposed to be slill hovering before the divine under
standing. At the same time something more might be said of it.
For in this living thought of God it was not merely the case that a
part a of this image stood to another part b in a certain relation,
140 The Unity of Things. [BOOKI.
which might have been discovered by the attention of a mind directed
to it. For in fact this consciousness actually was constantly directed
to it, and in this consciousness, in its relating activity, these relations
had their being. The presentation of a was in fact in such an in
stance the efficient cause which brought the presentation of b into
the divine consciousness, or — if this is held to be the office of the
Phantasy — which at any rate retained it in consciousness and re
cognised it as the consistent complement to a. The active condition
ing of b by a is absent from the elements of reality and is expressly
replaced, according to the theory in question, by the mere coexist
ence, without any active operation of one on the other, of things the
same in content with the presentations of the divine consciousness.
Thus, to say the least, the realised world, so far from being richer,
is poorer in consequence of its supposed independent existence as
detached from the Divine Being — in consequence of its course re
sulting no longer from the living presence of God but only from an
order of relations established by him. The requirement that God
and the world should not be so blended as to leave no opposition
between them is in itself perfectly justified. But the right way to
satisfy it would have been not by this unintelligible second act of
constitution, by the realisation of what was previously an image of a
merely possible world, but by the recognition that what in this theory
is presented as a mere possibility and preliminary suggestion (to the
mind of God) is in fact the full reality, but that nevertheless the one
remains different from all the manifold, which only exists in and
through the one.
80. I now return to the thesis, of which I just now postponed
the statement for an instant. It at once forms the conclusion of a
course of thought previously entered on and has a decisive bearing
on all that I have to say in the sequel. At the outset of this dis
cussion we came to the conclusion that the proposition, ' things
exist/ has no intelligible meanirig except that they stand in relations
to each other. But these relations we left for the present without a
name, and contented ourselves, by way of a first interpretation of our
thought, with reference to various relations in the way of space, time,
and of cause and effect, of which the subsistence between things
constituted for our every-day apprehension that which we call the
real existence of the world. But between the constituents of the
world of ideas — constituents merely thinkable as opposed to real —
we found a complex of relations no less rich. Nay, our mobile
thought, it seemed, had merely to will it, and the number of these
CHAPTER vi.] What are ' objective relations? 141
relations might be indefinitely increased by transitions in the way of
comparison between points selected at pleasure. This consideration
could not but elicit the demand that the relations on which the being
of things rests should be sought only among those which obtain
objectively between them, not among such as our subjective process
of thinking can by arbitrary comparisons establish between them.
This distinction however is untenable. I repeat- in regard to it
what I have already in my Logic1 had opportunity of explaining in
detail. In the passage referred to I started with considering how
a representation of relations between two matters of consciousness, a
and b, is possible. The condition of its possibility I could not find
either in the mere succession or in the simultaneity of the two several
presentations, a and b, in consciousness, but only in a relating activity,
which directs itself from one to the other, holding the two together.
1 He who finds red and yellow to a certain extent different yet akin,
becomes conscious, no doubt, of these two relations only by help of
the changes which he, as a subject of ideas, experiences in the trans
ition from the idea of red to that of yellow;' but, I added, he will
not in this transition entertain any apprehension lest the relation of
red to yellow may in itself be something different from that of the
affections which they severally occasion in him ; lest in itself red
should be like yellow and only appear different from it to us, or lest
in reality there should be a greater difference between them than we
know, which only appears to us to involve nevertheless a certain
affinity. Doubts like these might be entertained as to the external
causes, to us still unknown, of our feelings. But so long as it is not
these causes but only our own ideas, after they have been excited in
us, that form the object of our comparison, we do not doubt that the
likenesses2, differences, and relations which these exhibit on the part of
our presentative susceptibility indicate at the same time a real relation
on the part of what is represented to us. Yet how exactly is this
possible ? How can the propositions, a is the same as a, and, a is dif
ferent from <5, express an objective relation, which, as objective, would
subsist independently of our thought and only be discovered or
recognised by it ? Some one may perhaps still suppose himself to
know what he means by a self-existent identity3 of a with a; but
what will he make of a self-existent distinction between a and £?
and what objective relation will correspond to this ' between,' to which
we only attach a meaning, so long as it suggests to us the distance in
1 [§§ 337, 338.] 2 ['Gleichheiten.']
3 ['Gleichheit. gleich,' v. note on § 19.]
142 The Unity of Things.
space which we, in comparing a and £, metaphorically interpolated
for the purpose of holding the two apart, and at the same time as a
connecting path on which our mind's eye might be able to travel from
one to the other ? Or — to put the case otherwise — since difference,
like any other relation, is neither a predicate of a taken by itself nor of
b taken by itself, of what is it a predicate ? And if it only has a
meaning when a and b have been brought into relation to each other,
what objective connexion exists between a and b in the supposed case
where the relating activity, by which we connected the two in con
sciousness, is not being exercised ?
The only possible answer to these questions we found to be the
following. If a and b, as we have so far taken to be the case, are not
things belonging to a reality outside and independent of our thought,
but simply contents of possible ideas like red and yellow, straight and
curved, then a relation between them exists only so far as we think it
and by the act of our thinking it. But our soul is so constituted, and
we suppose every other soul which inwardly resembles our own to be
so constituted, that the same a and b, how often and by whomsoever
they may be thought, will always produce in thought the same rela
tion — a relation that has its being only in thought and by means of
thought. Therefore this relation is independent of the individual
thinking subject, and independent of the several phases of that sub
ject's thought. This is all that we mean when we regard it as having
an existence in itself between a and b and believe it to be discoverable
by our thought as an object which has a permanence of its own. It
really has this permanence, but only in the sense of being an occur
rence which will always repeat itself in our thinking in the same way
under the same conditions. So long therefore as the question concerns
an a and b, of which the content is given merely by impressions and
ideas, the distinction of objective relations obtaining between them,
from subjective relations established between them by our thought, is
wholly unmeaning. All relations which can be discovered between
the two are predicable of them on exactly the same footing ; all, that
is to say, as inferences which their own constant nature allows to our
thought and enjoins upon it ; none as something which had an exist
ence of its own between them prior to this inferential activity on our
part. The relation1 of a to b in such cases means, conformably to the
etymological form of the term, our act of reference 2.
81. We now pass to the other case, which concerns us here as
1 [' Beziehung.']
a ['Unsere Handlung des Beziehens.']
CHAPTER vi.] Relations of Qualities and of Things. 143
dealing no longer with logic but with metaphysics. Let a and b indi
cate expressly Realities, Entities, or Things. The groups, a and b, of
sensible or imaginable qualities, by which these things are distinguished
from each other, we can still submit with the same result as before
to our arbitrary acts of comparison, and every relation which by so
doing we find between the qualities will have a significance for the
two things a and b equally essential or unessential, objective or non-
objective. No relation between them could be discovered if it were
not founded on the nature of each, but none is found before it is
sought.
But it is not these relations that we have in view if, in order to
render intelligible a connexion of the things a and b which experience
forces on our notice, we appeal to a relation C, which sometimes does,
sometimes does not, obtain between a and b ; which is thus not one
that belongs to the constant natures, a and b, of the two things, but a
relation into which the things, as already constituted independently of
it, do or do not enter. In this case the conclusion is unavoidable
that this objective relation C, to which we appeal, cannot be anything
that takes place between a and b, and that just for that reason it is not
a relation in the ordinary sense of the term, but more than this. For
it is only in our thought, while it passes from the mental image or
presentation of a to that of b, that there arises, as a perception imme
diately intelligible to thought, that which we here call a between. It
would be quite futile to try, on the contrary, to assign to this betiveen,
at once connecting and separating a and b, which is a mere memorial
of an act of thought achieved solely by means of the unity of our con
sciousness, a real validity in the sense of its having an independent
existence of its own apart from the consciousness which thinks it.
We are all, it is true, accustomed to think of things in their multipli
city as scattered over a space, through the void of which stretch the
threads of their connecting relations ; whether we insist on this way of
thinking and consider the existence of things to be only possible in
the space which we see around us, or whether we are disposed with
more or less clearness, as against the notion of a sensible space, to
prefer that of an intelligible space which would afford the web com
posed of those threads of relation equal convenience of expansion. But
even if we cannot rid ourselves of these figures, we must at least allow
that that part of the thread of relation which lies in the void between
a and b, can contribute nothing to the union of the two immediately
but only through its attachment to a and b respectively. Nor does
its mere contact with a and b suffice to yield this result. It must
144 The Unity of Things.
communicate to both a definite tension, prevalent throughout its own
length, so that they are in a different condition from that in which
they would be if this tension were of a different degree or took a dif
ferent direction.
It is on these modifications of their inner state, which a and b sus
tain from each other — on these alone — that the result of the relation
between them depends ; and these are obviously independent of the
length and of the existence of the imagined thread of relation. The
termini a and b can produce immediately in each other these reciprocal
modifications, which they in the last resort must produce even on
supposition that they communicated their tension to each other by
means of the thread of relation ; since no one would so far misuse
the figure as to make the thread, which was ostensibly only an adapta
tion to sense of the relation between the termini, into a new real
material, capable of causing a tension, that has arisen in itself from
the reciprocal action of its own elements, to act on inert things, a and
b, attached to it. Let us discard, then, this easy, but useless and con
fusing, figure. Let us admit that there is no such thing as this interval
between things, in which, as its various possible modifications, we
sought a place for those relations, C, that we supposed to form the
ground of the changing action of things upon each other. That
which we sought under this name of an objective relation between
things can only subsist if it is more than mere relation, and if it sub
sists not between things but immediately in them as the mutual action
which they exercise on each other and the mutual effects which they
sustain from e.ach other. It is not till we direct our thought in the
way of comparison to the various forms of this action that we come
to form this abstract conception of a ?nere relation, not yet amounting
to action but preceding the action which really takes place as its
ground or condition.
CHAPTER VII.
Conclusion.
82. WE may now attempt by way of summary to determine how
many of the ontological questions, so far proposed, admit of a final
answer. In the first place, to stand in relations appeared to us at
the beginning of our discussion to be the only intelligible import of
the being of things. These relations are nothing else than the im
mediate internal reciprocal actions themselves which the things un
remittingly exchange. Beside the things and that which goes on in
them there is nothing in reality. Everything which we regard as
mere relation — all those relations which seem to extend through the
complete void of a * leiween-things] so that the real might enter into
them — subsist solely as images which our presentative faculty on
its own account makes for itself. They originate in it and for it, as
in its restless activity it compares the likeness, difference, and se
quence of the impressions which the operation of A, B, C upon us
brings into being — this operation at each moment corresponding to
the changeable inner states a, <5, c, which A, JB, C experience through
their action on each other. To pursue this Thesis further is the problem
of Cosmology, which deals with things and events as resting or pass
ing in the seemingly pre-existent forms of space and time, and which
will have to show how all relations of space and time, which we are
accustomed to regard as prior conditions of an operation yet to
ensue, are only expressions and consequences of one already taking
place.
We find an answer further to the enquiry as to that metaphysical
C5 that relation which it seems necessary should supervene, in order
that things, which without it would have remained indifferent to each
other, might be placed under the necessity, and become capable, of
operation on each other. The question is answered to the effect that
such a thing as a non-C1, a separation which would have left the things
indifferent to each other, is not to be met with in reality and that
therefore the question as to the transition from this state into that of
VOL. I. L
1 46 Conclusion. [BOOK i.
combination is a question concerning nothing. The unity of M is
this eternally present condition of an interchange of action, unremit
ting but varying to the highest degree of complexity. For neither
does this unity ever really exist in the general form indicated by this
conception and name of unity and by this sign M. It really exists at
each moment only as a case, having a definite value, of the equation
for which I gave the formula *, and in such form it is at the same time
the efficient cause of the actuality of the state next-ensuing as well as
the conditioning ground of what this state contains. Thus the stream of
this self-contained operation propagates itself out of itself from phase
to phase. If a sensible image is needed to help us to apprehend it,
we should not think of a wide-spread net of relations, in the meshes
of which things lie scattered, so that tightening of the threads, now at
this point, now at that, may draw them together and force them to
share each other's states. We should rather recall the many simul
taneous 'Parts' of a piece of polyphonic music, which without being in
place are external to each other in so far as they are distinguished by
their pitch and tone, and of which first one and then another, rising
or falling, swelling or dying away, compels all the rest to vary cor
respondingly in harmony with itself and one another, forming a series
of movements that result in the unity of a melody which is consistent
and complete in itself.
83. Our last considerations started from the supposition that in a
certain element A of M a new state a has somehow been introduced.
It is natural that now a further question should be raised as to the
possibility of this primary change, from the real occurrence of which
follows the course of reactions depicted. This question as to the
beginning of motion has been a recognised one since the time of
Aristotle, but it has been gradually discovered that the answer to it
cannot be derived from the unmoved, which seemed to Aristotle the
ultimate thing in the world. The most various beliefs as to the
nature and structure of reality agree upon this, that out of a con
dition of perfect rest a beginning of motion can never arise. Not
merely a multiplicity of originally given real elements, but also given
motions between them, are presupposed in all the theories in which
professors of the natural sciences, no less than others, strive to explain
the origin of the actual course of the world out of its simplest prin
ciples. To us, with that hunger for explanation which characterises
our thought, it looks like an act of despair to deny the derivability
from anything else of some general fact, when in regard to its
1 [Cp. § 70-]
CHAPTER vi i.] Might the wor Id have been different? 147
individual forms one is accustomed to enquire for the conditions of their
real existence. We experience this feeling of despair if we find our
selves compelled to trace back the multiplicity of changeable bodies
to a number of unchangeable elements. Yet the question, why it
is just these elements and no others that enjoy the prerogative of
original reality, does not force itself upon us. Our fancy does not
avail, beyond the elements given by experience, to produce images of
others, which might have existed but were in some unintelligible way
cheated of their equal claim to reality. Of the motions, on the con
trary, of which these elements, once given, are capable, we see first
one and then another take place in reality according as their changing
conditions bring them about. None of them appears to us so
superior to the rest that it exclusively, and without depending in its
turn on similar conditions, should claim to be regarded as the first
actual motion of the real.
These considerations lead on the one side to an endless regress in
time. It is not necessary however at this point to complicate our
enquiry by reference to the difficulties connected with occurrence in
time. Our effort will be to exclude them for the present. But, no
matter whether we believe ourselves to reach a really first beginning
or whether we prolong the chain of occurrence in endless retrogres
sion, the established course of the world is anyhow a single reality in
contrast with the innumerable possibilities, which would have been
realised if either the primary motion had been different, as it might
have been, or if, which is equally thinkable, the endless progression,
as a whole, had taken a different direction. For whether in reality it
be finite or infinite, in either case its internal arrangement admits of
permutations which, as it is, are not real.
All these doubts, however, are only different off-shoots of a general
confusion in our way of thinking and a complete misunderstanding
of the problems which a metaphysical enquiry has to solve. The
world once for all is, and we are in it. It is constituted in a particu
lar way, and in us for that reason there lives a Thought, which is able
to distinguish different cases of a universal. Now that all this is so,
there may arise in us the images and conceptions of possibilities
which in reality are not ; and then we imagine that we, with this
Thought of ours, are there before all reality and have the business of
deciding what reality should arise out of these empty possibilities,
which are yet all alike only thinkable because there is a reality
from which this Thought springs. When once, in this Thought,
affirmation and denial of the same content have become possible, we
L 2
148 Conclusion. [BOOKI^
can propose all those perverted questions against which we have so
often protested— Why there is a world at all, when it is thinkable that
there should be none ? Why, as there is a world, its content is M
and not some other drawn from the far-reaching domain of the
non-J/? Given the real world as M, why is it not in rest but in
motion ? Given motion, why is it motion in the direction X and not
in the equally thinkable direction Z? To all these questions there is
only one answer. It is not the business of the metaphysician to
>make reality but to recognise it ; to investigate the inward order of
what is given, not to deduce the given from what is not given. In
order to fulfil this office, he has to guard against the mistake of
regarding abstractions, by means of which he fixes single determina
tions of the real for his use, as constructive and independent elements
which he can employ, by help of his own resources, to build up the
real.
In this mistake we have often seen metaphysicians entangled.
They have formed the idea of a pure being and given to this a
significance apart from all relations, in the affirmation of which and
not otherwise it indicates reality. They have petrified that reality
which can only attach to something completely determined, into a
real-in-itself destitute of all properties. They have spoken of laws
as a controlling power between or beyond the things and events in
which such laws had their only real validity. In like manner we
are inclined to think at the outset of the truly existing M, the complex
of all things, as a motionless object of our contemplation ; and we are
right in doing so as long as in conceiving it we think merely of the
function, constantly identical with itself, which it signifies to us. From
this function, it is true, simply as conceived, no motion follows. But
we forget meantime that it is not this conception of this function that
is the real, but that which at each moment the function executes, and
of which the concrete nature may contain a kind of fulfilment of the
function, which does not follow from that conception of it. In what
way that one all embracing M solves its problem — whether by main
taining a constant equality of content, or by a succession of innu
merable different instances, of which each satisfies the general equa
tion prescribed by its plan — that is its own affair. Between these two
thinkable possibilities it is not for us to choose as we will. Our
business is to recognise whichever of them is given as reality. Now
what is given to us is the fact of Becoming. No denial of ours can
banish it from the world. It is not therefore as a stationary identity
with itself but only as an eternally self-sustained motion that we have
CHAPTER vii.] Must a spiritual Being be assumed? 149
to recognise the given being of that which truly is. And as given
with it we have also to recognise the direction which its motion
takes.
84. I have referred to the theories which agree with my own in
being Monistic. In all of them motion is at the same time regarded
as an eternal attribute of the supposed ultimate ground of the world.
This motion, however, was generally represented as a ceaseless
activity, on the opposition of which, as living and animating, to the un
intelligible conception of a stark and dead reality the writers referred
to loved to dwell. Such language shows that the metaphysical reasons
for believing in the Unity of Being have been reinforced by aesthetic
inclinations which have yielded a certain prejudice as to the nature
of the Being that is to be counted supreme. It was not the mere
characteristic of life and activity but their worth and the happiness
found in the enjoyment of them which it was felt must belong in
some supreme measure to that in which all things have their cause and
reason. Such a proposition is more than at this stage of our enquiry
we are entitled to maintain. Life and Activity only carry the special
meaning thus associated with them on supposition of the spirituality
of the Being of which they are predicated. The only necessary
inference, however, from the reasoning which has so far guided us is
to an immanent operation, through which each new state of what Is
becomes the productive occasion of a second sequent upon it, but
which for anything we have yet seen to the contrary may be a blind
operation. I would not indeed conceal my conviction that there is
justification, notwithstanding, for a belief in the Life of that which is
the ground of the world, but it is a justification of which I must post
pone the statement. I would only ask, subject to this proviso, to be
allowed the use of expressions, for the sake of brevity, of which the
full meaning is indeed only intelligible upon a supposition, as we have
seen, still to be made good, but which will give a more vivid meaning
to the propositions we have yet to advance than the constant repeti
tion of more abstract terms could do.
85. So long as all we know of M is the function which it is
required to fulfil — that, namely, of being the Unity which renders all
that the world contains what it is — so long we can derive nothing
from this thought but a series of general and abstract deductions.
Every single being which exists, exists in virtue not of any being of
its own but of the commission given it, so to speak, by the one M;
and it exists just so long as its particular being is required for the
fulfilment of the equation M= M. Again, it is what it is not abso-
150 Conclusion. [BOOK i.
lutely and in immemorial independence of anything else ; it is that
which the one M charges it to be. One thing, finally, operates on
another not by means of any force of its own, but in virtue of the
One present in it, and the mode and amount of its operation at each
moment is that prescribed it by M for the re-establishment of the
equation just spoken of.
To the further interpretation of these propositions in detail I return
presently. That which is implied in all of them is a denial of any
knowledge antecedent to all experience — a denial which goes much
deeper, and indeed bears quite another meaning than is understood by
those who are so fond of insisting on this renunciation of a priori
knowledge. It is not in philosophy merely, but in the propositions
on which scientific men venture that we trace the influence of the
prejudice that, independently of the content realised in this world,
M •=. M, there are certain universal modes of procedure, certain rights
and duties, which self-evidently belong to all elements, as such, that
are to be united in any possible world, and which would be just as
valid for a wholly different world, N = TV, as for that in which we
actually live. There has thus arisen in philosophy a series of propo
sitions which purport to set forth the properties and prerogatives of
substances as such independently of that course of the world in which
they are inwoven. They obviously rest on the impression that every
other order of a universe, whatever it might be, that could ever come
into Being, would have to respect these properties and prerogatives
and could exact no function from Things other than what, in virtue of
a nature belonging to them antecedently to the existence of a world,
they were fitted and necessitated to render. And no less in the
procedure of the physical sciences, however many laws they may
treat as obtaining merely in the way of matter of fact, there is yet
implied the notion of there being a certain more limited number of
mechanical principles, to which every possible nature, however hetero
geneous from nature as it is, would nevertheless have to conform.
The philosophers, it is true, have imagined that the knowledge of the
prerogatives of Substance was to be attained by pure thinking, while
the men of science maintain that the knowledge of ultimate laws is
only to be arrived at by experience. But as to the metaphysical value
of that which they suppose to be discovered in these different ways
they are both at one. They take it as the sum of pre-mundane truth,
which different worlds, M= yJ/and N= N, do but exhibit in different
cases of its application.
This is the notion which I seek to controvert. Prior to the world,
CHAPTER vi i.] Nothing more primary than Rea lily. 151
or prior to the first thing that was real, there was no pre-mundane or
pre-real reality, in which it would have been possible to make out what
would be the rights which, in the event of there coming to be a reality,
each element to be employed in its construction could urge for its
protection against anything incompatible with its right as a substance,
or to which every force might appeal as a justification for refusing
functions not imposed on it by the terms of its original charter.
There is really neither primary being nor primary law, but the
original reality, M or N. Given M or N, there follows from the one
M for its world, M= M, the series of laws and truths, which hold
good for this world. If not M but N were the original reality, then
for the world N = ^V there would follow the other series of regulated
processes which would hold good for this other world. There is
nothing which could oppose to these ordinances MQT. TV any claim of
its own to preservation or respect.
86. Here the objector will interpose : ' Granting this, are you not
liable to the charge of having here in your turn given utterance to one
of those pre-mundane truths, of which you refuse to admit the validity?
Have you not of your own accord expressly alleged the case of two
worlds, M and N, which you suppose would both be obliged to
conform to the general rule stated?' Now I have purposely chosen
these expressions in order to make my view, which certainly stands in
need of justification against the above objection, perfectly clear. In
the first place, as regards the world N, which I placed in opposition
to the real world M, I have to repeat what I have already more than
once pointed out. The world M is, and we, thinking spirits, are in
it, holding a position which M in virtue of its nature as M could not
but assign to us. To this position are adjusted those general processes
of our Thought, by which we are to arrive at what we call a know
ledge of the rest of the world. Among these is that very important
one, no doubt corresponding to the plan on which the world M is
ordered, which enables us not only to form general ideas as such, but
to subsume any given manifold under any one of its marks, of which
a general idea has been formed, as a species or instance thereof.
This intellectual capability, once given, does not subject itself to any
limits in its exercise. Even that which, when we consider it meta
physically, we recognise as in reality the all-containing and uncon
ditioned, we may as a matter of logic take for one of the various
instances admitting of subsumption under the general idea of the un
conditioned. Hence, while it is only of particular things that we
assert multiplicity as a matter of reality, we attempt on the other
152 Conclusion . [BOOKI.
hand to form a plural of the conception ' Universe/ and oppose the
real M to many other possible Universes.
But the capacity of doing this we owe not to the knowledge of a
law to which M and N alike are subject, but only to that which
actually takes place in M, and to a certain tendency transferred from
it to us as constituents of M: the tendency to think of everything
real as an instance of a kind, of which the conception is derived by
abstraction from that thing, and thus at last to think even of the
primary all-embracing Real, M itself, as an instance representing the
idea we form of it, and so to dream of other instances existing along
with it. Thus arises the notion of that world N9 a perfectly empty
fiction of thought to which we ascribe no manner of reality, and of
no value, except, like other imaginary formulae, to illustrate the other
conception M, which is not imaginary. And I employed TV exclusively
for this purpose. Further, when we said that, if N existed, the laws
valid for N would flow from the equation N = N in just the same
way as those valid for M flow from the equation M = M, this was
not a conclusion drawn from knowledge of an obligation binding on
both of them. On the contrary, it was an analogy in which what was
true of the real M was transferred to the imaginary N. In reality we
have no title to make this transfer, for — to put it simply — who can tell
what would be and would happen if everything were other than it is ?
But if we do oppose this imaginary case to the real one in order to
explain the latter, we must treat it after the type of the real. Other
wise, as wholly disparate, it would not even serve the purpose of illus
trating the real by contrast with it — the only purpose for which it is
introduced.
87. Yet a third objection remains to be noticed. The statement
that from M follows the series of laws that hold good for this world
M, obviously does not mean merely that these laws proceed anyhow
from M-, it means that they are the proper consequences of its
nature. But what is meant by a ' proper consequence ' when it can
no longer be distinguished from an improper consequence as corre
sponding to some rule to which the improper consequence does not
correspond? .Have we not after all to presuppose some law of the
necessity or possibility of thought, absolutely prior to the world and
reality, which determines, in regard to every reality that may come to
be, what development of its particular nature can follow consistently
from the nature of the primary real, M or N, in distinction from such
a development as would be inconsistent ?
This variation of the old error can only be met by a variation of the
CHAPTER vi i.] * Consistency' requires Comparison. 153
old answer. At first sight it seems a pleonasm to demand that actual
consequences should not be inconsequent. Still the expression has
a certain meaning. Hitherto we have taken the idea of reason and
consequent to be merely this, that from a determinate something there
flows another determinate something. The question, what determinate
something admits of being connected with what other, by coherence
of this sort, has been left aside. The idea of reason and consequent, as
above stated, would be satisfied, if with the various reasons g^ g* g* the
completely determinate consequences p q r were as a matter of fact
associated, without there being any affinity between p q and r corre
sponding to that between gl g*g*. We shall find that our knowledge
of reality is in fact ultimately arrested by such pairs of cohering
occurrences. For instance, between the external stimuli on which the
sensations of sight and hearing depend, we are able to point out
affinities which make it possible to present those several modes of
stimulation as kinds, gl and g-2, of one process of vibration, g. But
between sounds and colours we are quite unable to discover the same
affinity, or to prove that, if sensations of sound follow upon^1, sensa
tions of colour must in consistency present themselves on occasion
This example illustrates the meaning of that consistency of conse
quence which, in our view as stated above, can within certain limits
be actually discovered and demonstrated in the real world, but beyond
those limits is assumed to obtain universally in some form or other.
The Unity of Being, without which there would be no possibility of
the reciprocal action within a world of the seemingly though not really
separate elements of that world, excludes the notion of a multiplicity
of isolated and fatalistic ordinances, which without reference to each
other should bind together so many single pairs of events. There
must be some rule or other according to which the connexion of the
members of each single pair, g * and_/^ with each other determines that
of all the other pairs, ^m and/"m. It is only in reference to the com
parison of various cases with each other, which thus becomes possible,
that there is any meaning in speaking as we did of ' consistency.'
The expression has no meaning in relation to any single pair, g and
y, which we might have made the point of departure for our pre
liminary consideration of the rest. The coherence between two
members would at the outset be an independent fact of which
nothing could be known but simply that it was the fact. For
1 ['g' and 'P stand for ' Grand' and 'Folge* here, as on p. 83. Cp. also p. 96
where ' Grand ' (Reason) is distinguished from ' Ursache ' (Cause).]
154 Conclusion.
[BOOK I.
supposing we chose to think of their adjustment to each other as
connected with the fulfilment of a supreme condition Z requiring
consistency, they would still only correspond to this condition. The
actual concrete mode in which they satisfied it, the content in virtue
of which they subordinated themselves to it, would be something
which it would be impossible to suppose determined by Z itself; the
more so in proportion as Z was more expressly taken to be an or
dinance that would have to be fulfilled indifferently in innumerable
cases, nay even in the most various worlds. Supposing Z to be
neither the determining ground of the content of^- and/; nor the pro
ductive cause of their real existence, the proposition that a connexion
between the two ensues in accordance with Z, cannot be a statement
of a real metaphysical order of supremacy and subordination : but is
just the reverse of the real order. The primary independent fact of
the connexion between ^ and/"1 is of such a character that the com
parison of it with g* and /2, g* and /3, enables us first to apprehend
a universal mode of procedure on the part of the various connexions
of events in the world — a concrete procedure, peculiar to this world
M — and then, upon continued abstraction, to generate the conception
of a condition Z, which would hold good for the organization of any
world, N, so long as the mental image of N was formed after the
pattern of the given reality, M.
88. At the present day few will understand the reasons for the per-
^ sistency with which I dwell on these considerations and so often
/ return to them. We live quickly, and have forgotten, without settling,
a controversy which forty years ago was still a matter of the liveliest
interest among the philosophers of Germany. The difficulties involved
in Hegel's system of thought were then beginning to make themselves
felt even by those who looked with favour on his enterprise — of
repeating in thought by a constructive process the actual development
of the world from the ground of the absolute. It was not after
Hegel's mind to begin by determining the subjective forms of
thought, under which alone we can apprehend the concrete nature
of this ground of the Universe — a nature perhaps to us inaccessible.
From the outset he looked on the motion of our thought in its effort
to gain a clear idea of this still obscure goal of our aspiration as the
proper inward development of the absolute itself, which only needed
to be pursued consistently, in order gradually to bring into conscious
ness all that the universe contains.
Thus the most abstract of objects came to be thought of as the
root of the most concrete — a way of thinking which it was soon found
CHAPTER VII.] CoHStrUCtlOHS of t/16 WOT Id. 155
impossible to carry out. Even in dealing with the phenomena of
nature, though they were forced into categories and classifications
without sufficient knowledge, it had to be supposed that the process
of development, once begun, was carried on with a superabundance
in the multiplication of forms for which no explanation was to be
found in the generalities which preceded the theory of nature. All
that these could do was to make us anticipate some such saltus\ for the
transition of one determination into its opposite, or at any rate into
an ' otherness,' had been one of the supposed characteristics of the
motion which was held to generate the world. The same difficulty
might have been felt when the turn came for the construction of the
spiritual and historical world, into which nature was supposed to pass
over. There are many reasons, however, even in actual life, for not
being content with the derivation of our ideas of the beautiful and the
good from the living feeling which in fact alone completely appre
hends their value, but for giving them greater precision by requiring
them to satisfy certain general formal determinations. It is true that
they too undergo a sensible degradation if they are looked on merely
as instances of abstract relations of thought, but this was taken almost
less notice of than the same fact in regard to the phenomena of nature,
for owing to the latter being objects of perception, it could not be
ignored how much more they were than the abstract problems which
according to the Hegelian philosophy they had to fulfil.
Hegel himself was quite aware of the error involved in this way of
representing the world's course of development. He repeatedly insists
that what appears in it as the third and last member of the dialectical
movement described is in truth rather the first. And assuredly this
remark is not to be looked upon as an after-thought of which no
further application is made, but expresses the true intention of this
bold Monism, which undertook far more than human powers can
achieve, but of which the leading idea by no means loses its value
through the great defects in its execution. From the errors noticed
Schelling thought to save us. It was time, he told us, that the higher,
the only proper, antithesis should be brought into view — the antithesis
between freedom and necessity, in apprehending which, and not other
wise, we reach the inmost centre of philosophy. I will not dwell on
the manner in which he himself workecf out this view in its application
to the philosophy of religion. It was Weisse who first sought to
develope it systematically. That which Hegel had taken for true
Being, he looked upon merely as the sum of prior conditions without
which such Being would be unthinkable and could not be, but which
156 Conclusion. [BOOKI.
themselves have not being. Thus understood, they formed in his
view the object of a certain part of philosophy, and that comparatively
speaking a negative part, namely Metaphysic. It was for experience
on the other hand — the experience of the senses and that of the moral
and religious consciousness — as a positive revelation to give us know
ledge of the reality built on that abstract foundation.
Such expressions might easily be explained in a sense with
which we could agree. It would be a different sense, however,
from that which they were intended to convey. According to that
original sense the general thoughts, which it was the business of
Metaphysic to unfold, were more than those forms of apprehending
true Being without which we cannot think. They were understood
indeed to be this, but also something more. In their sum they were
held to constitute an absolutely necessary matter for which it was
impossible either not to be or to be other than it is, but which, not
withstanding this necessity, notwithstanding this unconditional being,
was after all a nothing, without essence and without reality; while
over against it stood the true Being, for which according to this
theory, it is possible not to be or to be other than it is, thus being
constituted not by necessity but by freedom. I shall not spend time
in discussing this usage of the terms, freedom and necessity. I would
merely point out that the latter term, if not confined to a necessity of
thought on our part, but extended to that which is expressly held to
be the unconditioned condition of all that is conditioned, would have
simply no assignable meaning and would have to be replaced by the
notion of a de facto universal validity. The adoption of the term
'Freedom' to indicate the other sort of reality expressly recognised as
merely de facto — the reality of that which might just as well not be —
is to be explained by the influence of ideas derived from another
sphere of philosophy — the philosophy of religion — which cannot be
further noticed here. Taken as a whole, the theory is the explicit
and systematic expression of that Dualism which I find wholly un
thinkable, and against which my discussions have so far been directed.
In this form at any rate it cannot be true. It is impossible that there
should first be an absolute Prius consisting in a system of forms that
carry necessity with them and constitute a sort of unaccountable Fate,
and that then there should come to be a world, however created,
which should submit itself to the constraint of these laws for the
realisation of just so much as these limits will allow. The real alone
is and it is the real which by its Being brings about the appearance
of there being a necessity antecedent to it, just as it is the living body
CHAPTER vii.] Idealism and Realism. 157
that forms within itself the skeleton around which it has the appear
ance of having grown. / t "
89. We have not the least knowledge how it is that the seemingly '.
homogeneous content of a germ- vesicle deposits those fixed elements
of form, around which the vital movements are carried on. Still
less shall we succeed in deducing from the simple original character,
M, of a world, the organization of the necessity which prevails in it.
There are two general ways, however, of understanding the matter,
alike admissible consistently with our assumption of the unity of the
world, which remain to be noticed here. I will indicate them
symbolically by means of our previous formulae, M—$\ABK\,
and the converse $ [A B K\ — M. By the former I mean to convey
that M is to be considered the form-giving Prius, of which the
activity, whether in the way of self-maintenance or development,
at every moment conditions the state of the world's elements and the
form of their combination, both being variable between the limits
which their harmony with M fixes for them. In the second formula
M is presented as the variable resulting form, which the world at
each moment assumes through the reciprocal effects of its elements —
this form again being confined within limits which the necessity,
persistently and equally prevalent in these effects, imposes. I might
at once designate these views as severally Idealism and Realism,
were it not that the familiar but at the same time somewhat indefinite
meaning of these terms makes a closer investigation necessary.
90. Availing ourselves once again, for explanatory purposes, of
the opposition between two worlds, M and N, we might designate
the form in which, according to the sense of the former view, we
should conceive the different characters of the two worlds to be alike
comprehended, so that of an Idea * or, Germanice, as that of
a Thought 2. It is thus that in ^Esthetic criticism we are accustomed
to speak of the Idea or Thought of a work of Art, in the sense of
the principle which determines its form in opposition to the particular
outlines in which indeed the principle is manifested but to which it is
not so absolutely tied that other kindred means, even means wholly
different, might not be combined to express it. So again in active
life we speak of a project as an Idea or Thought, when we mean to
censure it for including no selection between the manifold points
capable of being related by the combination of which it might be
carried out. If now we drop the imaginary world N, we cannot
thereupon suppose that the real world M lacks that concrete character
1 ['Idee.'] 2 [' Gcdanke.']
158 Conclusion.
[BOOK I.
\
by which we distinguished it from N, although that character would
no longer be needed for the purpose of distinguishing it from some
thing else now that it is understood that there is nothing external
to it. It would therefore be incorrect to call the Idea, simply as the
Idea, the supreme principle of the world. Even the absolute idea,
although, in opposition to the partial ideas which it itself conditions
as constituents of its meaning, it might fitly be called unlimited, would
not on that account be free from a definitely concrete content, with
which it fills the general form of the Idea.
In other cases it is more easy to avoid this logical error of putting
an abstract designation of essence, as conceived by us, in place of the
subject to which the essence belongs. We are more liable to it in
the present case, where the reality, being absolutely single, can only
be compared with imaginary instances of the same conception. We
are then apt to think that every determinate quality which we might
leave to this reality would rest on a denial of the other determinate
qualities which we excluded from it, and which, in order to the
possibility of such exclusion, must at the same time be classed with
that which excludes them as coordinate instances of a still higher
reality. This reality can then only be reached by an extinction of
all content whatever. Thus the tendency, which so often recurs in
the history of philosophy, spins out its thread — the tendency to look
on the supreme creative principle of the world not merely as un-
definable by any predicates within our reach but as in itself empty
and indefinite. These ways of thinking are only justifiable so far as
they imply a refusal to ascribe to the supreme M, as a sort of pre
supposition of its being, a multitude of ready-made predicates, from
which as from a given store it was to collect its proper nature. It is
no such doctrine that we mean to convey in asserting that the supreme
principle of reality is to be found in a definitely concrete Idea, M,
and not in the Idea merely as an Idea. The truth is rather this.
M being in existence, or in consequence of its existence, it becomes
possible for our Thought, as included in it, to apprehend that which
M is in the form of a summum genus to which M admits of being
subordinated and as a negation of the non-3/. It is not every deter
mination that rests on negation. On the contrary, there is an original
Position without which it would be impossible for us to apprehend
the content of that Position as a determination and to explain it by
the negation of something else.
91. The mode of development/ accordingly, which is imposed on
the world by the Idea of which it is the expression, would depend on
CHAPTER vii.] The Idea and its phases. 159
the content of the Idea itself, and could only be set forth by one who
had previously made himself master of this content. So to make
himself master of it must be the main business of the Idealist as much
as of any one else. The only preliminary enlightenment which he
would. have to seek would relate to that characteristic of the cosmic
order in the way of mere form which is implied in the fact that,
according to him, it is in the form of a governing Idea that the con
tent just spoken of, whatever it may be, constitutes the basis of this
order. For him M means simply a persistent Thought, of which the
import remains the same, whatever and how great soever in each
instance of its realisation may be the collection of elements combined
to this end. The world therefore would not be bound by M either
to the constant maintenance of the same elements or to the main
tenance of an identical form in their connexion. Not only would
ABR admit of replacement by abr and afip, but also their mode of
connexion $ by x or ^, if it was only in these new forms that those
altered elements admitted of being combined into identity with M.
It would be idle to seek universally binding conditions which in each
single form of M's realisation the coherent elements would have to
satisfy simply in order to be coherent. What each requires on the
part of the other in these special cases is not ascertainable from any
source whatever either by computation or by syllogism. We have
no other analogy to guide us in judging of this connexion than that —
often noticed above — of aesthetic fitness which, when once we have
become acquainted with the fact of a combination between manifold
elements, convinces us that there is a perfect compatibility, a deep-
seated mutual understanding, between them, without enabling us to
perceive any general rule in consequence of which this result might
have come about. The relation, however, of the Idea M to the
various forms, thus constituted, of its expression — tj>[Al?JZ], x[0£r],
^[a$p]— is not that of a genus to its species. It passes from one into
the other — not indifferently from any one into any other, but in de
finite series from <f> through x into +. No Idealism at any rate has
yet failed to insist on the supposition — a supposition which experience
bears out — that it is not merely in any section of the world which
might be made at any given moment, but also in the succession of its
phases, that the unity of the Idea will assert itself.
The question may indeed be repeated, What are the conditions
which </> and x have to satisfy in order to the possibility of sequence
upon each other, while it is impossible for ^ to arise directly out of
<£ ? Of all theories Idealism is most completely debarred from an
160 Conclusion,
appeal to a supra-mundane mechanism, which makes the one suc
cession necessary, the other impossible. In consistency it must
place the maintenance of this order as unconditionally as the forma
tion of its successive members in the hands of the Idea itself which
is directed by nothing but its own nature. On this nature will de
pend the adoption of one or other of certain courses ; or rather it
will consist in one or other of them. It will require either a per
fectly unchanged self-maintenance, or the preservation, along with
more or less considerable variations, of the same idea and outline
in the totality of phenomena ; either a progress to constantly new
forms which never returns upon itself or a repetition of the same
periods. It is only the first of these modes of procedure which
observation contradicts in the case of the given world. Of the others
we find instances in detail ; but if we were called to say which of
them bears the stamp of reality as a whole, our collective expe
rience would afford no guide to an answer. All that we know is
that the several phases of the cosmic order, whatever the nature of the
coherent chain formed by their series as a whole, are made up of
combinations of comparable elements, that is, as we are in the habit
of supposing, of states and changes of persistent things. This is
the justification of our way of employing the equivalent letters of
different alphabets to indicate the constituents which in different
sections of the cosmic order seem to replace each other. If we
V allow ourselves then to pursue this mode of representation and con
cede to Idealism that the Idea M determines the series of its forms
without being in any way conditioned by anything alien to itself,
still by this very act of determination it makes each preceding phase,
with its content, the condition of the realisation of that which follows.
It is no detached existence, however, that we can ascribe to the
Idea, as if it were an as yet unformed M apart from all the several
forms of its possible realisation. We may not present it to our
selves as constantly dipping afresh into such a repertory of forms,
with a definite series in view, for the purpose, after discarding the
prior phase, of clothing itself in the new one which might be next in
the series. At each moment the Idea is real only in one of these
forms. It is only as having at this particular time arrived at this parti
cular expression of its meaning, that it can be the determining ground
for the surrender of this momentary form and for the realisation of
the next succeeding one. The aesthetic or, if that term is preferred,
the dialectic connexion between such phases of reality as stand in a
definite order of succession, which was implied in their being re-
CHAPTER vi i.] The Idea and its Mechanism. 161
garded as an expression of one Idea, must pass over into a causal
connexion, in which the content and organization of the world at
each moment is dependent on its content and organization at the
previous moment.
92. The difficulties involved in this doctrine have been too much
ignored by Idealism, in the forms which it has so far taken. In
seeking to throw light on them, I propose to confine myself to the
succession of two phases of the simple form </> \ABK\ and </> \ab R\,
which were treated in §72 as possible cases. This determinate
succession can never become thinkable, if each of these phases is
represented as an inert combination of inert elements : for in that
case each is an equivalent expression for M and the transition from
each into each of the innumerable other expressions or phases of M
is equally possible and equally unnecessary. Either the included
elements must be considered to be in a definitely directed process of
becoming, or the common form of combination, <£, must be con
sidered a motion which distributes itself upon them in various definite
quantities. This assumption is not inconsistent either with the prin
ciples previously laid down, according to which a stationary being
of things could not be held to be anything but a self-mainte
nance of that which is in constant process of becoming, or with
the spirit of Idealism ; for Idealism includes in its conception of
every form of being the dialectical negativity, which drives the being
out of one given form of its reality into another. For these two
unmoving members therefore we should have at once to substitute
the one independent fact of a process by which A passes into a and
B into b, while R remains the same. Now this fact is an equivalent
expression of that form of becoming which at this moment con
stitutes the reality of M. A-a and B-b, accordingly, are two occur
rences of which, in the expression of the idea which constitutes M,
one cannot take place without the other. Taken by themselves,
indeed, they would have no such mutual connexion. The con
nexion does not represent any supra-mundane law, holding good
for the world N as well as for the real M. It is only in this real
M — which means for us in fact unconditionally — that they belong
together as each the condition of the other, so long as there is no
change on the part of the remaining member R to affect the pure
operation of the two on each other.
Supposing it, now, to come about in the course of this world Mt
that certain preceding phases once again gave rise to the occurrence
A-a and along with it to an unchanged R or an R changed only
VOL. i. M
1 62 Conclusion.
[BOOK I.
in respect of internal modifications without external effect, then we
should infer that in this case of repetition of A-a, the occurrence
B-b must also reappear as its consequence required by the nature
of M. If, however, the preceding phases necessitated along with
A-a a transition of R to r, then the tendency of the former occur
rence to produce B-b, while continuing, would not be able to
realise itself purely. What would really take place would be a re
sulting occurrence, the issue of those two impulses, determined by a
relation of mutual implication in M just in the same way as, in the
case of the indifference of R> B-b is determined by A-a. Or —
to express the same generally — the transition of the one phase $ into
the other x ls brought about by the combination of the reciprocal
effects, which the several movements contained in <£ once for all exer
cise in virtue of their nature, independently of the phase in which
they happen to be combined or of the point in the world's course at
which they from time to time appear.
We thus come to believe in the necessity of a mechanical system,
according to which each momentary realisation of the Idea is that
which the preceding states of fact according to certain laws of their
operation had the power to bring about. Nor is it, in any fatalistic
way, as an alien necessity imposing itself on the Idea, that this
mechanism is thought of, but as an analytical consequence of our
conception of the Idea — of the supposition that it enjoins upon
itself a certain order in its manifold possible modes of manifestation
and by so doing makes the one an antecedent condition of that
which follows. So long, however, as Idealism continues to regard
the import of the Idea as the metaphysical Prius which determines
the succession of events, so long there lies a difficulty in this twofold
demand — the demand that what is conditioned by the Idea a fronte
should be always identical with that to which this mechanism of its re
alisation impels a lergo. At a later stage of my enquiry I shall have
occasion to return to this question. It will be at the point, to which
the reader will have been long looking forward, where the appear
ance within nature of living beings brings home to us with special
cogency the thought of relation to an end as governing the course of
things, or of an ideal whole preceding the real parts and their com
bination. The question can then be discussed on more definite
premisses. In the region of generality to which I at present confine
myself Idealism could scarcely answer otherwise than by the mere
assertion ; ' Such is the fact : such is the nature of the concrete
Idea, and such the manner of its realisation at every moment, that
CHAPTER VII.] LlMltS of Idealism. 163
everything which it ordains in virtue of its own import must issue as
a necessary result in ordered succession from the blind co-operation
of all the several movements into which it distributes itself, and
according to the general laws which it has imposed on itself.'
93. It is not every problem that admits of a solution, nor every
goal, however necessarily we present it to ourselves, that can be
reached. We shall never be able to state the full import of that Idea
M, which we take to be the animating soul of the Cosmos. Not the
fragmentary observation, which is alone at our command, but only
that complete view of the whole which is denied, could teach us
what that full import is. Nay, not even an unlimited extension of
observation would serve the purpose. To know it, we must live it
with all the organs of our soul. And even if by some kind of com
munication we had been put in possession of it, all forms of thought
would be lacking to us, by which the simple fulness of what was
given to us in vision could be unfolded into a doctrine, scientifically
articulated and connected. The renunciation of such hopes has
been prescribed to us by the conclusion to which we were brought
in treating of Pure Logic. It remains, as we had there to admit1, an
unrealisable ideal of thought to follow the process by which the
supreme Idea draws from no other source but itself those minor
Premisses by means of which its import, while for ever the same, is
led up to the development of a reality that consists in a manifold
change. Here, however, as there we can maintain the conviction
that in reality that is possible which our thoughts are inadequate
to reproduce2. It is not any construction of the world out of the
idea of which the possibility is thus implied, but merely a regressive
interpretation, which attempts to trace back the connexion of what
is given us in experience, as we gradually become acquainted with it,
to its ineffable source.
To this actual limitation upon our possibilities of knowledge the
second of the views above 3 distinguished — ' Realism ' — adjusts itself
better than Idealism, though it has not at bottom any other or more
satisfactory answer to give to the questions just raised. Realism does
not enquire how the course of the world came to be determined as it
is. It contents itself with treating the collective structure of the world at
any moment as the inevitable product of the forces of the past operating
according to general laws. On one point, however, I think the ordinary
notion entertained by those who hold this view has already been
corrected. They commonly start from the assumption of an indefinite
1 Logic, § 151. a Logic, loc. cit. 3 [§ 89.]
M 2
1 64 Conclusion. [BOOK i.
number of mutually independent elements, which are only brought
even into combination by the force of laws. That this is impossible
and that for this Pluralism there must be substituted a Monism is what
I have tried to show and need not repeat. It is not thus, from the
nature of objects1, but from the nature of the one object2, that we must,
even in Realism, derive the course of things. In fact, the distinction
between the two views would reduce itself to this, that while the
Idealist conceives his one principle as a restlessly active Idea, the
Realist conceives his as something objective3, which merely suffers the
consequences of an original disintegration into a multitude of elements
that have to be combined according to law — a disintegration which
belongs to the de facto constitution of its nature, as given before
knowledge begins. The mode of their combinations may become
known to us through the elaboration of experience : and this know
ledge gives us as much power of anticipating the future as satisfies
the requirements of active life. An understanding of the universe is
not what this method will help us to attain. The general laws, to
which the reciprocal operations of things conform — in the first in
stance special to each group of phenomena — are presented as limita
tions coeval with knowledge, imposed by Reality on itself and within
which it is, as a matter of fact, compelled to restrain the multiplicity of
its products. The overpowering impression, however, which is made
by the irrefragability of these limits, is not justified -by any value which
in respect of their content they possess for our understanding.
They would thus only satisfy him who could content himself with
the mere recognition of a state of things as unconditional matter of
fact. But even within the range of realistic views the invincible
spiritual assurance asserts itself that the world not merely is but has
a meaning. To succeed in giving to the laws, that are found as a
matter of fact to obtain, such an expression as makes the reason in
them, the ratio legis, matter of direct apprehension, is everywhere
reckoned one of the finest achievements of science. Nor can the
realistic method of enquiry resist the admission that the ends to which
events contribute cannot always be credibly explained as mere pro
ducts of aimless operation. It is not merely organic structures to
which this remark applies. Even the planetary system exhibits forms
of self-maintenance in its periodic changes, which have the appearance
of being particular cases especially selected out of innumerable
equally possible, or more easily possible, results of such operations. It
is true that our observation is unable to settle the question whether
1 ['Sachen.'] 2 ['Sache.'] 3 ['Sache.']
CHAPTER vii.] Realism and Teleology. 165
these cases of adaptation to ends are to be thought of as single
islands floating in a boundless sea of aimless becoming, or whether
we should ascribe a like order in its changes to the collective universe.
Realism can find an explanation of these special forms only in the
assumption of an arrangement of all operative elements, which, for all
that depends on the general laws,might just as well have been another,
but which, being what it is and not another, necessarily leads in
accordance with those laws to the given ends. It thus appeals on its
part to the co-operation, as a matter of fact, of two principles inde
pendent of each other which it knows not how to unite ; on the one
hand the general laws, on 'the other hand the given special arrange
ment of their points of application. In this respect Realism can
claim no superiority over Idealism. At the same time it is only enquiries
conducted in the spirit of Realism that will satisfy the wishes of Idealism.
They will indeed never unveil the full meaning of the Idea. But there
is nothing but recognition of the de facto relations of things that can
make our thoughts at least converge towards this centre of the universe.
94. The conception of a Thing which we adopt has been exposed
to many transformations, hitherto without decisive issue. Doubts have
at last been raised whether the union of oneness of essential being
with multiplicity of so-called states has any meaning at all and is any
thing better than an empty juxtaposition of words. In approaching
our conclusion on this point we must take a roundabout road. The
misgiving just expressed reaches further. In all the arguments
which we ultimately adduced, and in which we passed naif judgments
on the innermost essence of the real, on what is possible and impos
sible for it, according to principles unavoidable for our thought, what
warranted the assurance that the nature of things must correspond to
our subjective necessities of thought ? Can such reasonings amount
to more than a human view of things, bearing perhaps no sort of like
ness to that which it is credited with representing ?
This general doubt I meet with an equally general confession,
which it may be well to make as against too aspiring an estimate of
what Philosophy can undertake. I readily admit that I take Philo
sophy to be throughout merely an inner movement of the human
spirit. In the history of that spirit alone has Philosophy its history.
It is an effort, within the presupposed limits, even to ourselves abso
lutely unknown, which our earthly existence imposes on us, to gain a
consistent view of the world — an effort which carries us to something
beyond the satisfaction of the wants of life, teaching us to set before
ourselves and to attain worthy objects in living. An absolute truth,
1 66 Conclusion. [BOOK i.
such as the archangels in heaven would have to accept, is not its
object, nor does the failure to realise such an object make our efforts
bootless. We admit therefore the completely human subjectivity of
all our knowledge with the less ambiguity, because we see clearly
moreover that it is unavoidable and that, although we may forego
the claim to all knowledge whatever, we could put no other knowledge
in the place of that on which doubt is thrown, that would not be open
to the same reproach. For in whatever mind anything may present
itself which may be brought under the idea of knowledge, it will
always be self-evident that this mind can never gain a view of the
objects of its knowledge as they would seem if it did not see them,
but only as they seem if it sees them, and in relation to it the seeing
mind. It is quite superfluous to make this simple truth still more
plain by a delineation of all the several steps in our knowledge, each
monotonously followed by a proof that we everywhere remain within
the limits of our subjectivity and that every judgment, in the way of
recognition or correction, which we pass from one of the higher of
these steps upon one of the lower, is still no more than a necessity of
thought for us. At most it is worth the trouble to add that — still, of
course, according to our way of thinking — this is no specially preju
dicial lot of the human spirit, but must recur in every being which
stands in relation to anything beyond it.
Just for this reason this universal character of subjectivity, belong
ing to all knowledge, can settle nothing as to its truth or untruth.
In putting trust in one component of ostensible knowledge while
we take another to be erroneous we can be justified only by a con
sideration of the import of the two components. We have to reject
and alter all the notions, which we began by forming but which
cannot be maintained without contradiction when our thoughts are
systematized, while they can without contradiction be replaced by
others. As regards the ultimate principles, however, which we follow
in this criticism of our thoughts, it is quite true that we are left with
nothing but the confidence of Reason in itself, or the certainty of belief
in the general truth that there is a meaning in the world, and that the
nature of that reality, which includes us in itself, has given our spirit
only such necessities of thought as harmonise with it.
95. Of the various forms in which the scepticism in question
reappears the last is that of a doubt not as to the general capacity for
truth on the part of our cognition, but as to the truth of one of its
utterances — a determinate though very comprehensive one. It relates
to that whole world of things which so far, in conformity with the
CHAPTER VII.] FicktC OH TklHgS dud Spirits. 1 67
usual way of thinking, we have taken for granted. After the admirable
exposition which Fichte has given us of the subject in his ' Vocation
of Man,' I need not show over again how everything which informs
us as to the existence of a world without us, consists in the last resort
merely in affections of our own ego, or— to use language more free
from assumption — in forms which hover before our consciousness,
and from the manifold variations and combinations of which there
arises the idea — and always as our idea— of something present with
out us, of a world of things. Now we have a right to enquire what
validity this idea, irrespectively of its proximate origin, may claim in
the whole of our thoughts ; but it would have been a simple fallacy
merely on account of the subjectivity of all the elements out of which
it has been formed, to deny its truth and to pronounce the outer world
to be merely a creation of our imagination. For the state of the case
could be no other, were there things without us or no. Our know
ledge in the one case, our imagination in the other, could alike only
consist in states or activities of our own being — in what we call im
pressions made on our nature, supposing these to be things, but on
no supposition in anything other than a subjective property of ours.
As is well known, Fichte did not draw the primary inference which
— offensive as it is — would be logically involved in the error noticed,
the inference, namely, that the single subject, adopting such a philo
sophy, would have to consider itself the sole reality, which in its own
inner world generated the appearance of a companion Universe. In
regard to Spirits he followed the conviction which I just now stated.
It is only by means of subjective effects produced upon him, like
those which mislead him into believing in things, that any one can
know of the existence of other Spirits ; but just because this must
equally be the case if there really are Spirits, this fact proved nothing
against their existence. If therefore Fichte allowed the exist
ence of a world of Spirits, while he inexorably denied that of
a world of Things, the ground of his decision would only lie in the
judgment which he passed on the several conceptions in respect
simply of their content— in the fact that he found the conception of
Spirit not only admissible but indispensable in the entirety of his view
of the world, that of the Thing on the contrary as inadmissible as
superfluous. To this conviction he was constant. To have no longer
an eye for mere things was in his eyes a requirement to be made of
every true philosophy.
06. I proceed to connect this brief historical retrospect with the
\ ^difficulties which, as we saw, have still to be dealt with. We found
1 68 Conclusion.
it impossible for that to be unchangeable which we treated as a thing,
a. It did not even admit of being determined by varying persist
encies on the part of different qualities *. We were forced to think
of it as in continuous becoming, either unfolding itself into the one
series, a1, a2, a3, or maintaining itself, in the other, a, a, a, by constantly
new production. Each of these momentary phases, however, we saw
must be exactly like itself, but a1 = a1 is different from every other.
Even the exactly similar members of the latter series, though exactly
similar, were not one and the same. For all that we asserted that in
this change the Unity of a thing maintained itself. We could not but
assert this if we were to conceive the mutual succession of the several
forms, which could not arise out of nothing but only out of each
other. We were not in a condition, however, to say what it was that
remained identical with itself in this process of becoming. We took
advantage of the term * states' 2, which we applied to the changing forms,
but we came to the conclusion that in so doing we were only express
ing our mental demand without satisfying it. We saw that an im
mediate perception was needed to show us this relation of a subject
to its states as actually under our hands and thereby convince us of
its possibility.
Perhaps the reader then cherished the hope that there would be no
difficulty in adducing many such instances in case of need. Now, on
returning to this question, we only find one being, from the special
nature of which the possibility of that relation seems inseparable.
This is the spiritual subject, which exercises the wonderful function
not merely of distinguishing sensations, ideas, feelings from itself but
at the same time of knowing them as its own,, as its states, and which
by means of its own unity connects the series of successive events
in the compass of memory. I should be misunderstood if this state
ment were interpreted to mean that the Spirit understands how to
bring itself and its inner life in the way of logical subsumption under
the relation of a subject to its states or to recognise itself as an
instance of this subordination. It experiences the fact of there being
this relation at the very moment when it lives through the process of
its own action. It is only its later reflection on itself which thereupon
generates for it in its thinking capacity the general conception of this
relation — a relation in which it stands quite alone without possibility
of another homogeneous instance being found. It is only in the
sensitive act, which at once repels the matter of sense from us as
something that exists for itself and reveals it to us as our own, that
1 [§ M ff-] 2 [§ 47-]
CHAPTER vii.] How can Things be Subjects? 169
we become aware what is meant by the apprehension of a certain a
as a state of a subject A. It is only through the fact that our atten
tion, bringing events into relation, comprehends past and present in
memory, while at the same time there arises the idea of the persistent
Ego to which both past and present belong, that we become aware
what is meant by Unity of Being throughout a change of manifold
states, and that such unity is possible. In short it is through our
ability to appear to ourselves as such unities that we are unities. Thus
the proximate conclusion to which we are forced would be this. If
there are to be things with the properties we demand of things, they
must be more than things. Only by sharing this character of the
spiritual nature can they fulfil the general requirements which must
be fulfilled in order to constitute a Thing. They can only be distinct
from their states if they distinguish themselves from their states.
They can only be unities if they oppose themselves, as such, to the
multiplicity of their states.
97. The notion that things have souls has always been a favourite
one with many and there has been some extravagance in the imagina
tive expression of it. The reasoning which has here led us up to it does
not warrant us in demanding anything more than that there should
belong to things in some form or other that existence as an object
for itself which distinguishes all spiritual life from what is only an
object for something else. The mere capacity of feeling pain or
pleasure, without any higher range of spiritual activity, would suffice
to fulfil this requirement. There is the less reason to expect that this
psychical life of things will ever force itself on our observation with
the clearness of a fact. The assumption of its existence will always
be looked on as an imagination, which can be allowed no influence
in the decision of particular questions, and which we can only indulge
when it is a question, in which no practical consequences are involved,
of making the most general theories apprehensible.
It is therefore natural to enquire whether after all it is necessary to
retain in any form that idea of an existence of Things which forced
this assumption upon us. There are two points indeed which I
should maintain as essential : one, the existence of spiritual beings
like ourselves which, in feeling their states and opposing themselves
to those states as the unity that feels, satisfy the idea of a permanent
subject1: the other, the unity of that Being, in which these subjects
in turn have the ground of their existence, the source of their peculiar
nature, and which is the true activity at work in them. But why over
1 [' Eines Wesens.'J
1 70 Conclusion. [BOOK i.
and above this should there be a world of things, which themselves
gain nothing by existing, but would only serve as a system of occa
sions or means for producing in spiritual subjects representations
which after all would have no likeness to their productive causes?
Could not the creative power dispense with this roundabout way and
give rise directly in spirits to the phenomena which it was intended
to present to them ? Could it not present that form of a world which
was to be seen without the intervention of an unseen world which
could never be seen as it would be if unseen ? And this power being
in all spirits one and the same, why should there not in fact be a
correspondence between the several activities which it exerts in those
spirits of such a kind that while it would not be the same world-
image that was presented to all spirits but different images to dif
ferent spirits, the different presentations should yet fit into each other,
so that all spirits should believe themselves planted at different posi
tions of the same world and should be able to adjust themselves in it,
each to each, in the way of harmonious action ? As to the effects
again which Things interchange with each other and which according
to our habitual notions appear to be the strongest proof of their
independent existence — why should we not substitute for them a
reciprocal conditionedness on the part of innumerable actions, which
cross and modify each other within the life of the one Being that
truly is ? If so, the changes which our world-image undergoes would
at each moment issue directly from the collision of these activities
which takes effect also in us, not from the presence of many inde
pendent sources of operation bringing these changes about externally
to us.
In fact, if the question was merely one of rendering the world, as
phenomenally given to us, intelligible, we could dispense with the con
ception of a real operative atom, which we regard only as a point of
union for forces and resistances that proceed from it, standing in
definite relations to other like atoms and only changing according to
fixed laws through their effect upon it. We could everywhere substitute
for this idea of the atom that of an elementary action on the part of
the one Being — an action which in like manner would stand in
definite relations to others like it, and would through them undergo a
no less orderly change. The assumption of real things would have no
advantage but such as consists in facility of expression. Even this we
could secure if, while retaining the term ' things/ we simply established
this definition of it.; that ' things ' may be accepted in the course of
our enquiry as secondary fixed points, but for all that are not real
CHAPTER vi LI Thing s as merely 'existing! 171
existences in the metaphysical sense, but elementary actions of the
one Being which forms the ground of the world, connected with each
other according to the same laws of reciprocal action which we com
monly take to apply to the supposed independent things.
98. For the prosecution of our further enquiries it is of little im
portance to decide between the two views delineated. But a third
remains to be noticed which denies the necessity of this alternative,
and undertakes to justify the common notion of a Thing without a
Self. When we set about constructing a Being which in the change
of its states should remain one, it was the experience of spiritual life,
it will be said, which came to our aid, and by an unexpected actual
solution of the problem convinced us that it was soluble. What
entitles us, however, to reckon this solution the only one ? Why might
there not just as well be another, of which we can form no mental
picture only for the reason that we have had no experience of it as
our own mode of existence ? Why may not the ' thing ' be a Being
of its own particular kind, defined for us only by the functions which
it fulfils, but not bound in the execution of these to maintain any such
resemblance to our Spirit as, with the easy presumption of an anthro
pomorphic imagination, we force upon it ?
This counter- view is one that I cannot accept. So long as what we
propose to ourselves is to give shape to that conception of the world
which is necessary to us, we allow ourselves to fill up the gaps in our
knowledge by an appeal to the unknown object, to which our thoughts
converge without being able to attain it ; but we may not assume an
unknown object of such a kind as would without reason conflict with
the inferences which we cannot avoid. Now it seems to me that the
suggestions just noticed imply a resort to the unknown of this un
warrantable kind. In the first place it is not easy to see why the
conception of the Thing, in the face of the duly justified objections to
it, needs to be maintained at the cost of an appeal to what is after all
a wholly unknown possibility of its being true. Secondly, while
readily allowing that anything which really exists may have its own
mode of existence, and is not to be treated as if it followed the type
of an existence alien to it, we must point out that where such
peculiarity of existence is asserted the further predicates assigned to
it must correspond. What manner of being, however, could we con
sistently predicate of that from which we had expressly excluded the
universal characteristics of animate existence, every active relation to
itself, every active distinction from 'anything else ? Of that which had
no consciousness of its own nature and qualities, no feeling of its
172 Conclusion.
states, which in no way possessed itself as a Self ? Of that of which
the whole function consisted in serving as a medium to convey effects,
from which it suffered nothing itself, to other things like itself, just as
little affected by those effects, till at last by their propagation to
animate Beings there should arise in these, and not before, a compre
hensive image of the whole series of facts. If we maintain that in fact
such a thing cannot be said to be, it is not that we suppose ourselves
to be expressing an inference, which would still have to be made
good as arising out of the notion of such a thing : it is that we find
directly in the description of such a thing the definition of a mere
operation, which, in taking place, presupposes a real Being from
which it proceeds and another in which it ends, but is not, itself, as a
third outside the two. That our imagination will nevertheless cling
to the presentation of independent and blindly-operating individual
things, we do not dispute nor do we seek to make it otherwise ; but
in. the effort to find a metaphysical truth in this mode of expression
we cannot share. It is not enough to try to give a being to these
things outside their immanence in the one Real, unless it is possible
to show that in their nature there is that which can give a real
meaning to the figure of speech conveyed in this 'outside.'
As to the source of our efforts in this direction and their fruitless-
ness, I may be allowed in conclusion to repeat some remarks which in
a previous work * I have made at greater length. We do not gain the
least additional meaning for Things without self and without conscious
ness by ascribing to them a being outside the one Real. All the
stability and energy which they ensure as conditioning and motive
forces in the changes of the world we see, they possess in precisely
the same definiteness and fulness when considered as mere activities
of the Infinite. Nay it is only through their common immanence in
the Infinite, as we have seen, that they have this capability of mutual
influence, which would not belong to them as isolated beings detached
from that substantial basis. Thus for the purpose of any being or
function that we would ascribe to things as related to and connected
with each other, we gain nothing by getting rid of their immanence.
It is true however that things, so long as they are only states of the
infinite, are nothing in relation to themselves : it is in order to make
them something in this relation or on their own account that we insist
on their existence outside the Infinite. But this genuine true reality,
which consists in relation to self — whether in being something as
related to self or in that relation simply as such — is not acquired by
1 Mikrokosmus, iii. 530.
CHAPTER VIM ' Immanence and ' Transcendence' 173
things through a detachment from the one Infinite, as though this
'Transcendence,' to which in the supposed case it would be impossible
to assign any proper meaning, were the antecedent condition on which
the required relation to self depended as a consequence. On the
contrary, it is in so far as something is an object to itself, relates itself
to itself, distinguishes itself from something else, that by this act of its
own it detaches itself from the Infinite. In so doing, however, it
does not acquire but possesses, in the only manner to which we give
any meaning in our thoughts, that self-dependence of true Being,
which by a very inappropriate metaphor from space we represent as
arising from the impossible act of 'Transcendence/ It is not that the
opposition between a being in the Infinite and a being outside it is
obviously intelligible as explaining why self-dependence should belong
to the one sort of being while it is permanently denied to another. It
is the nature of the two sorts of being and the functions of which they
are capable that make the one or the other of these figurative ex
pressions applicable to them. Whatever is in condition to feel and
assert itself as a Self, that is entitled to be described as detached from
the universal all-comprehensive basis of being, as outside it : whatever
has not this capability will always be included as ' immanent ' within
it, however much and for whatever reasons we may be inclined to
make a separation and opposition between the two.
BOOK II.
OF THE COURSE OF NATURE (COSMOLOGY).
CHAPTER I.
Of the Subjectivity of our Perception of Space.
IN the course of our ontological discussion it was impossible not to
mention the forms of Space and Time ; within which, and not other
wise, the multiplicity of finite things and the succession of their states
are presented to perceptive cognition. But our treatment did not
start from the first questions that induce enquiry, rather it pre
supposed the universal points of view which have already been re
vealed in the history of philosophy. We were able therefore to deal
with abstract ontological ideas apart from these two forms which are
the conditions of perception. Any further difficulties must look for
a solution to the Cosmological discussions on which we are now
entering. Among the subjects belonging to Cosmology it may seem
that Time should come first in our treatment ; seeing that we substi
tuted the idea of a continual Becoming for that of Being as unmoved
'position1.' Accessory reasons however induce us to speak first of
Space, which indeed is as directly connected with our second require
ment, that we should be able in every moment of time to conceive
the real world as a coherent unity of the manifold.
99. In proposing to speak of the metaphysical value of Space, I
entirely exclude at present various questions which, with considerable
interest of their own, have none for this immediate purpose. At present
we only want to know what kind of reality we are to ascribe to space
as we have to picture it, and with what relation to it we are to credit
the real things which it appears to put in our way. No answer to
this, nor materials for one, can be got from psychological discussions
1 [v. Bk. I. § 38.]
Origin and Validity distinct. 175
as to the origin or no-origin of our spatial perception. To designate
it as an a priori or innate possession of the mind is to say nothing
decisive, and indeed, nothing more than a truism ; of course it is
innate, in the only sense the expression can bear *, and in this sense
colours and sounds are innate too. As surely as we could see no
colours, unless the nature of our soul included a faculty which could
be stimulated to that kind of sensation, so surely could we represent
to ourselves no images in space without an equally inborn faculty for
such combination of the manifold. But again, as surely as we should
not see colours, if there were no stimulus independent of our own
being to excite us to the manifestation of our innate faculty, so surely
we should not have the perception of space without being induced to
exert our faculty by conditions which do not belong to it.
On the other hand, one who should regard our spatial perception
as an abstraction from facts of experience, could have nothing before
him, as direct experience out of which to abstract, beyond the arrange
ment and the succession of the sense-images in his own mind. He
might be able to show how, out of such images, either as an un
explained matter of fact, or by laws of association of ideas which he
professed to know, there gradually arose the space -perception, as a
perception in our minds. He might perhaps show too, how there
originated in us the notion of a world of things outside our conscious
ness as the cause of these spatial appearances. We shall find this a
hard enough problem, later on; but granting it completely solved,
still the mere development-history of our ideas of space would be in
no way decisive of their validity as representing the postulated world
of things, nor of the admissibility of this postulate itself. As was
said above, the way in which a mode of mental representation grows
up can be decisive of its truth or untruth, only in cases where a prior
knowledge of the object to which it should relate convinces us that its
way of growth must necessarily lead whether to approximation or to
divergence. Therefore, for this latter view, as well as for the former
which maintains the a priori nature of the space-perception, there is
only one sense in which the question of its objective validity is answer
able : namely, whether such a perception as we in fact possess and
cannot get rid of, however it arose, is consistent with our notions of
what a reality apart from our consciousness must be ; or whether,
directly or in its results, it is incompatible with them.
100. A further introductory remark is called for by recent investiga
tions. We admitted that our ideas of Space are conditioned by the
1 Logic, § 324.
1 76 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK n.
stimuli which are furnished to our faculty for forming them It is
conceivable that these stimuli do not come to all minds with equal
completeness, and that hence the space-perception of. one mind nee<
not include all that is contained in that of another. But this indefinite-
ness in the object of our question is easily removed. Modes
mental presentation which are susceptible of such differences (
development may have their simplest phases still in agreement with
the object to which they relate, while their consistent evolution evokes
germs of contradiction latent before. Therefore when their truth is
in question, we have only to consider their most highly evolved form ;
in which all possibility of further self-transformation is exhausted, and
their relation to the entirety of their object is completed.
We all live, to begin with, under the impression of a finite extension,
which is presented to our senses as surrounding us, though with un
determined or unregarded limits ; it is our subsequent reflection that
can find no ground in the nature of this extension for its ceasing at
any point, and brings the picture to completion in the idea of infinite
space. This then, the inevitable result of our mode of mental por
trayal when once set in motion, is the matter whose truth and validity
are in question. But scepticism has gone further. It is no longer
held certain and self-evident that the final idea of a space uniform and
homogeneous in all directions, at which men have in fact arrived, and
which geometry had hitherto supported, is the only possible and
consistent form of combination for simple perceptions of things beside
one another. Some hold that other final forms are conceivable,
though impossible for men; some credit even mankind with the
capacity to amend their customary perception of space by a better
guided habituation of their representative powers. This last hope we
may simply neglect, till the moment when it shall be crowned with
success ; the former suggestion, in itself an object of lively interest, we
are also justified in disregarding for the present : for all the other
forms of space whose conceivability these speculations undertake to
demonstrate, would share the properties on which our decision depends
with the only form which we now presuppose ; that, namely, whose
nature the current geometry has unfolded.
101. The kind of reality which we ought to ascribe to the content
of an idea must agree with what such a content claims to be ; we
could not ascribe the reality of an immutable existence to what we
thought of as an occurrence ; nor endow what seemed to be a
property with the substantive persistence which would only suit its
substratum. Therefore we first try to define what space as represented
CHAPTER i.] Space not Thing, Property, or Concept. 177
in our minds claims to be ; or, to find an acknowledged category of
established existence under which if extended to it, it could fairly be
said to fall.
Some difficulty will be found in the attempt. The only point
which is clear and conceded is that we do not regard it as a thing but
distinguish it from the things which are moveable in it; and that
though many determinations which are possible in space are properties
of things, space itself is never such a property. Further ; the defini
tions actually attempted are untenable ; space is not a limit of things,
but every such limit is a figure in space; and space itself extends
without interruption over any spot to which we remove the things. It
is neither form, arrangement, nor relation of things, but the peculiar
principle which is essential to the possibility of countless different
forms, arrangements, and relations of things ; and, as their abso
lutely unchangeable background, is unaffected by the alternation and
transition of these determinations one into another. Even if we
called it ' form ' in another sense, like a vessel which enclosed things
within it, \ve should only be explaining it by itself; for it is only in
and by means of Space that there can be vessels which enclose their
contents but are not identical with them. These unsuccessful attempts
show that there is no known general concept to which we can sub
ordinate space ; it is sui generis, and the question of what kind its
reality is, can only be decided according to the claims of this its
distinctive position.
102. As the condition of possibility for countless forms, relations,
and arrangements of things, though not itself any definite one of
them, it might seem that Space should be on a level with every
universal genus-concept, and as such, merit no further validity. Like
it, a genus- concept wears none of the definite forms, which belong to
its subordinate species ; but contains the rule which governs the
manifold groupings of marks in them, allows a choice between certain
combinations as possible, and excludes others as impossible.
Just such is the position of Space. Although formless in comparison
with every outline which may be sketched in it, yet it is no passive
background which will let any chance thing be painted on it ; but it
contains between its points unchangeable relations, which determine
the possibility of any drawing that we may wish to make in it. It is
not essential to find an exhaustive expression for these relations at
this moment ; we may content ourselves, leaving much undetermined,
with defining them thus far : — that any point may be placed with any
other point in a connexion homogeneous with that in which any
VOL. i. N
j 78 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK n.
third point may be placed with any fourth ; that this connexion is
capable of measurable degrees of proximity and that its measure
between any two points is defined by their relations to others. No
matter, as I said, what more accurate expression may be substituted
for that given, in as far as our perception of space contains such a
legislative rule we might regard every group of manifold elements,
which satisfied this rule, as subordinate to the universal concept of
Space. But we should feel at once, that such a designation was
unsuitable ; such a group might be called a combination of multiplicity
in space, but not an instance of space, in the sense in which we regard
every animal whose structure follows the laws of his genus as a species
or instance of that genus. The peculiarities of what we indicated
above as the law of space in general * create other relations between
the different cases of its application, than obtain between the species
of natural Genera. Each of the latter requires indeed that its rule of
the grouping of marks shall be observed in each of its species ; but it
puts the different species which do this in no reciprocal connexion.
They are therefore subordinate to it; but when we call them, as
species of the same genus, co-ordinate with one another, we really
mean nothing by this co-ordination but the uniformity of their lot in
that subordination. Supposing we unite birds, fishes, and other
creatures under the universal concept ' animal,' all we find is that the
common features of organization demanded by the concept occur in
all of them ; this tells us nothing of the reciprocal attitude and be
haviour of these classes ; the most we can do is, conversely, to attempt
afterwards a closer systematic union, by the formation of narrower
genera, between those which we have ascertained from other sources
of experience to possess reciprocal connexions.
On the other hand, the character of Space in general \ requiring
every point to be connected with others, forbids us to regard the
various particular figures which may satisfy its requirements as isolated
instances ; it compels us to connect them with each other under the
same conditions under which points are connected with points within
the figures themselves. If we conceive this demand satisfied, as far
as the addition of fresh elements brings a constantly recurring possi
bility and necessity of satisfying it, the result which we obtain is
'Space"2: the single and entire picture, that is not only present by the
uniformity of its nature in every limited part of extension, but at the
same time contains them all as its parts, though of course it is not,
as a whole, to be embraced in a single view : it is like an integral
1 [' Raumlichkeit.'] 2 [• der Raran.']
CHAPTER i.] Empty Space Conceivable ? 1 79
obtained by extending the relation which connects two points, to the in
finite number of possible points. The only parallel to this condition,
is in our habit of representing to ourselves the countless multitudes of
mankind not merely as instances of their genus, but as parts united
with the whole of Humanity ; in the case of animals the peculiar
ethical reasons which bring this about are wanting, and we are not in
the habit of speaking in the same sense of ' animality.'
103. Of course, in the above remarks, I owe to the guidance of
Kant all that I have here said in agreement with his account in Sect. 2
of the Transcendental Aesthetic ; as regards what I have not men
tioned here, I avoid for the moment expressing assent or dissent, ex
cepting on two points which lie in the track of my discussion. ' It is
impossible/ Kant says \ ' to represent to one's self that there is no
space, though it is possible to conceive that no objects should be met
with in space.' Unnecessary objections have been raised against the
second part of this assertion, by requiring of the thought of empty
space, which Kant considers possible, the vividness of an actual per
ception, or of an image in the memory recalling all the accessory
conditions of the perception. Then, of course, it is quite right to
pronounce that a complete vacuum could not be represented to the
mind, without at least reserving a place in it for ourself ; for what
ever place, outside the vacuum which we were observing, we might
attempt, as observer, to assign ourself, we should unavoidably con
nect that place in its turn, by spatial relations, with the imagined
extension. We should have the same right to assert that we could
not conceive space without colour and temperature ; an absolutely
invisible extension is obviously not perceptible or reproducible as an
image in memory : it must be one which is recognised by the eye
at least as darkness, and in which the observer would include the
thought of himself with some state of skin-sensation, which, like colour,
he transfers as a property to his surroundings. But the question is
not in the least about such impossible attempts ; the admitted mobility
of things is by itself a sufficient proof that we imply the idea of com
pletely empty space, as possible in its own nature, even while we are
actually considering it as filled with something real. This is most
simply self-evident for atomistic views ; if the atoms move, every point
of the space they move in must be successively empty and full ; but
motion would mean nothing and be impossible, unless the abandoned
empty places retained the same reciprocal positions and distances
which they had when occupied ; the empty totality of space is there-
1 [Trans. Aesth. 2. (2).]
N 2
180 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space.
fore unavoidably conceived as the independent background, for which
the occupation by real matter is a not unvarying destiny.
To prefer the dynamical view of continuously filled space leads to
the same result. Degrees of density could mean absolutely nothing,
and would be impossible, unless the same volume could be con
tinuously occupied by different quantities of real matter ; but this too
implies that the limits of the volume possess and preserve their
geometrical relations independently of the actual thing of which they
are the place ; and they would continue to possess them, if we sup
posed the density to decrease without limit and to approach an
absolute vacuum. Therefore it is certain that we cannot imagine
objects in space without conceiving its empty extension as a back
ground present to begin with ; although no remembered image of a
perception of it is possible without a remembrance of the objects
which made it perceptible to sense.
104. With this interpretation we may also admit the first part of the
Kantian assertion. It is true that we cannot represent to ourselves the
non-existence of space as something that can be experienced, and
re-experienced in memory. It is however not inconceivable to us abso
lutely; but only under the condition that an aggregate of actual exist
ence, capable of combination, in short a real world, is to be given, and
that the subjects which have to bring it before them are our minds.
Now this real world is given us ; metaphysic rests entirely on this fact,
and only investigates its inner uniformity without indulging in con
templation of the unreal : it is enough then for her to consider space to
be given, as the universal, unchangeable, and ever present environment
of things, just as much as things and their qualities are recognised to
be given as changeable and alternating.
In this sense I may couple Kant's assertion with another saying
of his; 'space is imagined as an infinite given magnitude1/ It has
been objected against this too, that an infinite magnitude cannot be
imagined as given; but no one knew this better than Kant. A
reasonable exposition can only take his expression to mean, that
space is above all things given, and is not like a universal of which
there can be a doubt whether it applies to anything or not ; and that
further, in every actual limited perception space is given, as a mag
nitude whose nature demands and permits, that, as extending
uniformly beyond every limit, it should be pursued to infinity. Hence,
the infinity of space clearly is given ; for there is no limit such that
progress beyond it, although conceivable, yet would not be real in
1 [Trans. Aesth. 2. (4).]
CHAPTER i.] Grounds of Kant's Doctrine. 181
the same sense as the interval left behind ; every increment of exten
sion, as it is progressively imagined, must be added to the former
quantity as equally a given magnitude.
Finally, all these observations strictly speaking do nothing but
repeat and depict the impression under which we all are in every-day
life. The moment we exert our senses, nothing seems surer to us
than that we are environed by Space, as a reality in whose depths the
actual world may lose itself to our sight, but from which it can never
escape ; therefore while every particular sense-perception readily falls
under suspicion of being a purely subjective excitement in us, to doubt
the objectivity of Space has always seemed to the common appre
hension an unintelligible paradox of speculation.
105. The motives to such a startling transformation of the ordinary
view were found by Kant not in the nature of space itself, but in con
tradictions which seemed to result from its presupposed relation to the
real world. The attempt of the Transcendental Aesthetic, to demon
strate our mental picture of space to be an a priori possession of our
mind, does not in itself run counter to common opinion. For
suppose a single space to extend all round us and to contain within
it ourselves and all things ; precisely in that case it is of course im
possible that the several visions of it, existing in several thinking
beings, could be the space itself; they could not be more than sub
jective representations of it in those beings : so whether they belong
to us originally, or arise in us by action from without, there is no
prima facie hindrance to their being, qua images belonging to cog
nition, similar to a space which exists in fact.
Nothing short of the antinomies in which we become entangled, if
we attempt to unite our ideas of the entirety of the world or of its
ultimate constituent parts with this presupposition of an actual Space,
decided Kant for his assumption that the space-perception was
nothing but a subjective form of apprehension with which the nature
of the real world that had to be presupposed had nothing in common.
With this indirect establishment of his doctrine I cannot agree ;
because the purely phenomenal nature of space does not properly
speaking remove any of the difficulties on account of which Kant felt
compelled to assert it. It is quite inadmissible, after the fashion
especially of popular treatises of the Kantian school which exulted in
this notion, to treat Things in themselves as utterly foreign to the
forms under which they were nevertheless to appear to us ; there must
be determinations in the realm of things in themselves prescribing the
definite places, forms, or motions, which we observe the appearances
1 8 2 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space.
in space to occupy, sustain, or execute, without the power of changing
them at our pleasure. If Things are not themselves of spatial form
and do not stand in space-relations to one another, then they must be
in some network of changeable intelligible relations with one another ;
to each of these, translated by us into the language of spatial images,
there must correspond one definite space-relation to the exclusion of
every other. How we are in a position to apply our innate and con
sequently uniform perception of space, which we are said to bring to
our experiences ready made, so that particular apparent things find
their definite places in it, is a question the whole of which Kant has
left unanswered; the results of this omission, as I think it worth while
to show briefly, encumber even his decision upon the antinomy of
Space.
106. The real world, it is said, cannot be infinite in space, because
infinity can only be conceived as unlimited succession, and not as
simultaneous. Now how is our position bettered by denying all
extension to the real world, while forced, with Kant, to admit that in
all our experience space is the one persistently valid form under
which that world appears ? I cannot persuade myself that this so-
called empirical reality of space is reconcilable with the grounds
which cause the rejection of its transcendental validity for the world
of Things in themselves.
In this world, the world of experience, if we proceed onwards in a
straight line, we shall, admittedly, never come to the end of the line ;
but how do we suppose that our perceptions would behave during
our infinite linear progress? Would there always be something to
perceive, however far we advanced ? And if there was, would there
be some point after which it would be always the same or would it
keep changing all through ? In both of these cases there must be
precisely as many distinguishable elements in the world of things in
themselves as there are different points of space in this world of per
ception ; for all the things that appear in different places, whether
like or unlike, must be somehow different in order to have the power
of so appearing, and so must at least consist in a number of similar
elements, corresponding to the number of their distinguishable places.
Consequently, on this assumption, space could only possess its em
pirical reality if there were conceded to the real world that very
countlessness or infinity the impossibility of admitting which was the
reason for restricting space to an empirical reality. I trust that it
will not be attempted to object that in fact the infinite rectilinear
progression can never be completed. Most certainly it cannot, and
CHAPTER i.] The World Limited in Space ? 183
doubtless we are secure against advancing so far in space as to give
practical urgency to the question how our perceptions will behave:
but in treating of the formation of our idea of the world, we must
consider the distances which we know we shall never reach as in
their nature simultaneously existent, just as much as those which
we have actually traversed are held simultaneously persistent ; it is
impossible for us to assume that the former are not there till our
perception arrives at them, and that the latter cease to be, when we
no longer perceive them.
Now, one would think, the other assumption remains ; suppose at
a definite point reached in our advance, the world of perception came
to an end, and with it, all transmission of perceptions arising from the
actually existing contents of the distances previously traversed. This
would give the image of a finite actual world-volume floating in the
infinite extension of empty space. Kant thinks it impossible ; his idea
is that in such a case we should have not merely a relation of things
in space, but also one of things to space ; but as the world is a
whole, and outside it there is no object of perception with which
it can stand in the alleged relation, the world's relation to empty
space would be a relation of it to no object. The note * which Kant
subjoins here, shows clearly what his only reason is for scrupling to
admit this relation of a limitation of the real world by space : he
starts with his own assumption that space is only a form to be
attached to possible things, and not an object which can limit other
objects. But the popular view, which he ought not to disregard as
up to this point2 he has not explicitly disputed it, apprehends space to
be a self-existent form such as to include possible things, but clearly
in treating it thus by no means takes it for a form which can only
exist in attachment to things as one of their qualities, or for a simple
non-entity. Rather it is held to be a something of its own enigmatic
kind, not indeed an object like other objects, but with its peculiar
sort of reality, and such therefore as could not be known without
proof to be incapable of forming the boundary of the real world.
But in any case we should have no occasion to expect of empty space
a restricting energy, which should actively set limits to the world, as
if it were obvious that in default of such resistance the world must
extend into infinity. The fact is rather that the world must stop at
its limit, because there is no more of it ; we may call this a relation
of the world ' to no object,' but such a relation is at least nothing
1 [Kritik d. r.V. p. 307, Hartenstein's ed. 1868. Footnote, 'der Raum 1st bios
die Form,' etc ] 3 [Cp. § 105.]
1 84 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK u.
mysterious or suspicious ; moreover, it would have to remain true
even of our unspatial world of things in themselves ; this also, the
totality of existence, would be in the same way bounded by Nothing.
So if in our progression through the world of experience, the coherent
whole of our observations convinced us that at any point the real
world came to an end, this fact alone would not cause us the difficulty
by which Kant was impelled to overthrow the common idea ; were
it but clear what is meant by saying of things that they are in space,
\ve should not be disturbed at their not being everywhere.
On the other hand it cannot be denied, that this boundedness of
the world in space would also be reconcilable with Kant's doctrine,
if this were once accepted, and supplemented in the way I suggest.
If the world of things in themselves were a completed whole ; if they
all stood to each other in graduated intelligible relations, which our
perception had to transform into spatial ones ; then the pheno
menal image of such a world would be complete when all these
actually existing relations of its elements had found their spatial
expression in our apprehension. But beyond this bounded world-
picture there would appear to extend an unbounded empty space;
all conceivable but unrealised continuations or higher intensities of
those intelligible conditions would like them enter into our percep
tion, but only as empty possibilities. To indicate it briefly; every
pair of converging lines a b and c d whose extremities we found
attached to impressions of real things, would require their point of
intersection to be in the infinite void, supposing them not to find it
within the picture of the real world. The boundedness of the real
world is therefore admissible both on Kant's view of space and on
the popular view, and so the choice between them is undetermined ;
it is equally undetermined if we assume the unboundedness of the
world, as neither of the views in question by itself removes the
difficulties which are found in the conception of the infinity of exist
ing things.
107. I intend merely to subjoin in a few words the corresponding
observations on the infinite divisibility, or the indivisibleness, of the
ultimate elements of real existence. If we abide strictly by the em
pirical reality of space, then in thinking of the subdivision of extended
objects as continued beyond the limits attainable in practice, we must
come to one of two conclusions about the result ; either we must
arrive at ultimate actual shapes, indivisible not only by our methods
but in their nature ; or else the divisibility really continues to- infinity.
If real things were infinitely divisible the difficulty which we should
CHAPTER i.] Infinite Divisibility. 185
see in the fact would be no more removed by assuming space to be
purely phenomenal, than was the similar difficulty in the idea of
infinite extension : every real Thing, which presented itself pheno
menally to our perception as something single and finite occupy
ing space, would have to be itself infinitely divisible into unspatial
multiplicities ; for every part of the divisible space-image, must, as it
appears in a different point of space from every other part, be de
pendent on a real element which has an existence of its own and in
its unspatial fashion is distinct, somehow, from all other points.
If on the contrary we arrived at the conviction, that definite
minimurn volumes of real things were indivisible, while the space they
occupied of course retained its infinite geometrical divisibility, we
might still think it obscure what could be meant at all by saying that
real things occupy space : but if we assume this as intelligible, we
should not be astonished that in virtue of its nature as a particular
kind of unit, each real thing should occupy just this volume and no
other, and allow no subdivision of it. Here once more the obscure
point remarked upon is made no clearer by the assumption that space is
merely phenomenal. We should have to represent to ourselves that
every Thing in itself, though in itself unspatial, yet bore in its in
telligible nature the reason why it is forced to present itself as a
limited extension to any perception which translates it into spatial
appearance. This idea involves another ; that the real Thing, though
indivisibly one, is yet equivalent to an indissolubly combined unity of
moments, however to be conceived ; every point of its small pheno
menal volume, in order to distinguish itself from every other and
form an extension with their help, presupposes a cause of its pheno-
menality in the Thing-in-itself, distinct from the corresponding cause
of every other point, and yet indissolubly bound up with those causes.
How to satisfy these postulates we do not yet know; common opinion,
which says that the Thing is actually extended in an actual space,
probably thinks that it is no less wise, and much more clear, about
the fact of the matter than the view of the unreality of space, which
common opinion holds to be at all events not more successful in com
prehending it.
Here, as in the last section, I dismiss the objection that there is a
practical limit ; that we can never get so far in the actual subdivision
of what is extended, as to be enabled to assert either infinite divisi
bility or the existence of indivisible volumes. One of the two must
necessarily be thought of as taking place as long as the empirical
reality of space is allowed universal validity; that is as long as we
1 86 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK n.
assume that however far we go in dividing the objects of our direct
experience, spatial ideas will find necessary application to all the
products of this subdivision ; that there would never be a moment
when the disruption of what is in space would suddenly present us
with non-spatial elements.
108. The foregoing discussions have brought me to the conviction
that the difficulties which Kant discovers by his treatment of the Anti
nomies, neither suffice to refute the ordinary view of the objectivity
of space, nor would be got rid of by its opposite ; but that other
motives are forthcoming, though less noticed by Kant, which never
theless force us to agree with him.
The want of objective validity in the spatial perception is revealed
before we come to apply it to the universe or to its ultimate elements.
We have only to ask two other and more general questions ; how can
space, such as it is and must be conceived whether occupied or not,
have ascribed to it a reality of its own, in virtue of which it exists
before its possible content ? And how can what we call the exist
ence of things in space be conceived, whether such occupation by
real things concerns its entire infinite extent, or only a finite part of it?
The first of our questions, more especially, but the second as well,
require a further introductory remark. We must give up all attempt
to pave the way for answering the two questions by assigning to space
a different nature from that which we found for it in our former de
scription. There is obvious temptation to do so in order to make the
substantive existence of space, and its limiting action on real things,
seem more intelligible. Thus we are inclined to supply to space,
which at first we took for a mere tissue of relations, some substratum
of properties, undefinable of course, but still such as to serve for
a substantive support to these relations. We gain nothing by doing
so ; we do not so much corrupt the conception of space, as merely
throw the difficulty back, and that quite uselessly. For the second of
our questions was, how real things can at all stand in relation to
space. Precisely the same question will be raised over again by the
new substratum in which space is somehow to inhere. Therefore
we must abide by this ; there is simply nothing behind that tissue of
relations which at starting we represented to ourselves as space ; if
we ask questions about its existence, all that we do or can want to
know is, what kind of reality can belong to a thing so represented, to
this empty and unsubstantial space.
109. No doubt, when so stated, the question is already decided in
my own conviction by what I said above concerning the nature of all
CHAPTERI.] How is Space Real ? 187
'relations1': that they only exist either as ideas in a consciousness
which imposes them, or as inner states, within the real elements
of existence, which according to our ordinary phrase stand in the
'relations.'
Still I do not wish to answer the present question merely by a
deduction from this previous assertion of mine ; but should think it
more advantageous if I could succeed in arriving at the same result
by an independent treatment. But I do not hide from myself how liable
such an attempt is to fail ; it is a hard achievement to expound by
discursive considerations the essential absurdity of an idea which
appears to be justly formed because it is every moment forming itself
anew under the overpowering impression of a direct perception ; an
idea too, which never defines precisely what it means, and which
therefore escapes, impalpably, all attempts at refutation.
This is our present case. It is an impression which we all share
that space extends before our contemplating vision, not merely as an
example of external being independent of us, but as the one thing
necessary to making credible to us the possibility and import of
any such being. The idea that it would still remain there, even if
there were no vision for it to extend before, is an inference hard to
refute ; for it does not explain in what the alleged being of that space
would any longer consist if it is to be neither the existence of a thing
which can act, nor the mere validity of a truth, nor a mental repre
sentation in us. It is vain to repeat, that space itself teaches us with
dazzling clearness that there are other and peculiar kinds of reality
besides these ; this is only to repeat the confusion of the given per
ception with the inference drawn from it ; the former does find space
appearing in its marvellous form of existence ; but perception cannot
go outside itself and vouch that there corresponds to this reality which
is an object of perception a similar reality which is not ; this notion
can only be subjoined by our thought, and is prima facie a question
able supposition.
I now wish to attempt to show how little this hypothesis does to
make those properties intelligible, which we can easily understand to
be true of space if we conceive it merely as an image created by our
perceptive power, and forthcoming for it only.
110. Every point p of empty space must be credited with the same
reality, whatever that may be, which belongs to space as a whole ;
for whether we regard this latter as a sum of points, or as a product
of their continuous confluence with one another, in any case it could
1 [§ Si, end.]
1 88 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK n.
not exist, unless they existed. Again, we find every point p exactly
like every other q or r, and no change would be made if we thought
of/ as replaced by q or by r. At the same time such an interchange
is quite impossible, only real elements can change their relations
(which we are not now discussing), to empty space-points ; but these
latter themselves stand immovable in fixed relations, which are dif
ferent for any one pair and for any other.
Of course, no one even who holds space to be real, regards its
empty points as things like other things, acting on each other by
means of physical forces. Nevertheless, when we say ' Space exists,'
it is only the shortness of the phrase that gives a semblance of settling
the matter by help of a simple ' position 1 ' or act of presenting itself,
easily assigned or thought of as assigned to this totality, which we
comprehend under the name of space. But, in fact, for space to
exist, everything that we have alluded to must occur ; every point
must exist, and the existence of each, though it is like every other,
must consist in distinguishing itself from every other, and determining
an unalterable position for itself compared with all, and for all com
pared with it. Hence the fabric of space, if it is to exist, will have to
rest on an effectual reciprocal determination of its empty points ; this
can in any case be brought under the idea of action and reaction,
whatever distinction may be found between it and the operation of
physical force, or between empty points and real atoms.
This requirement cannot be parried by the objection that as we
have not to make space, but only to consider it as existing, we have
no occasion to construct its fabric, but may accept it, and therefore
the position of all its points, as given. True, we do not want to
make space, as if it had not existed before, but this very act, the
recognition of it as given, means presupposing that precise action and
reaction of its points which I described. No points or elements,
unless thought of as distributed in an already existing space, could
conceivably be asserted simply to be in particular places, without being
responsible for it themselves, and to share in the relation subsisting
between these places ; but the points of empty space cannot be taken
as localised in turn in a previous space, so as to have their reciprocal
relations derived from their situation in it ; it must be iii consequence
of what they themselves are or do, that they have these relations, and
by their means constitute space as a whole. Hence, if the two points
p and q exist, their distance pq is something which would not be there
without them, and which they must make for themselves.
1 ['Position/ v. § 10.]
CHAPTER i.] T/ie ' Relations ' between Spatial Points. 189
I can imagine the former objection being here repeated in another
shape ; that we did not conceive the spatial relations as prior, in
order to place the points in them afterwards ; and so now, we are
not to assume the points first, so that they have to create the relations
afterwards ; the two together, thought in complete cohesion, the
points in these relations, put before us, at once and complete, the
datum which we call existing space. Granting then, that I could
attach any meaning to points being in relations simply as a fact,
without either creating or sustaining them by anything in themselves ;
still I should have to insist on the circumstance that every reality,
which is merely given in fact, admits of being done away and its
non-existence assumed at least in thought. Now not only does no
one attempt to make an actual hole in actual empty space ; but even
in thought it is vain to try to displace one of the empty space-points
out of that relation to others which we are told is a mere datum of
fact ; the lacuna which we try to create is at once filled up by space
as good as that suppressed. Now of course I cannot suppose that
anyone who affirms the reality of space will set down this invulner
ability only to his subjective perception of it, and not to existing
space itself; obviously this miraculous property would have to be
ascribed to real extension as well.
This property is very easily intelligible on the view of the purely
phenomenal nature of space. If a consciousness which recollects its
own different acts or states, experiences a number n of impressions
of any kind in a succession which it cannot alter at pleasure ; if,
in the transition from each impression to the next, it experiences
alterations, sensibly homogeneous and equal, of its own feeling; if,
again, it is compelled to contemplate these differences not merely as
feelings, but owing to a reason in its own nature, as magnitudes
of a space whose parts are beside each other ; and if, finally,
after frequently experiencing the same kind of progression, it ab
stracts from the various qualities of the impressions received and
only calls to mind the form under which they cohered; then, for
their consciousness, and this only, there will arise before the mind's
eye the picture of an orderly series or system of series, in each of
which between the terms m— i and m+i it is impossible for m to
be missing. If there were no impression to occupy the place m,
still the image of the empty place in the series would be at once
supplied by help of the images of the two contiguous places and
by means of the single self-identical activity of the representing con
sciousness.
i go Subjectivity of our Perception of Space.
All is different if we require an existing space, and conceive the
absence of this consciousness, which combines its images, evokes
some to join others, and never passes from one to the others without
also representing the difference which divides them. Then, the
empty points of space would have to take upon themselves what the
active consciousness did ; they would have to prescribe their places
to each other by attraction and repulsion, and to exert of themselves
the extraordinary reproductive power by which space healed its
mutilations. And in spite of all we should at once get into fresh
difficulties.
111. For, the relation or interval p q, which the two existing points
p and q would be bound according to their nature to establish between
them, ought at the same time to be different from every other similar
relation which p and r or q and r for similar reasons would set up
between them* But the complete similarity of all empty points in
volves, on the contrary, an impossibility of / and q determining any
other relation between themselves, than any other pair of points
could between themselves ; even N, a number of connected points,
conceived with determinate relations already existing between them,
could assign no place in particular to another point s which we might
suppose thrown in, because any other, / or u, would have as good a
right to the same place.
It is easy to foresee the answer that will at once be made ; that it
is quite indifferent, whether the point is designated by s or / or u ; it
is in itself a yet undefined, and therefore, in strictness, a nameless
point ; it is only after N has assigned it a particular place that it
becomes the point s, which is now distinct from the points / and tt,
which are differently localised by N. But this observation, though
quite correct in itself, is out of place here. It would only apply if we
were regarding s as the mere idea of an extreme term belonging to
a series N begun in our consciousness ; such an idea of s would be
created by our consciousness, in the act of requiring it, in the par
ticular relations to N which belonged to it ; there would be no in
ducement to the production of any other image which had not these
relations. Or again ; our consciousness may not restrict itself to its
immediate problem, but recalling previous experiences may first form
the idea of an extreme term, e.g. for two series which converge, without
being aware what place it will hold in a system of other independent
terms which is to serve as the measure of its position ; then we have
a term x, which has as yet no name, and which is not particularised
as s, /, or u, till we come accurately to consider the law according to
CHAPTER i.] A re Spatial Points Active f 191
which each series progresses, and so the simultaneous determining
equations are both solved.
Such a productive process of determination, realising what it aims
at, is explained in this case by the nature of our single consciousness,
which connects with each other all the particular imagined points of
its content ; but if instead of mental images of empty points we are
to speak of actual empty points, then we should really be compelled
to assume, either that every existing number of points N is constantly
creating new points, which by the act of their production enter into
the relations appropriate to them ; or that by exerting a determining
activity N imposes these relations on points already existing whose
own nature is indifferent to them. Obviously we should not conceive
either of these constructions as a history of something that had once
taken place, but only as a description of the continually present
unmoving tension of activities which sustains in every moment the
apparently inactive nature of space. Having once got so far into
this region of interesting fancies I wish to pursue the former of these
hypotheses one step further; the second, my readers will gladly
excuse me from considering.
112. We cannot seriously mean to regard a particular ready-made
volume N as the core round which the rest of space crystallises. Not
merely any N whatever, but ultimately every individual empty point,
would have the same right to possess this power of propagation, and
we should arrive at the idea of a radiant point in space, fundament
ally in the same sense in which it is known to geometry. Then, the
radiant point p would produce all the points with which its nature
makes a geometrical relation possible, and each of them in the precise
relation which belongs to it in respect of p ; among others the point
q, which is determined by the distance and direction p q. All this is
just as true of any other empty point ; it would still hold good if
among them was a q, and then among the innumerable points which
q would create there would be one standing to q in the relation q p,
the same which was above designated, in a different order, by p q.
And now it might be supposed that we had done what we wanted,
and obtained a construction of space corresponding to its actual
nature; for it seems obvious that p q and qp indicate the same dis
tance between the same points, and that thus the radiant activities of
all points coincide in their results, so as to produce ordinary exten
sion with its geometrical structure.
But this expectation is founded on a subreption. Before we com
pleted our construction we knew nothing more of the empty points
1 92 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [ROOK IT
from which it was to start, than that they are all similar to one
another, and that the same reality attaches to all of them ; but beyond
this they had no community with each other. It is therefore by no
means self-evident, that the pencil of rays which starts from the
existing point p will ever meet the other, emitted by the independent
point q ; both of them may, instead of meeting, extend as if into two
different worlds, and remain ever strange to each other, even more
naturally than two lines in space which not being in the same plane,
neither intersect nor are parallel. The point q, generated by the
radiant point /, is not obviously the same q, with that which, as given
independently, we expected to generate p ; the second / generated
by the given q need not coincide with the first />, nor the line qp with
the previous line p q ; in a word, what is generated is not a single
space, in which all empty points would be arranged in a system, but
as many reciprocally independent spaces, as we assumed radiant
points ; and from one of these spaces there would be absolutely no
transition into another. Our anticipation of finding that only a single
space is generated, started with the tacit assumption that space was
present as the common all-comprehending background, in which the
radiations from the points could not help meeting.
Still, if all the resources of a disputatious fancy are to be exerted
in defence of the attempted construction ; there might be this escape.
Suppose there are countless different spaces, it might be said ; still, just
because they do not concern each other, for that very reason they do
not concern us ; excepting that particular one in which we and all our
experiences are comprehended, and with which alone, as the others
never come in contact with us at all, Metaphysic has to do. Then let
us confine ourselves to the space which is generated by the radiant
point p. The point q which it creates, has equal reality with /, and
so shares its radiant power ; it must, in its turn, determine a point
towards which it imposes on itself the relation q p ; and this point />
will certainly be no other than, but the same with, that which first
imposed on itself towards q the relation/?; therefore the lines qp
and p q will certainly coincide.
But even this does not give us the result aimed at. As we cannoc
regard a particular point p exclusively, but are able to regard any
whatever, as the starting-point of this genesis of space, the result of
our representation translated from the past tense of construction into
the present of definition, is simply this; that it is the fact that in
existing space every point has its particular place, and that a line/*?
of determinate direction and magnitude, taken in the opposite direc-
CHAPTER i.] Genesis of Space, actual or intellectual? 193
tion qp, returns to its starting-point. No doubt this is correct; but
no one will affirm that this last construction fulfils its purpose of
explaining such a condition of things ; there is something too extra
ordinary- in the notion that an existing point generates out of itself an
infinite number of points with equally real existence, and some
thing too strange in the result that every existing empty point has as
it were an infinite density, being created and put in its place by every
other point, not merely by one; and finally, the whole idea is too
empty a fiction, with its radiant power which if it is not to lead to a
purely intensive multiplication of being into itself, but to an Extension,
must in any case presuppose a space, in which its effect may assume
this very character of radiation.
Nevertheless all these incredibilities appear to me to be un
avoidable, as long as we persist in thinking of empty space with
its geometrical structure as actually existing ; but the doctrine of
its purely phenomenal nature avoids them from the beginning;
and it is hardly requisite to prove this by a protraction of this long
exposition.
One can understand how, for a consciousness which remembers its
previous progression through the terms pqr, there arises the expecta
tion of a homogeneous continuance of this series in both directions,
which implies an apparent power of radiation, as above, in those
points ; only what takes place here is not a self-multiplication of some
thing existent, but a generation of ideas out of ideas, i.e. of fresh states
of a single subject out of its former states, in accordance with the laws
of its faculty of ideas and the movement of its activities which was in
progress before. It is on this hypothesis equally easy to understand,
that the converse march of the movement returns from q to the same
/>, i.e. reproduces the identical image p from which it started ; for the
image q has only such radiant power as it derives from representing
to the mind the purport of the series ; so that q by itself, as long as it
is represented as a term in the series, can never induce a divergence
from the direction of that series.
On the other hand, starting with a qualitatively determined impres
sion TT, which fills the geometrical place of the term p, there may be
an advance to other impressions K and p, such that the differences
TT - «c, K — p, may be comparable with each other, though not com
parable with the difference of the series p, q, r. Then we have the
case which we mentioned above ; ?r radiates too, but, so to speak,
into another world, and the series TT, *, p, finds in fact no place in
space-perception, and in respect to its relations within itself can only
VOL. i. o
194 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space.
be metaphorically or symbolically represented by constructions in
space, but cannot be shown to have a spatial situation.
113. I am sure that the whole of this account of the matter has
only convinced those who were convinced before, and will not have
done much to shake the preference for an existing space. Let us
therefore ask once more where in strictness the difference of the two
views lies ; and what important advantage there is that can only be
secured by the assumption of this enigmatic existence, so constantly
reaffirmed, of an empty extension, and that must be lost by con
ceding that its import is purely phenomenal? The clearness and
self-evidence, with which our perception sees space extended around
us, is equally great for both views ; we do not in the least traverse
this perception, which is endowed with such self-evidence ; but only
the allegation of a being that underlies it, which must be inaccessible
to perception and so cannot share its self-evidence. No doubt for
common opinion every perception carries a revelation of the reality of
what is perceived ; but in the world of philosophy Idealism claims the
first hearing, with its proof that what is perceived, in this case, space,
is given to begin with merely as the subjective perception of our
minds. Now of course in common life we do not need to go through
the long toil of inference from perception before attaining the idea
that what is perceived is real ; but in the world of philosophy this
investigation is essential, to decide whether we may retain this idea;
for I repeat that in this region it is not the primary datum, but re
mains problematic till it is proved to be necessary.
Such a proof, in strictness, has never been attempted ; the burden
of disproof has been thrown on the opposite view, and its opponents
have taken their stand on the probability of their own opinion as im
porting a valid presumption of its truth. The probability seems to rest
on this ; that a space, which exists by itself with all the properties
ascribed to it by our perception, makes the origin of this perception
seem much more natural than does our more artificial doctrine;
according to which it arises from a combination of inner states of
our consciousness wholly dissimilar to it. But the artificiality here
objected to must be admitted, even if space were as real as could be
wished. The pictures which are made of it in the countless minds
which are all held to be within space, could not be more than
pictures of it, they could not be it', and as pictures they could only
have arisen by means of operations on the mind which could not be
extensions, but could only be inner states corresponding to the nature
of the subject operated upon. In every case our mental representa-
CHAPTER i.] Space as 'ttul* as any Perception. 195
tion of space must arise in this way ; we cannot get it more cheaply,
whether we imagine beneath the picture presented to our mind an
existence like it outside us, or one entirely disparate.
What can be gained then by maintaining the view which we
oppose ? Men will go on repeating the retort ; that it is impossible
to doubt the reality of space, which is so clearly brought home to us
by immediate perception. But are we denying this reality ? Ought
not people at length to get tired of repeating this confusion of ideas,
which sees reality in nothing but external existence, and yet is ready
to ascribe it to absolute vacuity ? Is pain merely a deceitful appear
ance, and unreal, because it subsists only for the moment in which it
is felt ? Are we to deny the reality of colours and tones because we
admit that they only shine and sound while they are seen and heard ?
Or is their reality less loud and bright because it only consists in being
felt and not in a self-sustained being independent of all consciousness ?
So then space would lose nothing of its convincing reality for our
perception if we admitted that it possesses it only in t)ur perception.
We long ago rejected the careless exaggeration which attaches to
this idea ; space is not a mere semblance in us, to which nothing i
the real world corresponds ; rather every particular feature of our spatial
perceptions corresponds to a ground which there is for it in the world
of things ; only, space cannot retain the properties which it has in our
consciousness, in a substantive existence apart from thought and"
perception. In fact, there is only one distinction forthcoming, and
that of course remains as between the two views ; for our view all
spatial determinations are secondary qualities, which the real relations
put on for our minds only; for the opposite view space as the
existing background which comprehends things is not merely secondary
but primary as a totality of determining laws and limits, which the
Being and action of things has to obey, so that the things and ourselves
are in space ; while our view maintains that space is in us. This brings
us naturally to the second of the questions, which were proposed x
above.
114. When I want to know what precisely we mean by saying that
things are in space, I can only expect to meet with astonishment, and
wonder what there is in the matter that is open to question ; nothing,
it will be said, is plainer. And in fact this spatial relation i& given so
clearly to our perception, that we find all other relations, m them
selves not of the spatial kind, expressed in language by designations
borrowed from space. We even meet with philosophical views which
1 [Sect. 108.]
0 2
196 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK n.
not only demand constructions in space by way of sensuous elucidation
of abstract thought, but prefer to regard the problem of cognition as
unsolved till such constructions are found. I have no hope of
making clear the import of my question to such a ' scientific mind.'
But the assumption of a purely phenomenal space has little difficulty
in answering it.
Only I feel compelled to repeat the warning, that this assumption
does not any more than the other aim at denying or modifying the
directness of the overwhelming impression which makes space appear
to us to include things in it ; it only propounds reflections on the true
state of the facts, which makes this impression possible ; and we
expressly admit of our reflections that they are utterly foreign to the
common consciousness. The power of our senses to see colours and
forms or to hear sounds, seems to us quite as simple ; we need, we
think, only to be present, and it is a matter of course that sensations
are formed in us, which apprehend and repeat the external world as it
really is; the natural consciousness never has an inkling of the
manifold intermediate processes required to produce these feelings ;
and one who has gained scientific insight into their necessity does
not feel them a whit more noticeable in the moment of actual
sensation.
It is the task of psychology to ascertain these intermediate pro
cesses for the case in hand ; its solution will not point to an image of
empty space, formed prior to all perceptions, into which the mind had
subsequently to transplant its impressions ; it is rather the series of
peculiar concomitant feelings of homogeneous change of its condition,
experienced in the transition from the impression p to the other
impression q, that is felt by it as the distance p q\ and from the
comparison of many such experiences there arises, as I indicated just
now, by help of abstraction from the content of the various im
pressions, the picture of empty extension. After it has arisen, to
localise an impression q in a particular point of this space simply
means: taking an impression p as the initial state from which the
movement of consciousness starts, to contemplate the magnitude of
the change which consciousness felt or must feel in order to reach q,
under the form of a distance p q.
These different concomitant feelings, which distinguish the im
pressions p and g, are independent of the qualitative difference of
their content, and may attach to like as well as to unlike impressions.
Therefore metaphysic can only derive the feelings from a difference
in the effects produced on the soul by the real elements which corre-
CHAPTER i.] Space and the things in it. 197
spond to them, in conformity with a difference of actual relations in
which the realities stand to the soul, and consequently, with a deter
minate actual relation in which they stand to each other. I reserve for
a moment my further explanations concerning these intelligible rela
tions, as we may call them, of the realities, which we regard as causes
of our perceived relations of space ; I only emphasise here the fact
that they consist in actual relations of thing and thing, not of things
and space ; and that it is not they, as merely subsisting between the
things, but the concentration in the unity of our consciousness of
effects of the things varying in conformity with them, that is the
proximate active cause of our spatial idea in which we picture their
locality, and their distance from each other.
115. From this point we may obtain a conspectus of the difficulties
which spring from the opposite view, that space has an existence of
its own, and that things are in it. If space exists, and consequently
the point p exists, what is meant by saying that a real element IT is in
the point p ? Even if p itself is not to be taken to be a real thing,
still, between it as something existent, and the reality TT, some
reciprocal operation must be conceivable by the subsistence of which
the presence of TT in p is distinguished from its not being present in p.
But as regards TT we do not believe that its place does anything to it ;
on the contrary, it remains the same in whatever place it may be ;
therefore there is nothing which takes place in it by which its being in
p is distinguishable from its being in q ; the two cases would only be
distinguishable to an observer, who had reason on the one hand to
distinguish p from q, and on the other to associate the image of rr in
the moment of perception only with / and not with q.
If we go on to ask what happens to the point p when TT is in it, we
should suppose that the nature of p would be just as little changed as
that of TT ; but no doubt the answer will be : the very fact that / is
occupied by TT distinguishes it from q, which is now not the place
occupied by ir. Against this answer I am defenceless. It is indeed
unassailable if we can once conceive, and accept as a satisfactory
solution, that between two realities, the point p and the actual element
TT, there should be a relation as to which neither of the related points
takes note of anything except that it, the relation, subsists, while in
every other respect the two things are exactly as they would be if it did
not subsist. I might add, that p would not be permanently filled by TT,
but, in turn, by other real elements K or p ; surely the one case ought
somehow to distinguish itself from the other, and the point p to be
different when occupied by TT from what it is when occupied by K.
198 Subjectivity of our Perception of Space.
But this would be unavailing; I should be answered with the same
acuteness : that in all these cases / remains just the same in every
other respect, and the distinction between them is constituted by the
simple fact, that the occupation of/, which does not affect it in itself,
is carried out by TT in one case and by K in another. As all this more
over is as true of q as of />, I can only meet this reassertion by reas
serting the opposite notion ; that the whole state of things alleged is
inconceivable to me as in real existence, and only conceivable as in
the thought of an observer, who, as I indicated, has reason to dis
tinguish p from q and, at the moment, to combine either TT or K with
p or q — to make one combination and not another.
Finally, taking p q as the distance between the real elements TT and «
which occupy the points p and q, we do not in fact treat this localisation
as unimportant in our further investigation of things ; for we believe
the intensity of reciprocal action between TT and K to be conditioned
according to the magnitude of the distance. But their action cannot
be guided by this changeable distance unless it is somehow brought
home to them ; how are we to suppose this to be done ? The distance
p q is not in the points p and q but between them ; if we suppose the
empty point q represented at / by some effect produced by q on />,
which makes the distance p q always present to /, and consequently,
though I can see no reason for the inference, present also to the
element n in p and determining its behaviour, still this would hold
equally good of any other empty point r or s. All of them would be
represented at />, consequently they would all have an equal right to
determine the behaviour of the element TT at p ; the pre-eminence of
q which is at the moment occupied by the real element K, could only
depend on the latter, and would have to be accounted for thus : the
empty point q must undergo a change of state by becoming filled,
must transmit the change to / through qp and there transfer it to the
element ?r; a reaction between real existence and the void, which
would be as inevitable as it is inexplicable. The argument might be
pursued farther, but I conclude here, hoping that the mass of ex
travagances in which we should be involved has persuaded us of the
inconceivability of the apparently simple assumption that space has
independent existence and that things have their being in space.
116. The opposite view which I am now maintaining leads to a
series of problems which I will not undertake to treat at present ; it
is enough to characterise their import as far as is requisite to establish
the general admissibility of the doctrine. We may begin by ex
pressing ourselves thus ; that we regard a system of relations between
CHAPTER i.] Reality expressed by spatial relations. 1 99
the realities, unspatial, inaccessible to perception, and purely in
telligible, as the fact which lies at the root of our spatial perceptions.
When these objective relations are translated into the subjective lan
guage of our consciousness, each of them finds its counterpart in one
definite spatial image to the exclusion of all others. I should avoid
calling this system of relations an ' intelligible space ' and discussing
whether it is like or unlike the space which we represent to ourselves
by help of our senses. I start from the opposite conviction, that
there exists no resemblance between the two ; for it would transfer
to the reality of the new condition of things all the difficulties which
we found in the reality of empty space.
However, it is not worth while to keep up the idea of such a
system of relations, which was only of use as a brief preliminary ex
pression of the fact ; we now return to the conviction expressed above ;
it is not relations, whether spatial or intelligible, between the things, but"
only direct reactions which the things are subject to from each other,!
and experience as inner states of themselves, which constitute the real
fact whose perception we spin out into a semblance of extension.
Let P and Q be two real elements thought of as unrelated ; let P K and
QTT indicate them when in the states of themselves which are set up
by a momentary mutual reaction ; these states of theirs contain the
reason why P and Q, or at the moment P K and QTT, appear in our
perception in the places p and q, separated by the interval p q. It
need hardly be observed that the mere fact of the reaction subsisting
between P and Q cannot by itself set up our perception ; but can only
do so by means of an action of P and Q upon us, conformable to
their momentary states K and TT ; and therefore other than it would
have been in the moment of a different mutual reaction. The
meeting of these two actions in our consciousness causes, first, in
virtue of its unity, the possibility of a comparison and reciprocal
reference of the two ; secondly, in virtue of its peculiar nature the
necessity that the result of this comparison should assume the form
of distance in space to our perception ; and finally, the magnitude of
the difference which is felt between the two actions on us, determines,
to put it shortly, the visual angle by which we separate the im
pressions of the two elements.
Thus the theory attaches itself to a more general point of view,
which I adopt in opposition to a predominant tendency of the
philosophic spirit of the age ; holding that thought should always go
back to the living activities of things, which activities are to be
considered as the efficient cause of all that we regard as external
2OO Subjectivity of our Perception of Space. [BOOK n.
relation between things. For in calling these latter ' relations ' we are
in fact using a mere name ; we cannot seriously conceive them to be
real and to subsist apart from thought. I regret that there is an in
creasingly widespread inclination in the opposite direction, namely, to
apprehend everything that takes place as the product of pre-existing
and varying relations ; overlooking the circumstance that ultimately,
even supposing that such relations could exist by themselves, nothing
but the vital susceptibility and energy which is in Things could
utilise them, or attach to any one of them a result different from that
attaching to the others.
117. As an elucidation, and more or less as a caution, I add what
follows. If the arrangement of perceivable objects in space were
always the same, we might think of them as the image of a sys
tematic order in which every element had a right to its particular
place, in virtue of the essential idea of its nature. It would not be
necessary that the elements which presented a greater resemblance of
nature should occur in closer contiguity in space, or that dissimilar
things should be more widely separated; the entire scheme of M,
which realises itself in the simultaneously combined manifold of
things, might easily necessitate a multitude of crossing relations or
reactions between them, of such a kind that similar elements should
repeatedly occur as necessary centres of relation at very different
parts of the whole system, while very dissimilar ones would have to
stand side by side, as immediately conditioning each other.
The movability of things makes it superfluous to go deeper into
this notion; the ground of localisation is clearly not in the nature of
the things alone, but in some variable incident which occurs to them,
[compatible with their nature, but not determined by it alone. This
might lead to the idea, that it was simply the intensity of the subsist
ing reaction between them which dictated the apparent situation of
things in space; whether we presume that in all things what takes
place is the same in kind and varies only in degree; or, that the
inner states produced in things by their reactions are different in
kind, but so far comparable that their external effects are calculable as
degrees of one and the same activity.
It would be no objection to this that it is observed that there often
are elements contiguous in space which seem quite indifferent to each
other, while distant ones betray a lively reciprocal action. No
element must be torn from its connexion with all others, and none of
its states from their cohesion with previous ones ; contiguous elements
which are indifferent are together not because they demand one
CHAPTER i.] Interaction and nearness in space. 201
another, but because their relations to all others deny them every
other place, and only leave them this one undisputed ; the remote
elements in question act powerfully on one another, because the
ceaseless stream of occurrence has produced counteractions, which
hinder the two elements from attaining the state towards which they
are now striving.
However, it is not my intention to continue the subject now, or to
show by what general line of thought my view of space might be
reconciled with the particular facts of Nature. The following sections
will compel us to make this attempt, but they would entirely dis
appoint many expectations unless I began by confessing that the
theory of a phenomenal space when applied to the explanation of the
most general relations of nature will by no means distinguish itself
for facility and simplicity in comparison with the common view.
On the contrary; the latter is a gift which our mental nature gives
us as a means to clearness and vivid realisation. But I insist upon
it that my view is not propounded for its practical utility, but simply
because it is necessary in itself, however much it might ultimately
embarrass a detailed enquiry were we bound to keep it explicitly
before us at every step. We shall see that we are not obliged to do
so; but at present I maintain with a philosopher's obstinacy, that
above all things that must hold good which we find to be in its
nature a necessary result of thought, though all else bend or break.
In no case may we regard other hypotheses as definitive truth (con
venient as they may be for use and therefore to be admitted in use),
if they are in themselves as unthinkable as the indefinite species of
reality, which the ordinary view attributes to empty space.
CHAPTER II.
Deductions of Space.
118. AMONG the commonest undertakings of modern philosophy
are to be found attempted deductions of Space ; and they have been
essayed with different purposes. Adherents of idealistic views, con
vinced that nothing could be or happen without being required by
the highest thought which governs reality, had a natural interest in
showing that Space was constrained to be what it is, or to be re
presented as it is represented to us, because it could not otherwise
fulfil its assigned purpose. Self-evident as the belief fundamentally is,
that everything in the world belongs to a rational whole, there are
obvious reasons why it should be equally unfruitful in the actual de
monstration of this connexion in a whole ; and even the deduction
of Space has hardly given results which it is necessary to dwell on.
The solidarity of the whole content of the universe was maintained,
in the dawn of modern philosophy, by Spinoza ; but in a way which
rather excluded than favoured the deduction of Space. The reason
lay in an enthusiasm, somewhat deficient in clearness, for the idea of
Infinity, and for everything great and unutterable that formal logical
acumen combined with an imagination bent on things of price could
concentrate in that expression. Hence he spoke of infinitely nume
rous attributes of his one infinite substance, and represented it as
manifesting its eternal nature by means of modifications of each of
them. Our human experience, indeed, was restricted to two only of
them, consciousness and extension, the two clear fundamental notions
under which Descartes had distributed the total content of the
universe; and the further progress of the Spinozistic philosophy
takes account of these two only. But it adheres to the principle
laid down at its starting about all attributes ; each of them rests
wholly on itself, and can be understood by us only by means of
itself ; we find it expressly subjoined, that though it is one and the
same substance which expresses its essence as well in forms of
Consciousness and Extension. 203
extension as in forms of thought ; yet the shape which it assumes in
one of these attributes can never be derived from that which it has
assumed in the other. This prohibits any attempt to deduce the
attributes of Space from what is not Space ; but at the same time
Consciousness and Extension are considered to be as manifestations
of the absolute quite on the same level; in assuming the shape of
extension, it does a positive act as much as in giving existence to
forms of consciousness ; neither of these is the mere result or sem
blance of the other.
119. These notions influenced Schelling. After Kant had des
troyed all rational cohesion between things-in-themselves and spatial
phenomena, it was natural to make the attempt to restore Space to
some kind of objective validity. If we may here eliminate the many
slight alterations which Schelling's views underwent, the following
will be found a pretty constant series of thoughts in him. Empty
Space is for him too only the subjectively represented image, which
remains to our pictorial imagination when it disregards the definite
forms of real existence in Space, that is, of matter ; it is not a prior
creation of the absolute which goes before the production of the
things to be realised in it, but matter itself is this first production, and
spatial extension is only real in. matter, but in it is actually real and
rot a mere subjective mode of the spectator's apprehension. How
he represents the creation of matter as coming to pass, we need not
describe here; but in general it is easy to see how the desire to
explain by one and the same root the distinction which experience
presents between the material and spiritual world might lead to
denying the primary presence of the characteristic predicates of these
two worlds in the Absolute, the root required ; while conceiving, in
the complete indefmiteness thus obtained of this absolute Identity,
two eternally co-existent impulses, tendencies, or factors, out of
which the distinction that had been cancelled might again arise.
Some interest attaches to the different expressions which Schelling
employs to designate them ; he opposes to the real objective producing
factor, which embodies the infinite in forms of the finite, the ideal
subjective defining factor which re-moulds the finite into the in
finite ; it is the former whose predominance creates Nature, the
latter that creates the world of Mind ; though the two are so in
separably united that neither can produce its result without the co
operation, and participation as a determining factor, of the other.
This account admits of no idea of a deduction proper of Space ;
still I think that the equal rank assigned to the above designations
2O4 Deductions of Space. [BOOK n.
contains an indication of the reason which made the space-generating
activity of the absolute appear indispensable to the idea of it. It became
obvious not only that nothing could be generated out of the void of
absolute Identity, but it was also impossible for the determinations
which might have been held to be included in it as merely ideal, to
be more than unrealisable problems failing one condition ; that
something should be forthcoming, given, with content, and for per
ception ; such as the ideal forms could never create, and as applied
to which, qua forms of its relations, and so only, they would possess
reality. Thus, not without a reminiscence of Kant's construction of
matter out of expanding and contracting forces, Schelling makes the
one, that is the productive factor, provide above all things for the
creation of that which the ideal factor has only to form and to deter
mine ; it is only by the activity of the first that results are made raz/,
which for all the second could do, would never be more than a
postulate, that is, an idea. Even the actual form which the creation
assumes is determined by the character of the productive factor; for
it is only this character that can, though under the control and
guidance of the other factor, create such shapes of reality as are
within its range.
120. The indefiniteness of the absolute Identity has disappeared
in Hegel, and the position of the two factors has altered ; the com
prehensive system of notions which forms his Logic may be regarded
as the interpretation of what the ideal factor, now the proximate and
primary expression of the Absolute, demands ; the consciousness,
how strongly all these determinations involve and postulate that as
determinations of which they must be presented in order to be real,
appears as the urgency of the ideal factor or hitherto purely logical
idea, to pass over into its form of otherness ; that is, into a shape
capable of direct or pictorial presentation, such as can only exist in the
forms by which a multiplicity whose parts are outside one another is
connected into a whole. Therefore the logical idea, doing away its
own character as logical, produces Space as ' the abstract universality
of its being outside itself1/ Hegel says on this point'2, 'As our pro
cedure is, after establishing the thought which is necessitated by the
notion 3, to ask, what it looks like in our sensuous idea 4 of it ; we go
on to assert, that what corresponds in direct presentation to the
thought of pure externality is Space. Even if we are wrong in this,
1 [' Die abstracte Allgemeinheit ihres Aussersichseins.']
2 Naturphilosophie. Sammtliche Werke, Bd. VII. § 47.
3 [• Begriff.'] * [' Vorstellung.1]
CHAPTER in The idea and its ' ot/iemessj 205
that will not interfere with the truth of our thought.' I refer to this
remarkable passage in order to indicate the limits which such specula
tive constructions of Space as this is can never overstep. They may
of course derive in a general way, from the thought in which they
conceive themselves to express the supreme purpose of the world, a
certain postulate which must be fulfilled if the end is to be fulfilled ;
but they are not in a position to infer along with the postulate what
appearance would be presented by that which should satisfy it. In
the passage quoted Hegel admits this ; in pronouncing Space to be
the desired principle of externality he professes to have answered a
riddle by free conjecture; the solution might be wrong, but the
problem, he asserts, would still be there.
Just in the same way Weisse says * ' That primary quality of what
exists, the idea of which arises from quantitative infinity being
specified and made qualitative by the specific character of triplicity —
is Space ;' only that he, although in this sentence expressly separating
enigma and answer by a mark of interruption, yet regards the latter
as a continuous deduction of the space which is present to perception
from his abstract and obscure postulate. It can never be otherwise ;
after, on the one hand, we feel justified in making certain abstract
demands which reality is to satisfy, and after, on the other hand, we
have become acquainted with Space, then it is possible to put the two
together and to show that Space, being such as it is, satisfies these
demands. But it is impossible to demonstrate that only it, and no
other form, can satisfy them ; we are confined to a speculative inter
pretation of space, and any deduction of it is an impossibility on this
track. One would think that the opinion Hegel expresses could not
but incline him prima facie to the view of the mere phenomenality of
the sensuous idea of space; but what he adds on the subject can
make no one any wiser as to his true meaning ; as a rule the
views of his school have adhered to extension as a real activity of
the Absolute.
121. Philosophical constructions, it was held, were under the further
obligation, to demonstrate not merely of Space as a whole, but further
of each and every property by which geometry characterises it, that it
is a necessary consequence of ideal requirements. Attempts have
been made on obvious and natural grounds to conceive the infinite
divisibility and the homogeneousness of an infinite extension, as
antecedent conditions of that which the idea sets itself to realise
within space ; but the most numerous and least fortunate endeavours
1 Metaphysik, p. 317.
206 Deductions of Space. [BOOK n.
have been devoted to the three dimensions. There are two points
in these innumerable attempts that have always been incompre
hensible to me.
The first is, the entire neglect of the circumstance that space
contains innumerable directions starting from every one of its
points, and that the limitation of their number to three is only ad
missible under the further condition that each must be perpendicular
to the two others. Accessory reasons, which are self-evident in the
case of geometry and mechanics, have no doubt led to the habit of
tacitly understanding, by dimensions of space, such par excellence as
fulfil this condition ; but the philosophical deductions proceed as if
the only point was to secure a triplicity, and as if it was unnecessary
to find among the abstract presuppositions from which space is to be
deduced, a special reason why the dimensions which are to correspond
to three distinct ideal moments (however these may be distinguished),
should be at right angles to one another.
The second point which I cannot understand is the fastidiousness
with which every demonstration partaking of mathematical form, that
a fourth perpendicular dimension must necessarily coincide with one
of the other three, is always rejected as an external and unphilosophical
process of proof. I think, on the contrary, that if we once supposed
ourselves to have deduced that certain relations which we postulated
in an abstract form must take the shape of lines and angles between
them, then the correct philosophical progress would consist in the
demonstration that these elementary forms of space being once
obtained were completely decisive of its whole possible structure.
As a whole subject to law it can have no properties but those
constituted in it by the relations of its parts ; if its properties are
to correspond besides to certain ideal relations then it ought to have
been shown that this correspondence demanded just those primary
spatial relations from which the properties must proceed as inevitable
result. However, it is not worth while to go at greater length into
these unsuccessful undertakings, which are not to the taste of the
present time, and, we may hope, will not be renewed.
122. Our attention will be much longer detained by other investi
gations which are sometimes wrongly comprehended under the name
of Psychological Deductions of Space. In virtue of the title ' Psycho
logical ' they would not claim mention till later ; but they treat in
detail or touch in passing three distinct questions, the complete
separation of which seems to me indispensable.
i. The first, were it capable of being solved, would really belong
CHAPTER ii.] * Psychological* questions about space. 207
to Psychology: it is this: what is the reason that the soul, receiving
from things manifold impressions which can only be to begin with
unextended states of its own receptive nature, is obliged to envisage
them at all under the form of a space with parts outside each other ?
The cause of this marvellous transfiguration could only be found in
the peculiar nature of the soul, but it never will be found ; the question
is just as unanswerable as how it comes to pass that the soul brings
before consciousness in the form of brightness and sound the effects
which it can only experience by means of light and sound vibra
tions transmitted through the senses. It is important to make clear
to ourselves that these two questions are precisely alike in nature ; and
that to answer the first is neither more essential nor more possible
than to answer the second, which every one has long desisted from
attempting. All endeavours to derive this elementary and universal
character of ideas of space, this externality, which appears to us in the
shape of an extended line, from any possible abstract relations, which
are still unspatial, between psychical affections, have invariably led to
nothing but fallacies of subreption ; by which space, as it could not be
made in this way, was brought in at some step of the deduction as an
unjustified addition.
2. On the other hand, if we postulate as given the capacity and
obligation of the soul to apprehend an unspatial multiplicity as in
space, then there arises the second problem, which I hold to be
capable of being solved though a long way from being so ; What sort
of multiplicity does the soul present in this peculiar form of its appre
hension ? — for there are some which it does not treat thus. And
under what conditions, by what means, and following what clue,
does it combine its occasional particular impressions in the definite
situation in space in which they are to us the express image
of external objects ? As no perception of this variable manifold can
take place but by the instrumentality of the senses, the solution of this
question concerning the localisation of sensations belongs wholly to
that part of psychology which investigates the connexion of sensa
tions, and the associations of these remembered images ; which latter
are partly caused by the conjoint action of nervous stimuli, partly by
the activity of consciousness in creating relations.
3. There remains a third question, that of the geometrical structure
of extension which arises if we develope all the consequences that the
given character of the original externality necessitates or admits ; and
which is wanted to complete the totality of the Space-image in whose
uniformly present environment we are obliged to set in array the
208 Deductions of Space.
various impressions of sensation. This investigation, which has fallen
to the share of Mathematics, has hitherto been conducted by that
science in a purely logical spirit ; it took no account of the play of
psychical activities, which bring about in the individual apprehending
subject a perception of the truth of its successive propositions, a play
of which in these days we think we know a great deal, and really know
nothing ; it attached the convincingness of their truth purely to the
objective l necessity of thought with which given premisses demand
their conclusions. But the premisses themselves, as well as that
combination of them on which the conclusion has to rest, were
simply accepted by Mathematics from what it called Direct or In
tuitional Perception 2. Nor could the word perception 2 be held to
designate any psychical activity, which could be shown to possess a
peculiar and definite mode of procedure ; every impartial attempt to
say what perception 2 does, must end with the admission that it really
does nothing, that there is no visible working or process at all as a
means to the production of its content ; but that on the contrary it is
nothing but a direct receptivity, with an entirely unknown psychical
basis, which merely becomes aware of its object and the peculiar
nature of that object. Obviously, an investigation cannot begin before
the matter is given to which it is to refer ; but again, it will only
consist, even when the matter is forthcoming, in presenting one by
one to this receptivity all the details which do not fall at once in the
line of our mental vision ; and defining their differences or similarities
by help of marks which make it possible to transfer from one to the
other of these features the judgments about them made by direct per
ception, and to connect all such features systematically together.
I shall return later on to what it is indispensable to say on this
head; I will only add now that it was possible for the Euclidean
geometry, which arose in the above way, to remain unassailed as long
as no doubt was raised of the objective validity of space ; while it was
believed, that is, that we had in it if not a real thing, at least the
actual and peculiar form attaching to real things. It was not indeed
solely, as we shall see, but chiefly, the modern notion which sees in it
only a subjective mode of perception, that disturbed this unsuspicious
security and raised such questions as these ; of how much that is
true about the world can we properly be said to get experience by
help of this form of apprehension ; could there not be other species
of perception that might teach us the same truth about Things better,
or other truths quite unknown ; and finally, may not the whole fabric
1 [' Sachliche.'] * [' Anschauung.']
CHAPTER 1 1.] Inferences from Subjectivity of Space. 209
of our spatial perceptions be incomplete, perhaps charged with inner
contradictions which escape our notice for want of the empirical
stimuli which would bring them to light ? The diversity of opinions
propounded in relation to the above matters compels me in my meta-
physic to enter upon the essential nature of space in its geometrical
aspect ; and I begin my task by a very frank confession. I am quite
unable to persuade myself that all those among my fellow-students of
philosophy, who accept the new theories with applause, can really
understand with such ease what is quite incomprehensible to me ; I
fear, that from over- modesty they do not discharge their office, and
fail, on this borderland between mathematics and philosophy, to
vindicate their full weight for the grave doubts which they should
have raised in the name of the latter against many mathematical
speculations of the present day. I shall not imitate this procedure;
but while on the contrary I plainly say that the whole of this specu
lation seems to me one huge coherent error, I am quite happy to risk
being censured for a complete misapprehension, in case my remarks
should have the good fortune to provoke a thorough and decisive
refutation.
123. I begin with the first inference suggested by the doctrine that
space is only the subjective form of apprehension which is evolved
from the nature of our souls, though not deducible by us. Then, there
is nothing to interfere with our thinking of beings endowed with mental
images as differing in nature within very wide limits ; or with our
assigning to each of these kinds a mode of apprehension of its own,
which, as is commonly said, it holds in readiness to apply to its future
perceptions. Meantime we have convinced ourselves how little use
such forms could be to these minds, if they were only a subjective
manner of behaviour and destitute of all comparability with the things.
In short, things would not be caught in nets whose meshes did not
fit them ; far less could there be in purely subjective forms any
ground of distinction which could compel things to prefer one
place to appear in rather than another. We must therefore neces
sarily give a share in our consideration to the connexion in which
the forms of apprehension are bound to stand with the objects
which they are to grasp. The following cases will have to be
distinguished.
Let X and Z be two of those modes of perception, different from
our space S, which we arbitrarily assign to two kinds of beings
endowed with mental images, and organized differently from us.
This assumption would cause us no difficulty as long as, (i.) we sup-
VOL. I. P
2 1 o Deductions of Space. i BOOK IL
posed the worlds which are to be perceived by their means, to differ
from the world M accessible to our experience, but to be such as to
admit of apprehension in the forms X and Z as easily as the world
M lends itself to our apprehension in the form of our space S. Only,
this assumption would not interest us much ; though free from in
ternal contradiction, in fact, strictly, a mere tautology, it has no
connexion whatever with the object of our doubt ; the interest of our
question depends entirely on a different presupposition ; (ii.) that this
same world M, which we represent to ourselves as enclosed in the
frame of Euclidean space S, appears to other intellectual beings in
the utterly heterogeneous systematic forms X or Z. On this sup
position also there are two cases to be kept separate. The actions
and reactions which the things of this world M reciprocate with each
other may be extremely various ; it is neither necessary nor credible
that they only consist in such activities as cause us to localise the
things in spatial relations in accordance with them ; on the contrary,
much may go on within the things that is not able to find expression
in their appearance in space, even with the help of motion. Therefore
there is still this alternative ; either, (a.) the forms of perception X and
Z reproduce relations of things which cannot be represented in our
space 5 and do not occur in it ; about this assumption we can have
no decisive judgment, but only a conjecture, which I will state
presently ; or (/3.) we assert that the same relations of things which
appear to us as relations in space 5* are accessible to other beings
under the deviating modes of perception X or Z ; and on this point
we shall have something more definite to say.
124. Let us begin with the former alternative (ii. a). We are
justified in subordinating the idea of space -S1 to the more universal
conception of a system of arrangement of empty places, within which
the reciprocal position of any two terms is fully determined by a
number » of relations of the two to others. And there is nothing to
prevent us, as long as no other requirements are annexed, from con
ceiving many other species of this genus, in which the reciprocal
definition of the terms might be effected by other rules than those
valid for the space S, or might require a greater or smaller number of
conditions than are required in it. Still, it seems to me unfruitful to
refer for further illustration of such ideas to the well-known attempts
to arrange in a spatial conspectus either the whole multiplicity of
sensations of musical sound, with reference to strength, pitch, quality,
and harmonic affinity; or the colours in all their variety on similar
grounds. Nothing indeed is more certain than that (i) we here have
CHAPTER ii.] Symbolic representations in Space. 2 1 j
before us relations of the terms to be arranged for the adequate
representation of which our space S is unfitted ; but at the same time
I think nothing can be more doubtful than the implied idea by which,
whether furtively or explicitly, we console ourselves, that (2) there
may be other modes of perception X or Z which permit to beings of
different organization the feat which we cannot perform. I must
speak more fully of both parts of my assertion.
125. (i) We may arrange musical notes in a straight line according
to their rise of pitch ; but as there appears to be an increasing diver
gence from the character of the keynote up to the middle of the
octave, and from that point again an increasing approximation to it,
having regard to this we may represent the notes still more clearly, by
arranging them as Drobisch does in a spiral, which after every circuit
corresponding to an octave returns to a point vertically above the
starting-point. But in doing so we should bear in mind that all this,
like any other appropriate device which might be added to the scheme,
is still a symbolical construction ; the notes are not in the space in
which we localise them for the convenience of our perception, nor is
the increment-element A/ of the pitch p really the element As of a
line in space s, to which, for the purpose of our perception, we treat
it as equivalent. No one refuses this concession; but it is not pre
cisely in this that the ground of my difficulty lies. Seeing that I have
asserted the phenomenal nature of space there is no longer any mean
ing for me in distinguishing Things as in space, from sounds as only
to be projected into it by way of symbolism. When Things appear
to us in space, what we do to them is just the same as the treatment
to which we submit the ideas of notes in the above constructions ;
like them, things have neither place nor figure in space, nor spatial
relations ; it is only within our combining consciousness and only to
its vision that the living reactions which Things interchange with each
other and with us expand into the system of extension, in which
every phenomenal element finds its completely definite place. So if
the innumerable mental representations of sounds compelled us as
unambiguously to place each of them in definite spatial relations to
others, I should not be able to see how such an arrangement must be
less legitimate for them than for things, for which also it remains a
subjective apprehension in our minds.
It will further be observed, and quite correctly, that Things are
movable in space, and their place at any time only expresses the sum
of relations in which they stand to other things, which subsists at the
moment but is essentially variable ; it tells nothing of the Thing's own
p 2
212 Deductions of Space. ,
nature ; whereas such constructions of the realms of colour or sound
aim at a completely different result ; they attempt to assign to each
one of these sensations conformably with the peculiar combination
in which each unites definite values of the universal predicates of
colour and sound, a systematic position between all others which it
can never exchange for another place. No doubt this difference is
important as regards the nature of the elements which it is proposed
to systematise in the two cases ; still there is no essential obstacle to
copying the eternal and permanent articulation of a system of con
tents1 fixed in the shape of ideas by means of the same mode of per
ception which is used to represent the variable arrangement of real
Things. In fact, for every single indivisible moment the existing
arrangement of real things in space would be precisely the total ex
pression of the complete systematic localisation appropriate to the
individual things in virtue of the actions which intersected each other
in them at that moment. The circumstance that within things there
is motion, which will not admit of being represented for ever by the
same fixed system, is a fact with its own importance, but not a proof
that the space form is inadequate to express systematic relations.
Therefore the felt inadequacy of the space-form S can only rest on the
fact that its articulation, though fitted for what we perceive in it, is
not fitted for such matter as these sensations which we project into it.
126. Things then obviously do not arrange themselves in space
according to a constant affinity of their natures, but according to
some variable occurrence within them, consisting of the reactions
which they interchange. We are not justified in assuming an en
tirely homogeneous form of event as produced in all of them by
these actions ; but we cannot help regarding as homogeneous all that
part of such events which has its effect in fixing their place in space ;
in designating it by the name of ' mechanical relations ' of things we
approach the common view of physical science, which considers that
in every moment the place which a body occupies abandons or tends
to, is determined by the joint action of entirely comparable forces and
impulses.
Now it is just this comparability which is wanting to the musical
properties of sounds ; that is, the felt properties, for we are only
speaking of them, not of the comparable physical conditions of their
production. The graduated series of loudness 2 i and of pitch p may
1 ['Inhaltsystem.']
2 [' Tonstarken.' I have retained the / because it probably stands for ' Intensitat *
(intensity).]
CHAPTER IT.] Space-perception and disparate qualities. 213
no doubt be formed, each separately, by addition of homogeneous
increments ; but when we come to the series of qualities q we find it
cannot be exhibited in this way; and in any case A*, A/, and kq
would remain quite incomparable with each other. The lines i,p, and q,
though we might suppose that each could be constructed by itself,
yet would diverge from any point in which they were united, as it
were into different worlds ; and if one of them were arbitrarily fixed
in space still there would be nothing to determine the angles at which
the others would cross it or part from it.
It will of course be said that this as well as the difficulties raised in
the last section, was known long ago ; but that no one can be sure
that (2) beings different from us have not at command forms of
apprehension X or Z, which attach themselves to the content to be
arranged just as unambiguously and perfectly, as our space S does to
its matter, the mechanical relations of things. Yet I cannot see how
this should be supposed possible as long as we ascribe to those beings
the same achievement as that in which we fail. If instead of the
qualitatively different colours and tones which we see and hear, they
perceived only uniform physical or psychical actions, from a mixture
of which those sensations arose in us, I do not dispute that in that
case they might have for such actions an adequate perceptive form X
or Z\ but the relations which they would have to arrange would again
be purely mechanical, only mechanical in a different way from those
which we reproduce in our space S.
On the other hand, if those beings are supposed to feel the same dif
ference between red and blue as we do, or to feel the pitch of a note as
independently of loudness and quality as we feel it, then the different
progressions i, p, q, would be as incomparable for them as for us ;
though they might arbitrarily reduce the relations of tones and colours
to the forms X and Z by way of symbolism, with the same sort of
approximation as we obtain in our space S. But I hold that a special
colour-space X or tone-space Z is an impossibility ; an impossibility
that is, as an endowment of the supposed beings with two faculties of
the nature of empty forms of apprehension, prior to all content and
so having none of their own, but able to dictate particular situations
to disparate elements subsequently received into them, solely in
virtue of the rules of connexion between individual places which
they contain. No form of perception X, be it what it may, can
enable elements which remain disparate even for it to pre
scribe their places in it definitely and unambiguously to each other.
And conversely; there may no doubt be rules of criticism for variously
214 Deductions of Space.
combined values of disparate predicates, which, being based on an
estimate of the efficient causes which produce such combinations,
show how to exclude impossible terms and to arrange possible
ones in series according to their various aspects ; but a form of
perception X such as to unite all these different series of ideas about
the material into a single image of the material seems to me impos
sible.
I cannot see how we lose much if we admit this ; the many-sided
affinities, resemblances, and contrasts of colours and tones are not
lost to us because we cannot satisfactorily symbolise them in space ;
we have the enjoyment of all of them when we compare the impressions
with each other. Now it seems to me that no being can get beyond
this discursive knowledge in respect of elements which in their sum of
predicates combine different properties that remain disparate even for
that being ; a form of perception, in the sense of an ordered system
of empty places, can only exist for such relations of elements as are
completely comparable, and each of which is separated from a second
by a difference of the same kind as separates this second from any
third or fourth. It is possible that things contain some system of
uniform occurrences which escape us, but form the object of percep
tion for other beings, and are in fact apprehended by them in forms
of perception which differ from our space-form S and adapt them
selves to the peculiar articulation of the occurrences ; but this idea
being motived by no definite suggestion need not be pursued further,
at least for the moment.
127. We are much more interested in the other of the cases dis
tinguished above (ii. /3) l. If the same relations of things which are
imaged by us as in space were supposed to meet with forms of a
different kind in other beings ; at least we know that there is nothing
in the nature of these relations to make them intractable to combina
tion before the mind's eye into one entire image ; such an X or Z
undoubtedly might bear the character of perceptive forms. They
would not need to be in the least like our space S; the difference
between two places of the system which appears to us in our space as
the line s, would represent itself in them in the form x or z ; both
of which would be as disparate from s as the interval between two
notes from the distance between two points. As long as we maintain
these postulates, we have no reason to deny the possibility of these
perceptions X and Z ; but as we do not possess them their assump
tion remains an empty idea, and we know absolutely nothing further
1 [§123, end.]
CHAPTER ii.] Common elements of alleged ' Spaces' 215
of how things present themselves and what they look like under those
forms. Only we must not require more of them than our own space-
apprehension can achieve ; not, therefore, that the beings which enjoy
them shall be enabled by them in each individual perception to appre
hend the true relations of what is perceived. This is more than even
our space 6" does for us ; for instance we have to assign ourselves a
place in it, with the change of which the whole constellation of our
impressions is displaced ; even to us, owing to the laws of the optical
impressions made on us, parallel lines inevitably appear to converge
at a distance, magnitudes to diminish, and the horizon of the sea to
rise above the level of the shore. As we require the comparison of
many experiences to enable us to apprehend the true relations in
despite of the persistent semblance of the false, no more than this
ought to be demanded of the nature of X and Z ; that is, that com
bined experiences should give criteria for the elimination of the con
tradictions and mistakes of isolated ones. We may say then, subject
to such conditions, that the same relations of things as appear to us
in space admit of other kinds of perception completely unknown to
us but leading to equally true cognition. Still even this is by no
means what is as a rule in people's minds ; it is expressly other space-
perceptions than ours that it is hoped to make conceivable in this
way. It is to be taken as settled that the relation of two elements
presented to perception is given by perception the shape of the ex
tended line s, and the relation of two such relations that of the angle a ;
and still even so there is to be a possibility that by help of other com
binations this s and a may form not our space £ but a different one
•S*1 or -S2, like ours in respect of the character of its elements s and a
as pictured to the mind, but unlike in the fabric of the whole which
they generate. Perhaps it will not be too painful to the feelings of
philologists if I propose for these forms -S"1 or S* the name of Rau-
moids1 ['quasi-spaces']. I know no shorter way of expressing the
difference between these forms and our previous forms X and Z\ and
as I mean to maintain that there cannot be Raumoids, their name
will soon disappear again supposing I am right ; if I am wrong, I
make a present of it to my antagonists as the only thing I can do for
their cause. For I shall hardly myself be brought to surrender my
conviction that to accept s and a as elements of space is to decide its
total form and inner structure, fully, unambiguously, and quite in the
sense of the geometry which has hitherto prevailed.
128. I hold it, strictly speaking, unreasonable to require any other
1 [From 'Raum,' 'Space.']
216 Deductions of Space.
proof of this than that which lies in the development of the science
down to the present time. That assuming the elements s and a they
admit of other modes of combination than can be presented in our
space S ] and that these other combinations do not remain mere
abstract names, but lead to kinds of perception Sl and S2; all this
could only be proved by the actual discovery of the perceptions in
question. But it is admitted that our human mode of representation
cannot discover S1 and -S"2 ; nothing but £ can be evolved out of it ;
therefore if the logical sequence of this evolution were established,
and we still believed in other beings who could form divergent per
ceptions out of the same elements s and a, we should have to credit
them with other laws of thought than those on which the truth of
knowledge rests for us. Such an assumption would destroy our
interest in the question ; though no doubt it would not in the least
run counter to the taste of an age whose tendency is so indulgent as
to take anything for possible, which cannot be at a moment's notice
demonstrated impossible.
But there is a point at which our geometry has long been thought
deficient in consecutiveness of deduction ; that is in the doctrine of
parallel lines and of the sum of the angles of a triangle. Still it
appears to me as if philosophical logic could neither advance nor
properly speaking admit the peculiar claims to strictness of procedure
made at this point by the logic of mathematics. After all, discursive
proof cannot make truth, but only finds it ; the perception of space
with the variety of its inner relations faces us as the given object of
inner experience ; one which, if not so given, we should never be
able to construct by a logical combination of unspatial elements, or
even of those elements of space which we assumed ; all demonstrations
can but serve to discover certain definite relations between a number
of arbitrarily chosen points to be implied in the nature of the whole.
For such discovery perfect strictness of reasoning is indispensable ;
and elegance of representation may also require that the multiplicity
of relations shall be reduced to the minimum number of directly
evident and fundamental ones ; but it will always be fruitless to
assume fewer independent principles than the nature of the facts
requires, and always erroneous to presuppose that it does not require
a considerable number. We convinced ourselves in the Logic that
all our cognition of facts rests on our application of synthetic judg
ments ; the law of Identity will never tell us more than that every A
is the same as itself; there is no formal maxim which gives us any
help about the relation of A to B, except the one law which simply
CHAPTER ii.] Constructions presuppose Space-perception. 217
disjoins them because they are not the same ; every positive relation
which we assert between A and B can only express a content which
is given us, a synthesis ; such as could be derived neither from A nor
from B, nor from any other relation between them which was not
itself in turn given to us in the same way. It is impossible to pursue
this here in its general sense, but it will be useful to elucidate it in
relation to space in particular.
129. The first consequence of what has been referred to is that a
case is possible in which we are unable to give adequate definitions
either of A or of B without involving the relation C in which they are
given to us, and equally so to define this relation apart from A and B.
It would be impossible to say what a point of space is and how
distinguished from a point of time, unless we include in our thought
the extension in which it is, and treat it, for instance, as Euclid does,
as the extremity of a line ; no more could we construct this line out
of points without a like presupposition. Two precisely similar and
co-existent points may have innumerable different relations of the kind
which we know as their greater or less distances from one another ;
but how could we guess or understand this unless the space in which
they are distributed, being present to the mind's eye, taught us at
once that the problem is soluble and what the solution looks like ?
Just as little can a line be generated by motion ; it can only be
followed ; for we could not set about to describe the track left behind
us without the idea of a space in general which furnishes the place
for it ; again any definite line could only be generated in space if in
every point which we pass through the further direction which we
mean to take were already present to our imagination.
Again, in any line when we compare it with others we shall be able
to distinguish its length from its direction ; but we cannot make the
simplest assertions about either property without learning them from
perception. That the addition of two lines of the length a gives a
line of the length 2 a seems a simple application of an arithmetical
principle ; but strictly arithmetic teaches only that such an addition
results in the sum of two lines of the length a, just as putting together
two apples weighing half an ounce each gives only the sum of these
two, not one apple twice the weight. The possibility of uniting the
one line with the extremity of the other so that it becomes its un
broken continuation and the two lengths add up into one only follows
from the mental portrayal of a space within which the junction can
be effected. I say expressly, ' of a space' \ for not even the considera
tion that the things to be united are two lines is sufficient; on the
2i8 Deductions of Space.
contrary, we know that a thousand lines 1, if thought of as between
the same extremities, will form no more than one and the same line ;
they must be put together lengthways, and to do this the image of
the surrounding space which gives the necessary room is indispensable.
Geometry only expresses the same thing in another form, when it says
that every line is capable of being produced to infinity.
As regards direction, it is easily seen that it is a delusion to suppose
that we have a conception of it to which straightness and curvedness
can be subordinated as co-ordinate species ; its conception is only
intelligible as completely coinciding with that of the straight line
which is called from another point of view, in relation to its extremi
ties, the distance between them ; every idea of a curve includes that
of a deviation from the straight direction of the tangents and can only
be fixed in the particular case by the measurement of this deviation.
Thus we can it is true assign a criterion for any extended line which
is security for its straightness ; the distance between its extremities
must be equal to the sum of the distances between all pairs of points
by which we may choose to divide the line ; but of course we do not
by this get rid of the conception of straightness in principle ; the
distance between the extremities and each of these intermediate
distances can only be conceived under that conception. So in fact it
is not proper to say that the straight line is the shortest distance
between two points ; it is rather the distance itself; the different circuits
that may be made in going from a to b have nothing to do with
this distance which is always one and the same ; but their possibility
calls our attention to the circumstance that perception is in that fact
telling us something more than would follow from its teaching up to
that point taken alone.
130. If a straight line can be drawn between a and b and another
between a and c, it does not in the least follow from these isolated
premisses that the same thing can or must take place between b and
c ; the two lines might diverge from a as if into different worlds, and
their extensions have no relation to each other. But they have one ;
our spatial perception and nothing else reveals to us the angle a, and
shows us that space extends between the two lines and allows a
connexion between the points b and c by means of a straight line be
of the same kind as ab and ac\ it teaches us at the same time that
there is this possibility for all points of ab and ac, and so creates the
third element of our idea of space, the plane p. This, after having so
discovered it, we are able to define as the figure in space any point of
1 [' Straight lines ' of course.]
CHAPTER ii.] Litie, Angle, Plane, data of Perception. 219
which may be connected with any other point by a straight line lying
wholly in that figure. This definition however, though I should think
it a sufficient one, contains no rule for construction according to
which we could produce for ourselves the plane p without having had
it before ; for what is really meant by requiring all connecting lines to
be contained in the spatial figure which is to be drawn is only made
clear by the spatial perception of the plane. Now I will not deny
that it may be of use in the course of scientific investigations to
demonstrate even simple conceptions as the result of complicated
constructions ; in cases, that is to say, in which it is our object to
show that the complicated conditions present in a problem must have
precisely this simple consequence; but I cannot comprehend the
acumen which seeks as the basis of geometry to obtain the most
elementary perceptions by help of presuppositions, which not only
contain of necessity the actual elements in question but also more
besides them.
It is possible to regard the straight line as a limiting case in a
series of curves ; but it would not be possible to form the series of
these curves without in some way employing for their determination
and measurement the mental presentation of the straight line from
which they show a measurable deviation. Whoever should give it as
a complete designation of a straight line, that it was the line which
being rotated between its extremities did not change its place, would
plunge us into silent reflexion as to how he conceived the axis of that
rotation ; and by what, without supposing a straight line somewhere,
he would measure the change of place which the curve experienced in
such a rotation.
I hold it quite as useless to construct the plane p over again, after
it has once been given by perceptive cognition ; no doubt it is also
the surface in which two spheres intersect, and reappears as the
result of countless constructions of the kind ; but every fair judge will
think that it is the perception of the plane which elucidates the idea of
the intersection and not vice versa.
And now, if we may let alone these attempts to clear up what is
clear already, we are invited to a more serious defence of the rights of
universal Logic by the dazzling play of ambiguities which endeavours
to controvert and threatens to falsify the perception itself. A finite arc
of a circle of course becomes perpetually more like a straight line as
the radius of the circle to which it belongs is increased ; but the whole
circle never comes to be like one. However infinitely great we may
conceive the radius as being, nothing can prevent us from conceiving
22O Deductions of Space.
it to complete its rotation round the centre ; and till such rotation is
completed we have no right to apply the conception of a circle to the
figure which is generated; discourse about a straight line which,
being in secret a circle of infinite diameter, returns into itself, is not a
portion of an esoteric science but a proof of logical barbarism. Just
the same is shown by phrases about parallel lines which are supposed
to cut each other at an infinite distance ; they do not cut each other at
any finite distance, and as every distance when conceived as attained,
would become finite again, there simply is no distance at which they
do so ; it is utterly inadmissible to pervert this negation into the posi
tive assertion, that in infinite distance there is a point at which inter
section occurs. Here again, however, I am not denying that in the
context of a calculation good service may be rendered within certain
limits by modes of designation which rest on assumptions like these ;
so much the more useful would be a precise investigation within what
limits they may be employed in every case, without commending to
notice absolute nonsense by help of pretentious calculation.
131. It is obvious that according to the above general discussion,
I cannot propose to solve the dispute about parallels by the de
monstrative method commonly desiderated ; I am content with ex
pressing my conviction by saying that in presence of direct perception
I can see no reason whatever for raising the dispute. We call parallel
the two straight lines a and b which have the same direction in space,
and we test the identity of their direction by the criterion that with a
third straight line c in the same plane p, the straight lines a and b
form on the same side of them s, the same angle a. In saying this
I do not hesitate to presuppose the plane p and side s as perfectly
clear data of perception ; still they might both be eliminated by the
following expression ; a and b are parallel if the extremities a and /3
of any equal lengths a a and b $ taken on the two straight lines from
their starting points a and b, are always at the same distance from one
another. It follows from this as a mere verbal definition, that a b will
also be parallel to a/3; and at the same time from the matter of the
definition, that a and b, as long as they are straight lines, must remain
at the same distance from each other, measured as above; every
question whether to produce them to infinity would make any change
in this is otiose, and contradicts the presupposition which conceives
identity of direction to infinity as involved in the direction of a finite
portion of a straight line. That the sum of the interior angles which
a a and b & make with a b or with a /3 is equal to two right angles,
only requires the familiar elucidation.
CHAPTER ii.] Mathematical Perception v. Measurement. 221
Now if a triangle is to be made between a a and b /3 both the lines
must change their position, or one of them its position relatively to
the other. If we suppose a a to turn about the point a so that the
angle which it forms with a b is diminished, our spatial perception
shows us that the interval between its intersection with a 0 and the
extremity 8 of that line must also diminish; if the turning is continued
this interval is necessarily reduced to zero, and then ab, aft, and £/3,
enclose the required triangle. When this has been done the line a #
and the line of its former position a a. make an angle, which is now ex
cluded from the sum of the angles which were before the interior angles
between the parallels a a. and b /3 ; but the vertical angle opposite to
this angle, and therefore the angle itself, is equal to the new angle which
a /3 produces by its convergence with b /3 ; the latter forms a part of
the sum of the angles of the triangle which is being made, which sum
as it loses and gains equally, remains the same as it was in the open
space between the parallels; that is, in every triangle, whatever its
shape may be, it is equal to two right angles. If this simple connexion
between the two cases will not serve, still we could attach no import
ance to any attempt to postulate a different sum for the angles of
a triangle, except on one condition ; that it should not only proceed
by strictly coherent calculations but should also be able to present the
purely mathematical perception of the cases which corresponded to
its assumption with equal obviousness and lucidity. For in fact it is
not obvious, why, if the sum of the angles of a triangle were generally
or in particular cases different from what we made it, this state of
things should never be discovered to exist or be demonstrated to be
necessary. But here we plainly have misunderstandings between
philosophy and mathematics which go much deeper. Philosophy
can never come to an understanding with the attempt which it must
always find utterly incomprehensible, to decide upon the validity of
one or the other assumption by external observations of nature. So
far these observations have agreed with the Euclidean geometry ; but
if it should happen that astronomical measurements of great distances,
after exclusion of all errors of observation, revealed a less sum for the
angle of a triangle, what then ? Then we should only suppose that
we had discovered a new and very strange kind of refraction, which
had diverted the rays of light which served to determine the direction ;
that is, we should infer a peculiar condition of physical realities in
space, but certainly not a real condition of space itself which would
contradict all our perceptive presentations and be vouched for by no
exceptional presentation of its own.
222 Deductions of Space.
132. However all this is the special concern of geometry, without
essential importance for metaphysic. There is another set of ideas
in which the latter has a greater interest. I admitted above that a
being endowed with ideas would not evolve forms of space-perception
which no occasion was given him to produce. Others have connected
with such an idea the conjecture of a possibility that even our
geometry may admit of extensions the stimulus to which in human
experience is either absent or as yet unnoticed.
Helmholtz (Popular Scientific Lectures, III) in his first example
supposes the case of intelligent beings living in an infinite plane, and
incapable of perceiving anything outside the plane, but capable of having
perceptions like ours within the extension of the plane, in which they
can move freely. It will be admitted that these beings would establish
precisely the same geometry which is contained in our Planimetry ;
but their ideas would not include the third dimension of space.
Not quite so obvious, I think, are the inferences drawn from a
second case, in which intelligent beings with the same free power of
movement and the same incapacity of receiving impressions from
without their dwelling-space, are supposed to live on the surface of
a sphere. At least, I suppose I ought to interpret as I did in the last
sentence the expression that they l ' have not the power of perceiving
anything outside this surface'; the other interpretation that even if
impressions came to them from without the surface, they nevertheless
are unable to project them outside it, would give the appearance of
an innate defect in the intelligence of these beings to what according
to the import of such descriptions ought only to result from the lack
of appropriate stimuli. Under such conditions the direct perceptions
of these beings would certainly lead in the first place to the ideas which
Helmholtz ascribes to them ; but I cannot persuade myself that the
matter would end there, supposing we assume that the mental nature
of such beings has the tendency with which our own is inspired, to
combine single perceptions into a whole as a self-consistent and
complete image of all that we perceive.
For shortness' sake I take two points N and -S1 as the North and
Souih poles of the surface of the sphere, and suppose the whole net
of geographical circles to be drawn upon it. Suppose first that
a being B moves from a point a along the meridian of this point.
We must assume then that B is not only capable of receiving quali-
1 [' Popular Lectures on Scientific Subjects;' Atkinson's translation, 2nd series,
P- 34-]
CHAPTER 1 1.] The sphere-dweller s perceptions. 223
tatively different or similar impressions from East and West ; it must
be informed by some feeling, by whatever means produced, of the
fact of its own motion, and at the same time have capacity to interpret
this feeling into the fact of its motion, that is, into the change of its
relation to objects which for the time at least are fixed ; it must
finally have equally direct feelings which enable it to distinguish the
persistent and similar continuance of this motion or change from
a change of direction or a return in the same direction. However
these postulates may be satisfied in the being B, it is certain that if
we are to count upon any definite combination of the impressions it
receives, it can experience no change of its feeling of direction in its
continuous journey along the meridian ; for by the hypothesis it is
insensible to the concavity of its path towards the centre of the
sphere. So if having started from a it passes through N and £ and
returns to a, keeping to this path, such a fact admits of the following
interpretations for its intelligence.
As long as a only distinguishes itself from b or c by the quality of
the impression it makes on B it will remain unestablished that the
a' which has recurred is that from which its movement started ; it
may be a second, like the first but not identical with it. On the
other hand, the feelings which arise in B from its 'actual movement may
prove to it a change in its own relation to objects, but as long as this
is all it is not self-evident that the feelings can only indicate a change
of spatial Delation to them ; the feelings are simply a regular series of
states, the repeated passage through which is always combined with
the recurrence of one and the same sensation a ; very much, though
not exactly, like running up the musical scale, when we feel a con
tinuous increase in the same direction of our exertion of the vocal
organs, which brings us back in certain periods not indeed to the
same note, but to its octave which resembles it.
If B can feel no more than this, no space-perception can be gene
rated ; in order that it should be, a further separate postulate is
required ; B must be forced by the peculiar nature of its intelligence
to represent to itself every difference between two of its felt states as
a distance in space between two places or points. Under this new
condition the interpretation of the experience gained is still doubtful,
until the identity of the two <?'s is determined ; as B does not
experience a deviation to East or West, and by the hypothesis does
not feel the curvature of its path inwards, it might suppose itself to
have moved along an infinitely extended straight line, furnished at
definite equal intervals with similar objects a.
224 Deductions of Space.
But it is not worth while to spend time on this hypothesis ; let us
suppose at once that B moves freely on the surface and is able to
compare in its consciousness innumerable experiences acquired in
succession ; then it will find means to establish not only the exact
resemblance l but the identity of the two a's. If this has taken place
its journey along the meridian from a by N and £ back to a will
appear to it to establish the fact that by following a rectilinear move
ment in space, without change of direction or turning back, it has
returned to its starting-point. At least I do not know how its path
could appear to it other than rectilinear ; as it can measure the whole
distance from a to a by nothing but the length of the journey accom
plished, it is of course equal to the sum of all the intermediate dis
tances from point to point of this journey and so falls under the
conception of straightness which was determined above ; and on the
other hand we cannot assume that B would detect in every element
that made part of his journey, therefore in each of the minimum
distances from point to point, the character of the arc of a circle ;
it would then possess the power denied to it of perceiving convexity
in terms of the third dimension ; and therein it would at once have
a basis for the complete development of the idea of that dimension,
its possession of which is disputed.
But such an idea must undoubtedly arise in its mind, not on
grounds of direct perception, but by reason of the intolerable con
tradiction which would be involved in this straight line returning into
itself, if this apparent result of experience were allowed to pass as an
actual fact. For a power of mental portrayal which has got so far as
to imagine manifold points ranged beside each other in a spatial
order the content of the experience which has been acquired is
nothing but the definition of a curve, and indeed, all things con
sidered, of the uniform curve of the circle; but as it cannot turn
either East or West, there must necessarily be a third dimension, out
of which immediate impressions never come, and which cannot
therefore be the object of a sense-perception for the being B in
the same way as the two other dimensions ; but which neverthe
less would be mentally represented by B with the same certainty
with which we can imagine the interior of a physical body although
hidden by its surface. As soon as this conception of the third
dimension is established the being B would evolve from the com
parison of all its experiences according to the most universal laws
of logic and mathematics precisely the same geometry that we acquire
) ['Gleichheit.']
CHAPTER ii.] The sphere-dweller and parallel lines. 225
more easily, not having to call to our aid a dimension which for
our sensuous perception is imaginary, to reduce things to order ; the
being B would by this time understand its dwelling-space to be what
it is, a figure in space which is extended in three dimensions ; and
would be in a position to explain the extraordinary phenomena which
its experience of motion had presented to it by help of this form of
idea.
133. Parallel lines, Helmholtz continues, would be quite unknown
to the inhabitants of the sphere ; they would assert that any two lines,
the straightest possible, would if sufficiently produced, cut one another
not merely in one point but in two. It depends somewhat on the
definition of parallelism and on the interpretation of the assumptions
which are made whether we are forced to agree to the former asser
tion. Movements along the meridians could of course not lead to the
idea of parallel lines; but still, in case of free power to move, B
might traverse successively two circles of the same north and south
latitude ; it would find that these circles have equal lengths to their
return to the starting-point, that they never either cut or touch each
other ; but that counting from the same meridian the extremities of
equal segments of the two have always the same distance from each
other. This seems to me sufficient ground for calling them parallel,
and in fact we use the term parallel of the circumferences of similarly-
directed sections of a cylinder, which in this case the two circles
would really be.
But that would be, as I said, merely a question of names; I
mention these movements here for a different reason. The tan
gential planes of the successive points of the southern circle cut
each other in straight lines which converge to the south; the cor
responding sections for the northern circle do the same to the north ;
the question is whether the being B would be aware of this difference
or not. If it were not, then B would really suppose itself to traverse
two paths of precisely the same • direction, which would in fact be
parallel in the same sense as the above cylinder-sections ; and then
it might, as long as no other experiences contradicted the idea, con
ceive both paths to be in one plane as circles, the centres of which
are joined by a straight line greater than the sum of their radii.
This would not be so in the other case, which we must anyhow
regard as the more probable hypothesis. Of course it is hard to
obtain a perfectly clear idea of what we mean by calling B sensitive
only to impressions in the surface of the sphere ; but we may assume
that it would become aware of the slope of the tangential planes to
VOL. I. Q
226 Deductions of Space.
North and South from the fact that the meridians, known to it from
other experiences, make smaller angles with its path on the side on
which the plane inclines to the pole, and greater on the opposite side.
However this might produce its further effect on Fs feelings of
motion, the only credible result would be that it would think its path
along the southern parallel concave to the south ; and that along the
northern parallel concave to the north; in other respects it would
take them for circles, returning into themselves. These two im
pressions given by this second case would not be capable of being
reconciled with the experience above mentioned of the constant dis
tance maintained between equal segments of the two paths, taking
these latter as transferred into a plane ; and this case also would
necessitate, in order to reconcile the contradiction it involves, the
invention of the third dimension though not directly perceptible.
134. This result must guide us in forming our opinion on the
vexed question of the fourth dimension of space. I omit all reference
to fancies which choose to recommend to notice either time, or the
density of real things in space, or anything else as being this fourth
dimension ; if we do not intend an unmeaning play upon words we
must take it for granted at least that any new dimension is fully
homogeneous and interchangeable with those to the number of which
it is added ; moreover if it is to be a dimension of space > it must as
the fourth be perpendicular to the three others, just as each of them
is to the remaining two.
It is conceded that for our perception this condition cannot be
fulfilled ; but the attempt is made to invalidate this objection by re
ferring to the beings which have been depicted, whose knowledge
stops short even of the third dimension of space because perception
affords them no stimulus to represent it to their minds. Therefore,
it is argued, a further development of our receptivity might perhaps
permit to us an insight into a fourth dimension, now unknown to us
from lack of incitement to construct it. The possibility that some
beings content themselves with a part of the space-perception attain
able can of course be no proof by itself that this form of perception
is not in itself a whole with certain limits ; or that it admits of per
petual additions even beyond the boundary we have reached ; but we
must admit that for the moment the appeal to these imaginary cases
at least obscures the limit at which we may suppose the mental image
to have reached such a degree of completeness as forbids any further
additions. This makes it all the more necessary to see what that
appeal can really claim. The imaginary beings which could only
CHAPTER no The fourth dimension. 227
receive perceptions from a single plane, would have been in the most
favourable situation, supposing changed life-conditions to bring them
impressions from outside it, for the utilisation of such new percep
tions ; they would have been able to add the geometry of the newly
discovered direction to the Planimetry which they possessed without
having to change anything in their previous perceptions.
When we came to the beings on the sphere-surface, we at once
found a different situation ; they were forced to devise the third di
mension by the contradictions in which the combination of their
immediate perceptions entangled them ; but yet they never found a
direct presentation of it given, and could not do so without re
modelling all their initial ideas of space.
If we mean to use this analogy to support the possibility in our own
case of a similar extension of our perceptive capacity, I hope that atten
tion will be given to the differences which exist between our position
and that of those imaginary beings. In particular ; they were com
pelled precisely by the contradictions in their observations to postu
late the new dimension ; we have no contradiction present to us, of
a kind to force us as in their case to regard our space-image as in
complete, and to add a fourth to its three dimensions. At the same
time we are not, at all events just now, in the position of the beings
in the plane, who were unsuspectingly content with their Planimetry
and never even conjectured the third dimension, which we know;
for the idea of a fourth dimension which is now mooted on all sides
is so far a substitute for the absent incitements of experience that it
does not leave us quite unsuspicious of the enlargement of our space-
perception which may be possible, but draws our attention to it, more
seriously than in fact is worth while. If such an enlargement were
possible, things would have to go on very strangely for the examina
tion of space as we picture it to ourselves not to reveal it to us
even without suggestions on the part of observation; on the other
hand if the required observations came to us, without the possibility
of remoulding our space-image so as to reconcile their contradic
tions, we should simply have to acquiesce in the contradictions.
Now the following difference subsists; the beings on the sphere-
surface were no doubt compelled by observations to alter their initial
geometrical images, but then they found the alteration practicable;
we are not in any way compelled to make the attempt, and besides,
we find it utterly impracticable ; in our space S it is admittedly im
possible to construct a fourth dimension perpendicular to the other
three and coincident with none of them. This seems to me to settle
Q 2
228 Deductions of Space.
the matter ; for no one should appeal to the possibility that the space
S, without itself becoming different, may still admit of a different
apprehension, exhibiting a fourth dimension in it. As long as the
condition is maintained that the dimensions must be at right angles
to each other, such an apprehension is impossible ; if it is dropped,
what we obtain is no novelty; for in order to adapt our formulae to
peculiar relations of what exists or can be constructed in space it has
long been the practice to select a peculiar and appropriate system of
axes. Nothing would prevent us from assigning to the plane alone
three dimensions cutting each other at angles of 60° ; which would
give a more convenient conspectus of many relations of points dis
tributed in space than two dimensions at right angles.
Therefore only the other question remains provisionally ad
missible ; whether there can be another form of apprehension X or
Z, unlike the space S, which presents four or more dimensions,
perfectly homogeneous, interchangeable, and having that impartial
relation to each other which appears in the property of being
at right angles as known in the space S. I shall return to it
directly ; meantime I must insist upon the logical objection for which
I have been censured; it is absolutely unallowable to transfer the
name and conception of a space S to formations which would only
be co-ordinate with it under the common title of a system of arrange
ment capable of direct presentation to the mind ; but whose special
properties are entirely incompatible with the characteristic differentia
of the space S, that is with the line s, the plane />, the angle a, and the
relations which subsist between these elements. It is this dangerous
use of language that produces the consequences which we have before
us ; such as the supposition that the space -S in which we live really
has a fourth dimension over and above its three, only is malicious
enough not to let us find it out ; but that perhaps in the future we
may succeed in getting a glimpse of it ; then by its help we should
be able to make equal and similar bodies coincide, as we now can
equal and similar plane figures. This last reason for the probability
of the fourth dimension is moreover one which I fail to understand ;
what good would it do us to be occupied with folding over each other
bodies of the same size and shape, and what do we lose now by
being unable to do it ? and further ; must everything be true which
would be a fine thing if it were ? No doubt it would be convenient if
the circumference of the circle or any root with index raised to any
power in the case of any number could be expressed rationally ; but
no one hopes for an extension of arithmetic which would make this
CHAPTER 1 1.] Three dimensions in the abstract. 229
possible. What have we come to? Has the exercise of ingenuity
killed all our sense of probability ? The anticipation of such trans
figurations of our most fundamental kinds of perception can only
remind us of the dreams of the Fourierists, who expected from the
social advance of man a corresponding regeneration of nature, ex
tending to the taming of all savageness and ferocity in its creatures.
But perhaps the two processes may help each other; it will be a fine
thing when we can ride on tame whales through the fourth dimension
of the eau sucre sea.
135. To return to the above question; I am convinced, certainly,
that the triplicity of perpendicular dimensions is no special property
of our space S; but the necessary property of every perception R
which presents, however differently from our space, a background or
comprehending form for all the systematic relations of a co-existent
multiplicity. Still I could wish that I had a stronger argument to
sustain my conviction than what I am now going to add. To avoid
all confusion with ideas taken from existing space which of course
press upon us as the most obvious symbols to adopt, let us con
ceive a series of terms X, between which, putting out of sight their
qualitative character which we treat therefore as wholly uniform, there
are such relations, homogeneous in nature but now not otherwise
known, that every term is separated from its two next neighbours by
a difference x. How in such a system of arrangement R this differ
ence x would be imagined, or pictured to the mind, we leave quite
out of the question ; it is merely a form or value of an unknown r,
and corresponds to what appears in our space-perception as the
straight line s or as the distance in space between two points. Now
let 0 be the term of the series X from which we start; then the
differences between its place in the series and that of any other
term, that is the differences between the particular elements of the re
quired perception R itself measured in the unknown form r, will be
of the form + mx, where m is to be replaced by the numbers of the
natural series. Now 0 may be at the same time a term of another
series Y of precisely similar formation, whose terms we will designate
by + my so that each my is not merely like in kind but also equal to
mx.
There are two conditions which these two series X and J'would have
to satisfy in order to stand in a relation corresponding to that of two
lines in space at right angles to each other. First, progression in the
series Yt however far continued, should bring no increment of one-sided
resemblance in the terms my so arising to + mx or — mx, but every
230 Deductions of Space. [BOOKII.
my should have its difference from -f mx equally great with that from
— mx in whatever such difference consists. Secondly, this difference
should not consist in any chance quality, but should be comparable
both in kind and in magnitude both with x and withjy. This second
condition must be remarked; obviously countless series like J^can be
conceived, starting from a term O common to it and X and extend
ing, so to speak, into different worlds, whose terms would approach
neither + x nor — x because quite incomparable with either ; but
such suppositions would have nothing to do with our subject. In our
space 6" the difference between my and mx is a line s, just as mx and
my themselves are lines of the kind s ; in the other system of places
JR which we are here supposing this difference is of the otherwise
unknown kind r, just as mx and my are comparable forms or values
of r.
From this point we might proceed in different ways. We might
attempt to form the idea, still problematic, of several series Y, all of
which satisfy these conditions ; but against this suggestion it is rightly
urged, that as long as we are without the conception of a space whose
plainly presented differences of direction would show us how to keep
asunder these several -Ps, so long they are all in their relation to
X, (and so far they are defined by nothing else), to be considered as
one single series ; they would not be many, till the same difference
should subsist between them, as between them and X, and that
without interfering with their common difference from X. Now let us
consider one of these F's as given ; the others, which, in the abstract
sense which we explained, are as well as the given ^perpendicular
to the series X, may have the most diverse relations to the former ;
their progressive terms may approximate more or less to the + my
or — my of the first given series ; but among all these series there can
conceivably be only one which we will call Z, whose successive terms
mz though commensurable with + my still have equally great differ
ences from the positive and from the negative branch of Y. It is true
too of this third series Z as long as it is defined by nothing but its
relation to Y, that it is only to be regarded as one ; but of it too we
may form the problematic idea that it is forthcoming in a number of
instances, all of which stand in the same relation of being perpen
dicular to Y. If we now choose one of these many Z's, then the rest
may stand to it again in the most diverse relations ; but again only
one, which we will call V, could be such that its progressive terms
mv would have always equal differences from the + mz and the
- mz of that one determinate Z. Observations of this kind might be
CHAPTER ii.] Four series perpendicular to each other. 231
continued for ever; but there is an absolutely essential and decisive
point which as they stand, they just omit.
We have so far only supposed the F's perpendicular to X, the Z's
to F, and the Vs to Z, but have not decided the question, how far
the relation of Z.as at right angles to .Fbrings this Zinto a necessarily
deducible relation with X, or that of V to Z has a similar effect upon
V as regards Y or X. If we really added nothing further this would
be a case of what I have more than once expressed in metaphor; the
Z's would no doubt have the same relation to the F's that the F's
have to the *Y's; only the relation of the Z's as perpendicular to Y
would as it were point into another world from that of the F's as
perpendicular to X ; and though we should be able to have a per
ception of each particular one of these relations, that of the F's
to the X's and that of the Z's to the F's, yet we should not bring
together these two instances of one and the same relation into any
definite mental picture at all, in spite of the common starting-
point 0.
Therefore in this way we shall never obtain the collective percep
tion R, which we were looking for and within which we hoped to
distribute in determinate places all the points we met with in its
alleged n dimensions; only the accustomed perception of space S,
which we introduce unawares, misleads us into the subreption that
it is self-evident that these successive perpendicular branchings of
the X's from F, of the F's from Z, and of the Z's from V take
place in a common intuitional form R. But in fact, to secure this,
the particular condition must be added to which I drew attention
above. A Z which is perpendicular to a J7", or deviates in a measur
able degree from the perpendicular to it, must by this circumstance
enter also into a perfectly definite relation with X, to which that Y is
perpendicular. At present we have only to do with one of these
various relations ; which is this ; among the Z's perpendicular to F,
that one which is also to be perpendicular to X must necessarily be
one among the many F's, as they included all the series that had this
relation to X ; therefore even this third dimension cannot exist in K
without its coinciding with one, and taking X as given, with a par
ticular one of the many instances of the second dimension all perpen
dicular to X ; still less can there be a fourth dimension F, at once
perpendicular to X} F, and Z, and yet distinct from the one par
ticular Z which stands alone in answering to the two conditions of
being perpendicular to X and at the same time to F. I maintain
therefore that in no intuitional form R, however unlike our space
232 Deductions of Space.
«$*, provided that it really is to have the character of a comprehensive
intuitional form for all co-existing relations of the content arranged
in it, can there be more than three dimensions perpendicular to each
other; taking the designation 'perpendicular' in the abstract meaning
which I assigned it, and which refers not only to lines s and angles a
but to every element r, however constituted, in such a form of per
ception JR. Of course this whole account of the matter is, and
in view of the facts can be, nothing but a sort of retranslation
from the concrete of geometry into the abstract of logic ; perhaps
others may succeed better in what I have attempted. I believe that
I am in agreement with Schmitz-Dumont on this question as well as
on some of the points already discussed, but I find it hard to
adopt the point of view required by the whole context of his ex
position.
136. Among the properties which our common apprehension
believes most indispensable to Space is the absolute homogeneous-
ness of its infinite extension. The real elements which occupy it or
move in it may, we think, have different densities of their aggrega
tion and different rules for their relative positions at different points ;
space itself, on the other hand, as the impartial theatre of all these
events, cannot possess local differences of its own nature which might
interfere with the liberty of everything that is or happens at one of its
points to repeat itself without alteration at any other. Now if we
conceive a number of real elements either united in a system at rest,
or set in motion, by the reactions which their nature makes them
exert on one another, then there arise surfaces and lines, which can
be drawn in space, but are not a part of its own structure ; they
unite points in a selection which is solely dependent on the laws of
the forces which act between the real things. Mathematics can
abstract from the recollection of these causes of special figures in
space and need not retain more than the supposition of a law,
(disregarding its origin,) according to which definite connected series
of points present themselves to our perception out of the infinite
uniformity of extension as figures, lines, or surfaces.
So far ordinary ideas have no difficulty in following the endeavours
of geometry when in obedience to the law of combination of a multi
plicity given in an equation it searches for the spatial outlines which
unite in themselves the particular set of spatial points that correspond
to this law. But in the most recent speculations we meet with a
notion, or at least imagine we meet with it, which we cannot under
stand and do not know how to justify. It is possible that the diffi-
CHAPTER ii.] ' Spaces', and figures in Space. 233
culties which I am going to state are based on a misconception of the
purposes aimed at by the analytically conducted investigations of this
subject ; but then it is at least necessary to point out plainly where
the need exists for intelligibility and explanation which has not been
in the least met by the expositions hitherto given.
To put it shortly, I am alluding to the notion that not only may
there be in infinite uniform extension innumerable surfaces and lines
whose structure within the particular extent of each is very far from
uniform, that is, variously formed figures in space; but that also there
may be spaces of a peculiar structure, such that uniformity of their
entire extension is excluded. It is clear to us what we are to think
of as a spherical or pseudo-spherical surface, but not clear what can
be meant by a spherical or pseudo-spherical space; designations
which we meet with in the discussion of these subjects without any
help being given to us in comprehending their meaning. In the
following remarks I shall only employ the former of these designa
tions ; the mention of 'pseudo-spherical space,' which is harder to
present definitely to the mind, could only reinforce our impression of
mysteriousness, without contributing to the explanation of the matter
any more than the allusion to the familiar spherical figure. The idea
of a spherical surface, being that of a figure in space, presupposes the
common perception of space; the situation of its points is determined,
at least has been hitherto, by some system of co-ordinates which
measures their distance and the direction of that distance from an
assumed point of origin according to the rules which hold for a
uniform space. To pass from the spherical surface to a spherical
space, one of two assertions seems to me to be needed; either
this surface is the whole space which exists, really or to the mind's
eye ; or this totality of space arises out of the spherical surface by
making the co-ordinates pass continuously through the whole series of
values compatible with the law of their combination. If we do the
latter there arises by the unbroken attachment of each spherical sur
face to the previous one, the familiar image of a spherical Volume,
which we may either limit arbitrarily at a particular point or conceive
as growing to infinity, as the equation of the surface remains capable
of construction for all values of the radius ; in this way we attain to
nothing more than the admissible but purely incidental aspect, that
the infinite uniform extension of space is capable of a complete
secondary construction, if from any given point of origin we sup
posed a minimum spherical surface to expand in all directions con
formably to its equation. But in the interior of this spherical volume
234 Deductions of Space.
there is no further structure revealed than that of uniform space, on
the basis of which the co-ordinates of the boundary-surface at each
particular moment had been determined : the interior does not
consist permanently and exclusively of the separate spherical shells
out of which in this case our representing faculty created its repre
sentation ; the passage from point to point is not in any way bound
to respect this mode of creation of the whole, as though such a
passage could take place better or more easily in one of the spherical
surfaces than in the direction of a chord which should unite any
places in the interior. The conception of a measure of curvature
has its proper and familiar import for each of the surfaces, distinguish
able in this space by thought, but wholly obliterated in the space
itself; but it is impossible to conceive a property of space itself to
which it could apply.
In the case of the sphere its law of formation permitted the con
tinuous attachment of surface to surface ; but equations are con
ceivable which if constructed as a system of positions in space would
produce either a series of discrete points or one of discrete surfaces,
perhaps partially connected or perhaps not at all. We know such
constructions primarily as figures in space and nothing else, and
conceive their production as conditioned by equations between co
ordinates whose power of being reciprocally defined by each other
corresponds to the nature of uniform space, now known as Euclidean
space ; but let us assume that we had escaped from that postulate
and had employed co-ordinates which themselves partook of the
special nature of the variously formed space which is to be obtained.
It may then be difficult to project an image of these strange figures
within our accustomed modes of space-perception; I attach more
weight to another difficulty, that of determining what we properly
mean when we speak of them as spaces. Let us assume that the
fundamental law, being capable of algebraical expression, which pre
vails in a system of related points not yet explicitly apprehended as
spatial, conditions a systematic order of them which could only be
represented in our space S by a number of curved sheets not wholly
attached to one another ; then the fact, form, and degree of their
divergence could only be observed by us through the medium of
distance measured according to the nature of the space S, as existing
between particular points in the different sheets.
However, let us even put out of the question all idea of a space S
as the neutral background on which the figure X was constructed, and
attempt to regard this X as the sole represented space; still the
CHAPTER ii.] Space which is not uniform. 235
different sheets of it could not possibly extend as if into different
worlds, so as to prevent there being any measurable transition from one
to another ; just as little could that which separates them and makes
them diverge be a mere nothingness when compared to the space X
itself, and capable of no -measurable degrees whatever; even in this
case that which gave the reason for their being separate could not
but be a spatial magnitude or distance, uniform and commensurable
with the magnitudes which formed the actual space A". Thus our
attempt would be a failure ; we should not be able to regard that AT
as space, but only as a structure in a space; we might no doubt
assume, for the moment, of this space that in each of its minutest
parts it had a structure other than that of our space S, but we should
have to admit at once that it formed a continuous whole witji the
same inner structure in every one of its parts. For, provided that
this tentatively assumed space X is not to be regarded as something
real, but as the empty form of a system for the reception of possible
realities, there can be no difference of reality or value between the
points contained in those sheets and the*other points by the interposi
tion of which their divergence arises ; they would all accordingly have
equal claims to be starting-points of the construction in question,
and from the intersection of all these constructions there would once
more be formed the idea of a space uniform through an infinite ex
tension, and indifferent to the structure of the fabrics designed in it.
Not even a break in the otherwise uniform extension is possible ;
such a break is only conceivable if in the first place there is a some
thing between Lhe terms which keeps them asunder, and if moreover
that something is comparable in kind and magnitude with what it
bounds on both sides of itself; hence space cannot consist of an
infinite number of intersecting lines which leave meshes of \vhat is
not space between them ; it uncontrollably becomes again the con
tinuous and uniform extension which we supposed it to be at first ;
and the manifold configurations of the kind X are conceivable in it
only as bounded structures, not as themselves forms of space.
137. I feel myself obliged to maintain the convictions which I have
expressed even against Riemann's investigations into a multiplicity ex
tended in n directions. My objections are on the whole directed to the
point, that here again the confusion which seems to me to darken the
whole question has not been avoided ; the confusion of the universal
localisation- system of empty places presented to the mind, a system in
which structures of any shape or any extent can be arranged, with the
structure and articulation belonging to that which has to be arranged
236 Deductions of Space.
in this system ; or to repeat the expression employed above, the con
fusion of space with structures in space. In II. § 4 of his treatise on
the hypotheses which lie at the foundation of Geometry, Riemann
expresses himself as follows : ' Multiplicities whose measure of curva
ture is everywhere zero, may be treated as a particular case of multi
plicities whose measure of curvature is everywhere constant. The
common character of multiplicities whose degree of curvature is
constant may be expressed by saying that all figures can be moved
in them without stretching. For, obviously, figures could not be made
to slide or rotate in them at pleasure, unless the degree of curvature
were constant. On the other hand, by means of the constant de
gree of curvature the relations of measurement of the multiplicity in
question are completely determined; accordingly in all directions
about one point the relations of measurement are exactly the same
as about another, and therefore the same constructions are practic
able starting from the one as from the other and consequently in
multiplicities with a constant measure of curvature figures can be
given any position/ •
Now I have no doubt at all that by analytical treatment of more
universal formulae the properties of space indicated may be deduced
as a special case ; but I must adhere to my assertion that it is only
with these special properties that such an 'extended multiplicity' is
a space, or corresponds to the idea of a system of arrangement for
perception ; all formulae which do not contain so much as these de
terminations, or which contain others opposed to them, mean either
nothing, or only something which as a special or peculiar formation
may be fittingly or unfittingly reduced to order in that universal frame.
A system of places which was otherwise formed in any one of its
parts than in another, would contradict its own conception, and
would not be what it ought to be, the neutral background for the
manifold relations of what was to be arranged in it ; it would be
itself a special formation, ' a multiplicity extended in n directions '
instead of being the ^-dimensional multiplicity of extension, about
which the question really was.
I cannot believe that any skill in analysis can compensate for this
misconception in the ideas ; alleged spaces of such structure that in
one part of them they would not be able to receive, without stretch
ing or change of size, a figure which they could so receive in another,
can only be conceived as real shells or walls, endowed with such
forces of resistance as to hinder the entrance of an approaching real
figure, but inevitably doomed to be shattered by its more violent im-
CHAPTER ii.] Uniform Space implied in all other Spaces. 237
pact. I trust that on this point philosophy will not allow itself to be
imposed upon by mathematics ; space of absolutely uniform fabric
will always seem to philosophy the one standard by the assumption of
which all these other figures become intelligible to it. This may be
illustrated by the analogy of arithmetic. The natural series of numbers
with its constant difference i, and its direct progression, according to
which the difference of any two terms is the sum of the differences of
all intermediate terms, may be treated as a special case of a more
general form of series just as much as can uniform space. But, by
whatever universal term it might be attempted to express the law of
formation of this series, it could have no possible meaning without
presupposing the series of numbers. Every exponent or every co
efficient wrhich this universal formula contained, would be of unassign
able import unless it had either a constant value in the natural series
of numbers, or else a variable one, depending in particular cases on
the value, measurable only in this series of numbers, of the magnitudes
whose function it might be. Every other arithmetical series only
states in its law of formation how it deviates from the progression of
terms of equal rank which forms in the series of numbers ; no other
standard can be substituted for this, without standing in need in its
turn of the simple series of numbers to make it intelligible. Precisely
the same seems to me to be the case in the matter of space ; and I
cannot persuade myself that so much as the idea of multiform space
or of a variable measure of curvature in space could be formed and
defined, without presupposing the elements of uniform space, recti
linear tangents and tangential planes, in fact uniform space in its
entirety, as the one intelligible and indispensable standard, from which
the formation of the oilier, if it could be pictured to the mind at all,
would present definite deviations.
CHAPTER III.
Of Time.
THE Psychologist may if he pleases make the gradual development
of our ideas of Time the object of his enquiry, though, beyond some
obvious considerations which lead to nothing, there is no hope of his
arriving at any important result. The Metaphysician has to assume
that this development has been so far completed that the Time in
which, as a matter of fact, we all live is conceived as one comprehen
sive form in which all that takes place between things as well as our
own actions are comprehended. The only question which he has to
ask is how far Time, thus conceived, has any application to the Real
or admits of being predicated of it with any significance.
138. In regard to the conception I must in the first place protest
against the habit, which since the time of Kant has been prevalent
with us, of speaking of a direct perception of Time, co-ordinate with
that of space and with it forming a connected pair of primary forms
of our presentative faculty. On the contrary we have no primary and
proper perception of it at all. The character of direct perception
attaching to our idea of Time is only obtained by images which are
borrowed from Space and which, as soon as we follow them out,
prove incapable of exhibiting the characteristics necessary to the
thought of Time. We speak of Time as a line, but however large
the abstraction which we believe ourselves able to make from the
properties of a line in space in order to the subsumption of Time
under the more general conception of the line, it must certainly be
admitted that the conception of a line involves that of a reality be
longing equally to all its elements. Time however does not cor
respond to this requirement. Thought of as a line, it would only
possess one real point, namely, the present. From it would issue two
endless but imaginary arms, each having a peculiar distinction from
each other and from simple nullity, viz. Past and Future. The dis
tinction between these would not be adequately expressed by the
No pictorial perception of Time. 239
opposition of directions in space. Nor can we stop here. Even
though we leave out of sight the relation in which empty Time stands
to the occurrences which fall within it, still even in itself it cannot be
thought of as at rest. The single real point which the Present con
stitutes is in a state of change and is ceaselessly passing over to the
imaginary points of the Past while its place is taken by the realisation
of the next point in the Future.
Hence arises the familiar repfesentation of Time as a stream. All
however that in this representation can be mentally pictured originates
in recollections of space and leads only to contradictions. We cannot
speak of a stream without thinking of a bed of the stream : and in
fact, whenever we speak of the stream of Time, there always hovers
before us the image of a plain which the stream traverses, but which
admits of no further definition. In one point of it we plant ourselves
and call it the Present. On one side we represent to ourselves the
Future as emerging out of the distance and flowing away into the
Past, or conversely — to make the ambiguity of this imagery more
manifest — we think of the stream as issuing from the Past and
running on into an endless Future. In neither case does the image
correspond to the thought. For this never-ending stream is and
remains of equal reality throughout, whether as it already flows on the
side where we place the future or as it is still flowing on that which
stands for the past ; and the same reality belongs to it at the moment
of its crossing the Present. Nor is it this alone that disturbs us in
the use of the image. Even the movement of the stream cannot be
presented to the mind's eye except as having a definite celerity, which
would compel us to suppose a second Time, in which the former
(imaged as a stream) might traverse longer or shorter distances of
that unintelligible background.
139. Suppose then that we try to dispense with this inappropriate
imagery, and consider what empty time must be supposed to be, when
it is merely thought of, without the help of images presented to the
mind's eye. Nothing is gained by substituting the more abstract con
ception of a series for the unavailable image of a line. It would
only be the order of the single moments of Time in relation to each
other that this conception would determine. It is, no doubt, involved
in the conception of Time that there is a fixed order of its constituents
and that the moment m has its place between ??i+ i and m— i : also
that its advance is uniform and that the interval between two of its
members is the sum of the intervals between all the intervening mem
bers. Thus we might say that if Time is to be compared with a line
240 Of Time.
at all, it could only be with a straight line. Time itself could not be
spoken of as running a circular course. There may be a recurrence
of events in it, but this would not be a recurrence if the points of
Time, at which what is intrinsically the same event occurs, were not
themselves different. So far the conception of a series serves to
explain what Time is, but it does so no further. Time does not
consist merely in such an order as has been described. That is an
order in virtue of which the momenf m would have its place eternally
between m + i and m — i. The characteristic of Time is that this
order is traversed and that the vanishing m is constantly replaced by
»/ + i, never by m — i. Our thoughts thus turn to that motion of our
consciousness in which it ranges backwards and forwards at pleasure
over a series which is in itself at rest. If Time were itself a real
existence, it would correspond to this motion, with the qualification of
being a process directed only one way, in which the reality of every
stage would be the offspring of the vanished or vanishing reality of
the preceding one and itself in turn the cause of its own cessation
and of the commencing reality of the next stage. We might fairly
acquiesce in an impossibility of learning what the moments properly
are at which these occurrences take place and what are the means by
which existence is transferred from one to the other. In the first
place it would be maintained that Time is something sui generis, not
to be defined by conceptions proper to other realities : and secondly
we know that the demand for explanation must have its limit and may
not insist on making a simplest possible occurrence intelligible by
constructions which would presuppose one more complex. But with
out wanting to know how Time is made, it would still be the fact that
we were bringing it under the conception of a process and we should
have to ask whether to such a conception of it any complete and
consistent sense could be given.
We cannot think of a process as occurring in which nothing pro
ceeds, in which the continuation would be indistinguishable from the
beginning, the result produced from the condition producing it. This
however would be the case with empty Time. Every moment in it
would be exactly like every other. While one passed away, another
would take its place, without differing from it in anything but its
position in the series. This position however it would not itself indi
cate by a special nature, incompatible with its occupying another. It
would only be the consciousness of an observer, who counted the
whole series, that would have occasion to distinguish it by the number
of places counted before it was reached from other moments with
CHAPTER 1 1 1.] Can empty 'Time' act on Reality f 241
which it might be compared. But if so, there would not in Time itself
be any stream, bringing the new into the place of the old. Nor can
appeal be made to the view previously stated, according to which
even the unchanged duration of a certain state is to be regarded as
the product of a process of self-maintenance in constant exercise and
thus as a permanent event, though there would be no outward change
to make this visible. If this view were applied to Time, it would only
help us to the idea of a Time for ever stationary, not flowing at all.
A distinction of earlier and later moments in it would only be possible
on the basis of the presentation to thought of a second Time, in which
we should be compelled to measure the extent in a definite direction
of the first Time, the Time supposed to be at rest.
140. Such is the obscurity which attaches to the notion of a stream
of empty Time, when taken by itself. The same obscurity meets us
when we enquire into the relation of Time to the things and events
which are said to exist and take place in it. Here too the convenient
preposition only disguises the unintelligibleness of the relation which
it has the appearance of enabling us to picture to the mind. There
would be no meaning in the statement that things exist in Time if
they did not incur some modification by so existing which they would
not incur if they were not in Time. What is this ? To say that~the
stream of Time carries them along with it would be a faulty image.
Not only would it be impossible to understand how empty Time could
exercise such a force as to compel what is not empty but real to a
motion not its own. The result too would be something impossible
to state. For even supposing the real to be thus carried along by the
stream of Time, it would be in just the same condition as before, and
thus our expression would contradict what we meant it to convey.
For it is not a mere change in the place of something which through
out retains its reality, but an annihilation of one reality and an
origination of another, that we mean to signify by the power at once
destructive and creative of the stream of Time. But, so understood,
this power would involve a greater riddle still. Its work of destruc
tion would be unintelligible in itself, nor would it be possible to con
ceive the relation between it and that vital power of things to which
must be ascribed the greater or less resistance which they offer to
their annihilation. Empty Time would be the last thing that could
afford an explanation of the selection which we should have to sup
pose it to exercise in calling events, with all their variety, into existence
in a definite order of succession.
But if, aware of this impossibility, we transfer the motive causes of
VOL. I. R
242 Of Time. [BOOKII.
this variety of events to that to which they really belong, viz. to the
nature and inner connexion of things, what are we then to make of the
independent efflux of empty Time, with which the development of
things would have to coincide without any internal necessity of doing
so? There would be nothing on this supposition to exclude the
adventurous thought that the course of events runs counter to time
and brings the cause into reality after the effect. In short, whichever
way we look at the matter, we see the impossibility of this first familiar
view, according to which an empty Time has an existence of its own,
either as something permanent or in the way of continual flux, in
cluding the sum of events within its bounds, as a power prior to all
reality and governed by laws of its own. But the certainty with
which we reject this view does not help us to the affirmation of any
other.
141. Doubts have indeed been constantly entertained in regard to
the reality which is commonly ascribed to Time and many attempts
have been made, in the interests of a philosophy of religion, to
establish the real existence of a Timeless Being as against changeable
phenomena. A more metaphysical basis was first given to this
exceptional view by the labours of Kant. He was led by the contra
dictions, which the supposition of the reality of Time seemed to intro
duce even into a purely speculative theory of the world, to regard it
equally with space as a merely subjective form of our apprehension.
This is not the line which I have myself taken. It seemed to me a
safer course to show that Time in itself, as we understand it and as
we cannot cease to understand it without a complete transformation
of the common view, excludes every attribute which would have
to be supposed to belong to it if it had an independent existence
prior to other existence. On the other hand I cannot find in the
assumption of its merely phenomenal reality a summary solution of
difficulties, which only seem to arise out of the application of Time to
the Real but in truth are inseparable from the intrinsic nature of the
Real. On this subject I may be allowed to interpose some remarks.
142. Were it intrinsically conceivable that an independent existence
of any kind should belong to Time, and were it further possible to
conceive any way in which the course of the world could enter into
relation to it, then the difficulties which Kant found in the endlessness
of time would cause me no special disturbance. That the world has
of necessity a beginning in Time, is the Thesis of his antinomy, and
this according to the method of diraytayfi he seeks to prove by dis-
' proving the antithesis. It may be noticed in passing that for those
CHAPTER in.] Kant on the endlessness of Time. 243
who do not, to begin with, find something unthinkable in empty Time
as having an existence of its own, the reference to the world which
fills Time is even here really superfluous. The Thesis might just as
well assert of Time itself that it must have a beginning, and then
proceed as it does. 'For1 on supposition that Time has no beginning,
before any given moment of Time there must have elapsed an eternity,
an endless series of successive moments. Now the endlessness of a
series consists in this, that it can never be completed by successive
synthesis. An endless past lapse of Time is therefore impossible and
a beginning of it necessary/
I confess to having always found something questionable in the
relative position which Kant here assigns to the thought of the end
lessness of Time on the one hand, and that of the impossibility of
completing the endless series by synthesis on the other. He thinks
it obvious that the latter constitutes a reason against the former,
whereas one might be tempted on the contrary to consider it merely
an obvious but unimportant consequence of this thesis. For un
doubtedly, in contemplating an endless lapse of time, we suppose that
a regress from the present into the past would never come to an end,
and that accordingly we could not exhaust the elapsed time by a
successive synthesis of the steps taken in this regress. The two
thoughts are thus perfectly consistent, and the endlessness of the past
would not be found to involve any contradiction until we could
succeed in discovering a last stage in the regress. Presumably indeed
Kant merely meant by the second thought to exhibit more clearly an
absurdity already implicit in the first. But it is just on this point that
I cannot accord him an unqualified assent.
143. To begin with, I propose to put my objection in the following
general form: the right and duty to admit that something is or
happens does not depend on our ability by combining acts of thought
to make it in that fashion in which we should have to present it to
ourselves as being or happening, z/~it were to be or to happen. It is
enough that the admission is not rendered impossible by any inner
contradiction, and is rendered necessary by the bidding of experience.
By no effort of thought can we learn how the world of Being is made ;
but there was no contradiction in the conception of it, and experience
compelled us to adopt the conception. We have had no experience
how the world of Becoming is made, on the contrary, the attempt to
construct it in thought constantly brings us to the edge of inner con-
1 [Altered from Kant's Kritik d. r. Vernunft, p. 304 (Hartenstein's ed.). The
words in italics are Lotze's alterations.]
R 2
244
tB°OK
tradictions, and it is only experience that has shown us that there may
happen in reality what we cannot recreate in thought. We cannot
make out how the operation of one thing on another is brought about,
and in this case we found it impossible to overcome the inner contra
diction implied in the supposition that independent elements, in no
way concerned with each other, should yet concern themselves with
each other so far that the movement of one should be regulated by
that of the other. This conception of operation, accordingly, we
could not admit without discarding the supposition of the obstructive
independence of things, and so rendering possible that mutual regu
lation of their motions, which experience shows to be a fact. Could
the ascription to empty space of an existence of its own, independent
of our consciousness,*be carried out without contradiction, the infinite
extension, inseparable from its nature, would not have withheld us
from recognising its reality, although we were aware that we could
never exhaust this infinity by a successive addition of its points or of
the steps taken by us in traversing it. It was no business of ours to
make Space. It is the concern of Space itself how it brings that to
pass which the activity of our imagination cannot compass. Certainly,
if a self-sustained existence, it was not bound to be small enough for
us to be able to find its limits. In its infinity no contradiction was
involved. From every limit, at which we might halt for the moment,
progress to another limit was possible, which means that such progress
was always possible. A contradiction would only have arisen upon a
point being found beyond which a further progress would not have
been allowed, without any reason for the stoppage being afforded by
the law which has governed the process through the stages previously
traversed, and against the requirement of that law. From this infinity
of Space the impossibility of exhausting it by successive synthesis
would have followed as a necessary, but at the same time, unimportant
consequence : unimportant, because the essence of Space, as a com
plex of simultaneous not successive elements, would have been quite
unaffected by the question whether a mode of origination, which is
certainly not that of Space, is possible.
In this respect the case is undoubtedly quite different in regard to
Time. It is by the succession of moments that every section of Time
comes into being. Therefore no wrong is done it by the question
whether its infinity is attainable by the method of successive synthesis,
which ceases in this case to be merely the subjective method followed
by our thought. But even here the impossibility of coming to an end
cannot be regarded as disproving the endlessness of Time. Kant
CHAPTER in.] The successive syntJiesis is in Time. 245
speaks expressly of a successive synthesis, and of the certainty that the
infinite series can never be exhausted by it. If we insist on these
expressions, it is clear that the course of Time, the infinity of which is
alone ostensibly impugned, is itself already regarded as a real condition
antecedent of that activity of imagination, which attempts the synthesis
said to be fruitless. The several steps of this activity follow each
other. Now whatever the celerity with which this task of adding
moment to moment may be supposed to be carried on, no one will
maintain that it is achieved more quickly than the lapse of the
moments which it counts. The mental reconstruction of Time in
time by means of the successive synthesis of its moments will take as
much time as Time itself takes for its own construction ; therefore an
endless Time, if Time is endless. And this is in fact, as it seems to
me, the real meaning of the word never in the above connexion. It
cannot have the mere force of negation, not. It only asserts what is
in itself intelligible, that no succession in Time, neither that of our
mental representation of Time nor that of Time itself, can measure
an infinite Time in a finite Time. But no inner contradiction lies in
this progress from point to point. This is the more apparent from the
consideration that the progress must be supposed really to take place
if we are to conceive the possibility of the successive synthesis, by
which we are said to learn that it continues so endlessly as never to be
completed. It is not with itself therefore that the endlessness of Time
is in contradiction, but only with our effort to include its infinite
progress in a finite one of the same kind.
144. In writing thus, I am not unaware of the possible objection
that this view admits of unforced application only to the Future, which
no one would seriously doubt to be without limits. It may be said
that the Future, as we conceive it, contains that which is coming to be
but has not yet taken shape, and the endlessness of its progression
agrees with this conception : whereas the Past (if Infinity is to be
ascribed to it) would compel us to assume a finished and ready-made
Infinity. I cannot help thinking, however, that we have here a con
fusion of ideas.
In the first place, I would dispose of the difficulty which may be
suggested by Kant's expression, that 'up io any moment of the present
an infinite series of Time must have elapsed.' It seems to me im
proper to represent the Present as the end of this series. It is not the
stream of Time of which the direction can be described by saying
that it flows out of the Past, through the Present, into the future. It
is only that which fills Time — the concrete course of the world — ;hat
246 Of Time. IBOOKII.
conditions what is contained in the later by what is contained in the
earlier. Empty Time itself, if there were such a thing, would take the
opposite direction. The Future would pass unceasingly into the
Present and this into the Past. In presenting it to ourselves we
should have no occasion to seek the source of this stream in
the past.
This correction, however, only alters the form of the above objec
tion, which might be repeated thus : — If the Past is held to be
infinite, then there must be considered to have elapsed an infinite
repetition of that mysterious process, by which every moment of
the empty Future becomes the Present, and again pushes the Present
before it as a Past. The true ground, however, of the misunder
standing is as follows. Future and Past alike are not; but the manner
of their not-being is not the same. It is true that in regard to empty
Time, though we would fain make this distinction, we cannot show
that it obtains, for one point of the elapsed void is exactly like every
point of the void that has still to come. But if we think of that course
of the world which fills Time, then the Future presents itself to us as
that which, for us at any rate, is shapeless, dubious, still to be made,
while the Past alone is definitely formed and ready-made. Only the
Past — which indeed is not, but still has known what Being is — we
take as given, and as in a certain way belonging to reality. For every
moment of what has been the series of conditions is finished — the
conditions which must have been thought or must have been active in
order to make it the definite object which it is. This character of
what has been, since it belongs to every moment of the past, is
shared by the whole past of the world's history, and is transferred by
us to empty Time. Thus, as a matter of course, when we speak of
an endless Past, we take it to be the same thing as saying that this
endless Past * has been'*. But it is quite a different notion that Kant
conveys by his expression 'gone by'2. This is the term used of a
stream, of which it is already known or assumed that it has an end
and exhausts itself in its lapse. But there is nothing in the essential
character of the Past to justify this assumption. Nothing is finished
but the sum of conditions which made each single moment what it
has been. To say, however, that this determination is in each case
finished is quite a different thing from saying that the series of repe
titions of this process is itself closed, and must be held to be given as
a closed series or to have gone by, if it is to be equivalent to the series
of what has been. The latter is indeed the assertion of Kant, but the
1 ['Seigewesen.'] 2 [• Verflossen.']
CHAPTER in.] Reality of an infinite series. 247
thought so expressed is not one necessarily involved in the conception
of that which has been, so as to be alleged as a disproof of the
assumption of an infinite past. All that can be said is that whoever
thinks of an infinite past, thinks of an infinite that has been. Why he
should not think this does not appear. He will simply deny that the
conception of what has been contains a presumption of its being finite.
But that, on supposition of an infinite past, we should never come to
an end in an attempt to reconstruct the past by the successive syn
thesis of a process of imagination, is not anything to surprise us. It
is the natural result of our assumption. A contradiction would only
arise if the infinity asserted broke off anywhere.
145. The doctrine that our imagination can only approach the
infinitely great by a progress which can be continued beyond every
limit that may be fixed for the moment may be met with elsewhere
than in Kant. I do not dispute the correctness of this doctrine. But
if it is meant to convey a definition of the infinite I must object, that
it would be a definition of the object only by one of its consequences
which may serve as a mark of it, not by the proper nature from which
these consequences flow. For that the progress in question admits of
being continued beyond every limit is something that cannot have
been learned by any actual experiment. Any such experiment must
necessarily have stopped at some finite limit without any certainty that
the next step in advance, which had unfortunately not been taken,
might not have exhausted the infinite. Rather we derive this certainty,
that the imagination with its posterior constructions will not exhaust
it, from a prior conception which does exhaust it, were it only the
simple recognition that the infinite has not an end, and that therefore,
as a matter of course, such an end cannot be found.
The above definition by consequences may, notwithstanding, have
its use. What must, on the contrary, be disputed is the conclusion
connected with it, that in the range of our thoughts about the real a
case can never occur in which we might recognise the infinite as
actually present and given ; or, to put it otherwise, that an infinite
can never possess the same reality which we ascribe to finite magni
tudes of the same kind. If we continue the series of numbers by the
addition of units, the infinite cannot, it is true, be found as a number.
To require that it should be so found would be to contradict our
definition of it. But to every further number admitted beyond the last
which we presented to ourselves, we have to ascribe the same validity
as to this last. The series does not so break off where o,ur synthesis
comes to an end as that the further continuation should be in any way
248 Of Time.
[BOOK II.
distinguishable from the piece already counted, as the merely possible
or imaginary from something real or given. On the contrary, to our
conception the series has undiminished validity as an infinite one,
although on the method of addition of units it could never be begotten
for our imagination. The Tangent of an angle increases with the
increase of the angle. Not only, however, do we continuously ap
proximate to the case in which its value becomes infinite ; we actually
arrive at it if the angle is a right angle and the Tangent parallel to the
Secant. This infinite length remains throughout unmeasurable by
successive synthesis of finite lengths : but we are at the same time
forced to admit that as the concluding member of a series of finite
Tangent-values, which admit of being stated, this infinite inexhaustible
Tangent presents itself with just the same validity as those that are
exhaustible. We say with equal validity, and that is all that we can
say, for none of these lines are realities, but only images which we
present to the mind's eye. But I find nothing to prove that in the
conception of reality, as such, there is anything to hinder us from
recognising, beside finite values which we are forced to admit, the
reality of the infinite, as soon as the necessary connexion of our
thoughts compels us to do so.
Now for those who consider a stream of empty Time, as such,
possible, such a necessity lies not merely in the fact that no moment
of this time has any better title than another to form the beginning.
On the contrary, try as we may, an independent stream of Time
cannot be regarded as anything but a process, in which every smallest
part has the condition of its reality in a previous one. There thus
arises the necessity of an infinite progression — a necessity equally un
avoidable if, on the other hand, we look merely to the real process of
events and regard this as producing in some way the illusion of there
being an empty Time. It is impossible to think of any first state of
the world, which contains the first germ of all the motion that takes
place in the world in the form of a still motionless existence, and yet
more impossible to suppose a transition out of nothing, by means of
which all reality, together with the motive impulses contained in it,
first came into being.
146. All these remarks, however, have only been made on suppo
sition that a stream of empty Time is in itself possible. Since we
found it impossible, we will try how far we are helped by the opposite
view, that Time is merely a subjective way of apprehending what is
not in Time. A difficulty is here obvious, which had not to be en
countered by the analogous view of Space. Ideas, ex parte nostra, do
CHAPTER in.] Time as purely subjective. 249
not generally admit of that which forms their content being predicated
of them. The idea of Red is not itself red, nor that of choler choleric,
nor that of a curve curved. These instances make that clear and
credible to us which in itself, notwithstanding, is most strange ; the
nature, namely, of every intellectual presentation, not itself to be that
which is presented in it. It may indeed be difficult for the imagination,
when the expanse of Space spreading before our perception announces
itself so convincingly as present outside us, to regard it as a product,
only present for us, of an activity working in us which is itself to no
conditions of Space. Still, in the conception of an activity there is
nothing to make us look for extension in Space on the part of the
activity itself as a condition of its activity. On the contrary, had we
believed that the impressions of Space in our inner man could them
selves have position in Space, we should have been obliged to seek
out a new activity of observation which had converted this inner con
dition into a knowledge of it, and to look to this activity for that
strange apprehension of what is in Space which must do its work
without being in Space itself.
If, on the other hand, we try to speak in a similar way of a timeless
presentation of what is in time, the attempt seems to break down.
The thought that Time is only a form or product of our presenta-
tive susceptibility, cannot take away from the presentation itself the
character of an activity or at least of an event, and an event seems
inconceivable without presupposition of a lapse of time, of which the
end is distinguishable from the beginning. Thus Time, unlike Space,
is not merely a product of the soul's activity, but at the same time the
condition of the exercise of the activity by which Time itself as a pro
duct is said to have been obtained, and the presentation to conscious
ness of any change seems impossible without the corresponding real
change on the part of the presenting mind. Now it must be borne in
mind that in no case could Time be a subjective form of apprehension
in such a sense as that the process of events, which we present to our
selves in it, should be itself opposed to the form of apprehension as
being of a completely alien nature. Whatever basis in the way of
timeless reality we may be disposed to supply to phenomena in
Time, it must at any rate be such that its own nature and constitution
remain translateable into forms of Time. To this hidden timeless
reality, it may be suggested, that activity of thought would itself belong,
of which the product in our consciousness would be that course of
occurrences and of our ideas which is seemingly in Time. Of it, and
by consequence of every activity as such, it must be sought to show,
250 Of Time.
t BOOK II.
according to the view which takes Time to be merely our form of
apprehension, that while not itself running a course in a time already
present, it may yet present itself to sense in its products as running
such a course. Let us pursue the consideration by which it may be
attempted to vindicate this paradoxical notion.
147. No one will maintain that the stream of empty Time brings
forth events in the sense of being that which determines their cha
racter and the succession of the various series of them. It would be
admitted that all this is decided by the actual inner connexion of
things. But although that which happens at one moment contains
the ground G of that which at the next is to appear as consequence
Ft it may be fancied that the lapse of Time is a conditio sine qua non
which must be fulfilled if the grounded consequence is really to follow
from its ground. A reference to the general remarks previously
made, upon the several kinds of cause distinguished in common
parlance, may meanwhile suffice to convince us that what we call a
conditio sine qua non can stand in no other relation to the effect result
ing than does every other co-operative cause. The mere presence of
that which in each case is so called is never sufficient to draw a
distinct event in the way of consequence after it. The case rather is
that the presence of such a complementary condition must always
manifest itself by an effect exercised on the other real elements
which without it would not have sufficed for the production of the
consequence F.
Now if upon such a supposition we assume first that at a certain
moment a state of things, G, is really given which forms the complete
ground of a necessary consequence, F, there is no conceivable respect
in which the lapse of an empty Time, T, should be necessary, or
could contribute, to bring about the production of F by G. Granted
that, during the time T, G has continued without change, neither
producing F nor a more immediate consequence, / preliminary to
the other, then at the end of the interval T everything will be just as
at the beginning, and the lapse of time T will have been perfectly
barren. If, on the other hand, during the same interval G has passed
into the series of consequences/, /2, /3 , each related to the next
following as ground to consequence, the same remark is applicable to
any two proximately related members of this series. If /2 is the sole
ground of/3, then the lapse of the smaller interval of empty Time /3 — /2
can be neither contributory nor essential to the production by/ of its
effect/. It will no doubt be objected that the flaw of our argu
ment consists in this, that we fix a certain momentary state of things,
CHAPTER in.] Empty Time does not cause Becoming. 251
G, and consider this fixed state of things, in complete identity with
itself, to act as the operative cause of an effect ; whereas in fact G
only becomes such a cause through a lapse of Time during which it is
itself in continuous process of becoming. For this reason, it will be
said, the series of determinate causes and effects unfolds itself as a
process of events, while on our supposition it remains out of Time
and just for that reason cannot form more than a system of members
which stand to each other eternally in graduated relations of depend
ence without ever moving in these relations. It must be admitted
that whoever puts this objection strikes a most essential point. He is
perfectly right in insisting upon ceaseless motion or uninterrupted
becoming as constituents of the real. For undoubtedly, if once the
perfectly unchanging fact G were recognised as given, then the con
sequent F, of which it contains the sufficient reason, would as specu-
latively valid truth, subsist permanently along with G, while considered
as reality it would either always exist along with it or never come
into being out of it. For then the addition of the lapse of an empty
Time / would not produce the motion absent from G at all, at any
rate not produce it more or less than would the lapse of o . / or oo . /.
This shall be more fully considered below. For the present my
concern is to show that for the very process of Becoming in question
the mere lapse of Time can afford no means, any possible appli
cation of which could be necessary to bringing it about. The proof
of this, however, I hold to be involved in what has been already said.
For here it comes to the same thing in effect whether we only speak
of a series of distinct causes which produce their several effects, so to
speak, by jumps, or whether taking the case of continuity we understand
by fr fv fz constituents of a continuous stream of causation — con
stituents which are only arbitrarily fixed in thought but of which
really each in turn moves. On the latter supposition it would be just
as impossible that the internal motion, which results in the emission
ofy^ from/g, should be dependent on the lapse of the empty time
/3 — /2 in such a way as that it could not take place unless this lapse
of time preceded. Such an influence is unintelligible unless we sup
pose that the lapse of empty time can announce itself toy^ — nay that
the completion of the period /3 — /a makes itself felt as different from
that of the longer period /4 — tv in order that in the former there may
be occasion for the advance of the process of becoming from/2 only
tofy in the latter to/~4. But the ends of the two periods are com
pletely like each other and like every other moment of empty time.
The entry of the one has no such distinction from that of the other
252 Of Time.
as can give to/"2 the signal for this or that amount of advance. For
that reason the sum of the continuously flowing moments, which forms
the duration of each period, cannot make itself felt by the operative
powery^ as a measure of the work which it has to do in the way of pro
duction of Becoming. On the contrary, it will only be in the same
way in which we measure a period of Time for purposes of our know
ledge that the length of this period can announce itself to/2 so as to
determine the magnitude of the change which f^ has to undergo.
This is by the enumeration of the repetitions of a similar process,
which at the end of some period of Time exhibits a different state of
reality from what it did at the beginning. So far as our knowledge
is concerned, the perception of the different positions which a
pendulum, for instance, occupies at the beginning and at the end of
its vibration, would suffice for the purpose. For a reality, which was
to take account of the lapse of Time in order to direct its becoming
accordingly, there would be needed the constant summing of the
impressions received by it from another real process, by means of
which it itself or its own condition had been so changed as to be
able to serve as indicator of the length of Time elapsed. The con
clusion plainly is that a process of becoming, B, which required a
lapse of time in order to come about, must have already traversed in
itself a succession of different stages, in order to feel in that succes
sion the lengths of the periods according to which it is supposed to
direct itself, and which it is supposed to employ for the purpose of
effecting the transition from one stage to another.
148. These considerations do not lead us at once to the end of
our task. For the present I may put their result, which I shall not
again discuss, as follows. It is quite unallowable to put the system of
definite causes and effects, which gives its character to any occurrence,
on one side and on the other side to suppose a stream of empty
Time, and then to throw the definitely characterised event into the
stream in expectation that its fabric of simultaneous conditions will
in the fluidity of this stream melt into a succession, in which each of
the graduated relations of dependence will find its appropriate point
of time and the period of its manifestation. It is only in the actual
content of what happens, not in a form present outside it into which
it may fall, that the reason can be found for its elements being related
to each other in an order of succession, and at the same time for the
times at which they succeed each other.
The other view therefore begins to press itself upon us — the view
that it is not Time that precedes the process of Becoming and
CHAPTER 1 1 1.] 'Becoming* produces Time. 253
Activity, but this that precedes Time and brings forth from itself
either the real course of Time or the appearance in us of there being
such a thing. The constant contradiction to this reversal of the
habitual way of looking at the matter which our imagination would
present, we could no more get rid of than we could of the habit of
saying that the sun rises and sets. What we might hope to do would
be to understand one illusion as well as the other. It is also our
habit to speak of general laws, standing outside things and oc
currences and regulating their course ; yet we have been forced to
the conviction that these have no reality except in the various par
ticular cases of their application. Only that which happens and
acts in determinate forms is the real. The general law is the
product of our comparison of the various cases. After we have
discovered it, it appears to us as the first, and the realities, out of
the consideration of which it arose, as dependent on its antecedence.
In just the same way, after the manifold web of occurrence has
in countless instances assumed for us forms of succession in
Time, we misunderstand the general character of these forms, which
results from our comparison of them — the empty flowing Time — and
take it for a condition antecedent, to which the occurrence of events
must adjust itself in order to be possible. That we are mistaken in
so doing and that the operation of such a condition is unthinkable—
this ' reductio ad impossibile,' which I have sought to make out, is, it
must be admitted, the only thing which can be opposed to this
unavoidable habit of our mental vision.
149. The positive view, which we found emerging in place of the
illusion rejected, is still ambiguous. Is it a real Time that the pro
cess of events, in its process, produces or only the appearance of
Time in us? In answering this question we cannot simply affirm
either of the alternatives. One thing is certainly clear, that the
production of Time must be a production sut generis. Time does
not remain as a realised product behind the process that produces it.
As little does it lie before that process as a material out of which
the process can constantly complete itself. Past and Future are not^
and the representation of them both as dimensions of Time is in fact
but an artificial projection, which takes place only for our mind's eye,
of the unreal upon the plane which we think of as containing the
world's real state of existence.
Undoubtedly therefore Time, conceived as an infinite whole with\
its two opposite extensions, is but a subjective presentation to oun
mind's eye ; or rather it is an attempt, by means of images borrowed
t
254 Of Time. IBOOKII.
from space, to render so presentable a thought which we entertain as
to the inner dependence of the individual constituents of that which
happens. What we call Past, we regard primarily as the condition
' sine qua non ' of the Present, and in the Present we see the necessary
condition of the Future. This one-sided relation of dependence,
abstracted from the content so related and extended over all cases
which it in its nature admits of, leads to the idea of an infinite Time,
in which every point of the Past forms the point of transition to
Present and Future, but no point of Present or Future forms a point
of transition to the Past. That this process must appear infinite
scarcely needs to be pointed out. The condition of that which has
a definite character can never lie in a complete absence of such
character. Every state of facts, accordingly, of which we might think
for a moment as the beginning of reality, would immediately appear
to us either as a continuation of a previous like state of facts, or as a
product of one unlike ; and in like manner every state of facts
momentarily assumed to be an end would appear as the condition of
the continuance of the same state of facts, or in turn as the beginning
of a new one. If finally the course of the world were thought of as
a history, which really had a beginning and end, still beyond both
alike we should present to ourselves the infinite void of a Past and
Future, just as two straight lines in space which cut each other at the
limit of the real, still demand an empty extension beyond in which
they may again diverge.
150. It will be felt, however, that we have not yet reached the end
of our doubts. It will be maintained that though the process of Be
coming does indeed make no abiding Time, it yet does really bring
into being or include the course of Time, by means of which the
various parts of the content of what happens, standing to each other
in the relation of dependence described above, having been at first only
something future, acquire seriatim the character of the Present and
the Past. If we chose to confine ourselves simply to highly deve
loped thought, and to regard the dimensions of Time merely as
expressions for conditioned-ness or the power of conditioning, then
the whole content of the world would again change into a motionless
systematic whole, and everything would depend on the position which
a consciousness capable of viewing the whole might please to take up
facing, so to speak, some one part of it, m. From this point of departure,
m, the contemplator would reckon everything as belonging to the Past,
m— i, in which he had recognised the conditions that make the con
tent of m what it is, while he would assign to the Future, m+i9 all the
CHAPTER in.] Past, Present^ and Future, without Time. 255
consequences which the necessities of thought compelled him to draw
from it : and this assignment of names would change according as m
or n might be made the point of departure for this judgment. This
however does not represent the real state of the case. This capa
city of tracing out the connexion of occurrences in both directions —
forwards and backwards — would only be possible to a consciousness
standing outside the completed course of the world. It belongs to us
only in relation to the past, so far as the past has become known to
us through tradition. Immediate experience is confined to a definite
range, and neither does the recollection of the past reproduce for
experience its actual duration, nor does the sure foresight of the
future, in the few cases where it is possible, take the place for ex
perience of the real occurrence of the foreseen event.
What then is the proper meaning of the Reality, which in this
connexion of thought we ascribe only to the Present ? Or con
versely, what constitutes this character of the present, which we
suppose to belong successively in unalterable series to the events of
which each has its cause in the other, and to be equivalent to reality ?
I will not attempt to prepare the way for an answer to this question,
or to lead up to it as a discovery. I will merely state what seems to
me the only possible answer to it. It is not the mere fact that they
happen which attaches this character to the content of events. On
the contrary the import of the statement that they happen is only
explained by the expression ' the Present,' in which Language aptly
makes us aware of the necessity of a subject, in relation to which
alone the thinkable content of the world's course can be distinguished
either as merely thinkable and absent on the one hand, or on the
other as real and present. To explain this, however, I am obliged
to go into detail to an extent for which I must ask indulgence and
patience.
151. Let us consider one of the finite spiritual beings like our
selves, which shall be called S. In the collective content of the
world, 7J/, which to begin with we will think of as we did before,
merely as a regularly arranged whole of causes and effects, S has its
proper place in the system at m between a past JH — I, which con
tains its conditions, and a future m+i, of which it is itself a joint
condition. We will first assume that the place m, which S holds in
M, is without extension. By this I mean that it is only in this single
plane of a section m through the manifold interlacing series of causes
and effects which forms the content of M— not in any other m— i or
m -f i — that there lie the conditions of S : while at the same time
256 Of Time. t BOOK 1 1 .
every element of M — S among others — may be supposed to have
knowledge, immediately and not by gradual acquisition, as to the whole
structure and content of M. All that would be implied in this sup
position would be that S would no longer be able at its pleasure to
seek out positions indifferent as concerned itself for its survey of the
whole of M. Being only able to plant itself in the position /», every
thing in which it recognises a joint condition of its own being will
appear to belong to a different branch, m—i, of the world's content,
from that in which it finds reactions from its own existence — that
existence which is confined to m. At the same time this knowledge
on the part of S, that it is merely co-ordinated in this entire system
of conditions with the other parts of the world's content that are in
cluded in m, would remain a mere speculative insight, which would
excite in -S1 no stronger interest in this m, and one of no other nature,
than the interest in the fact of the dependence of m upon m — i and
of m + i upon m. Thus, although S would distinguish according to
their import the two branches of the system of conditions that have
their point of departure in m, it would yet have no occasion to
oppose them both to m as what is unreal and absent to what is real
and present. And this would still be the case, though we so far
altered our assumption as to suppose 6" to be not only contained in
the one section-plane m of J/, but also to be co-ordinated with the
contents of other planes m — a and mi- a, without undergoing any
change in itself. To us indeed, who are accustomed to the idea of
Time, this position of S in a system would present itself as a duration,
as the filling by S of the period of time, 2 a : but to S itself, if S
continued to possess the immediate knowledge supposed, it could
only convey the speculative impression that S is interwoven in an
extended section of M, while -S" would still have no occasion to
oppose this section as present to others as absent.
All this would be changed on one supposition only, which indeed
for other reasons must be made ; the supposition, namely, that the
place of 5 in the system contains not only the conditions of its exist
ence but those of its knowledge. In this is implied that only those
elements of m — i can be an object of its knowledge which not only
systematically precede it as conditions but of which the consequences
are contained in m, and only as far as their consequences are so con
tained. Of m+ i on the contrary all that will be knowable will be the
impulse, already present in m, which is the condition of m+ i. Even
the entire content of m will not, merely as such, form an object of
knowledge to S. Even the fact of belonging to m is for each element
CHAPTER in.] The indication of 7^ime to the Subject. 257
of it only the condition of a more special relation to S, which we may
call its effect on 6" in the way of producing knowledge. If now we
return to our supposition that m is a place without extension, then
the knowledge possessed by S will be an unchangeable presentation
to consciousness, without there being any occasion for the distinction
of Present from Future in it. If on the contrary £ found itself con
tained in the whole extended section 2 a of M, then it would follow —
since we are now supposing its knowledge to rest upon the effect
produced in it by the content of this section — that S is no longer
identical with itself in all points of 2 a, but has to be defined by
sv sv sz> corresponding to the various conditions to which it is
subject in the various points of 2 a. But thus S would fall asunder
into a multiplicity of finite beings, unless something supervened to
justify us in adhering to the unity asserted of it, and this justification,
if it is not merely to establish an accidental view about s in us
but to constitute an essential unity on the part of s, can only consist
in an action of its own on the part of s by which it unites the
several s's.
This requirement however is not satisfied by the assumption of an
S having unity, which distinguishes the several j's in itself as its
states. S as thus constituted would still never live through any
experience. The whole content of its being would be presented to it
just in the same way as on our previous supposition. There would
indeed be a clear insight into the plan upon which the elements
are formed into a connected whole, but the whole would be pre
sented simultaneously, just as is the frame-work of theoretic pro
positions which appear to us not as arising out of each other in a
course of time but as always holding good at the same time, although
we understand their dependence on each other. Only one of the
j's can in any case be the knowing subject, but in it— in J3, let us
say— the content of ja must not only be contained by its conse
quences, through which it helps to constitute the nature of ss, but
this content as presented to consciousness must be distinguishable
in the form of a recollection from that which belongs to s3 as its
own feeling or perception. On this condition only is it possible for
s3 to distinguish this latter experience as present from that repre
sented content as absent, and on the same condition, since the same
reproduction of sl in J2 has already taken place, the whole series of
these mutually dependent contents, as represented in consciousness,
while preserving its inner order, will be pushed back to various dis
tances of absence. The question indeed as to the foundation of this
VOL. i. s
258 Of Time.
faculty of distinguishing a represented absent object from one ex
perienced as present is a question upon which any psychological
or physiological explanation may be thankfully accepted in its place.
Here however it would be useless. What we are now concerned
with is merely the fact itself, that we are able to make this distinction
and to represent to ourselves what we have experienced without
experiencing it again. This alone renders it possible for ideas of
a proper succession to be developed in us, in which the member n
has a different kind of reality from n+ i. It would have been more
convenient to arrive at this result otherwise than by this tedious pro
cess of development. I thought the process indispensable, however,
because it leads to some peculiar deductions, which require further
patient consideration.
152. For instance ; what has been said will be found very in
telligible — not to say, obvious — if only we allow ourselves to inter
polate the thought that sz ceases to exist when it has produced s3 ;
that thus there is a time in which those section-planes of M or of 2 a
succeed each other. But it will be thought to be as impossible after
our discussion as it was before it, to look upon the content of the
world as out of time, a whole of which the members are related
systematically but not successively, while yet there arises in parts of
it the appearance of there being a lapse of time on the part of the
periods which those parts observe. For if there is no successive
alternation of Being and not-Being, then, it will be said, every stage
of development, sv which a subject, s3, believes itself to have ex
perienced in the past, will possess, as a ground of J3, the same
reality as the consequence s3 itself. Accordingly we should be com
pelled, it would seem, to think of all that is past — all histories, actions,
and states of an earlier time — as still existing and happening ; and
every individual being JB, would have alongside of itself as many
doubles, sv sv s3, completing themselves one after another, as it counts
various moments in the existence which it seems to have lived through.
Against this objection, however, we must maintain that such pecu
liar views would not be the logical consequence of our denial of the
lapse of Time, but on the contrary of the inconsistency of allowing
the succession that has been denied again to mix itself with our
thoughts. For only this habituation of our imagination to the idea of
Time could mislead us into treating the elements of the world,
which are of equal value— all, that is to say, equally indispensable to
the whole — as if they must be contemporaneous unless they are to
be successive, whan all the while our purpose was to show that every
CHAPTER 1 1 1.] Developed view of Subjective Time. 259
determination in the way of time is inapplicable to them, as such.
We shall never succeed in ridding ourselves of this habit of fantasy.
Only in thinking shall we be able to convince ourselves, in standing
conflict with our demand for images presentable to the mind's eye,
that adherence to the assumption of timelessness does not lead to the
consequences in which we have just found a stumbling-block.
There would not indeed on our view be that kind of past into which
the conditioning stage of development would be supposed to vanish
instead of illegitimately continuing in the present alongside of the
consequence conditioned by it — that consequence to which it ought
to have transferred the exclusive possession of the quality of being
present. The histories of the past would not continue to live in this
present, petrified in each of their phases, alongside of that which
further proceeded to happen in the course of things. It would not
be the case that sl really existed earlier than J2 and strangely con
tinued along with it, but rather that it had reality only so far as it was
contained in s2 and was presented by the latter to itself as earlier.
It will be with Time as with Space. As we saw, there is no such
thing as a Space in which things are supposed to take their places.
The case rather is that in spiritual beings there is formed the idea of
an extension, in which they themselves seem to have their lot and in
which they spatially present to themselves their non-spatial relations
to each other. In like manner there is no real Time in which occur
rences run their course, but in the single elements of the Universe
which are capable of a limited knowledge there developes itself the idea
of a Time in which they assign themselves their position in relation to
their more remote or nearer conditions as to what is more or less
long past, and in relation to their more remote or nearer conse
quences as to a future that is to be looked for more or less late.
It is not out of wantonness that I have gone so far in delineating
this paradoxical way of looking at things. It is what we must come
to if we wish to put clearly before us the view of the merely subjective
validity of Time in relation to a timeless reality. It is vexatious to
listen to the mere asseveration of this antithesis without the question
being asked whether, when adopted, it intrinsically admits of being in
any way carried out, and whether it would be a sufficient guide to the
understanding of that experience from which we all start. The de
scription which has been given will be enough to raise a doubt whether
the latter is the case. The reasons for this doubt however are not
all of equal value. In regard to them again, while passing to the con
sideration of this contradiction, I must ask to be allowed some detail.
s 2
260 Of Time.
153. In order to find a point of departure in what is familiar, I
will first repeat the objection which will always recur. Pointing to
the external world the objector will enquire — ' Is it not then the case
that something is for ever happening ? Do not things change ?
Do they not operate on each other ? And is all this imaginable
without a lapse of time ? ' Imaginable it certainly is not, and we
have never maintained that it is so. But in what relation do the
lapse of Time and this happening stand to each other, which might
enable us to maintain the correctness of this imagination of ours ?
That it is only in what is contained in a sufficient cause, G, that
there lies a necessity for the consequence, F — that the necessity, if
otherwise lacking, could not supervene through lapse of a time, T—
this we found obviously true. It was admitted also that, G being
given, it would neither be intelligible where the hindrance should
come from which should retard its transition into F, nor how the
lapse of empty Time could overcome that hindrance. Thus con
strained to confess that our habit of thinking the effect as after the
cause does not point to anything which in the things themselves con
tributes to the production of the effect, what other conclusion can we
draw than this, that succession in Time is something which our mode
of apprehension alone introduces into things — introduces in a way
absolutely inevitable for us, so that our thought about things remains
constantly in contradiction with our habit of presenting them to the
mind's eye ?
One may attempt to make this thought clear to oneself by gradual
approximation. To a definite period of Time it is our habit in
common apprehension to ascribe a certain absolute quantity. If we
ask ourselves, however, how long a century or an hour properly lasts,
we at once recollect that the time filled by one series of events we
always measure simply according to its relation to another series,
with the ends of which those of the first series do or do not coincide.
Our ordinary impression of the duration of periods of time is itself
the uncertain result of such a comparison, in which we are not clearly
conscious of the standard of our measurement. Hence the same
period may appear long or short in memory. The multiplicity of
the events contained in it gives it greater extent for the imagination.
Poverty of events makes it shrink into nothing. It has itself no
extensive quantity which is properly its own. Therefore no hindrance
meets us in the attempt to suppose as short a time as we will for the
collective course of events. However small we think it, still it is not
in it but in the dependence of events on each other that the reason
CHAPTER in.] Succession essential to Reality f 261
lies of the order in which events occur ; and the entire history which
fills centuries admits of being presented in a similar image, as con
densed into an infinitely small space of Time through proportional
diminution of all dimensions.
With this admission however it will be thought necessary to come
to a stop. However small, it will be said, still this differential of
Time must contain a distinction of before and after, and thus a lapse,
though one infinitely small. But we want to know exactly why.
Undoubtedly the transition to a moment completely without extension
would deprive History of the character of succession in Time ; but
then our question is just this, whether the real needed this succession
on its own part in order to its appearance as successive to us. And
in regard to this we must constantly repeat what has been already
said ; that neither could the order of events be constituted by Time,
if it were not determined by the inner connexion of things, nor is it
intelligible how Time should begin to bring that which already has a
sufficient cause to reality, if that reality is still lacking to it. On the
other hand, we believe that we do understand how a presentative
faculty such as to derive from its own nature the habit of viewing the
world as in time, should find occasion in the inner connexion between
the constituents of that world, as conditioning and conditioned by
each other, to treat its parts as following each other in a definite
order and as assuming lengths — definite in relation to each other but,
apart from such relation, quite arbitrary — of this imagined Time.
Thus even upon this method, by help of the idea of an infinitely
small moment, we should have mastered the thought of a complete
timelessness on the part of what fills the world. For in that case we
should certainly not go out of our way to think of that extension of
time, within which this moment would seem of a vanishing smallness,
and so bring on the world the reproach of a short and fleeting
existence, as compared with the duration which expansion into in
finite Time would have promised it.
154. After all, it will be objected, we have not yet touched the
proper difficulty. If all that we had to take account of were an
external course of the world, then it would indeed cost us little effort
to regard all that it contains as timeless, and to hold that it is only in
relation to our way of looking at it that it unfolds itself into a succes
sion. But the motion, which we should thus have excluded from the
outer world, would so much the more surely have been transferred
into our Thought, which, on the given supposition, must itself pass
from one of the elements which constitute the world to another, in
262 Of Time.
order to make them successive for its contemplation. For the un
folding, by which what is in itself timeless comes to be in time, cannot
take place in us without a real lapse of Time ; the appearance of succes
sion cannot take place without a succession of images in conscious
ness, nor an apparent transition of a into b without the real transition
which we should in such a case effect from the image of a to that of b.
But convincing as these assertions are, they are as far from con
taining the whole truth. On the contrary, without the addition of
something further, the doctrine which they allege would be fatal to
the possibility of that which it is sought to establish. If the idea of
the later b in fact merely followed on that of the earlier a, then a
change of ideas would indeed take place, but there would still be no
idea of this change. There would be a lapse of time, but not an
appearance of such change to any one. In order to a comparison in
which b shall be known as the later it is necessary in turn that the
two presentations of a and b should be objects, throughout simul
taneous, of a relating knowledge, which, itself completely indivisible,
holds them together in a single indivisible act. If there is a belief
on the part of this knowledge that it passes from one of its related
points to another, it will not itself form this idea of its transition
through the mere fact of the transition taking place. In order that
the idea may be possible, the points with which its course severally
begins and ends, being separate in time, must again be apprehended
in a single picture by the mind as the limits between which that
course lies. All ideas of a course, a distance, a transition — all, in
short, which contain a comparison of several elements and the re
lation between them — can as such only be thought of as products of
a timelessly comprehending knowledge. They would all be im
possible, if the presentative act itself were wholly reducible to that
succession in Time which it regards as the peculiarity of the objects
presented by it. Nay if we go further and make the provisional
admission that we really had the idea of a before we had that of b,
still a can only be known as the earlier on being held together with b in
an indivisible act of comparison. It is at this moment, at which a is
no longer the earlier nor b the later, that for knowledge a appears as
the earlier and b as the later. In assigning these determinate places,
however, to the two, the soul can only be guided by some sort of
qualitative differences in their content — by temporal signs, if we like
to say so, corresponding to the local signs in accordance with which
the «0;z-spatial consciousness expands its impressions into a system of
spatial juxtaposition.
CHAPTER HI.] Time-distinctions and ' Temporal signs'. 263
Such could not but be the state of the case even if there were a
lapse of Time in which our ideas successively formed themselves.
The real lapse of Time would not, immediately as such, be a sufficient
cause to that which combines and knows of the succession in Time
which it presents to itself. It would be so only mediately through
signs derived by each constituent element of the world from that
place in the order of Time into which it had fallen. But such various
signs could not be stamped on the various elements by empty time,
even though it elapsed, since one of its elements is exactly like every
other. They could only be derived from the peculiar manner in
which each element is inwoven into the texture of conditions which
determine the content of the world. But just for that reason there
was no need of a real sequence in Time to annex them to our ideas
as characteristic incidental distinctions. Thus it would certainly be
possible for a presentative consciousness, without any need of Time,
to be led by means of temporal signs, which in their turn need not
have their origin in Time, to arrange its several objects in an apparent
succession in the way of Time.
155. I am painfully aware that my reader's patience must be
nearly exhausted. Granted, he will say, that in every single case in
which a relation or comparison is instituted this timeless faculty of
knowing is active: it remains none the less true that numberless
repetitions of such action really succeed each other. Yesterday our
timeless faculty of knowledge was employed in presenting the suc
cession of a and b, to-day it presents that from c to d. There are
thus, it would seem, many instances of Timeless occurrence which
really succeed each other in Time. I venture, however, once again
to ask, Whence are we to know that this is so ? And if it were*so,
in what way could we know of it? That consciousness, to which
the comparison made yesterday appears as earlier than that made
to-day, must yet be the consciousness which we have to-day, not
that which may have been yesterday and have vanished in the course
of Time. That which appears to us as of yesterday cannot so
appear to us because it is not in our consciousness, but because it
is in it ; while at the same time it is somehow so qualitatively deter
mined, that our mental vision can assign it its place only in the past
branch of apparent Time.
I will allow, however, that this last reply yields no result. The
Past indeed, of which we believe ourselves already to have had living
experience, one may try to exhibit as a system of things which has
never run a course in Time, and which only consciousness, for its
264 Of Time.
own benefit, expands into a preceding history in Time. But how then
would the case stand with the Future, which we suppose ourselves
still on the way to meet? Let J3, according to the symbols pre
viously used, stand for this Ego, which J2 and jx never really preceded
but always seem to have preceded, what then is J4 which ss in turn
will thus seem to have preceded ? What could prevent s3 from being
conscious also of J4, its own future, if the temporal signs which teach
us to assign to single impressions their position in Time, depended
only on the systematic position which belongs to their causes in the
complex of conditions of a timeless universe ? It may be that the
content of J4, which follows systematically upon J3, is not determined
merely by the conditions, which are contained in s3 and previously in
J2 and j,, but jointly by others, resting on the states of other beings
which do not cross those of S till a later stage of the system. For
that reason J4 might be obscure to s3 and this might constitute the
temporal character which gives it in the consciousness of s3 the stamp
of something future. But if this were the case, the process would
have to stop at this point. It would only be for another being s4 that
what was Future to s3 could, owing to its later place in the system, be
present. On the other hand in a timeless system there would be no
possibility of the change by means of which s3 would be moved out
of its place into that of s± : yet this would be necessary if to one and
the same consciousness that is to become Present which was pre
viously Future to it. If one and the same timeless being by its time
less activity of intellectual presentation gives to one constituent of its
existence the Past character of a recollection, to another the signi
ficance of the Present, to a third unknown element that of the Future,
it could never, if it is to be really timeless, change this distribution
of characters. The recollection could never have been Present,
the Present could never become Past and the Future would have to
remain without change the same unknown obscurity. But if there is
a change in this distribution of light ; if it is the case that the in
definite burden of the Future gradually enters the presence of living
experience and passes through it into the other absence of the Past ;
and finally if it is impossible for the activity of intellectual presenta
tion to alter this order of sequence ; then it follows necessarily that
not merely this activity, but the content of the reality which it pre
sents to itself, is involved in a succession of determinate direction.
This being so, we must finally decide as follows : Time, as a
whole, is without doubt merely a creation of our presentative intellect.
It neither is permanent nor does it elapse. It is but the fantastic
CHAPTER in.] Succession inseparable f rom Reality. 265
image which we seek, rather than are able, to project before the
mind's eye, when we think of the lapse of time as extended to all the
points of relation which it admits of ad infinitum, and at the same
time make abstraction of the content of these points of relation. But
the lapse of events in time we do not eliminate from reality, and we
reckon it a perfectly hopeless undertaking to regard even the idea of
this lapse as an a priori merely subjective form of apprehension,
which developes itself within a timeless reality, in the consciousness of
spiritual beings.
153. Thus, at the end of a long and troublesome journey, we come
back, as it will certainly appear, to complete agreement with the
ordinary view. I fear however that remnants of an error still survive
which call for a special attack— remnants of an error with which we
are already familiar and which have here needed to be dealt with only
in a new form, viz. the disintegration of the real into its content and
its reality. We are unavoidably led by our comparison of the mani
fold facts given to us to the separation of that on the one hand which
distinguishes one real object from another — its peculiar content which
our thought can fix in abstraction from its existence — and on the
other hand of that in which every thing real resembles every other —
the reality itself which, as we fancy, has been imparted to it. For this
is just what we go on to imagine — that this separation, achieved in our
thoughts, represents a metaphysical history ; I do not mean a history
which has been completed once for all, but one which perpetually
completes itself; a real relation, that is to say, of such a kind that
that content, apart from its reality, is something to which this reality
comes to belong. The prevalence of this error is evidenced by the
abundant use which philosophy, not least since the time of Kant, has
made of the conception of a 'Position/ which meeting with the
thinkable content establishes its reality. In an earlier part of this
work we declared ourselves against this mistake. We were con
vinced that it was simply unmeaning to speak of being as a kind of
placing which may simply supervene upon that intelligible content of
a thing, without changing anything in that content or essence or
entering as a condition into its completeness. As separate from the
energy of action and passion, in which we found the real being of the
thing to consist, it was impossible even to think of that essence, im
possible to think of it as that to which this reality of action and
passion comes from without, as if it had been already, in complete
rest, the same essence which it is under this motion.
It is the same impossible separation that we have here once again,
266 Of Time.
in consideration of the prevalence of the misunderstanding, carefully
pursued to its consequences in the form of the severance of the
thing which happens from its happening. It was thus that we were
led to the experiment of seeking the essence1 of what happens — that
by which the actual history of the world is distinguished from another
which might happen but does not — in a complex system of relations
of dependence on the part of a timeless content of thought ; while
the motion in this system, which alone constitutes the process of be
coming and happening, was regarded as a mode of setting it forth which
might simply be imposed on this essential matter, or on the other
hand, might be wanting to it without changing the distinctive character
of the essence. We could not help noticing, indeed, the great differ
ence between reality and that system of intelligible contents. In the
latter the reason includes its consequence as eternally coexisting with
it. In the former the earlier state of things ceases to be in causing
the later. Then began the attempts to understand this succession,
which imposes itself like an alien fate on the system in its articula
tion. They were all in vain. When once the lapse of empty time
and the timeless content had been detached from each other, nothing
could enable the set nature of the latter to resolve itself into a con
stant flux in the former. It was clear that in this separation we had
forgotten something which forced that content — involving as it did,
if it moved, the basis of an order of time — to pass in fact into such a
state of motion. I will not suppose that crudest attempt to be made
at supplying the necessary complement — the reference to a power
standing outside the world which laid hold on the eternal content
of things, as on a store of material, in order to dispose its elements
in Time in such a way as their inner order, to which it looked
as a pattern, directed it to do. Let us rather adopt the view that
in the content itself lies the impulse after realisation which makes
its manifold members issue from each other. Still, even on that view
it would be a mistake, as I hold, to think of the measure and kind of
that timeless conditionedness, which might obtain between two ele
ments of the world's content, as the antecedent cause which com
manded or forbade that operative impulse to elicit the one element
from the other. What I am here advancing is only a further appli-
1 [This is still ' the content ' — ' that which distinguishes one real object from
another.' A verbal difficulty is caused by the distinction being here, per accidens,
between the actual world and an imaginary world, so that but for the context we
might take 'essence' to be used in just the opposite sense to that of p. 265, and
to refer to that which distinguishes what is real from what is unreal.]
CHAPTER in.] ' Time'' as a Whole subjective. 267
cation of a thought which I have previously expressed. Every rela
tion, I have said, exists only in the spirit of the person instituting the
relation and for him. When we believe that we find it in things them
selves, it is in every case more than a mere relation : it is itself already
an efficient process instead of being merely preliminary to effects.
On the same principle we say — It is not the case that there is first
a relation of unchanging conditionedness between the elements of
the world, and that afterwards in accordance with this relation the
productive operation, even though it may not come from without but
may lie in the things themselves, has to direct itself in order to give
reality to legitimate consequences and avoid those that are illegiti
mate. On the contrary first and alone is there this full living opera
tion itself. Then, when we compare its acts, we are able in thought
and abstraction to present to ourselves the constant modus agendi,
self-determined, which in all its manifestations has remained the same.
This abstraction made, we can subordinate each single product of the
operation, as we look backward, to this mode of procedure as to an
ordaining prius and regard it as determined by conditions which are
in truth only the ordinary habit of this operation itself. This process
of comparison and abstraction leads us in one direction to the idea
of general laws of nature, which are first valid and to which there
then comes a world, which submits itself to them. In another di
rection it leads to the supposition of an empty Time, in which the
series of occurrences succeed each other and which, in the character
of an antecedent conditio sine qua non, makes all operation possible. But
this last way of looking at the matter we have found as untenable
as would be the attempt to represent velocities as prior to motions
(somewhat as if each motion had to choose an existing velocity), and
to interpret the common expression, according to which the motion
of a body assumes this or that velocity, as signifying an actual fact ;
whereas in truth the motion is nothing but the velocity as following a
definite direction.
In this sense we may find more correctness in the expressions that
may be often heard, according to which it is not Time that is the
condition of the operation of things, but this operation that produces
Time. Only what it brings forth, while it takes its course, is not an
actually existing Time as an abiding product, somehow existing or
flowing or influencing things, but only the so-called ' vision ' of this
Time in the comparing consciousness. Of this — the empty total
image of that order in which we place events as a series- — it is thus
true that it is only a subjective form of apprehension ; while of the
268 Of Time.
succession belonging to that operation itself, which makes this
arrangement of events possible, the reverse is true, namely that it is
the most proper nature of the real.
157. I should not be surprised if the view which I thus put forward
met with an invincible resistance from the imagination. The un
conquerable habit, which will see nothing wonderful in the primary
grounds of things but insists on explaining them after the pattern of
the latest effects which they alone render possible, must here at last
confess to being confronted by a riddle which cannot be thought out.
What exactly happens — such is the question which this habit will
prompt — when the operation is at work or when the succession takes
place, which is said to be characteristic of the operative process ?
How does it come to pass — what makes it come to pass — that the
reality of one state of things ceases, and that of another begins?
What process is it that constitutes what we call perishing, or transition
into not-being, and in what other different process consists origin or
becoming ?
That these questions are unanswerable — that they arise out of the
wish to supply a prius to what is first in the world — this I need not
now repeat : but in this connexion they have a much more serious
background than elsewhere, for here they are ever anew excited by
the obscure pressure of an unintelligibility, which in ordinary thinking
we are apt somewhat carelessly to overlook. We lightly repeat the
words ' bygones are bygones ' ; are we quite conscious of their
gravity ? The teeming Past, has it really ceased to be at all ? Is it
quite broken off from connexion with the world and in no way
preserved for it? The history of the world, is it reduced to the
infinitely thin, for ever changing, strip of light which forms the
Present, wavering between a darkness of the Past, which is done with
and no longer anything at all, and a darkness of the Future, which is
also nothing ? Even in thus expressing these questions, I am ever
again yielding to that imaginative tendency, which seeks to soften the
1 monstrum infandum ' which they contain. For these two abysses of
obscurity, however formless and empty, would still be there. They
would always form an environment which in its unknown within
would still afford a kind of local habitation for the not-being, into
which it might have disappeared or from which it might come forth.
But let any one try to dispense with these images and to banish from
thought even the two voids, which limit being : he will then feel how
impossible it is to get along with the naked antithesis of being and
not-being, and how unconquerable is the demand to be able to think
CHAPTER in.] Reality of Past and Fiiture. 269
even of that which is not as some unaccountable constituent of the
real.
Therefore it is that we speak of distances of the Past and of the
Future, covering under this spatial image the need of letting nothing
slip completely from the larger whole of reality, though it belong not
to the more limited reality of the Present. For the same reason even
those unanswerable questions as to the origin of Becoming had their
meaning. So long as the abyss from which reality draws its continu
ation, and that other abyss into which it lets the precedent pass away,
shut in that which is on each side, so long there may still be a certain
law, valid for the whole realm of this heterogeneous system, according
to the determinations of which that change takes place, which on the
other hand becomes unthinkable to us, if it is a change from nothing
to being and from being to nothing. Therefore, though we were
obliged to give up the hopeless attempt to regard the course of events
in Time merely as an appearance, which forms itself within a system
of timeless reality, we yet understand the motives of the efforts which
are ever being renewed to include the real process of becoming within
the compass of an abiding reality. They will not, however, attain
their object, unless the reality, which is greater than our thought,
vouchsafes us a Perception, which, by showing us the mode of solu
tion, at the same time persuades us of the solubility of this riddle. I
abstain at present from saying more on the subject. The ground
afforded by the philosophy of religion, on which efforts of this kind
have commonly begun, is also that on which alone it is possible for
them to be continued.
CHAPTER IV.
Of Motion.
THE perceived facts of motion are a particularly favourable subject
matter for numerical calculation ; but our present interest is not in
the manifold results obtained by the mathematical treatment of accepted
relations of proportion between intervals of space and of time ; but
solely in the question which phoronomic and mechanical investigations
are able to disregard for their immediate purpose ; the question what
motion implies as taking place in the things that move.
158. Common apprehension takes motion, while it lasts, to be the
traversing of an interval of space ; and its result at every moment in
which we conceive it as arrested to be a change of place on the part
of the thing moved. We shall be obliged for the moment to invert
this order of our ideas, in order to remain in agreement with our view
of the merely phenomenal validity of space. Things cannot actually
traverse a space which does not actually extend around them, and
whose only extension is in our consciousness and for its perception ;
what happens is rather that just as the sum -S" of all the intelligible
relations in which an element e at a given moment stands to all others
assigns it a place p in our spatial image ; exactly in the same way any
change of that sum of relations S into 2 will demand the new place TT
for the impression which is to us the expression, image, or indication
of e. Therefore change of place is the first conception to which we
are led in this connexion ; and from that point we do not arrive quite
directly at the notion that a journey through space is essential to the
change ; even an apparent journey, that is, for we no longer think a
real one possible.
It only follows from what was said just now that in every moment
the thing's situation p or TT in apparent space is determined by the
then forthcoming sum 6" or 2 of its intelligible relations ; it is still
undecided in what way the transition takes place from one situation to
another. However, it only happens in fairy-tales that a thing dis-
The L aw of Continuity. 271
appears in one place and suddenly reappears in another, without
having traversed a path leading in space from the one place to the
other; all observation of nature assumes as self-evident that the
moving object remains in all successive moments an object of possible
perception in some point of a straight or curved path, which unites
its former and subsequent position without breach of continuity. We
have no intention of doubting the validity of this assumption ; it
involves for us the further one, that in like manner the sum S of
intelligible relations does not pass into another 2 without traversing
all intermediate values that can be intercalated, without break though
not necessarily with uniform speed. And this is what we really think
of all variable states which are in things, as far as our modern habit
of referring every event to an alteration of external relations will allow
us to speak of such states at all. We do not believe that a sensation
comes suddenly into being with its full intensity ; nor that a body at a
temperature ^ passes to another /2, without successively assuming all
intermediate temperatures ; nor that from a position of rest it acquires
the velocity v, without acquiring in unbroken series all degrees of it
between o and v. Thus we speak of a Law of Continuity to which
we believe that all natural processes are subject ; yet however familiar
the idea may be to us, and however irresistible in most cases to which
it is applied, still its necessity is not so self-evident to thought that all
consideration of the ground and limits of its validity is wasted.
159. Of course the application of the law of Continuity is not
attempted where disparateness between two extremes excludes all
possibility of a path leading from one to the other in the same
medium. No one conceives a musical note as changing continuously
into colour ; a transition between the two could only be effected by
annihilation of the one and creation of the other anew ; but that
negation of the note would not have the import of a definite zero in a
series such as could not but expand into colours on the other side of
it ; it would be a pure nothing, of which taken by itself nothing can
come, but after which anything may follow, that we choose to say is to
follow. On the other hand, in what relation to each other are Being
and not-Being, the actual transition between which is put before us in
every instance of change ? Are we to assume that because this transi
tion takes place it too must come to pass by continuous traversing of
intermediate values between Being and not-Being? We unhesitatingly
negative this suggestion, if it is to require for one and the same
content a a gradation of existence such as without changing a itself to
remove it by degrees from reality to unreality or vice versa ; we could
272 Of Motion. [BOOK ii.
attach no meaning to the assertion of a varying intensity of being
which should make a permanent unvarying l a partake of reality in
a greater or less degree. We should on the other hand assent to
this ; that the content of a itself could not disappear and could not
come into being without traversing all the values intermediate be
tween o and a, which its nature made possible ; the not-being of a
is always in the first place the being of an a, which is continuous
with a as the value immediately above or below it. Therefore the
transition from being to not-being of the same content is no con
tinuous one, but instantaneous ; still, no value a of a natural process
or state arises thus instantaneously out of absolute nothingness, but
always out of a reality of its own kind, whose value a is the proximate
increase or diminution of its own.
The case is different with the increase or decrease which property,
for instance, is exposed to in games of chance or in commerce. A
sum of money which we have staked on a cast of the dice becomes
ours or not ours in its whole amount at once, and is whichever it is
immediately in the fullest sense. It was no one's property as long as
the game was undecided; our hopes of calling it our own are a
matter of degree, and no doubt might rise per saltus, though not
continuously, as one die after another came to rest ; but neither this
nor any other intermediate process, even if some of them were
continuous, can alter the essential state of the facts ; on the one hand
our complete right of ownership begins instantaneously on the aggre
gate result of the throw becoming quite certain, and so far from
existing to a less degree the moment before, had then no existence at
all. On the other hand, this suddenly created right applies at once
to the whole sum in question, without extending by degrees over more
and more of it. In this instance and in innumerable similar ones
presented by human intercourse based on contract, a perfectly arbi
trary ordinance has attached to an absolutely peculiar case S a con
sequence F of which £ is not the obvious producing cause ; therefore
by an equally arbitrary ordinance all the cases sl s^ ss which naturally
belong to the same series as S may be made completely ineffectual ;
and all equally so, irrespective of their greater or less approximation
to the favourable condition S. Such relations can only occur in
artificial institutions, in which a covenant, quite foreign to the nature
of the thing, attaches anything we please to anything else, and at the
same time our loyalty to the covenant is the only pledge for the
execution of what was agreed on ; as it will not execute itself.
1 [v. note on § 19, supra.]
CHAPTER iv.] Continuity and Succession. 273
In all natural processes on the contrary the S to which a result F
is supposed to correspond is the actual and appropriate ground G of
this consequent F] such as not only demands the result in question
but brings it .about by itself and unaided by any ordinance of ours ;
hence the cases sls2ss which we have a right to regard as other
quantitative values of the same condition S cannot be without effect,
but must in like manner, produce the consequents/"^/^ proportional
to their own magnitudes and of the same kind with F. Hence arises
the possibility of regarding the amount of a natural phenomenon ob
tained under a condition F as the sum of the individual consequents
produced in succession by the successive increments of the condition.
But this possibility is at the same time in a certain sense a necessity.
We are not here concerned with a relation of dependence, valid irre
spective of time, between the ideal content of F and that of G its
sufficient reason, but with the genesis of an effect /''which did not
exist before ; so that the condition S in like manner cannot be
an eternally subsisting relation, but can only be a fact which did not
exist before and has now come into being.
Now, if we chose to assume that S arose all at once with its
highest quantitative value, no doubt it would seem that F as the
consequence of this cause could not but enter upon its reality all at
once ; but in fact it would not still have to enter upon its reality, for
it would be in existence simultaneously with S ] nothing could con
ceivably have the power to interpose an interval of time, vacant as in
that case it would be, between cause and consequence. The same
would hold good regressively ; if S arose all at once, the cause of its
reality too must have arisen all at once, and therefore, strictly speak
ing, have existed contemporaneously with £ rather than arisen before it.
Thus we find that it is impossible to regard the course of the world
as a series of sudden discrete states conditioning each other without
completely re-transforming it into a mere system of elements which
all have their validity or existence simultaneously ; quite unlike reality,
the terms of which are successive because mutually exclusive. I shall
not prolong this investigation ; it was only meant to show that con
tinuity of transition is not a formal predicate of still problematic
validity, which we might assign to Becoming after some hesitation as
true in fact; its validity is rather an indispensable presupposition
without which the reality of Becoming in general is inconceivable.
160. I have now to give a somewhat different form to the ideas
with which I began. In the artificial arrangements which we men
tioned, the conscious deliberation of the parties to the agreement had
VOL. I. T
274 Of Motion. [BOOK ii.
previously determined the result which was to follow from a par
ticular occurrence in the future; and in the same way in all our
actions the representation in our minds of an aim that is not yet
realised, of a goal that has yet to be reached, may itself be present
and effectual among the conditions of the activities which are set in
motion to attain our purpose. We should be wrong in transferring
this analogy to our present subject-matter, by choosing to regard the
altered sum of relations 2 which by itself would be the cause of the
quiescence of the element e at the point TT, as being at the same time
the cause of its seeking and rinding this new place. There cannot be
an inner state q of any thing such as to be for that thing the condition
of its being in another particular state r. Our reflexion might antici
pate with certainty that this state r would contain no reason for
further change ; but the thing itself could not feel that it was so until
the state began, and turned out to be the condition of a more perfect
or quite perfect equilibrium.
Thus in our instance ; the sum 2 of a thing's relations, if it had
always existed, would have corresponded to the place TT ; but when
something new has to arise out of the transition from S to 2, its
action cannot consist in assigning to the thing a new particular
place TT, as one which would suit the thing better, if it once were
there ; it can only consist in expelling the thing from the place p
where its nature and conditions no longer hold it in equilibrium.
But in the real world the negation of an existing state can only be
the affirmation of another ; besides, there can be no such thing as
want of equilibrium in general, but only between specific points in re
lation, and between them only with a specific degree of vivacity.
Therefore, the power of negation exerted by a state which is to act
as the condition of a fresh occurrence can only consist in displacing
the element in question from its present intelligible relations in a
specific direction, which we have still in the first place to conceive as
unspatial, and with a specific intensity. The spatial phenomenon
corresponding to this process would be a specific velocity with which
the element departs from its place p in a specific direction, impelled
therefore a tergo without a predetermined goal but not attracted a
fronle by the new place TT ; this latter cannot act either by retaining
or by impelling, till it is' reached. So what takes place in the things
themselves, and what we might call, of course in quite a different
sense from that recognised in mechanics, the v is viva of their motion,
is this velocity, with which in the intelligible system of realities they
leave the place where they were out of equilibrium, or, to our percep-
CHAPTER iv.] The Law of Persistence. 275
tion, appear to leave a situation in space ; what length of space they
may traverse, whether with uniform or varying motion, whether in
straight lines or in curves, is the result of the existing circumstances ;
that is, of the new positions into which they are brought by the actual
motion which takes place, which positions react on that motion as
modifying factors.
161. In this way we have arrived directly at the law of Persistence,
the first principle of the doctrines of mechanics, according to which
every element maintains its state of rest or motion unaltered as long
as it does not come in contact with the modifying influence of ex
ternal causes. The first part of the law, the persistence of rest, has
seldom caused any difliculty ; for it can hardly be urged as a serious
objection that the nature of an actual element e is quite inaccessible
to us and that element may contain inner reasons unknown to us for
setting itself in motion. Whatever unconjecturable states the inner
being of a thing may experience, still they can only set up a motion
which did not exist before by beginning at a particular moment to
manifest themselves as reasons for that motion. In that case they
presuppose a previous history of a Becoming within the thing ; but if
there had once been a moment of complete rest, in which all states
of things were in equilibrium with each other, and there was no
velocity inherited from an antecedent process of Becoming with
which they might have made their way through the position of
equilibrium, such quiescence could never have given rise to a
beginning of change. Our ignorance of the real nature of things
only justifies us in assuming as a possibility that such a succession of
states remains for a time a movement within the thing, neither con
ditioned by influences from without, nor capable of altering the
relations of the thing to external related points ; and that, as a result
of this hidden labour, a reason sufficient to alter even those external
relations whether to other things or to surrounding space, may be
generated as a new factor at one particular moment. But even then
the movement in space would not be produced out of a state of rest,
but out of a hidden movement which was not of the same kind with
it ; as is the case with animated bodies which initiate their changes of
place by independent impulse. In the first place, however, even
these owe the activity within them which generates their resolutions
to the stimuli of the outer world ; and in the second place their reso
lutions can only give rise to movement in space by a precontrived
connexion of several parts which are accessible to the action of the
mind and under its influence move in the directions prescribed to
T 2
276 Of Motion. [BOOK ii.
them by their permanent position in the plan of the organic structure
and their situation at the moment in external space.
This analogy is not transferable to a solitary element, to be con
ceived as setting itself in motion in empty space. In animated beings
the element which is charged with the unspatial work within does not
set itself in motion, but only other elements with which it is in
interaction; and it does so by destroying the equilibrium of the
forces operative between them, and leaving the want of equilibrium
which results to determine the amount and direction of the motion to
be generated. The solitary element has none of these determining
reasons ; it could not move without taking a definite direction
through the point z of empty space to the exclusion of all others;
to secure this it would not be enough that the direction e z should be
geometrically distinct from any other; the distinction would have to
be brought to the cognisance of /s inner nature, that is, z would
have to act on e differently from any other point in space. But as
an empty point it is in no way distinguished from all the other
points ; it could only be given pre-eminence before all the others by
the presence of a real element occupying it. So even if we admit an
abundance of inner life in every thing, still we cannot derive the
initiation of a movement in space from that life, but only from ex
ternal determining conditions.
Still, this is an expression which we shall do well to modify.
Whatever attractive or repulsive force we conceive to proceed from 0;
it cannot determine e to motion by reason of its own starting from z,
but only by reason of its arrival at e, or rather through the alteration
which it effects in the inner states of <?. It is therefore, in fact, this
state of inner want of equilibrium which hinders e from remaining at
rest ; only this state cannot have arisen in a way to determine the
line of motion, unless e is conceived as part of a universe which by
the configuration of its other parts at any moment helps to determine
that of e's inner being.
162. The other part of the law, the continuance of every motion
that has once begun, remains a paradox even when we are convinced
of it. If we separate the requirements which we may attempt to
satisfy ; in the first place the certainty of the law, or its validity in
point of fact, is vouched for both by the results of experiment and by
its place in the system of science. The better we succeed in ex
cluding the resistances we are aware of as interfering with a motion
that has been imparted, the longer and more uniformly it continues ;
we rightly conclude that it would continue unvaryingly for ever, if it
CHAPTER iv.] Contimiance of Motion. 277
were permanently left to itself without any counteraction. And on
the other hand, however a motion that is going on may be modified
at every moment by the influence of fresh conditions, still we know
that our only way of arriving at the actual process in calculation is to
estimate the velocity attained in every moment as continuing, in order
to combine it with the effect of the next succeeding force.
If we go on to ask whether this doctrine being certain in point of
fact has also any justification as conceivable and rational, we can at
least see the futility of the assumptions which prevailed in antiquity,
when, under the influence of inappropriate analogies, men held that
the gradual slackening of all motion was the behaviour more naturally
to be expected. If they had said that all motion is wholly extin
guished in the very moment in which the condition that produces it
ceases to act, the idea put forward would at least have been an in
telligible one in itself; but by treating the motion as becoming
gradually weaker they actually admitted the law of persistence for
as much of the motion as at any given moment had not disappeared.
Still, the more definitely we assume the ordinary ideas of motion, the
more remarkable does the law of persistence appear; if motion is
nothing but an alteration of external relations by which the inner
being of the moving object is in no way affected, and which in no
way proceeds from any impulse belonging to that object, why should
such an alteration continue when the condition which compelled it
has ceased ?
We look in vain for more general principles which might decide the
question. I said above in the Logic (§ 261) that the law 'Cessante
causa cessat effectus ' cannot safely be held to mean more than that
after the cessation of a cause we do not find the effect which the
cause would have had if it had continued ; but that it remains doubtful
whether the effect which is already produced requires a preserving
cause for its continuance. It appeared to me then that every state
which had in reality once been produced would continue to exist, if it
were neither in contradiction with the nature of the subject to which
it occurs, nor \vith the totality of the conditions under which that
subject stands towards other things. But even this formula is useless ;
for there is still this very question, whether motion which has been
generated in a thing not by its own nature, but only by means of
external conditions, is to count among the states which are conceivable
as going on to infinity without contradicting that nature and those rela
tions. On the other hand, it has been suggested that the reason for
the persistence of states of motion in things must in every case lie in
278 Of Motion. ( BOOK ii.
the actual nature of the things ; I am convinced that no explanation
is to be found in this direction ; we should only be obliged, after
executing some useless circuits, to assert the principle of Persistence
about some motion or other within real things, with no more success
in deducing it than if we had taken the shorter way of granting its
validity at once for motion in space. Instead of a direct demonstration
of the law, I believe that nothing more is possible than an indirect
treatment, which I subjoin.
163. Let C^ be the condition which sets in motion an element e
with definite velocity and direction so as to traverse the distance doc
in the time dt. Let us suppose that the activity and effect of C±
continue through the duration of dt, but cease when at the end of that
interval e has traversed the short distance dx, has thus changed its
position, and has for this reason come under the influence of the new
condition C2. This again, if operative during an equal time dt, will
make another equal journey dx possible for e, and will cease when e
has traversed it. It is plain that as long as we treat d ' x as a real
distance however small, the element e, acted upon by this series of
successively annihilated influences, will pass through a finite length of
space in the time /.
But our assumptions, as we made them just now, have to be
modified. Cl must cease to act not when, but before, e has arrived at
the extreme point of the first distance dx; by the time e has accom
plished the smallest portion of that short distance its position would
be changed, and would no longer be that which acted upon it as the
motive impulse C^ ; if in spite of this we suppose e to traverse the
whole distance dx in consequence of the impulse C\, the only possible
reason for its doing so will be the postulated validity of the law of
persistence ; the motion produced by Cl will have lasted after C^ itself
had ceased to exist or act. But if we do not regard this law as valid,
then not even the smallest portion of the short journey in question will
really be achieved ; the moment that Cx so much as threatens to
change the place of e, and so transform itself into C2, the determining-
force with which it purposed to produce this result must disappear at
once, and the matter will never get as far as the entrance into action
of the fresh condition C2 which could maintain the motion ; for the
motion never begins. If y is a function of x, there may be a finite
integral of the formula ydx as long as we regard dx as a real magni
tude ; and the calculation would be more exact as this interval is less
for which we take a value of_>> as constant; but the whole integral
becomes o, if we regard d x as vanishing entirely.
CHAPTER iv.] * Persistence ' indispensable to Action. 279
In the present case we should apply this common mode of repre
sentation as follows ; if y is the velocity generated by Cv or existing
along with some initial value of x, according to the law of Persistence
this y will hold good for the whole interval for which the integral is
required. The succeeding condition C2 will be partly satisfied, in
respect of what it has in common with Cv by the motion y which
already takes place in consequence of Cl ; only that in which C2
deviates from Cl is a fresh active condition whose consequence dy, a
positive or negative increment of velocity, continues in like manner
from that moment through the entire interval of the integration. It is
the summation of the initial value y, and of these continuously suc
ceeding increases or decreases, that gives the total of the result
obtained between the limits in question.
The tendency of all this is obvious ; of course it cannot tell us how,
strictly speaking, it comes to pass that motion when once generated
maintains itself; but still we can see that the law of Persistence is not
a marvellous novelty of which it might be questioned whether it would
or would not be true of a given natural motion ; in fact its truth is an
integral part of our idea of motion. Either there is no such thing
as motion, or, if and as there is, it necessarily obeys the law of Per
sistence, and could not come to pass at all if really and strictly the
effect produced had to end with the cause that produced it. For the
law holds good not merely as applied to motion, but with this more
general significance. No condition can act without having a result
which is, speaking generally, a modification of the state of things that
contained the stimulus or impulse to action ; and therefore apart from
the principle of Persistence no result could ever be reached ; the exci
tation would begin to be inactive at the moment in which it began
to act.
164. If two elements change their distance from one another in
space, real motion must in any case have occurred ; but it remains
doubtful which of the two moved or whether both did so, and in the
latter case the same new position may have been brought about either
by opposite motions of the two, or by motions in the same direction
but of different amount. This possibility of interpreting what to our
perception is the same result by different constructions continues to
exist most obviously as long as we look exclusively to the reciprocal
relations of two elements without regard to their common environ
ment ; nor does it cease when we consider the latter also ; only in
that case the possible constructions will not all seem equally appro
priate. We should prefer to regard as in motion the element which
280 Of Motion. . [BOOK ii.
is alone in altering its position relatively to many which retain their
reciprocal situations ; still there is nothing to prevent us from con
ceiving that one as at rest, and the whole system of the numerous
others as moving in the opposite direction. I need not pursue the
advantages which we gain in practice from this plasticity of our ideas;
but the casuistic difficulties which metaphysic attaches to this Rela
tivity of motion, seem to me to rest on mere misapprehensions.
Let us conceive to begin with a solitary element in a perfectly void
world of space ; is there any meaning in saying that it moves, and
that in a particular direction ? Again, in what can its motion consist,
seeing that the element cannot by moving alter its relations to related
points, as there are none, while we should not even be able to dis
tinguish the direction in which it would move from the other directions
in which it would not move ? I think we must answer without
hesitation : as long as we adhere to ordinary ideas by speaking of
real space, and by setting down the traversing of it under whatever
condition as a possible occurrence, there is no reason against re
garding the motion of this solitary element as one which actually takes
place, and none therefore against recognising so-called ' absolute
motion ' as a reality. If perfectly empty space is wholly devoid of
related points for purposes of comparison, even of distinctions between
the quarters of the heavens, still this does not plunge the motion itself
into any such ambiguity or indefiniteness of nature as to prohibit it
from actually occurring ; only we lose all possibility of designating
what occurs. However little we may be in a position to distinguish
intelligibly between the point z which is in the direction of the moving
object e and other points which are not, still it would be distinct from
all others as long as we regard as real the extension of space which
by its definite position towards all other points it helps to constitute.
And however little we could distinguish the direction e z in which e
moves from other directions, before we had a given line in a par
ticular plane which would define the position of e z by help of the
angle formed between them, still ez would be in itself a perfectly
definite direction ; for such an angle would not be capable of being
ever ascertained and determined, unless the position of ez were
already unambiguously fixed at the moment when we applied our
standard of comparison in order to define it.
So the assertion that a motion is real is certainly not dependent for ad-
missibility on the implication of a change of relations in which the real
element in motion stands to others like it. Indeed, during every moment
for which we conceive a previously attained velocity to continue ac-
CHAPTER iv.] 'Relativity' of Motion. 281
cording to the law of persistence, the moving element moves with
precisely the kind of reality which is held in the above case to be of
doubtful possibility. True, in this case we are in a position to assign
the direction of the motion, within a world in which it took place, by
relations to other realities and to the space which they divide and
indicate. Still all these relations in this case only enter into considera
tion as interfering or modifying causes ; the persistent velocity of the
element, which we must not leave out of our calculation, is in itself, in
fact, simply such a motion of a solitary element that takes no account
of anything else. Thus, so far from being a doubtful case, it is truer
to say that absolute motion is an occurrence which is really contained
in all motion that takes place, only latent under other accretions. On
the other hand, if we intended to acknowledge no motion but what is
relative, in what way should we suppose it to take place? If we under
stand by it one which involves a real and assignable change of relative
position on the part of the elements, how can this change have arisen
unless one or several of the elements in order to approach or to
separate from each other had actually traversed the lengths of space
which form the interval that distinguishes their new place from their
old ? But suppose we understood by relative motion one which was
merely apparent, in which the real distances between pairs of elements
underwent no change. Still it is clear that such an appearance could
not itself be produced apart from motion really occurring somewhere,
such that the subject to whom the appearance is presented changes
its position towards one or more of the elements in question.
165. Our conclusion would naturally be just the same about the
other case which is often adduced ; the rotation of a solitary sphere
in empty space. No doubt it would be absolutely undefinable till a
given system of co-ordinates should determine directions of axes, with
which its axis could be compared. But there is also no doubt that
the specific direction of the rotation is not made by these axes which
serve to designate it ; the rotation must begin by being thoroughly
definite in itself, and different from all others, that it may be capable
of being unambiguously reduced to a system of co-ordinates. All that
such a reduction is wanted for, is to make it definable; but what
happens happens, whether we can define it or not ; of course a
capacity for being known demands plenty of auxiliary conditions,
whose absence no one would conceive as destroying the possibility of
the occurrence itself. Suppose we had the clearest possible system
of co-ordinates at our disposal, and saw a sphere in a particular place
of that system ; still we should fail to ascertain whether it was turning
282 Of Motion. [ BOOK ii.
or not, or in what direction, if it consisted of perfectly similar parts a
distinguished to our eye neither by colouring nor by variable reflex
ions of light. At every moment we should observe the similar
appearance a in the same point of space ; we should have no means
of distinguishing one instance of the impression from another ; are we
to infer from this that a sphere of uniform colour cannot turn round
in space, but only a chequered one ; and even this only with a limited
velocity, for fear the different impressions of colour should blend into
an undistinguishable mixture to our eyes ?
Hence we may be sure that such absolute rotation about an axis is
perfectly conceivable ; in fact it is not in the least a problematic case,
but is continually going on. We have no proof of any action of the
heaven of the fixed stars on the motions within our planetary system,
nor is it required to explain those motions ; both it and the influences
of the other planets can never claim to be regarded as more than
disturbing causes when we are considering the revolution of the earth
and sun round their common centre of gravity; these two bodies
therefore actually move as a solitary pair in universal space. And
again, the earth, by itself, continues its existing rotation about its axis
without help or hindrance in it from its relation to the sun. So in fact,
rotation of this kind, the possibility of which is doubted, really occurs,
only concealed by accessory circumstances which have no influence
on it ; indeed the instance of a spinning top which maintains its
plane of rotation and opposes resistance to any change of it, presents
it strikingly to our senses. The idea of the reality of an infinite
empty space and the other of an absolute motion of real elements in
space are thus most naturally united and are equally justifiable; nor
will it ever be feasible to substitute for this mode of representation
another which could form as clear a picture in the mind.
166. As we have surrendered the former of these ideas, we have
now to reconcile the latter with the contrary notion which we adopt.
Our observations up to this point could not do more than prove that
the absolute motion of an element in empty space was conceivable as
a process already in action; what still appeared impossible was its
beginning and the choice of a direction and velocity out of the infinite
number of equally possible ones. This alone would give no de
cisive argument against an existing space and an actual motion
through it ; whatever inner development we choose to substitute for
this apparent state of facts as the real and true occurrence, the im
possibility of a first beginning will always recur. We should have to
be satisfied with setting down the fact of motion with its direction and
CHAPTER iv.i ' Relative is not 'Indefinite! 283
velocity along with the other original realities which we have to look
on as simply given, and which we cannot deduce from a yet unde
cided choice between different possibilities. In fact, every permanent
property of things, the degree of every force, and all physical con
stants whatever, might give rise in infinite recuirence to the same
question ; why are they of this specific amount and no other, out of
the innumerable amounts conceivable ?
I need only mention in passing once more, that the unavoidable
relativity of all our designations of such constants is not to seduce us
into the mistake of considering the constants themselves as indefinite.
The units to which we refer the measurement of a certain force g,
and in which we express it, are arbitrarily chosen ; but after they are
chosen it results from the peculiar and definite intensity of the force
that according to this standard its measurement must be g and can
not be ng. A semicircular movement which goes from right to left
when looked at from the zenith, will go from left to right when
looked at from the nadir of its axis. This does not prove that its
direction is only determined relatively to our position, but just the
reverse ; that it is definite in itself independently of that position, and
therefore to suit the observer's different points of view must be ex
pressed by different definitions relating to those points.
Undoubtedly therefore, the real world is full of such constants,
perfectly definite, yet taken by themselves incapable of being desig
nated ; they must be set down as definite even while they vary in
value according to a law, under varying conditions ; for, to adhere to
the example of the force above mentioned, its intensity under a new
and definite condition will always be measured by a function of g,
and never by the same function of ng. It is, as has been observed
more than once already, only by application of our movable thought,
with its comparisons of different real things, that there can arise
either the idea of countless possibilities, which might equally well
have existed but do not ; or the strange habit of looking on what is
real as existent to some extent before it exists, and as then proceed
ing to acquire complete existence by a selection from among possi
bilities. Therefore, if we recognise that the first genesis of real
things is altogether incapable of being brought before our minds by
us, though we find their continuance intelligible, we may accept
absolute motion in space and its direction as one of the immemorial
data from which our further considerations must start.
167. But it cannot be denied that one thorny question is left.
We admit all constants which, speaking generally, form the essence
284 Of Motion. [BOOK ii.
of the thing whose further behaviour is to be accounted for ; but here
we have on one side an empty space which is absolutely indifferent
to all real things and could exist without them, and on the other side
a world of real things which, even supposing it to seem to us in need
of a spatial extension of its own, is yet expressly conceived as wholly
indifferent to the place which it occupies, and therefore just as in
different to the change of that place, and incapable of determining
by its own resources the direction of any motion to be initiated,
although actually engaged in one motion out of infinitely many.
Sensuous perception may find no difficulty in such a fundamental
incoherence between determinations which nevertheless do cohere
together; but thought must pronounce it quite incredible; for the
endeavours of thought will always be directed to deriving the causes
which determine the destiny of existing things from the nature of the
things themselves. To say that motion is the natural state of things
is utterly worthless as a philosophical idea ; nothing is natural to a
thing but to be what it is ; states of it may be called matter of fact,
but cannot be called natural ; they must always have their conditions
either in the things or without them. Each particular thing, on the other
hand, cannot be in motion merely in general, but its motion must have
a certain direction and velocity; further, the whole assumption of
original motion is only of use by ascribing different directions and
velocities to different elements ; but as, at the same time, it persists
in regarding the elements as uniform, it is all the less able to conceive
such differences as natural states, and is compelled to treat them simply
as matter of fact, and indeed as alien to the nature of the thing.
In reality it was this causelessness that was the principal obstacle
to the recognition of absolute motion; for what, strictly speaking,
does happen if the advancing element e traverses one empty space-
point after another, without being in itself at all different when it
reaches the third from what it was when in the first or second ? or,
fruitless as the transition is, without so much as receiving an indica
tion of the fact of its fruitless occurrence : finally, without making it
possible for even an observer from without, were it only by help of
relations to other objects, so much as to give a bare designation of
the supposed proceeding ? And are we to suppose that a process so
unreal as this, a becoming which brings nothing to pass, must of
necessity last for ever when once stimulated to action, though to
begin with incapable of originating without external stimulus ? These
inconceivabilities have at all times led to some rebellion against the
view adopted by mechanics (though it yields so clear a mental picture
CHAPTER iv.] Relative Motion and Apparent Space. 285
and is so indispensable in practice), which makes the moving ele
ment merely the substratum of the motion, without any peculiar
nature which is affected by the motion or generates it by being
affected. It is objected that motion cannot consist in the mere
change of external relations, but must in every moment be a true
inner state of the moving body in which it is other than it would be
in a moment of rest or of different movement. Then can the view
which concedes to space no more than a phenomenal validity offer
anything satisfactory by way of a resolution of this doubt ?
168. Let us suppose a real element e to be in inner states which
we will sum up in the expression p. Then the question for us could
not be whether ep would produce a motion in space, but only
whether ep could form the ground of an apparent motion of e within
space for a consciousness which should possess the perception of
such space. We will begin by making the same assumption as we
made in the discussion of time1 ; that the consciousness in question
is an absolutely immediate knowledge of everything, including there
fore ep ; and is not based on the acquisition of impressions by means
of any effect produced by ep on the knowing subject ; and therefore
does not compel us to attribute to this subject any specific and
assignable relation to ep.
Then, I think, we may consistently conclude as follows. Such a
consciousness has no more ground for ascribing a particular spot in
the space of which it has a mental picture, or motion in a particular
direction, to the ep of which it is aware, than ep has power in an
actual empty space to prefer one place to another as its abode, or one
direction to others for its motion which has to be initiated. If we
want to bring before ourselves in sensuous form what appears the
reasonable result under such imaginary conditions, — we can only
think of a musical note, to which we do no doubt ascribe reality in
space, but localise it most imperfectly, and then only in respect of
its origin : or we must think of a succession of notes, which we do
not exactly take to sound outside space, but which still remains
a purely intensive succession, and has definite direction only in the
realm of sound, and not in space.
I should not adduce such utterly fictitious circumstances, were they
not about on a par with what is usually put forward by popular
accounts of the Kantian view ; a ready-made innate perception of
space, without any definite relations between the subject which has it, '•
and the objects which that subject has to apprehend under it. But
1 [Cp. p. 256 sup.]
286 Of Motion. t BOOK n.
in reality we find the consciousness in question invariably attached to
a definite individual being c, and in place of immediate knowledge
we find a cognition which is always confined to the operations of
e on f. Besides this postulate, however, something more is required
for the genesis of phenomena of motion in the experience of e.
Whatever the inner state p within e may be, and in whatever way it
may alter into q and its effect TT on e into K, still, for an e that is simple
and undifferentiated in itself all this could only be the ground for a
perception of successive contents, not for their localisation in space
and for their apparent motion. More is required than even a plurality
of elements, ep) eq) er, in different states of excitation, operating
simultaneously on a simple e. No doubt, the felt differences of their
action might furnish *, supposing it able and obliged to apprehend
them by spatial perception, with a clue to the determination of the
relative positions which their images would have to occupy in space.
And alterations of their action would then lead to the perception of
the relative motions by which these images changed their apparent
places as compared with each other. But the whole of the collective
mental picture which had thus arisen, whether at rest or in motion,
would still be without any definite situation relatively to the subject
which perceived it. The complete homogeneousness of this latter
would make it analogous to a uniform sphere, so that it could turn
round within the multiplicity which it pictured to itself without ex
periencing, in doing so, any alteration in the actions to which it is
subjected, or any, therefore, in its own perceptions. To make one
arrangement of phenomena a b c distinguishable from another ar
rangement c b a or a downward motion to the right from its counter
part in an upward motion to the left, it is essential that the directions
in question should be unmistakably distinguished in the space-image
for e itself by a qualitative mark ; then e will be able to refer every
action or modification of an element to that direction to which it
belongs according to the qualitative nature of the impression made or
of the modification of that impression.
The result of the argument comes to this, after the insertion of
some intermediate ideas which I reserve for the psychology. It is
true that a simple atom, endowed with a perception of space, might
find occasion in the qualitative differences of the impressions received
from innumerable others to project a spatial picture of phenomena
with a definite configuration of its own. But for this same atom there
would be no meaning in the question what place or direction in
absolute space such images or their motions occupied or pursued.
CHAPTER iv.] Position in Apparent Space. 287
What could be meant by such an expression in general would not
become intelligible to it till it had ceased to be an isolated atom
endowed with knowledge, and had come into permanent union with
a plurality of other elements, we may say at once, with an Organism ;
such that its systematic fabric, though still to be conceived as itself un-
spatial, should supply polar contrasts between the qualitatively de
finite impressions conducted from its different limbs to the conscious
centre. The directions along which consciousness distributes these
impressions as they reach it, in its picture of space, and in which it
disposes such images as appear to it of its own bodily organism,
would alone furnish consciousness with a primary and unam
biguous system of co-ordinates, to which further all impressions
would have to be reduced which might arise from variable intercourse
with other elements, e the subject of perception may then gain
further experiences in this intercourse, such as prove to it that per
manent relations exist between the other elements towards the totality
of which € can give itself and its body varying positions ; and then
the inducement arises to look in the spatially presented picture of the
outer world for a fresh system of co-ordinates belonging to that
world, to which both its permanent relations and e's varying positions
shall be most readily reducible.
But it will again be essential to any such fresh system that it should
be defined by a qualitative distinction between the perceptions
which are assigned to the opposite extremities of one of its axes * ;
though on the other hand what place this whole system with its inner
articulation holds in absolute space, or in what direction of absolute
space this or that of its axes extends, are questions which on our view
would cease to have any assignable meaning at all. For this is just
what does not exist, an absolute space in which it is possible for the
subject of spatial perception with all the objects of its perception, to
be contained over again, and occupy a place here or there. Space
only exists within such subjects, as a mental image for them ; and is
so articulated for them by the qualitative difference of their impres
sions, that they are able to assign the appearances of other elements
their definite places in it ; and finally, it is the thorough coherence of
all reality which brings about that each of these subjects also presents
itself in the space pictured by every other in a station appropriate to
the totality of its relations with the rest of what the world contains ;
and thus it happens that each of them can regard the space which is
1 [This alludes to the distinction of ' up ' and ' down ' furnished by the feeling of
resistance to the force of gravity. Cp. § 287.}
288 Of Motion.
in its own perception as a stage common to all, on which it can itself
meet with other percipient subjects than itself, and can be in relations
which agree with theirs, to yet another set of subjects.
169. But it is still necessary to return expressly to the two cases
given above, in order to insist on the points in them which remain
obscure. We saw that they present no special difficulties on the
common view ; if we have once decided to accept empty space as a
real extension, and motion as an actual passage through it, then
rectilinear progress and rotation of a solitary element might be
accepted into the bargain as processes no less real although unde-
finable. But we should now have to substitute for both of them an
internal condition of e, say /», whose action TT on an e endowed with
perception produces in this latter the spectacle of a motion of e through
the space mentally represented by e. Now according to the common
view the absolute motion of e, whether progressive or rotatory, though
it really took place, yet was undefinable. The reason was that the
observing consciousness which had to define it was treated only as an
omnipresent immediate knowledge, possessing itself no peculiar relation
with its object which helped to define its perception ; therefore the de
signation of the actual occurrence would have been effected in this case
by co-ordinates independent of the observer ; and as none such were
found in empty space the problem of designating this occurrence re
mained insoluble, though its reality was not thereby made less real.
For us the case is different. What we want to explain is not a real
movement outside us, but the semblance of one, which does not take
place outside, within us ; therefore for us the presence of the observing
subject e for whom the semblance is supposed to be forthcoming, and
the definite relation of <• to the external efficient cause of this semblance,
is not merely the condition of a possible designation and definition of
the apparent motion, but is at the same time the condition of its
occurrence, as apparent. So we too, within the phenomenal world
which we represent to our minds, may accept the progress or rotation
of a solitary e for a real occurrence, if we do not forget to include
ourselves in the conception as the observer e, in whose mind alone
there can be a semblance at all. For then there must in any case
be a reaction and a varying one between e and e as elements in one
and the same world, and it is the way in which the action of e on us
changes from TT to K while e is itself undergoing an inner modification,
that will define the direction of the apparent motion in question with
reference to some system of co-ordinates with which we must imagine
the space-perceiving e to be equipped from the first if its universal
CHAPTER iv.] ' States ' corresponding to Motion. 289
perception is to admit of any method of application to particular
things.
170. Still I feel that these doctrines are inadequate, as strongly as I
am persuaded that they are correct ; they leave in obscurity a particular
point on which I will not pretend to see more clearly than others. It
concerns that transition of e from one inner state to another which in
acting on us produces for us the semblance of a motion of e. It must of
course be conceived as going on at times when it does not act on us, or
before it begins to act on us ; and at those times it can be nothing but an
inner unspatial occurrence which has a capacity of appearing at some
later time as motion in space by means of that action upon us which it
is for the moment without. Here we are obstructed by an inconvenience
of our doctrine which I regret, but cannot remove ; we have no life
like idea of inner states of things. We are forced to assume them in
order to give a possibility of fulfilling certain postulates of cognition
which were discussed above ; but we cannot portray them ; and any
one who absolutely scorns to conceive them as even analogous to the
mental states which we experience in ourselves, has no possible image
or illustration of the constitution by help of which they accomplish this
fulfilment of essential requirements.
This lack of pictorial realisation would not in itself be a hindrance
to a metaphysical enquiry; but it becomes one in this particular case
where we are dealing with the conceivability of the motions in question.
When the element e traverses an apparent path in our perception it is
true that the beginning of the series of inner states, whose successive
action on us causes this phenomenon, must be looked for not in e itself,
but in the influence of other elements ; but still the undeniable validity
of the law of persistence compels us to the assumption that an impulse
to motion when it has once arisen in e becomes to our perception
independently of any further influences the cause of an apparent
change of place of the sense-image, with uniform continuance. The
same assumption is forced on us by another instance, that of two
similar elements e which unceasingly traverse the same circle, being at
the opposite extremities of its diameter.
We can easily employ the ordinary ideas of mechanics to help out
our view so far as to assume an inner reaction between the two
elements, which, if left to itself, would shorten the distance between
their sense-images in our perception ; then there would still remain
to be explained the rectilinear tangential motion, which, continuing
in consequence of the Law of Persistence, would counteract this
attraction to the amount needed to form the phenomenal circle.
VOL. i. u
290 Of Motion. [BOOK ii.
Now what inner constitution can we conceive e to possess, capable of
producing in our eyes the phenomenon of this inertia of motion?
Considered as a quiescent state it could never condition anything but
a permanent station of e in our space ; considered as a process it still
ought not to change ep into eq in such a way that the new momentary
state q should remove the reason for the continuance of the same
process which took place during ep ; we should have to suppose an
event that never ceases occurring, like a river that flows on ever the
same without stopping, or an unresting endeavour, a process which
the result that it generates neither hinders nor prohibits from con
tinuing to produce it afresh. This conception appears extraordinary
enough, and justifies a mistrust which objects to admitting it before
it is proved by an example to signify something that does happen,
and not to be a mere creation of the brain.
It is certainly my belief, though I will not attempt a more definite
proof, that mental life would present instances of such a self-
perpetuating process, which would correspond in their own way to
the idea, extraordinary as it is though not foreign to mechanics, of
a state of motion. Perhaps there may even be someone who cares to
devote himself to pursuing these thoughts further ; after we have been
so long occupied with the unattainable purpose of reducing all true
occurrence to mere change of external relations between substrata
which are in themselves unmoved, even fashion might require a
transition to an attempt at a comprehensive system of mechanics of
inner states; then we should perhaps find out what species are
admitted as possible or excluded as impossible by this conception of
a state as such, which has hitherto been as a rule rather carelessly
handled. Till then, our notions on the subject have not the clear
ness that might be desired, and the law of persistence remains a
paradox for us as for others ; I will only add that it presents no more
enigmas on our view than on the common one. The fact of such an
eternal continuance of one and the same process is actually ad
mitted by mechanics ; the strangeness of the fact is what it ignores
by help of the convenient expression which I have quoted, ' State of
motion/
171. I may expect to be met with the question whether it would
not be more advisable to abstain from such fruitless considerations ;
it is not, however, merely the peculiarity of the presuppositions that
we happen to have made which occasions them. Poisson, in § 112
of his ' Mechanics,' in speaking of uniform motion according to the
law of persistence, observes ; ' the space traversed in a unit of time
CHAPTER IV.] MotlOH and the MeaSUTB of MotlOH. 2QI
is only the measure of velocity, not the velocity itself; the velocity of
a material point which is in motion, is something which resides in
that point, moves it, and distinguishes it from a material point which
is at rest ; ' and he adds that it is incapable of detailed explanation.
I am better pleased that the illustrious teacher should have expressed
himself somewhat cavalierly on a difficult problem, the solution of
which was not demanded by his immediate purpose, than if he had
philosophised about it out of season. He, however, is not open to the
charge of taking a mere formula of measurement furnished by our
comparing cognition for a reality in things; on the contrary, he
justly censures the common notion as overlooking a reality to which
that formula should only serve as measure. Velocity and accelera
tion are not merely the first and second differential quotients of
space and time ; in that case they would only have a real value in as
far as a length of space was actually traversed; but it is not only
within an infinitely short distance, but in every indivisible moment
that the moving body is distinguished from one not moving ; although
if the time is zero, that which distinguishes them has no opportunity
to make itself cognisable by the body describing a path in space and
by the ratio of that interval to the time expended.
It is impossible to deny this while we speak of the law of per
sistence. If an element in motion, that passes through a point, were
even in the unextended moment of passing precisely like another
which merely is in the point, its condition of rest would according to
that law last for ever. Therefore, we shall not indeed conclude with
Zeno that the flying arrow is always at rest, because it is at rest in
every point of its course. But we shall maintain that it would have
to remain at rest for ever if it were at rest in a single point, and that
so it would never be able to reach the other places in which, accord
ing to Zeno's sophism (which rather forgets itself at this point), the
same state of rest is to be assigned to it. Now if that in which this
essence of motion consists cannot exist in an indivisible moment as
velocity, i.e. as a relation of space and time, but nevertheless must
exist with full reality in such a moment, then of course nothing
remains but to regard it as an inner state or impulse of the moving
object which is in existence prior to its result. We may admit too
that this impulse moves the element ; for however it may itself have
arisen by the action of external forces, still Poisson and we were only
speaking of the impulse which has arisen, in as far as it is for the
future the cause of the persistence of the motion.
172. The parallelogram of motions teaches us the result of the
U 2
292 Of Motion. i BOOK n.
meeting of two impulses in the same movable material point. Its
validity is so certain that all proofs which only aim at establishing its
certainty have merely logical interest ; we should here be exclusively
concerned with any which might adduce at the same time the mean
ing of the doctrine, or the ratio legis which finds in this proposition
its mathematical expression as applicable to facts.
If a subject S has a predicate p attributed to it under a condition TT
this same S as determined by TT could possess no other predicate q ;
for every condition can be the ground of one consequent only and of
no other. Thus, the two propositions $„ is />, and SK is q, each of
which may be correct in itself, speak of two different cases or two
different subjects; mere logical consideration gives no determining
principle to decide for what predicate ground would be given by the
coexistence of the two conditions TT and K in the same case or in the
same subject. The real world is constantly presenting this problem ;
different conditions may seize upon an element, which they can deter
mine, not merely in succession, but at once; and as long as no
special presuppositions are made no one of them can be postponed
or preferred to the others. Just as little can the conflict of their
claims remain undecided; in every case a result must be generated
which is determined by the two conditions together.
I thought this characteristic of the real world worth a few words of
express notice ; it is generally presupposed as self-evident and atten
tion turned at once to determining the form of such a result. If we
are to attempt this in an absolutely general way, we shall first have to
reflect on the possibility that the conditioning force of the two may
depend on their priority in time, and consequently there may be a
different result if K follows TT and if TT follows K. In the case of
motion this doubt is solved by the law of persistence. The element
moved by the condition TT is at every moment in the exact state of
motion into which it was thrown at the moment in which the motion
was first imparted. Therefore at whatever moment the second con
dition K begins to act all the relations are just the same as if TT was
only beginning to exert its influence simultaneously with K, and so the
order of the two conditions in time is indifferent. But even so it
remains doubtful whether K will endeavour to give an element e acted
on at the same time by the condition TT the same new movement
q which it would have imparted to it in the absence of IF. If we con
ceived p as the motion produced first by TT alone, then the motion
resulting from the two conditions might possibly be not merely p 4- q or
p q, but also (p + q) (i ± 8) or p q (i ± 5) ; if, first, q had been produced
CHAPTER iv.] Parallelogram of Motions. 293
alone by K, the addition of TT would turn it into qp (i±e) or (p + q)
(i + *). It is obviously indifferent which of the two formulae we
choose ; the only function of the mathematical symbol is to designate
p and q as absolutely equal in rank ; the result which is produced is
strictly speaking neither sum nor product. Now as the order in
time of the conditions is indifferent, p q (i + 8) must = p q (i + f) ; and
this equation is satisfied by either of two assumptions ; that d = e, or
that both = o. I do not think it possible to decide on general grounds
for one or other of these assumptions with reference to the joint
action of any two conceivable conditions however constituted ; on the
contrary, I am convinced that the first has its sphere of application as
well as the other ; therefore though it is a familiar fact that the second
holds good for motions and their combinations, I can only regard
it, in its place in my treatment of the subject, as a fact of the real
world, such as is easily interpreted when established on other evidence,
but such as in default of that confirmation could not be reliably proved
a priori. The meaning of this fact then is, that n simultaneous
motions produce in the element e in a unit of time the same change
of place which they would have produced in n units of time if they had
acted on e successively, each beginning at the place which e had
already reached. It is unnecessary to observe how the final place of e
and also, as the same relations hold good for every infinitely small
portion of time, the path of e as well, determine themselves by this
principle in accordance with the parallelogram of forces.
This behaviour of things is akin in significance to the law of per
sistence ; just as by the latter a motion once in existence is never lost
if left to itself, so too in its composition with others none of it is lost,
in so far as the collective result completely includes the result of each
separate motion. Only, the process by which this collective conse
quence is attained must be single at every moment and cannot contain
the multiplicity of impulses as a persistent multiplicity; it is the resultant,
which blends them. The expression p + q would correspond to the
former idea by indicating the two motions which may be allowed to
succeed one another with a view to obtaining the same result ; the
other, p q, would express the latter, the process by which this result is
reached ; namely that the motion in the direction p would be con
tinuously displaced parallel to itself through the condition q.
173. In declining the problem of a deduction of the law of the
parallelogram I expressly said that I only did so in its place in my
discussion. But if we make the ordinary assumptions of mechanics I
believe that the restriction of it to mere empirical validity is quite
2Q4 Of Motion. c BOOK n.
baseless. I find it maintained that all attempts to prove it as a neces
sary truth of the understanding have to meet the argument that there
is nothing in our reason to compel us to assume precisely this arrange
ment to exist in nature. There would be, it is said, no contradiction
to the nature of our reason in such an assumption as that the physical
or chemical quality of the material points and the mode of generation
of the forces brought into play had an influence on the amount and
direction of the resultant. For instance, forces of electric origin
might influence degree and direction of the resultant differently from
forces of gravitation, or attractive forces differently from repulsive ; it
is admitted that this is not the case, but alleged that it is only expe
rience that tells us so. As against this argument I must remind my
readers that the general science of mechanics treats of forces only
in as far as they are causes of perfectly homogeneous motions, dis
tinguished by nothing but direction, velocity, and intensity, and not
with reference to other and secret properties. The law of the paral
lelogram applies directly to none but the above motions, and to them
only as already imparted and so brought under the uniform law of
persistence ; and this application excludes all reference to the history
of what precedes their origin. In the same way the movable elements
are taken to be simply and solely substrata of motion, and perfectly
indifferent to it. That component, with respect to which they are
purely homogeneous masses possessing a quantitatively measurable
influence on the course of their motions only by the resistance of
inertia, is conceived as standing out separately to begin with from the
rest of their qualitative nature.
Granting these postulates our reason has no longer a number of
possible cases before it ; on the contrary, it is certain that two motions
which are nothing but changes of place, and have no force behind them
which can influence their persistence, can produce no more than their
sum if they are similar, or their difference if they are opposed. This
determines the maximum and minimum of the change, because no
increase or diminution of what exists can take place without a reason.
But supposing that there are other relations between two motions
besides complete agreement and complete opposition, it is equally
certain that if the nature of the case admits of both impulses being
obeyed at once both will have to be satisfied as far as it admits;
for again, nothing can be subtracted from their complete satisfaction
unless the new phenomenon of subtraction has a compelling cause
that hinders the complete continuance of what already exists. Now
it is the nature of space which in virtue of the infinite variety of
CHAPTER IV.] MotlOHS UOt FoTCCS. 2Q5
directions possible in it admits of these relations of imperfect oppo
sition between motions. And this same nature of space, by permitting
the different directions to be combined, and compensated by each
other, makes possible the complete and simultaneous fulfilment of the
different impulses ; and therefore the determination of the result in
accordance with the law of the parallelogram is of course a necessity
and there is no alternative which Can be treated as equally possible.
This was the proper occasion to notice the objection just refuted ; for
as long as the question was how the inner movements of things modify
each other it was possible for the total result of two simultaneous
impulses to be an increase or diminution of the phenomenon in
question dependent on the qualitative peculiarities of the impulse
itself. But when it comes to be decided that their results in the e
which is acted on are nothing but two homogeneous motions, and when
these motions come to be regarded as already produced or as commu
nicated to e, then the further composition of the motions can only
result according to a simple law that regards what they are at the
moment and not the utterly extinct history of their past.
CHAPTER V.
The theoretical construction of Materiality.
174. THE elements of Real Existence have hitherto been spoken
of only in so far as regards the positions occupied by them in Space
and the changes in those positions ; as regards the form and nature
of that which takes up and changes its positions, we have been silent.
This latter question, which at the point we have now reached we
shall be called on to consider, is usually stated as the theoretical con
struction of Matter. If I were to give this name to the following
investigations, it could only be with the reservation that I under
stand the philosophical problem which is commonly designated by
it in a changed sense. For this Matter, the construction of which
is required, is not a ready-made fact open to observation. Real
Existence — as known to us in Space — consists merely of an in
definite number of individual objects variously distinguished by
inherent differences in their sensible qualities. At the same time,
however, we learn by observation and comparison of these objects to
perceive a number of common properties in which they all, to a
greater or less extent, participate. They are all alike extended in
space ; all alike show a certain tendency to maintain their positions
against any attempt to change them ; they all oppose a certain vis
inertiae to any efforts to move them. These common properties of
things, which are consistent also with the most manifold differences,
may be classed together under the generic name Materiality, and
Matter would then be a general term standing for anything which
participated, to whatever extent, in the above-mentioned modes of
behaviour. The problem of philosophy would be to determine what
is the subject of which these are the attributes, and under what con
ditions there arise in their successive grades the forms of existence
and of action which we comprehend under the name of 'Materiality/
A general consideration of these questions must have regard to two
possible modes of answering them. Conceivably the Real Existence
which appears to us under forms of action so homogeneous, may be
fs 'Matter' a homogeneous reality ? 297
not merely of like, but of quite identical nature throughout, and may
owe the differences which characterise it to subsequent accessory con
ditions. But it is equally conceivable, that Beings originally distinct,
and such as cannot be comprehended in the totality of their nature
under any one notion, should yet be bound by the plan of the world,
in which they are all included, to express their own inmost and hetero
geneous Being, where they come into mutual relations, in a language
of common currency, i. e. by means of the properties of matter.
175. I shall not now attempt to determine, whether the present
age with its more extended knowledge of nature has discovered
grounds decisively favouring the first of these suppositions — what is
certain is, that the ancients, who first propounded this view, proceeded
on no such sufficient grounds. The conception of an attribute
admitting of being applied to things differing from each other, they
hastily transformed into the conception of a real identical subject
underlying the varieties of phenomena. This example has unfortunately
been very generally followed by Philosophy in subsequent times, and
the days are still quite recent when the most strenuous attempts were
made to construct this universal substratum, though even if it had
been shown to exist, it would have been most difficult, if not altogether
impossible, to deduce from it the different material bodies to the
explanation of which it was supposed to be necessary. In any case,
this universal matter could not have been adequately determined by
reference to those predicates which constitute its materiality. For, all of
them, extension, reaction, vis mer/iae, denote merely the manner or mode
in which a thing behaves or is related. They do not in any way touch
the nature of that to which these changes of behaviour are attributed.
There are two ways in which it may be attempted to get the better
of this difficulty. As we are under no obligation to lay claim to
universal knowledge, so it may simply be granted, that Matter is a
real determinate thing, but known to us and intelligible only in respect
of its behaviour. This is roughly the point of view which is adopted
by Physical Science. Science distinguishes that which is extended
and operative in space from the empty environment in which it
appears. But it leaves the original nature of this substratum unde
fined, or ascribes to it only such general characteristics as are forced
upon it by the analysis of individual objects. By so doing, Science
gives up the attempt to construct a theory of a universal matter, pre
ferring rather to examine into the nature of phenomena singly, whilst
assuming the existence of a common basis underlying them. On the
other method, if we attempt to deduce the general properties of
298 The theoretical construction of Materiality.
matter from the nature of the real thing of which they are predicates,
we are met by a well-known difficulty. We convinced ourselves,
when treating of ontology, that to look for the essence of a thing in a
fixed quality and then to represent the modes of its activity as con
sequences derivative from this, was a method which could never be
successful *. We saw, that all those forms of insight which seemed
to explain the inner nature of things were only possible because they
were nothing but forms of vision, appearances such as a consciousness
may present to itself. What lay at the bottom of such perceptions, in
external reality, always converted itself into some kind of activity
or process or mode of relation. And however strong may be the
impulse to attribute these living processes to some subject, we had to
give up the attempt to explain the marvellous fact of active being, by
representing its activity as the mere predicate of an inactive subject.
Similarly, in the present case, it would be labour mis-spent to attempt
to describe the reality underlying the forms of material existence pre
vious to and independent of these its manifestations. There does
however still remain something to be done, viz. to determine the place
which this inaccessible substratum occupies in the sum-total of exist
ence. At any rate we must be clear as to whether we mean to regard
it as something absolutely original and specific, standing in no con
nexion with other forms of reality, or as itself, no less than its pro
perties, an intelligible part of the order of the universe. The attempt
to explain the origin of matter mechanically is now regarded as im
possible ; no theory of a universal matter can show how the existence
of matter first became possible and then actual. All that can be
done is to indicate the manner of its existence and its place in the
order of the world. Not until the nature of matter had been thus
explained, and so could be taken for granted, could the attempt be
renewed to derive individual phenomena by mechanical laws from the
universal fact of matter.
176. There has never been a dearth of such attempts ; I shall con
tent myself with a brief mention of only a few ; confining myself to
those which stand in the closest relation to existing opinions on the
same subject. According to Descartes, extension and conscious
ness constituted together the two ultimate facts of perception, both
being equally clear and neither admitting of being merged in the other.
Having made this discovery, Descartes proceeded with a light heart
to treat also the res extensa and the res cogitans as equally simple
and clear. He considered that these were the two original elements
1 [Cp. Bk. I. Chap. 2, § 22.]
CHAPTER v.] Descartes and Spinoza. 299
of the world, and he maintained that they had no further community
of nature than such as followed from their having both sprung from
the will of the creator, and being involved in a relation of cause and
effect, which the same will had established. Doubtless, an advance
was made upon this view by Spinoza, in so far as he conceived of
conscious life and material existence not merely as springing from the
arbitrary will of the creator, but as two parallel lines of development,
into which, by reason of its two essential attributes, the one absolute
substance separated itself. At any rate, it was established that the
material world does not proceed from any principle peculiar to itself,
and of undemonstrable origin : the Reality underlying the forms and
relations of matter in space is the same as the Reality, which in the
intelligible world assumes the form of Thought.
But I cannot convince myself that Spinoza got further than this
point towards a solution of the questions now before us. Though
insisting on the necessary concatenation of all things, even to the
extent of denying every kind of freedom, he hindered the development
of his view, by introducing barren logical conceptions of relation, the
metaphysical value of which remained obscure. A logical expression
may often be found for the content of a conception by enumerc ting a
number of attributes co-ordinated in it. All that this really means is
that every such determination a is imposed upon the single object
in question by the given condition p, with the same immediate neces
sity with which in another case the determination b would follow upon
the occurrence of q. But we cannot tell in what consists the unity of
a substance, which apart from all such conditions exhibits. two original
disparate sets of attributes, leaving it open as to whether these are
eternal forms of Being (essentia), and as such help to constitute the
nature of the substance, or whether we are to understand by them
merely two modes in which the nature of this substance is apprehended
by us. The fact that in respect to the infinite substance every influ
ence of external conditions must be denied, makes it all the more
necessary that the inner relations which are contained in its essential
unity, issuing as they do in such very different modes of manifestation,
should be explained and harmonised. The striking peculiarity of the
circumstance that Thought and Extension should be the attributes
thus colligated, is not explained away, it is only hidden from view by
the suggestion that besides these attributes, there are an infinite
number of others, which though inaccessible to our knowledge are
yet co-ordinated together in the nature of the absolute after the same
incomprehensible fashion.
300 The theoretical construction of Materiality.
Again, every individual existence in the material world may be
logically subsumed under the universal attribute which is called by the
not very appropriate name extension, as species or subspecies ; but,
in the merely formal conception of absolute substance, there is nothing
whatever to determine why out of the infinitude of possible modifica
tions of the absolute substance which are logically conceivable, one
should exist in reality and another should not — or, supposing it to be
held that in the infinite unexplored totality of existence all these
numberless possibilities as a matter of fact are realised, there must still
be some reason why the events within the limits of our own experience
take place in the order in which they do and not in another. Those
two attributes of the infinite substance would, if left to themselves, be
able to develope merely the system of all possible consequences
derivable from them ; but such is not the reality which we find before
us ; in order to arrive at that we need either a plurality of underived
existences, or a simple plan capable] of being the reason why of the
possible consequences of those principles some occur often, others
but rarely, and all in such infinitely various combinations.
Once more, it is true that no modification of the one attribute can
be derived out of a modification of the other, and therefore thought
cannot be derived from extension nor extension from thought. But
the logical impossibility of deriving one from the other analytically
cannot invalidate the possibility of their synthetic combination in
actual reality, except on a view which treats logical subordination as if
it were the same with dependence in fact, and confuses a condition
with a cause. The necessary admission that in Being there are
elements which cohere and mutually affect each other, though in
thought they are incommensurable, cannot be replaced by the weari
some repetition of the assertion, ' ordo et connexio rerum idem est
atque ordo et connexio idearum.' Whatever reference this proposition
may be supposed to have, whether to the parallelism of the forms of
Being in the totality of the world, or to the combination of physical
and psychical functions in the life of each individual, as long as
consciousness and extension have admittedly no common term, there
can be no common term between the order and connexion of their
respective modifications. Their alleged identity can only be under
stood in the restricted sense that always and in every case the modifi
cation b of the attribute B corresponds with the modification a of the
attribute A, and that the change of a into a is followed always by a
corresponding change of b into /3. But there is no proof that the
correspondence which is exhibited as a matter of fact between a — a
CHAPTERV.] SckelHng and Hegel. 3OI
and b — /3 rests on any identity of nature ; or, in other words, that the
transition between two modifications of the one attribute is or expresses
or repeats the same thing in a different form as the corresponding
transition in the other. I cannot, therefore, discover that Spinoza has
advanced the explanation of the material world in its relation to the
spiritual. Instead of a metaphysical theory, what he gives is scarcely
more than a logical classification. According to this, material and
spiritual existences may be ranked under two disparate categories,
which, both as real determinations in the nature of the absolute, and
in all that is produced from it, are, not indeed by any inner necessity,
but always as a matter of fact, combined. It is quite possible that we
may not be able to make any advance worth speaking of beyond this
point ; but, in that case, we must admit that we have arrived at a
result which is worth almost nothing, and we shall not feel bound to
make any profession of enthusiasm on account of such a trifling
addition to our knowledge.
177. I shall touch only briefly on the kindred speculations which
our own idealist philosophy has developed more recently. Schelling
contented himself at first, as Spinoza had done, with the recognition
of that Law of Polarity, which as a fact constrains the absolute to
develope itself under the twofold form of Ideality and Reality. He
interested himself more, however, in showing the constant presence of
these two elements in every phenomenon, and explained the manifold
differences of things as arising from the preponderance of one or other
of them. But it soon became evident (as would have appeared even
more clearly if his demonstration had been successful) that he intended
to regard this duality not as a mere fact, but as a necessary process
of differentiation involved in the original nature of the Absolute. At a
later period, he was dominated, as was Hegel, by the thought of a
development within which the material world appears as an anticipa
tion of the higher life of the Spirit. Of this development Hegel
believed himself to have discovered the law.
It would be impossible, without going to extreme length, to give a
representation of the governing purpose of Hegel's account, which
should be at once faithful to the original, and at the same time
adapted to our present habits of thought. I shall confine myself,
therefore, to attempting to show that he has confused two classes cf
questions which ought to be kept distinct. After satisfying oneself
that the purpose of the world is the realisation of some one all-
comprehensive idea, and after being further assured that the arrange
ment of the forms of existence and activity in a fixed system is re-
302 The theoretical construction of Materiality.
quired as a means to this realisation, one may proceed to ask, what is
the place of matter in such a system ? what necessary and peculiar
function is served by it ? It would then be natural to speak first of
matter in its most universal form, i. e. materiality as such ; and we
might hope to find that the same inner process of development,
following which the original idea of matter breaks itself up into
certain definite postulates of existence, necessitated by the corre
spondence of the idea with the whole sphere of reality, would be
followed in like manner by the concrete forms which different objects
assume in filling in the common outline, and that these would be
similarly developed. No one now believes in the pleasant dream that
this project is realisable, still less that it has been realised. Still, there
is nothing unintelligible in the notion itself. What troubles us is the
obscurity of the connexion between this project and the second of the
problems I alluded to, that of showing how the postulates dictated by
the Idea are satisfied both in existence as a whole, and in the complex
course of actual events in particular. As regards the former point, it
may be sufficient to bear in mind that the self-developing idea is no
mere system of conceivable possibilities of thought, but itself living
reality. The same reflexion cannot, however, as often it is wrongly
made to do, serve the place of a system of mechanics, determining in
reference to each concrete existence in Space and Time why precisely
here and now this rather than some other manifestation of the idea
should necessarily be realised.
178. More in accordance with the scientific views at present held
is the teaching of Kant. I can remember how a few decades ago the
student used to hear it said that of all Kant's epoch-making works
the deepest were those which treated of the Metaphysical basis of
Natural Science. While admitting the worth of what Kant has written
on this subject, I cannot value it quite so highly. I lament, in the first
place, the gap which separates the results of these speculations from
those of the Critique of the Reason. The ideal nature of space which
is asserted in the Critique is here left almost out of account ; the con
struction of matter is attempted exclusively from the ordinary point of
view, according to which there is a real extension, and there must be
activities adapted to fill it. I lament no less what has previously been
observed by Hegel, viz. that there should remain such uncertainty as
to the subject to which the activities thus manifesting themselves in
Space, and so constituting matter, are to be attributed. That this
subject is what moves in Space, and that it is the reality which under
lies our sensations, these seem to be the only determinations of it
CHAPTER v.] Kant on Matter and Extension. 303'
which are not derived from what the properties of matter show them
selves to be by their subsequent effects. Who or what this is that is
thus movable or real remains unexplained. Taking into considera
tion the fact that Kant used to speak of things in themselves in the
plural, it seems probable that his thoughts on this subject did not pass
beyond the conception of an indefinite multiplicity of real elements,
an obvious hypothesis, which was likely to recommend itself to him
for the purposes of Physical Science. This view is confirmed by his
mode of deriving the differences of individual existences from com
binations of the two * primary forces in varying degrees of intensity,
which is his invariable explanation of matter as a phenomenon. Now
these differences of combination would have nothing to stand upon if
they are not based on specific differences of nature in the real elements
which they combine. Although, therefore, it is not explicitly laid down
that the Real elements are originally distinct, still this interpretation is
quite as little excluded, and it may be admitted that what Kant is
endeavouring to explain is not a universal matter, but rather the
universal form of materiality, together with the special manifestations
which are developed within this form in consequence of the character
istic nature of the Reality which the form contains. But, supposing
this to be admitted, we should still be at a loss to explain how this
real existence is related to Space, in which it thus makes its ap
pearance. If we refer back to the Critique of the Reason, we find one
thing settled, but only in the negative. True Being can neither be
itself extended, nor can the relations in which it is expressed be other
than purely intelligible ones. The problem would then have been to
show how the elements of Real existence are able to present them
selves to our consciousness 2 — in which alone space is contained — in
such a way that they not merely take up definite positions, but also
have the appearance of being extended in Space. Kant never really
handled this question. The forces of attraction and repulsion which he
mentions can only be understood on the supposition of certain definite
points from which they are put in operation by the ultimate elements.
Moreover, if Space which is continuous is to be continuously filled with
matter, differing indeed in degrees of density, but still such that no
smallest particle of it can be absolutely driven out of Space even by the
greatest pressure, and if matter is to an unlimited extent divisible into
parts which still remain matter, there seems to be nothing left for our
imagination but to conceive of extension in Space and impenetrability
as original and fixed characteristics of the real substratum, which
1 [I.e. attraction and repulsion.] a [' Anschauung.']
304 The theoretical constriction of Materiality. [BOOKIL
thus becomes the basis of further enquiry. But in that case, what we
should have would be neither a universal matter nor the universal
form of materiality. The latter would be merely assumed as the
common characteristic in real elements otherwise diverse, in order
that it might serve as a basis for investigation into the relations
subsisting between different material existences. This result would
not be very unlike that which is soon reached by the ordinary
reflexion upon Nature. Different kinds of unknown elements are
assumed, which owing to causes also unknown we come upon, each
of them in numerous specimens, at different points in Space. At
these different points each fills a certain volume with its presence ;
their presence is manifested by the changes of position which they
originate, and by the resistance which they offer to any attempts
coming from without to remove them from their occupancy or to
lessen its extent. In other words, we think that there are many
different kinds of matter which are distinguished for us by the different
coefficients which we are compelled to assign in each of them to
the action of certain forces or inherent tendencies common to
them all.
179. The application of this conception of force in order to
explain the fundamental qualities of matter has always been regarded
as the most valuable advance of Kant's Philosophy of Nature, though
to some it has seemed to go further than experience would warrant.
Kant himself does not appear to me to have allowed the motive
clearly enough to emerge which led him to this view, though there can
be no doubt as to what it was, and we may trace it thus. He mentions l
Lambert's account of Solidity as a necessary property of all material
existence. According to Lambert, it follows from the very concep
tion of Reality, or, in other words, it is a consequence of the Law of
Contradiction, that the mere fact of the presence of a thing in Space
makes it impossible that any other thing should occupy the same
position at the same time. Against this it was contended by Kant
that the Law of Contradiction could not by itself keep back any part
of matter from approaching and making its way into a position
already occupied by some other part. This objection is not quite
fair. We should not expect the physical impossibility referred to
to be produced by the Principle of Contradiction, but only in ac
cordance with that principle and by the fact of solidity which for
practical purposes, we assume as an attribute of Real Existence. And
1 [Kant. Metaphysische Anfangsgriinde der Naturwiss. Dynamik. Lehrsatz I.
Anmerkung.]
CHAPTER v.] Why assume expansive force ? 305
why should we not make this assumption if there is nothing at variance
with it in experience ? It is no sufficient reason against doing so to
urge, as Kant does in the course of his ' Proof of this 'Precept No. i '
of his 'Dynamic,' that to make way into a position is a motion; and that
in order for there to be a decrease or cessation of motion there must be
a motion proceeding from an opposite quarter, or rather a something
which can produce such a motion, a moiive force. For the view of
atomism according to which the smallest particles of matter are pos
sessed of solidity, though it would admit that motion makes its way
up to the surface of a body, would not admit that it makes its way
into the body ; yet, according to this view, the effects of the impact
communicated would not vanish without producing an effect at the
surface of the solid matter, but would be distributed from one atom
to another, or to several atoms, and so become imperceptible.
Whatever difficulties may attend the explanation of the phenomena
by this method, at any rate a closer investigation than has been •
entered on by Kant would have been required in order to exhibit
them.
Again, what Kant adds in his note is not to me convincing. He
admits that in constructing a conception it is allowable to assume any
datum to start with, e.g. solidity, without attempting to explain what
the datum itself is. This, however, he says, gives us no right to affirm
that the hypothesis is altogether incapable of being explained by
mathematics. It seems to him that such a view would only hinder us
in the attempt to penetrate to the first principles of science. But
supposing we were willing to go so far with Kant as to assume the
force of expansion, to which he gives precedence, would this be more
than a datum, which could be used certainly to explain subsequent
manifestations, but was itself taken for granted and would not admit
of being deduced from the nature of real existence as such ? The
point at which a man will declare himself satisfied in this matter really
depends in each case on his individual taste. There could be no real
necessity to follow Kant in assuming something more than solidity as
a fact pure and simple, unless it could be shown that solidity itself
is either impossible or inadequate. Now the question whether it is
impossible must for the present be left out of account ; inadequate,
however, it certainly is. The fact that no visible body is of unvary
ing extension, but all are susceptible of compression or expansion,
would, it is true, apart from Kant's assumption of a continuous
plenum in space, form no immediate disproof of the solidity in
question, though this obviously implies the allegation of unvary-
VOL. I. X
306 The theoretical construction of Materiality. [BOOK n.
ing volume. The atomic theory, postulating empty spaces between
its solid elements, would have a different explanation for the varying
size of substances. But all the phenomena of elasticity, in which
bodies resume their former shapes so soon as the external agencies
which determined them to change have ceased to operate, prove
beyond question that there must lie in the very nature of real exist
ence conditions capable of producing states of Being which as yet
are not. The form and extension, consequently, which an object of
sensible perception assumes, cannot attach to it as an original and
fixed property, but are rather a varying state of its existence, determined
by inner conditions inherent in its Being. Sometimes, the object is
permitted to appear in its true form, sometimes it is hindered from
doing so ; in the latter case, however, i. e. where the inner states of
Being are prevented from giving themselves expression, they make
known their existence by the resistance which they offer to the adverse
influences. These inner determinations may be spoken of as forces,
in order to distinguish them from properties. It will then be seen not
to be enough to ascribe solidity, as a property, though it were only to
the smallest particles of matter. The atoms themselves must have
certain moving forces attaching to them, in order to make the ever-
changing volume even of composite bodies intelligible.
Thus we may say provisionally that Kant regarded as fundamental
in this problem of Science that principle which we cannot dis
pense with even though we prefer the other principle ; but which may
very well help to explain that other principle. This solid matter was
not a fact open to observation ; it was not so even as applied to the
smallest particles ; it was an hypothesis. Hence, it could be denied,
and every occupation of space not merely by large visible bodies, but
by their smallest elements, could be regarded as a perpetually changing
state produced by the force of expansion, according as its action was
free or impeded. Stated in a few words the case stands thus. If
every material existence, remaining always indivisible, occupied the
same space at one time as at another, solidity might be predicated of
it as an original quality which it must not be attempted further to ex
plain. But, now, inasmuch as extension, though a character indelebilis,
is not a character mvan'abilis of matter, the extension which a thing
has at any moment is the result of conditions which though present
at that moment may vary at other moments ; one of these conditions
lies in matter itself, and offers a resistance, though not an insuperable
one, to those which come from without.
180. I wish to dwell for a moment longer on the difference to
CHAPTER v.] Force and Quality. 307
which I have referred between a fixed quality and a force. We have
been long convinced that what we ordinarily call properties of things
are really only modes which they assume, or manifestations which
become known to us as the result of their interaction. Things do
not have colour except as seen by us, and at the moment when in
combination with waves of light they stimulate the eye. They are
not hard, except in relation to the hand which attempts to move or
pierce them. As a matter of fact, then, we should be at a loss to
point to an indubitable instance of what we mean by a quality of a
thing. All we can say is, that we are clear ourselves as to what
we mean. By a quality is meant that which a thing is for itself and
independently of any of its relations to other things. Hence, in order
to exist, a quality neither requires these other things, nor is interfered
with by them. A force, on the other hand, is not, like a quality,
something belonging to things as such. In order, therefore, for a
thing to be what it is, we do not attribute to it any force of being ;
though we do speak of its having a force of self-conservation, in
opposition to certain conditions which we assume to be capable of
changing it. Our conception of a force, therefore, involves the thought
that the character of a thing is neither unchanging, nor yet on the
other hand determinable to an unlimited extent from without. Rather,
it implies that when the two things meet, they both undergo a real
change, the change of the one depending on the nature of the other,
but each at the same time by its own nature forbidding a change
without limits or one which would amount to a surrender of its essen
tial Being. If qualities attach to things in their isolation, forces can
only belong to them in consideration of their relation to each other ;
they are, in fact, conditions which enable one thing to affect another
and to place itself to it in different relations. It is in this sense that
Kant speaks of the forces which fill space ; they belong to the separate
parts of matter, and are brought into activity by these parts in their
mutual relations ; their appropriate effects they either succeed in pro
ducing, or else show to be present by the resistance which they offer
to other forces tending to hinder them. Here, however, it may be
objected that Kant did not confine himself to the exposition of
this process, but that taking this for granted as a universally pre
supposed fact, he imported into the discussion considerations of quite
a different order, attaching to the term 'Force,' which he selected.
I do not believe that Kant himself is liable to the charge here made
against him ; but the popular view of nature which was suggested by
X 2
308 The theoretical construction of Materiality.
his doctrines, has given rise to a number of false opinions, and these
therefore we shall now proceed to examine more at length.
181. It is no doubt most useful to be able to express the import
of an intricate relation between several connected points, by means
of a single word ; at the same time, there is danger in doing
this. After the word has been called into existence, not only are we
able to combine it with other words, but we are led to suppose that
every such grammatical combination has something real correspond
ing with it in fact. Thus, we speak first of all of force, and then of
the force of matter. The use of the genitive in this instance, implying
as it does that matter is possessed of force, or, that force is exercised
by matter, has suggested these interminable questions concerning the
nature of force as such, and its relation to matter of which it is a
function. Such questions cannot be easily answered at once, when
stated in this form. To understand, however, the applications of
which this conception of force admits, we have only to observe the
ordinary usage of Physical Science. Physics makes no mention of
Force in itself, but only of its effects, i. e. of the changes to which it
gives rise, or which it hinders. It is moreover against the Law of
Persistence that an element should of itself modify its own states ; the
impulse to change must come from some other element. Thus, an
element a is not possessed of a force p until a second element b is
presented to it on which it may take effect. The force is really pro
duced in a by the relation to b ; and it changes to q or r if either the
nature of the second element or the relation of a to it is changed.
Now, observation shows that there is nothing impossible in the
attempt to determine the nature of the elements, the relations in which
they may stand to each other, and the changes which they un
dergo in consequence of these relations. We can understand how,
when elements containing specific amounts of generic properties enter
into specific forms of some general relation, there are general effects
which follow and vary proportionally according to definite laws. The
proposition, a is possessed of the force/, when all that it implies is
fully stated, in the first instance merely conveys the assurance that
whenever a is brought into a specific relation m with a given element
I, changes of state will be experienced both by a and by b which will
go together to form the new occurrence, of fixed character and
amount, TT. Having arrived at this result we may then go on lo
speak of this fixed determinate force in another way, as if, i. e. it were
present in a in an ineffective and indeterminate form, its definite effect
being supposed to depend on subsequent conditioning circumstances,
CHAPTER v.] Idea of dormant Force. 309
e. g. the nature of the elements b or c which come into contact with a,
the peculiarity of the relation m or n into which a is brought, the pre
sence or absence of some third circumstance. To all these causes
the actual realisation of the result TT or AC might be ascribed. Even
this mode of statement, however, expresses no more than a presump
tion as to what will necessarily happen in a given supposed case. It
follows in accordance with the general law which connects the changes
of things with one another, that the circumstances being such as they
are, no other result could have happened. Each of the elements, in
virtue of its own nature, contributes to this result, and it is an allow
able mode of statement first of all to represent them as containing
severally and individually all the required conditions, and then to
rectify the error of such an assumption by adding that the force
potentially inherent in each element cannot become active until
the element enters into some specially determined relation. As
a matter of fact, it is this special relation which gives rise to the
force. If we desire a definition of force, we may say that it is
that quantitatively and qualitatively determined result, which may or
must ensue, whenever anyone element enters into a specific relation with
any other. It is only for convenience of speech that this future result,
which under given conditions we are justified in expecting, is ante
dated as a property already present though inoperative in the element.
This being understood, there can be no harm in thus speaking of a
force as being asleep and awaiting the moment of its awakenment,
according as the conditions, which together with the specific nature
of the element constitute all that is necessary to produce the result,
are present or absent. We shall perhaps make the matter clearer, if
we adduce other instances besides those of physical forces with
which we are more immediately concerned. Thus, it is the same
conception of force which we have in view, when we speak of the
powers of the mind, the revenue-yielding power of a country, or the
purchasing power of money. In this last case, no one seriously
believes that the current coin contains some latent property which
gives it its value. The possibility of obtaining a given quantity of
goods in exchange for so much money depends on highly com
plex relations which men enter into for purposes of traffic ; and the
value of the money changes not owing to any change in the substance
of the metal, but to a change in some one of the conditions by which
the value of the money is for the time being determined. There would
be no power of purchase in money if there were no market in which
to exchange it. Similarly we are quite justified in speaking of the
310 The theoretical construction of Materiality.
Power of Judgment as a property of mind. When we make an asser
tion in regard to any given matter before us, which is what properly
constitutes a judgment, it is certainly our intellectual nature that is
called into exercise ; at the same time, however, it would be nonsense
to speak of a power of judgment, which belonged to us before we
came to make use of it, or one which was constantly being exercised
without reference to any distinct object-matter. It is impossible to
say more than that we are constituted by nature in such a way that
the mind, when it is acted upon by impressions from without, not only
receives the impressions singly, but reacts upon them in that way of
comparison of their different contents which we call judgment. It is
only at the moment when it is exercised that the Power of Judgment
is living and present, and this applies not only to the reality of the
activity, but also to its nature and content ; these likewise being
dependent on the conditions which bring them into existence for the
time being. We may say the same as regards the conception of force
which obtains in Mechanics. Thus when we speak of centrifugal force,
we do not mean that this force is possessed by Bodies as such, when they
are at rest. We at once see that we are speaking of effects which may
or must take place when bodies are rotating or being swung round.
If we distinguish from these forces certain others, such viz. as the
attraction which bodies exercise upon each other, and call the latter
primary forces inherent in the bodies as such, all that we mean is that
the conditions under which such forces arise are extremely simple and
always fulfilled. In order for two elements to be drawn to each other
by the force of attraction, all that is required is that they should exist
at the same time in the same world of space. This one condition,
however, is indispensable ; it would have no meaning to say that an
element gravitated, if there were no second element to determine the
direction of its motion.
We shall not, therefore, attempt to determine what actual relation
subsists between forces and the bodies which are their substrata, be
lieving as we do that the problem itself results from a misunderstand
ing. No such relation exists in the sense that a force can in any
way be separated from the body which we call its substratum. Its
name ' force ' is only a substantive-name employed to express a pro
position, the sense of which is, that certain consequences follow upon
certain conditions. What it signifies is neither a thing, nor any exist
ing property of a thing, nor again is it a means of which a thing could
avail itself in order to produce any given result. It merely affirms the
certainty that a given result will happen in a given case, supposing all
CHAPTER V.] FoTCC IH Physical SciCHCC. 311
the necessary conditions to be complied with. Nor can we ourselves
attach any meaning to those hastily-conceived maxims, which are
popularly held to express the truth on this subject, such e. g. as that
there can be no force without matter ; and, no matter without force.
These equally stale propositions merely add a small grain of truth to
the old error in a more perverted form. It is rather true that there is
no force inherent in any matter, and no matter which by itself has or
brings with it any kind of force. Every force attaches to some
specific relation between at least two elements. On the other hand
no opinion is here expressed with regard to the question as to whether
it is possible for two elements thus to be brought in relation without
some force being engendered. It is dangerous to attempt to lay
down propositions by the way with regard to matters of fact, merely
for the sake of making a verbal antithesis.
182. If these considerations are regarded as conclusive, the term
force will be understood, not indeed in the sense in which it is
sometimes used, viz. as a Law according to which things take place,
but as an assertion in regard to each single case to which the term is
applied that we have in that case an instance of the operation of
the Law. Thus understood, the term will not suggest any meta
physical explanation as to why the particular facts must fall under
the general Law.
It is this sense which Physical science is content to adopt when
making use of the term. For the practical aim of science, that of
connecting events in such a way as will enable us on the basis of
present facts to predict the Future or unriddle the Past, it is found
amply sufficient to know the general law of the succession of pheno
mena and by inserting the special modifications of its conditions
which occasion prescribes to determine the nature of the result.
Science can afford to be indifferent as to the inner connexion by
which results are made to follow antecedents. It cannot be main
tained that this was all that Kant intended to be understood by his
conception of force. He everywhere speaks as if he meant to ex
plain extension not as a simple consequence of the existence of
matter, but rather as due to the action of a force. This is a very
different conception of force from that according to which it is
regarded simply as the connexion of phenomena in accordance with
Law. Clearly he means by Force something which is active in the
strict sense of the word, something which, he believes, will produce
real changes of state ; whereas, the counter-theory, confining itself
within narrower limits, asserts only that they follow each other in
312 The theoretical construction of Materiality. [BOOK n.
orderly succession. The popular view of nature which based itself
on Kant's doctrine imported into the idea of physical force all those
associations which are suggested by reflexion on our own conscious
activity. In order for this doctrine not to seem to be at variance
with the observed facts of the outer world, it had to be toned down,
and, in spite of the manifold contradictions which the idea involved,
the activity was regarded as Will or Impulse unconscious of itself.
These latter-day developments of Kant's view I shall for the present
leave to take care of themselves. It will, however, be understood
after what I have urged in the ontological portion of my work
as regards the relation of cause and effect, that this view which has
been made to bear so heavily on Kant, is one in which I fully agree
with him — I agree with him in the general recognition of an inner
process and activity, in virtue of which things are able to be that
which, according to the frequent expression of Physicists, it alone
belongs to them of right to be, viz. interconnected points serving as
the basis of ever-varying combinations, centres from which forces
proceed and to which they return, points of intersection at which
different converging processes meet and cross each other in fixed
succession. I do not regret that Kant should have refused to put
this view on one side. I regret rather that he should not have
brought us to closer quarters with it. The general position for which
I have already contended does not require to be further elaborated
in reference to this special case of Physical causation. An element a
cannot produce the effect p merely because there is a general law Z,
which prescribes that when a stands in the relation m to b, the result
p shall follow. No doubt this result does follow in the given case,
i. e. we who are the spectators see and know that it does so. But, in
order for the change itself to take place, in order for a to give birth
to an activity under these new conditions which it did not previously
produce, it must undergo an experience through being placed in the
relation m which otherwise it would not have undergone, and,
similarly, the effect p could never be brought home to b, merely
because the relation m existed between b and a. The existence of
the relation m must have been felt by b before it could have been
acted on. Hence, the results which arise in each case are not con
sequences of mere relations which subsist between a and b. These
relations, as we call them, are really inner states of Being, which
things experience as the result of their mutual activity. It is not to be
expected that this theory of an unceasing activity of the inner life of
things will be of much real assistance in the explanation of each
CHAPTER V.] Attraction (111(1 RepulsiOll. 313
separate fact of nature. It is a supposition, however, which it is
necessary for us to entertain if we are to cease to regard the world
from a point of view, which however useful it may be for practical
purposes is full of inconceivabilities, the view, viz. that the elements
of existence are without individuality and without life, endowed with
reality merely because a network of relations is established between
them by the agency of general laws. The usefulness of this latter
point of view, if considered merely as a half statement of the
truth, I shall not dispute, whilst at the same time I shall point out
how far it is applicable and justifiable, and when and where it is
necessary to recur to what actually takes place in the nature of
things.
183. Out of the multitude of opinions which offer themselves for
consideration at this point I shall make mention, first, of Kant's view,
according to which there are two forces necessary to every material
existence, the force of attraction, by which things are made to cohere,
and the force of repulsion by which they are expanded; the two
together forming a standing element in the countless attempts at
explanation which have been made since Kant's time. I must confess
myself that I do not feel much interest in these two forces. When
the point is raised as to how it can be that a given matter has
definitely fixed limits of extension, it is easy to see that there must be
some reason why it is what it is — neither more nor less — i. e. there
must be an attraction of the parts, which if it were allowed to work
alone would reduce the extension to nil, and there must also be
repulsion, which similarly, if it were the only principle at work, would
make the extension infinite. This is simply a logical analysis which
might be applied to the conception of any real existence which has
a definite magnitude in space. The enquiry does not become meta
physical until it deals with two further questions ; how, that is, these
two mutually opposed forces are possible, both attaching as they do
to the same subject ; and what that is which produces and main
tains them in such varying proportions as are required in order to
give rise to the manifold differences of material things in point of
extension?
The first of these two questions has been made a subject of in
vestigation by Physics. It was considered that to ascribe to matter
two equally original opposed forces would involve a contradiction in
terms. The attempt was therefore made to assign the two forces to
different subjects. The mutual attraction of the parts proceeded from
the ponderable elements, the repulsion was regarded as confined to
3 1 4 The theoretical construction of Materiality. \ BOOK n.
particles of imponderable ether ; and thirdly, an interchange of ac
tivities between the two classes of elements was admitted, in order to
explain those varying states of equilibrium between attraction and
repulsion which the facts required. Whether this last result was
secured by the hypotheses is for our present purpose indifferent. It
may be admitted that the reasoning is logically sound, though the
conclusion is only necessary, if, in compliance with the usage of
language, both forces are conceived as original and essential attributes
of the subjects to which they attach. How the whole matter may be
regarded from a different point of view, for which the course of my
argument will already have prepared the way, I shall now proceed
gradually to unfold, ignoring provisionally arguments derived from the
alleged ideality of space. Even if we adopted the ordinary view of
the nature of space, it would not really become any less difficult to
explain, why the mutual relation between two elements, belonging to
the same world, should be one of absolute repulsion, when this fact
would seem rather to show that the world to which they belonged
was not the same; nor would it be less wonderful that two other
elements, both of them, similarly, supposed to belong to one and the
same world of extended matter, should be drawn towards each other
by such an absolute force of attraction, as that if there were no
counteracting principle, the whole possibility of their extension
would be annihilated. Once grant that the world is a single
whole, and not a mere confused aggregate of existences, and it
will follow that its component elements cannot be governed by
any abstract principles of attraction or repulsion, driving them
continually out of or into one another, but must aim at the conserva
tion of the whole order, which, in accordance with the intention of
the whole, assigns to each one of them its place at each moment of
time. The force which proceeds from the collective mass of the
elements, is one which determines the position of those elements and
which, while it seems to reside in each individual element, really sets
itself against any deviation from the law imposed on all. It sets
limits to the nearness or remoteness of objects as regards each other,
appearing in the one case as the force of repulsion, in the other, as
that of attraction ; in both cases acting as a corrective wherever there
is a tendency in the object to oppose the requirements of the whole.
I wish to see the order of our thoughts on this subject reversed.
We are accustomed to regard the position of a thing as the result of
certain forces acting upon it. The first consideration, as I think, on
the contrary, is precisely the position which a thing occupies, as deter-
CHAPTER V.] ThingS and their PoSltlOHS. 3 I 5
mined by its nature and character, in the world-system, and the first
and only function which a thing as an individual has to perform,
seems to me to be to retain this position ; while attraction and re
pulsion we may represent to ourselves as the two elements into which
this self- conservation of things admits logically of being analysed.
In reality however what happens is that the self-conservation assumes
one or other of these forms according as the needs of the moment
give occasion to it. We must postpone the consideration of the
question, as to what takes place in the inner nature of things when
the place in which they find themselves at any given moment is out of
harmony with the place marked out for them. As a phenomenon in
space, the tendency to return to an equilibrium must necessarily appear
in its simplest form, either as the approximation or as the separation of
two elements. Hence it is possible to refer all physical processes to
motive forces consisting of attraction or repulsion. But it is not the case
that on all other occasions things are empty of content, and that
these forces attach to them merely for the time being. Rather, like
the gestures of living beings, the forces are merely the outward ex
pression of what is going on within.
184. Thus far, no doubt, the statement of our views has conveyed
the impression that we regarded the world like a picture having fixed
outlines, within which every single point invariably occupies the same
position and clings to it with equal tenacity. Such a picture would
be little in accordance with the facts. We have long known that the
world is never at rest and that the picture which it presents is for
ever changing. Yet, the whole case is not stated even when we have
grasped this truth. Admitting that the picture of reality is what it is
at any given moment in virtue of its essential connexion with the
arrangement that prevailed the moment before and that which is to
prevail the moment after, the forces emanating from the different
points of space must still derive their power to act on each separate
occasion from the law which pervades the whole. The connexion
between the whole and the part is peculiar to each case, and is very
different from a mere instance of the operation of law in general,
such as is known to us by observation and makes it possible to us
to apprehend the process of the world as the result of innumerable
individual forces working by invariable rules. I have, however,
already * endeavoured to show that this plan or idea cannot be made
real in this off-hand way of itself and without means ; rather indeed
that it presupposes uniformity of action on the part of the elements,
1 [E.g. §67.]
3 1 6 The theoretical construction of Materiality. [ BOOK n.
so that under like conditions like consequences flow from them, quite
independently of the place which each occupies in the universal plan.
Hence, even assuming that the world is ceaselessly in a state of flux,
our view that the permanent tendency of each thing is to maintain
the place which belongs to it in the system of the universe, and that
this is what gives to it its force, does not exclude the opposite or
physical view according to which the course of events in the world is
explained as due to varying combinations of constant forces. I
may add that the supposition of a number of forces attaching to the
same elements at the same time, but acting in different directions,
does not seem to me to be liable to any of the objections which are
commonly urged against it. No doubt, it would be unintelligible as
applied to two elements working in isolation, but it is not so as
applied to elements between which a connexion has been established
owing to their belonging to one and the same world. We may learn
to comprehend this by the experience of our own lives. Our actions
are conditioned by many different systems of motives, which operate
on us at the same time. The satisfaction of our physical wants may
e. g. be inconsistent with the social good. What family-affection
requires of us may conflict with our duty as citizens, and within this
last sphere we find ourselves parts of many different institutions whose
claims it is not always easy to harmonise. A like interpretation
must be given of the world in which we live. When we speak of a
systematic connexion between things, we do not mean a single uni
form classification in which we could find any given member by
following out one principle of division. Rather, there are many
cross-purposes at work, each of which requires that the elements
should be distributed exclusively with reference to its own satisfaction.
Each element may be stationed at the intersecting point of several
different tendencies which unite and divide the world. As long,
therefore, as two elements are considered as belonging to such a
world, there is no reason why their mutual activities should not be
regarded as the result of a plurality of forces acting simultaneously,
and differing entirely in the effects they produce in response to each
change in the circumstances of the environment ; owing to the
different points of view under which they bring the same set of cir
cumstances, and to the consequent variety of the reactions set up.
185. There still remains to be considered the question as to
whether it is allowable to speak of forces which take effect from
a distance, or whether those are not right who regard the possibility
of a thing's acting where it is not as inconceivable. I cannot help
CHAPTER V.] ActlOH at a distance. 3 I 7
adding to the two conflicting views which are held on this question,
a third one of my own. It seems to me that motion can only be an
effect of forces acting at a distance; to speak of action when the
elements are in close contact, I regard as a contradiction. Let us
suppose two spherical bodies of equal diameter and density to be
placed so as exactly to contain each other. If, then, the nature of
the materials of which the bodies are composed is such as to admit
of their reciprocal action, and if we are to disregard all possibility of
effects taking place at a distance, it will follow that every point a
of the one body will produce an effect on the point b of the other body,
with which it coincides. Now, I do not dispute that the two elements
may be affected in a very real way by reason of this coincidence at
the same geometrical point. But, whether the effects thus produced
are such as to intensify or such as to diminish the condition in
which the elements find themselves, i. e. whether they tend to at
traction or repulsion, in no case can these inner occurrences result in
motion, a and b being already stationed at the same point of space
cannot by any attraction be brought nearer ; nor could any force of
mutual repulsion, however actively manifested in other ways, avail to
part them asunder, there being no reason why the initial movement
tending to separate them should take any one direction rather than
another.
Nor need we confine ourselves to bodies perfectly coincident in
extension. No matter what form the two bodies assume, they would
never be able to affect each other's motions, if there were no distance
intervening between them ; for those parts of the two bodies which
were coincident would admit only of being affected internally by their
mutual action, and thus there would be no external motion. It makes
no difference as regards this conclusion, that effects are spoken of as
taking place between contiguous bodies, and that the ambiguity to
which this mathematical conception so easily lends itself, is made to
yield a perplexing solution of a difficulty which is one of fact. If we
confine ourselves to the case in which the two bodies are spheres,
their volumes can only meet at one point. Now, we must be
sure that what we have in view is a real contact of the bodies in
question, and we must banish from our minds all thought of there
being any distance, even an infinitesimal one, intervening between
them. As long as we have any such idea we have in principle
admitted the action of force at a distance, though without any reason
restricting the distance to an infinitesimally small one ; a conception
which, besides other difficulties, it is, to say the least, not easy to
3 1 8 The theoretical construction of Materiality, t BOOK n.
explain on physical principles. It is equally inadmissible to substitute
for a 'point of contact an infinitely small surface, or, supposing the
contact to be between flat surfaces, to imagine that the layers which
are in contact and which thus produce the effect, can have any, even
the smallest conceivable degree of thickness. It must be taken as
settled that the bodies which are in contact have their boundaries
common or coincident, in the first case, in a point without extension,
in the second, in a surface without thickness. Whatever way we may
try to turn these ideas, the fact will always remain, that real elements
which occupy the same position in Space will exercise no effect as
regards the production of motion, and such effect as does take place
will spring only from those parts of the bodies which are really
separated from each other by intervals of Space. As for a contact
which does not involve either separation or coincidence at the same
point in Space, the idea is intelligible enough as applied to the whole
volume of each of the two bodies brought into contact, but it has no
meaning as applied to a possible interaction of single points such as
we have been here considering.
This same observation holds good as regards the attempt to
substitute, instead of forces operating between different elements, a
reflexive power of expansion or contraction, in virtue of which a thing
assigns to itself a greater or less space of its own accord. If the
' thing ' here spoken of is understood as a material existence extended
and divisible, this power of self-extension belonging to the whole must
in every case be capable of being finally referred to the reciprocal
repulsion of the parts, these being already distinguished in Space. If,
on the other hand, the thing is held to be endowed with this power
in consequence of a real metaphysical unity prior to its multiplication
in Space, we shall then have to face another enquiry, which is for the
most part overlooked in these attempts to construct a theory of
matter, viz. this, How did this reality first get form and extension in
Space — that form and extension which are always presupposed, in
order that forces of the kind mentioned above may be furnished with
points to which to attach themselves ? This question we propose to
consider in the next chapter.
186. All that the above demonstration proves is that mere contact
of elements cannot produce motion. If, however, it should be found
to be equally inconceivable that effects should take place at a distance,
we shall be compelled to deny that motion is a result of force in any
shape whatever, and our task will then be limited to the attempt to
conceive of physical effects as taking place owing to the supply of
CHAPTER v.] Communication of Motion. 319
motion already in existence being perpetuated. But it soon appears that
the expression, communication or distribution of 'motion , though enabling
us to picture to ourselves results which are constantly passing before
our eyes, does not give any tenable conception of the process to which
the results in question are due. Take, e.g. the familiar instance
of the effects of impact on inelastic bodies. Suppose b to be a body
in motion and a a body at rest, then, when b strikes against a, we say
that it communicates to it a certain part of its own motion, and this,
no doubt, is an extremely convenient way of signalising the new fact
which has taken place, in consequence of the two bodies having been
brought together. We cannot, however, seriously suppose that the
motion produced the result by changing its place. If we may repeat
what has before been said *, it is for ever impossible to conceive that a
state q, by which a real thing b is affected, should loose itself from b,
and pass over to a ; yet this is such a case ; before the motion could
transfer itself from the limits of b to a, it would have to traverse, no
matter in how short a time, a certain space intermediate between the
two, and during this* time it would be a state which was the state of
nothing. The absurdity of this notion is here even further increased
by the fact that it is only by a free use of language that we are able to
speak of motion as a state at all. Motion, in fact, is not a quality
permanently attaching to anything ; it is an occurrence merely, or a
change which the thing moved undergoes. Hence, the very concep
tion of a motion, which is itself set in motion in order to pass from
one thing to another, is ipso facto impossible. But what should we
have gained, supposing that this inconceivability were a fact ? If the
motion has passed over to a, it is now where a is, but that would not
make it a state of a, nor would it explain why it should ever move a.
Inasmuch as it was possible for the motion to become detached from
b, either wholly or in part, why should it not continue on its course
according to the same law of Persistence which it followed whilst on
the way from b to a ? Why should it not leave a at rest, and again
become a motion belonging to no one as before, and so on ad infini-
tum ? It results, therefore, that this theory fails to give any reason for
the motion of the body which receives the impulse, and it gives only
an obscure reason for the decreased motion of the body from which
the impulse proceeds. Of course, it will be argued that both these
facts are due to the impenetrable nature of bodies, which makes it
impossible for one of them to find a passage for itself through the
space occupied by the other. But this impossibility taken by
1 [§ 56.]
32O The theoretical construction of Materiality. [BOOKII.
itself rather suggests a dilemma than furnishes us with a solution
of.it.
If two bodies cannot both occupy the same position in Space, and
if nevertheless it is this at which one of them aims, the question arises
as to how these two conflicting propositions are to be reconciled.
How they are reconciled as a matter of fact we see before us ; we see
motion originated in the one case, and a corresponding decrease of
motion in the other. But we cannot suppose that this happy solution
comes to pass of its own accord because it is an ingenious idea ; it
must rather be the necessary consequence of what the bodies are in
themselves, and of what they pass through at the time. If, further, we
bear in mind that in order adequately to estimate the result, account
must be taken of the mass of the two bodies, we shall be led back to
the conclusion that this impenetrability, which the communication of
motion requires, is an effect produced by the conflicting tendencies of
various forces, which thus give rise to motions in opposite directions,
so that bodies at rest are supplied with motion which before they were
without, whilst the bodies set in motion lose some of their velocity
owing to the resistance of the bodies at rest. But it is impossible to
represent such a repulsion as arising when the bodies are in contact,
and not before. For, if at the point of contact there is no inter-
penetration of the two surfaces, the contact instead of being a real one
becomes a mere geometrical relation ; it can have no influence on the
bodies themselves, but only on the limits by which they are bounded.
If, however, we suppose that the bodies do interpenetrate each other
at the point of contact, it will follow from our previous conclusions
that the forces proceeding from the two bodies can only affect each
other's motions at those points which are still separated by an interval
of space. Nor can it be said that the motion q, which is communi
cated to a body at rest a by a body in motion b, determines what
would otherwise be undetermined, viz. the direction of the two
bodies at the moment of their divergence. For, from the mere fact
that the mutual repulsion takes place at the moment that the body b,
whilst tending in the direction qt comes into immediate contact with
0, it could only be argued, in opposition to all experience, that b would
pass through a in its former direction q with accelerated speed, whilst
a would begin to move in the direction — q. It seems to me, therefore,
that under these circumstances we cannot but conclude that even the
communication of motion is ah effect dependent on the action of
moving forces, and that, in this case as in all others, forces can only
produce motion when the bodies are removed from each other, while,
CHAPTER v.] 'A thing can only act where it is?' 321
contrariwise, they are powerless to produce it when the bodies are
in contact.
187. All this reasoning would be to no purpose, if there was really
any insuperable difficulty in conceiving of forces as taking effect at a
distance. But I must say for myself that it quite passes my compre
hension to understand on what grounds it can be maintained to be the
most self-evident of facts that a thing can only act where it is. What,
we may ask, is the meaning of the assertion, a is at the point a ? Can
there ever be any other evidence or manifestation of a thing's Being,
than by means of the effects which are transmitted from a to the point
p, where we ourselves are ? Of course, it will be instantly objected :
1 No doubt, the effects of a and the directions which these follow in
the course of their transmission to us, are the only sources of the
knowledge which justifies us in concluding that a is at the point a ; the
fact itself, however, is independent of the means by which we come
to know it.' But what conception can be formed of this fact itself, if
we abstract all the effects which the given form of existence a emits
from the point a, where it is stationed ? Is the existence of a in
general a conception which has anything definite corresponding with
it ? and how can the limitation of a to the point a be understood, if it
does not give rise to any effects at that point distinguishing that point
from all other similar points of Space, where a is not present ? It is
an illusion to believe that the mere being at a certain place can give a
thing any determinate character, and that it acquires subsequently to
this the capacity to produce the effects which seem to be diffused
around that point. We ought rather to say, on the contrary : Be
cause, in the disposition and systematic arrangement of the world as
a whole, and in the world of Space which is its counterpart, a is a
meeting point for relations of the most various kinds, and acts upon
the other elements as these relations prescribe, for this reason and for
no other, it has its fixed place amongst them ; or more correctly — it
is this which justifies us in making use of the common forms of
speech, a is at the point a and acts from thence.
This, however, will form the subject of further investigations.
Putting this question as to the relation between real existence and
Space for the present aside, we shall make use of a very simple idea
to expose the fallacy of the doctrine here referred to. Let us suppose
that at the commencement of their existence things were stationed
each at some one point of Space, e.g. a and /3 : what reason would
there be why the interval a# between them should prevent them
from mutually affecting each other ? ' It is obvious and self-evident
VOL. I. Y
322 7*he theoretical construction of Materiality, t BOOK H.
that it would do so ; ' it will be replied, — ' the body set in motion does
not feel the impulse to move, until the impelling body reaches it.
There can be no sense of vision until the nerves have been touched by
the moving particles of the ether. That which is incapable of trans
mission has no effect, and is for us as if it had no existence/ These
instances, however, may be met by others. The stone falls without
requiring first to be impelled ; an electric repulsion takes place to all
appearance quite independently of any connecting medium. If any
one wishes to refer these phenomena to the communication of motion
already in existence, he may do so ; but he will be appealing not to
observed facts, but to his own hypotheses ; he will be employing
without any just reason the particular form which one class of effects
assumes, as if it were the universal form which must necessarily be
assumed by all other effects. And yet even these hypotheses, which
aim at the avoidance of all distant effects in the case of large bodies,
cannot help interposing Spaces between the infinitesimal particles of
the media which are held to explain the transmission of the impulse.
There could be no presumption in favour of the above interpretation
unless it could be shown that contact in Space was as obviously a con
dition favourable to the action of force, as separation in Space is
maintained to be unfavourable to it. But this is not true with regard
to contact in Space. For, it cannot be concluded that anything must
of necessity happen from the mere fact that two elements touch at the
same limit, or are stationed at the same point of Space ; nothing can
come of the contact of the elements if they are not fitted by Nature
mutually to affect each other, and when this condition is wanting,
spatial contact cannot produce it. As for the assertion that elements
which have this capacity to affect each other, require contact in Space
in order to make its exercise possible, it rests on that arbitrary selec
tion of instances mentioned above ; with those in whom it has become
a cherished prejudice it is ineradicable, but it is not in itself neces
sary, nor capable of being shown by the evidence of undoubted facts
to hold good universally. We ourselves, it is true, are not endowed
with any capacity for producing effects at a distance. The objects
on which we attempt to bring our activity to bear, we, no doubt, set
in motion by means of a continuous succession of intermediate effects,
which serve to bring us and them together. But this is not enough to
make us conclude that two elements, between which there is an
interval of Space, belong, as it were, to two different worlds separated
by a gulf which nothing can bridge over. We are compelled, in order
to understand their subsequent effects, to conceive of them both as
CHAPTER v.] Affinity independent of Space. 323
subject to the same laws ; a fact which we are accustomed to consider
as self-evident, without enquiring into the presuppositions which it
involves. This fact obliges us to regard, without exception, all things
throughout Space as interconnected parts of one world, and as united
together by a bond of sympathy to which separation in Space acts as
no hindrance. It is only because the elements of the world are not
all of the same kind, and, instead of being simply co-ordinated, are
related in the most various ways, that this unfailing sympathetic
rapport, by means of which all things act on each other at a distance,
is not in all cases equally apparent, but differs in degree of intensity,
being in some cases widely diffused, in others contracting itself within
narrow and scarcely perceptible limits.
Y 2
CHAPTER VI.
The Simple Elements of Matter.
THE confused notions which the different theoretical constructions
showed to exist in regard to the true nature of Matter, led us in the
first place to examine into the conception of the forces, the operation
of which gives rise to the changing qualities of material things. There
remains now to be considered the question as to the form in which
the real thing, from which these forces themselves emanate, takes up
its position in Space. The subject to which we shall be introduced
by this question is the antithesis between atomism and the theory of
a continuous extension in Space.
188. What appears to be the evidence of immediate perception on
this point must not be misrepresented at starting by a slovenly mode
of statement. Of a single continuously extended Matter it tells us
nothing ; all that it presents to us is a vast variety of different material
objects which for the most part are separated from each other by
clearly defined limits and are but rarely blended and confused together.
This multiplicity of things is all that can be affirmed at starting-
many, however, even of these things the naked eye at once perceives
to be composed of parts existing side by side, but differing in kind.
Others, which appear to be extended in Space with unbroken con
tinuity, are seen by means of the microscope to fall asunder into a
distinguishable variety of divergent elements. It is not proved by
this, but it is made probable, that the apparent continuity of the rest
merely conceals a juxtaposition of discrete elements. But, what is
proved for everyone who has eyes to see is, that substances composed
of atoms may produce on the senses the impression of perfect con-
*tinuity of extension. The frequently -urged objection, that a com
bination of discrete parts would never account for the coherent surface
and the solid interior structure of material bodies, does not really
require any metaphysical refutation. The sharp edge of a knife,
when placed beneath a microscope, appears to be notched like a saw,
Natural grounds of Atomism. 325
and the surface, which feels quite smooth, becomes a region of moun
tains. Spots of colour again, even if seen only from a short distance,
take the form of a continuous line. These recognised facts are a
sufficient proof that the nature of our sensible organs makes con
sciousness of what intervenes between successive vivid impressions
impossible for us, when the intervals are either empty of all content,
or such that they only faintly affect us. Though, therefore, the
appearance of continuous extension, no doubt, may correspond with
a real fact, it arises none the less certainly and inevitably from a suf
ficiently close approximation of discrete parts. Now, what induces
us to adopt this last hypothesis in explanation of the whole is this,
that even substances which seem to be continuous admit of being
divided, to an apparently unlimited extent. For, as the parts which
spring from this division retain unimpaired the same material qualities
which belonged to the undivided whole, it would seem that they cannot
owe their origin simply to the division of this whole ; but that they
existed before it, and formed it by their combination. Later on, I
shall give reasons for suspecting the soundness of this conclusion ;
but, at first sight, it is convincing enough, and in all ages it has given
rise to attempts to exhibit the parts of Matter as elements whose
metaphysical unity of nature expressed itself in terms of Space as
.indivisibility.
I shall offer some remarks — not intended to be historically ex
haustive — on the forms of Atomism which thus arose. Two points I
shall mention here in advance. First, let it be remembered that this
hypothesis of a multitude of interconnected points admitting of change
able and precisely determinable relations and interactions, is the only
practical means of satisfactorily explaining the extremely complex
phenomena for which an explanation is sought ; and that in contrast
with this explanation, the bare general supposition of the uniformity
of Matter, not less than the special one of its continuity in Space, has
never led to any fruitful solution of the facts given in experience. To
prove this would be only to repeat what has been so clearly and con
vincingly stated by Fechner (cp. his * Doctrine of Atoms '). Taking it
then for granted that the real world of nature is presented to us pri
marily under the form of an infinite number of discrete centres of
activity, I shall confine myself merely to a metaphysical investigation
into the nature of these centres. This is a question which Physics is
not practically called upon to decide, nor is her certainty about it at
all equal to the ingenuity with which -she avails herself of the advant
ages which the hypothesis offers to her. Again, I am entirely at one
326 The simple elements of Matter.
with Fechner in regard to his second conclusion. I believe with him
that the atomic view of the Physical world is peculiarly adapted to sa
tisfy the aesthetic needs of the mind. For what we long to see exhibited
everywhere and in the smallest particulars, is precisely this, organiza
tion, symmetric and harmonious relations, order visible throughout the
whole, and a clear view of the possible transitions from one definite
form into another. The demonstration of this point I likewise do not
repeat. I wish only to say that I have never been able to compre
hend the reason of that tendency, which for a long time past our
German Philosophy has shown, to look down upon atomic theories as
of an inferior and superficial character ; whilst the theory of a con
tinuous matter was opposed to them as quite incontrovertibly a truth
of a higher kind. If there were proofs at hand to establish the neces
sity of this latter conclusion, they should have been set forth in a more
convincing form than they have yet received. There is, however,
really nothing to admire in the theory of continuity, either when con
sidered in itself, or in regard to the results which have been derived from
it. It seems as if a mystical power of attraction had been given to it
merely owing to the mathematical difficulties in which the whole con
ception is involved.
189. The following are the chief characteristics of general interest
which distinguished the atomism of antiquity, as represented by
Lucretius. Theoretic knowledge of the changes of things would be
impossible for us, if we were restricted to observation of the co-exist
ence of qualities, and the modes of their succession ; there being no
fixed standard, by which to estimate their relationship, opposition, and
quantitative difference. We cannot be in a position to deduce from
such conditions any conclusion of real value, unless we are able to
exhibit the states which succeed each other as comparable forms of a
homogeneous existence and occurrence, or unless, at any rate, we
can show how effects disparate in themselves can yet be annexed to
comparable relations of comparable elements. The conviction that
this was what had to be shown, led by steps of reasoning which can
easily be supplied to the attempt to refer the varieties of sensible
phenomena to differences of shape, size, combination, and motion, in
certain absolutely homogeneous and unchangeable elements. The
working out of the theory in detail was extremely defective and rudi
mentary. It was not so much that it was left unexplained how the
sensible appearances which attach to these mathematical groupings
can arise out of them, but the impossible assertion was made that the
sensible qualities are nothing but these very mathematical determina-
CHAPTER VI.] A lOMlSm of LuCretiuS.
tions themselves. Setting aside, however, these imperfections, the
general conception of Atomism is one of the few Philosophical
Speculations of antiquity which have hands and feet belonging to them,
and which, therefore, live on and lead to ever fresh results, whilst
other theories, with perhaps more head, find a place now only in the
History of Ideas. The hard and fast line of distinction that was
drawn between the equality of the several parts of Being, as opposed
to the inequality of their relations, excluded all original differences
from the ultimate elements themselves ; these latter, however, if they
had been so completely equal, could never have served as a basis for
the manifold appearances which spring out of them ; they had, there
fore, at any rate to be assumed to differ in size and shape.
But this admission was no sooner made than it was seen to be in
consistent with the uniform oneness of all existing things. Hence, these
differences were held to obtain merely as facts, which in the order of
nature as it now exists cannot be reversed, but which are not in them
selves original, having come into Being only at the commencement of
the present age of the world's history. At any rate, I think I have
shown that Lucretius distinguishes between the multiform atoms,
which are the unchanging causes of the present order of phenomena
in the world, and those infinitesimal and essentially uniform particles,
from the combination of which the atoms are themselves ultimately
formed. He supposes that there are different ages of the world,
during each of which the combination of the atoms for the time being
is dissolved by the stream of change. It is only the combination of
the atoms which is dissolved ; the atoms themselves do not change,
but are combined afresh. At the end, however, of each age the atoms
likewise are reduced back to their homogeneous, first elements, and
these latter being again united so as to form new atoms, are what
constitute the material substances out of which are met the demands
for the phenomena of the next succeeding age. We see here a recog
nition of the metaphysical difficulty mentioned above, though not a
solution of it ; it still remains that the form which the atoms are to
assume is determined by an arbitrary cause.
The further elaboration of the system presents little that can
interest us. The common nature of what is real, which was declared
to be the true substantive existence contained in all the countless
atoms, might, one would have thought, have suggested the hypothesis
of an inner relation existing between them, and from this might have
been developed the conception of forces by which they mutually affect
each other ; forces, which would assume different modes of operation,
328 The simple elements of Matter. [BOOK IT.
according as the ultimate component particles of the atoms were
differently combined. But no use was made of this thought. The
communication of motion by impact remained as the sole form in
which things affect each other; and the resistance which they oppose
to the falling asunder of their parts was no less inadequately explained
than the invincible tendency of the ultimate elements to combine in the
form of an atom.
190. Passing over the various forms which Atomism assumed after
it had been revived by Physical Science, I shall mention only the last
of them. As long as extension and shape were ascribed to the atoms,
no matter whether all were supposed to be the same in these respects,
or, some to be different from others, it could not but appear that a
question was being solved in reference to the larger bodies by the
assumption of the smaller ones which was left unsolved as regarded
those smaller ones. It was impossible to go on for ever deriving each
atom from atoms still smaller ; some point of space must at last be
reached which is continuously filled by the Real thing. But here a
doubt suggested itself. How can the continuous substratum be indi
visible, if the space which it occupies is infinitely divisible ? That a
portion of space should be held intact against all attempts to encroach
upon it, would seem to be conceivable only as the combined effect
of activities proceeding from points external to each other, and
prescribing to each its fixed position in relation to the rest. Such
active points, however, would inevitably come again to be regarded as
so many discrete elements, from which the whole is formed only by
aggregation. It seems to me that the regression into infinity which
would thus result, could not be escaped from by any appeal to the
metaphysical unity of the essence which forms the real content of an
atom, and which preserves it from the division of its appearance in
Space. This distinction between the real essence and its appearance
in Space would be a meaningless rhetorical phrase if it did not suggest
questions far deeper than any of those with which Atomism is con
cerned and quite indifferent to it.
Atomism considers extended and tangible matter as reality pure
and simple, not as a mode in which Reality manifests itself, and
which requires a process of intermediation to connect it with Reality.
Now it is most difficult for many reasons to apply to this extended
Real thing the conception of unity. I do not mean to maintain that
the question is at once decided by the fact that in order for a form of
matter to remain unaffected by all external forces, it would have to be
credited with a simply unlimited power of resistance, such as would
CHAPTER VI.] Utllty of tJlC Atom.
be very little in harmony with the first principles of our knowledge of
mechanics. I do not say this ; for in the last resort there would be no
thing to prevent us from conceiving of the atoms as elastic ; and then
each atom would really undergo a change of form proportioned to
the force acting upon it ; only that there would be an accompanying
reaction, sufficient to restore to the atom its original outline, and pre
serve it from disintegration. No doubt, in a sense it is true that the
atom would require to have an unlimited power of cohesion in order
to admit of this process. But there is nothing in it inconsistent with
what we know about mechanics in other respects. The force inherent
in an atom would not be indifferent to all external influences ; rather,
it would react with a degree of intensity precisely corresponding with
the original stimulus.
But another requisition must be complied with if the metaphysical
unity of an extended real thing is to make itself felt as an actual fact
and not be a mere name. Essential unity of nature cannot contain
parts, which are affected by experiences peculiar to themselves, and
not shared by the rest. Every impression by which the point a of
any such unity A is affected, must at once be a state or impression of
the whole A, without any process of intercommunication being re
quired, to transmit the impression from a to b, or to the other points
contained in the volume. At all events, if the parts of A are so dif
ferent that what each experiences has to be transmitted to the rest, I
fail to see in what would consist its essential unity, or how, since a
system of discrete elements would necessarily proceed in precisely the
same way, there can be any difference between the two. Before pro
ceeding further, I must guard these statements against ft possible
misunderstanding. I cannot find that there is anything incompatible
between the essential unity of A and the existence at the same time
of different modes of its Being a /3 y, which are necessitated by different
influences acting upon A simultaneously : I only wish to maintain
that both a and 0 are equally states of the whole A, and therefore
that they are neither of them produced by influences which merely
affect themselves, but are both modified by the fact of their contem
poraneous existence in the same essential unity. Let us suppose a
and # to be motive stimuli affecting two points a and b in the same
atom. The result would not be two separate movements of these two
points, which at some later period merged in a common result ; but
in the point a, which was the part affected by a, the whole Real thing
would be present in the same complete fulness as in the point b,
which is affected by £. The immediate effects of both impulses
330 The simple elements of Matter.
would be felt equally at both points, and the resultant p would be but
one motion which would at once lay hold of the whole extended sub
stance. Further, since every change requires for its occurrence a cer
tain space of time, and according to the law of Persistence, leaves a
trace of itself behind, it is quite intelligible that a primary stimulus
a should not till after some interval show itself as the condition of the
next stimulus /3 ; and that a new impression of the kind a should make
itself felt in modifying the states connected with it before it modifies
those that are connected with /3. When this happens, we are accus
tomed to say : ' only one side of the whole Being of the thing was
affected ; the other remained untouched/ But by the use of this figure
derived from Space, we express most inappropriately our better and
truer meaning. At each moment, the whole essential Being is both
acting and being acted upon ; only it belongs to the nature of this
indivisible unity that the several activities which external conditions
elicit from it should, as they succeed each other, exhibit the most
various degrees of mutual dependence, and should be some more and
some less closely associated together.
Let us apply these legitimate ideas to the case before us. What we
should be entitled to say would be, not that the atom A responds
so immediately to the stimulus a by producing the result a that
there is absolutely no intervening interval of time, but rather that the
reaction in it does always follow upon the stimulus, at however in-
fmitesimally small an interval of time ; so that what takes place here
too is that A is first affected on its receptive side, and only after
wards and in consequence of this on its side of reaction. This
imagined splitting up of the substance into parts has nothing in
common with the false notion of there being in fad any such separa
tion between them, as would be the case, if we meant that an im
pression a produced upon an atom is confined to a point a, from
which point it does not pass on to the remaining points b and c, until
after some lapse of time. In such a case, there would, as I have
before remarked, be nothing left to distinguish the pretended unity of
this A from the communication of effects which takes place in every
assemblage of discrete and independent elements when brought into
active contact. If we are serious in supposing this unity to exist, we
must assert that every motion communicated to a point a in an atom,
is also literally a motion of the point a" at the other end of a diameter
of the atom. The motion, consequently, would have to be trans
mitted all along the intervening line a a1 in absolutely no time at all ;
and the ordinary rule according to which the intensity of a force varies
CHAPTER VI.] AtOMS which are not extended. 33!
with its distance, would have in this case to be suspended ; the effect
produced upon the remoter point a1 must be as strong as that pro
duced upon a. These consequences which, as it appears to me,
are inevitable, cannot be reconciled with the ordinary principles of
Mechanics. But if they are to be avoided, either the unity of the atom
or its extension must be given up.
191. Physical theories in favour of the latter of these two alterna
tives have assumed a variety of forms. Though they have not
been expressly based on the above-mentioned arguments, which have
led me to infer that extension is not a predicate of a simple or single
substance, but the appearance assumed by many different elements
when combined, they have originated in a general feeling that the very
thing which it was intended to explain in composite bodies by means
of the atoms, could not be consistently assumed as already existing in
the atoms. The extension of the simple elements was not a fact given
in experience ; nor was there any necessity for assuming it. All that
was required was, certain points in space, from which forces of
attraction and repulsion could operate with a certain intensity. The
unextended atoms, as the vehicles of these forces, served quite as well
to explain phenomena, as they would have done on the almost
inconceivable hypothesis of their extension. Hence, since all that
was needed was a working hypothesis, it became the custom for
Physicists to describe the atoms simply as centres, to and from which
Forces and Operations are transmitted, leaving it unexplained how
these real points are distinguished from the empty points of space
which they fill. This omission may easily be supplied. A real thing
could never by being extended in space produce an effect which it
was not in virtue of its nature capable of producing when in relation
with the other thing in question. At most, the space which it occu
pies could only prescribe the sphere of operation, within which
capacities due not to extension but to the inherent nature of what the
thing is, are exercised. If, further, it is impossible to conceive of
motion as produced under conditions of actual contact and if
distance is necessary to the operation of force, actual reality becomes
independent of extension in space, and the elements, though they
have indeed positions in space, are without either volume or shape.
This point of view grew up not merely as a conclusion arrived at
by Physics ; it is an ancient possession of Philosophy. Herbart refers
back to Leibnitz ; for myself, I prefer his own definite exposition to
the doctrines of his forerunner, which can only be arrived at by a
somewhat dubious interpretation. Herbart's ontology starts from the
332 The simple elements of Matter. IBOOKII.
\ assumption of countless simple substances without parts or extension,
which form the elements of the world. His construction of matter
could, therefore, only lead to Atomism : and, he tells us quite clearly
what are the original subjects from which the activities formative of
matter proceed, and as to which we found Kant's explanation un
satisfactory. Herbart distinguishes his own theory from the theories
of the Physicists, by calling it ' Qualitative Atomism.' He gives it
Z^ this name, not only to show that his simple substances owing to their
qualitative differences are endowed with distinct concrete natures,
and not merely substantiated abstractions of a single homogeneous
reality ; he uses the term in a far more important signification than
this to imply that from the inner experiences to which these differ
ences of nature give rise, all these Forces and Laws of relation are
\ derived, which the common modes of speaking and thinking in
Physical Science represent, without any further attempt at explana
tion, as predicates inherently attaching to the ultimate elements.
Being, as I am, quite at one with Herbart in regard to this general
conception, I regret that owing to a certain ontological doctrine,
which I do not myself share with him, he should have been
deprived of the fruits of these conclusions in constructing his theory
of matter.
The entire independence which he ascribed to each of the essential
elements prevented him from holding the doctrine of a pervading
connexion, in virtue of which the states by which one is affected
become the immediate condition for what is experienced by the rest.
Another of his assumptions, the origin of which I am ignorant of, led
him to regard contact in space as the only cause capable of disturb
ing the mutual indifference of the elements and forcing them into
active relationship. As, on this view, it was impossible for the
essential elements to act on each other from a distance, Herbart
became involved in the hopeless attempt to show how points un-
extended, though real, are brought into contact in order that they
may act upon each other, but yet not absolutely into contact, in order
that their combined effects may endow a multiplicity with an extension
which attaches to no single one of its component parts. It is a view
which requires to be changed only in a single point, though this no
doubt is a vital one. The simple elements of reality, on which the
\ constitution of the world primarily depends, must be regarded as con-
<> \ ditioned, not independent, and therefore as in unceasing relation to
) each other. By making forces which act at a distance emanate from
the simple elements, elements not empty but of a definite internal
CHAPTER vi.] A toms and Phenomenal Extension. 333
character, we can frame an intelligible picture of the forms of matter,
as systems of real unextended points, limited in space, and endowed
with forces of cohesion and resistance in very various degrees.
192. Now, at this point we might stop, if it were not for another
assumption which these theories commonly contain, that viz. of an
actually extended space, in which the real elements take up their
positions. The contrary conviction, in support of which I have con
tended, compels me to introduce some further modifications into the
view which I have first stated in order to arrive gradually at the idea
which I wish ultimately to establish. I continue for the present to
make the assumption of an indefinite number of individual existences;
an assumption from which the explanation of the variety of pheno
mena must always make its first start. Not much need be added to
what has been already said as to the general relation of these exist
ences to space. These simple elements, having as such no connexion |
with space, stand to each other in a vast variety of relations, which
only for our modes of apprehension assume the forms of position and
distance in space. It is for Psychology to supplement the suggestions
which have been already made by telling us how this mode of appre
hension is originated ; here, we are only concerned with the ideas which
we must form of the nature of Real existence, in order to make in
telligible the particular mode in which it presents itself to our sub
jective consciousness.
In the first place, then, to repeat what I have already mentioned, it
is requisite that we should reverse one of our ordinary ways of think
ing. When a certain element a is in a certain position a, we think of
this fact as if it was something in itself, as if it was in virtue of this
that the element had the power to produce effects on other things in
certain definite ways. But, according to all the results at which we
have so far arrived, we ought contrariwise to say : — That the element
a ' is in the position a,' can only mean for it, that it has received so
many and such impressions from all the other elements which belong
to the same world to which it belongs, that, if we regard the whole
mass of existing facts of that world under the form of space no place
except a corresponds to that which is assigned to a in the universal
order. Hence, the position which an element occupies must always
be regarded by us as the result of the forces that determine it, and in
so determining it, are in a state of equilibrium. This conclusion the
Science of Mechanics only half admits. It admits, no doubt, that
during every moment that an element remains at rest, the forces
working upon it must be in a state of equilibrium. But the con-
'334 The simple elements of Matter. [BOOKII.
ception still remains possible that an element might occupy a position
in space without any action of force whatever, and that forces arising
subsequently might find it there and act upon it.
Further, I have abundantly shown that by this systematised arrange
ment of unextended points, which I believe to be what constitutes the
world as a whole, I understand not the order of a rigid classification,
but an order which, incessant as is the movement of things, and
manifold and various as are the forms which the sum of conditions
at each moment assumes, maintains throughout a continuous and
unchanging purpose. The position, therefore, which an element
assumes, when it appears in space, does not simply indicate the
place which it occupies from all eternity in a classification of the
world's contents, but, rather, the place which, at that moment, was the
only point at which the changing conditions to which it is subject
came to a changeable equilibrium. It would be too simple an ex
planation of what takes place, to suppose that when two elements
a and b make their appearance at two points of space in close prox
imity, a and 0, they have been accredited to these positions owing to
the special sympathy of their natures or the intimacy of their inter
action. Rather they may have been quite indifferent to each other, and
yet have been forced into this juxtaposition, simply because the
demands made by all the rest of the elements and their motions
can find no better satisfaction than in the momentary proximity of
these two elements, though it may not answer to any vital con
nexion between the elements themselves. Reflexion upon this
constant motion of the world will cause us to modify our previous
view, or, at all events, to define it more accurately. The position a
of an element a, though always no doubt it expresses the balance of
the several forces for the time being affecting a, may also at the same
time be the expression of an unavoidable want of equilibrium between
the present state of a, and that state to which its nature gives it a
claim in the totality of existence ; an expression, therefore, of a dis
cordant Tension, which remains until, in the course of events, the
causes which occasioned it again disappear.
I make these remarks, in order to give an idea of the complex
kinds of relations which here present themselves, and in order to
remove the impression that there is any correspondence between the
appearance of the world in space at any given moment and an intel
ligible order of things, in which the position of each element would
correspond with the conception which permanently represents its
nature. But I hasten to add that this reference to a disproportion of
CHAPTER vi.] Is Matter homogeneous ? 335
states, in the above-mentioned sense, must not be mixed up with any
secondary associations of * that which ought not to be,' ' that which is
out of place/ or * which contradicts the purpose of the whole.'
Whether anything of this kind ever happens, whether, i. e. there is
anything in the world's course which can be compared with discords
in a musical progression, we shall not here enquire. The dispro
portion of which we have been speaking is primarily nothing but the
impulse to a change of state which is suggested by the course of
events, and which tends to or accomplishes the transition to posi
tions according as it is impeded or unimpeded. Turning now from
these general considerations, we will apply ourselves to the solution
of certain* special questions, which acquire from our present point of
view either the whole of their significance or a different significance
from that which is- commonly assigned to them.
193. Let us start as before from the supposition of a given plurality
of active elements; remembering at the same time how frequently
it happens, as has been proved by experiments, that apparently
different properties are really only the result of different combina
tions of a single homogeneous substance. The question will, then,
obviously be, must we, in order to explain the facts, assume the exist
ence of a multiplicity of originally distinct materials ? or, shall we
explain even the characteristic differences between the chemical Ele
ments as mere modifications of a single homogeneous matter ? The
eagerness which is now shown in favour of the attempt to explain
away these differences seems to me to be based to some extent on a
false principle of method. For practical purposes Science is, of
course,. always interested in reducing the number of independent
principles upon which to base its explanations, and in making calcu
lable the course of events by subordinating the complex derivative
premisses to a few primary ones. But not less certain is it that
Science cannot desire any more complete unity than actually exists,
and until the point is decided by experience, a unity which remains
still unknown must not be presupposed as certainly existing except
in cases in which without it a contradiction would be introduced
into the nature of the subject-matter.
Now, our idea of Nature implies three things, (i) A system of
universal laws, which determine the sequence of cause and conse
quence. (2) A multitude of concrete points to which these laws may
attach and so find their application. (3) Lastly, a purpose to realise
which these actual existences are combined together. Every theory of
Science admits the two first of these postulates ; the last is, no doubt,
336 The simple elements of Matter. [BOOK ir.
the subject of conflicting opinions. But wherever the thought of a
purpose in nature is cherished, it stands to reason that there can be
but one, and that all seemingly independent tendencies must be really
subordinate to this unity and appear as moments in its Being. Not
less necessary is the unity of the supreme laws which govern the
connexion of events. These consist not so much in the rules to
which various forces variously conform, as in the universal truths of
mathematics, to which any self-consistent world, even though it were
quite otherwise constituted than the existing one, would always have
to submit throughout its whole extent alike. It is impossible to con
ceive an order of nature, unless it can be determined according to the
same rules of measurement in every instance what results may be
deduced from the presence of active elements in given proportions,
and from their reciprocal interactions in calculable degrees of in
tensity. On the other hand, the actual existence, which has to
furnish these laws with cases in which they will apply, has to fulfil no
requirement but the primary one of being manifold. Nor is there the
slightest reason why a theory which takes no exception to the doctrine
of an original plurality of homogeneous atoms should regard with
suspicion the hypotheses of original differences of quality. No further
likeness of nature need be attributed to the atoms than such as is
required to enable them to combine together in the same order of
things. It must be possible in so far as they affect each other by way
of interaction, to exhibit their natures as combining in definite degrees
of intensity certain universal modes of activity. But there appears to
me to be no necessity for regarding the group of specific coefficients
which these general modes of action .are found to take in any par
ticular element, as attached to a substance of like nature through
out, or, more strictly, as attached to what is merely the substantiated
abstraction of reality. The group may equally well be regarded
as the expression of a specific quality, so far as such expression
is allowed by the mutual intercourse of the various forms of
matter.
Practically the importance of the difference between these two
views would consist in this, that the latter would altogether exclude
the possibility of one chemical element passing into another, whilst,
according to the former view, this would be at any rate conceivable.
It would indeed be more than conceivable. It would rather be in
explicable that throughout the endless process of combination, dis
solution and transformation to which the parts of matter are subject,
no element should ever lose its identity or merge its own individuality
CHAPTER vi.j 77ie Conception of ' Mass! 337
in that of some other. If the essential character of each element
depends merely on a peculiar arrangement of homogeneous particles,
it may be conjectured that the same course of events which gave
birth to one of the forms thus composed, might again produce the
conditions which would lead to its being either dissolved or trans
formed into some other shape. But if it was meant that it could
be shown that there are certain forms of combination which having
once originated can never by any possible conjunction of forces
be dissolved, it would still be open to ask, Why at any rate there
is not, through a further composition of the simpler structures, a
constant increase in the number of these irrevocable combinations ?
Finally, if it is to be regarded as an eternal fact that these com
binations are all alike indestructible and at the same time incapable
of further development, it would be difficult to say in what would
consist the difference between this view and that which assumes an
original difference between the elements. As regards the practical
explanation of nature there would be no difference between the two
ideas ; it would be a difference merely of theoretical view. The
probability of all reality being homogeneous in essence, unless con
firmed by future experience, could only be maintained upon con
siderations of a different and more indirect kind.
194. To this class of considerations belong the views commonly
held in regard to the mass of matter, its constancy, and its influence
in determining the character of different kinds of effects. It is now
quite superfluous to recur to what was once a mistake of frequent
occurrence in philosophy, by pointing out that the idea of mass is
not exclusively associated with that of weight and heaviness ; but, that,
as applied to the reciprocal action of any two material bodies, the
term expresses the intensity of the force which each contributes to
the common result. Let us suppose that we have formed two bodies
from m and p. numbers of units of the same matter, and have ob
served their behaviour to a third bodyV in regard to a certain effect of
the kind /. If having observed this, we then find that two other
bodies, both demonstrably formed from the same material, behave
in the same way towards c as the two first in respect of the same
effect />, we rightly conclude that they also contain m and p. number of
units of the same matter. Suppose, however, these two latter bodies
exhibited divergent properties, so that their consisting of the same
matter was open to doubt, and yet that, in regard to p, they were
affected towards c precisely as those two substances had been which
we had ourselves formed from a demonstrably common matter, it
VOL. i. z
338 The simple elements of Matter.
would no doubt be a natural and obvious conjecture that their
behaviour was also due to the presence of m and /* units of a homo
geneous substance, though this likeness was hidden in their case by
secondary differences of quality. At the same time, this conjecture
would go beyond the facts. All that the facts teach is that in respect
of the effect /, the two bodies in question are equivalent to m and jx
numbers of the before-mentioned matter ; not that they actually
consist 0/"them. There is nothing to prevent them from being in all
oiher respects different in original quality from each other, and from
c, and yet being capable of a special interaction of the kind p
between them and c, in which their contribution to the common result
admits of a numerical expression m and /z, as identical or comparable
with that of the two bodies first considered. If now, assuming them
to have the above specific quality, we proceed to consider their inter
action with a fresh body d resulting in a different kind of effect q, we
shall not be justified in assuming that the proportion in which they
contribute to this result is the same, viz. m : p, as that in which they
contributed to produce /. Rather, it is conceivable that in their new
relation to d, bringing into play as it would new forces, they would be
like where they had before been unlike, and unlike where they had
been like ; or, in a word, that in regard to the effect q, they would
assume the quantities ml and ^, different from the previous quantities
m and p. In point of fact, at any rate at first sight, this is how the
several effects/, q, r, produced by the reciprocal action of the bodies
in question, are related, and it is never certain that a which in regard
to/ is greater in quantity than b, will still remain so in regard to q.
Whether these differences can be intelligibly explained on the
hypothesis of a homogeneous matter, as secondary effects due to
different modes of combination, must here be left undecided. Owing
to the extreme variety of the phenomena to be taken into account,
such a conclusion could only be established, if at all, in the distant
future. On the other hand, it is of course always possible to express
each of the new quantitative determinations that arise, e.g. ml and plt
by means of the old ones, i.e. by k m and K /u, and so by, assigning for
each kind of special effect a specific coefficient to bring the fiction of
a homogeneous mass into harmony with the given facts. In a meta
physical point of view this would decide nothing. The possible
qualitative difference between the parts of matter is as little made to
disappear by this reduction, as corn and meat cease to be two
different things after their value has been expressed in the common
term- of money. The doctrine then which I am maintaining is not
CHAPTER vi.] Unity which is not Homogeneous. 339
open to any general objection on these grounds, though it cannot be
applied to explain the particular facts. It, at any rate, does not oblige
us to think of the different elements as differing without any principle.
Belonging as they would to one and the same world, their qualities
would be mutually related members of a single interconnected system,
within which they would be combined in different directions, in dif
ferent senses, and with various degrees of intimacy. Stationed at the
meeting-point of many opposing tendencies, an element might on
one of its sides display a greater degree of force than its neighbour, on
another an equal degree, whilst on a third side its force might be
less ; and, if we knew the purpose of the whole system, which we do
not know, we should be able to deduce from the mass which an
element exhibited in the production of the effect /, the specific co
efficients which belong to it for the actions q, r, &c., and to exhibit
those coefficients as a series of mutually dependent functions.
195. I have made these observations, still proceeding on the as
sumption that a plurality of individual elements is what forms the ulti
mate constituents of the world. We shall see, however, that they have
equal force, if viewed in connexion with a result established by our
ontological investigations, according to which these multitudinous
elements are but modifications of one and the same Being1. To
hold this latter opinion, seems at first to be equivalent to repeating
the very view against which we have been contending. It appears as
if we could have no real interest in establishing the fact of difference
amongst the elements, if this is not to be regarded as ultimate and
irremovable. But the doctrine here maintained, is essentially dis
tinguished from the doctrine of Physics. I understand by this abso
lute Being, not a Real existence infinite in quantity and of like
nature throughout, which has no other inherent capacity than that of
falling into countless homogeneous parts, and which only is in a
secondary sense, by means of the various possible combinations of
those parts, the ground of a diversity existing in the content of the
world. I conceive it rather as a living idea, the import of which,
inaccessible in its essence to any quantitative measurement, is no
mere homogeneous aggregate of ideas, but a self-articulated whole
of variously interwoven parts ; each one of these parts, as well as the
several elements which compose it, acquiring a determinate quantity
according to its value and position in the whole.
Let us give an illustration. If this idea could be expressed in terms
of our thought, it could only be so by means of a number of propo-
1 [Cp. Chapters vi. and vii. of Book I.]
Z 2
340 The simple elements of Matter.
sitions which would be towards one another in those extremely
various modes of dependence in which the different parts of a
scientific system are connected together. But these principles would
be meaningless, if they were not again composed of words — words of
which the meanings while different and unchangeably fixed, are still
not immeasurably different, but so precisely determined in relation to
each other that they admit of being joined together in very various
syntactical combinations, to serve as vehicles by which the Idea is
articulated into its parts. With these words I compare the ele
mentary materials of nature. In themselves they are nothing ; they
are merely forms of a common principle underlying the world,
a principle, however, which maintains them as constantly uniform
activities, so that in every case in which they occur and enter into
mutual relations they observe the same laws of behaviour. But,
although thus involved from all eternity in a network of relations,
they still remain different as regards each other, and incapable of
being referred to mere division and re-combination of a uniform
substratum. The mathematical mode of regarding the question
which favours this latter view, and which has very extensive rights in
the treatment of nature, is still not the only way of conceiving its
unity, nor does it penetrate to the ultimate ground of things-
Merely, within the limits of our observation, this mathematical con
nexion of things, secondary though it is, presents itself first. That
whole world of quantitative and numerical determinations is itself
based on an order of things, the synthetic connexions of which we
could never have arrived at by any logical analysis. We have called
this order ' systematic,' and now we may replace this imperfect ex
pression by another, that of the ' esthetic ' unity of purpose in the
world, which, as in some work of art, combines with convincing
justice things which in their isolation would seem incoherent and
scarcely to stand in any relation to one another at all. Or, lastly, we
might prefer to use the term ' dialectical unity/ in memory of a late
phase of our German Philosophy, which was thoroughly alive to the
truth of this doctrine, but failed, as it seems to me, because it be
lieved itself able to apply to details of fact principles which can only
in a rough way prescribe a general direction to our thoughts.
196. This transformation of our views introduces us to a further
question, which to Physical Atomism appears to be no question at all.
It is assumed that a countless number of individual atoms fill the
world. Now, be they the same or be they different in kind, whence
comes their plurality ? If they are regarded as starting-points to be
CHAPTER VI.)
Plurality of Identicals.
341
assumed, beyond which we cannot go in thought, no doubt their
dispersion throughout space can also be included in the number
of facts to be taken for granted, which we must recognise without
attempting to explain. But, to us, who have conceived every qualita
tively distinct element as one of a connected series of acts emanating
from the supreme principle of the universe, it is necessarily perplexing
to find that the instances in which each element occurs are scattered
over a countless number of different points in space. Nor is this an
enigma merely from our point of view. We can, no doubt, by an
act of thought easily represent to ourselves the same content a
a thousand times over, and we can distinguish the thousand creations
of our imagination, by localising them at different points of space,
or by enumerating them according to the different moments of time
when they first suggested themselves to us. But how, strictly speak
ing, can it be conceived that, in actual fact, the same a occurs several
times over? Must not the mere fact that there are several, make it
necessary that a should be in one case something different from what
it is in another, though it ought in every case to be the same ? ^JVVhai
constitutes the objective difference between them, which makes a truih
of fact of the logical assumption that they are so many like instances
of a general notion or a common nature ? We remember what a
stumbling-block this question was to Leibnitz. It seemed to him to
be impossible that two things should actually occur, unless their duality
was based on a difference of nature between them. He would not
even allow that two leaves of a tree could be exactly alike. This
difficulty scarcely attracts any attention now. I must say, however,
that it seems to me to have been somewhat too hastily passed over
by those who have followed in the footsteps of Kant. What Thought
could not achieve, was held to be made possible by spatial per
ception. It was in and through space that it was clearly shown
how things could be at once like and manifold ; they might differ
in position, but be perfectly identical in the nature which occupies
the position.
Certainly, this is clear enough ; but I cannot see in this clearness a
solution of the difficulty. All that it does is to bring the problem itself
vividly before us ; but for this phenomenon, indeed, the difficulty
would scarcely have been suggested. Now, if science admitted to an
unlimited extent the possibility of things acting upon each other at a
distance, it might no doubt be granted that one atom is never subject
to precisely the same sum of external influences as another. And,
if it were further granted that the atoms experience changes of inner
34 2 The simple elements of Matter. [BOOK H.
state corresponding with these external influences, it would follow
that an atom a would be in some way different at each moment of
its existence from a second and otherwise similar atom, since its
internal states at any moment are not an extraneous appendage to
its nature, but an actual constituent of what it is at that moment.
But this mode of statement would still involve the latent supposition,
that though the states by which an atom is affected change, yet
through all this change the atom itself remains as a constant
quantity, which would have maintained itself in its position even if
there had been no forces acting on it, and which only becomes
distinguished from other atoms of the same kind as itself owing to
external influences which might not have been operative. Thus we
are brought back to the question, What does it really mean that an
element occupies a point in space? and how can it be that in virtue
of its position it is distinguished from other elements, seeing that all
points of space, both in themselves and in their effects on the
elements, are precisely alike ? I have tried to give an answer to this
question. Its very terms are meaningless from the point of view
which regards space as something actually existing by reference to
which things are determined. Things do not first find themselves in
certain positions, and then become enabled to take effect, but it is
the kind and degree of the effects which they already exercise upon
each other that makes them occupy those positions for the per
ceptive consciousness, which seem to us to be those which originally
belong to them.
This answer, however, does not at once remove our present dif
ficulty. In order to find a reason why these qualitatively-distinguished
elements should assume the form of a scattered multitude of in
dividual atoms, it seems as if we should be compelled to suppose
that in the intelligible world, which reflects itself in space, that action
or thought which we designated as the nature of an element, must
repeat itself as often as its phenomenon. Is such a repetition less
unaccountable than the easy hypothesis of a plurality of atoms with
which Physics is content? I feel myself able to answer in the
affirmative. It is merely owing to the effect of constant association
with the forms of space, that when we come to represent to ourselves
these 'repeated' actions, we conceive them as falling into a number
of disconnected groups separated from one another by empty intervals
just as the parts of space are separated by their lines of distance.
There is really no such relation between them. Just as in our own
inner experience the self-same principle or the same conception recurs
CHAPTER vi.] Divisibility of Atomic Centres. 343
in the most various connexions, and exercises a limiting or deter
mining influence of many different kinds on any other of our thoughts
with which it happens to be associated, just so the idea, which deter
mines the qualitative nature of an element of matter, serves in the
order of the universe as a point of intersection for the different
tendencies which make that universe into a connected whole ; con
nected, as I must again insist, not merely as a rigidly classified system,
but as an eternally progressive history. We are, therefore, not called
upon, nor are we interested to maintain that there are distinct special
existences corresponding in number with the functions which the
same idea must fulfil when thus associated with others in these
various combinations. The number of scattered atoms is merely the
number of the separate appearances which an element assumes to
our perception of space owing to the manifold relations in which it is
involved with other elements.
197. The extremely paradoxical nature of this conclusion shall not
prevent me from mentioning also a certain corollary which follows
from it. We have now arrived at a point of view from which the
atomic theory can no longer satisfy us, not even after that transforma
tion of its fundamental idea, to which it seemed not to be disinclined.
So long as the unextended points, from and to which forces proceed,
points which have indeed positions in space but no volume, were con
ceived as having, not less than the extended atoms had previously
been conceived as having, an obstinately indestructible nature, there
could of course be no mention of a further division into parts ; since
that which was to be divided was, as its very name implied, indivisible.
This mode of representation no longer holds good. If the single real
idea which determines the nature of a qualitative element necessarily
manifests itself under a number of distinct forms, and if there is no
limit to the multiplication of the relations which it may assume towards
other ideas, why should it be specially attached to just those points in
space where it happens to be active at any given moment ? Why should
not the positions which it may occupy also admit of being multiplied
indefinitely, seeing that none of the manifestations of the element
have any other claim to a separate existence except such as depends
on the mandate of the whole order which assigns to them this and no
other position ?
Not that I have any desire to return to the notion of a continuously
extended, infinitely divisible matter, nor to that other notion, accord
ing to which the real atom, at least in its spatial phenomenon, is
quite continuous in the sense that it is equally present at every point
344 The simple elements of Matter.
within its own narrow volume. I would rather not in any way de
part from the results of Atomism most recently arrived at, according
to which an atom is conceived as developing its activity from a
geometric point. But I can see no reason for regarding the amount
of force which is thus diffused — a force which is now no longer in
any sense an indestructible metaphysical unity — as eternally attached
to this one point. Rather, it would admit of partition in space, just
as it is itself only a partial manifestation of a single identical function
of the whole. In proportion as new combinations of phenomena
were required to exist by the course of the world, each centre of
activities would have the power of breaking itself up into several
centres, which would then assume different positions in space ac
cording as the new conditions to which they were subject prescribed.
These conditions may be very different. Their effect may be not
merely to compel the new centres of activity to combine with atoms
belonging to other elements, but also to cause an increase in the
volume of any particular atom by forcing its constituent elements to
expand and fall asunder. There would thus come to be differences
in the density of the atoms. Owing to this constant process of inner
dissolution, new points of departure for effects would be multiplied,
and there would arise the appearances which were formerly believed
to be only capable of being explained on the hypothesis of a con
tinuous and real extension in space, and which are only accounted
for at the cost of a permanent improbability by those who believe,
with ordinary atomism, that all things are ultimately analysable into
real existence and empty space. In this way we should be brought
to the idea of an infinite dynamic divisibility of unextended atoms,
an idea which, it is to be hoped, will seem less frightful than the
barbarous name by which, in order to distinguish it from the tra
ditional theories, I believe that it may most briefly be described. It
will no doubt have been taken for granted that the degree of intensity,
or, to put it shortly, the mass of each of the parts will be diminished,
while the sum of these masses remains the same. I have nothing to
say against this addition, but the principle on which it is made will
require further discussion in our next chapter.
CHAPTER VII.
The Laws of the Activities of Things.
OF the inner movements of things we know nothing. Still less do
we know what are the constant modes of co-operation which the
order of the Universe requires them to assume. Hence, experience
alone can discover to us the motive forces into which the course of
natural events can be analysed and the law according to which each
of these several forces may be conceived as taking effect. But a
sufficiently careful and comprehensive observation has long since
established certain general results, which deserve, by way of supple
ment at any rate, to receive an interpretation in connexion with
metaphysical views, and which suggest the question whether they
are really nothing but the expression of what has been observed to
take place, and not rather of necessities of thought to which ex
perience has directed our attention only subsequently? I shall
attempt to investigate this point, though well- knowing beforehand
that my labours are not likely to produce any considerable result.
They will serve merely to draw attention to the ambiguity of those
speculations, philosophical no less than scientific, which will never
cease to be directed to this unpromising subject.
198. In the first place, it is universally admitted that the intensity
of the effects which a force produces at a distance, is dependent on
the interval between the elements between which it operates. And
to this conclusion the doctrine which is here maintained must also
lead, though it remains to be seen later by what steps. If the
positions of things in space are merely expressions of the forces
which are already acting upon them, a fortiori every impulse to
further activity will depend upon these interactions between the ele
ments and on the distances in which those interactions manifest
themselves. This merely general characterisation is not, however,
enough to determine precisely the nature of the connexion between
forces and the distances of elements. But the other assumption,
346 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [BOOK n.
which is asserted with almost as much assurance as the last, viz.
that the intensity of the effect is in an inverse ratio to the distance,
has nothing to recommend it if we exclude the familiar instances
furnished by experience, except the inadmissible idea that space acts
as an obstacle which cannot be overcome except by a partial sacrifice
of force.
Other preconceived notions combine with this one to produce an
impression that this decrease of force is a fixed law, holding good in
all cases in which forces act at a distance. That a force, emanating
from a certain starting-point, diffuses itself through space, is not
merely our mode of expressing the fact that its effects differ in degree
at different distances. Unfortunately, we believe ourselves to be
describing not only a fact but an actual process by which the neces
sity of this difference is explained. As the force is transmitted to
larger and larger spherical shells it seems as if its tenuity must
increase in the same ratio as the area which it occupies, the ratio of
the square of the distance from its starting-point. This coincidence
of a simple geometric relation with a general law which we see illus
trated in the effects produced at a distance by gravitation and by
electric and magnetic agencies, is too tempting not to invite often-
repeated attempts to establish the closest connexion between them.
None of the assumptions, however, which are required as links in the
connexion can be admitted. A force cannot be supposed to proceed
from a point c, without at once being regarded as an independent
fluid medium. That its tenuity should increase with its increasing
extension, would no doubt not be altogether inconceivable. But still
we should have to discover to what the motion of the fluid was due.
This could only ultimately arise from a new force, a force of repul
sion, exerted upon the fluid by the thing present at c. We should
have also to show what becomes of the force thus diffused, if it
meets with no object on which to take effect, and further from what
source the constant supply of force at c is derived. These questions
cannot be evaded by supposing that the force does not diffuse itself
around c, but is, as it were, a permanent atmosphere already diffused
around it. To deny the fact of the movement of radiation, would be
to take away the only justification for the principle that the density
decreases with increase of distance, whilst it would contribute
nothing towards the explanation of the effect eventually produced.
Let us, then, suppose that a given force whilst proceeding from c,
meets in the point / with an object which it is to act on. How is
this action possible? and how can the force impart to the body
CHAPTER vii.] Difficulties of Radiation of Force. 347
motion in any particular direction? All that could.be concluded
from the arrival of the force at />, would be that it was now present at
that point — not, that a body situated at that point must, owing to the
action of the force, be set in motion. But, even granting that it were
thus set in motion, what direction could the motion take? The
motion as such could stand in no relation to the point c ; for, if the
activity of the force is made to depend on this process of its diffusion,
it follows that it only acts at p just as far as it is there ; it makes no
difference whether it was there always or whence it came there.
Supposing it then to coincide exactly at p with some real element,
it could not impart any motion to that element, for there would be
no reason why it should prefer one direction to another *. If, on the
other hand, we suppose that at the first moment of its beginning to
exercise its activity, the force is separated from the element by ever
so small an interval, we are making action at a slight distance serve
as an explanation of action at any and every distance, though we
cannot bring the former under any definite law, and must therefore
fail in the attempt to deduce the law of the latter.
Even if these difficulties could be got rid of, it would still remain a
question whether the resulting motion will take the direction cpt or the
opposite one p c. For this process of radiation would be just the same
for an attractive and for a repulsive force. Each smallest particle of
the fluid would, in such a case, still have to exert attraction or repulsion
upon whatever it might meet with at the point to which it had come,
as a property peculiar to itself and not admitting of further explana
tion. But, if that were so, there would be no longer any occasion for
confining these effects to the parts of the force which come before p
in the line c p ; the parts on the other side of />, which lay in the
course of this line when produced, or which had come there, would
exercise an influence on the element at />, of the same kind thougli
in a contrary direction. The ensuing motion would then be. the
result of these different impulses ; at any rate it could not correspond
with the simple law which it was hoped could be deduced from it.
Finally, the attempt may be made to get rid of these difficulties, by
supposing that the radiating force imparts its own motion to the
element which it lights upon, and determines by its own direction
that which the element in its turn is to take. Putting aside, however,
that this is a transition from one idea, that of a force acting at a
distance, to another, the idea of communication of already existing
motion, all that would be explained by this method would be the
1 [CP. § 185.]
348 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [BOOK IT.
centrifugal effects of repulsion ; every case of attraction would require
a centripetal pressure, such as has, indeed, often been assumed, but
has not hitherto had any intelligible explanation given of it.
199. On these grounds I not only hold that these attempted de
ductions have failed to establish their own special conclusions, but the
spirit in which they have been undertaken seems to me to be incon
sistent with itself. Of course, many of the occurrences which take
place in the world are of a compound character, and arise from
mechanical combination of others. It is possible that gravitation
and other similar phenomena which seem to us to be the expressions
of the simplest primary forces, may really be compound results pro
duced by forces still more simple. An elaboration of experience so
advanced as to show this to be the case would really have succeeded
in furnishing us with a genetic theory of the Law of Gravitation. If,
on the other hand, these and all effects of a like kind are regarded as
the expression of simple and primary forces, we must not attempt, as
is done by these theories, to give a mechanical explanation of their
origin, by referring them to a diffusion and attenuation of force.
The only proof that can be expected of these elementary processes
and their Laws is the speculative one, that they have a necessary
place in the rational order of things. The Ratio legis might be given,
but not the machinery by which it is carried into effect. The treat
ment, then, of this problem belongs, without doubt, to Philosophy,
nor do I complain that there should have been such innumerable
attempts to solve it, though unfortunately I know of none that has
been successful. I do not therefore continue my own investigation
with any hope of arriving at a result that can be final, but merely in
order to bring out more clearly some of the distinctive features of my
general view.
200. Owing to the doctrine which I have already expounded in
regard to the nature of forces, I do not feel touched by an objection
which Physicists have urged against the absolute validity of the Law
of Gravitation, an objection which, if it held good, would render un
tenable the whole of this doctrine which speculation so obstinately
attempts to deduce a priori '; where the distance — o, the attracting
force must according to this law, it is said, be infinite. I will not
now stop to enquire whether this result is altogether inadmissible.
It would be open for those who maintain the ordinary hypothesis of
a continuously extended matter to urge that contact takes place only
between points, lines, or surfaces without thickness, and consequently
that the masses whose distance = o, must in every case themselves = o
CHAPTER vii.] Attraction at no Distance. 349
also. If the hypothesis of unextended atoms conceived as points be
preferred, we should certainly have to ascribe to them an infinite
power of resisting separation, in case they had once got united in the
same point by attraction. But all that would be necessary would be
to take care that such a case never arose. It would be easy indeed
so to alter the formula of the law, that in case of all observable dis
tances, even the smallest, it should correspond as nearly as possible
with the results of observation, while in the case of vanishing dis
tances it should still not imply the infinity of the force of attraction.
But, I think we can achieve the same end, without introducing a
modification of the law such as would be purely arbitrary and in
capable of ever being proved. All the several forces which Physics
is led by experience to assume, stand in our view merely for the
various components into which the single power of interaction in
herent in the nature of things admits of being analysed. It is not
therefore at all surprising that a law which expresses with perfect pre
cision the operation of one out of this number of components should
nevertheless yield infinite degrees of intensity or other inapplicable
values if the component is supposed to continue its operation isolated
and uncontrolled. These cases of isolated action are precisely those
which are never met with; they express merely what would occur
under certain imagined conditions, but what under existing con
ditions, never does occur. Hence it is not necessary to modify the
formula of the well-known law of gravitation, considered as simply
claiming to indicate the variations of the attractive action; in this
sense the formula may be perfectly precise; only the limiting case
never occurs for which alone it would yield such problematical values.
In proportion as the elements which are attracted approach each
other more nearly the tendency to repulsion will be found to grow
even more rapidly, and if any one of the proposed modifications of
the law could be shown to hold good in actual experience it would
not be a more correct expression of the attraction taken by itself so
much as of the total effect in which attraction and repulsion are
already united. Moreover, it is easy to see that without this sup
position this partial law expressing mere attraction would yield results
which would be not so much inconceivable as merely inapplicable in
our view of nature. Let us suppose two elements a and b between
which there is attraction but never repulsion, to approach the point
c from opposite sides. They would then at the moment of meeting
have not only an infinite attraction g, but also infinite though
opposite velocities ±v. Now as the velocity last reached, v, has
350 The Laws of the Activities of Things. \ BOOK n.
arisen by the summation of all the accelerations which have been
increasing infinitely up to the value g, we cannot but regard the
infinite quantity v as greater than the infinite quantity g. Hence, if
there were no repulsion, g could not prevent the two elements from
passing with opposite velocities through each other's midst and thus
distance would be restored between them and the amount of their
attraction would become finite again.
201. A special objection to the received views has been urged by
Herbart. He will not himself admit the operation of forces at a dis
tance ; but for those who do admit it, he holds that the only legitimate
assumption is this, that the intensity of each force is diminished in
proportion as it is satisfied by the attainment of its result. That a
repulsion, therefore, should decrease with the distance which it has
produced, requires no explanation. On the other hand, the force
of attraction, which becomes always more intense in proportion as it
has drawn its object nearer, remains a paradox for him. This
objection is plausible enough if .the object is to explain the observed
effects of the law by reference to its inner meaning ; but I cannot
think that the particular psychological analogy, to which it owes its
conclusiveness, will admit of this general application. I entirely agree
with Herbart that there are inner processes in things, from which the
forces moving them are derived, and I will concede to him that in
both the cases which are here brought together — psychical endeavour
and physical motion — the impulse to what is done lies in a differ
ence between a thing's actual state of- being and some other state,
which, if it could be realised, would be more in correspondence with
its nature. But I dispute the conclusion which is so hastily drawn
from these premisses. Herbart shows himself in this matter to be
influenced by his main conception, according to which each changing
state of a thing is a disturbance of its original nature, so that
the only manifestation of activity which can fairly be attributed to
real existence, is that of self-conservation or recurrence to the
status quo ante. In that case, no doubt, supposing M to be this
permanently fixed aim, and q the state which is a departure from it,
the result to be achieved at each instant would correspond to this
difference M- q. Strictly speaking, it does not at once follow from
this, that the intensity of the force which exerts itself to recover the
former state, must vary directly as the amount of divergence repre
sented by q, and inversely as the result already obtained. All that would
be measured by M— q is the extent of what is required in order to
attain the given end. But there would be nothing to prevent the
CHAPTER vii.] The satisfaction of Force. 351
force from continuing to operate with unvarying intensity until this
difference had been made to disappear, just as a labourer in filling up
a pit does not at first work more rapidly and afterwards with less
energy, because the space to be heaped in was at the beginning
larger and has since become smaller, but he works throughout at
the same pace.
Even, however, admitting this assumption, insufficiently proved as
it is, I doubt the relevancy of the analogy which would make the
occurrence of a physical effect correspond with the satisfaction of a
psychical impulse. If, taking an imaginary case, we compare a supposed
quantity M, of which we have an idea, with a smaller given quantity g,
no doubt we know that M—q expresses the amount which must be
added to ^, in order to make it = M. In this case, Mt though not
present before us in external reality, was as adequately represented by
its idea as q was, and the estimation of the difference between them
was thus made possible. If, however, we experienced a state q, and this
were merely a manner or mode of our consciousness, some form
perhaps of feeling, this feeling would not be able by itself to produce
in our minds the idea of the absent M. Knowledge of the character
and extent of the difference between q and M could only arise if we
had had a real experience of M as well, and it were to enter into our
consciousness in the form of a feeling or the remembrance of a feel
ing similar in kind to q. Although, therefore, the disturbed state of
our feelings may depend upon the difference M—q,yz\. this difference
only exists primarily for the comparing mind of an onlooker; it is
not a real element in the experience of the being who is affected by
the state q, at any rate not unless there is some remembrance of the
state M. It cannot therefore be the obvious standard by which such
a being, with a sort of preference for what is reasonable and just,
determines the intensity of the effort which it has to make. However
far, then, we may go in assimilating the inner states of things to
processes of mind, so long as we do not believe that the physical
operations of things are regulated like acts of our own by rules drawn
from experience, as long as we believe rather that there is a necessity
imposed on them to come to pass as they do, the difference between
an actual and a better state of things cannot be the determining reason
by which Physical effects are regulated.
On the other hand, there is no reason, we at least can see none,
why the order of the universe which prescribes to all things their
nature and mode of working, should not have attached to q a blind
and unpurposed activity, which was as a matter of fact measured by
352 The Laws of the Activities of Things.
the difference M—q, though the individual thing which was affected
by the difference was itself unconscious of it. But, as there is nothing
to hinder this supposition, so there is nothing to make it necessary ;
it remains a possible though but an arbitrary assumption that the
course of things is nothing but a constant effort to attain to an
equilibrium and to reproduce a state M, which can only be effected by
getting rid of their present state. There is equally nothing to prevent
us from admitting the claims, though not the exclusive claims,
of the opposite view, according to which the attainment of a state
q means a change in the condition of things, which tends to reproduce
itself in a more emphatic and intensified form. That other theory,
the watchword of which is ' disturbance,' has thought only of pain ;
and then it seems quite natural that the self-conservative activity
directed to the removal of pain, should decrease in proportion as it
succeeds. It has taken no account of pleasure, which just as
naturally creates a stimulus to the intensification of the state which
was desired and is pleasant. For it is not true, except in those
cases in which the source of enjoyment lies partly in the .body, that
pleasure is dulled with satisfaction. The body, no doubt, is forbidden
by the habits of its action from contributing to the intensification of
feeling, and interrupts it by weariness and satiety. It will not, however,
be maintained that the pursuit of knowledge and its results, or the
aspiration after beauty and goodness, is lessened by approximation
to the ideal.
But we will leave these analogies, which decide nothing. The
general conclusion to which we come is this : there is a blind
tendency in each thing, owing to its place in the all-embracing order
of the world, whenever it is in any given state q, to produce an
effect. The character and extent of this effect are not regulated by
any law inherent in the nature of substance or force, and binding
things without regard to the purport of this universal order. It is
this order and this alone, which, in accordance with its own aims,
connects reason and consequent, and it is as able to determine that
the force of reaction should increase with the attainment of results,
as that it should diminish in proportion as they are attained.
202. It is easy to see the consequences that follow from this
conviction. As we do not know the idea which is endeavouring
to realise itself in the world, it is from experience only, as I have
before remarked, that we can derive our knowledge of the recurrent
operations of things according to general laws. We cannot, therefore,
take it amiss that Physics, following the lead of observation, should
CHAPTER vii.] A Primary Law of Force and Distance? 353
assign to the different forces, the assumption of which is found to
be necessary, laws of action of the most various kinds. These Laws
Physics regards merely as expressions of the facts, without attempting
any metaphysical interpretation of them, and every idea of this kind,
serving to clear up a group of interconnected phenomena, and enabling
us to infer the future from the present, deserves respect, as an enlarge
ment of our knowledge. Philosophy is altogether in the wrong, when
she depreciates results obtained in this way, merely because they do not
penetrate to the ultimate truth ; but she is certainly within her right,
when, starting from her own point of view she attempts to supply the
interpretation which is still lacking to those results. Whatever may be
thought of space and of existence in space, if once the intensity of inter
action between two elements is made to depend on the distance sepa
rating them, and just so far as it is made to depend only on this, it seems
to be impossible that different forces could be determined by this cause
to act in different ways; the same distance, it would seem, could
only make itself felt by the elements and determine all their reciprocal
effects in the same way. It is this which has prepossessed philo
sophers in favour of the view that the different modes of action which
Physics assumes, when it makes different forces dependent on dif
ferent powers of the distance, cannot have a primary right of existence,
but that there must be one fundamental law for the relation of action
to distance, and the deviations from it which experience compels us
to admit must be due merely to the complexity of the circumstances.
By an easily understood transition, this fundamental law then came
to be identified with the Law of Gravitation, this being a Law which
is obeyed by many familiar effects, differing from each other and
occurring under apparently very simple circumstances. I cannot
myself share this prepossession, except with great reservations. It is
necessary first of all that a certain assumption from which all such
attempted explanations start, should be clearly stated. That assumption
is made by thinkers, by whom perhaps in their ultimate essence all
things are mysteriously merged in the unity of an infinite substance
and a single creative plan, when they afterwards leave out of sight
the continuous operation of this single principle, and explain the
whole course of the world merely from the permanent qualities
and the changing relations of individual existences, and the con
sequences which, by common logic, seem to follow from these two
premisses.
203. Upon this assumption we are not justified, according to all
that has preceded, in regarding the interval of distance itself as that
VOL. i. A a
354 The Laws of the Activities of Things. t BOOK n.
which determines the amount offeree exercised between two elements,
a and b. This is due only to the inner states of the elements which
correspond to the distances between them. Every mode of treating
the question must admit so much as this. Even if we adopt the
ordinary view of space as objectively existing, the distance of things
will still only be distance between them ; the distance and its measure
is, therefore, a reality prima facie only for an observer who is able to
represent to himself the space which must be traversed in order to
pass from a to b. If a and b are to be guided by it in what they do,
it must be possible for them and not for an observer only to take
note that the distance between them is in one case d and in another
case 8 ; thus in order to act they must first be acted upon by the very
same condition which is to regulate their activity. This would lead
us — supposing the merely phenomenal character of space to be
assumed — to the conclusion, that every actual distance between a
and b is nothing but the manifestation in space of the sum of the
effects which they experience at the moment from one another and
from the whole, and which are also the cause of their effect upon us.
The universal order is, however, neither according to our view, nor
according to the ordinary view, a rigidly classified system, such that
each element persistently occupies the place which corresponds
with its conception. Such a system no doubt exists, but its parts
which are in a constant state of chaotic flux, are every moment
falling into relative positions which do not correspond to the per
manent affinities of their natures.
We know what this means in terms of ordinary spatial perception ;
it is not the elements which are by their nature most fitted for active
intercourse which are always the nearest neighbours ; the action of
some third or fourth element may separate those which are coherent,
or bring together those which are indifferent. It is indeed impos
sible to give a picture of what things undergo or experience in their
inner nature when they enter into those changing intelligible relations
with which we are familiar in spatial perception as distances of
greater or less extent. As objects of such perception, i. e. as dis
tances, these relations seem to us obviously to imply a greater or less
amount of estrangement or of sympathy in the things, and upon this
the degree of their reciprocal action is naturally supposed to depend.
Yet our previous investigations have shown that we cannot account
for the manner and degree in which things act upon each other from
the mere fact of their being outside one another ; it is only from
what they get or experience from this fact, or from the way in which
CHAPTER vii.] Affinity marked by the Distance. 355
it connects them, that we can do so. We cannot, therefore, say that the
distance between things itself exercises an influence on the intensity of
their force ; it is merely the mode in which the greater or less degree
of their metaphysical affinity is manifested to us, varying as this does
with the different combinations into which they are brought by the
course of events. Throughout this process the things remain what
they are, and continue to act upon each other conformably to their
natures. At the same time, the different degrees to which they are
temporarily displaced from their position in the system, cannot but
have some influence on their behaviour ; a change in the closeness
of their metaphysical affinity involves a corresponding change in the
amount i of the intensity/* with which they stimulate those mutual
actions for which their nature has fitted them. If these very
abstract considerations have so far inspired any confidence, we now
stand before a conclusion which seems certain, and before an alter
native which we are quite unable to decide. No reason can be any
where discovered why this metaphysical affinity should correspond to
any but the first power of the distance, which is the distance itself. On
the other hand, after what has been said above, it seems quite as
possible that the effect of this affinity should vary directly as that it
should vary inversely, with the distance. The two formulae —
i = pd and i = P.
d
would be the only formulae in which this point of view could result,
and they would be of equal validity.
204. In making use of these expressions, I wish it to be borne in
mind that as I understand them they have not the same meaning as
any of those quantities to which the ordinary mechanical view of
Physics leads us. We do not use i to designate any kind or degree
of outward performance, but merely the intensity of the stimulus with
which, in virtue of the relation at the time being subsisting between
two elements, one of them excites and is excited by the other to any
or all of those possible forms of reciprocal activity which spring from
their affinity, their difference, or generally their respective places in the
system. As regards what follows from the stimulus a fresh and specific
determination is required to decide whether it is to be attraction or
repulsion, and yet another to decide its amount. The first require
ment, however, may perhaps be assumed to be already fulfilled by the
coefficient p. For though we have hitherto spoken of this merely as a
quantity, it is dependent on the nature of the interacting elements,
and therefore, strictly speaking, could only be a concrete number.
A a 2
356 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [BOOK n.
On the other hand, as regards the amount of the initial motion,
I can see no reason why it should not be considered as simply pro
portionate to the stimulus z', which is its motive cause. I shall
not, therefore, make any further comparison between the formula
i = pd, which would indicate a sort of metaphysical elasticity, and
what we meet with under the same name, though generally under
highly complicated conditions, in the sphere of Physics. As re
gards the second formula, I do not see how the desired result,
viz. dependence upon the square of the distance, could be shown
necessarily to follow from it.
I will however mention the assumption which would have to be
made in order to bring this law into ultimate harmony with the other
or metaphysical view. I cannot esteem as of any value for such a
purpose the appeal to the reciprocity of all effects, which some
distinguished authorities have introduced into the discussion. If
/ = - is the intensity with which one element is attracted by another
and at the same time tends of itself towards it, I cannot see any
reason for supposing the result to equal the product of the two
activities ; like every other resultant, it would be the sum of them ;
it is only the intensity of the effect, not the function of the distance
upon which it depends, that would be affected. Perhaps, how
ever, it will be urged, that the effect of a force depends not merely
on what the force intends to do, but also on how much it is
able to do, i. e. in the case before us, not merely on the amount
of mutual excitation, but also on the conditions which promote or
check the satisfaction of the demands. To put the matter shortly
and clearly ; the distance d between a and b indicates a degree of
estrangement between them, and their willingness to act upon each
other is therefore inversely proportional to that distance. But, the
weaker will is not only weaker, but has opposed to it the greater
obstacle, in the shape of the greater distance which weakened it. The
active force, therefore, which can be exerted, is found by multiplying
the effort by the reciprocal of the resistance to be overcome ; and
accordingly is inversely proportional to the square of the distance.
Such a mode of expression could indeed only serve to indicate briefly
the essence of the idea ; in real truth, the distance d even if it were
a really extended space between a and b, could not be regarded as an
obstacle to the effect. According to the view which we have main
tained, it could not actively condition the incipient process, except in so
far as it was represented within the elements a and b by means of that
CHAPTER vii.] Rationale of Sqicare of Distance. 357
hidden state of excitation which we found ourselves obliged to assume
in all cases. But perhaps it is precisely to this inner state of things
that an argument of this kind may seem to be most rigorously
applicable. It may perhaps seem incredible that when two elements
a and b are separated by the distances d or 5, they should in both
cases alike, though not excited to action to the same degree, yet in
spite of this difference aim at producing one and the same effect. It
may be thought that the object of their effort as well as its integrity
would vary, and vary proportionately to the degree of their excitation.
The amount of the actual external result would then be found by
multiplying i into a quantity proportional to *, and would thus vary
inversely with the square of the distance.
I shall not attempt to decide whether there is anything of value in
this suggestion : I wish only to point out that this new way of
characterising an intended result, as one which increases in pro
portion to the stimulus, is just one which cannot be decisively
established, if nothing is assumed but individual elements with their
natures and the relations subsisting between them. There is no
universal Metaphysic of Mechanics, capable of showing that every
time any two existences combine in a relation, they must have so
combined. Whenever any such relation occurs, it is a matter of fact,
which, from a Metaphysical point of view, can only be regarded as an
effect of the all-embracing M, i.e. the idea of the whole. It must be
this idea which is present and active in all individual elements,
assigning to each its mode of manifestation in relation to the rest,
which otherwise would not flow necessarily from the mere con
ception and the nature of the elements. But, as we do not know the
content of this idea, we cannot affirm positively that it imposes a
necessity on things to assume these forms and no others ; and hence,
the whole attempt to establish the existence of a single, original, and
only legitimate law for the operations of all forces is entirely fruitless.
205. Nothing is left to us, but to accept with thanks the empirical
rules \vhich enable Physics to express, in conformity with observation,
the effects actually produced by the several forces on each occasion
of their activity. Philosophy should not turn away from assumptions,
unless they are inherently absurd, and those made by Physics are
seldom that. Thus, no one has ever attempted to explain an increase
or diminution in the intensity of force as depending on mere Time ;
where observation seemed to confirm such a view, the Time was in
every instance occupied by actual occurrences, each of which con
tained in itself the efficient cause of that which was to follow ; these
358 The Laws of the Activities of Things. \ BOOK n.
processes, then, and not the mere lapse of Time, must have deter
mined the varying intensity of forces. On the other hand, there is no
reason on philosophical grounds to deny that the amount of force
which results from the interaction of two elements, depends to some
extent also on their motions. For according to our view motion is
not merely a change of external relations, which takes no effect on
the things themselves ; as those relations depend on inward states of
the things, so the rapidity with which they change them is also an
inward experience, and one which at every moment may help to
determine their subsequent behaviour. Besides the degree of intensity
which a force would have, corresponding with the distance at the
moment between the two elements from which itj proceeds, there
would thus be a positive or negative increase of the force, dependent
on the rapidity with which the elements travel through the space
which they at present occupy. But it is not expedient to continue
the discussion on this point; for while the hypothesis has been
employed by Physicists only with extreme reserve, in regard to the
interaction of electric currents, — a case in which it seemed to be
required, — there would be no limits to its application when treated,
as we should have to treat it, as a general principle. Once admitted,
the dependence of force upon velocity of motion, and upon its suc
cessive accelerations, would apparently have to be regarded as a
universal characteristic of physical action.
206. Connected with this question is the other one : Do forces, in
order to take effect, require Time ? Stated in this form, indeed, as it
occasionally is, the question is ambiguous. It is a universally ad
mitted truth that, every effect, in its final result, is formed by the
successive and continuous addition of infinitesimal parts which go on
accumulating from zero up to the final amount. In this sense suc
cession, in other words, expenditure of Time, is a characteristic of
every effect, and this is what distinguishes an effect from a mere
consequence, which holds good simultaneously with its condition.
Vain, however, would it be— as we saw in our investigation of Time-
to seek to go further than this, and to discover the inscrutable process
by means of which succession of events in Time comes to pass at all.
The question we are considering was proposed on the assumption of
the diffusion of force in Space. Supposing it were possible to
instance a moment of Time in which a previously non-existent force
came into Being, would all the various effects which it was calculated
to produce in different places, both near and remote, be at once
realised ? Or, would a certain interval of Time be required, just as it
CHAPTER vi i.] Is Force transmitted in Time f 359
is in the case of Light, which transmits itself to different objects
rapidly, but not instantaneously, and must first come into contact
with them before it can be reflected by them?
It is not necessary to embellish the question by introducing con
ditions which make any decision impossible. There is no need to
imagine either the sudden appearance out of nothing of some new
body in the world, or the disappearance of one already existing, and
then to enquire, whether the addition of gravity, as in the first case
(the new body being likewise supposed subject to the law of gravita
tion), or the subtraction of gravity, as in the second, would make
itself felt by distant stars immediately, or not till after a measurable
interval ? The action of force in its beginnings may he illustrated by
examples nearer to hand. Each smallest increase in the velocity of
two elements, which are working upon each other — whether by attrac
tion or repulsion — at a distance, by the very fact that the elements are
brought nearer to or are parted from each other, brings about an
increase of attraction or repulsion, in other words, a new force,
though no new vehicle of it. Similarly, the electrical actions of
bodies, depending as they do upon a condition which is not always
present, furnish an example of a beginning of force in Time. It
makes no difference that this condition itself does not come into
existence at once and with a permanent intensity, but only by degrees ;
at any rate, a moment can be assigned for every one of its degrees
before which it did not exist, and from which its effect must begin.
Having regard to such cases the question that has been raised can
only be answered in the negative ; there could be no possibility of an
affirmative answer, except on that supposition of a diffusion of force
which we found to be impossible *. But even on that supposition,
it is the passage through space which, strictly speaking, would have
to be regarded as the first work of the diffused force ; the work done
upon its arrival at the distant object would be only second and sub
sequent, for its presence as force would not be felt by the object until
it had come into the necessary contact with it. It must not however
be supposed that after the force has come into Being, a blank space
of time / is required to pass before the motion begins to be trans
mitted ; nor again, that after the force has reached its object, and so
secured its control over it, it should require a similar space of
Time /, in order to take effect. If this space of Time / were
really blank, everything would remain at the end of it as it was
at the beginning, and the effect might just as well be expected to
i [CP. § 198.]
360 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [ BOOK n.
occur at the end of some other space of Time = n /; if, on the other
hand, any positive change in the phenomena takes place during this
time, this change is a link, by means of which C, the imperfectly
realised condition of the result F, is completed and perfected : that
part of C, however, which was already present has, at the moment
of its coming to be, immediately produced that corresponding part of
F which it was adequate to produce.
207. It will be objected that real events are, as I stated above, not
related to each other in the same way as conditions to their conse
quences, because the result in the former case always follows the
cause which produces it; but for this succession, events would be
transformed into a system of cotemporaneous parts, which would differ
only in the different degrees of their dependence upon the first of the
series : C and F, therefore, though it is true there could be no blank
interval of Time between them, would always come into contact in the
order C F, not in the order F C. This true remark again suggests an
enigma, the insolubility of which we have already admitted. For suc
cession in time could never arise from these contacts which occupy no
time, however often repeated, between members which follow out of one
another ; we should still have merely a systematic order if C and F did
not each fill a certain extent of time of its own ; if they did, then, it
seems, F would have to wait till C had completed its interval of time.
But even this is not a way out of the difficulty. Suppose C and F
both to consist of a series of parts following each other in unbroken
succession, e. g. cv <r2, cyf^fvfy Are we then to suppose that the
occurrence of F is conditional on the completion of the group C ?
that it cannot, i.e. commence, until cz is reached, and that nothing of
the nature of F takes place until this term is realised ? There are
facts enough which seem to confirm this view, and indicate that the
result F is attached to a specific determination of C. A closer
examination will, nevertheless, not fail to show that the force C, all
the time that it seemed to be increasing in amount without producing
any effect, was really already occupied with the removal of hindrances
which stood in the way of the occurrence of anything of the nature
of F. When, at last, the amount cs is reached, this removal is com
pleted, and from this point its first positive and visible effect com
mences, though not absolutely its first effect. As regards this effect,
again, we do not believe that a finite amount of ii,fv arises suddenly
so soon as C is ended. Rather, each smallest addition which is made
to B, involves a correspondingly small addition to F; but between
these two occurrences there is no blank interval of Time ; /H corre-
CHAPTER vii.] Time and Reciprocal Action. 361
spends to cn immediately. But the assumption we have made as
regards C itself involves the same difficulty. If C remains unchanged
during the whole space of Time /, which it is supposed to fill, there
is no better reason why F should follow at the close of that time than
at its commencement. If however we assume, as was assumed, that
C traverses the series c± c^ rs, then, as the order of the series is sup
posed to be fixed, each term must be the condition of the succeeding
one, and as in the previous case, if they are to form a succession in
times, two adjacent terms can neither have any blank interval of time
between them, nor can they be simultaneous.
The conclusion to which this points is clear. The whole nature of
Becoming is unknown to us, and we cannot reconstruct the origin of
it in theory. In this quite general sense, it is true to say that every
operative condition and every force draws its consequences and its
effects after it. But in order to do this, it is not so much the case
that they need a lapse of time, as that they are this lapse of time
itself; only because they are themselves in a process of becoming can
they convey that same process to their consequences. But there is no
measurable interval of Time between the condition cn and its true and
immediate result fn ; there is nothing but the enigmatical fact of
their contact, a fact which cannot be ignored any more than it can be
explained.
If we now leave these general considerations, and return to the
subject which first suggested them, that of forces acting at a distance,
it must follow from the doctrine which has been stated, that, at the
same moment that the force which is active in the element p passes
from ^2 into <:3, there will be a similar transition in the element q, no
matter how remote it may be, from/2 to fy provided that c and / are
causally connected through that inner sympathetic affinity upon
which all action depends. Moreover, just as c.z in the element p
can only change into c3 continuously, that is, by passing through all
the intermediate values, in exactly the same way in the element q,f*
will pass by succession into/3. But the idea that a lapse of Time is
required in order that p should transmit its force to q at all, is barred,
among other considerations, by that of the reciprocal action of the
two elements, which is universally admitted to be a necessary as
sumption. No force could be diffused from p towards q, nor could
any force even originate in />, unless it were awakened and solicited
in / by q ; on the other hand, q could not produce this excitation,
unless it was invited by p. No action, therefore, could ever take place
between p and q, if it were required that a force should first proceed
362 The Laws of the Activities of Things. t BOOK n.
from p to q ; for the only thing which could excite this force to set
out from p would be the stimulus of another force starting from q ;
and this stimulus it would never have, because q would be waiting for
an invitation from p. This connexion of mutual affinity between the
elements, the source of their action upon each other, does not at one
time or another come into existence through a diffusion of forces in
space ; it always exists t thus rendering it possible that changes of
state experienced by one element should involve corresponding
changes in another.
208. Owing to the boundless complexity of the manifold con
ditions which meet in the course of nature, we cannot expect to be
able to explain every event directly from the joint action of the forces
which combine to produce it. Hence, the desire has often been felt
to discover certain customary rules by which, at any rate, the course
of the natural world is regulated. It was hoped that in cases where
knowledge of the special connexions between things is wanting, we
might thus be enabled to establish equations expressive of general
conditions with which the results, however unknown may be the
manner in which they are brought about, must certainly correspond.
Experience itself also leads us to the same ideas, whether, as aome
believe, it is from this source that they are derived exclusively, or that
they are preconceptions which experience merely confirms, and which,
as it then seems, we must have arrived at independently.
Opinions are divided between these two alternatives. The Realistic
view inclines to treat general principles of this kind either as designa
tions of mere matters of fact, which might have occurred differently,
or else their universality is explained by what is called their self-
evident truth, though its opposite is not regarded as strictly incon
ceivable. On the other hand, the Idealist view, which is that which
we here adopt, can recognise no supreme law except the one un
changing purpose underlying the multiplicity of phenomena, and
seeking for its realisation in them. At the same time, the Idealist,
being unable to express the nature of this purpose, or the laws to
which it requires that things should conform, cannot regard these
universal principles, in so far as they are borne out by experience, as
more than habits of nature on a great scale, valid within the circle of
our observation, but not infallible as regards the far larger sphere of
reality which lies beyond the limits of Time and Space to which our
investigations are confined. Hence, instead of establishing any
positive truths, the duty which lies before me is the less grateful
one of calling in question the unlimited validity of principles, the
CHAPTER vii.] Conservation of Mass. 363
limited validity of which is one of the most important and unfailing
aids to scientific enquiry.
209. One of the simplest of these truths appears to be the in
variability and the conservation of mass. Though not especially, or,
at any rate, not invariably confirmed by the appearances of every-day
life, this doctrine receives such universal support from the systematic
view of science, that it would be superfluous to adduce any detailed
arguments for its certainty. But now that it has been fully established,
I cannot see in it any necessity of thought the late discovery of which
need cause surprise. It may indeed be self-evident for a theory
which regards the world as composed of individual and mutually
independent atoms. Out of the absolute void, which would be all
that would lie between these atoms, obviously no new real existence
could arise ; the principle that out of nothing comes nothing, would
hold good absolutely. But this point of view we have been compelled
to abandon. In order to conceive reciprocal action, without which no
course of nature is intelligible, we were led to regard the individual
elements, not as self-conditioned, but as depending for the beginning,
continuance, and end of their existence on the determination of the
one Being, from which their nature, and capacities of action are
derived. Now, it is certainly a tempting conclusion, but it is no
necessity of thought, to go on to suppose that this one Being at
least is a sum of reality which cannot be increased or diminished, and
which changes only the forms of its manifestation. And we ourselves
inclined above to this idea, when we admitted it to be natural that
each individual qualitatively-distinguished element, i.e. each activity
of the one existence, when conformably with the plan of the world it
splits itself up into various elements, should have a diminished intensity
in each of the parts so arising.
But all this world of quantitative determinations has no significance
outside that complexity of things and processes which the one and only
true reality creates to express itself. It is only their meaning and
function, and the value which they thus acquire, that give to the
individual elements and forces the particular magnitudes they possess
and exhibit in comparison with others. But what lies beneath them
all, is not a quantity which is eternally bound to the same limits, and
can only represent the same sum in different ways, however variously
divided. On the contrary, there is no reason why, if it is required by
the Idea which has to be realised, one period of the world should not
need the efficient elements to be more, and another less, and why in
the former case each part of the whole should not also exert itself with
364 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [BOOK n.
a greater degree of force on the rest. The history of Nature would
then resemble a musical melody of varying strength of tone, the
swellings and varyings of which do not spring from nothing, nor yet
from one another, but each in its place results from the requirement
of the whole. I do not mean to affirm that this actually is what takes
place in Nature. Quite conceivably it may be part of the hidden
purpose of the supreme Idea, that all its requirements should depend
for their realisation on a fixed sum of real elements, and that the pro
duction of variety should be restricted to different adaptations of the
same material. Still less ought we to be surprised if the course of
Nature, so far as we can observe it, shows this to be practically the
case. For, as far as we can see with clearness, we find Nature moving
in a cycle, which makes it certain that forms once in existence will
maintain themselves in existence. The only phenomena which suggest
a progress wholly new, a progress which would go nearest to proving
that the materials as well as the results are changed, are those which
come from an antiquity so remote as to preclude exact investigation.
It would, therefore, be mere folly to call in question the principle of
the conservation of mass, so long as we confine our view to the world
of accessible facts, and to what we may call the retail dealings of the
physical elements in it. But it is the business of Philosophy to be
constantly reminding us how limited is that section of the universe
which is open to our observation, and that the whole which compre
hends it is a reality, though not one which we can make an object of
positive knowledge.
210. Similarly, the attempt has been made to conceive of the sum
of motions in the world as a constant quantity. The general state of
knowledge at the time when this idea was first entertained, did not
admit of its being substantiated or even rendered probable by evidence
derived from experience. For, as long as the effects which things
exercise upon each other were explained as due merely to com
municated motion, the conclusion could not be evaded that contrary
velocities of elements tending in opposite directions would neutralise
each other either wholly or in part, and consequently that motion
disappeared from the world without any compensation. And ordinary
experience seemed to confirm this conclusion by an abundance of
examples, which no one knew how to explain in any other way. On
the other hand, it was seen that living Beings were centres from
which fresh motions were initiated at every instant, which could not
but be taken for really new beginnings. So that neither was there
anything in experience which was inconsistent with the indefinite
CHAPTER vi i.] Conservation of Force. 365
multiplication of motions. Nor, finally, did experience suggest at all
that this increase and diminution must balance each other, so as to
maintain a constant sum of motion. Such a conception originates in
an hypothesis as to the general character of the course of nature.
Such an hypothesis was furnished by the idea of a system, having no
object but the maintenance of itself, and furnished with fixed resources
to this end : one of these means was the sum of motion, as it once for
all exists, which in the economy of nature might not be spent, but
only differently dispensed.
Recent physical speculations tend to revert to this same idea. So
many apparently fixed qualities and conditions of things have been
already demonstrated to be a ceaseless process, that it may be doubted
whether there is such a thing as Rest at all, except in the indi
visible moments of reversal in the minute oscillations with which all
things are vibrating. Philosophy can have no motive for objecting to
the assumption of such eternal motion as a matter of fact ; it is a
mere prejudice to infer, that because from our point of view an
element must be first supposed at rest in order that the results of
varying motions which condition it may be understood, this quiescence
must have been prior in reality, and that the impulse to motion is an
addition for which it has to wait. At the same time, it is only as a
fact, and not in any other light, that we can regard this perpetual
motion. It implies, not merely that motions already in existence may
be communicated, but also that fresh motions must be produced in
cases where two motions are opposite, and their communication
could only result in the neutralisation of both. This elasticity of
things, without which it would be impossible for them to counteract
the self-annihilation of motion, is only conceivable if there are
inner states of their being capable of developing the forces from
which motions spring. It is possible, though not probable, that effects
produced at a distance — against which there exists an unfounded
prejudice — are conveyed in this way by means of motions transmitted
from point to point of some connecting medium. But, even in that
case, not only the conception of force, but also in a special sense that
of force producing effects at a distance, is still indispensable, in order
to explain each one of those countless communications of motion, the
sum of which is usually held to compose the effects of force at
measurable distances. If, however, force alone gives a sufficient
reason for expecting that the motion will be replaced, which mere
communication would permit to be lost in its antagonism, it cannot
be supposed that force itself is the constant quantity which is in
366 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [BOOK n.
request ; its intensity varies with the distance, though this is itself
determined by force. The constant element in the course of Nature
can only be an inner connexion between the circumstances which give
rise to the operation of forces, a general law governing all combinations
and connected successions of effects. It was thus that that most
comprehensive principle, the one which dominates our whole estimate
of physical processes, that of the Conservation of Force, first suggested
itself, in respect to which I proceed now, though only so far as the
connexion of my views requires, to offer the following considerations.
211. The simple principle, that out of nothing comes nothing,
requires to be more precisely defined by the addition that even from
something no result can follow, so long as that something, the event
B, is only the condition or occasion of what is to take place, and
remains just the same after the consequence F has been produced as
before. On the contrary, B must be sacrificed, either wholly or in
part, in order to produce F. This is the difference so constantly
referred to between a causal nexus of events and the merely formal
connexion of conditions and consequences. Our ontological dis
cussions proved to us that, in the simplest case of causation, at least
two factors, a and b, must enter into a relation <:, and that the result
which takes place consists in this, that a becomes changed into a, b
into /3, c into y. Every effect, therefore, is the effect of two elements
acting upon each other, neither of which can inflict upon the other a
change in its condition, without paying a definite price for it by a
corresponding change in its own. If a wishes by acting at a distance,
whether in the way of attraction or of repulsion, to change the place
of 3, it can only do so by displacing itself in the opposite direction to
a corresponding distance. There is no reason for excepting any
single operation of nature from this general law ; it holds good even
in those cases of communicated motion when the process cannot be
observed in all its details. It is not possible for a motion of one
element, after imparting a certain velocity to a second, to persist un
changed in the first, ready to produce the same result again, and so
increase its effect to infinity ; its influence is exhausted in proportion
to the degree in which it has been exerted.
212. Certain corollaries, of different degrees of certitude, arise out
of this general conclusion. If we assume that the course of nature
includes occurrences differing in kind from each other, and not
admitting of being represented as mere quantitative or formal modifi
cations of a single homogeneous process, we shall not be justified in
asserting that every occurrence, A, calls into existence every other, C,
CHAPTER vii.] Progress may be possible. 367
or admits of immediate application to its production. It would be
quite conceivable that there was no way from A to C except through
the medium of a third, 2?, A and C remaining unsympathetic to each
other. If therefore it cannot be said that there is necessarily any
reciprocal action between every A and every C, it is equally clear on
the other hand that if such a relation does take place, a specific
amount of A must be sacrificed in order to produce a specific amount
of C. Nor is it logically necessary, or self-evident, that every con
nected succession of two occurrences A and C must be convertible.
No doubt, whatever is lost to A in the process of producing C, testifies
to an effect of C upon A; but this effect is merely to impede A, and
it is not a matter of course that every C which is able to do away
with an A should therefore be able to call into existence an A which
does not exist. That none the less it seems natural to us that this
should be so, is due to the assumption which unconsciously we make
to ourselves, that the economy of nature has no other object than
self-conservation. In a process which implied progress, the order of
events might easily be so determined as that A should lead to C, but
that there should be no way back from C to A.
It cannot therefore be asserted a priori, and as a self-evident truth,
that all the processes in Nature must be mutually convertible back
wards and forwards ; how far this convertibility extends can only be
learned by experience. But, even in those cases in which it holds good,
it is still by no means certain that the same amount c of C, which was
produced by the amount a of A, and which therefore caused a to dis
appear, would now reproduce exactly the same amount, a, as was
spent in its own production. That could not be unless it had been
previously proved that there is in Nature no tendency towards progress;
if there is progress, there can be nothing to make it impossible that
each stage in a series of occurrences, a c, c av a1 cv c^ av should contain
the condition of an advance in the next stage. This assertion is at
variance with ordinary ideas ; as, however, I do not intend to apply it
to explain the actual details of the course of Nature, I shall merely
repeat by way of justification what has previously been suggested, viz.
that the nature of being and process is not limited by any premundane
system of mechanics, but that it is the very import of this process
which determines all the quantities in which the elements make them
selves felt, and the consequences which their relations entail.
Finally, if, proceeding on the assumption of the unlimited converti
bility of mutually productive activities, we suppose that a and b enter
into a varying relation r, the sum of the effects which one is able to
368 The Laws of the Activities of Things. [BOOK n.
exercise on the other will be, within certain determinate values of <:, a
constant quantity. As each intermediate amount of c is reached, the
capacity for action continues as regards that part of the possible total
amount which it has not yet produced ; on the other hand, it has lost
so much of its force as was required to produce the result thus far
achieved; this loss can only be made good by restoring the elements
to their original state, that is, by doing away with the results already
obtained. If we call this capacity for future action potential energy *,
in contrast with kinetic energy 2 which is active at the moment, the
sum of these two forces, when the two elements are related as above,
forms a constant quantity.
In the same way a sum of money M, so long as it remains
unspent in our possession, has a purchasing power, and loses this
power in proportion to the purchased goods which it acquires. Its
original purchasing power can only be restored and applied to other
objects by re- selling the goods. This example throws light upon
the difficulties raised above. It would be impossible for us to know
a priori that the potential force which the possession of the money
would imply, could put us in possession of other objects by being
itself got rid of; this exchangeability depends, in fact, on highly
complex relations of human society. Nor should we be any more
justified in taking for granted that the goods, G, by being similarly
got rid of, would put us again in possession of the money ; and as a
matter of fact, this convertibility, which in like manner presupposes the
connexion of human wants, has its limits ; for it is well known that
by buying goods and selling them again, we are equally likely to gain
and to lose. It is not the case, then, that in the conversion of trade
every quantity reproduces the same quantity as that by which it was
produced. It is of course obvious, and need not be urged as an
objection, that this result is due to conflicting- circumstances, and to
the influence which the nature of human business has in determining
the relation of M to G ; it is to these dealings of men with each
other, not to any essential peculiarity of M and G, that the fact of
their standing in any relation is due. But this is the very point
which I would urge against the over-confident procedure of natural
science. It does not appear to me self-evident that a perfectly
adequate ground can be found for the mutual relations of the elements
of Nature either, merely by considering their fixed characters M and
G ; here, too, their exchangeable value may depend partly on some
larger commerce of the world. At the same time, I have no doubt
1 [Spannkraft] 2 [Lebendige Kraft.]
CHAPTER vii.i Idea ofct single primitive Force. 369
as to the practical truth of the principle of the Conservation of Force,
within the limits of our experience. Merely in the interests of
Metaphysic I felt compelled to speak of these difficulties, and I wish
now to make mention also of some accessory notions which have
formed round this general principle.
213. We are often told with enthusiasm how it has at last been
shown that all the various processes of the natural world are produced
by a single indestructible force never varying in its intensity, and that
nothing changes except the form in which the ceaseless transformations
of this force are presented. It is especially the important corres
pondence between mechanical work and heat, which, by a somewhat
hasty generalisation, has given rise to this idea of a transition of
forces into one another, and of a universal primitive force to which they
are all subordinate. The satisfaction thus given to that feeling which
compels us to comprehend the infinite multiplicity of things and
events under some single principle, seems to me to be illusory.
Lichtenberg once contrasted the early ages of the world, when man
kind was equally ready to believe in God and in ghosts, with the
present age, which denies both ; he feared compensation in a future
when all that would be believed in would be the ghosts. Something
like this seems to have happened in the case before us. For after all
we are only doing honour to a ghost, when we dream o'f an ab
solutely nameless primitive force, which, formless in itself, and
consisting of nothing but an unnamed number of constant amount,
assumes, as a trifling addition that needs no explanation, the changing
names under which it is manifested. If, however, we reflect upon
and realist the fact that this original force never exists in this naked
and nameless shape, but is continually passing from one to another
of the forms which it assumes, we are again admitting that what
really gives to each phenomenon its character is the concrete nature
of that which embodies the quantum of force, either wholly or partly,
for the time being. The same reflection would show that what
makes the succession of changing phenomena possible, is a unity
of meaning which pervades and connects all those concrete forms of
being with one another. Finally, it would appear that the persistence
of quantity through all this play of forces is only a mode in which
the already existent reality manifests itself, and cannot be the source
from which that reality with all its various forms originally springs.
The latter view, which would reverse the true order and mistake
the shadow for the substance, scarcely needs any further refutation ;
more serious are the objections which may be raised against the
VOL. i. B b
370 The Laws of Causation. [BOOK n.
general assertion which we admitted above, that the conservation
of the same sum of force is as a matter of fact the rule of ex
perience. In as far as we can reduce two physical processes A
and C to comparable primary occurrences consisting in comparable
velocities v of comparable masses m, so far it may .be shown
that C which is produced by A, contains precisely the same
amount of energy which A, by producing it, has lost. Where, how
ever, the two elements do not admit of this exact comparison, and
we have before us merely the fact that the specific amount a of A
produces the specific amount c of C, and, it may be, vice versa, it is
an essentially arbitrary course to conclude that c and a contain
the same amount of energy, merely distributed in each case in a
different form. All that can be said is, that a and c are equivalent,
not that they are equal. It is possibly a just expectation that all the
various processes of external nature will admit of being ultimately
referred to variously combined motions of infinitesimal elements, and
as regards these particular processes, the arbitrary interpretation re
ferred to might be defended on this ground ; but the general con
ception which underlies the principle of the conservation of Force
must without doubt apply to one case in which no such expectation
can be entertained; I allude to the interconnexion of physical and
psychical processes.
Whatever effect is produced on the organs of sense by an outward
irritation /, whether it is simply received, or transmitted, or diffused,
or changed, there must always be left over from the physical process
a residuum *', to which the psychical process of the sensation s will
succeed immediately; nor can we doubt that the strength of the
sensation will change with the changes in the strength of i. Again,
no matter what constitutes an act of will Wt or how it may act
upon other states of consciousness, or be limited by them, there must
be ultimately a part of it w, from which the first motion, f, of the
body and all its consequences take their rise, and in this case we do
not doubt, any more than in the other, that the extent of the physical
effect is determined by the varying intensity of w. Now according
to all ordinary vie.vs of what happens in such cases, by itself the mere
fact that there is an i or w, considered as an opportunity or occasion,
is not enough to entail the existence of j or/ In order that the
reaction may vary with the varying amount of the stimulus, the
stimulus must be perceptible by that which it affects, in other words,
must produce in it a change of state of definite amount. In the two
cases before us, as in all others, it will be found that no effect can
CHAPTER vii.] Equivalence and Equality. 371
take place, i. e. neither that of the last physical movement upon the
sensitive subject, nor that of the last mental excitation upon the first
nerve-element which it acts upon, without a corresponding loss ;
here, too, the productive energy is consumed, in whole or in part, in
bringing about the result. But never will it be possible to refer
i and s, or w and /, physical and psychical processes, to a common
standard ; the members of each of the two groups may be com
pared with each other, but the unit of measurement in the one has
nothing in common with that in the other. Granting, then, that here
is compensation for physical energy by psychical or for psychical by
physical, still in such a case as this there ceases to be any meaning in
saying that one and the same quantity of action or work is maintained
throughout ; all that is open to us is, to speak of an equivalence of
two activities, such that a specific amount s /z of the one, measured
by the unit /*, corresponds to a specific amount im of the other,
measured by the unit m. No one, however, can say whether these
two activities are equal in quantity, nor which of them is the
greater.
214. These considerations suggest certain others. In the first
place, we may attempt to generalise from what has been discovered
as regards these processes; in all cases, we may say, the simplest
fact, the fact which first meets us in experience, is this relation of
equivalence between two processes or forces. We do not first dis
cover that two forces are equal and like *, and therefore produce
equal and like * effects ; but what we do first is to observe that they
balance each other, or, that under the like circumstances they produce
the like motions. From this equivalence which has been found to
obtain between them in certain special cases we infer their quanti
tative equality ; at the same time we assume for the elements to which
the forces in question belong, the qualitative identity which enables
us to apply to them the same standard of measurement. I have no
motive for entering here into all the indirect reasons and proofs which
show in what a number of physical processes this assumption holds
good ; I would refer especially to the idea of homogeneous mass and
of its conservation understood as it has been above. Confining
myself to the metaphysical aspect of the question, I wish merely to
point out that the principle of the conservation of Force, or, as I
prefer now to say, the equivalence of different effects, does not impose
on us any obligation to reduce all processes in Nature to the single
class of material motion. So far as the principle applies to this latter
1 ['Gleich,' cp. note on § 19.]
B b 2
372 The Laws of Causation. [BOOK n.
class it is only a special instance of that more general correspondence,
existing between heterogeneous things as well, which we express by
this wider term of 'Equivalence/ Far, therefore, from being a
monotonous transmission of the same unchanging process, it might
be that the course of nature is for ever producing unlike by unlike ;
though the equivalence which the sovereign purpose of the world
has established between these several disparate activities, would make
the ' incidental view' practicable and fruitful, according to which we
reduce the concrete varieties of phenomena to mere quantitative values
of a single, abstract, uniform principle, just as we determine the value
of the most different things by the same artificial standard of money.
I know well how stubbornly this view will be contested. The very
analogy we have used will appear defective ; the prices of things, it
will be said, only admit of comparison because the things all serve
more or less to satisfy human wants which themselves admit of com
parison ; and this implies that the effects of the things on us, and
ultimately therefore that which is the source of those effects, must be
homogeneous. I on my side am not less stubborn in the defence
of my own view. I do not deny that in so far as different things
have like effects upon us, we are able by means of an artifice to
ignore their specific differences' for the time being, and to regard
them as differing only quantitatively ; but the things themselves are
not therefore like because they admit of this justifiable fiction. Even
if all qualitative differences are pronounced to be mere appearances,
yet the difference of this appearance still remains, and belongs no
less to the sum-total of reality; the utmost, therefore, that we can
do will be to exhibit the external world as a mechanism of homo
geneous parts which produces in us these appearances ; but by no
process of Mathematics or Mechanics would it be possible to deduce
analytically concrete magnitudes from abstract ones, or magnitudes of
different denomination from magnitudes of the same denomination.
The process of the world is no mere combination of identical ele
ments, but a synthesis of elements differing in quality and only
connected by unity of plan.
215. But are we really correct in what we have laid down with
regard to physical and psychical processes ? Is it true that in this
case also, the activity which occasions the result must necessarily be
sacrificed in the process ? Long before the principle of the Con
servation of Force had excited its present interest, I had pointed to
this conclusion ; but it is not self-evident except upon the assumption
which we adopted above, viz. that isolated elements can only be
CHAPTER vii.] Interaction of Body and Soul. 373
influenced by one another if they are capable of acting upon one
another, and that no one element will adapt itself to another without
requiring compensation from its amenability. But, it may be said,
if all the elements, a and b, must be regarded as moments of the one
M with no independence of their own, why should not the change of
a into a suffice to give the signal, which is simply followed by the
change of b into /3, according to the theory of Occasionalism ? Why
should any special effort be required in order to bring about an
affinity between the elements which already exists ? Still it is clear
that if what this theory demands is conceded it cannot apply ex
clusively to the interaction of physical and psychical processes as an
exceptional case. The same consideration would apply also to all
that takes place between the elements of the external world. Even
the atoms would find in M a constant bond of union, and what was
experienced by one atom would be the simultaneous signal for
changes in another, which would follow like premisses from their
conclusion, without involving any self-sacrifice on the part of the
first. If, however, we find that this sacrifice does as a matter of fact
take place, as it certainly does in the external world, though it can
scarcely be proved by experience in the case of physical and
psychical processes, all that remains to us is to suppose that this fact
too, is a constituent element in the purpose which finds or ought to
find expression in the real world ; at the same time, we must not
represent it as a condition imposed by some inscrutable necessity,
without which the world as it is would not be possible. My only
object in making this remark was to repeat, that if all conditions
continued to exist simultaneously with their consequences (which is
what would follow from the principles of Occasionalism), the world
would appear again as a merely systematic whole, from which all
change was absent. If, however, Becoming, the alternation between
Being and not Being, is the very characteristic of the real world,
it appears to me that the absorption of the cause in the effect is
quite as necessary to that world as persistence is necessary to the
conception of motion. For those signals which we spoke of could
themselves have no signals for their occurrence except in the succes
sion of effects ; they would be produced by one set of effects, they
must disappear again in producing another.
216. Amongst the general habits described as characteristic of the
course of Nature, it is common to hear Principles of Parsimony
mentioned. The conception is a very vague one, and even in the
principle of least action the way in which it has been formulated is
374 The Laws of Causation.
not without ambiguity. What it signifies is only clear in cases where
there is some end in view which admits of being equally realised by
different means, each however involving a different amount of
expenditure. But the standard by which this amount is estimated
is still dependent on circumstances, which make in one case the
saving of Time, in another that of distance, in another that of
material, the more important, or cause us to prefer an habitual
method to the trouble of learning a new one. In order, therefore,
to settle with any certainty the question as to the procedure which
involves the least expenditure of means, a statement of the direction in
which economy is most valuable must be included in the original
definition of the end.
This alone is enough to show what ambiguities are likely to be
involved when this conception is transferred to the operations of
Nature. Assuming that Nature follows certain ends, we do not know
what these are, nor can we determine what direction her parsimony
must take. The one thing which we should perhaps assert would be
this, that nature is not sparing in matter or in force, in Time, in
distance, or in velocity, all of which cost her nothing, but that she is
sparing in principles. It is this kind of parsimony which we do in
fact believe to exist in Nature, especially in the organic world ;
by variations of a few original types, by countless modifications of a
single organ the variety of organic beings, we believe, is produced, and
their different wants supplied. Here Nature seems to us, if it may be
permitted to our short-sighted wisdom to say so, to be wasteful of
material and Time, and to reach many of her ends by long circuitous
routes which it would have been possible, by departing from her
habitual and typical course, to have shortened. These ideas do not hold
good of mechanics, since mechanical laws apply, not to any particular
type of effect, but to any and every type. We know that, within
certain limits, the various elements in a mechanical effect are con
vertible; thus increase of velocity may make up for decrease of
mass, and increase of Time for decrease of force. There cannot
therefore be an economy in all elements at once for the attainment of
a given end e ; we must look for the least expenditure in that com
bination of all the different elements which amounts to less than any
other combination equally possible under the circumstances.
But this gives rise to a fresh ambiguity. If we look at the matter
fairly, it appears that e, which we just now described as the end or
aim, is nothing more than the particular occurrence e, and it need not
be said that the modes of activity which led to this result must have
CHAPTER vii.] The Principle of Parsimony. 375
been exactly adequate to produce it. But, under the special circum
stances in the given case, the modes of activity were at the same time
the only possible ones which could give rise to e. For in order to
follow a given path, it is not enough that it presents no obstacles,
there must also be a positive impulse to follow it. It is therefore quite
idle to excogitate different methods by which, theoretically, the end e
might have been arrived at; that would require that we should analyse
precisely the starting-point A from which the effect is supposed
to proceed, and then, after considering all the several possibilities
contained in A, that we should be able to determine that in this
particular case the other methods were still equally possible. But
this we shall never succeed in doing, for it involves a contradiction ;
it is true that the other methods may be, even in this particular case,
all equally free from impediment, but there could not be positive
inducements to follow them all equally; otherwise what would
eventually take place would be, not e, but E, the resultant of all
these different inducements. If therefore we find on comparison that
the method m by which the result e is actually reached, is the
shortest of many conceivable methods, what makes the possibility
actual reality is not that this method has been chosen out of many
others equally possible ; rather we should say that m was in this
case the only possible method, because any other direct method Mt
which might have led to the same result, lacked the conditions for
carrying them into effect ; in a different case, where these conditions
were present, the result E would be different and the shortest way to
it would be M. We must not therefore speak of parsimony in the
sense of an act of choice, the exercise of which is merely a peculiar
habit, not a causal necessity, of nature. The utmost that we could
venture to assert is, that the Laws of Nature are so devised that
the shortest way to any given result is in every case a necessary
result of the laws themselves.
Yet even this statement would be no better than ambiguous.
For the new truth which it seems to contain, and which makes it
appear more self-evident than the preceding one, is similarly de
pendent on our arbitrary determination to regard as an end what is
really only a result. It is true that according to the known law of
reflexion a ray of light transmitted from the point a and reflected by
the surface S, takes the shortest way to a point b which lies in the
line of its reflexion, or again that according to the known law of
refraction, if refracted by an intervening body, it takes the shortest
way to a point b in the line of its exit from the retracting medium.
376 The Laws of Causation. [BOOK n.
But by whose command did the ray proceed from a precisely towards
this point b and no other ? That it arrives at this point is not to be
wondered at, since it lies in the line of direction which the laws above
mentioned prescribe to light ; but for this very reason the ray is not
transmitted to any of the other innumerable points c, which lie outside
that direction, and which might yet deserve to be illuminated no less
than b. If we conceive the attainment of the point b as a sort of end
which in some way or other reacts upon the means to its attainment,
the shortest way would have been for the ray at once to change its
direction at a and traverse the straight line a b ; this, however, was
forbidden by the general laws to which it is subject, and the ray was
compelled to follow a course not absolutely the shortest, but only the
shortest conditionally upon the necessity of its reflexion. If, again,
by an equally arbitrary assumption, we suppose a point c as that
which has to be illuminated, those same laws of reflexion now appear
in the light of hindrances which do not allow of the attainment of the
end except by a longer way, not perhaps until the ray has been
several times reflected upon many different surfaces. Hence, the
only thing quite certain is this. In passing from any fully determined
point A to the consequence E which flows from it, Nature makes
no circuits to which she is not compelled but always takes the way
which under the given conditions is the only possible but therefore
also the necessary one. The parsimony of Nature consists in the
fact that groundless prodigality is a mechanical impossibility.
Something more, however, remains. We can conceive laws of
reflexion, e. g. which would require that each of the points on which
a ray of light is to touch, though lying in the line of its projection,
should yet be reached by a longer way than that by which they are
reached as a matter of fact. That reflexion, once assuming its neces
sity, takes place according to the known law of nature in the shortest
possible geometrical line, this and other like considerations may
confirm the opinion above expressed, that the concrete laws of
Nature are so constituted that it is a necessary characteristic of
their operation to effect their results at the smallest cost. It will not,
however, be doubted that the law of reflexion in question is itself a
mechanically necessary consequence of the motion of light, not a
codicil subsequently imposed upon that motion by Nature from free
choice and preference for parsimony. All that we come to finally,
therefore, is the quite general conclusion, which is also perfectly
obvious, that the order of Nature does not rest on a disconnected
heap of isolated ordinances. There is contained in the fundamental
CHAPTER vii.] Apparent Rationality of Nature. 377
properties of reality, taken together with the necessary truths of
Mathematics, a wonderful rationality which at countless different
points gives the impression of an elaborately concerted plan and fixed
aims. That even the most axiomatic principles serve a purpose, is
due not to any property implanted in them, as in some strange soil,
after they have come into being, but rather in these axiomatic prin
ciples themselves there is a deep and peculiar adaptation to purpose,
which might well furnish an attractive subject for further enquiry.
CHAPTER VIII.
The forms of the Course of Nature.
217. I GAVE to this second book the name ' Cosmology,' intending
to show that it would be devoted to the consideration only of those
general forms and modes of behaviour, which enable us to represent
to ourselves how manifold phenomena are connected together so as
to form an ordered universe ; it remained for the facts themselves to
determine with which amongst the various possible formations the
outlines thus sketched should be filled in, and these facts which are
what constitute reality in the full sense, it was proposed, therefore, to
leave to Natural Philosophy. Yet after all, how easy is it to invent
well-founded titles for sciences of the future. If only it were as easy
to discover the facts which would fill up their framework! But
indeed we have not been able to establish much, even as regards
those general tendencies of Nature, in spite of their seeming to be so
near to the region of necessary truth. We found that they too were
really dependent on the plan which is working itself out in the world.
Still less shall we be able to show as long as we are in ignorance of
that plan, that concrete processes and products, which can depend on
nothing but it, are elements and stages in a systematic development.
Such a hope was once entertained by Idealism ; light and weight,
magnetism and electricity, chemical processes and organic life were
all made to appear as necessary phases in the evolution of the
Absolute, the innermost motive of whose working was supposed to be
known ; not only so, but bold attempts were made to represent the
varieties of plants and animals as following each other in a regular
succession, and where a link was missing, to deduce it from the pre
supposed order of development, explaining the previous oversight of
it as an accident. I see no reason for repeating the criticism that
history has passed upon these attempts. It was a delusion to suppose
that the forms of reality, while still inaccessible to observation, could be
Deduction of N a here impossible. 379
deduced from a single fundamental principle : all that could be done
with such a principle was to reduce to it the material already given by
experience, with its attendant residuum of peculiarity which cannot be
explained but must be simply accepted as a fact. It did not of course
follow that the interpretation of given facts which these theories had to
offer were wrong throughout, and they gave rise to many fruitful
suggestions which subsequent science has thankfully followed, though
they had to be put in a new light before it could utilise them. At the
same time, there is one direction in which even the scientific views
now prevalent require to be on their guard against the continuance of
a similar illusion.
The later exponents of those Idealist doctrines lived, like our
selves, under the influence of the cosmographical views which recent
scientific enquiry had developed ; far from participating in the fanatic
notions of antiquity, according to which the earth was the centre
of the Universe, and all things besides were merely subsidiary to
it, they admitted the Copernican discoveries, and realised that they
and all the exercise of their observation were fixed at an eccentric
point in the small planetary system. Yet in spite of this they per
suaded themselves that the spiritual development of their absolute was
confined to the shores of the Mediterranean, and that its plastic force
in the physical world was exhausted in producing the forms of plants
and animals, neither of which, as they knew, could exist except upon
the earth's surface. Now it is certainly an idle and profitless task to
attempt really to imagine what the forms of existence and life might
have been, had the circumstances been wholly different ; all such at
tempts result in mere clumsy reduplications of the forms of existence
which experience presents to us. The just general conviction that
Spiritual Life, the ultimate end of Nature, does not stand or fall with
the earthly means which it uses for its realisation, cannot call to its aid
any creative imagination capable of actually picturing another life of
which we have had no experience. But, however mistaken may be
the attempts which are made in this direction, the general conviction
which inspires them will always remain valuable ; supposing physical
science to be justified in assuming that certain physical processes
prevail without variation over the whole universe, it would still be
premature to assert a universal uniformity, which excluded any idea
of forces peculiar in character and unexampled on the earth. So
much the less ground is there for placing the concrete forms of
reality, which no man can number, on the same footing with con
ceptions which, under the head of cosmology, we endeavoured to
380 The forms of the Course of Nature.
form of the universal rules of action to which Nature conforms. The
former, therefore, I leave to be dealt with by natural philosophy, and
renounce the prevailing fashion of relieving the dryness of Meta
physical discussion by picturesque illustrations selected from the
experimental sciences.
218. It might, however, be truly objected, that though it may be
impossible to deduce the concrete forms of nature, the reduction of
them to the universal laws mentioned above is just one of the duties
of metaphysic, I admit this duty, and only regret that it is one which
no one can fulfil, not at least to the extent which the objection would
require. The two points in which we seemed to run most counter to
the ordinary view are, firstly, that of the phenomenal character of
Space, secondly, that of the inner activity of Things, to which, instead
of to external changes of relation between fixed elements, we ascribed
the origin of events. Now, I have not neglected to insist in general
terms on the necessity of starting from these inner states in order to
explain even the possibility of that causative force which external
circumstances appear to exercise. A more minute' investigation of
them, however, seemed to be forbidden, by the admitted impossi
bility of knowing them ; and this would be the same even if more use
were made than has yet been done of the hypothesis that their nature
is spiritual. But this practical inapplicability does not impair the value
of an idea which we found to be necessary, and to which no objection
can be found either in itself or in the facts of experience. With re
spect to the Phenomenality of Space, I have argued at equal length
and with a minuteness which has probably seemed tedious, that the
appearance both of Space itself and of the changes which take place
in it, is to be referred to real events which do not take place in Space,
and I reserve for the Psychology what remains to be said by way of
supplement to this ; but, in this case also, it seems to me quite unfair
to require my view to be worked out in detail. Such a requisition, if
it applied to the particular perceptions of everyday life, would be as
extravagant as the demand not merely to see what takes place before
us, but at the same time to know the physical causes which make all
that we see present itself to sight just as it does ; only that here what
we should ask to see through would be not physical causes but the
supersensuous relations which the elements assume in the universal
plan, and to which their appearance in Space is due.
Perhaps, however, no more is required than that in the case of the
various main groups of natural processes, the hypotheses which had
been constructed to explain them on the supposition of the reality of
CHAPTER viii.] Can Real Space be dispensed with ? 38 1
Space, should now give place to others equally capable of ex
plaining the facts, on the understanding that true being does not
exist in Space. If this is what is meant, I think the demand will
in the future certainly be complied with, but at present this is im
possible, or, if approximately possible, is not to be regarded as
a slight addition to what has been already done. In order to make
such a translation of physics into metaphysics possible we should
require first of all to have the whole text which is to be translated,
incontrovertibly fixed and settled. Nothing can be further than
this is from being the case at present. As things stand now, every
hypothesis which is used in explanation of the several branches of
natural phenomena, is compelled3 in order not to ignore any pecu
liarities of the object in question, to assume a plurality of original
facts, which, though they may not be mutually inconsistent, exist only
side by side, and are not derivable the one from the other. Still
more untrustworthy is our knowledge of the border-lands in which
these various spheres of natural phenomena meet. What use then
would it be to show — what would be a difficult task in itself — that
these hypotheses can be replaced in all points, with equally fruitful
results, by a view which substituted for the supposed objects and
motions in Space, determinate supersensuous relations and excitations
in the inner elements of true being ? We should still have no other
way of determining these internal states than that by which physics
discovered the corresponding external ones : we should have to as
sume them as primary facts, which the phenomena in question re
quired for their explanation. But Metaphysic, if once she set herself
to this task, would have to do more than this ; she must be in a
position to show that all these necessarily assumed individual facts are
at the same time the logical consequences of those inner states, and
that the nature and character of true being justifies the attribution of
those states to it. As long as this, which is again in fact a kind of
deduction of reality, is impossible for us, there can be little good and
small hope of reward in the attempt to reduce sensible facts to super
sensible ones. Leaving therefore any such attempt for another occa
sion, I will merely add a few general observations on the relation of
speculation to the ordinary methods of experimental science.
219. Man must make the best of what he has, and not decline
valuable knowledge merely because it does not at once offer him the
whole truth which he wishes to know. In every science there will
always be a considerable gap between the most general points of
view from which we should wish to regard the given objects, and the
382 The forms of the Course of Nature.
actual knowledge which we can possibly acquire about them; and
this gap proves nothing either against the Tightness of those ulti
mate points of view or against the value of the methods by which
we succeed in investigating particular facts. We must beware of that
doctrinairism, which will allow no conclusion to be valid, unless it is
reached by the method of a logical parade-ground, reminding us
of Moliere's physician, who only demanded of his patient, * qu'il
mourut dans les formes.' In respect to applied Logic it must be
granted that there is some truth in the cynical remark of the Emperor
Vespasian. Every method is praiseworthy which leads to a sure
result j even the most monstrous hypothesis, if it really enables us to
connect the facts together and to explain their mutual dependence, is
better than the neatest and trimmest theory, from which nothing
follows. Holding these views, I can have no sympathy with the
often repeated attempts of philosophers to show that the fundamental
ideas of Physical Science are inadequate, disconnected, and fre
quently inconsistent. Without attempting to determine how much
there is of justice or injustice in this indictment, I readily admit that
it is in the main true ; but I am not so much struck by these defects,
as filled with sincere and unmixed admiration at the manifold variety
of consistent and reliable results, which, with such imperfect means at
her disposal, science has established by unwearied observation and by
brilliancy of invention.
I hope and believe, also, that if science continues to work with the
same conscientiousness, many truths, which now appear only in neces
sary juxtaposition, and many others which are seemingly opposed,
will enter into a nearer and better relation, as different results of one
and the same original process ; in fact that, as at the end of a long and
complicated reckoning, a simple total will be left over, which the
philosophy of the future will be able to apply to the satisfaction of its
own special wants. This much to be desired result, however, can
only be obtained in the first instance by means of clearly outlined
hypotheses, framed so as to meet the observed facts, and modified
and transformed so as to keep pace with each fresh discovery: it
matters not that the expression which our suppositions assume in this
intermediate stage of discovery is imperfect in form ; the wished for
simplicity and clearness of statement can belong only to the finished
result. No other method can be substituted for this ; not that of
Positivism, which bids us be content with general formulae for the
observed connexion of facts without introducing ideas about the inner
connexion of things, advice which at first sight commends itself, but
CHAPTER viii.] Meaning of ' Mechanism' 383
which is entirely fruitless in practice : not a lofty philosophic intui
tion which only a great poetic genius could delude men into regard
ing as an actual means to the discovery of truth ; not any speculative
deduction, which hears only part of the evidence before rushing to its
conclusion. These leave us where we were: Moses may stand on
the mountain of speculation and pray that the laws of thought may
be faithfully observed ; but facts can only be brought into subjection
by what Joshua is doing in the valley. After this confession, my
present object can only be to analyse those conceptions by the help
of which philosophy distinguishes the wealth of natural processes into
groups, seeing in each group either the operation of a specific prin
ciple, or a particular application of general principles, and regarding
them at the same time as contributing in different ways to the realisa
tion of the all-embracing plan of Nature.
22O. The word mechanism, which has so many meanings, is used
by modern schools of thought to describe sometimes a particular
mode of action, sometimes a class of effects produced by this action :
in either case, the mechanical aspect of Nature is spoken of in terms
of marked disparagement, as compared with another and different
aspect, to which it is deemed inferior. What the word means is more
easily learned from the customary use of language than from the con
flicting definitions of the schools. All modern nations speak of the
mechanism of government, of taxation, of business of any kind.
Evidently, what is signified by it is, the organization of means either
with a view to realising a particular end, or to being prepared for
carrying out different but kindred objects. We do not, however,
speak of a mechanism of politics; we expect political ends to be
effected by an art of statesmanship, and this we should blame, if we
saw it working by mechanical rules. This distinction in the use of
the term clearly expresses the limitation that the mechanical organiza
tion of means is only calculated for general conditions, common to a
number of kindred problems, and meets the requirements in question
by working according to general laws.
Now, it is impossible to conform to a law in a merely general way ;
every application of the law must give rise to a determinate result
depending on a determinate condition, whereas the law in its general
expression makes the dependence only general. It seems, therefore,
up to a certain point to be part of the very essence and conception of
a mechanism to take account of the differences in the particular in
stances to which it applies. In the first place, the laws themselves which
it obeys require that its effects shall be proportionate to the given cir-
384 The forms of the Course of Nature.
cumstances ; next, the circumstances themselves, their peculiar nature,
resistance, and reaction, modify the action and combination of the
forces which it sets in motion — also according to fixed laws — and so
enable it to produce the designed effect even under unforeseen condi
tions. The technical industry of the present day furnishes many ex
amples of this self-regulation of machinery ; but whatever advances it
may make in many sidedness and delicacy, it never escapes the limi
tations which popular language, as we saw, imposes upon the capa
bilities of mechanism. It is the ingenuity of the inventor to which
alone the handiness of the machine is due ; it is his calculation, his
comparison of the end with the means and the hindrances to its
realisation, which has enabled him so to combine the forces of Nature,
that they must now lead of themselves to the desired result according
to universal laws of their own which are independent of him. His
penetration may have enabled him to see disturbing causes in advance
and to meet them by a combination of the means at his disposal so
that the disturbances themselves liberate the reacting forces which are
to compensate them ; even disturbing causes which he has not fore
seen may by good luck be neutralised by the internal adaptation and
power of self-adjustment of a machine. But all these favourable
results have their limits. If they occur, they are the necessary conse
quences according to universal law of the joint action of the machine
and its circumstances ; if they fail to occur, the machine is destroyed ;
the power of resisting the conditions has not been given it from with
out, by the genius of its inventor or by a lucky chance, and it is
incapable of generating such a power of itself.
Here lies the difference of statesmanship and every other prac
tical art from what is mechanical. Every art, following as it does
ends which cannot be realised of themselves, is confined to the use of
means which it cannot make but can only find ; it cannot compel
any one of these means to produce effects which are impossible or
extraneous to its nature ; it can only combine together the means at
its disposal in such a way that they will be compelled by the universal
laws of their action to produce necessarily and inevitably the de
sired result. Every higher form of activity, consequently, which we
are inclined to assume in Nature, even the most perfectly unrestrained
freedom must, if it would be operative in the world, take just that
mechanical form which is supposed at first to be inconsistent with its
nature. The only privilege that distinguishes it, is the power of
varying according to its aims the combination of the several mechan
ical elements, and of taking first one and then another part of the
CHAPTER VIII.] Pure 'McC/lCWlSm' a FictlOH. 385
mechanism for its base of operations, thus making each part yield its
own results. But its capabilities come to an end as soon as its object
is one which cannot be produced by any combination of mechanical
operations, or as soon as it can no longer bring about that particular
combination which would have the result in question.
221. As regards the special meaning attached to the term * mech
anism ' in their explanation of natural phenomena, philosophers un
doubtedly understood by it primarily a peculiar mode of activity, the
range of which was still undetermined. But it was distinctly believed,
at the same time, that there was a certain special class of natural
products, which was subject to the single and undisputed sway of the
mechanical principle. I cannot subscribe to either of these two
theories, except with essential reservations. Mechanism could only be
defined in the sense in which it is employed in current language.
Always determined by the given circumstances and general laws
which lie behind it, never by the nature of an end which lies before it,
it was contrasted (I shall return to this contrast later) as a concatena
tion of blind and irrevocable forces with those organic activities which
seemed to follow ends with a certain freedom though they were also
liable to fail in their attainment. But even within the limits of what was
called the inorganic world, mechanism was opposed and deemed in
ferior to chemism. While in the chemical sphere, owing to the elective
affinities of the elements, the specific qualities of bodies were continually
destroying old forms and properties and creating new ones, thus co
operating decisively in determining the course of events, mechanical
action was depreciated as a mere external process, which never gives
a hearing to the distinctive nature of things, deals with them all as
mere commensurable mass-values, and therefore produces no other
effects but various combinations, separations, movements, and arrange
ments of inwardly invariable matter.
But Philosophy ought never to have believed in the reality of a
mode of activity which it regarded in this light. A man or an official
might be reproached for executing general laws and regulations with
out regard to exceptional cases, which deserve special consideration
and forbearance. Such action, which we blame as mechanical, only
succeeds because the combined force of human society deprives the
ill-treated exceptions of the power of resisting. But things are not
hindered from defending themselves by any such considerations, nor
can there be anything in nature to prevent them from asserting their
special peculiarities in the production of each effect, to the precise
extent to which, if we may speak of them as human beings, they have
VOL. I. C C
386 The forms of the Course of Nature.
an interest in so doing. It will be objected, however, that it is not
meant to conceive of this mechanical agency, after the analogy of the
inflexible official, as an authority of nature imposing itself auto
cratically upon things from without ; what is meant is merely a process
which is indeed developed from the interaction of things themselves,
but which derives its character from the very fact that the things have
no interests of their own, that they have not reached the point of
letting their individuality be seen and heard, but are content to be
have as samples of homogeneous mass ; so far as this indifference of
things extends, so far does mechanism extend. But even when stated
in this improved form, the doctrine is not tenable unless either a
physical process can be pointed out which takes place without being
in any way influenced by the distinctive idiosyncracies of things, or it
can be shown that results in the final form of which such influences
though really operative seem to have vanished, are to be considered
as preconceived elements in the plan of Nature. All attempts to
establish the first case are from our point of view based on a wrong
foundation. After having maintained that a change of outer rela
tions is only possible as a consequence of mutual solicitations in the
inner nature of things, we can only regard a mechanism which com
bines things in mutual action without taking account of this inner
nature and its co-operation, as an abstraction of Science, not as a
reality. Science, no doubt, has need of this abstraction. Whatever
distinctive differences there may be between things, at any rate the
contributions which they make to the production of a single event
must admit of being expressed in values of comparable action. In
order to be able to estimate their effects, we must refer the laws which
govern them to certain ideally simple instances, zero values or maxima,
of their effective differences, and then, after calculating our result upon
this basis, subjoin such modifications as the concomitant conditions
of the given case require.
It is in this way that we arrive at the indispensable conceptions of
mechanics ; the conception of a rigid immutable atom, from which
every qualitative change is excluded ; the conception of an absolutely
fixed body, from which we have eliminated any alteration of form and
all other effects of composition ; at the principle, lastly, which may
serve to express in the shortest form what we mean by mechanism,
the principle that, if several forces act together upon the same object,
no one of them has any effect on the tendency to action of the rest, but
each continues to operate as if the rest were not present, and it is only
these several and singly calculable effects which combine to form a
CHAPTER viii.] ' Corrections ' of Theoretical Results. 387
resultant. Now none of these conceptions expresses anything which
we can regard as occurring in actual fact, not even the principle last
named. But supposing that this principle were not valid — and indeed
the limits within which it holds good cannot be fixed a priori — sup
posing that the tendency to act of a force were altered by its relation to
other forces working simultaneously, we should still require to make
use of the principle, for we could not estimate the nature of the altera
tion, unless we first knew what the action would be unaltered ; for
even though it does not occur in its unaltered form, it would still help
to condition the variation which does occur. So far, however, as the
principle does hold good, it merely allows us to measure results when
they take place, it does not tell us how they take place : it is not the
case that the forces have been indifferent and taken no account of
one another : the truth rather is that they, or the inner movement of
things which correspond to them, have taken this account of each
other, only it happened that the resolution at which they arrived in
this particular case was to the effect that each should maintain
its former tendency to act, just as in another case it might have been
that this tendency should be changed. From this it appears that
these very processes which, as far as the form of their result goes, ex
hibit all the characteristics of mechanism, are not produced mechani
cally in this sense at all, and the whole conception of mechanism as a
distinct type of action, based on the mutual indifference of things,
must be banished entirely from the philosophical view of Nature.
Nor does it receive more than a semblance of support from obser
vation. Even in cases of impact, to which most of the so-called
mechanical processes are reducible, there are produced along with
the imparted translatory motion permanent or elastically neutralised
changes in the form of the body impinged upon, besides inner vibra
tions which make themselves known as Sound or Heat. The number
of these secondary effects, and the completeness with which the
translatory motion is imparted, depends in every case on the inner
interactions which hold together the ultimate elements of the bodies,
depends, i. e. on forces which have their origin in the heart of things,
and which differ from each other according as things themselves
differ in quality. These inner effects we are accustomed, and for
purposes of science obliged, to regard as secondary, and as dis
turbances of the theoretically perfect instance ; but in taking account
of them as corrections to be added to the result which strict rules
would give us, we are really correcting our own abstract conception
of a pure mechanism, which, as such, has no real existence in Nature.
C C 2
388 The forms of the Course of Nature.
222. As this is the case with regard to the first of the two alterna
tives1 proposed, it remains that the Philosophy of Nature can only
undertake the second. Looking only at the ultimate form in which
processes result, it would be possible to arrange the facts of Nature
in groups according as the qualitative nature of things, which is a
constant factor in each process, was more or less apparent in the
results. And this is naturally the course which Idealism would have
followed, had it been consistent with itself. Its object being to point
out phenomena in which as a series the ends of Nature were succes
sively realised, it might have entirely disregarded the question how
all these phenomena are produced, and have considered them solely
from the point of view of their significance, when once in existence.
All the misunderstandings which have arisen between Idealism and
the Physical Sciences, have been occasioned by this error of confound
ing interpretations of the ideal significance of phenomena with expla
nations of the causes which have led to their existence. Imposing on
ourselves, then, this restriction, we might seek, in the first place, for a
department of processes where there seemed to be no trace at any
point of the constant silent influence of the qualitative differences of
things; or where, in case the elements producing the result were
homogeneous, there was no sign of the perpetual return of the pro
cess into, and its reproduction out of, the inner nature of things. It
would be in such a group of activities that we should have to look for
the semblance of a perfect mechanism.
In the small events which every day pass before us in changing
succession, in the motions which partly at our instance, partly owing
to causes which remain unobserved, bodies communicate to each
other — we do not find this mechanical action exemplified. In these
cases, though varying in distinctness, those secondary effects are
never wholly absent, in which the diversity of the co-operating
elements manifests itself. We find what we are looking for only in
the process of gravitation, or, more properly, in the revolutions in
closed curves, which result from the attraction of the heavenly bodies
and an original tangential motion. Attraction itself cannot be con
sidered as an external appendage to the constituent elements of the
planets : as these elements are different, the degree of attraction
would have to vary to suit the nature of each part. But the different
distribution in different planets of elements varying in the degrees of
their reciprocal action, determines what we call the mass of the planets;
1 [The treatment of ' Mechanism ' a as a mode of Action, jS as a kind of Effect,
v. Sect. 220 init.]
CHAPTER viii.] Grcivita lion, Light, and Sound. 389
and so after having included in the conception of this unchanging
mass everything which related to the qualitative nature of the elements,
we find ourselves able to calculate the subsequent motions of the
heavenly bodies without assuming anything beyond their original
velocities and directions, and the general law of the variation of force
with distance ; and without being obliged to recur again to the inner
nature of the elements, though it is from this that the whole result
springs. It was this great spectacle of the universe maintaining
itself perpetually the same, that claimed the attention of Philosophy,
which saw in it the first stage of the self-development of thought in
Nature, the exhibition of the universal order, which remains undis
turbed by any inner movements of the particular.
Next and in contrast to Gravitation or Matter, which was strangely
identified with it, was placed Light, or rather (since a name was
wanted which would include not only Light but also Sound) those
undulatory processes, by means of which impulses diffuse themselves
on all sides, without any considerable translatory motion. It was
not altogether without reason that in these phenomena of Nature an
analogy was found to Mind ; for it is through them, no doubt, that
things convey to each other their fluctuating inner experiences, each
as it were reflecting itself in the other; so that a communication
between them is established, similar to that which exists between the
knowing subject and its object. It was owing to a misconception that
speculative Philosophy refused to allow these processes to be classed
under mechanism and treated mechanically. The equal diffusion of
light compels us, no doubt, to explain the force with which each
particle of ether communicates motion to the adjoining particle, as
due to inner experiences arising from their constant and sympathetic
relationship : but as it also leads us to assume that the ether consists
of none but homogeneous elements, the further progress of this
occurrence of transmission admits of being treated in precisely the
same way as the motions of the heavenly bodies. It is only when
these undulations come into contact with material bodies, i.e. when
they are reflected, refracted, dispersed, that the quality of particular
bodies makes itself felt in effects, which necessitate a number of new
truths derived from experience, and serving as starting-points for
analytical deductions. I have no intention of discussing in this
place the validity of those fruitful hypotheses, on the basis of which
optics has raised her imposing edifice ; nor do I wish to replace them
by others. I wished merely to justify to some extent the older specu
lation in its view, that these phenomena exhibit a new, characteristic,
390 The forms of the Course of Nature. [BOOK n.
and important form of Nature's activity, a form in which the influences
of the specific qualities of things are not indeed quite neutralised, but
do not appear to dominate the whole process : the general form, in fact,
of a still inoperative affinity between diverse and changing elements.
223. A different impression was produced by the phenomena of
electricity and chemistry. Philosophy here encountered the doctrine
of the two electric fluids, which had already been fully developed by
Physics, and was thus confirmed in regarding this as the first case in
which the qualitative opposition of things appears as really determining
the course of events. The further development of this branch of Physics
will certainly not be able to dispense with the special presuppositions,
which have been framed in consequence of this view. There seems
at any rate no prospect at present of explaining that peculiar notion
of absorption or neutralisation, in which forces, once in full activity,
evanesce without leaving any trace of themselves, as due to a mere
opposition of motions, similar to the absorption of Light by inter
ference. Such an explanation would still leave the question, what is
the principle on which these conflicting motions are distributed
amongst the bodies, from which the electric appearances are elicited ?
And this question could hardly be answered without reinstating —
though perhaps in a different form and connexion — the conception of
a polar opposition of a qualitative kind. But this also does not con
cern us here : it is sufficient that electric phenomena, whatever may
be their origin, in the form of their manifestation express precisely
this idea of an opposition inherent in the nature of things.
This influence of the specific nature of agents was believed to be
much more distinctly apparent in the case of chemical phenomena,
which had likewise been already connected by Physics with electricity.
The idea that in chemical as opposed to so-called mechanical action,
the individual nature of things for the first time awoke, co-operated,
and underwent inner transformations, was not, strictly speaking, sup
ported by observation. Striking changes were frequently seen to
take place in the sensible qualities of things, in consequence of mere
changes in their composition. Hence it was possible to suppose
that other changes, the origin of which was not similarly open to
experimental proof, might also be due to differences not directly
perceptible in the arrangement of the ultimate particles and their
resulting interactions. But the chemical process, according to that
view of it which was favoured by Philosophy, was that, out of a and £,
a third new and simple product c resulted, in which both a and b are
merged, though by reversing the process, they may again be produced
CHAPTER vin.] Chemism and Mechanism. 39 1
out of it. This view, which obviously implies a constant and complete
interpenetration of the active chemical elements, expressed the idea
of which the phenomena of chemism furnished sensible illustration.
As a Physical theory it remained barren, because it failed to explain
how similar combinations of elements can give rise to permanently
different products, as also because it left out of account the manifold
analogies between combinations of essentially distinct elements.
To this view, there succeeded an exclusively atomic conception of
chemistry. The elements a and b were supposed to subsist unchanged
in the result c, and the properties above-mentioned were accounted
for by the different positions which the various samples of a and b may
assume in the product c of their*combination. I do not understand
why the pictures which we often see of the structure of such chemical
combinations should be accompanied by the warning that they are not
to be understood literally. If they are only symbols, they at once
lead to a metaphysical view, according to which we should speak, not
of positions in Space, but of intelligible relations of varying intensity
between the actions of the absolute, which present themselves to us
singly as chemical elements. If we shrink from making use of th^se
certainly impracticable notions, of which I have spoken previously,
and make up our minds to follow the ordinary view of the reality of
Space, it seems to follow that either these graphic representations
must be understood quite literally, or that they have no intelligible
meaning at all. It is not, however, my purpose to describe the
consequences which the atomic view of chemistry has had in general,
and especially of late the hypothesis of Avogadro, in itself an entirely
improbable one. I would only call attention to the fact that after all
that can be said, our knowledge is limited on the one hand to the
elements which enter into composition, on the other to the actual and
probable typical forms which the composition finally assumes ; the
process by which the combination takes place, i. e. the true chemical
process, still escapes us. Our conceptions of it cannot be made to
fit with the rest of our mechanical notions, unless we admit as new
data both the original difference between the elements, not reducible
to physical modifications of a common matter, and the special elective
affinities of these elements, which determine their general capacities
of combination and the proportions in which they will permanently
combine.
Even then one phenomenon still remains dark, that which gave to
chemistry its old name ' Scheidekunst ' (art of division), the analysis
of the combinations. Let us suppose that between all the elements>
392 The forms of the Course of Nature.
a b c . . . z, the only affinity that exists is that of attraction in varying
degrees of intensity. In that case, if there is no new condition intro
duced, any reciprocal action between the two pairs a b and c d can
only lead to their amalgamation abed, never to their fresh distribu
tion into a c and b d. And even if the affinities between a and c, b
and d, be ever so much closer than those between a and bt c and d,
there cannot be any separation of the elements : the most that can
happen is this, that an external force, z/"it were brought to bear upon
the whole combination a b c d — which would be the necessary result
of mere forces of attraction — would detach a from b or c from d more
easily than a from c, or b from a. Any repulsion, therefore, must
come from elsewhere than the resrrits of attraction ; and as there is
no evidence of direct repulsion between the single elements it can
only be looked for in the circumstances which accompany the chemical
process, or, as is probable, actually constitute it. These may consist
in motions which disconnect the elements, or in the affinity of the
elements to the different electricities, the polar antagonism of which
may require them to move in these particular ways.
But however that may be, my only purpose was to show that
Philosophy was right in ascribing to the qualitative differences of
things a decisive influence in the sphere of chemistry, wrong in deny
ing any such influence in that of mechanics: and that therefore though
the opposition between these processes of nature is not without some
reason in it, it is practically impossible to draw a sharp line of dis
tinction between them, such as would separate their spheres, and
assign to them two different principles of action.
224. But all this has now scarcely more than an historical interest ;
the relation of forces to organic activities is still the subject of con
flicting opinions. In an essay on ' Life and Vital Energy,' which
forms the introduction to Rudolph Wagner's Hand-Dictionary of
Physiology, I defended, six-and-thirty years ago, the claim of the
mechanical view to a place in the science of Physiology, a claim
which was at that time still much disputed. Scientific taste has now
to some extent changed ; at present, not merely all the practical in
vestigations of Physiology, but to a great extent also the formulation
of its theories are dominated by the mechanical spirit ; those who are
opposed to it, repeat the old objections, for the most part in the old
form. If, though weary of going back to these matters, I proceed
now to recapitulate shortly the conclusions which were developed in
the above-mentioned essay, and subsequently in the ' General Phy
siology of Corporeal Life' (Leipsic, 1851), it is chiefly for the sake
CHAPTER viii.] Vital Force — one or many? 393
of a remark which has been often overlooked, at the end of the
essay, and which is to the effect that it necessarily contained only
the one half of the principles which a complete biological theory
implied. The other half would have touched on the question, how
the mechanical treatment of vital phenomena, necessitated by
the facts, harmonises with those requirements of an opposite kind,
which the primary instincts of philosophy will never cease to make,
as in times past. For this dispute is, in fact, an old one. I
should have been able to go back to Aristotle, whose ' substantial
forms ' extended the dominion of the activity of Thought far beyond
living things, to which in the modem controversy it is confined,
while already in antiquity the Aristotelian view was elaborately
opposed by the Epicurean physics, which denied the activity of
thought no less unrestrictedly. The question did not, however, be
come one of pressing importance, until, with the development of
modern science, a definite formulation had been given to the group of
ideas, the application of which to explain life meets with so much
opposition. Putting aside the more ethical, aesthetic, and religious
grounds for this aversion, which it is not necessary here to examine,
the theoretical motive which has prompted it has always been the
same. The scanty knowledge which we possess of the formative in
fluences active throughout the rest of nature, did not seem sufficient
to explain the complex and yet fixed forms of organic life ; their
germs at any rate, it was thought, must have an independent origin,
even if in their subsequent development they were subject to the
Universal Laws of Nature. But further, the peculiar phenomena of
growth, nutrition, and propagation, the general fact of the interde
pendence of continuously active functions, and that of self-preservation
in presence of repeated disturbances, all this seemed to demand the
continued presence and operation of that higher principle, to which
had been attributed at first only the initial formation of the germ.
Finally, the undefined but overpowering general impression of per
vading adaptation, witnessed to the presence of an end which guided
organic nature, rather than to a past which blindly compelled it. The
conception of a vital force was the first form in which these ideas
were united.
225. As long, however, as this expression was merely thrown out
in a general way, it could not serve to solve the difficulty, but only
to indicate its existence. It was not allowable to follow the example
of Treviranus, and explain everything from the byssus to the palm,
from the infusorium to the monster of the sea, as living by Vital
394 The forms of the Course of Nature.
Force : the difference between the palm and the byssus had also to be
taken account of; every species of living things required its own special
vital force, and every individual of the species needed its own share or its
particular sample of the force. The general name Vital Force indicated,
therefore, merely a formal characteristic, which could attach to many
different real principles yet to be discovered. It was besides an im
proper use to make of the term force^ which had been applied by
Physics in quite a different sense ; the appropriate word was impulse
(Trieb). For when the general characteristic in question had to be de
scribed, the contrast was obvious. Every physical force always produces
under the same conditions the same effects, under different con
ditions, different effects ; it is always conditioned by a general law,
irrespectively of the ensuing result ; everything that under given cir
cumstances the force can effect, it must necessarily effect, nor can any
part of the effect be kept back, nor any addition be made to it which
would not have been inevitable under the existing circumstances. To
Impulse, on the other hand, we ascribe the power of changing its
manner of operation, not indeed without regard to existing circum
stances, but with regard at the same time to a result which does not
yet exist ; a power of leaving undone much that it might do, and
of beginning something new instead which it is not bound by the
given conditions to do at all. It had to be admitted, however, that
the vital impulse never produces anything in a vacuum, but only
works with the materials supplied to it by nature ; and thus arose the
ordinary view of vital force as a power, which, though dependent in a
general sense upon material conditions, is superior to the physical and
chemical laws of matter, and gives rise to phenomena which those
laws will not explain.
226. I must take permission to refer to the above-mentioned essay
for many details, which here I can only lightly touch on, but could
not altogether omit without leaving constantly recurring fallacies only
half-refuted. We are continually being told that no application of the
improved means which we now have at our command will enable us
to manufacture artificially a product which even remotely resembles a
living organism. The fact must simply be granted. Neither cellulose
nor albumen, nor any other of the tissue-forming substances of
organic bodies can be produced by chemical art, although the dis
tinction between the ternary and quaternary combinations of organic
life and the binary combinations of inorganic nature, which was once
so much insisted on, has long since lost its meaning : nor are we any
longer under the delusion that these combinations last only so long as
CHAPTER viii.] What Subject has the Vital Force? 395
the vital force lasts, a delusion which any thoughtful student might
have been disabused of from the first, if he had only thought of the
wood of the table, at which he was writing, or of the pens and paper.
Still, it is true that in none of our artificial productions is there any
such connected series of chemical transformations, form- modifications
and functions as could be compared with the growth, nourishment,
and propagation of an organic Being: even the recently observed
formation of cells out of inorganic substanc.es, though worthy of all con
sideration, is not likely to prove the starting-point for new discoveries
in this direction. But all that this proves is that in the present course
of Nature, Life is a system of processes self-maintaining and self-
propagating, and that outside its sphere there is no combination of
materials, such as would make the development of such phenomena
possible. Nothing is thus decided as to the conditions under which
this play of forces is sustained after it has begun, and yet these must
first be known before it can be determined what requirements a
theory as to the first origin of Life has to meet. But neither the
question concerning the origin of the whole organic world, nor, the
consideration whether in the future it may not be possible to add to it
by artificial means, must be allowed to confuse the discussion here.
The only point to be considered is, whether the vital force which
organic beings as a matter of fact exercise in developing themselves
and resisting external injury, requires us to assume a principle of
action, which is strange to the inorganic world; and whether that
other vital force, which such a principle of action is assumed to be,
is conceivable in itself, and adequate to explain the given facts ?
227. We shall require, in the first place, for the sake of clearness,
to be definitely informed as to the nature of the subject, to which the
activities included under the name of vital force are supposed to
belong. There has been no lack of theories which endeavoured to
meet this question fairly. Some have spoken of a universal sub-
slance of Life, which they found either in a ponderable matter, or
in electricity, or some other unknown member of the more refined
family of ether. Others regarded the soul as the master-builder and
controller of the body, assuming at the same time that plants had
souls, which was, to say the least, not a fact of observation. I will
only mention briefly the common defect in all these theories. It is
impossible to deduce difference from a single homogeneous principle,
unless we have a group of minor premisses to show why the one
principle should necessarily develop a at one point, b or c at another.
As has already been said, we should always have to assume as many
396 The forms of the Course of Nature.
different material bases of life as there are different kinds of living
things ; or else it would have to be shown to what subsequently
arising causes it was due that such different forms as an oak tree and
a whale could be produced out of the one substance. In the latter
case the development of Life would be at once brought again under
the general conception of a mechanism. For mechanism in the
widest sense of the term may be said to include every case in which
effects are produced by the reciprocal action of different elements, of
whatever kind, working in accordance with universal Laws ; and such
conformity to law would have to be assumed by all these theories ; they
could never leave it open to doubt that, under the influence of an
accessory condition a, the single principle of life would take shape in
the product a rather than in b.
But metaphysic has no interest in maintaining the claims of the
mechanical principle, except in this very general sense ; nor, on the
other hand, will physics be so narrow-minded as to insist that it is
precisely from these materials and forces which we now know, and
according to the exact analogy of inorganic processes, that we are
to conceive of the phenomena of organic Life. All that physics
claims, is, that whatever kinds of matter, force, or energy remain yet
to be discovered, must all fall within the compass of her investigations,
must all be connected together according to Universal Laws.
Further, however, experience did not at all show that the choice
between these accessory conditions was so unrestricted. It is not the
case that every organic kind requires as the basis of its existence peculiar
kinds of matter which it places at the disposal of the one vital force.
The most different products of Nature are all constructed from the
same storehouse of material elements, which are found on the surface
of the earth. Hence, however peculiar the principle of Life may be in
itself, it can never have been free from interaction with that same matter
which we know to be also controlled by physical laws of its own.
The principle might issue what commands it pleased, but could only
carry them out (supposing the materials in question not to obey them
spontaneously) by. exerting those forces to which the matter is naturally
amenable. We know that in all cases the contribution which is made by
the several co-operating factors, to a result in the final form, may be of
the most different amounts. Thus it may be that the form which Life
is to assume in any given case is already traced by anticipation in some
specific kind of substance ; but the actual existence of this life is
always the result of mechanical causes, in which the original substance
would be only prima inter pares, contributing just so much to the
CHAPTER viii.] A ^ Life-principle ' explains nothing. 397
result as can arise according to general laws from its coming into
contact with the other factors. But that that is actually the case, at any
rate in the sense that there are certain kinds of matter specially privi
leged in this respect, could not in any way be proved ; the natural con
clusion which the facts suggest is, that the phenomena of Life arise
out of a special combination of material elements, no one of which has
any claim to be called exclusively, or, in the degree suggested above,
preeminently, the principle of life. The very fact which has been taken
to imply a special vital principle, the fact that Life is only maintained
by successive self-propagation, ought rather to lead to the conclusion
that the germ of its development can only be found in a certain peculiar
combination of material elements, which maintains and reproduces
itself in unbroken continuity. It is, therefore, quite a matter of
indifference, whether we shall ever succeed in giving a name to the
general form, or in exhibiting in detail the development, of such a
material combination in which life is implicit ; the point is, that the
supposition of a single Real principle of Life is both impossible in
itself and quite barren of results, whilst on the other hand, the only thing
which the mechanical view leaves unexplained is the ultimate origin
of Life. I will reserve what I have to say on the Soul till later ; as
it neither creates the body out of nothing, nor out of itself, it can have
no special dignity as regards the construction of the body (whatever
other dignities it may have) except that of being prima inter pares ;
it must work jointly with the material elements which are supplied to
it. The conception of mechanical action, however, is wide enough to
include that of a co-operation, according to universal laws, between
spiritual activities and conditions of matter.
228. It is the way of mankind to meet a theory not by direct refuta
tion, but by expressing general dislike and pointing out the defects
in the working out of it, and to magnify striking though unessential
differences until they seem to be impassable gulfs. I should certainly
never of my own motion speak of the living body as a machine, thus
nullifying the distinction between the poverty of even our most in
genious inventions and the mighty works of Nature ; but those who
are so morbidly anxious to leave out of account in their consideration
of life all those operations which they can stigmatise as mechanical,
need to be reminded that the living body and not inorganic Nature
furnishes the models of the simple machines, which our art has imitated;
the pattern of pincers is to be found only in the jaws of animals ; that of
the lever in their limbs which are capable of movement. Nowhere else
are there instances of motions produced in articular surfaces by cords
398 The forms of the Course of N attire.
such as the muscles are, and of their guidance by ligaments in definite
directions : it is the living body alone which utilises the production
of a vacuum and the consequent inhalation of atmospheric fluids,
the pressure of containing walls * upon their contents, and the valves
which prescribe the direction of the resulting motion. How little does
all this resemble that mysterious power of immediate agency which is
most eagerly claimed for the vital force !
The exaggerated pictures of the superiority of living machines to
artificial ones do not rest on any better foundation. The comparison
of an organism to a self-winding clock altogether ignores the droop
ing plant which can find no substitute for water, if water will not come
to it, and the hungry animal which is indeed able to seek its own
food, but yet dies of want if none is found. Irritability, or the power
of responding to impressions, is said to be a distinguishing character
istic of organisms ; when a given stimulus is applied to them, they are
supposed to react in ways which are not explicable from the nature of
the stimulus ; at the same time, it has been assumed that in me
chanical action the cause and effect are precisely equal and similar,
though not even in the simple communication of motion is this really
the case, while organic life has been contrasted with it on the ground
of a supposed peculiarity which is in fact the universal form of all
causative activity. For it is never the case that an impression is
received by an element ready made, merely to be passed on in the
same form ; each element always modifies by its own nature the effect
of the impulse experienced. In a connected system of elements, the
effects which will follow a stimulus will be more various and striking
in proportion as the intermediate mechanism is more complex, which
conducts the impression from point to point and changes it in the
process. The same must be said of the power of recovery from
injury which is supposed to belong peculiarly to organisms, and to
prove clearly a continuous adaptivity superior to anything mechanical.
But if it were really the case that this force of resistance raised
organic Beings out of the sphere of physical and chemical necessity,
why was it ever limited? If once it had become independent of
mechanical influences there was no task which it need fail in accom
plishing. But the numberless cases of incurable disease indicate plainly
enough its limits. No doubt, when once its combinations of elements
and forces have been fully matured the body is so well furnished for
its purpose that even considerable changes in its environment produce
reactions in it which avert or remove the disturbing influences which
1 [Of the heart and blood vessels.]
CHAPTER vi 1 1.] Mechanical View True but not Final. 399
threaten or have begun to act upon it. But as in every mechanical pro
duct, there are limits to this power of self-preservation. There is no
such power, where the body has not been blest at starting with these
particular provisions, nor do we ever see the want supplied by the sub
sequent creation of fresh means ; we much more often see the means
already at its disposal forced into a reaction, which under the special
conditions of the moment can only lead to further dissolution.
229. I shall not continue this polemic further, having devoted
sufficient attention to it before. I simply adhere now to the decision
which I then expressed. In order to explain the connexion of vital
phenomena, a mechanical method of treatment is absolutely necessary;
Life must be derived, not from some peculiar principle of action, but
from a peculiar mode of utilising the principles which govern the
whole Physical world. From this point of view, an organic body will
appear as a systematic combination of elements, which, precisely
because they are arranged together in this form, will be able by
conforming to fixed laws in their reciprocal action, and by the help
of external nature, to pass through successive stages of development,
and within certain limits to preserve the regularity of its course
against chance disturbances. This makes me the more sorry that
Physiologists should regard this view, which embodies the necessary
regulative principle of all their investigations, as being also the last
word upon the subject, and should exclude every idea which is not
required for their immediate purposes, from all share in the formation
of their ultimate conclusions. But they will never remove from the
mind of any unprejudiced person the overwhelming impression that
the forms of organic life serve an end ; nor will men ever be per
suaded that this marvellous fact does not call for explanation by a
special cause. I know full well that as a thesis it may be maintained
that every result which {fresupposes mechanical agency presupposes
nothing more than this. Nor is this new ; long ago Lucretius de
clared that animals were not provided with knees in order to walk,
but that it was because the blind course of things had formed knees,
that they were able to walk. It is easy to say this, and it may be
that it sounds particularly well when expressed in Latin verse ; but
it is impossible to believe it; there is no more tedious product of
narrow caprice than such philosophy of the schools. Yet it is
unfortunately true that the conviction of a higher power working for
an end, and shaping life with a view to it, has too often intruded itself
rashly and confusingly into the treatment of special questions ; and this
explains the unwillingness of conscientious enquirers to recognise
4OO The forms of the Course of Nature. [BOOK n.
what to them must seem a barren hypothesis. It cannot, however, be
ignored that many of our contemporaries are animated by a profound
hatred of everything that goes by the name of Spirit, and that, if a
principle were submitted to them which seemed to bear traces of this,
even though it was not opposed to any postulate of science, they
would, none the less, turn away from it in indignation to enjoy their
feast of ashes, and delighted to feel that they were products of a
thoroughly- blind and irrational necessity. Such self-confidence it is
impossible to reason with ; we can only consider the difficulties
which stand in the way of the acceptance of the opposite view.
230. We must not stop short at those general accounts of the
matter, which merely represent a higher power in any indefinable
relation of superiority to mechanical laws without making the obe
dience of those laws intelligible ; in speaking of this, as of all other
forms of rational activity directed to an end, the first thing to do is
to give a name to the subject from which the action is supposed to
proceed. Now we certainly cannot speak of 'ends' with any clear
ness, except as existing in a living and willing mind, in the form of
ideas of something to be realised in the future. Hence it was
natural to look for this highest wisdom in God ; and not less natural
was the desire to bring again into an intelligible relation the unlimited
freedom of action involved in the conception of the divine essence,
and the fixed course of Nature which seems to bear no traces of that
freedom. Thus arises the theory upon which sooner or later Philo
sophy ventures, the theory that the world was created by God and
then left to itself, and that it now pursues its course simply accord
ing to the unchangeable laws originally impressed upon it. I will
not urge the objection that this view provides only a limited satis
faction to our feelings ; in its scientific aspect it is unintelligible to
me. I do not understand what is meant* by the picture of God
withdrawing from the world that He has created, and leaving it to
follow its own course. That is intelligible in a human artificer,
who leaves his work when it is finished and trusts for its maintenance
to Universal Laws of Nature, laws which he did not make himself,
and which not he, but another for him, maintains in operation. But
in the case of God I cannot conceive what this cunningly-contrived
creation of a self-sustaining order of Nature could be ; nor do I see
what distinction there can be between this view and the view that God
at each moment wills the same order, and preserves it by this very
identity of will. The immanence of God in the course of Nature
could not, therefore, be escaped from by this theory; if Nature
CHAPTER viii.] Stcihl 's theory of the soul. 401
follows mechanical laws, it is the Divine action itself, which, as we are
accustomed to say, obeys those laws, but which really at each moment
creates them. For they could not have existed prior to God as a
code to which He accommodated Himself; they can only be the
expression to us of the mode in which He works.
This unavoidable conclusion will not be at once nor willingly
admitted : however much the world may be primarily dependent on
God, the desire will be felt, that it should contain secondary centres
of intelligent activity as well, not entirely determined in their effects
by the mechanical system of things, but themselves supplying to that
system new motives for developed activity. It was this wish which
was expressed by Stahl's theory of the soul, when he spoke of it as
moulding the body to its own ends. This theory was in so far
correct that it conceived of the soul as a living and real Being,
capable of acting and being acted upon with effect : but it missed its
mark, because the formation of the body, in its most essential and
irreversible features, is concluded at a time when the soul may
perhaps have some dream of its future aim, but certainly cannot as
yet have knowledge enough of the external world to be able to adapt
the body to the conditions which life in that world imposes. Thus
the advantages which the soul might seem to derive from its
consciousness and power of taking thought for the proper develop
ment of the organism, are all lost ; and the only power of adaptation
which it remains to ascribe to it is an unconscious one. Though this
conception is very frequently misapplied, it does not seem impossible
to attach to it a definite meaning. All along, we have considered
things as distinguished from each other by manifold differences : and
although we cannot fully realise to ourselves what constitutes the
essential character of any single thing, there is nothing to prevent us
from assuming a certain difference of rank between them, such that
when two things were subjected to the same external conditions,
the one would manifest its nature in simple and uniform reactions,
the other in complex and multiform ones ; and these latter reactions
might be such that each gave rise to some entirely new capacity in
the thing, or that they all united to form a single development directed
to a definite end. In that case, we shall possess in the soul a real
principle at once active in the pursuit of ends and yet unconscious,
such as would not be at variance with mechanical laws ; for none of
the possibilities that lie latent in the soul would be realised, except •
through stimuli acting upon it according to fixed laws, and eliciting
its development step by step.
VOL. i. D d
4O2 The forms of the Course of Nature. [BOOK n.
Clearly, however, in this case, the soul will no longer imply any
thing peculiar or characteristic ; once get rid of consciousness, and
it becomes a mere element of reality like other elements; and that
superiority of nature, which made it so pregnant a centre of manifold
forms of life, might equally well be ascribed to any other element
(making allowance for differences of degree) even though it possessed
none of the characteristic properties of the soul. The question as to
the true origin of the soul, leads to the same conclusion. If it is
conceived as eternally pre-existent and prior to the Body, it must still
be confined within the limits of the course of Nature ; what then is it,
and where ? For to suppose that it suddenly becomes a part of
Nature without having previously been so, is virtually to assign it
an origin. If then it is always a part of Nature, we cannot help re
garding it as one among other natural elements ; and as there is no
reason for supposing the other elements inferior, we must ascribe to
them too, and in a word to all elements whatever, the same inner
capacity for organic development. And here it seems as if we were
once again brought back to the unfruitful idea of a common material
basis of life. For the manifold forms which these elements assume,
would depend on the different modes in which they were combined by
the course of Nature ; hence, the form which is actually realised at any
given moment, must be either the result of mere mechanical agencies
— though these may be of a higher type than any with which we are
familiar in Physico-Chemical processes — or else, supposing that traces
of an independent activity still remain, the soul, which concentrates
the different active elements upon this particular development, must
come into existence afresh at the moment that they unite ; and the
question then arises, Whence does it come ?
231. This difficulty of finding a real subject, capable of formative
activity for an end, has led to attempts to dispense with a subject
altogether ; it was thought that the generic Idea or Type would be
sufficient to account for such activity. Aristotle set the example with
the unfortunate but often repeated remark, that in living things the
whole precedes the parts, elsewhere, the parts precede the whole.
This saying, no doubt, gives utterance to the mysterious impression
which organic life produces; unluckily, it has been regarded as a
solution of the mystery. And yet what truth can be more simple
than this, that Ideas are never anything else but Thoughts, in which
the thinker gathers up the peculiar nature of an already existing
phenomenon ; or of one which he knows will necessarily exist in the
future as soon as the data exist which are required to produce it ? It
may be allowed that Reality is so constituted, that from our point of
CHAPTER vino Von Daer on Purpose in Nature. 403
view it is always exhibited in subordination to certain Ideas, general
notions, or Types ; and we may accordingly go on to say that these
Ideas hold good in reality and dominate it ; but their dominion is
only like that of all legislative authorities, whose commands would
remain unobserved if there were no executive organs to carry them
out. Never, therefore, in Organic Life is the whole before the parts,
in the sense that it is before all parts ; it only has existence in so far
as an already formed combination of parts guarantees that existence
in the future as a necessary result of the germ here present, and not
of the germ only, but also of favourable external circumstances acting
upon it. Anyone who is not satisfied with this development of the
whole from the parts, and desires to reverse the relation, will be
required to show who the representative of the generic Idea is, who
stands outside the parts and gives to the Idea, which in itself is merely
potential, a real power in the real world. It must be shown where
these Ideas reside, before they initiate a development, and how they
find their way thence to the place where they are attracted to an
exercise of their power.
Quite recently, an attempt of a different kind has been made by
K. E. von Baer. We could have wished that this deservedly popular
investigator had succeeded in making out his point to satisfaction ; I
cannot, however, persuade myself that his proposal to conceive of
Nature as striving towards an end, really carries us any farther. If
all that it means is, that the different forces, which are active in the
construction of organisms, converge in different directions towards a
common result, this fact has never been doubted ; nor, considered
merely as fact, is it the subject of the present controversy. The
question at issue is rather this ; is the cause which determines this
combined action to be found merely in the course of things after they
have once been set in motion? i.e. does the convergence occur when
there is this motion to produce it, and not occur when there is no
such motion ? or is there anywhere a power not subject to this con
straint of antecedent conditions, which, on its way to the attainment
of an end, brings together things which but for it would exist apart ?
Naturally, it is this latter view which is preferred here. Yet it is not
clear, how this supposed tendency to an end would differ from that
which might be ascribed, e.g. to falling stones, which, while converg
ing from all quarters of the globe towards its centre, move merely in
obedience to a universal law. It is the presence of purpose alone
which could constitute that difference, converting the mere end of a
process into an aim, and motion to that end into an impulse. Such
D d 2
404 The forms of the Course of Nature. t BOOK n.
a purpose Baer's theory accepts, and yet by banishing consciousness,
which is presupposed by it, at the same time rejects. Finally, to
whom is this tendency in the direction of an end to be ascribed ? It
would not suit the character of the individual elements, which, varying
as they do in capability, tending now to one end, now to another,
need some power outside themselves to inform them upon what point
they have to converge in any given case ; and it is, in fact, from Nature
that such a tendency is supposed to proceed. But, where is this
Nature ? It is allowable in ordinary discourse, no doubt, to use this
term in such a merely general sense ; but in the particular cases in
which the designation of Nature as an efficient cause is intended to
decide in its favour the choice between it and other agents, there
should be some more accurate determination of the conception of it,
as well as of the metaphysical relation in which, as a whole, it stands
to its subordinate parts. We propose now to supplement the theory
in this point, and thus to bring our investigations to a close.
232. The grounds which have led me to my final conclusion have
been expounded at such length throughout my entire work, that what
I shall now add with regard to this much debated question will be
only a short corollary. Men have created for themselves a false gulf,
which it has then seemed impossible to bridge over. It is not with
any special reference to the opposition which has to be reconciled
between living Beings and inanimate Matter, but on much farther-
reaching and more general grounds that I have all along maintained
the inconceivableness of a world, in which a multitude of independent
elements are supposed to have been brought together subsequently
to their origin, and forced into common action by Universal Laws.
The very fact that laws could hold good in the same way of different
elements, showed that the elements could not be what they pleased.
Though not directly homogeneous, they must be members in a system,
within which measurable advances in different directions lead from
one member to another ; on this condition only could they and their
states be subsumed under the general Laws, as instances of their
application. But the validity of general Laws, so established, was
not enough to explain the possibility of their application in particular
cases ; in order that they should necessitate one event at one time
and place, another at another, the changing state of the world as a
whole had to be reflected at each moment in those elements, which
are working together for a common result. It would be idle, however,
to suppose that the elements, being originally separate, required the
mediation of some ' transeunt ' agency which should convey to them
CHAPTER viii.] All effects depend on Unity of World. 405
the general condition of the world and stimulate them to further
activity : rather, what is experienced by one element must become
immediately a new state of another. Hence we saw that every action
that takes place necessarily presupposes a permanent and universal
relation of sympathy between things, which binds them together in
constant union, and which itself is only conceivable on the supposition,
that what seems to us at first a number of independent centres of
energy, is, in essence, one throughout. It is not, therefore, to bring
about any specially privileged and exalted result, that the assistance of
the infinite Being M, which we have represented as the ground of all
existence, is required; every effect produced by one element on another,
even the most insignificant, is due to the indwelling vitality of this
One Being, and equally requires its constant co-operation. If there is a
class of processes in Nature, which, under the name of mechanical,
we contrast as blind and purposeless with others in which the forma
tive activity of the One Being seems to stand out clearly, the contrast
is certainly not based on the fact that effects of the former kind are
left to be governed by a peculiar principle of their own, whilst only
in the latter does the one universal cause attempt after some incom
prehensible fashion to subdue this alien force. In both cases alike
the effects proceed solely from the eternal One itself; and the dif
ference lies in what it enjoined in each case, in the one case, the
invariable connexion of actions according to universal laws which
constitute the basis of all particular conditions, in the other, their
development into the variety of those particulars. But, instead of
repeating this line of thought in its generality, I shall endeavour to
show how it applies to the special question now before us.
233. The germ of an organic growth is not developed in empty
Space, in other words, not in a world of its own which has no con
nexion with the whole of Things. Wherever the plastic materials are
present, there the absolute One is likewise present ; not as an idea
that may be conceived, not as an inoperative class-type, not as a
command passing between the elements of a group, or a wish without
them, or an ideal above them ; but as a real and potent essence
present in the innermost life of each element. Nor is it, like divisible
Matter, distributed among them in different proportions. It manifests
itself in each one in its totality, as the unity that embraces and
determines them all, and in virtue of the consistent coherence of its
entire plan, assigns to each of these dependent elements those
activities which ensure the convergence of their operation to a definite
end. But the Absolute is no magician ; it does not produce Things
406 The forms of the Course of Nature.
in appropriate places out of a sheer vacuum, merely because they
correspond to the import of its plan. All particular cases of its
operation are based on a system of management according to law,
adapted to its operation as a whole. But I must repeat : it is not
here as it is with man, who cannot do otherwise ; rather this con
formity with general principles is itself a part of what is designed to
exist. Hence it is, that each stage in the development of organic
Life seems to arise step by step out of the reactions which are made
necessary for the combined elements by their persistent nature ; nor,
is there anywhere an exception to the dependence of Life on
mechanical causes.
At the same time, we are never justified in speaking of a merely
mechanical development- of Life, as if there were nothing behind it.
There is something behind, viz. the combining movement of the
absolute, the true activity that assumes this phenomenal form. We
may even admit that it apparently breaks through the limits ordinarily
assigned to mechanical action. I have before mentioned, and I now
repeat, that the principle of mutual indifference, which Mechanics has
laid down in respect to forces working concurrently, is, if strictly taken,
by no means justified as a universal law. It should rather be laid
down as true universally that an element a when it is acted upon by
the determining circumstance />, has, by this very fact, become some
thing different, an a which = ap, and that a new force q will not exer
cise the same kind of effect on this modified element, which it would
have exerted on it if unmodified ; that the final result, therefore, will
not be a™, or a(p+q) but, ar. But this r could never be obtained ana
lytically out of any mere logical or mathematical combination of p and
q\ it would be a synthetic accession to those two conditions, and thus
not deducible except from the import of the entire course of things.
This is expressed, according to ordinary views, thus— the combina
tion of several elements in a simultaneous action may be followed by
effects, which are not mere consequences of the single effects produced
by the reactions between every pair of them. That which we now
wrongly regard as the universal and obvious rule, viz. that effects
should be summed up in a collective result without reciprocally influ
encing each other, would be only one special case of the general
characteristic just mentioned. I shall not now enquire whether and
in what direction Biological science will find itself compelled to
recognise the possibility of this modification of effects; we must,
however, leave a place for it in our own theory. Its admission would
not in any way invalidate our conception of the mechanical order.
CHAPTER viii.i Limits of Free Initiation. 407
but only extend it further. For it would be our first position even with
regard to these new grounds of determination, which intrude upon
the course of events, that neither did they arise without a reason, but
according to rules, though rules which are more difficult for our
apprehension to grasp. But at the same time we should escape from
regarding Life as a mere after-effect of a Power, which having formed
the mechanism, had left it to run its course. The Power would
rather continue to manifest its living presence and constant activity,
as operative in the phenomena of Life.
What direction our thoughts might have to take beyond this point,
I am not now called on to decide. There is nothing more to be
added, which could be urged with absolute certainty of conviction
against those who regard the whole sum of the effects produced by
this ultimate agency, not less than the inner activities whence they
proceed, as still but mere facts of Nature, a tendency which the course
of things has followed from all eternity; but which includes no
element resembling what we understand by intention, choice, or con
sciousness of a purpose. Our view, it must be admitted, is no such
very great advance upon the mechanical explanation of Nature, from
which a refuge was sought. The development of the world
would on it be no less a necessary concatenation of cause and
effect; excluding all free initiation of new occurrences. Only the
most extreme externalism would be avoided. The mechanism
would not consist, at starting, of an unalterably fixed complement of
forces, which would only suffice to effect changes of the position
of existing elements. The mechanism would itself produce at
certain definite points those new agencies which would be the
proximate principles governing organized groups of connected phe
nomena. For my own part, I cherish no antipathy to the opposite
view, which insists that this whole world of forces, silently arrayed
against each other, is animated by the inner life of all its elements and
by a consciousness which is that of an all-embracing spirit. I shall
not even shrink from attempting, in the proper place, to show that
there is a real Freedom which can give rise to truly new departures,
such as even this latter belief does not necessarily involve. But such
a demonstration would transcend the limits of Metaphysic. It would
lead us to consider a mysterious problem, which our discussions
down to this point have bordered upon. I have already expressed
the opinion that we must not merely credit things with a persistent
impulse to self-preservation; but are justified in assuming (as an
hypothesis, and in order to explain the phenomena) an impulse to
408 The forms of the Course of Nature.
the improvement of their state. Now, if this hypothesis is conceivable
in regard to the individual elements, it becomes almost necessary
when we no longer speak of them as individuals, but conceive of them,
both in their nature and in their actions, as manifestations of a single
and all-embracing supreme cause whose mandates they execute. I
should at the same time most unquestionably admit that this assumed
tendency towards improvement, though it may be the ultimate ratio
legis from which all special laws of action of things are derived, could
never furnish us (since we cannot define this ' improvement ') with
anything more than the final light and colour of our view of the
world; it could never serve as a principle from which those laws
could be deduced. But here, the same question which we asked con
cerning the vital energy, suggests itself once more — If this endeavour
after improvement is a fact, why does it not everywhere achieve its
end ? Whence come all the hurts and hindrances by which the course
of Nature, as it is, so often prevents from being fully satisfied the im
pulses which it nevertheless excites ? The conflict of forces in Nature,
like the existence of evil in the moral world, is an enigma, the solution
of which would require perfect knowledge of the ultimate plan of the
world. Metaphysic does not pretend to know what this plan is ; nor
does she even assert that it is a plan that rules the course of events ;
for this would be inseparable from the idea of the purpose of a con
scious being. But, if it limits itself to the belief, that existence has
its cause in a single real principle, whatever its concrete nature may
be, no considerations concerning these ultimate enigmas can affect
the certainty of such conclusions. For, I wish here most distinctly to
assert, that though I am old-fashioned enough not to be indifferent to
the religious interests which are involved in these problems, the views
for which I have been contending rest on a purely scientific basis,
quite without reference to Religion. No course of things, whether
harmonious or discordant, seems to me conceivable, except on the
supposition of this unity, which alone makes possible the reciprocal
action of individual existences. The disturbing effects which things
exercise upon each other witness to this unity, not less clearly than
the joint action of forces with a view to a common end.
234. Similarly, the limits within which metaphysical enquiry is con
fined compel us to exclude from its sphere the much debated question
as to whether the conception of a kind has really that objective validity
in the organic world which we ordinarily ascribe to it. It will not be
supposed that we are going to fall back into thinking that the type of
a kind is a real self-subsistent principle, which makes its influence felt
CHAPTER viii.] Natural Kinds. 409
in the world by its own inherent force. The only question is — does
the disposition of things as a whole require that the forms of combina
tion which the forces active throughout the world assume in the pro
duction of Beings capable of existence and growth, should be limited
to a certain fixed number ? or, on the other hand, may there not be
innumerable forms intermediate between these types, and partaking
in different degrees of their permanence and power of self-preservation,
while the types only represent points of maximum stability? We must
leave this question to be decided by the sober evidence of Natural
History. Philosophy will do well to regard every attempt at an
a priori solution of it as a baseless assumption. The bias of our
minds in this case is determined by our own preconceived unverifiable
opinions regarding the course of the world as a whole. Suppose,
however, we assume that not merely self-conservation, but also
Progress is a characteristic of the world as a whole, yet, even then,
it would be conceivable that in the age of the world's history in which
we now live, and of which we cannot see the limits, the forms of Life
established by Nature might be incapable of addition, just as the
quantities of those permanent elements which Nature uses in order
to construct her products, are incapable of addition. According to this
view, any forms in which things combined, owing to the influence of
circumstances other than the forms determined by Nature, would
have only a passing reality, and would be subsequently dissolved owing
to the influence of the same circumstances which had produced them.
On the other hand, nothing hinders us from introducing the alleged
development within the limits of the epoch which we can observe, and
regarding it as possible that new forms may come into Being and old
forms pass away, and that what went before may gradually be trans
formed into what follows. The present aspect of the discussion on
this subject forms part of a larger and more general question, the
question, as to whether the world is finite or infinite.
235. It is needless to discuss at length the question as to whether
the succession of events in time is finite or infinite. We cannot
represent to ourselves in thought, either the origin of reality out of
nothing, or its disappearance into nothing, and no one has ever
attempted to take up this position without assuming, as existent in
the Nothing, an originating principle or agency, and ascribing to it
previous to its creative act a fixed existence of its own which has had
no beginning in Time. Hence, whatever difficulties may be involved
in the attempt to conceive of the course of events in Time as without
beginning or end, the idea itself is inevitable. Nor need we occupy
4 1 o The forms of the Course of Nature. t BOOK n.
ourselves at any greater length with the question as to the limits of
the world in Space. If Space is to pass for a real existence, the only
difficulty is in the infinity of Space itself, which in that case is the
infinity of something real. I leave this assumption, therefore, to be
dealt with by those who are interested in maintaining it. On the
other hand, it does not at all follow, even if Space is infinite, that the
world need occupy the whole of it, as long as the content of that
world admits of the predicate ' finite.' It would be quite sufficient to
say with Herbart that Space sets no limits or conditions to the world,
but that it occupies just so much room in Space as it requires for its
movements, and that thus its boundaries are perpetually shifting. My
own view of the matter is almost to the same effect. Every change
in the true reactions of real elements must find room within the
infinity of our Space-perception for its phenomenal manifestation as
shape, position, and motion. But there is nothing to compel the real
existences to fill up at every moment all the empty places which our
Space-perception holds in readiness for impressions that may require
them.
The question therefore resolves itself into this, whether the sum of
real existence in the world is limited or unlimited, a question in
reference to which we follow alternately two opposite impulses. On
the one hand, the idea of infinity gratifies us just because we cannot
exhaust it in thought, by enabling us to marvel at the immensity of
the universe, of which we then readily acknowledge that we are but a
part ; though, at the same time, by making it impossible for us to
comprehend the world as a unity or whole, this infinity perplexes us.
On the other hand, by conceiving of the world as finite, we are indeed
enabled easily to grasp it as a whole ; but it vexes us to think that a
hindrance to its being greater than it is should have been imposed
from without. This last supposition, at any rate, is plainly absurd.
The world of reality is the sole source from which, in the minds that
form a part of it, the notion of these countless unrealised possibilities
springs. Hence arises the false idea that the Real world is limited
and conditioned by what it does not produce, though it is the Real
world alone that does produce this empty imagination in our minds.
And this misconception has then absolutely no limits. What would
be the use of assuming an infinity of real elements, if each one of
them was finite ? Surely it would be still better that each element
should be infinite. Yet even then we should still have only an
infinite number of infinite elements. Why not, in order to get rid
of all limitation, assume the existence of an infinite number of
CHAPTER viii.] Isthc Wor 'Id finite or infinite ? 411
worlds, both of infinite magnitude themselves, and composed of
elements whose magnitude was infinite ? There is therefore prima
facie no objection to the finite character of real existence — whereas,
the character of infinity is opposed by Physics, not merely as inex
haustible by thought, but also as involving certain special mechanical
difficulties. The unlimited distribution of matter would make im
possible a common centre of gravity. No one point would have any
better claim to be regarded as such than the rest. But what is our
motive in looking for a centre of gravity? and what exactly do we
mean by it ? The supposition could not be entertained, unless it were
regarded as self-evident that the same laws of reciprocal action which
obtain between the particles of matter in our planet, and which we
call Laws of Gravitation, obtain also throughout the whole range of
existence. I well know how little precedent there is for doubting this
fact. It is, indeed, ordinarily taken for granted without the slightest
misgiving. And yet, in the absence of positive proof derived from
observation, it can only be a bold argument from analogy. It seems
to me by no means a self-evident faqt, that all the real elements which
are contained in the infinity of space, including even those which are
stationed at the furthest points, are held together according to a
single law by the uniting force of gravity, just as if they were mere
samples of the mass to which it applies, and without individuality of
their own. The Law of Gravitation is only known to apply to the
bodies of our own planetary system. Besides this, there is only the
conjecture, which may be a true one, that certain of the binary stars
are kept in their courses by a similar mutual attraction, the law of
which we do not as yet know. But that the same influence by which
one system of material elements is made to cohere, extends as a
matter of course to every other coherent system in the Universe of
Space ; this is by no means such an established and irrefutable truth
as is, e. g. the uniform diffusion of the undulations of light through
all Space.
For a reason which has already been several times touched upon, I
am forced to proceed at this point by a different path from that which
is ordinarily followed in the physical Sciences. If I really thought
that the number of the real elements, or of the systems which are
formed from such elements, was infinite, then, though I should
certainly not regard them as having no connexion with each other, I
should just as certainly not imagine that the relation subsisting
between them was so monotonously uniform that they should be
treated as mere samples of homogeneous mass endowed everywhere
412 The forms of the Course of Nature. i BOOK n.
with the same force, so as to raise the question of their common
centre of gravity. In each of these several systems the inner relation
of. the parts might be essentially peculiar, depending on the plan
which governed its structure. Similarly, the several systems might
be united by different kinds of relations into the one universal plan.
Not that, in insisting on this point, I have any wish to maintain that
Real existence is infinite, any more than I wish to maintain that it is
finite. I have no sympathy with the point of view from which this
question thus conceived seems to be one of real importance. I have
more than once expressed my conviction that everything is subject to
mechanical Laws ; but I have at the same time asserted the essentially
subordinate character of these Laws, when considered with reference
to the Universe as a whole. I do not know if my expressions have
been understood in the sense in which they were intended. Certainly
they were not meant to imply that previous to the creation of the
world there existed a fixed sum of real elements, along with a code of
absolute mechanical Laws, and that an organizing power then entered
on the scene, and had to make the best of these resources. I have
throughout taken as my starting-point the living nature of the real
existence, that unity whose essence can only be expressed, if we are
to attempt to realise it to our intelligence, as the import of a thought.
Out of this import there arose (what was not prior to it) the funda
mental system of most general laws, as a condition which Reality
imposes on itself and its whole action. But just because dependent
on this import, the system possessed a wealth of meaning and power
of accommodation, adequate to provide not merely for the uniformity
of processes which never vary, but also for the manifold variety of
activities which are required by the animating idea of the Whole. I
should be the last to deny the necessity and value of the other point
of view which, as represented by modern mechanics, conducts calcu
lations based on the abstract conceptions of Mass and its constancy :
Force, and the conservation of Force, the inertia and invariability of
the elements. Not only do we owe to this method the greater part
of our present knowledge of Nature, but we may also safely assume
it as a guide throughout the whole range of our possible observation.
At the same time, I should be the last to ascribe to these notions,
being as they are abstractions out of the fraction of the world's course
which is accessible to us, that metaphysical certainty which would fit
them to serve as a key to the solution of questions which are such as
to transcend all experience of this kind.
What I have now to say in regard to the question of infinity has
CHAPTER vi 1 1.] What units are we to count? 413
been already indicated in several passages of my work. If the reality
of the world is to be found in a thought which fulfils itself in every
moment, the question as to the finite or infinite character of this
thought is as meaningless as the question as to whether a motion is
sweet or sour. As regards, however, the different and ever-changing
related points, by means of which the thought realises itself, we would
remark, in the first place, that their number is not absolutely either
finite or infinite. It is not, indeed, a fixed quantity at all. It is, at
each moment, precisely what the realisation of the thought demands
and its living activity produces. This heterodox assertion I have
already ventured on, thereby placing myself in opposition to the
dogma of the constancy of Mass. Supposing we fancied that we
had a standard in terms of which the sum of real existence at any
given moment of its history = m, it might very well at the next
moment be found to = /u. In the same way as the world might
take up just so much space as it should require at any given
moment, so the Idea which animates it would create for itself
just so many elements as are needed in order to accomplish its
development. Not as if there had been some material substance
present from all eternity, which was afterwards merely differently
distributed according as the Idea might require, nor yet as if the Idea
created new elements out of nothing. These new creations would
spring from the Idea itself, which is the cause of all things. Enough,
however, has been said on this point. It would be hopeless to
attempt to bring these thoughts home to anyone who was convinced
that a fixed quantity of matter had been ordained to exist from all
eternity. Whether, at any given moment, the number of the real and
active elements is unlimited, or whether there are certain fixed limits
within which the numbers vary, I confess myself unable to say. The
question itself involves confusion, until we have fixed on the unit the
number of whose recurrences is sought. It could have absolutely no
meaning for those who have admitted the infinite divisibility of matter.
It would be intelligible only, if it were held to apply to individual atoms
or to separate and distinct groups of elements, as, e. g. the number of
the stars. Here I will only say quite shortly that I am content to
assume that the number of material existences is limited, provided it
is understood that this number must suffice to enable them to carry
out the behests of the Idea, and that if this same condition is fulfilled,
I am equally content to conceive of their number as infinite. In this
latter case, the impossibility of reckoning their number would be due
41 4 The forms of the Course of Nature. t BOOK n.
merely to a defect in us. It would not be a fault on their side, or in
consistent with their reality.
236. The progress of observation has led us to the conviction that
the formation of the earth's crust took place gradually, and that
organic life could not have existed throughout the stages of this
process in its present state. This imposes on us the necessity of
attempting to show how the forms of life at present existing were
developed out of earlier and simpler ones. In the heat of the con
troversy on this subject, care should have been taken not to confuse
two questions which ought to be separated. Only one of them
belongs to Metaphysic, that, viz. as to the determining principles
which have been active throughout the course of this development.
I feel all the less inducement to make any addition to the rapidly
increasing literature which the discussion of this question has called
forth, inasmuch as, before this controversy had begun to rage, I en
deavoured to bring together whatever seemed to admit of being said,
with any claim to respect, in favour of explaining all cases of
adaptation as due to a fortuitous concourse of accidents, a view which
has a recognised place in the History of Philosophy. In the second
chapter of the fourth book of the Microcosmus, I treated expressly of
this derivation of the Cosmos from Chaos, and I cannot convince
myself that the more recent arguments from the same point of view
add anything of importance to those well-known ones of former
times which are there mentioned. I content myself with referring to
what I then said in regard to the details of the question. My
conviction on the matter as a whole needs not again to be stated
here. The controversy will become milder with time ; at least this
will be so, in so far as it is conducted in the interests of Science and
not from a feeling of invincible repugnance to every Idea which is
suspected of favouring the cause of Religion. An improvement in
this respect is already to some extent visible. Those who pray too
much are destined, says the proverb, to pray themselves through
heaven and to keep geese on the other side. A better fate has
befallen those who, out of a conscientious regard for the interests of
Science, have felt themselves compelled to derive Organic Life from
blind chance and purposeless matter. They have invested their
original principles with so much reason and power of internal
development, that nothing but the caprice of their terminology which
keeps to the names of Matter, Mechanism, and Accident, for what other
people call Spirit, Life, and Providence, seems to prevent them from
relapsing into notions which they have before strenuously opposed.
CHAPTER viii.] Development of L ife. 415
237. On the other hand, as regards the second question to be
distinguished, that, viz. as to the actual development of Organic Life,
this is purely a matter of Natural History. Philosophy is not con
cerned to dispute or to deny any results of observation on this subject,
which are based on sufficient evidence. Not even Religion should
presume to prescribe to God the course which the world's develop
ment must have followed subsequently to its creation. However
strange the path may have been, we might be sure that its strange
ness could not remove it from His control. Considering that the
human body requires to be kept alive each day by absorbing into
itself nourishment derived from common natural substances, there can
be no reason in claiming for it a manner of origin so exceedingly
distinguished. And with regard to the whole matter we would say
that man esteems himself according to what he is, and not according
to that whence he arose. It is enough for us to feel that we are now
not apes. It is of no consequence to us that our remote and
unremembered ancestors should have belonged to this inferior grade
of life. The only painful conclusion would be that we were destined
to turn into apes again, and it was likely to happen soon. It seems
to me, therefore, that from the point of view of Philosophy these
scientific movements may be regarded with the most perfect in
difference. Each result, so soon as it had ceased to be a favourite
conjecture and had been established by convincing proof, would be
welcomed as a real addition to knowledge. The very remarkable
facts of Natural History accumulated by the unwearied research of
Darwin, might be provisionally welcomed by Philosophy with the
warmest satisfaction, whilst, on the other hand, the pretentious and
mistaken theories based on those facts might be not less completely
disregarded. All that Philosophy herself can contribute towards the
solution of these questions is, to warn us against making unfounded
assumptions, which, whilst they are themselves to some extent of
philosophical origin, rob Science of its fairness. Whatever may have
been the state of the earth's surface, which first occasioned the
production of organic life, it cannot but be improbable that the
required conditions should only have been present at a single point ;
equally improbable, considering the diversity of the terrestrial elements
which were subjected on the whole to uniform influences, that organic
germs of the same kind only should have been generated at all
points ; and finally, it is extremely improbable that this productive
period should have lasted only long enough for the occurrence of an
instantaneous creative act, instead of being so protracted that the
4i 6 The forms of the Coiirse of Nature. [BOOKII.
conditions, slowly altering while it still lasted, might superadd fresh
creations to the earlier ones instead of merely developing their further
phases. Nor is there any difficulty in imagining that these various
organic beings, though produced at different times and on different
spots of the earth, would still present numberless analogies of structure.
The equation which contained the conditions of the union of elements
so as to be capable of life would restrict all possible solutions within
determinate limits. Hence, according to what is at any rate the
most probable supposition, Organic Life is derived from an original
multiplicity of simple types having a capacity for development.
Here we break off. We cannot pursue further the attempts which
are now being made to arrive at an explanation of the first beginnings
and the final destiny of things. Our knowledge of the present state
of the globe and of the forces that act upon it, does enable us to
form an idea, imperfect indeed, but not contemptible, with regard
to its fate in the future ; and it is of importance for Science to con
sider to what end the processes which we now see in operation would
lead, supposing them to continue unchecked and to follow the same
laws. From this point of view, we are able to appreciate those
ingenious calculations which draw conclusions as to the final state of
the world from our experimental knowledge of the economy of heat.
They are, however, nothing more than the indispensable computations
which draw out this portion of our physical knowledge into its results.
For this purpose we are obliged to assume the continuance of the
conditions which are operative at present. Whether this hypothesis
will be verified, or, whether the end towards which things now seem
to point, will not sooner or later be shown by fresh discoveries in a
new light, no one can decide. At the same time, however, the fate
which most attempts to forecast the future by means of statistics have
hitherto met, has been of the latter kind. Hence, we must be on our
guard against crediting as a prophetic announcement with regard to
the future, conclusions which follow, no doubt, necessarily on the
arbitrary assumption that the given conditions are the only ones to be
taken into account. Still less do we intend to busy ourselves with
the fancies of those who relate to us, just as if they had been them
selves present, how things were first produced ; how, e. g. the
inorganic elements of the earth's crust found themselves united in the
form of crystals capable of imbibition, and in systems endowed with
life and growth ; or, again, how the atmosphere of the primitive
world settled upon the earth in the shape of protoplasm, and there
CHAPTER viii.] The spurious ' historical sense' 417
struck roots of the most various kinds. This insatiable desire to get
beyond the general principles which still admit of being applied to
the investigation of these problems, and actually to conjecture those
special circumstances which are simply inaccessible to our knowledge,
may, by way of palliation, be considered to be characteristic of that
historical sense by which the present age is distinguished, thus con
trasting favourably with former ages, when, owing to their speculative
bias, men sought for truth not in matters of fact but in ideas that had
no reality in Space and Time. Yet I do not know in what the worth
of history would consist, if facts were in truth only described as
having occurred in this or that place, without any attempt being made
to pass beyond the facts and their succession, and to lay bare the
nerves which govern the connected order of things always and every
where. But for this purpose history must above all things be true.
Every fact of the Past which can be demonstrated by certain proof we
shall esteem as a real and valuable addition to our knowledge. On
the other hand, those rash anticipations of knowledge, entertaining at
first, but wearisome in their recurrence, have nothing to do with this
laudable ' historical sense,' but spring from the dangerous inclination
to anecdote simply for its own sake. It is thus that our own gene
ration, maintaining its opposition to Philosophy, endeavours to con
sole itself for its want of clearness in respect to general principles by
a vivid exercise of the sensuous imagination. If we come upon pile-
dwellings in some forgotten swamp, we piously gather together the
insignificant remains of a dreary Past, supposing that by contemplating
them we shall grow wiser and learn that which a glance into the
affairs of everyday life would teach us with less trouble. Compared
with such objects as these how small a chance of notice have the
Philosophical ideas, which represent the efforts of long ages to
obtain a clearer insight into eternal truth. If only these ideas could
be stuffed ! Then it might be possible that beside a fine specimen
of the Platonic idea and a well-preserved Aristotelian entelechy even
the more modest fancies which in these pages I have devoted to
speedy oblivion, might attract the attention of a holiday sight-seer.
VOL. i.
BOOK III.
ON MENTAL EXISTENCE (PSYCHOLOGY).
CHAPTER I.
The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul.
THE old Metaphysic of the Schools reckoned among its problems
the construction of a Rational Psychology. This name was not
meant to imply that the science in question could dispense with such
a knowledge of its object as should agree with experience ; the design
was merely to bring the general modes of procedure which were
observed in that object into connexion with metaphysical convictions
as to the possibility of all being and happening. I will not ask here
how much or how little the science accomplished ; but I accept the
end it set before itself as a limit for my own discussions. There
is at present a strong inclination towards the empirical investigation
of psychical phenomena, in all their manifold complexity, and I am
not opposing this inclination when I confess some want of confidence
in the trustworthiness of its results. Speaking generally no great
doubt can be felt as to the nature of those associations of impres
sions, by means of which the whole of our sensuous view of things
as well as the riches of our mental culture are in the last resort
acquired; but the ingenious attempts which have been made to
demonstrate the way in which particular portions of this total sum
actually came into our possession, have not the same certainty. Often,
instead of being founded on empirical evidence, they are merely
descriptions of the modes in which we can without any great difficulty
imagine the material in question to have originated; sometimes
they are accounts of processes of the possibility of which we persuade
ourselves only because we use as self-evident means of explanation
mental habits which it is really our first business to explain. It is not my
Psychology needs Hypotheses. 419
purpose, however, to lessen the deserved sympathy which these valuable
efforts have won ; but this book must come to an end somewhere,
and therefore they are excluded from it ; and my wish here is simply
to overcome, for a moment at least, the disfavour which any meta
physical treatment of these subjects is apt to encounter.
When we say that we adopt an empirical stand-point we must
mean more than that we wish to stand still at this point ; we really
intend it to be no more than the starting-place from which we may
appropriate the field of experience around us. Now, considered as
such a point of departure, the knowledge of those facts which are
furnished by experience is indispensable to every psychology alike ;
and even those attempts which have been especially stigmatised as
transcendent, are in the end simply interpretations of the material
supplied by observation. The divergence of opinion does not really
begin till we ask by what method we are to appropriate in the
form of theory that which, from the empirical position, we all see with
the same eyes. In speaking of the physical investigation of nature I
pointed out how slight and how arduous its progress would be if it
confined itself to bare observation and refused to connect the given
facts by framing hypotheses respecting that nature of things which
cannot be observed. And I may now appeal for confirmation to the
excellent attempts which have been made in psychology to reach, at
least at one point, the beginnings of an exact science — the point I refer
to is the question how the strength of a sensation is related to that
of its external stimulus. For these attempts have at once become
involved in a mass of theoretical and speculative problems, to the
settlement of which a future experience may perhaps contribute much
but which it will certainly never completely solve. If then we are com
pelled to use as a basis some hypothesis respecting the connexion of
physical and psychical phenomena, why are we to take the first
hypothesis that comes to hand? Why not go back to the most
general ideas that we necessarily form respecting all being and
action, and so attempt to define the limits within which we can
frame suppositions, sometimes trustworthy and at other times at all
events probable? But, further, even supposing it were possible, in
the investigation of this special subject, to find a point of departure
which should be productive of results and yet should imply no fixed
pre-judgment as to the nature of the subject, a difficulty would
still remain : for though this freedom from pre-suppositions would
be possible for this particular investigation, it would still be un
acceptable to us as men. We may be warned to abstain from discussing
E e 2
420 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
questions which do not seem to be soluble by the special methods of a
particular science ; but the warning will never deter the human race
from returning to these riddles ; for a consistent opinion about them
is not less important and indispensable to it than are those explana
tions of observed facts which in this field can never be more than
fragmentary. I shall therefore attempt to extend these metaphysical
considerations to the sphere of Psychology, and so to bring them to a
conclusion. For the elaboration of many particular points I may
refer to the corresponding sections of the Mikrokosmus ; here I wish to
bring together the essential points treated in the Medicinische Psycho
logic, (Leipzig, 1852), which I shall not reissue, and to show the
metaphysical connexion which in those two works could not be
sufficiently brought out.
238. Let us leave out of sight, to begin with, anything which the
earlier part of this enquiry might offer by way of foundation for what
/is to follow. If we do this, we shall have to confess that mental life
I is given us, as a fact of observation, only in constant connexion with
\ bodily life. Accordingly the supposition at once suggests itself that
this mental life is nothing but a product of the physical organization,
the growth of which it is observed to accompany. Yet such a view
has never been more than a doctrine of scientific schools. We meet
with the word ' soul ' in the languages of all civilised peoples ; and
this proves that the imagination of man must have had reasons of
weight for its supposition that there is an existence of some special
nature underlying the phenomena of the inner life as their subject or
cause. It is, I think, possible to reduce these reasons to three, of
very different value. The first I will refer to, the appeal to the
freedom which is said to characterise mental life, and is distinguished
from the necessity of nature, has_np weight. It is a conviction with
which we begin our enquiry and to which we hold, that all events in
external nature form an uninterrupted series of causal connexion
according to universal laws ; but this necessity is not a fact of obser
vation. There remain always vast tracts of nature, the inner con
nexion of which is simply unknown to us and which can therefore
furnish no empirical verification of that presupposition. But, when
we come to mental life, not even those for whom freedom is in itself a
possible conception can regard it as the universal characteristic of that
life. They can demand it only at one definite point, viz. the resolutions
of the will. Everything else, the whole course of ideas, emotions, and
efforts, is not only, in the souls of animals and men alike, manifestly
subject to a connexion according to universal laws, but the denial of
CHAPTER i.] Common grounds of belief in ' soul* 42 1
that connexion would at once destroy the possibility of any psycho
logical enquiry ; since it, like every other enquiry, can be directed to
nothing but the discovery of conditions universally valid.
239. The second reason which led to the conception of the soul
was the entire incompar ability of all inner processes — sensations,
ideas, emotions, and desires — with spatial motion, figure, position, and
energy ; that is, with those states which we believe we observe in
matter, or which we can suppose it to experience if we see in it only
what the physical view of nature gives it out to be. It is a very long
time since philosophy recognised this incomparability. and it needed
no new discovery or confirmation. It has escaped no one except
those who, out of their prejudice in favour of a desired conclusion,
have not been afraid of the logical error by which two different things
are held to be of the same kind simply because as a matter of fact
they are connected with one another. We may imagine a quantity of
movements of material elements, and we may attribute to them what
ever degree of complexity we choose; but we shall never reach a
given moment at which we can say, Now it is obvious that this sum
of movements can remain movements no longer but must pass into
sweetness, brightness, or sound. The only obvious change we could
ever anticipate from them would be into a fresh set of movements.
We shall never succeed in analytically deducing the feeling from the
nature of its physical excitant ; we can only connect the two syntheti
cally ; and the physical event does not become a condition of the rise
of the feeling until the sum of motions in which it consists meets with
a subject which in its own nature has the peculiar capacity of pro
ducing feeling from itself. In this fact a limit is at once placed to all
physiological and psychological enquiry. It is utterly fruitless to
attempt to show how a physical nervous process gradually transforms
itself (as we are told) into sensation or any other mental occurrence.
There remains only the different but extremely important task of dis
covering what psychical event a and what physical stimulus a are as
a matter of fact universally connected in the order of nature, and of
finding the law by which a undergoes a definite change and becomes
£, when a by a change equally definite (but definable only by a
physical standard and not a psychical one) becomes b. This is a point
at which the professedly empirical method and the metaphysical change
their roles. The former, in pursuing the (Jream of an identity of
physical and psychical processes, leaves the field of experience far
behind it and does battle with our most immediate certainty that they
are not identical : the latter, when it refrains from describing an event
422 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
which cannot occur at all, is not denying the connexion between the
two series of events ; but it limits itself to a more useful enquiry, it
investigates the laws according to which the results of that connexion
change, and it forbears to ask questions, which to begin with at any
rate cannot be answered, regarding the mode in which that connexion
is in all cases brought about.
240. On the other hand we must beware of drawing conclusions
too definite from this incomparability of physical and psychical pro
cesses. All that follows unavoidably from it is that we should reserve
for each of these two groups its own special ground of explanation ;
but it would be going too far to assert that the two principles, which
we must thus separate, necessarily belong to two different sorts of
substances. There is nothing to be said at starting against the other
supposition, according to which every element of reality unites in
itself the two primitive qualities, from one of which mental life may
arise, while the other contains the condition of a phenomenal appear
ance as matter. On this view, instead of having, on the one side,
souls destitute of all physical activity and, on the other, absolutely
self-less elements of matter, we might suppose that the latter, like
the former, possess in various grades an inner life, though a life
which we cannot observe nor even guess at, so long as it has no forms
of expression intelligible to us. And with regard to the cause which
would unite these two attributes in what exists, this theory would be as
much within its right in refusing to discuss it as ours was in simply
appealing to the fact of a connexion between two series of incom
parable processes. It seems to me that every mode of thought,
which calls itself Materialism, ultimately rests on this supposition, or
on a little reflexion must be led to it ; the matter from which such
modes of thought would deduce mental phenomena, is privately
conceived by them as something much better than it looks from
outside. So it comes about that it can be held a fair problem, to
deduce the mental life of an organism from the reactions of the
psychical movements of the corporeal elements in the same sense in
which its bodily life arises as a resultant from the confluence of the
physical forces of those elements. And if we were confined to the
external observation of a psychical life not our own, I do not know of
anything perfectly decisive that could be alleged against this supposi
tion. But, according to it, every psychical manifestation would be
merely the final outcome of a number of components destitute of any
centre : whereas our inner experience offers us the fact of a unity of
consciousness. Here then is the third and the unassailable ground, on
CHAPTER i.] True ground of belief in ( soul! 42 3
which the conviction of the independence of the soul can securely
rest. The nature of this position I proceed to explain.
241. It has been required of any theory which starts without pre
suppositions and from the basis of experience, that in the beginning
it should speak only of sensations or ideas, without mentioning the
soul to which, it is said, we hasten without justification to ascribe them.
I should maintain, on the contrary, that such a mode of setting out
involves a wilful departure from that which is actually given in experi
ence. A mere sensation without a subject is nowhere to be met with
> as a fact. It is impossible to speak of a bare movement without
i thinking of the mass whose movement it is; and it is just as im
possible to conceive a sensation existing without the accompanying
idea of that which has it,— or, rather, of that which feels it ; for this
also is included in the given fact of experience, that the relation of the
feeling subject to its feeling, whatever its other characteristics may be,
is in any case something different from the relation of the moved
element to its movement. It is thus, and thus only, that the sensation
is a given fact ; and we have no right to abstract from its relation to
its subject because this relation is puzzling, and because we wish to
obtain a starting-point which looks more convenient but is utterly un
warranted by experience. In saying this I do not intend to repeat
the frequent but exaggerated assertion, that in every single act of
feeling or thinking there is an express consciousness which regards
the sensation or idea simply as states of a self; on the contrary,
everyone is familiar with that absorption in the content of a sensuous
perception, which often makes us entirely forget our personality in
view of it. But then the very fact that we can become aware that
this was the case, presupposes that we afterwards retrieve what we
omitted at first, viz. the recognition that the perception was in us, as
our state. But, further, there are other facts which place in a clearer
light what in the case of single sensations might remain doubtful.
Any comparison of two ideas, which ends by our finding their con-
'; tents like or unlike, presupposes the absolutely indivisible unity of
! that which compares them : it must be one and the same thing which
, first forms the idea of a, then that of b, and which at the same time is
conscious of the nature and extent of the difference between them.
Then again the various acts of comparing ideas and referring them to
' one another are themselves in turn reciprocally related; and this
relation brings a new activity of comparison to consciousness. And
so our whole inner world of thoughts is built up ; not as a mere
collection of manifold ideas existing with or after one another, but as
424 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul.
a world in which these individual members are held together and
arranged by the relating activity of this single pervading principle.
£his then is what we mean by the unity of consciousness ; and it is
is that we regard as the sufficient ground for assuming an indivisible
>ul. As compared with the thousand activities of this unity involved
in every act by which two ideas are referred to each other, it is a
matter of indifference whether at every moment that particular act of
relation is explicitly performed by which these inner states are appre
hended in their true character, as states of this active unity. Although
this reflexion is possible, we can think of many conditions which
frequently prevent it taking place. But that it can take place at all
proves to us the unity of the active subject which performs it.
242. Further discussion is, however, needed, in order to show the
necessity of our conclusion and to explain its meaning. First, as to
its necessity : even if we admit the unity of consciousness, why are
we bound to trace it back to a particular indivisible subject? why
should it not resemble a motion which results from the co-operation
of many components ; seeing that this resultant, like the unity of
consciousness, appears perfectly simple and gives no indication of the
multiplicity of elements from which it arose ? I answer : such an
idea seems possible only because we state the mechanical law, to
which we appeal, in slovenly short-hand. We must not say, ' From
two motions there comes a third simple motion :' the full formula is,
When two different impulses act simultaneously on one and the same
material point, they coalesce at this point into a third simple motion
of this point ; they would not do so if they met with different elements,
nor would the resultant have any significance if it were not a motion
of that very same element in which they met. If we wish then to
make an analogous construction of consciousness, it is indispensable
that we should mention the subject whose states we have to combine.
Thus if a, 6, c, . . . 2 are the elements of a living organism, each of
them may have at once a physical and a psychical nature and each
of them may be capable of acting in accordance with its two natures ;
but the fact still remains that these actions cannot stream out into the
void and be states of nobody, but must always consist of states which
one element produces in other elements. Supposing this reciprocal
action took place equally among them all, then the impressions received
and imparted would be equalised, and the end of the process would
be that each one of the elements would reach the same final state Z,
the resultant of all the single impulses. If then Z were a conscious
ness, this consciousness would be present as many times as there were
CHAPTER I.]
Consciousness a Resultant ?
425
homogeneous elements : but it would never happen that outside, side
by side with, or between these elements a new subject could be formed,
privileged to be the personified common spirit of the society of inter
acting units. Doubtless, however, the homogeneity we have assumed
will not be found to exist ; the constituents of the organism will
differ from one another ; they will be conjoined in accordance with
their nature, and will have different positions, more or less favourable
to the spread of their interactions ; and at whatever moment we sup
pose the course of these interactions to be finished, the result will
probably be that the different elements will have reached different
final states A,B, , . . Z, depending on the degree of liveliness with
which each element has received the influences of the others, and on the
measure in which it has succeeded or failed in concentrating those
influences in itself. In this case it becomes still more impossible than
before to say which of all this array of resultant consciousnesses is
the object of our search, the soul of the organism : but in this case as
in the former, it is certain that there cannot arise, outside of and
beyond all these elements, a new subject which in its own conscious
ness should bring together and compare their states, as we who are
investigating can compare them in the unity of our consciousness.
Our only remaining resource would be to fall back on the idea of
Leibnitz and to say that although the countless monads which com
pose the living creature are essentially homogeneous, there is never
theless among them a pn'ma inter pares, a central monad, which in
virtue partly of its superiority in quality and partly of its favourable
position between the rest, is capable of the intensest mental life and
able to over-master all the others. This central monad would be
what we call our soul, the subject of our one consciousness; the
others, though they too have psychical movements of their own, would
be for our direct inward experience as inaccessible as the inner life of
one person in a human society is for that of any other. Thus the end
at which this attempted construction would arrive would not be that
it set out to reach. It too would have to recognise the absolutely
indivisible unity of that which is to support our inward life : and,
instead of the hope of showing this unity to be the resultant of many
co-operating elements, there would remain the more moderate as
sumption that these many elements stand to the one being in manifold
relations of interaction. Such a view has no longer any special pecu
liarity, beyond, first, the idea that all elements of the body have a soul-
life, although this soul-life has not much significance for ours ; and
secondly, (though this applies only to the hypothesis I am describing,
426 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
and not to Leibnitz) the doubtful advantage of being able to attribute
to the one element which is the soul not only psychical predicates but
the predicates of an element which is operative after the fashion of
matter.
243. I said that the meaning of the unity of consciousness, as well
as the necessity of assuming it, needed some further explanation.
My remarks on this meaning ought to be saved by their connexion
with the rest of a metaphysical work like the present from the mis
understanding with which my previous accounts of the subject have
met. The conclusion we have now reached is usually expressed by
saying that the soul is an indivisible and simple substance; and
I have used this formula in all innocence, as an intelligible name.
How it can be misunderstood I have learned from the way in which
my esteemed friend Fechner in his Atomenlehre characterises my view
in opposition to his own. It was natural to him as an investigator
of Nature, and probably his intimacy with the most eminent represent
atives of the Herbartian philosophy made it still more natural, to
understand by substance a physical atom or one of the simple real
' existences ' of that school. But I had given no special occasion for
this misunderstanding : on the contrary I had put forward the pro
position which was censured and therefore could not have escaped
notice ; ' It is not through a substance that things have being, but
they have being when they are able to produce the appearance of a
substance present in them.' I have discussed this point at sufficient
length in the Ontology, and have now only to show its consequences
for our present question. When from the given fact of the unity of
consciousness I passed on to call the subject of this knowledge exist
ence or substance, I could not possibly intend by doing so to draft' a
conclusion which should deduce from its premisses something not
contained in them but really new. For my only definition of the idea
of substance was this, — that it signifies everything which possesses the
power of producing and experiencing effects, in so far as it possesses
that power. Accordingly this expression was simply a title given to a
thing in virtue of its having performed something ; it was not and
could not be meant to signify the ground, the means or the cause
which would render that performance intelligible. Was substance to
be one or many ? It would have been too absurd to suppose this
power of producing and experiencing effects in general to have its
ground in one universal substance, and then to expect that a grain of
this substance, buried in each individual thing, would quicken this
general capacity into the particular ways of producing and ex-
CHAPTER I.] TIlC Soill IH wkdt SCHSC a SubstaUCC. 427
periencing effects which distinguish that thing from all other things.
On the other hand the supposition that each thing, instead of being
carved out of the matter of the universal substance, is a substance on its
own account would have at once led us back to our starting-point,
and we should have recognised the name substance to be, what it
really is, simply the general formal designation of every way of pro
ducing and experiencing effects, but not the real condition on which
in each particular case the possibility of doing so and the particular
way of doing so depends. I was therefore very far from sharing the
view of those who place the soul in the mid-current of events as one
hard and indissoluble atom by the side of others or as an indestructible
real existence, and who fancied that its substantiality, so understood,
offered a foundation from which the rest of its phenomena could be
deduced. The fact of the unity of consciousness is eo ipso at once
the fact of the existence of a substance : we do not need by a process
of reasoning to conclude from the former to the latter as the condition
of its existence, — a fallacious process of reasoning which seeks in
an extraneous and superior substance supposed to be known before
hand, the source from which the soul and each particular thing
would acquire the capacity of figuring as the unity and centre of
manifold actions and affections.
The reason why, in spite of this, I thought it worth while to desig
nate the soul as substance or real existence, I shall mention here
after when I come to oppose the pluralistic view suggested by
Fechner : my point was not so much the substantiality as the unity
of the soul, and I wished to emphasize the idea that it is only an
indivisible unity which can produce or experience effects at all, and
that these words cannot be applied in strictness to any multiplicity,
— an idea which I attempted to bring out more clearly in the
Mikrokosmus, (i. p. 178). But, relying on the fact that the imagination
is accustomed to connect this idea of unity with the name ' substance'
or ' real existence,' I considered that these two expressions, even in
that meaning of them which I have described and repudiated, might
still, when once the true account of the matter had been given, be
used as serviceable abbreviations of it.
244. It is natural at this point to think of Kant's treatment of that
Paralogism of the pure Reason which seeks to establish the sub
stantiality of the soul. We may sum up his criticism thus : It is a
fact that we appear in our thoughts as the constant subject of our
states, but it does not follow from this fact that the soul is a constant
substance j for even the former unity is in the end only our subjective
428 The Metaphysical Conception of the Sold.
way of looking at things, and there are many things which in them
selves may be quite different from what they must needs seem to us to
be. This last idea is certainly incontrovertible, but it does not affect
the point which constitutes the nerve of our argument. I repeat once
{more, we do not believe in the unity of the soul because it appears as
unity, but simply because it is able to appear or manifest itself in
some way, whatever that may be. The mere fact that, conceiving
itself as a subject, it connects itself with any predicate, proves to us
the unity of that which asserts this connexion ; and, supposing the
soul appeared to itself as a multiplicity, we should on the same
grounds conclude that it was certainly mistaken if it took itself really
to be what it appeared. Every judgment, whatever it may assert,
testifies by the mere fact that it is pronounced at all, to the indivisible
unity of the subject which utters it.
But, I am well aware, I shall still be reproached with having
neglected the fine and subtle distinction which Kant draws between
the subject of our inward experience and the unity of the Soul con
sidered as a thing in itself ; he admits the unity of the former, but
prohibits any conclusion to that of the latter. It is a difficult task,
and one in which I have no interest, to dissect Kant's final ideas in
this section of the Critique of Reason ; I shall content myself with
explaining clearly the difference between my view and that which I
conjecture to be his. Kant is without doubt right when he is opposing
that traditional argument for the substantiality of the soul, the object
of which was to make that quality, when it had been inferred, a medius
terminus for fresh consequences, as, for instance, that of immortality;
but he was mistaken when he looked on this inference as a further
goal which it is our misfortune that we are unable to attain. In
the very prohibition he utters against a conclusion from the unity of
the subject to that of the substance, he admits that this conclusion
would have an important bearing, if only it could be drawn ; and all
that seems to him to be wanting is the links of argument which might
justify us in bringing the soul under this fruitful conception of
substance and all the consequences it legitimately involves. That
Kant cannot free himself from this idea, is shown by a foot-note
which in the first edition of the Critique is appended to the doctrine
of the Paralogisms. It runs as follows: 'An elastic sphere which
collides with another in a direct line, communicates to it its whole
motion and, therefore, (if we regard nothing but their positions in
space) its whole state. Now if, on the analogy of such bodies, we
suppose substances, one of which imparted to the other ideas together
CHAPTER L] Kant on the Unity of the Soul. 429
with the consciousness of them, we can imagine a whole series of
these substances, of which the first would impart its state, together
with the consciousness of that state, to the second, the second would
impart its own state, together with that of the preceding substance, to
the third, and this again would communicate to another, not only its
own state with the consciousness of it, but also the states of all its
predecessors and the consciousness of them. Thus the states of all
the substances which had undergone changes, together with the
consciousness of these states, would be transferred to the last sub
stance : and in consequence this last substance would be conscious of
all these states as its own, and yet, in spite of this, it would not have
been the same person in all these states.' In this way, according to
Kant, the identity of the consciousness of ourselves in different times
would be possible even without the numerical unity of the soul.
The various assumptions, which are made at starting in this note,
are so strange that a criticism of their admissibility would be un
bearably prolix : one can only say of them, Certainly, if it were so, it
would be so. But if the communication of a completed state together
with the consciousness of it is possible, why should we not go further
and make an approach to the actual state of affairs by assuming that,
over and above this, the fact of this communication will be an object
of consciousness for the soul receiving it ? In that case the process
would resemble the propagation of culture by tradition and instruc
tion. It is in this way, at least, that the busy soul collects by industry
the thoughts of its predecessors ; but then it is at the same time
conscious that the thoughts it receives are not its own, but what it
has received. And fortunately there is another point at which the
comparison fails ; for the original possessor does not lose his thoughts
by communicating them. All this, however, matters nothing: but
what is the meaning of the conclusion, ' and yet there has not been
the same person in all these states ' ? The fact is the very reverse ; it
was not the same sphere that served an abode for the personality ; but
the person is one, in the same sense in which it is possible for any
substance capable of development to be one, although at the beginning
of its history it is naturally poorer in recollected experiences than it
afterwards becomes : and what Kant maintains is nothing but a
strange transmigration of the soul, in which the personality, while
it grows in content, passes from one substratum to another. I will
not dwell longer on the oddities of this unfortunate comparison ; but
it shows — and this is its only serious interest — that there seemed to
Kant to be some meaning in the idea, that beneath the concrete
430 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
nature or content of anything there lies in the intelligible world a
thing in itself, destitute of content, but serving as a means of con
solidating the reality of the concrete thing, or useful to it in some
other way, I know not what ; and that it makes some difference to
the unity of consciousness, whether its substratum consists of the
first, or second, or third of these things in themselves, whether it is
always the same one, or whether it is many of them in succession ;
and this although there were even less difference between them than
there is between those elastic spheres, the positions of which in space
at least gives a reason for supposing that there is more than one of
them. Nor was this at all the object which the Paralogism criticised
sought to reach. No one who wished the doctrine of immortality to
be assured, could concern himself with anything but that continuity of
his consciousness which he desired not to lose ; he would be heartily
indifferent to the question whether the thing in itself which was to be
the substratum of that continuance occupied in the series the position
n or (n+ i).
I come back then to the point, that the identity of the subject of
inward experience is all that we require. So far as, and so long as,
the soul knows itself as this identical subject, it is, and is named,
simply for that reason, substance. But the attempt to find its capacity
of thus knowing itself in the numerical unity of another underlying
substance is not a process of reasoning which merely fails to reach an
admissible aim ; it has no aim at all. That which is not only con
ceived by others as unity in multiplicity, but knows and makes itself
good as such, is, simply on that account, the truest and most in
divisible unity there can be. But in Kant's mind, so at least it seems
to me, the prejudice is constantly recurring, that a thing may in a
certain peculiar sense be unity, and that this is metaphysically a much
prouder achievement than merely to make itself good as unity, since
this last capacity may perhaps also belong to that which is not really
or numerically one.
245. A further question now becomes inevitable. On what does
this living unity of self-consciousness rest ? Or, to put the problem
in its customary and shorter form, what is the soul, and how are we
to decide respecting its destiny, if our decision can no longer be
drawn from the claims which might be advanced in favour of every
substance as such, according to its traditional conception ? Here again
I need only answer by recalling the preliminary convictions to which
our ontology has led us. We know that when we ask 'what' any
thing is, we commonly mean by this word two different things ; firstly,
CHAPTER I.] The SOlll is what it doCS. 43 I
that which distinguishes it from other things, and, secondly, that which
makes it a thing, like other things. The error which it was our object
to avoid lay in the belief that, corresponding to these two constituents
of our conception, there exist in reality two elements capable of
entering into an actual relation to each other. But we found our
most serious obstacle in the habit of adding to these two constituents
of our idea a third, which though foreign to them is supposed to
guarantee their connexion : this third constituent is that empty /matter'
of existence on which the content of things is supposed to depend.
To anyone who is disposed to agree with me in these ontological
conclusions, it must seem utterly inconceivable that we should ask for
the * what ' of a thing, and yet look for the answer in anything except
that which this thing is and does; or that we should enquire as to
its ' being/ and yet seek this anywhere except in its activity. And in
the same way here it must seem equally unintelligible that we should
suppose we do not know the soul, because, although we know all its
acts, we are unluckily ignorant of the elastic sphere to which, ac
cording to Kant's comparison, the nature manifested in these acts is
attached ; or that instead of seeking the living reality of the soul in
its production of ideas, emotions, and efforts, we should look for it in
a nameless ' being,' from which these concrete forms of action could
not flow, but in which, after some manner never to be explained, they
are supposed to participate. But I have already disposed of these
generalities, and will not return to them. Every soul is what it shows
itself to be, unity whose life is in definite ideas, feelings, and efforts.
This is its real nature : and if it were alone in the world, it would be
idle to ask how this reality is possible, since we have long ago decided
that the question how things are made is not admissible. It is only
the fact that the soul is involved in a larger world, and meets with
various fortunes there, that makes it necessary to seek within this
whole the conditions on which its existence, and the origin or
preservation of that existence, depends. Within this sphere the soul
shows itself to be to a certain extent an independent centre of actions
and re-actions ; and in so far as it does so, and so long as it does so,
it has a claim to the title of substance : but we can never draw from
the empty idea of substance a necessary conclusion to the position
which the soul occupies in the world, as though its modes of action
had their ground and justification in that idea.
It will be obvious against what view this remark is directed. A
pluralism which considers the order of the world derivable from a
number of elements, perfectly independent of one another, and subject
432 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
only to a supplementary connexion through laws, naturally includes in
its idea of the original nature of these elements indestructibility and
immutability. Unless then the soul is to be connected with the juxta
positions of these stable atoms as a perishable side-effect, the only
resource of this view is to include it among the number of such
eternal existences. Thus the soul can rely upon its rights as a pre-
mundane substance, and rest assured that in no changes of the world,
whatever they may be, can either an origin or an end be ascribed
to it.
The fact that this reasoning leads to a double result is, on the face
of it, inconvenient. We might be glad to accept its guarantee for
immortality, although no great satisfaction is given to our desires by
a mere continuity the nature of which remains undecided ; but the
other conclusion which is forced on us at the same time, the infinite
pre-existence of the soul before the earthly life we know, remains, like
the immortality of the souls of all animals, strange and improbable.
Our monistic view has long since renounced all these ideas. The
order of the world, the existence of all things and their capacity for
action, it has placed wholly and without reserve in the hands of the
one infinite existence, on which alone the possibility of all interactions
was found to rest; and it has nowhere recognised a prior world of
ideal necessity, from which things might derive a claim to any other
lot than that which the meaning of the whole has given them in order
that they may serve it. Our first and foremost result is therefore this :
the question of the immortality of the soul does not belong to Meta-
physic. We have no other principle for deciding it beyond this
general idealistic conviction ; that every created thing will continue, if
and so long as its continuance belongs to the meaning of the world ;
that everything will pass away which had its authorised place only in
a transitory phase of the world's course. That this principle admits
of no further application in human hands hardly needs to be
mentioned. We certainly do not know the merits which may give
to one existence a claim to eternity, nor the defects which deny it
to others.
246. We cannot pass quite so quickly over the question of the
origin or genesis of the soul. How it can be brought about, or how
the creative power of the absolute begins to bring it about, that an
existence is produced which not only in accordance with universal
laws produces and experiences effects and alterations in its con
nexion with others, but also in its ideas, emotions, and efforts,
separates itself from the common foundation of all things, and
CHAPTER i.] Genesis of the Soul. 433
becomes to a certain extent an independent centre, — this question
we shall no more attempt to answer than we have others like it.
Our business is not to make the world, but to understand the inner
connexion of the world that is realised already ; and it was this
problem that forced us to lay down our limiting idea of the absolute
and its inner creation of countless finite beings. This idea we found
it necessary to regard as the conception of an ultimate fact ; and we
cannot explain the possibility of the fact by using the images of pro
cesses which themselves spring from it in a way we cannot explain.
But when the life of the soul does arise, it arises before our eyes in
constant conjunction with the physical development of the organism :
and thus questions are suggested as to the reciprocal relations of two
series of events which, as we have already remarked, cannot be com
pared, and which therefore might seem inaccessible to one another.
Where, we may be asked, does the soul arise, and in what way does
it come into this body which is just beginning to be, and which was
destined for it; since we are forbidden to regard it as a collateral
effect of the physical forces, and as having its natural birthplace in
this very body ? The question may seem natural, and yet it is only
an imagination accustomed to strange images which can ask it. We
are not to picture the absolute placed in some remote region of ex
tended space, and separated from the world of its creations, so that
its influence has to retraverse a distance and make a journey in order
to reach things ; for its indivisible unity, omnipresent at every point,
would fill this space as well as others. Still less ought we, who hold \
this space to be a mere phenomenon, to imagine a cleft between finite »
beings and the common foundation of all things, a cleft which would
need to be bridged by miraculous wanderings. Wherever in apparent
space an organic germ has been formed, at that very spot, and not
removed from it, the absolute is also present. Nor, I must once more
repeat, is it simply this class of facts which compels us to assume such
an action of the absolute. We may regard the process by which
things that possess a life and soul are formed as something unusual
and superior ; but the presence of the absolute which makes this
process possible is no less the basis necessarily implied in the most
insignificant interaction of any two atoms. Nor again do we think of
its presence as a mere uniform breath which penetrates all places
and this particular spot among them, like that subtle, formless, and
homogeneous ether from which many strange theories expect the
vivification of matter into the most various forms : but the absolute is
indivisibly present with the whole inner wealth of its nature in this
VOL. I. F f
434 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
particular spot, and, in obedience to those laws of its action which it
has itself laid down, necessarily makes additions to the simple con
junctions of those elements which are themselves only its own con
tinuous actions, simple additions where the conjunctions are simple,
additions of greater magnitude and value where they are more compli
cated. Everywhere it draws only the consequences, which at every
point of the whole belong to the premisses it has previously realised at
that point. It is thus that it gives to every organism its fitting soul ;
and it is therefore needless to devise a way or make provision for the
correct choice which should ensure to every animal germ the soul
which answers to its kind. Again, so long as the soul was regarded
as indivisible substance, it could only be supposed to enter the body
at a single instant and in its entirety : whereas, if we renounce these
ideas of an external conjunction, we need no longer wish to fix the
moment at which the soul enters into a development which at first is
supposed to produce only physical actions.
We have all along regarded the interaction of the absolute with all
the elements of the world as eternal and incessant. It is present just
as continuously in the first development of the germ ; and in the
same way there is nothing to prevent us from looking at the formation
of the soul as an extended process in time, a process in which the
absolute gradually gives a further form to its creation. Doubtless we
shall never be able to picture this process to ourselves ; but at any
rate there is no force in the possible objection that such a gradual
development contradicts the unity of the soul. For we are speaking,
not of a composition of pieces already present in separation, but of
the successive transformations of something established at the be
ginning of the process. And if this again should seem to contradict
the idea of one unchangeable substance, I recur to my previous
assertion ; it is not because the soul is substance and unity that it
asserts itself as such, but it is substance and unity, as "soon as, and in
so far as, it asserts itself as such ; and if it does this gradually in a
greater degree, and with a growing significance, I should not hesitate
to distinguish in its substantiality, and in the intensity of its unity,
countless different grades which it traverses by degrees when first it is
being formed, and the last and highest of which it may perhaps be
incapable of reaching during the whole of its terrestrial and super-
terrestrial existence.
And now, after our picture has been thus altered, collecting its
various traits, I may return to an earlier statement : if anyone were
in a position to observe the first development of the soul, just as with
CHAPTER i.] Soul's growth seems effect of Body s. 435
the microscope we can observe the physical development of the germ,
the result would infallibly be that everything would look to him
exactly as materialism believes it actually to take place. As the
structure progressively differentiated itself, he would see appearing,
not all at once, but by degrees, the faint and gradually multiplying
traces of psychical activity; but nowhere would he meet with the
sudden irruption of a power, which seemed foreign to the play of the
elements active before his eyes : he would see the whole condition of
things which has been thought to justify the view that all psychical
life is a side-effect of the physical process of formation. This con
dition of things we admit ; and the view based on it we reject. All
the single manifestations which could thus be observed might no
doubt be regarded as products of the interaction of the physical ele
ments ; but the unity of consciousness, to which at a later time our
inward experience testifies, cannot, in the absence of a subject, be the
mere result of the activities of a number of elements, and just as
little can this subject be created by those activities. Nor again is it
out of nothing that the soul is made or created by the absolute ; but
to satisfy the imagination we may say it is from itself, from its own
real nature that the absolute projects the soul, and so adds to its one
activity, the course of nature, that other which, in the ruling plan of
the absolute, is its natural completion.
247. I know well that our metaphysical enquiries are constantly
and jealously watched by certain side-thoughts of our own ; and here
they raise the question whether we are not in the interests of the
intellect laying down positions which will afterwards prove fatal to
the requirements of the emotional side of our nature. In subjecting
the origin of psychical life to the dominion of law, are we not once
more reducing the whole course of the world to that necessary evolu
tion of a mere nature in which no place remains for any free beginning
and, therefore, none for any guiding providence? I admit that there
is ground for such doubts, but not that it is my duty to meet them
here. If the need that is expressed in them is a justifiable one, still it
is only where its justification is successful that we can attempt to
satisfy it without cancelling what we have previously found to be
necessary for the theoretic intelligibility of the world. So long then as
psychical life is realised in countless instances after the same universal
patterns, and so long as the same processes are repeated countless
times in every single soul, we cannot refuse to admit a connexion
which follows universal laws and which here, as elsewhere, shows
like results following on like conditions, and the same changes in the
rf2
436 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
former following on the same changes in the latter. We may put
aside the question whether this connexion is all that the reality of
things conceals or includes : whatever may be necessary to complete
it, it cannot itself be denied.
There are two directions, therefore, in which a mechanical point of
view may extend its claim over these subjects. It has been attempted
long since in the case of the inward life of the soul, and the concep
tion of a psychical mechanism is no longer unfamiliar to us : I have
met with less sympathy for that other idea of a physico-psychical
mechanism, the object of which was to base the commerce between
soul and body on a series of thoughts similar to those which we
apply to the interaction of physical elements. Accepting with gratitude
the pleasanter name ' psycho-physical mechanism/ which by Fechner's
ingenious attempts has been introduced into science, I will once
more attempt to defend those outlines of my theory which I sketched
in the Medicinische Psychologic (1852). According to some views my
proposal is impossible ; and according to others it is superfluous. The
essence of it lay in the attempt to regard the soul as an existence
possessing unity, and the body as a number of other inter-connected
existences, and to regard the two as the two sides, neither identical
nor disconnected, from the interaction of which mental life proceeds,
that life being in posse based on the proper nature of the soul, but
stirred to actual existence by the influences of the external world.
248. I need not be prolix in opposing those who adduce the
incomparability of things psychical and material as an objection
against the possibility of any interaction between them. Admitting
this incomparability, it would still be an unfounded prejudice to
suppose that only like can act on like, and a mistake to imagine that
the case of an interaction of soul and body is an exceptional one, and
that we are here to find inexplicable what in any action of matter upon
matter we understand. It is only the false idea that an action or
effect1 is a complete state, transferable from one substrate to the
other, which misleads us into demanding that any two things which
are to influence one another should be homogeneous : for, if that idea
were correct, it would of course follow that b, to which the effect
passes, and a, from which it issues, must be sufficiently similar to
give it admittance in the same way. But, as a matter of fact, the
form of any effect proceeds from the nature of that on which the
external cause acts, and is not determined exclusively by the latter;
and no species of conditions can be adduced, the presence of which
1 [Cp. § 57, supra.]
CHAPTER!.] Interaction of Soul and Body. 437
is indispensable to enable one thing a to excite another thing b so to
manifest its own nature. To our sensuous imagination, it is true, no
interaction but that of similar elements (similar at least in their
external appearance) presents itself as a connected image ; but it is
only our sensuous imagination that seeks to retain for every case of
action the homogeneous character which it fancies it understands to
be an essential condition in this particular case. And this is just
where it deceives itself. I have frequently pointed out how often we
suppose ourselves to understand something, when our senses are
simply occupied with a variegated and unbroken series of phenomena.
So long as we are merely looking at the outside of a machine we do
not imagine that we comprehend it : but when it is opened and we
see how all its parts fit into one another, and how at last it brings out
a result utterly unlike the impulse first imparted, we think that we
understand its action perfectly. And it really is clear to us, in so far
as the explanation of a complicated process means its reduction
to a concatenation of very simple actions which we have made up
our minds to consider intelligible ; but the action which takes place
between each pair of the simplest links of the chain remains just as
incomprehensible as before, and equally incomprehensible whether
those links are like one another or not. The working of every
machine yet known rests on the fact that certain parts of it are solid
and that these parts communicate their motions ; but how the elements
manage to bind one another into an unchanging shape, and how they
can transmit motions — and this is what is essential in the process of
the action of matter on matter — remains invisible, and the similarity
of the parts concerned in the action adds nothing to its intelligibility.
When then we speak of an action taking place between the soul and
material elements, all that we miss is the perception of that external
scenery which may make the influence of matter on matter more
familiar to us, but cannot explain it. We shall never see the last
atom of the nerve impinging on the soul, or the soul upon it ; but
equally in the case of two visible spheres the impact is not the
intelligible cause of the communication of motion ; it is nothing but
the form in which we can perceive something happening which we
do not comprehend.
The mistake is to desire to discover indispensable conditions of all
action ; and we are only repeating this mistake in another form when
we declare the immaterial soul, as devoid of mass, incapable of acting
mechanically on a dense material mass, or conceive it as an in
vulnerable shadow, inaccessible to the attacks of the corporeal world.
438 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul. [BOOK in.
We might without hesitation take an opposite point of view, and
speak of the soul as a definite mass at every moment when it produces
an effect measurable by the movement of a corporeal mass. And
in doing so we should be taking none of its immateriality from it ;
for with bodies also it is not the case that they are first masses and
then and therefore produce effects or act ; but according to the degree
of their effects they are called masses of a certain magnitude. The
soul again is no less capable of receiving effects through the stimulus
of material elements than they are from one another, although it does
not stand face to face with them in an equally perceptible shape ;
for as between those elements themselves shape and movement,
impact and pressure, determine nothing but the external appearance
behind which, and the scene on which, the imperceptible process of
action goes on.
And, lastly, in our present metaphysical discussion we need not
have entered on these objections at all. We have given up that
simple and thorough division of reality, which places matter on one
side and the mind on the other, confident and full of faith in regard
to the former, timid and doubtful about the latter. Everything we
supposed ourselves to know of matter as an obvious and independent
existence, has long since been dissolved in the conviction that matter
itself, together with the space, by filling which it seemed most con
vincingly to prove its peculiar nature, is nothing but an appearance
for our perception, and that this appearance arises from the reciprocal
effects which existences, in themselves super-sensuous, produce on
one another and, consequently, also upon the soul. There may,
therefore, be some other way in which the soul is separated from
these existences ; but it is not parted from them by the gulf of
that incomparability which is supposed to be a bar to all inter
action.
249. So long as we believe this gulf to exist, we naturally try to
bridge it, and therefore raise the pointless question respecting the
bond which holds body and soul together. What is the use of a bond
except to hold together things which, being perfectly indifferent to
each other and destitute of all inter-action, threaten to fall asunder ?
And how is a bond to do its work except through the connexion of
its own parts, a connexion which one cannot suppose to be in its
turn effected by new bonds between these parts, but which must rest
in the end on their own inter-actions? And if in this instance it is
clear that the binding force of the bond consists simply in the inter
actions which flow from the inner relations of its parts to one another,
A ' bond' between Body and Soul f 439
why should the case be different between the body and soul ? Their
union consists in the fact that they can and must act on one another,
and no external bond which embraced them both could supply the
place of this capacity and necessity, unless its inclusion of them were
already based on their own natures. Besides, how poverty-stricken
is the idea of this single bond, which in our parsimony we fancy will
suffice us ! Even supposing it to exist, where are we to find the
positive ground of the nature and form of those actions or effects
which, as a matter of fact, take place ? The reason for their existence
cannot be found by another appeal to the indifferent bond ; it would
have to be sought in the peculiar natures of the things connected.
Whatever number of different inter-actions body and soul can effect in
virtue of the relation of their natures, so many bonds are there which
unite them and hold them together : but to look for the one nameless
bond which should take the place of all these, is vain, absurd, and
wearisome. Even if we understand it to be merely a conditio sine
qua non for the exercise of capacities based on something else, we
still must refuse to admit it; for the body and soul were never
separated from one another like two bodies which cannot act on one
another chemically until they are brought together. One word, lastly,
on the sarcasm which reproaches us with forming the personality of
man by adding two ingredients together. It is just this addition
that is made by the one external bond ; and what we want is not it
but the multiplicity of a complex double and united life. But in spite;
of this unity we do not look for man's personality in body and soul
alike, but in the soul alone. We seek in the body only the echo or
appearance of its action ; for the body is and remains for the soul
a part of the external world, though that part which it can most
directly rule and to whose influence it is most immediately susceptible.
250. There is another question on which I wish to touch, and
these remarks at once suggest it. If the inter-action of body and
soul is an easy matter, why not go a step further, instead of still
maintaining a separation into two interacting sides ? At how many
points have we come close to an opposite view ! We did not regard
the soul as something steadfast in itself from eternity, something
which enters as an indissoluble substance into the machinery of the
body's formation ; we admitted that they arise together. Even the
supposition that the soul arises gradually according as the bodily
organization approaches its completion, did not seem to us impossible.
What is there now to hinder the confession that it is simply a
consequence of this physical concatenation of atoms ? And if on
44-O The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul.
the other side it is conceded that, so long as we abide by the
customary physical ideas, we cannot deduce the origin of a psychical
process from the co-operation of material atoms, why need we hold
to those ideas ? Why not adopt that wider view, which holds that if
a number of elements meet together, then, according as the number
of the connected parts and the multiplicity of their relations
increases, perfectly new effects or actions may be connected with
those meeting elements, effects which do not follow on the inter
action of two atoms alone, and which therefore we never can discover,
so long as we try to find the conclusions of such complicated pre
misses by merely adding together the inter-actions of each pair
of them?
In answering this question I must first go back to an earlier state
ment. Even supposing we could unreservedly approve of these
ideas, still the only purpose we could put them to would be to deduce
from them what is given us in experience ; that must not be put
aside as a matter for doubt, on the ground that our presuppositions
are not found to lead to it. Now what is connected with these
associations of many elements is not merely psychical states, pheno
mena, events, or whatever we like to call them. For each of these
results inexorably demands a subject, whose state or stimulation it is ;
and psychical life, so far as it is a given object of inward experience,
includes for us the fact of a unity of this subject, to which the
events we have spoken of are or can be referred as something that
befalls it. I will not repeat my demonstration that the analogy of the
formation of physical resultants can never lead us to this unity,
unless we take beforehand as a fixed point the unity of the subject in
which a variety of elements is to combine : I will only add that the
ideas I have been mentioning offer no new expedient which could
lead us beyond that deduction of resultants. Since so much that is
new has to arise from the combination of the atoms, it seems to me
that we should have to make up our minds to the final step, and
maintain that from a certain definite form of this combination there
also arises, as a new existence, that one subject, that very soul which
collects in itself the states previously scattered among the subjects
of the individual atoms. But the mere admission that psychical unity
springs from physical multiplicity is no merit in the theory ; it simply
states the supposed fact, and so gives expression to a very familiar
problem, but it offers us no further explanation of it. On the other
hand, the expression employed is scarcely peculiar to the view in
question ; for the psychical unity of which it speaks is simply what we
CHAPTER LI Origin of Soul-substance de novo. 44 1
mean by the word substance. It is under this title then, as substance,
that the soul would become the foundation on which our account
of the rest of its life would be based ; for by nothing short of this
should we have complied with the postulates which experience im
poses on our attempts at explanation. And at this point I should
take leave to pursue the same point of view still further. According
to it, it is possible that a certain state of things may be the real
ground of a consequence which we cannot analytically deduce from
it but can only conjoin to it as something new ; but if this is so, it is
possible that the soul, once arisen, may go its own way and unfold
activities which have their sufficient ground in it alone (when once it
has come into being), and not in the least in those other facts which
led to its creation. There would remain therefore not a shadow of
necessity for the proposal to connect with every activity of the soul
as its producing condition a corresponding activity of the body, and
we should simply come back to that psycho-physical mechanism
which allows each side a sphere of inter-action, but at the same time
accords to each a field for an activity of its own in which the other
has no constant share.
251. I have still something to add to our hypothesis. ' When the
elements />, q, r . ., are combined in the form F an effect or action Z
is conjoined with them, which does not follow from the single effects
of the elements when taken in pairs': this is a pleasing expression,
and one that satisfies the imagination. But who has conjoined the
effect with them ? Or, not to insist unfairly on the words, how are we
to conceive the fact that a law holds good for the various elements
/>, q, r .., which determines the effect Z for their form of combina
tion Ft How are we to conceive this other fact, that those elements
take notice that at a given moment this F is present, i. e. that a case
has arisen for the application of the law which was not present the
moment before ? Or lastly, if we recollect that that form of combination
signifies nothing but an affection of those elements already present in
them, in consequence of which they are no longer />, g, r . ., but
TT, K, p . ., still the question would remain, how did this change in the
state of each become noticeable by every other, so that they could all
conspire to produce the further action Z? I have already raised
these questions more than once, and the necessary answer to them
has seemed to be that the course of the world is not comprehensible
by a pluralism which starts with an original multiplicity of elements
reciprocally indifferent, and hopes afterwards through the mere
behest of laws to force them to take notice of each other. Apart
44 2 % The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul, t BOOK in.
from the unity of the encompassing Reality which is all things at
once and which determines their being and nature, it is impossible to
conceive the arising of any action at a given place and time, whether
that action be one of those the content of which we believe to be
deducible from the given circumstances, or one of those which can
only be regarded as a new addition to them. I repeat this here in
order to defend the hypothesis of the preceding paragraph. For
I should certainly never set anyone the task, out of ten elements to
make an eleventh arise equally real with them. It is not from them
that, on this hypothesis, the substance of the soul would spring ; nor
would it arise above them, between them, or by the side of them,
out of nothing. It would be a new creation, produced by the one
encompassing being from its own nature as the supplement of its
physical activity there and then operating.
252. To a certain extent no doubt I should be merely disputing
about words, if I insisted on these statements still further in opposition
to Fechner, considering that his works testify so fully to his enthusiasm
for a unity of all things which should be at once ideal and effective. Yet
it would not be altogether a verbal quarrel ; I am anxious to take this
opportunity of declaring against a point of view which may be at any
rate surmised from the expressions he has chosen. After what I have
said I need not repeat that, in my eyes, nothing is gained in the way
of clearness by the invention of the name ' psycho-physical occur
rence,' or ' psycho-physical process.' I admit that the expression
may have a meaning when applied to a single element, in which, as
I said before, we conceive physical and psychical stimulations to exist
together. But when it is used to explain that life of the soul, which is
supposed to develope itself from the co-operation of a system of
elements, it seems to me to be attractive only because of its indistinct
ness. Where we find it difficult to define the connexion between two
members of a relation which must be kept apart and distinct, we
all feel some weakness for ideas which represent the two as an
original unity and thereby dismiss the object of our enquiry from the
world. In the present case I can find no clear account of the definite
single subject to which each single instance of this process is as
cribed, and no statement of the manner in which these actions or
effects work into each other and form a composite whole. What is
more important, however, to me is the difference between the lights
in which we view what is perhaps the same set of ideas. I allude to
the general remarks at the end of the second volume of Fechner's
Elemente der Psychophysik (p. 515). In this passage 1 find that he
CHAPTER i.] The substratum of the Psychical. 443
observes upon and supplies though in a peculiar form, what I looked
for in vain in other statements of the pluralistic hypothesis. I do not
doubt at all that, for those who are accustomed to the terminology,
the waves and principal waves of the psycho-physical activity, like its
sinking or its rising over certain thresholds, are something more than
short and pictorial designations of actual facts in the life of the soul ;
that they are signs which, through their capacity of taking a mathe
matical form, may lead to more definite formulations of reciprocal
relations of those facts. But I cannot help feeling that in these
descriptions of what happens the real condition of its happening
is also looked for ; or, if this is a misunderstanding, that at any rate
there is much provocation for it. For if no idea of this kind had had
a hand in the matter, many of the explanations that are given would
be in reality nothing but elegant transcriptions of familiar thoughts
into this sign-language, transcriptions which do not directly advance
the enquiry : and the reader will not suppose that he has gained
anything by them unless he is allowed to take these images for the
discovery of something hitherto unknown, of the instrumentation, so
to speak, on which the realisation of the psychical processes rests.
One of the last sentences of this celebrated book (p. 546) may
explain what it is I object to. The substrate of what is psychical, we
are told, is something diffused through the whole world and con
nected into a system by universal forces ; the quantity of conscious
ness depends simply on the quantity, and not on the quality of the
psycho-physical motion ; and this quality should rather be connected
only with the quality of the phenomena of consciousness. Thus
every motion, whatever its form and whatever its substrate, would, on
reaching a certain specified value, contribute something to conscious
ness, whether that consciousness be our own or that of another
person or a general consciousness ; and every particular form of
motion — i. e. every particular collocation and series of velocity-com
ponents — would carry with it its appropriate psychical phenomenon
of the appropriate form, so soon as the components entering into
that form all exceed a certain quantitative value.
' In this way we dispense with the magical charm, the qualitas
occulta, which is supposed to qualify for psychical effects only this or
that exceptional form of motion.' ' What is unconscious and what is
conscious in the world will represent merely two cases of the same
formula, which is the standard at once of their relation and of their
transition into one another.'
I maintain nothing respecting the meaning intended in these
444 The Metaphysical Conception of the Soul.
words : I maintain only that they may easily be understood, or mis
understood, to recommend a view, the admissibility of which I
certainly contest. However much we may bring the phenomena of
two different series of events under one and the same formula — and
I do not deny that it is possible to do so — still all that the formula
in any case does is to describe the phenomena after they are actually
there ; it is not the reason why they are actually there. If all the
hopes here expressed of the psycho-physical calculus were fulfilled,
we should nevertheless still be unable to dispense with that qualitas
occulta, which brings, not to an exceptional kind of motion, but to
every motion the capacity for an activity which does not lie in the
motion itself. I may be told that what I miss is already included in
the character of the motion as psycho-physical ; and indeed it is not
so much the meaning of these sentences that I wish to object to as
the manner in which it is expressed. Still there appears everywhere
as something first and foremost a universal mechanism, which of itself
is supposed to produce this result, that, in relation to certain forms
of motion, there arises, as their natural and necessary consequence
and as the consequence of nothing beside them, a mental activity ;
for even the general formula which is to include conscious and un
conscious as two cases, must obviously, as the common element of
which they are cases, mean not the mere abstract formula, but always
in the last resort that which is itself unconscious, namely, motion.
The beautiful thoughts in which Fechner contradicts this interpreta
tion will be put aside by most of his readers as excusable day
dreams ; but there are many who will make use of his expressions
in order to shelter under a great name their favourite doctrine of
the generatio aequivoca of everything rational from that which is devoid
of reason.
CHAPTER II.
Sensations and the Course of Ideas.
253. OUR mental life is aroused anew at every moment by sensa
tions which the external world excites. But the things without us
become the cause of our sensation not through their mere existence,
but only through effects which they produce in us ; through motions,
in which either they themselves approach the surface of our body
until they touch it, or which they from their own fixed position com
municate to some medium, and which this medium in turn propagates
from atom to atom up to that surface. And therefore, though lan
guage describes things as objects which we see and hear, we must
not allow these transitive expressions to suggest the idea that our
senses, or our soul by means of them, exercise some activity which
goes out to seek for the external objects and brings them to percep
tion. Our attitude is at first one of simple waiting ; and although
when we strain our eyes and ears in listening or watching we may
seem to feel in those organs something of such an outgoing activity,
what we really feel is not this but a different activity, — one by which
we place them in a state of the utmost sensitiveness for the impres
sions we expect.
Now it is self-evident that sensations, which we have at one time
and not at another, can only arise from the alteration of a previous
state, and therefore only through some motion which brings about
this alteration. The old idea therefore that the mere assumption of a
specific substance or caloric was sufficient to account for our feeling
of heat was, apart from all other objections, intrinsically false : for
this caloric, even if it were present, could not, in the absence of any
motion, produce either the sensation of heat or those other effects which
would prove that it itself was present. But that is one objection which I
fear will be raised against the doctrine that all our sensations and per
ceptions depend on motions of the things which are to be their objects.
From an ontological point of view I regarded a certain sympathetic rap-
446 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [ BOOK in.
port-as the ultimate ground of every possible inter-action. But, I may
be asked, if this idea is sound, why should not things exist for one
another apart from any physical intermediation ; and why should not
we perceive things immediately, without having to wait for the
impact of their propagated motion on us ? . That sympathy, I answer,
the name of which was borrowed from a dubious quarter, was not
such a community of all things as is destitute of order and degree.
On the contrary, we found that the elements of the whole stood to
one another in relations varying widely in their closeness or distance;
and it was to these elements we ascribed an immediate sympathy
which needs no artificial means for its production. The degree of
this closeness or distance determines for any two elements the num
ber of intermediates necessary for their interaction ; necessary, not
because the laws of a pre-mundane system of mechanics would render
the interaction impossible in the absence of these intermediates, bilt
because, in their absence, it would be in contradiction with the degree
and nature of the relation on which it is founded, and with that
meaning of the whole which again is the foundation of whatever
mechanical laws hold good in the world. Thus in our view, the
motions in question, the physical stimuli of the senses, are not the
instrumental conditions, which place all things for the first time in
relations to one another and to us, but expressions of that existing
and irremovable network of conditions which the meaning of the world
has established between the states of those things. We know that
in any chain, along which an action or effect is propagated, there is
necessarily presupposed in the last resort a wholly immediate action
between each link and that which lies next to it. The fantastic idea
which extends this direct reciprocal influence to anything and every
thing, and would accordingly place the soul in a communion, free
from all physical intermediation, with distant objects, cannot therefore
be theoretically proved impossible. But inability to controvert a point
of view lies a long way from belief in its validity. Considering that
the whole of the known and waking life of the soul is based through
out upon that physical intermediation, we can only answer asserted
experiences of an interruption of this connexion by the most decided
disbelief, and these experiences could call for attention only if occa
sioning causes could be assigned, adequate to produce such remarkable
exceptions in the course of nature.
254. On their arrival in the body the external stimuli meet with the
system of nerve-fibres prepared for their reception. The change which
they set up in these nerve-fibres becomes the internal sense-stimulus,
CHAPTER ii.] Transmission of sense-stimulus. 447
which is the more immediate cause of our sensation. We leave it to
physiology to ascertain exactly what takes place in this nervous process.
The answer to that question could have a value for psychology only if
it were so complete as to enable us to deduce from the various modifi
cations of the process the corresponding modifications of the sensa
tion and to express the relation in a universal law : whereas the mere
subordination of the nervous process under a specific conception is
only of importance for the question whether we have to consider it
as a mere physical process or whether it is itself something psychical.
The latter view is frequently met with. The sensation is said to be
formed already in the nerve, and to be transferred by it to conscious
ness. If this assumption is to have any clearness it must name the
definite subject to which it ascribes the act of sensation; for sensations
which nobody has cannot be realities. Now this subject of sensation
co'uld not be found in the whole nerve, as such, which is an aggregate
of unnumbered parts : it is only each single atom, however many of
them we suppose to be strung together in the whole nerve, tliat could
be, by itself, a feeling thing. But to this difficulty must be added a
familiar fact. The external sense-stimulus does not become the cause
of a sensation in us, unless the nerve remains uninterrupted through
out its whole course, from its peripheral point of stimulus up to the
central portions of the nervous system. If its continuity is broken by
a cut, the influence of the external stimulus on consciousness is re
moved. Whether the idea, to which this fact naturally gives rise, is
correct or not, — the idea that the soul has its seat in a particular spot
to which the incoming impression must be directed, — or in what other
way we are to explain the truth that this integrity of the nerve-fibre is
an indispensable condition of our sensation, we need not here discuss.
In any case there is a propagation of the stimulation in the nerve
itself, and all its parts cannot be at once in the state of sensation pre
supposed. But it is impossible that one and the same sample of
sensation can be handed on from one atom of the nerve to another
like a packet ; all that can happen is that each single element of the")
nerve becomes, in virtue of its own state, a stimulus to the next toj
produce the same state in itself. Now that this excitation is not pro
duced by a direct sympathy, is proved by that interruption to its
propagation which results from any mechanical breach of continuity.
Such a sympathy would pass undisturbed across the point of section,
and would feel no effects from changes in physical relations of which
it would be from its very nature independent.
We are therefore compelled to introduce a physical connecting link
448 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. t BOOK HI.
for the effect we have presupposed. Through the external sense-
stimulus there is produced in the first nerve-element the physical state
r and, in consequence, in the same element the state of sensation s.
By this change the first element is compelled to awake in the second,
its neighbour, the same state r and, in consequence, the sensation .r.
Thus, through the physical impact of one element on another there
would be propagated at the same time the creation of the correspond
ing sensation. But where would this end ? Wherever and however
this chain of atoms with their internal excitations may at last connect
itself with the soul, the sensation of the soul, our sensation, would
arise out of the soul itself simply through the influence of the last r
with which the last nerve-atom stimulates it, in precisely the same way
in which this sensation was produced in link after link of the chain.
Whatever service then can be rendered by the nerve in aid of the
production of our sensation, it can render just as well by transmitting
a merely physical change, as if each of its atoms experienced the same
psychical state which is to arise in us at the end of the whole process.
A piece of news which passes in the form of a letter from hand to
hand along a series of messengers, reaches the recipient no more
securely and is no better understood by him if each of the intermediates
knows and feels it. Doubtless we shall never be able to portray the
action of that final r on the nature of the soul ; but we cannot do so
any the more by adding to the physical process r the sensation s. This
s in its turn could only occasion the production of our sensation S in
some perfectly indemonstrable way ; it could not itself pass over into
us. On the other hand the propagation in the nerve of a physical
process r up to this mysterious moment, is something which the fact
of experience alluded to compels us to assume. It is sufficient, there
fore, to regard the nervous process as a propagation of something,
taking place in space and time in a definite direction and with a
definite velocity ; the precise nature of that which is propagated con
cerns us but little, and, since these are the only forms of its propagation
which are of importance, it may be described as merely physical.
255. The conscious sensation itself, the red or blue that we see,
the sound that we hear, is the third and last link in this series of
occurrences, and it is familiar to us. We know that this content of
sensation admits of no comparison either with the external sense-
stimulus or with the nervous processes. There is nothing in the red
ness of red, the blueness of blue, or the sound of the heard tone,
which suggests a larger or smaller number of vibrations of a medium ;
yet science has indirectly discovered such vibrations to be the occa-
CHAPTER ii.] Sensation merely Subjective f 449
sion of these sensations. In the same way they give us no informa
tion respecting that which directly occasions them, the process which
goes on in the optic or auditory nerve at the moment when these sen
sations are produced in us ; they are consequences, not copies, of
their stimuli. Thus they are internal phenomena in the soul, and in
this sense of the words the doctrine of the subjectivity of all sensations
has long been the property of philosophy and required no acquaint
ance with the functions of the nerves.
There is another sense of the words, according to which the sen
sations are held to be merely internal phenomena, and the external
world to be neither resonant nor silent, neither bright nor dark, but
to possess only mathematical predicates of number and magnitude,
of motions and their complications ; and in this sense of the words
the doctrine was in antiquity an insufficiently proved inference, and
it remains so for the physiology of the present day. None of the
proofs which are commonly appealed to in support of it, can close
every way of escape to the opposite view. Anyone who wishes to
maintain that things themselves remain red or sweet, will affirnl, as we
do, that it is not through their being that they can appear to us as
they are, but only through effects which, in accordance with their
nature, they produce on us. These effects or actions, which proceed
from them and are sense-stimuli to us, are no doubt only motions and
themselves neither red nor sweet ; but what is there to prevent our
supposing that, by acting through our nerves, they make that same
redness or sweetness arise, as our sensation, in our souls, which also
attaches as a quality to the things themselves ? Such a process would
be no more wonderful than the performances of the telephone, which
receives waves of sound, propagates them in a form of motion quite
different, and in the end conducts them to the ear retransformed into
waves of sound. Anything which deprives things of the medium
through which their excitations could reach us ; anything again which
has beforehand imparted to the medium motions which prevent the
passage of those excitations, would of course either hinder things
from appearing to us at all or would make them appear with other
qualities, and so would lead us to suppose that none of these qualities
belong to things themselves at all.
There are no individual proofs by which these assertions could be
controverted ; and yet the doctrine of the mere subjectivity of the
qualities of sensation is certainly sound. Their own nature makes it
impossible for us really so to represent them to ourselves as qualities
of things, as we profess to do. There is no meaning in speaking of
VOL. I. G g
450 Sensations and the Coiirse of Ideas. [BOOK m.
a brightness seen by nobody at all, of the sound of a tone which no
one hears, of a sweetness which no one tastes : they are all as impos
sible as a toothache which nobody has got. There is only one place
in which what is meant by these words can possibly exist, the con
sciousness of a feeling being : and there is only one way in which it
can exist, the way of being felt by that being. Without doubt then,
things are red only so far as they appear to us ; in itself a thing could
only have a particular look if it could look at itself.
256. According to a theorem of the doctrine of specific energies,
every nerve, by whatever stimulus excited, invariably calls forth sen
sations of one and the same kind, the special sensations of its own
sense ; and it makes no difference whether the stimulus is one appro
priate to the nerve or not. If this were a fact, its physical reason
would not be hard to imagine. Let us take a composite system of
parts. External stimuli, so long as they are not so violent as to
destroy the internal connexions of this system, will cause a motion
followed by an effort to return to equilibrium ; and these will take
place ki forms which essentially depend on the structure of the
system, which in that case remains unchanged. So with the nerve ;
disturbances of a certain magnitude would injure it ; but to less
violent stimuli it would always respond with the same reactions, and
these reactions would depend on its peculiar structure. But then, if
these reactions are to be different in the case of every single nerve,
the structure of the various nerves must be different ; and this variety
of structure we do not find in the nerves themselves, though we may
perhaps look for it in the central portions to which they lead.
But in any case the facts themselves are generalised in this theorem
to an extent which actual observation does not justify. We know
nothing of waves of sound which produce in the eye a sensation of
light, nor of waves of light which produce tones in the ear. The main
support of the hypothesis lies in the sensations of light which fre
quently arise in the eye from impact or pressure, as well as from
electrical stimulation. But there are other considerations which
compel us to assume in the media of the eye the presence of the same
ether which serves for the diffusion of the light outside ; and accord
ingly, when in consequence of impact the ponderable elements of the
tense eyeball fall into oscillation, we can scarcely help supposing that
they impart this oscillation at the same time to the ether. Thus the
same objective motion of light which commonly, as an adequate
stimulus, comes from without, may be excited in the eye by this oscil
lation of the eyeball, and a similar motion might be excited by electric
CHAPTER ii.] Doctrine of special Sensations. 451
currents; such motion not being sufficient to cast any observable
rays outwards, but strong enough to stimulate the nerve to produce a
sensation of light. Again, in the case of the inadequate stimuli which
actually do create a sensation of sound, the question is prudently
avoided whether they may not do so by accidentally exciting such
vibrations as form the natural stimulus of the auditory nerves. The
excitation of taste by electricity certainly depends on the adequate
stimulus, the chemical processes which are here set up ; the notion
that it can also be produced by laceration of the tongue seems to have
been an illusion, and it will be useless for insipid dishes to look for
help in this quarter : and as to the remaining sensations, we do not
know at all what the adequate form of the stimuli is which actually
must reach the nerves in order to produce them.
We may leave it therefore to physiology to decide whether the real
meaning of the present widely-spread doctrine of the division of labour
is not rather this ; — that every nerve is excited to its function only by
its own adequate stimulus, and that other stimuli either leave it un
affected or else interfere with it, but that at the same time there are
stimuli of various kinds which, along with their own effects, frequently
produce the adequate stimuli as side-results. The only interest psy
chology has in the question lies in opposing the fondness for a
mysterious psychical activity which, on the authority of the facts I
have mentioned, is attributed to the nerves and not to the soul, to
which it really belongs. To speak of a substance of the sense of
sight, and to say that this substance converts every possible motion
that reaches it into a sensation of right, is not to describe facts but to
use a piece of physiological metaphysic ; of which I am not sure that
it is at all more elegant than the metaphysic of philosophy.
257. However complete the separation may be between sensations
and the stimuli which occasion them, these two series of occurrences
are, as a matter of fact, connected, and we shall not suppose that this
connexion of fact is destitute of any principle. We shall always find
ourselves presupposing that like groups of sensations correspond to
like groups of stimuli, and different groups of the one to different
groups of the other ; that the difference of these classes of sensation
is proportional to the difference which exists between the classes of
stimuli ; that wherever the stimuli of a given group are arranged in a
progressive series or, in their progress, reach marked points of
eminence, the corresponding sensations are arranged in a similar
series and accordingly reproduce both the progress and the points of
eminence ; that, lastly, in the unity of the soul its various kinds of
eg 2
452 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
sensation not only are together as a fact, but in their meaning are
coherent according to some rule, though that rule may not be expres
sible in mathematical terms.
But of an 'empirical confirmation of this presupposition we find but
faint traces. Not only is it impossible to say why waves of ether must
necessarily be felt as light; but, even if this fact were given as a
starting-point, no theory, however much it emphasized the unity of
the soul, could prove that this same soul must in consistency perceive
waves of sound as tones, and other affections as taste or smell. So
far as we can see, that unity produces, from a nature of its own which
is quite unknown to us, the various classes of sensation, each for itself
and apart from the others ; and, even after we have come to know
them, all that we can connect with their impressions are vague and
fantastic ideas respecting the organization of a universal realm of
sensations. Again, when we come to the individual groups, the only
one which confirms our supposition is the group of sounds. Here
the increase in the height of a tone corresponds to an increase in the
number of waves within a given unit of time. The ascending scale,
which is just as clearly an ascent as is the increase in the number of
waves and yet is quite unlike that increase, repeats in its own specific
form the progress in the series of stimuli. Wherever this series attains,
through the doubling of a previous number of waves, a marked import,
there the sensation follows with the marked impression of the octave
of the key-note, and thus again in its own particular way represents
sensuously the likeness and difference of the two series. On the other
hand the colours, though their prismatic order rests on a similar in
crease in the number of waves, give no one who is unprejudiced the
impression of a similar progress ; and the reason of this possibly lies
in the peculiar nature of the nervous process which intervenes between
the stimulus and sensation, and which we cannot take into considera
tion because we do not know it. In the cases of the remaining senses
we have no exact knowledge of the nature of their stimuli, nor have
we succeeded in discerning any fixed relations between their individual
sensations. We do not possess even names for the various smells,
except such as describe them by their origin or their incidental effects ;
and among the multitude of tastes the only ones that can be dis
tinguished as well-defined are the four forms of acid, alkaline, sweet,
and bitter. Hypothetical theories carry us no further. In the case
of sight and hearing alone we know that each sensation rests on the
total effect of a very large number of successive impulses, and changes
with the alterations of this number within the given unit of time ;
CHAPTER II.]
Fechners Law. 453
whether the single impact of a wave of light or sound would be
observable by our senses, and if so in what way, is utterly unknown
to us. Still we can generalise this fact with some probability. Perhaps
it is true of all our sensations that they rest not on a constant and
indiscriminate stream of excitation, but on the number of alternations
of excitation and non-excitation included in a certain time ; the nature
of the process, which thus in the form of oscillatipn stimulates the
soul, might be a matter of less importance, and the same perhaps for
all the nerves. But then again this supposition makes it no easier to
connect the various kinds of sensation with one another in a progres
sive series ; and we have further to admit the possibility that our
human senses do not include the whole range of sensible existence,
and that other living beings may have other forms of sensation un
known to us and answering to processes which entirely escape our
perception.
258. There is at any rate one point at which the modern psycho-
physical investigations have resulted in the beginnings of an exact
knowledge regarding the relation between sensation and stimulus.
The commonest observation of a brightening light or a rising sound
shows us that our senses can detect very slight alterations in the strength
of an impression. But we never reach a moment at which, judging
merely by the direct impression, we could say that one brightness was
twice or thrice as strong, or one sound half as strong, as another. In
consequence of this inability to reduce to numerical equivalents the
more and less which we perceive, it is impossible for us to place a
series of values of stimuli side by side with the values of the corre
sponding sensations, and so to formulate a universal law according to
which the intensity of the latter would depend on the strength of the
former. There is however one judgment we can pronounce, if not
with absolute yet with sufficient certainty, viz. that there is or is not
an observable difference between two sensations. To this point
accordingly were directed those experiments, the object of which was
to discover, first of all, what amount of increase a stimulus requires
in order that the sensation which belongs to it as increased may begin
to distinguish itself from the sensation of its previous strength ; or,
again, to discover the limit of slightness down to which the difference
between two strengths of the stimulus can be diminished without
removing the possibility of the sensations being distinguished. With
regard to the moderate stimuli which are strong enough to excite a
distinct sensation, and yet do not approach the point at which their
intensity disturbs the function of the nerve, Fechner and many others
454 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
since, following E. H. Weber's example, have made a very large
number of experiments ; and these experiments lead with sufficient
unanimity to the result that that difference between any two stimuli
•which makes it possible to distinguish the corresponding sensations
from one another, is not a constant quantity, but, in the case of each
class of sensations, amounts to a definite fraction of the intensity
already possessed by that one of the two stimuli from which we start.
We are not interested in following the various mathematical formula
tions of Weber's Law, or the corrections which its application has
appeared to render necessary ; we may ascribe the latter to the
influence of the particular circumstances which, as in the case of
most natural laws, prevent the phenomena from answering precisely
to a law which in itself is valid.
The experiments themselves give no further result than that
described above; they do not tell us in what way the difference
between the stimuli makes it possible for us to distinguish the re
sulting sensations — whether it is by producing a difference of strength
between these sensations, or whether we are aided by qualitative
changes set up in the content of the sensation and dependent on the
difference of the stimuli. Nothing but our direct impression can
decide this point, and it certainly does not seem to me that this im
pression speaks quite clearly in favour of the first alternative. A
concentrated solution of an acid, does not simply give us the same
•taste in a stronger form which a more diluted one gives us in a
weaker form ; it also tastes different. Two degrees of heat, though
they rest on differences of intensity in the same stimulus, are felt as
different sensations and not merely as different degrees of strength
in the same sensation. If this is not so clear in the case of slight
differences, the fact is all the clearer that our direct impression makes
us speak of heat and cold as two positive opposites, and does not lead
us to recognise in them mere differences of degree. Lastly, no one
who experiments on degrees of brightness by means of shadows com
pared with the ground on which they are thrown, feels sure that he is
merely comparing differences of intensity in the same sensation ; the
shadow is not only a less degree of illumination, but it looks different
from the brighter ground — black if it is on a white ground.
I do not wish to lay any great stress on these doubts ; still they
would have to be removed before we could follow with entire security
the theory which deduces from the experiments I have alluded to a law
respecting the strength belonging to the sensation, and its dependence
on the strength of the stimuli. Supposing them removed, we should
CHAPTER ii.] Advance of Sensation per saltus. 455
then regard the transition from the point at which two sensations are
indistinguishable to that at which their difference is just observable, as
an increase, the same in amount in all cases, in the strength of the
first of the two, — and so the law in question would take this form :
Where the intensity of a sensation increases by equal differences, that
is, in arithmetical progression, it implies in the strength of the
stimulus an increase in geometrical progression. Thus the activity of
sensation would be one of those activities which it becomes in
creasingly difficult to heighten as the degree of liveliness already
attained increases.
259. Our present result, according to which the sensation does not
follow the growing strength of the stimulus at an equal speed, would
not, if taken by itself, present any extraordinary problem. But none
of the theories which have been formed on this point explain why the
continuous curve of growth in the strength of the stimulus is not
continuously followed by the slower augmentation in the strength of
the sensation, — why, on the contrary, there remains an interval
throughout which the stimulus strengthens without showing any
result, until at last, on its reaching a final degree of strength, it
produces an observable difference in the sensation. This difficulty, I
think, is most easily met by the physiological view which attempts to
explain it by reference to the mode in which the nerves are excited.
It is a problem soluble in mechanics, so to construct a system of
material parts that a force which impels continuously is nevertheless
prevented by internal hindrances from exerting its influence except
intermittently at certain moments. Following this analogy we should
have to suppose a structure of the nerve of such a kind that, given a
certain attained degree of excitation, a definite concentration and
heightening of that excitation is necessary before such a motion of
the nerve can be produced as will afford a stimulus to the rise of a
new sensation ; thus the sensation would increase in intensity pro
portionally to these intermittent excitations. On the other hand, we
do not in the least know how and where such an arrangement is to
be presumed in the nervous system. There is less probability to my
mind in the second hypothesis, according to which the nervous excita
tion increases proportionally to the stimulus and continuously. This
hypothesis has to look to the nature of sensation itself for the reason
both of the slower rate and of the want of continuity in its increase ;
there is nothing in the mere idea of sensation which could with any
probability be supposed to take the place of the machinery which
must, ex hypothesi, be absent. Nor is the solution offered by the
456 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
third view more convincing. The sensation, it tells us, increases in
strength proportionally to the stimulus and the nervous process, but
perception brings the actually increased intensity of the sensation to
consciousness in a different relation and discontinuously. The separa
tion of these two processes, the sensation and the perception of what
is felt, we shall be able to justify later on ; but we certainly shall not
be able to find in the nature of a perceiving activity, as such, any
reason for its not perceiving something. If the idea could be made
plausible, that the act of distinguishing two impressions — an act which
is always at the same time an act of comparison — is guided not by
single differences between them, but by their geometrical relation, still
the only deduction we could draw from this idea would be that, given
two pairs of impressions, this act would find an equally great difference
between the members of each pair, supposing that in both cases these
members stood to one another in the same ratio. But I do not know
why that act should fail to distinguish at all those which did not stand
in that ratio.
260. No method has yet been discovered of experimentally deter
mining the consequences which result from simultaneous impressions
on different senses ; it is even doubtful what goes on when the same
sense is excited in several ways at once. We are accustomed to the
notion of a mechanism of ideas ; but the attempt to go further and to
oppose to it the notion of a chemistry of ideas, can be met only with
the utmost distrust. As long as two external stimuli a and b are pro
ducing effects in the same nerve-element, there must ensue, in this
physical sphere, the formation of that resultant c which the con
junction of all the mechanical conditions renders possible and there
fore necessary. To this resultant <r, which alone reaches the soul as
an exciting motive, corresponds the simple sensation y ; and this y is
not the resultant of the two sensations a and /3 which the two stimuli,
if taken separately, would have produced, but appears instead of them,
since they are unable to arise. If, on the other hand, we suppose
that a and 3, either because they are transmitted in different nerve-
elements, or because they do not form one indistinguishable resultant
within the nerve, have actually produced the two sensations a and 0,
the result will be that the contents of the two sensations do not blend
in consciousness into a third simple sensation, but remain apart and
form the necessary pre-requisite of every higher activity of mind in
the way of comparison and judgment.
At the same time I must allow that there are objections to this last
view. For though the theoretical assertion that the soul is compelled
CHAPTER ii.] Simultaneous Sensations. 457
by its own one-ness to attempt to fuse all its internal states into an
intensive unity, could decide nothing so long as our inward experience
offered no example of such a result, it is on the other hand indubitable
that the simultaneous assault of a variety of different stimuli on different
senses, or even on the same sense, puts us into a state of confused
general feeling in which we are certainly not conscious of clearly
distinguishing the different impressions. Still it does not follow that
in such a case we have a positive perception of an actual unity of the
contents of our ideas, arising from their mixture ; our state of mind
seems to me rather to consist in (i) the consciousness of our inability
to separate what has really remained diverse, and (2) in the general
feeling of the disturbance produced in the economy of our body by
the simultaneous assault of the stimuli. As to the first point, I recur
to that distinction of sensation and perception, to which we found the
psycho-physical theory obliged to appeal. The act of distinguishing
two sensations is never a simple sensation ; it is an act of referring
and comparing, which may supervene on those sensations, but need
not always do so. Where it is prevented, the result is not that the
sensations melt into one another, but simply that the act of dis
tinguishing them is absent; and this again certainly not so far that the
fact of the difference remains entirely unperceived, but only so far as
to prevent us from determining the amount of the difference, and from
apprehending other relations between the different impressions. Any
one who is annoyed at one and the same time by glowing heat,
dazzling light, deafening noise, and an offensive smell, will certainly
not fuse these disparate sensations into a single one with a single
content which could be sensuously perceived ; they remain for him in
separation, and he merely finds it impossible to be conscious of one of
them apart from the others. But, further, he will have a feeling of
discomfort— what I mentioned above as the second constituent of his
whole state. For every stimulus which produces in consciousness a
definite content of sensation, is also a definite degree of disturbance
and therefore makes a call upon the forces of the nerves ; and the
sum of these little changes, which in their character as disturbances
are not so diverse as the contents of consciousness they give rise to,
produce the general feeling which, added to the inability to distinguish,
deludes us into the belief in an actual absence of diversity in our
sensations. It is only in some such way as this, again, that I can
imagine that state which is sometimes described as the beginning of
our whole education, a state which in itself is supposed to be simple,
and to be afterwards divided into different sensations by an activity of
458 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
separation. No activity of separation in the world could establish
differences where no real diversity existed ; for it would have nothing
to guide it to the places where it was to establish them, or to indicate
the width it was to give them. A separation can only proceed from a
mixture of impressions which continue to be diverse, and then only if,
owing to favourable circumstances, the single constituents of the
mixture are, one after the other, raised above the rest by an access of
strength, so as to facilitate comparison and the apprehension of the
width of the individual differences : if ideas of the single impressions
have once been acquired, it may then be possible to dissociate them
even in the unfavourable case of such a mixture as that described
above. It this way it might perhaps happen that many apparently
simple sensations may be dissociated into several sensations of the
same kind ; for example, in a colour we might separate the other
colours which formed its constituents, or in a tone the partial tones of
which we were unconscious at first, or in tastes and smells the elemen
tary sensations which were combined in a variety of different ways and
of which at present we have no knowledge. Thus within these narrow
limits a real chemistry of sensations, combining different elements
into a new quality of sensation, is not inconceivable. But after all
our experience up to the present time it remains uncertain whether
this intermingling into new resultants has not in all cases already
taken place among the physical excitations in the nerve or in the
central portions of the nervous system.
From these premises again, a conclusion might be drawn respecting
those sensations which attach to others in the way of contrast, and do
not need a particular external stimulus. I do not think they can be
considered reactions of the soul unoccasioned by anything physical.
It might be possible to take that view of the false estimates of magni
tude which make a sudden silence ensuing on deafening noise, or a
darkness ensuing on dazzling light, appear extra-ordinarily deep ; for
these are not sensations, but comparisons. And yet even in these
cases the probable cause of the judgment is the distance between the
degrees of excitation in the nerve, a distance just as great as that
between the sensations. But a colour ft cannot attach to another a
by way of contrast or complement through a mere reaction of the
soul. Even if we imagine in the soul a disturbance which seeks a
compensating adjustment, the aim of that search can be no more
than an opposite Non-a, the whereabouts of which is unknown. That
it is ft and nothing but ft which gives the desired satisfaction we
know only from experience ; to seek the reason of the fact in a com-
CHAPTER 1 1.] Disappearance of Sensations. 459
parison of the two impressions a and /3, is to seek it in something far
from self-evident, it must lie in the way in which the nerve acts, and
this activity of the nerve must attach the excitation which leads to /3
to the excitation which produces a, in the character of an effort to
attain equilibrium.
261. Neither observation nor theory have so far thrown any light
upon the interval which intervenes between the occurrence of a
sensation and its disappearance from consciousness. If we say that
it gradually diminishes in strength until at last it reaches zero or dis
appears below the threshold of consciousness, we merely describe
what we think we can imagine to be going on ; no one can observe the
process, since the attention necessary for observing it makes it im
possible. Whether this hypothetical view has a sufficient theoretical
justification, is doubtful. Beside the presupposition that a diminution
of the activity of representation, from its strength at a given moment
down to its disappearance, must be continuous, the physical law of
persistence is called in, in order to make the undiminished continuance
of the sensation appear as the natural course of events, and its dis
appearance from consciousness as the problem to be explained. This
last idea is not free from difficulty. A material atom undergoes no
internal change during its motion, — at least according to the ordinary
view of that motion, — and its state in any new place q is exactly what
it was in its former place p ; it follows therefore that it itself contains
nothing which would at any point resist a further motion, and that
the cause of the change or the checking of this motion must come
from outside. The soul, on the other hand, when it feels a, falls into
an internal state differing from its state when it feels /3 : if we consider
it capable of reacting against stimuli at all, we must admit that there
may lie in its own nature the permanent motive which stirs it to
oppose every one-sided manifestation of its capacity that may be
forced on it, and therefore stirs it also to eliminate the state of sensa
tion forced on it by the external stimulus. If indeed it were able
completely to annul what has occurred, it would be wholly impassive
and therefore incapable of interaction ; but might not its opposing
effort be strong enough to repress the sensation into a condition of
permanent unconsciousness ?
If we leave this question, which cannot be decided, we may seek
the causes of hindrance or checking partly in the new impressions
which arrive from outside, partly in those far less familiar ones which
are constantly being brought to the soul by the changing states of the
body. The first of these, the struggle of ideas with one another,
460 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK m.
served as the foundation of Herbart's theory of the internal mechanism
of the soul-life. I put aside at present the doubts which are suggested
by the metaphysical basis of this theory; the unchangeability of a soul
which yet experiences changing internal states ; its effort to fuse them
all into a unity, and the shipwreck of this effort on the differences of
the ideas ; the assumption, lastly, that the soul finds a satisfaction in
at least lessening the strength of the parties whose opposition it has
to tolerate. We accept simply as a hypothesis what Herbart offers us
as the foundation of his theory, the hypothesis that ideas check one
another according to the degree of their strength and of their oppo
sition ; and we utilise his just rejection of figurative modes of speech.
Consciousness, as he tells us,- is not a space in which ideas appear
side by side. Even if it were a space, still the ideas are not extended
things which require a definite place to exist in, rigid bodies which are
incapable of condensation, and therefore push one another from this
narrow stage. Nor, lastly, is there any original repulsion of ideas
against ideas ; it is only the unity of the soul in which they attempt to
exist at the same time, that turns their mere difference into a struggle.
The question now is, Does our internal observation confirm these
hypotheses ?
262. We have in thought to separate two things which never
appear apart in the real world ; the content to which the activity
of representation or sensation is directed, and this activity itself
which makes the content something represented or felt : to both of
these we might attempt to apply the conceptions (a) of opposition
and (Z>) of variable strength, (a) Now I cannot find anything given
in internal observation which testifies to a checking of ideas according
to the degree in which their contents are opposed. Doubtless we hold
a simultaneous sensation of opposite contents through the same nerve-
element to be impossible ; but I do not know that the idea of the
positive and of affirmation exercises any special repulsion against the
idea of the negative and of negation ; on the contrary, every possible
comparison of opposites implies that the two members of the com
parison do not check one another. If, on the other hand, we apply
the opposition to the representing activity, it is doubtless self-evident
that two of its acts which are opposed in respect of their action will
cancel one another ; but this proposition, if self-evident, is also
fruitless, for we have no right whatever to presuppose that the ideas
of two opposite contents rest on an opposition of the representing
activities in respect of their mode of action. Thus we do not know
CHAPTER no Variable strong th of Ideas. 461
where in such action we are to find oppositions which are to have a
mechanical value.
(&) The conception of a variable strength of ideas suggests similar
doubts. In the case of the sensations of an actually operating sense-
stimulus, it did not seem worth while to draw the distinction I have
just used ; the hearing of a louder noise, or the seeing of a brighter
light, is always at the same time a greater activity, excitation, or
affection ; and it is not possible to hear loud thunder as loud and yet.
to hear it weakly, or to feel a brighter light to be brighter and yet to
feel it less strongly than a dimmer light. But the case may well be
different with our ideas ; by which name I understand, in accordance
with usage, the image in memory of an absent impression, as
opposed to the sensation of the present impression. The difference
between the two is clear enough. The remembered light does not
shine as the seen light does ; the remembered tones do not sound as
heard tones do, although they reproduce in their succession the most
delicate relations of a melody ; the idea of the intensest pain does not
hurt, and is nothing compared to the least real injury. I will not
enquire whether this difference is due to the fact that an idea, as a
remembrance having its origin in the soul only, is not accompanied by
any bodily excitation, whereas such an excitation accompanies every
sensation and is the cause of its beginning and continuance; or
whether that view is correct which, in spite of its not receiving much
support from the direct impression of internal experience, assumes
that in sensation and idea alike there is always a physical nervous
excitation, and that the difference in the two cases is only one
of degree.
Now whatever we remember we can certainly represent in idea in
all the degrees of which its content is capable ; but it is not so clear
that the representing activity directed to this content can itself ex
perience the same changes in magnitude. We cannot represent
more or represent less to ourselves one tone of a given height and
strength, or one shade of a colour ; the attempt to do so really intro
duces a change in the content, and we are representing a stronger or
weaker tone, a brighter or duller colour, instead of merely representing
more or representing less the same tone and the same colour. Nor
does internal observation give us any more justification for regarding
this activity of representation, like the activity of sensation, as pro
portional to the content to which it is directed. The idea of the
stronger does not call for or cause any stronger excitation or greater
effort than the idea of the weaker. The images of memory resemble
462 Sensations and the Course of Ideas.
shadows, which do not differ in weight like the bodies that cast them.
Thus it appears so far as if the conception of a variable strength,
when applied to our ideas, may hold good of their content, but not of
the psychical activity, to which the mechanical theory at starting
certainly intended it also to apply.
263. To this it may be objected that the capacity of being
heightened, possessed by the representing activity, cannot be dis
closed by a trial made on purpose. Such an experiment, it may be
said, naturally brings before us the maximum attainable by that
activity in reference to the content chosen, and does not bring to our
notice the lower degrees to which it sinks, and through which it
passes on its way to extinction. It cannot be denied, we may be
told, that the distinction of clearer and dimmer ideas signifies some
thing which really exists in consciousness and which confirms our
belief that the activity has various grades although we cannot directly
observe them. To this objection I should give the following answer.
I cannot convince myself that internal observation testifies without
more ado to the reality of dim ideas in this sense of the word.
If the image of a composite object in our memory is dim, the reason
is not that the image is present, with all its parts in their order, and
that consciousness sheds only a weak light over the whole. The
reason is that there are gaps in the image; some of its parts are
entirely absent ; and, above all, the exact way in which those parts
that are present are connected, is usually not before the mind, and is
replaced by the mere thought that there was some connexion or other
between them ; and the wideness of the limits within which we find
this or that connexion equally probable, without being able to come
to a decision, determines the degree of dimness we ascribe to the
image. Let us take as an example the taste of a rare fruit. We
either have a complete idea of this taste, or we have none at all : and
the only reason why we suppose that we really have a dim idea of it
is this ; — we know from other sources that fruits have a taste, and
the other characters which are present to our memory and which
tell us the species of the fruit, move us to think only of that parti
cular class of tastes which belongs to this species ; the number of the
tastes which lie between these limits and between which we hesitate,
determines again the degree of the obscurity of the idea, which
we suppose ourselves to possess though we are really only looking
for it.
To take another example ; we try for a long time to remember
a name, and then, when one is suggested to us, we at once recognise
CHAPTER 1 1.] Dim Ideas. 463
it to be the right one. But this does not prove that we had an
obscure idea of the right one, and now recognise it as the right one
by comparing it with the name that is uttered. For on what is this
recognition to rest ? The name that is uttered might be wrong ; so
that, before we could proceed, we should have to show that the
obscure idea with which that name was found to be identical, is the
same idea we are trying to find ? Now this idea we are trying to find
is distinguished from others for which we are not looking, by its
connexions with remembrances of some qualities or other in the
object whose name it is or whose content it signifies ; for we cannot
try to find the name of something, unless this something can be
distinguished from other things which we do not mean. When, then,
the right name is uttered, the sound of it fits these other remem
brances of the object without trouble or resistance, and in its turn
calls them up anew or extends them ; and this is the reason why it
seems to us the right one ; whereas any wrong one that is uttered
would be foreign to the other ideas that come to meet it. And
supposing that the word we wanted to remember were one we did
not understand, still there must be some memory or other even of it
remaining behind, with which the uttered word must agree ; whether
it be the number of syllables, or the quality of the vowels, or some
prominent consonant, or merely the circumstances in which we heard
it, or the momentary general feeling with which its sound was
once connected. In none of these cases therefore have we an
obscure idea ; we are merely looking for the idea which we have not
got at all, and helping ourselves in the way I have mentioned. But
no idea that we really have, whether simple or complex, can be
heightened in the strength with which it is represented; and the
complex idea only seems to be so, so long as it is imperfect. No
one who thinks of all those ideas of parts which together form the
idea of the Triangle, and also of the way in which they are really
connected, can further strengthen his activity of representing this
complete content. If the geometrician seems superior to the be
ginner in this point, it is not because he represents this content more,
but because he represents more than this content, viz. the innumer
able relations which are conjoined with this figure in connected
knowledge.
264. I am not rejecting what we all regard as a correct inter
pretation of the facts, the assumption, I mean, that ideas push one
another out of consciousness, and change one another into permanent
unconscious states of the soul. For these states we retain a name
464 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
which is really self-contradictory, unconscious ideas, in order to in
dicate that they arose from ideas and are capable, under certain
circumstances, of being re-transformed into ideas. But all that this
assumption actually says is that the ideas have exercised a certain
power against one another, and that some of them have come off
victorious over the rest ; it does not follow as something self-evident,
though we naturally infer it, that they must have owed their power
to a degree of strength which belongs to them as such. In fact we
had no means of measuring this strength of theirs at all before the
struggle took place ; we only attribute it to them by reasoning back
wards after we have seen the issue of the struggle. And further, the
victory does not always fall to that side which in itself is the stronger ;
favourable circumstances may give it to the weaker. Since then
this assumption of a variable strength is found to apply not to the
activity of representing but only to the content of 'the ideas repre
sented : and since on the other hand, if we follow experience, we
cannot maintain that the idea of the stronger content always overcomes
that of the weaker, but meet with numberless cases of the opposite
event, the result is that we must look for the source of the power
exerted in something that attaches to the representing activity and is
in its nature capable of degrees of intensity.
I may say at once that this power rests neither on any strength in
the activity itself nor on that of the content represented, but on the
amount of our interest in the latter. If we could observe the first
stirrings of a soul still destitute of experience, we should certainly find
that that sensation1 which, in its total effect, is the greater agitation
of the soul and therefore the stronger in respect of its content, over
comes the others which, measured by the same standard, are the
weaker. But in the developed life, which alone we can observe, the
strength of the sensation is of far less moment than that which, in the
connexion of our memories, intentions, and expectations, it means,
indicates, or foretells. Many external stimuli, therefore, are unregarded
by us, if the strong sensations which they would naturally produce
have no relation to the momentary course of our thoughts. Very
slight stimuli attract our attention if they are intimately connected
with these thoughts. And this is still more the case with our
mere remembrances which are unsupported by any present bodily
excitation.
This interest of our ideas, which constitutes their power, has a
1 ['Sinnliche Empfindung ' translated merely 'sensation,5 to avoid the use of
'sensation of sense," and 'feeling' which has been reserved for ' Gefiihl.']
CHAPTER ii.] The l victory ' of Ideas. 465
constant element and a variable one. I cannot suppose that any
sensuous impression could be originally entirely indifferent to us.
Each, it seems to me, as being an alteration of our existing state,
must create an element of pleasure or pain ; the former, if it occa
sions an exercise of possible functions within the limits in which this
exercise answers to the conditions of the well-being and continuance
of the whole ; the latter, if it sets up changes which in their form or
magnitude contradict those conditions. The general economy of the
vital functions may be assumed to be nearly constant ; and therefore,
when the impression is repeated at later periods, the same element of
emotion will always attach to it, just as the same kind of light- waves,
repeated thousands of times in succession, always calls forth the same
sensation of colour. But this fixed component of the interest is
far outweighed by the variable one which an impression acquires in
the course of our life through its various connexions with others,
connexions which enable it to recall these others in memory. One
impression, which in itself is accompanied by an insignificant constant
element of emotion, may, if it is connected with a second, the ac
companying emotion of which is strong, excite a more lively interest
than a third impression, the feeling of pleasure or pain attached to
which comes between the two. But this interest of an impression
changes not only with the number of those with which it is connected
and with the constant emotion attaching to them, but also with our
momentary state of feeling at the time when it occurs. And for this
state of feeling the total content of the impression has more or less
value, according to the closeness or distance of its relationship to that
which is moving our feeling at the moment. If in the case of the
representing activity as such it was difficult to point out different
degrees of strength, it seems not less self-evident that all emotions,
on the other hand, have various degrees of intensity. The force
of ideas therefore seems to me to rest on their concatenation
with emotions ; and if I spoke of their strength I should use the
word merely to express the fact that they are victorious over others,
and the understanding that their victory occurs in this way and in
no other.
265. Respecting the connexion of ideas, a point to which these
remarks have already led us, we have little to recall. We know that,
on the renewal of an idea a, another idea b which we have had before
may return to consciousness without requiring any separate external
reason for its reappearance. This fact, which alone can be directly
observed, we interpret as a reproduction of the idea b by the idea a,
VOL. I. H h
466 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
without meaning by our use of the word to give any account of the
process through which a succeeds in recalling b. But then from this
fact we infer that, even in the time during which both a and b had
vanished from consciousness, there must have been a closer con
nexion between them than is given alike to them and to all other
ideas by the fact that they belong to one and the same soul. This
specific connexion we call the association of the ideas a and b, a name
again which denotes a necessary presupposition but gives no ex
planation of the exact nature of this connexion, i. e. of that which
distinguishes it from the more remote connexion obtaining between
all the states of one subject. Any attempt to find such an ex
planation would be fruitless : but there is another question, which
ought to be answered, viz. What are the universal rules accord
ing to which this inexplicable junction of ideas takes place ?
It is customary to distinguish four kinds of association. Two of
them I hold to be fictions of the brain, and the other two I reduce to
one. The former consist in the assertions that similar or like ideas
on the one hand, and on the other hand opposite ideas are pre
eminently associated ; and to these assertions I find nothing in in
ternal observation to correspond. I do not know, at least, that the
idea of one tone usually recalls all other tones to memory, or the idea
of one colour all other colours ; or again, that the idea of brightness
suggests that of darkness, or the sensation of heat the remembrance
of cold. Where anything of this kind seems to occur, it is plainly
due to different causes from the simple association of these ideas as
such. If we are calculating, and at a given moment are engaged in
comparing quantities and referring them to one another, there is a
special reason why the idea of the plus we affirm should make us
think of the minus we reject. In the night we who are busied with
plans for the future have abundance of reasons for thinking of the
day we long for : and so on in many cases not worth counting up.
The third and fourth classes are composed of the associations of those
impressions which are perceived either at the same time as parts of a
simultaneous whole, or one directly after another as parts of a suc
cessive whole ; and their existence is testified to in a variety of ways
at every moment of our daily life, the connected guidance of which
rests wholly on them. But the separation of these processes into two
classes seems to me needless. Not because the apprehension even of
a spatial whole takes place, as is supposed, through a successive
movement of the glance which traverses its outlines : I shall have
later on to mention the reason why this movement is necessary in
CHAPTER ii.] ' Reprodiiction ' of Ideas. 467
order to make reproduction secure ; but it is none the less indubitable
that the momentary illumination of an electric spark makes it possible
to perceive objects and gives us images of them in memory. What
is of more importance is that in temporal and spatial apprehension
it is just the absence of observable connecting links between a and b
which joins these two together so closely and in so pre-eminent
a degree, that we give the name of association to their conjunction
alone, although there must be some conjunction between a and c,
b and d, as well. I shall return to this point immediately ; but,
before going further, I will merely point out how superfluous it is to
distinguish from the indirect reproduction of one idea b by another a —
the case so far considered — the direct recalling of the same a by a.
We should know nothing whatever of this fact, the reproduction of a
former a by the present a, if the two were simply present, with no
distinction between them, at the same time. To know the present a
as repetition of the former a, we must be able to distinguish the two ;
and we do this because not only does the repeated a bring with it
the former one which is its precise counterpart, but this former one
also brings with it the ideas c d which are associated with it but not
with the present a, and thereby testifies that it has been an object of
our perception on some former occasion but under different cir
cumstances.
266. Respecting the great ease with which a successive series of
ideas is reproduced in the order of their succession, a fact which it
would be superfluous to illustrate, an attractive theory has been de
veloped by Herbart. Let us suppose that the external impressions
ABC... follow one another in time, and that the first of them
awakens the idea A ; on its appearance in consciousness, which is
never empty, this idea A will at once sustain a check from the con
tents already present in consciousness ; and, owing to this check, its
strength will have been reduced to a at the moment when the new
idea B is aroused. The only association formed therefore will be
between a and J9— the association aB — and there will be no asso
ciation A B in consciousness at all. The combination a B, again,
sustains the same check, and will be weakened to the degree a b at
the moment when C makes its impression C: the association that
arises will be abC, and no other will arise. Again, when D acts, it
finds a b C checked into a ft c : it is this therefore, and only this, that
connects itself with D. If now the series of external impressions, or
that of their ideas, is repeated, A will not call up all the rest forth
with, nor will it call them up with the same degree of liveliness, for it
aha
468 Sensations and the Course of Ideas. [BOOK in.
never was in actual fact connected with them : not until it itself has
sunk to the strength a, will it reawaken B with which alone it was
associated; not until a B in its turn has sunk to a b, will it reproduce C;
and in this way the series is repeated in memory in its original order.
The advantages of this view are not indissolubly connected with
the conception, which we were unable to accept, of a variable strength
of our ideas. Associations are not formed between those impressions
alone which we hold apart as separate ideas, each having its distinct
content; but every idea connects itself also with the momentary
tone G which characterizes our universal vital feeling, or the general
feeling of our whole state, at the instant when the idea appears ; and,
as many experiences testify, the recurrence of the general feeling G
reproduces with no less liveliness the ideas which were formerly con
nected with it. But, again, the arrival of a new idea A changes this
feeling G into g^ : then the second idea B connects itself with this
association A g^ , and in its turn changes g^ into g^ : with this new as
sociation, and with it alone, is connected C ; and in this way the
succession of these g^^ becomes the clue by help of which the
reproduction of the ideas, in their turn, arranges itself; G must be
changed again into g before B can be again produced by the asso
ciation gB.
In the next chapter I shall mention other considerations which
recommend this point of view to us ; I content myself here with the
remark that it promises to be of use when we come to consider the
reproduction of the component parts of a spatial image by one an
other. If we assume that the perception of the spatial image
ABC D is brought about by the eye traversing this whole succes
sively and repeatedly in various directions A BCD, A CDB, ADCB,
. . . , the question will still remain, how does it come about that a
later consciousness understands the various series, arising from these
voluntarily chosen directions, to be merely various subjective appre
hensions of the single objective order ABCD1 If this understanding
is to be attained, it will be necessary that, at every step we choose to
take within A. ..D, the position of each element relatively to its
neighbour should be indicated by a definite general feeling g arising
in the course of this movement ; and this feeling must be of such a
kind that the various g*s, which arise in the different directions of the
movement from part to part, when compared and adjusted, give as
their result these fixed actual positions of the single ideas in the total
order ABC D. How we are to conceive this process more in detail,
I shall show later on.
CHAPTER no Reproduction by help of Feeling. 469
I close here these brief remarks on the forces which are active in
the course of our ideas. I have not noticed the more general share
taken in it by the body. Highly significant as that share is, I should
seek it in a different direction from the present one. There are no
physical analogies either for associations or for reproductions ; and
although it is asserted that they too are merely products of co
operating nervous currents, those who make this assertion have not
yet been able to show, even in a general way, what we should require
to have shown,— how these processes can be mechanically construed
at all. But this again is a point to which we shall have to return at
a later time.
CHAPTER III.
On the Mental Act of 'Relation1?
267. IF we glance at a number of coins laid side by side in no
particular order, each of them produces its image in the eye, and
each image produces the corresponding idea. And yet it often
happens that, when we look away, we cannot tell how many coins we
have seen. That, nevertheless, we have seen each and all of them,
and, therefore, that their images have been conscious ideas, we know
from the fact that sometimes we succeed in counting them over in
memory, without needing to have the external impression repeated.
This and countless similar experiences convince us that we have
some ground for distinguishing between feeling and the perception of
what is felt 2 ; but at the same time they show that we must not press
this distinction further than the statement that the consciousness of
the relations existing between various single sensations (among
which relations we reckon here the sum formed by the sensations
when united) is not given simply by the existence of these relations
considered as a fact. So far we have considered only single ideas,
and the ways in which they either exist simultaneously in conscious
ness and act on each other, or else successively replace one another ;
but there exists in us not only this variety of ideas, and this change
of ideas, but also an idea of this variety and of this change. Nor is
it merely in thought that we have to distinguish: Xhat apprehension of
existing relations which arises from an act of reference and com
parison from the mere sensation of the individual members of the
relation ; experience shows us that the two are separable in reality,
and justifies us in subordinating the conscious sensation and repre-
1 [' Von dem bcziehenden Vorstelhn? Cp. sect. 80, end. There is no English
verb for ' to put in relation;' to 'refer' has been used where a verb seemed indis
pensable.]
3 [In this sentence Empfindung, elsewhere translated ' sensation ' to distinguish
it from Gefilhl, which is translated • feeling,' ' emotion ' (see § 266), is rendered
'feeling,' because we have no verb in English corresponding to the substantive
'sensation.']
Sensation and Comparison. 471
sentation of individual contents to the referring or relating act of
representation, and in considering the latter to be a higher activity,—
higher in that definite sense of the word according to which the
higher necessarily presupposes the lower but does not in its own
nature necessarily proceed from the lower. Just as the external
sense-stimuli serve to excite the soul to produce simple sensations, so
the relations which have arisen between the many ideas, whether
simultaneous or successive, thus produced, serve the soul as a new
internal stimulus stirring it to exercise this new reacting activity.
268. The possibility of all reference and comparison rests on the
continuance in an unchanged form both of the members which are
to be referred to one another, and of the difference between them.
When once two impressions a and b have arisen, as the ideas ' red ' and
' blue,' they do not mix with one another, disappear, and so form the
third idea c, the idea ' violet.' If they did so, we should have a
change of simple ideas without the possibility of a comparison
between them. This comparison is itself possible only if one and
the same activity at once holds a and b together and holds them
apart, but yet, in passing from a to b or from b to a, is conscious of
the change caused in its state by these transitions : and it is in this
way that the new third idea y arises, the idea of a definite degree of
qualitative likeness and unlikeness in a and b.
Again : if we see at the same time a stronger light a and a weaker
light b of the same colour, what happens is not that there arises, in
place of both, the idea c of a light whose strength is the sum of the
intensities of the two. If that idea did arise, it would mean that the
material to which the comparison has to be directed had disappeared.
The comparison is made only because one and the same activity,
passing between a and 3, is conscious of the alteration in its state
sustained in the passage ; and it is in this way that the idea y arises,
the idea of a definite quantitative difference.
Lastly : given the impressions a and a, that which arises from them
is not a third impression = 2 a ; but the activity, passing as before
between the still separated impressions, is conscious of having sus
tained no alteration in the passage : and in this way would arise the
new idea y, the idea of identity.
We are justified in regarding all these different instances of y as
ideas of a higher or second order. They are not to be put on a line
with the ideas from the comparison of which they arose. The
simple idea of red or blue, as it hovers before us, does not suggest to
us any activity of our own which has contributed to its existence ;
472 On the Mental Act of ( Relation! { BOOK in.
but, in return for this loss, it gives us a directly perceptible content.
The ideas y, on the contrary, have no content at all of their own
which can be perceived by itself. They are therefore never repre
sented in the strict sense of the word, as the simple idea is ; never
represented, that is, so that they stand before us now as resting per
ceptible images. They can be represented only through the simul
taneous reproduction of some examples or other of a and b, and
through the repetition of the mental movement from which they
arose.
269. I may look for the objection that this description of the way
in which the relating activity proceeds is strange and incapable of
being clearly construed. I admit the objection, but I see no re
proach in it. It is possible that better expressions may be found, to
signify what I mean : my immediate object is to indicate what hap
pens at least with such clearness that every one may verify its reality
in his own internal observation. It is quite true that, to those who
start from the circle of ideas common in physical mechanics, there
must be something strange in the conception of an activity, or (it is
the same thing) of an active being, which not only experiences two
states a and b at the same time without fusing them into a resultant,
but which passes from one to the other and so acquires the idea of a
third state y, produced by this very transition. Still this process is a
fact ; and the reproach of failure in the attempt to imagine how it
arises after the analogies of physical mechanics, falls only upon the
mistaken desire of construing the perfectly unique sphere of mental
life after a pattern foreign to it. That desire I hold to be the most
mischievous of the prejudices which threaten the progress of psy
chology ; and at this point, which seems to me one of the greatest
importance, I once more expressly separate myself from views which
are meeting now with wide-spread assent : first (a), from the attempts
to construe the life of the soul materialistically, psycho-physically,
or physiologically, without regard to its specific peculiarities ; and,
secondly (/3), from a view which must always be mentioned with respect,
that view of the psychical mechanism, by which Herbart rendered, up
to a certain critical point, great services to science.
As to the first point (a), these attempts either persistently pass over
the problem whence that unity of consciousness comes, which is testified
to by the most trivial exercise of the activity of representation in com
parison ; or they deceive us by the apparent ease with which single
formulas, believed to have been discovered for single psychical events,
gives rise in their combination to new formulas, in which even the
CHAPTER in.] Physical formula and Thought. 473
desired unity is supposed to be attained. But this whole super
structure of oscillations upon oscillations, of embracing waves upon
partial waves, this discovery of unities in the shape of points of inter
section for different curves, — all this leads to pleasing wood-cuts, but
not to an understanding of the processes they illustrate. Mathe
matical formulas in themselves determine nothing but quantitative
relations, between the related points which have been brought into
those formulas by means of universal designations. Such formulas,
therefore, subsume the definite real elements or processes, to which they
are applied, under a universal rule ; and no doubt these elements or
processes may really fall under the rule in respect of those properties
in virtue of which they were subsumed under it. But the universal
rule in its formal expression no longer reminds us of the special
nature of the object to which it is applied ; and thus, partly owing to
the different values given to the quantities contained in it, partly
through its combination with other formulas, a number of conse
quences can be drawn from it, respecting which it remains entirely
doubtful whether they mean anything whatever when they are applied
to the definite object in question ; or, if they do mean anything, what
the actual processes and agencies are which in the real thing lead to
an occurrence corresponding to the result of the calculation. The
first of these two cases I will not discuss further, though examples of
it might be adduced. If we have begun by calling the conditions
under which an effect appears, a threshold, we must, of course, have
something that either passes over it or fails to reach it; and then
these portraits of the deductions drawn from a metaphor easily pass
for self-evident facts. If in a calculation, in which x signifies the
liveliness of a sensation, we come to a negative x, we consider our
selves justified in speaking of negative sensations too. There are
various ways of making mythology : at present the mathematical turn
of imagination seems to take the lead. Respecting the second case
I shall meet with a readier assent. Formulas do not produce events ;
they copy them after real causes have created them, and they copy
only individual aspects of them. No coincidence of formulas, there
fore, can ever prove that the events which meet or fuse in them, also
fuse as a matter of course in the real thing without the help of any
particular cause to bring about this union. If this cause, without
which the event is metaphysically unintelligible, could be included in
the calculation, and that in such a way that every peculiarity of its
procedure found a precise mathematical expression, — then, a»d only
then, would these quantities be rightly denominated, and only then
474 On the Mental Act of ' Relation! [BOOK in.
could the calculus securely predict from their universal relations the
further consequences which may be drawn.
270. In opposition to Herbart, again (/3), I must repeat the doubts I
expressed long ago in my Sireitschriften (I, Leipzig, 1857). When
Herbart calls that which goes on in the simple real being when it is
together with others, its self-preservation, he raises hopes that in his
general view the specific conception of activity will get its rights ; a
conception which we shall always believe to signify something special
and something really to be found in the world, although we find it
quite impossible to define what we mean by it, when we oppose it to
a mere occurrence, in any way approaching to a mechanical con
struction. Did we deceive ourselves in this view of Herbart's inten
tion ? Ought we to have taken self-preservation for an active form of
speech describing a mere occurrence, which, without anything being
done by anybody, simply ends, as a matter of fact, with the result
that something continues in preservation, the non-preservation of
which we should rather have looked for as the probable end of the
occurrence ?
The further course of the Herbartian psychology would confirm
this interpretation. For, according to this psychology, if the soul was
ever active at all, it never was active but once. It asserted itself
against the stimuli which came from without, by producing the simple
sensations : but from that point it became passive, and allows its
internal states to dominate its whole life without interference. Every
thing further that happens in it, the formation of its conceptions, the
development of its various faculties, the settlement of the principles
on which it acts, are all mechanical results which, when once these
primary self-preservations have been aroused, follow from their
reactions ; and the soul, the arena on which all this takes place, never
shows itself volcanic and irritable enough to interfere by new reac
tions with the play of its states and to give them such new directions
as do not follow analytically from them according to the universal
laws of their reciprocal actions.
But the limitation of the soul's activity to these scanty beginnings
was neither theoretically necessary at starting, nor is it recormnApded
by its results. It was due to Herbart's quarrel with an earbj^^^sycho-
logy, with the assumption of a number of original faculties which,
doubtless to the detriment of science, were then considered to contain
everything necessary to the production of results, whose causes are in
reality . formed only by degrees and ought to have been made the
object of explanation. Here lie Herbart's unquestionable merits, and
CHAPTER in.] Progressive reactions of the Soicl. 475
I need not repeat that I fully recognise them. But they lie side by side
with that which I regret to have to call his error. The mere plurality of
these faculties, even the view of them as mere adjacent facts the real
connection of which remained unintelligible, could not, taken alone,
justify Herbart in going so far the other way as to base the development
of the mind upon a single kind of process and the consequences flowing
from it. For he himself both knew and said that the simple sensations
from which he started are just as independent of one another as were
the faculties he rejected; that we cannot conceive any reason why a soul
that feels ether-waves as colours must, in consistency, perceive air
waves as sounds; that therefore the soul has just the same number
of primal faculties irreducible to one another as of single sensations
different from one another. He did not on that account surrender
the unity of the soul, or doubt that in it this multiplicity is bound
together by some connexion, albeit that connexion entirely escapes
us. Now if this one nature of the soul can produce simultaneously,
or, so to speak, on the same level of its action, such manifold ex
pressions of its essence, why should it not in the same way produce
manifold expressions successively at different periods of its develop
ment ? Why should not its own internal states, through their increas
ing multiplicity, win from it new reactions, for which in their simpler
forms they gave no occasion ? There is certainly nothing impossible
in the idea of a constantly renewed reaction, in which that whole
essence of the soul that is always present casts new germs of de
velopment into the machinery of its internal states ; and a view that
rejects this source of aid could have proved it to be superfluous only
by its own complete success. That I do not find this view every
where thus successful, I shall have to mention again; here I will
refer to three points.
First, the deduction of the perception of Space. I have already
spoken of its impossibility and will not refer to it again at length. We
must content ourselves with regarding this perception as a new and
peculiar form of apprehension, which, proceeding from the essence of
the soul, attaches, as a reaction of the kind just described, to a definite
manifold of impressions, but does not of itself issue from that manifold.
The second point is attention : I shall have to mention it directly in
the course of the present discussion. Thirdly, in the case of any act
of reference or comparison, Herbart's psychology seems to me to take
no account of the eye which perceives the relations obtaining between
the single ideas ; the consciousness of the investigator which has per
formed this task of perception everywhere takes the place of the
476 On the Mental Act of ' Relation! [BOOK in.
consciousness investigated, which is required to perform it. It is of
no avail to answer that it is implied in the very notion of the soul as
something that represents, that it perceives everything that exists and
occurs in it, and therefore that it perceives the relations in which its
single ideas stand to one another: the need of a deduction of the
perception of space is by itself sufficient to disarm this rejoinder. For
Herbart agrees that the impressions which muster in the simple essence
of the soul, are together in the soul in a non-spatial way. A conscious
ness which as a matter of course perceived their reciprocal relations,
could only apprehend them as they are, as non-spatial. But this is
not what happens : consciousness changes them and reproduces
in perceptions of something side by side in space what in them
selves are only together with one another in a non-spatial way.
Here then the perception is at the same time a new creation of the
form in which it takes place : but even in those cases where there is
nothing novel in the reaction to surprise us, the perception of relations
is no mere mirroring of their existence, but at the least the new
creation of the very idea of them.
271. Expressed in Herbart's terminology, my view would take the
following form. The soul is stimulated by the external sense-stimuli
SL) as stimuli of the first order : and in consequence it forms the simple 1
sensations which we know, and to which perhaps the simplest feelings
of sensuous pleasure and pain ought to be added as creations which
arise with equal readiness. But the various relations (whether of
simultaneous multiplicity or of temporal succession) which exist be
tween the sensations or the images they have left in the memory, do
not simply exist, they form for the soul new stimuli J2, stimuli of a
second order, and the soul responds to them by new reactions. These
reactions differ according to the difference of their stimuli, and cannot
be explained from these secondary stimuli themselves, but only from
the still unexhausted nature of the soul, which they stir to an expres
sion of itself for which there was previously no motive. Among these
reactions we count the perception of Space, which holds a certain
simultaneous manifold together ; the time-ideas of a change, which
are not given by the mere fact of temporal change ; lastly, not only
these ideas 2 of the kind y, which measure theoretically the existing
relations between different contents, but also among other things, the
feelings of pleasure and pain which are connected with these relations.
Obviously, on this view, any condition of feeling or any series of re
ferring activities, directed in the way of comparison or judgment to
1 ['Einfachen sinnlichen Empfindungen,' v. note on p. 464.] 2 [v. §. 268.]
CHAPTER in.] General Ideas of Quantity, &c. 477
different contents of given ideas, may become in its turn a new stimulus
to the soul, an object of a still higher reflexion ; but it would be mere
trifling to reckon up reactions of a third and fourth order, unless a
detailed psychology, for which this is no place, had succeeded in
pointing out distinctly in internal observation the processes which would
justify us in assuming this ascending scale of orders. And for the
purposes of metaphysic such a course would bring us no further than
we are brought already by the recognition, once for all, that the soul
is in no case a mere arena for the contentions of its internal states,
but the living soil, which, in each instantaneous creation that it brings
into being, has produced at the same time new conditions for the
generation of still higher forms.
272. There is only one point, therefore, with regard to which I
will continue these remarks. Those ideas1 y, the origin of which I
touched on above, were, so far as they were then considered, in them
selves no more than definite single ideas of a quantitative or qualitative
difference, or of a single case of identity. It is only when we suppose
this same referring activity of knowledge to be applied to many re
peated cases of a similar kind, that we understand how the general
ideas of quantity and quality arise in the same way. As to the origin
of universal conceptions generally, we are sometimes told that they
arise from our uniting many single examples : those parts of the
examples which are like one another are accumulated, those which
are opposed cancel one another, those which are dissimilar dim one
another. But this mechanical mode of origination presupposes that
the individual ideas, in balancing one another so as to produce the
universal, have disappeared and been lost ; and the contrary is the
fact. They continue to exist; and it is not out of them that the
universal is produced, but side by side with them : it could not be felt
at all as universal, as something that is true of them among others, if
they had vanished and simply left it behind as their production. The
structure of the different kinds of universal conception is very complex,
and it is the business of Logic to analyse it. Psychology can do no
more than base their origin on a more or less intricate exercise of the
referring activity through which we apprehend the different relations
of the constituents which have to be united in them. The idea pro
duced by this group of activities is not of the same kind as those ideas,
which, as the direct result of external impressions, represent a per
ceptible fixed content; it is a conception, and the apparently simple
name which language gives to it is never more than the expression of
1 [v- p-471-]
478 On the Mental Act of ' Relation! [BOOK in.
a rule which we require ourselves to follow in connecting with each
other points of relation which are themselves conceived as universal.
We can fulfil this requirement * only if we allow our imagination to re
present some individual example or other, which answers to this rule,
while at the same time we join to our perception of this individual the
consideration that many other examples, and not this one only or
exclusively, can with equal justice be used as the perceptible symbol
of that which cannot in itself be perceived.
273. The fact of attention still remains to be mentioned. It was
depicted by psychologies of an earlier date as a moveable light which
the mind directs on to the impressions it receives, either with the view
of bringing them for the first time to consciousness, or else in order
to draw the impressions already present in consciousness from their
obscurity. The first of these alternatives is impossible ; for the sup
posed light could not search in consciousness for something which is
not there : the second at least leaves the obscurity in which the ideas
are supposed (without any reason being given for it) to find themselves,
very obscure. The necessary complement of this view would lie in
the perception that the direction of this moveable light cannot be acci
dental, but must depend on fixed conditions, and that therefore it must
naturally be the ideas themselves that attract attention to themselves.
But I think the view I am speaking of was right in regarding attention
as an activity exercised by the soul and having the ideas for its objects,
and not as a property of which the ideas are the subjects. The latter
notion was the one preferred by Herbart. According to him, when
we say that we have directed our attention to the idea b, what has
really happened is merely that b, through an increase in its own
strength, has raised itself in consciousness above the rest of the ideas.
But, even were the conception of a variable strength free from difficulty
in its application to ideas, the task which we expect attention to per
form would still remain inexplicable. What we seek to attain by
means of it is not an equally increasing intensity of the represented
content, just as it is, but a growth in its clearness ; and this rests in all
cases on the perception of the relations which obtain between its in
dividual constituents. Even when attention is directed to a perfectly
simple impression, the sole use of exerting it lies in the discovery of
relations ; it could achieve nothing, and a mere gazing at the object,
even if it were heightened to infinity, would be utterly fruitless, if there
were nothing in the object or around it to compare and bring into
relation. If we wish to tune a string exactly, we compare its sound
1 [On the nature of Universal Ideas, cp. Logic, sect. 339.]
CHAPTER in.] Attention an act of ' Relation' 479
with the sound of another which serves as a pattern, and try to make
sure whether the two agree or differ ; or else we take the sound of the
string by itself and compare it at different moments of its duration, so
as to see that it remains the same and does not waver between dif
ferent pitches. We shall assuredly find no case in which attention
consists in anything but this referring activity; and, on the other hand,
there are moments when we cannot collect ourselves, when we are
wholly occupied by a strong impression, which yet does not become
distinct because the excessive force of the stimulation hinders the ex
ercise of this constructive act of comparison. So closely is the
distinctness of a content connected with this activity that, even after
the eye has repeatedly traversed the outlines of a sensuous image, we
use a new expedient to secure the image in our memory : we translate
its impression into a description, in which, through the aid of the
developed forms of language, the internal relations of the image are
subsumed under the conceptions of position, direction, connexion,
and movement (all of them conceptions of relation), and which pre
scribes a rule enabling us to re-create the content of the impression
through successive acts of representation or thought.
274. The interest which the idea a possesses at a given moment,
has two factors, — the stable value of the idea for emotion, and the
variable significance which this value possesses for our total state at
the particular time. And this interest is the condition which on the
one hand awakes attention and enchains it, and on the other hand
diverts and distracts it. The latter case occurs when the associated
ideas b, c, which a reproduces, exceed a in momentary interest ; then
it is that the course of our thoughts moves in those strange leaps,
which we know so well, which we understand in their general con
ditions, but the direction of which we can seldom follow in any par
ticular instance. It is however in this fact, that the idea a is, to a
greater or less extent, able through its associations to attract and bring
back our attention to itself, that the greater or smaller force consists
which it exerts on the course of our ideas ; and further, it is in this
that there lies the measure of strength which we are accustomed to
ascribe to the idea as an inherent quality. If a has merely served as
a point of transition to the more rapid awakening of other ideas t>, c,
neither of which reconduct us to a, we regard a as an idea that was
weak, or that only raised itself slightly above the threshold of con
sciousness ; and alas ! by this figure of speech we too often suppose
ourselves to have described the real condition on which the slight
influence of the idea depends. But it is not at the moment when a is
480 On the Mental Act of 'Relation!
passing through consciousness that we rate it as clear or obscure,
strong or weak ; it is only at a later time, and when other occasions
reproduce it and convince us that it must have been in consciousness
at a former moment, that it appears to us as an idea that was weak ;
and it appears so, because we do not remember any referring act of
attention which at that time, by analysing its content, made it strong,
or which, by pursuing its relations to other ideas, assigned it a deter
minate position in the connexion of our inner life. Lastly it is obvious,
according to our general view, not only that every activity of attention
that has been put forth may become an object to a higher conscious
ness, but also that there need not be any such reflexion on what has
been done. The oftener we have made like relations between a
number of points of reference the object of acts of comparison and
reference, the more is there connected with the new example, in the
manner of a fixed association, the idea of the universal relation under
which its relations are to be subsumed. When impressions first occur,
we are often unable to connect and judge them without consciously
considering how we are to use our ideas in order to do so ; but, when
the impressions are repeated, these acts of connexion and judgment
frequently take place without any such considerations being necessary :
and so we are easily deceived into thinking that in these cases there
was really no operation to be performed, and that the mere existence
of the relations between the single impressions makes the perception of
those relations a matter of course.
My object in devoting this chapter entirely to the referring activity
was to emphasize its decisive importance. I may remind the reader
that it is really this activity whose delicacy is directly measured by the
psycho-physical experiments respecting our capacity for distinguish
ing impressions, and that all assertions as to the strength of sensations,
are, in so far as they rest on these experiments, theoretical deductions
drawn from this immediate result of observation.
CHAPTER IV.
The Formation of our Ideas of Space.
275. THE concluding remarks of the last chapter may serve to
introduce the discussion which is to follow on the psychological
genesis of our ideas of space and the localisation of the impressions
of sense. In this discussion I must use the freedom claimed by
every one who holds, as I do, that our perception of space is merely
subjective. In consistency no doubt we should have to consider our
own body, as well as the organs of sense by means of which it takes
possession of the external world, to be nothing but appearances in
ourselves; to be, that is, the ordered expression of a different
non-spatial order, obtaining between those super-sensuous real
elements, which the all-embracing meaning of the world has made
into a system of direct immediate links of connection between our
soul and the other constituents of the world. It is not impossible to
make this point of view clear to oneself in a general way, and to see
that the questions, now to be dealt with, respecting our sensuous com
merce with the outer world, might be expressed in the language of
that view ; but to carry it out in detail would lead to a prolixity as
intolerable as it would be needless. Needless, for this reason, that,
if the perception of space is once for all fixed by the nature of our
mind as our mode of apprehension, this perception has a rightful
existence for us, and we can hardly propose to look down upon that
which has the power of shedding clearness and vividness upon rela
tions which can be perceived by us only in this way and not in the
form they actually possess. It is enough to have assured ourselves at
a single point in metaphysic that spatiality is only our form of appre
hension, perhaps also a form belonging to every being that has a
mind. After it has been shown in a general way how the true intel
ligible relations of things admit of an ordered manifestation within this
form, we may again merely in a general way, subsume this special
instance of those relations, the structure of our own body, under that
general demonstration ; but in the further course of our enquiry we
VOL. i. ! i
482 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
shall everywhere substitute for the conception of the system of intel
ligible links of connexion between ourselves and the world that spatial
image of our body which, unlike the conception, can be perceived.
Accordingly, we presuppose here the ordinary view ; for us, as for it,
the world is extended around us in space ; we and the things in it
have determinate places in it ; the actions or effects of those things on
us are propagated in determinate directions up to the surface of our
body, and, passing somehow to the soul, produce in its perception a
spatial image; the component parts of which have the same reciprocal
positions — either exactly the same or within definite limits the same —
as the external things by which they, as sensations, were produced.
276. Owing to the directness of the impression we receive from
the external world, it seems as though the spatial perception of that
world came to us without any trouble on our part, as though we need
only open our eyes to take possession of the whole glory of the world
as it is. Yet, as we know, and as many experiences at once remind
us, it is not by merely existing that things are objects of our per
ception, but solely through their effects upon us. Their spatial
relations, no less than others, come to our knowledge not by the
mere fact of their existence, but only through a co-ordination of their
effects upon us, a co-ordination which corresponds to the relative
position of the points from which those effects proceeded. And,
conversely, the possibility of correctly concluding from the impression
these effects produce on us to the spatial relations of their causes,
depends on the extent to which those effects preserve their original
co-ordination in being propagated up to the point at which they
impress us.
But here begin the misunderstandings which obscure the way
before us. Our bodily organs offer an extended surface, on the
various points of which these impressions may be grouped in positions
similar to those held by the points in the outer world, from which
they came. It is therefore possible for an image to be produced
which has the same aspect as the object whose image it is ; and this
possibility has often seemed enough to make all further questions
superfluous. But in fact it has only doubled the problem. If it was
not clear how we perceived the object itself, it is no more clear how
we perceive its image ; and the fact that one resembles the other
makes matters no plainer. So long as this image consists simply in
a number of excitations of nervous points arranged in a figure cor
responding to the figure of an external object, it is no more than a
copy, brought nearer to us or diminished, of that which may be the
CHAPTER iv.] Space not transferable into Soul. 483
object of a future perception, but it does not give us any better
rationale of the process through which that thing becomes the object of
perception.
The question how this fact of nerve-excitation becomes an object
of knowledge for the soul at once gives rise to divergent views. We
may imagine the soul to be immediately present in the eye : there, as
though it were a touching hand, with its thousand nerve-points it
apprehends the individual coloured "points exactly in the position
they actually have in the eye ; and to many this view seems to make
everything clear. They forget that it would be just as difficult to
show how the feelings of touch which the hand receives justify us in
referring the various points apprehended to definite positions in space:
before they could do so we should have to presuppose that each posi
tion of the hand in space was already an object of that perception
which was precisely what we were trying to explain ; then, no doubt,
it would be certain that every point of colour lies at that spot in space
where the hand apprehends it. Others appeal to the physiological
fact that stimulations of the nerves are conducted to the brain by
isolated fibres, which may be supposed to lie (where they end in the
central portions) in the same order in which they begin in the organ
of sense. Thus, it is said, each impression will be conducted by itself
and free from intermixture with others, and all the impressions will
retain, in being conducted, the same geometrical relations of position
which they possessed in that organ. All that this idea accomplishes,
again, is to bring the copy, which has taken the place of the distant
external thing, rather nearer to the spot where we suppose the
mysterious transition of the physical excitation into a knowledge of
that excitation to take place.
But how does this come about ? How does the soul come to know
that at this moment there is a stimulation of three central nervous
points, which lie in a straight line or at the corners of a triangle ?
It is not enough that that which happens in these points should have
differences in its quality, and produce on the soul an effect correspond
ing to those differences : but it would also be necessary that the
spatial relation of the stimulating points should not only exist, but
should also produce an effect on the soul and so be observed by it.
Perhaps at this point we might conceive of the soul itself, or of
its consciousness, as an extended space, into which the excitations of
the nerves might be continued in their original order and direction :
and then the whole solution of the riddle would consist in a mere
transition. But, even if we supposed the many impressions to have
I i 2
484 The Formation of our Ideas of Space.
thus really appeared in the soul in exactly that shape in which they
came from the external objects, still this fact would not be the
perception of this fact. Even if we regarded each of these excitations
not simply as the condition of a future sensation, but as a present
state of the soul, a conscious sensation, yet, in spite of this, the
perception of the relations between them would remain to be ac
complished by a referring consciousness, which in the unity of its
activity excludes the spatial distinctions holding between its objects.
When we perceive the points a, b, c, in this order side by side, our
consciousness sets a to the left and c to the right of b : but the idea of
#, through which we thus represent a, does not lie to the left, nor the
idea of c to the right, of the idea of b ; the idea itself has not these
predicates, it only gives them to the points of which it is the idea.
And, conversely, if we still suppose consciousness to be a space, and
further that the idea of a lies in it to the left of the idea of b, this fact
would still not be the same thing with the knowledge of it; the ques
tion would always repeat itself, How does the extended soul succeed in
distinguishing these two points of its own essence, which at a given
moment are the places where that essence is stimulated ; and by what
means does it obtain a view of the spatial line or distance which
separates the two from one another ? The connecting, referring, and
comparing consciousness, which could perform this task, could never
be anything but an activity which is unextended, intensive and a
unity — even if the substantive being to which we ascribed this
activity were extended. In the end the impressions would have to
pass into this non-spatial consciousness ; and therefore we gain
nothing for the explanation of the perception of space by interposing
this supposition, — a supposition which in any case is impossible for
us to accept.
277. Let us return then to the other idea, that of a super-sensuous
being, characterised only by the nature of its activity. Now it is
doubtless incorrect to think of the soul under the image of a point,
for, if a thing is non-spatial, its negation of extension ought not to
be expressed in terms of space ; still the comparison may be admitted
here where we only wish to draw conclusions from that negation.
This premised, it is obvious that all those geometrical relations which
exist among the sense-stimuli and among the nervous excitations
they occasion, must completely disappear in the moment when they
pass over into the soul : for in its point of unity there is no room for
their expansion. Up to this point the single impressions may be
conducted by isolated nerve-fibres which preserve the special nature
CHAPTER iv.] Clue to the places of Impressions. 485
of each impression; even in the central portions of the nervous
system similar separations may still exist, although we do not know
that they do so ; but in the end, at the transition to consciousness, all
walls of partition must disappear. In the unity of consciousness
these spatial divisions no more exist than the rays of light which fall
from various points on a converging lens continue to exist side by side
in the focal points at which they intersect. In the case of the rays
indeed the motion with which they came together makes it possible
for them to diverge again, beyond the focal points, in a similar
geometrical relation; in the present case, on the other hand, the
required continuation of the process consists not in a re-expansion
of the impressions into a real space, but in the production of an idea
— the idea of a space and of the position of the impressions in that
space. This perception cannot be delivered to us ready-made. The
single impressions exist together in the soul in a completely non-
spatial way and are distinguished simply by their qualitative content,
just as the simultaneous notes of a chord are heard apart from one
another, and yet not side by side with one another, in space. From
this non-spatial material the soul has to re-create entirely afresh the
spatial image that has disappeared ; and in order to do this it must be
able to assign to each single impression the position it is to take up
in this image relatively to the rest and side by side with them. Pre
supposing then, what we do not think need be further explained, that
for unknown reasons the soul can and must apprehend in spatial
forms what comes to it as a number of non-spatial impressions, some
clue will be needed, by the help of which it may find for each impres
sion the place it must take, in order that the image that is to arise in
idea may be like the spatial figure that has disappeared.
278. We may illustrate this requirement in a very simple way.
Let us suppose that a collection has to be arranged in some new
place in exactly the same order that it has at present. There is
no need to keep this order intact during the transport ; we do what
ever is most convenient for the purposes of transport, and when it is
finished we arrange the several pieces of the collection by following
the numbers pasted on them. Just such a token of its former spatial
position must be possessed by each impression, and retained through
out the time when that impression, together with all the rest, was
present in a non-spatial way in the unity of the soul. Where then
does this token come from ? It cannot be the point in external space
from which the sense- stimulus starts, that gives to it this witness of its
origin. A blue ray of light may come from above or from below, from the
486 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
right or from the left, but it tells us nothing of all this ; it itself is the
same in all cases. It is not until these similar stimuli come in contact
with our bodies that they are distinguished, and then they are dis
tinguished according to the different points at which they meet the
extended surface of our organs of sense. This accordingly may be the
spot at which the token I am describing has its origin, a token which is
given along with the stimulus in consequence of the effects produced
by it at this spot, and which in the case of each single stimulus is
distinct and different from that given along with any other stimulus.
And now that fact regains its importance, which we could not
admit as a short-hand solution of these problems ; the isolation of the
conducting nerve-fibres. I cannot help remarking in passing that
physiology is mistaken when it finds the exclusive object of the
structure of the nervous system in the unmixed conduction of indivi
dual excitations. In the optic nerve we find this structure devoted to
that purpose ; but the olfactory nerve, which possesses it no less, shows
very little capacity for arousing such a multiplicity of separate sensa
tions as would correspond with the number of its individual fibres.
Nor is it only in the nerves that we meet with these elongated unrami-
fied fibres ; we find them in the muscles also, and yet the isolated
excitation of a single fibre certainly cannot be the object here, where
the simultaneous and like stimulation of many fibres is required for
the attainment of any useful result. Thus we must suppose, I
think, that the wide diffusion of this structure of the fibres has
a more general explanation. Perhaps their forms were the only ones
possible to the forces which shape an organic form, and a foundation
for greater effects may have been producible only through adding
together such elementary organs. Perhaps again the physical pro
cesses, on which the activities of life rest, are necessarily connected,
within narrow limits, with the fineness of the fibre, and could not take
place in masses of a thickness discernible to the naked eye. But
however this may be, — however this structure came into being, — when
once it is present, it can without doubt be used for the purpose
of separating the impressions of sense. Each single fibre, at the
spot where it receives the stimulus, can attach to it the extra-impres
sion described, and can transmit it to consciousness, stamped with
this character, and preserved by the isolation of the fibre from mixture
with other physical excitations.
279. A further assumption is necessary before we can make use
of this process to explain the localization of impressions. We must
suppose that similar stimuli give rise in each nerve-fibre to a special
CHAPTER iv.] Extra-Impressions or Local Signs. 487
extra-impression, an extra-impression which is different in the case
of every single fibre, and which connects itself, in the manner of an
association, with that main impression which depends on the quality
of the stimulus, — connects itself, therefore, in such a way that neither
of the two impressions, the main one and the extra one, interferes
with the peculiar nature and tone of the other. It must be confessed
that we have no anatomical knowledge of a diversity jn the single
nerve-fibres so manifold as this assumption requires. But this diver
sity may consist not only in properties which escape all the expedients
our external observation can employ, but in the very spatial position
of the fibre ; we might suppose, that is, firstly, that in a number of
fibres lying side by side interactions take place which produce dif
ferent states of susceptibility in the fibres lying at different spots in
this system ; and, secondly, it is no less possible that the excitations
of each fibre may acquire a particular tone from the effect produced
on it by occurrences in -the surrounding tissues. But this question of
detail, again, we must leave undiscussed ; what is certain is that no
other view of the matter can dispense with an assumption similar to
that for which we have suggested an explanation. In order to know
whether a push we felt when our eyes were shut came against
our hand or our foot, it is necessary that, the two pushes being in
other respects of equal measurement, the total impression should be
different in the two cases. In such a case it is of no use to appeal
to associations, and to say that on a former occasion the impression
of the push was connected with a simultaneous visual perception of
the place that received it, and that now when the push is repeated it
reproduces this perception. For in the course of life we unfortunately
so often receive pushes on all parts of the body, that the impression in
question will have associated itself almost indiscriminately with the
images of all of them : it will be impossible, therefore, in the case of
a repetition to decide to which of these parts the impression is to be
referred, unless in this new case the impression itself once more tells
us to which of them we are to refer it : it is necessary, in other words,
that the impression now recurring should be provided with a clear
token of its present origin. Let A B C, then, stand for three diverse
stimuli, / q r for three different spots in an organ of sense, TT K p for
three specific extra-impressions, which those spots connect with the
main sensations occasioned by A B C : then the difference between
these connected local signs it K p will be the clue by means of which
the sensations falling upon p q r can be localised in separate places in
our perception of space. The associations AwAicAp will signify
488 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK HL
three similar impressions which have fallen on the different spots pqr
of the organ of sense, and which are prevented by this very difference
in their local signs from being fused into one sensation, a fusion
which could not have been prevented if the three A's had been perfectly
identical * ; since, where no distinctions exist, no activity of conscious
ness can make them. The associations ATT B< Cp, on the other hand,
will signify three dissimilar impressions which affect those three
different spots in the organ at the same time ; these impressions, owing
to their qualitative difference, need nothing further to prevent their
fusion into one sensation, and all that IT K p give them is their spatial
arrangement. Lastly, A< B< C< would be the same three dissimilar
stimuli, acting on one and the same spot q in the organ of sense, and
therefore, as we seem obliged to suppose, appearing successively at
the same point in our perception of space.
280. I have no desire to conceal the difficulties which arise when
these considerations are pursued further. As long as we abstain
from considering the differences between the organs of sense, and
only try to fix in a general way the requirements we have to satisfy,
it is possible to form many different views respecting the nature
and genesis of local signs. The simplest would be one I have men
tioned in passing, that the extra-process destined to accompany
the main impression takes place directly, and at first as a physical
excitation, in the same nerve-fibre which is affected by an external
stimulus. In that case it would depend on the form of excitation
which was found to be the general mode of activity in the nerves,
whether it could permit the simultaneous conduction, without inter
mixture, of two different processes : and even if we found that this
was not possible in the case of two excitations of the same kind, still
it might be so when one of the two processes was the extra-excitation
which accompanies the main movement issuing from the stimulus,
but is not of the same kind with it. However, the whole supposition
of a double conduction fails to attain its object. For it involves the
tacit presupposition that two processes, which, without being other
wise connected, proceed along the same nerve-fibre, thereby ac
quire a permanent association : and this presupposition rests in the
end on a mode of thought which we were unable to accept, on
the notion, I mean, that the mere fact of the excitations existing side
by side in space is sufficient to give rise to the idea of their intrinsic
connexion. On a former occasion I compared consciousness, by
way of figure, to a single vessel ; and the various excitations, which
1 [I. e. if ATT, A*, Ap had been simply A, A, A or ATT, ATT, ATT.]
CHAPTER iv.] Nature of the Local Sign. 489
were conducted to this vessel and flowed into it through different
pipes, were supposed at last to meet in it and mix indiscriminately
together. We need not keep to this figure ; but however we like to
picture the transition into consciousness, the mere fact that A and n
B and K, C and p were together in space, will give consciousness
no token that it is to connect them exactly in this way instead of
joining A to K, B to p, and C to TT.
Accordingly, the other supposition seems to me more natural than
this of a double conduction, — the supposition that the main impres
sion and the extra-excitation really give rise in each fibre to one total
state, which is conducted as a total state and occasions nothing but
one total sensation. If this sensation remained by itself alone, we
should feel no occasion to distinguish different elements in it, any
more than violet, if we knew nothing but it, would suggest to us to
separate red and blue from one another in it. But many different
stimuli are in process of time connected with one and the same
extra-process ; and it may be that the comparison of these cases
would arouse an activity of separation which would analyse the total
impressions into their component parts, but which would at the same
time learn to refer the local sign, thus separated, in each case to that
qualitative impression from which it was parted in thought and in
thought alone. It is possible to find instances in which this actually
occurs. The effect produced by a tone must be apprehended as an
excitation which is at first one and total, in the sense above described :
but not only does the comparison of many successive tones enable us
to distinguish the quality from the height of each, but further, when
we hear several tones at once, we are able to attach each quality to
the height of the note from which it was thus separated. The
artificiality of this point of view may make us distrust it, but we
shall not find it easy to escape this artificiality by taking another
road.
Let us put aside altogether, what is quite unessential, the image of
the soul as a point at which all the impressions conducted to it
discharge themselves. Let us suppose, what we shall afterwards find
confirmed, that the soul perceives the physical nervous processes
directly at the spot where they reach the final form in which they are
destined to be objects of its perception. Still there remains the
question we would so gladly avoid : supposing the soul has appre
hended many impressions in this way, either at the same time or
one after the other, it can analyse each of them into the components
described above ; what determines it then not to allow these com-
490 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
ponents to fall asunder but to hold them together in a way cor
responding to the connexion from which it has previously disjoined
them ? We see, then, that the artificiality lies in the fact itself, or in
that view of the fact which alone remains open to us now, — in the
enigmatical nature of associations generally. I reminded the reader
in a former passage that in using this name we are merely designating
a fact we are obliged to assume, without being able to give any
account of the means by which it is brought about. And now it
seems to me that the source of the doubts that beset us here is that
we cannot persuade ourselves to renounce our search for a mechanism
which would bring about this connexion of states after the analogy
of physical processes. Such a construction we shall certainly never
find. On the other hand, if we are tempted to regard associations
as a peculiarity of the psychical activity, to which there is no analogy
elsewhere, we are held back by the undoubted fact that we do not yet
possess any intelligible general point of view which would exhibit the
ratio legis in every case, and which would explain not only the con
nexion at this point but its absence at that point : instead of this we
are forced in each particular case to make assumptions which appear
artificial because they are always constructed ad hoc. I believe then
that the hypothesis I have been speaking of here, that of the origin
of the local sign in the stimulated nerve itself, might be maintained ;
but, later on, I shall substitute for it another hypothesis, according
to which the extra-production of the local sign is less direct : and my
reason is not that the second hypothesis is free from the difficulties
of the first, but that it offers other advantages. At present we will
proceed for a moment with our general remarks.
281. If the local signs TTK p merely differ generally in quality, it is
true that they would suffice to prevent three perfectly similar stimuli
from coalescing, and to make them appear as three instances of the
same felt content. But the only result would be an impulse to hold
the sensations apart in a general way ; there would be nothing to
lead us on to give to the sensations thus produced a definite local
isation in space. It is this that is left unnoticed by those who regard
the isolated conduction of three impressions by three fibres as a
sufficient reason, taken by itself, for their being perceived as spatially
separate. Even if (in the absence of the extra local signs) this
isolation were a sufficient condition of the three impressions being
distinguished as three, yet the question whether they were to be
represented at the corners of a triangle or in a straight line, could
only be decided by a soul which already possessed that capacity of
CHAPTER iv.] Local Signs must differ measurably. 491
localisation which we are trying to understand. In this case the
soul would stand, as it were with a second and inner vision, before
the open key-board of the central nerve-terminations, would see them
lying ready side by side, and doubtless would very easily refer the
arriving excitations to the places occupied by those keys on which
they produce some observable motion. If this is impossible, as it is,
just as little would it be possible for the local signs given along with
sensations to produce a real localisation of the sensations, if these local
signs simply differed without being also comparable. If they are to
lead to this localisation they must necessarily be members of series
or of a system of series, in each of which there must be some general
characteristic in common, but within its limits a difference, measur
able in some way, of every individual from every other. If
K = TJ- -f A, p = TT -)- 2 A, or K = p — A,
then, but only then, can these signs be the reason why a perception,
which can and must apprehend these arithmetical differences in some
spatial way or other, should place B< nowhere but in the middle
between Air and Cp. And if more than one series of this kind is
involved, so that the general character of the local signs in the one
is qualitatively distinguished from that of the other, still even in the
transition from series to series this alteration of quality must somehow
proceed by measurable differences ; otherwise we should not know
how great, in terms of space, is the declination of some of the im
pressions from the straight line which is the shape others are to take
in the perception.
282. This postulate is closely connected with the settlement of
another question. Wherever the local signs may arise, there is no
doubt that, to start with, they are physical excitations which arise,
on occasion of the stimulus, in the stimulated spot, this spot having
an individuality or special nature of its own. We have gone on to
assume as self-evident, that they then produce sensations, states of
consciousness, just as the main impressions do which they ac
company; and that, from a comparison of the associations which have
thus arisen, a referring activity decides what relative position each
impression is to take among the rest. Now is this necessary? Or
does it suffice to regard n K p simply as physical processes which do
not themselves appear in consciousness, and merely determine the
direction in which consciousness guides each impression to its place
in the perceived space ? Now, supposing we adopt the second of
these alternatives, the difficulty remains that it will be just as necessary
for the unconscious faculty of localisation as it was for the conscious,
492 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in,
that the local signs should stand in the reciprocal relations we have
indicated ; otherwise this faculty will have nothing to determine it to
the definite directions spoken of. This will at any rate be necessary
if we are to hold in this case to that general rationality of the
phenomena which alone gives any interest to attempts to explain
them : for of course it is possible to take a purely fatalistic view, and
to say, It simply is the fact that, if the spot p is stimulated the
ensuing sensation must take the place x, and if the spot q is stimu
lated the ensuing sensation must take the placej' ; and there is no rule
or reason why the existence of one of these relations should involve
that of the other. On this assumption any further hypotheses as to
the nature of the local signs would be superfluous : but then on this
assumption all investigation would be superfluous, for there would be
nothing to investigate. If however that general rationality of phe
nomena is admitted, then I find no sufficient clearness in the
theory that our determination of place in perception is conducted
unconsciously. For this reason: according to the theory there is
something which determines the position to be given to each single
impression in the space perceived. This something, this ground of
determination, must remain conjoined with this single impression and
with it alone (for it holds good of it and of no other impression).
It cannot be merely a prior process determining the future localisation ;
it must be a permanent definite mark attached to that idea whose
localisation it is to further. And, since the idea now appears in
consciousness, it is difficult to imagine how the grounds of determi
nation can leave such an after-effect attached to the idea, as would
operate in consciousness and yet not appear in that same con
sciousness.
Here again there lie more general difficulties which interrupt our
course. It is, once more, because we are accustomed to observe the
external world, that we naturally separate any occurrence produced by
causes into a preceding impression on the one side, and a subsequent
reaction on the other. In a chain of processes, in which each link is
the sufficient reason only of the next, we may make this distinction
between the first link a and the last link z ; but it is useless to interpose
between the next neighbours a and b another impression, which it is
supposed that a must have already made before it can call forth b as a
reaction. We are separating what is really a unity, the occurrence
which is at once reception of an impression and reaction against it ;
and it is this false separation which in the present case makes it seem
natural that the external stimulus should first produce in the soul an
CHAPTER iv.] Can Local Signs be Unconscious ? 493
impression which is not yet consciousness, and that the conscious
sensation should afterwards follow on this impression as a reaction.
But it is easy to see that this interposition can be carried on ad
infinilum. On such a view, the activity of sensation, in its turn, could
not react in consequence of the unconscious impression till it had been
stimulated by it — if, that is, the impression had produced in it a second
unconscious state : and it would be only to this second stimulation
that the activity of sensation would respond with its conscious mani
festation. On this point I accept Herbart's opinion : a conscious idea
is directly an act of self-preservation against a disturbance. This dis
turbance does not first appear apart, and then call forth the idea as a
reaction. The disturbance only threatens, its threat is only effective,
it itself only exists in so far as it asserts itself in the idea itself which,
but for it, would not have existed. But I will not pursue these doubts.
They cannot be definitely set at rest. We have assuredly no right to
interpose some mere lifeless impression between two adjacent links of
a causal connexion : but still it remains undecided whether, as a
matter of fact, the physical excitation in the nerve, and the psychical
process of sensation, do form such adjacent links of a chain. It is not
necessary that the sufficient ground for the arousal of a sensation or
idea should consist in the connecting link of an unconscious state of
the soul ; but it is possible that it may consist in this. Accordingly
I do not put forward my view as anything more than the hypothesis
that I prefer. It may be stated thus : if the physical processes TT * p
are the local signs directly used by a referring activity when it deter
mines the position of the sensations in the perceived space, they are so
used not as physical processes, nor through the instrumentality of un
conscious impressions aroused by them in the soul, but in the shape
of conscious sensations resulting from them. I shall return to the
objections which stand in the way of this supposition, and consider
them in detail.
283. These then are the general postulates to which the local signs
have to conform. And it is these postulates alone that I regard as a
necessary metaphysical foundation for our spatial perceptions. Shortly
expressed, they come to the one requirement, that all the spatial rela
tions of the stimuli acting on us should be replaced by a system of
graduated qualitative tokens. In adding some instances in fuller
detail I am quite aware of the many abiding difficulties which could
only be removed by an accurate consideration of all the experience
that is available to us, or that may become so. Nothing but experience
can disclose to us the means by which the local signs we require
494 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
are really produced ; and I do not think this production takes place
in the same way in the case of the two senses which have to be
considered.
In the first case, that of sight, the first of the suppositions men
tioned appeared to me improbable, I mean the supposition that the
local signs arise directly in the spot stimulated. Even supposing
that the same kind of light Z, falling on various points of the retina,
produced sensations of colour somewhat differing from each other, C
in the point /, and c in q, still there will always be another kind of
light /, which occasions in q that same sensation C which L excites
in /. Accordingly it cannot be this difference of quality in the
impression that gives the reason for referring that impression to
a definite spot p or q. On the other hand, there seemed to me to be
a real importance in the fact that, from the yellow spot on the retina
— for our purposes let us say, from the central point E of the
retina — where the sensitiveness is greatest, there is a gradual diminu
tion of irritability in all directions, until at the edges of the hemi
spherical distribution of the nerves this irritability entirely disappears.
This fact, again, taken by itself is not sufficient for our purpose : for
a weak stimulation of a spot lying near the point E would necessarily
have the same effect as a stronger stimulation of a spot at a greater
distance from E. But if a stimulus in the way of light falls on one
of these side-spots />, it also makes the eye turn to such an extent and
in such a direction that the ray meets, instead of/, the point of clearest
vision E. This direction of the glance, as it is commonly called, is
accompanied by no idea of the end it actually serves, or of the means
by which it is brought about. . It must therefore be regarded, at any
rate originally, not as an intentional act, but as an automatic move
ment, a physical effect due to the stimulus and unknown to the soul.
Accordingly the following hypothesis seemed to be admissible : in the
central organs the single fibres of the optic nerve are mechanically
connected with the motor nerves of the muscles of the eye in such
a way that the stimulation of each of the former is followed by
a definite excitation of the latter, from which it results that the eye is
turned in a particular way. How this mechanical connexion of the
sensory and motor nerves is effected, is a question which does not
touch our present object; and the settlement of it may be left to
Physiology, which has to raise the same question in regard to many
other reflex motions.
284. The motions just described would satisfy the requirements to
be fulfilled by the local signs. If/> is the point stimulated, p E would
CHAPTER IV.] Local SigUS IH VlSWH. 495
be the arc which has to be traversed in order that the point of clearest
vision E may be stimulated instead of/; if q is stimulated, the corre
sponding curve is qE\ these motions will be different in every case,
but the difference between them will be merely one of magnitude and
direction. But then, on my hypothesis, it was not these motions
themselves, but the sensations excited by them, which were to be
directly used as the signs n <p of the spots pqr. Now a movement,
in occurring, occasions a sensation or feeling of our present state,
which is different from the feeling of the non-occurrence of the move
ment : and we even when at rest distinguish the momentary position
of our limbs, produced by former movements, from that position
which is not now present : these are facts which need no proof, how
ever simple or however complicated may be the conditions which give
rise to these feelings. But a further assumption is necessarily involved.
We must suppose that the perceptible differences of the feelings in
question correspond in their turn to the slightest differences of those
movements which the eye needs in order to turn its glance from one
point of the field of vision to its next neighbours : and this hypothesis
may arouse graver doubts. These doubts, however, really apply, I
think, only to a point which is of no decisive importance here. No
doubt, as a matter of fact, we notice those minimal movements, which
the glance has to make in passing from one point of the field of
vision to the next point, and from that again to the next ; but to our
immediate feeling they seem merely a greater or smaller alteration of
our state, a greater or smaller degree of a change which does not alter
its character. We cannot here, any more than in the case of our other
sensations, reduce the magnitude of these steps to comparable arith
metical values, so as to judge that one of them is double or half as
great as another. The reason why this becomes possible is that the
movements described bring a number of distinguishable points one
after another to the spot of clearest vision, and the images of these
points, instead of at once disappearing again, remain for sensation
side by side with one another : and it is only the number of these dis
tinguishable points which enables us to interpret the differences in
our feelings of movement as expressive of equal or unequal spaces
traversed, or of definite differences between these spaces. Thus if the
eye were shut or did not see, it would doubtless be aware, from the
immediate feeling of movement, that the curve p E is smaller than the
curve q E (which it would describe if it continued the same move
ment), and that q E is smaller than r E ; but these feelings would not
enable it to determine the co-ordinates of that point x in the field of
496 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
vision which would meet its glance if it were opened or began to see.
It is only the series of images which pass before the seeing eye while
it moves, and which remain side by side for some time so that they
can be compared, that enable us to give an accurate quantitative inter
pretation to the different sections of a series of feelings of movement.
If we follow with our eyes from beginning to end a line of one colour
drawn before us, doubtless we are conscious of a continuous and
homogeneous movement of the glance ; but suppose there is a stroke
drawn across the line near the beginning, marking off a small part of
it, we cannot" guess how many more fractions of the same size the
rest of the line will contain : it is only by marking them off that we
can tell their number and be sure that they are equal. How is it
again that we learn this last fact, the equality of the distinguished
parts ? Is it by keeping the head fixed and turning the eye in such a
way that these parts of the line, from a to z, are brought one after the
other into the direction of clearest vision? And do we then judge
that the movements be, cd, de, up to jyz, in each of which the eye
starts from a different position, and which really would not be equally
great, are equally great, and therefore that the parts a b, b c . . . y z are
also equal? We cannot ascertain their equality in this way. Any
attempt to do so accurately is really made thus : in looking at the
starting-point a, d, c of each line a b, b c, c d we place the eye so that
the direction of its glance forms in every case the same angle with
the direction of the piece to be judged, e. g. a right angle : the move
ments which the eye has then to make in order to go from a to b, b
to c,y to 2, are not only equal in magnitude (supposing the lines to be
equal), but they are identical, since the position from which they start
is in each case the same, and the position in which they end is in each
case the same. If, on the other hand, the lines are unequal, one of
the movements is readily felt in a general and inexact way to be
smaller or greater than another, since the position of the eye, at any
rate at starting, is the same in each case.
Thus, as with all sensations, our original capacity of estimating
impressions quantitatively would (apart from the results of practice)
rest on the possibility of generally recognising what is exactly like as
like, and what is different as different. And I do not think that for
our purposes any more delicate sensibility is required. I do not mean
that the two local signs TT =. p E w\& p = r E^ would enable the soul
forthwith to set the two sensations A and B connected with them at
1 [The letters on the right hand stand now not for the movements themselves
but for the feelings answering to them.]
CHAPTER iv.] Visual sign without actual movement. 497
definite points in a circular field of vision : it suffices that these signs
secure to the impressions their positions in relation to one another ;
that, for example, they make it necessary to set B between A and C
and nowhere else. With these explanations as to details, I think we
may hold to the theory that the feelings of movement TTKP are the
direct local signs of the sensations. But each of these feelings them
selves is at bottom a series of momentary feelings of position answering
to the various places traversed by the eye in its movement. In order
to keep the signs as simple as possible I merely mention this here, and
shall use ir to indicate the whole series of the successive sensations
TTO, 7rr 7r2 . . . ., which follow each other as the eye turns along the
curve p E.
285. The further application of these ideas will be as follows. If
we assume that the first impression of light felt in our lives affected the
lateral spot p, it will follow that there succeeded an actual movement
p E, and that, during this movement, there took place the series TT of
successive feelings of the position of the eye. If the same impression
is repeated, the same movement will ensue ; and the fact that an
identical stimulation has occurred in the past will make no difference
to the present one. But the case will be otherwise if at the moment
of their second stimulation another stimulus affects the spot q, and
solicits, with a force equal to that of the first stimulus, a movement of
the eye directly opposite to that which is required by p. The result
here will be that the eye remains at rest : but at the same time the
two impulses to movement, which in their effects cancel one another,
will not on that account be a mere zero ; as excitations of the nerves
they will remain, just as the force of gravity in two masses remains,
although those masses counterbalance one another in the scales and
therefore do not move them. The operation of that force consists in
the bending of the beam and in the pressure exerted on the point of
suspension. And I see no reason why, in the case before us, the two
excitations, which are prevented from producing an effect in the way
of movement, should not still be represented in the soul by two definite
feelings, so that the equipoise of opposed forces would be something
different from the repose due to the mere absence of excitation.
No doubt, if this is so, we must once more reform our idea of ?r or
K. So far we have regarded them as feelings which arise from the
movement set up ; thus they will not occur unless the movements do.
But I do not doubt that the stimulation of the spot />, apart from the
actual movement connected with it, can arouse a feeling by its mere
existence and occurrence, and that by means of this feeling the
VOL. i. K k
498 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. EBOOKHI.
presence of a thwarted impulse may be indicated to consciousness and
so distinguished from the mere absence of the impulse. This feeling
we should now regard as the first link TTO in that series TV = p E^ which
is produced during the movement p E> and of which each link irm will
now stand for a momentary feeling of position and also for the
momentary remnant of a thwarted impulse to movement. Now,
taken by itself, TTO will be simply a feeling, a way in which we are
affected, and it will not of itself point to its causes or its possible
effects. But then in that first experience the whole further series
TT connected itself with the first link ; this series is associated with TTO
and, on the repetition of TTO, it also will be reproduced. Accordingly,
though there is no movement of the eye, there arises the recollection
of something, greater or smaller, which must be accomplished if the
stimuli at p and q, which arouse only a weak sensation, are to arouse
sensations of the highest degree of strength and clearness. This is
what happens at first ; but if the soul has learnt that the movements
of the eye, reported by its feelings, are movements, — are, that
is, alterations of the relation in which the organ of sensation
stands to a number of what may be treated as fixed simultaneous
objects; and if finally the soul both can and must apprehend the
differences between such relations in a spatial form, — in this case
the idea of that something to be accomplished will be transformed
into the idea of a greater or smaller spatial distance between the
impressions falling on / and q and that middle point of the perceived
space which corresponds to the point E in the eye. If, lastly, we add
that to each of the many stimuli which at one and the same time
excite the spots p q r . . . of the retina, there is now conjoined the
corresponding series rr K p of reproduced feelings, the result will be
that owing to movements once performed and now remembered, the
eye, even when at rest, will be able to assign to each impression its
position among the rest.
286. I should be very prejudiced if I felt no alarm at the arti
ficiality of these ideas. But my intention was not to recommend the
hypothesis at all costs, but honestly to recount all the presuppositions
it involves; and, further, I do not know that it is possible to reach
the end we aim at in any simpler way, or that the artificiality lies
anywhere but in the facts themselves. The fact itself is strange
enough — and it cannot be got rid of — that we can see an unnum
bered mass of different-coloured points at once, and can distinguish
them. It must be possible, therefore, that what we require should
be effected : it must be possible for a large number of impressions
CHAPTER iv.] Is space-perception acquired f 499
to be in consciousness without mingling together ; there must be
in each of them something, some ' reason,' which makes it appear
now at one point in space, and now at another point; and these
various 'reasons' again, which are present simultaneously, must
operate without intermixture, each of them in exclusive relation to the
definite impression it belongs to. In other words, the same com
plicated relations which we assume between the feelings of movement,
must exist between any other possible elements which we might
substitute for those feelings. The only question, therefore, is whether
internal experience witnesses to the truth of our hypothesis, or
whether any other source of knowledge opposes to it objections
which are insuperable.
As to the first point, of course, I cannot tell whether others find in
themselves what I find in myself. If I ask what meaning an im
personal knowledge (if the phrase may be used) would attach to the
words 'two elements p and q are at a distance from one another/
I can imagine an answer by means of the idea of a universal space
in which I myself have no fixed position. But for my sensuous
perception of the seen points p and q, the only possible meaning of
the statement that these points are at a distance from each other
is that a certain definite amount of movement is necessary' if I am to
direct my glance from the one to the other ; the different positions
of the single points are felt by me simply and solely as so many
solicitations to movement. But then I can base nothing on this
experience. My individual disposition cannot be communicated.
I cannot therefore contradict those who tell me that they observe
nothing of these feelings of movements, however much I may be
convinced that they deceive themselves and, though they really have
the feelings, do not recognise them for what they are. I must content
myself therefore with pointing out to them that, in my view, the spatial
perception of the world is not something suddenly given us by nature
as soon as we open our eyes, but is the result of successive experience
and habituation ; only this habituation goes on at a time in our lives
of which we have no distinct recollection. The skill of the piano-
player, once acquired, seems to us a natural gift that costs no trouble ;
he glances at the notes, and complicated movements of the hand
immediately follow: in this case we know what a laborious process
he has gone through, and with what difficulty practice has set up
these associations of ideas with one another and with the movements
we see, — mere links of connection which no longer show themselves
in the consciousness of the practised artist. Exactly the same thing
K k 2
500 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
may happen in the case under discussion; and there need be
no distinct recollection in consciousness of the actual movements
through which we once learnt to localise our sensations. But, it will
be answered, this may be a probable account of the slow development
of a child, and as a matter of fact we see that its eyes turn towards
any light that is brighter than usual : to an animal on the other hand
the spatial knowledge of the world comes with so little trouble that
we cannot in its case believe in such a prolonged process of learning.
To this I reply that in reality we do not at all know what it is that an
animal sees directly it is born, nor what sort of perception of space it
has. In order merely to account in general for the early use it
makes of its limbs we have to assume a number of mechanical reflex
movements. It is therefore conceivable that the unhesitating way in
which it makes for an object lying in the direction of its glance may
really rest merely on a reflex movement set up by the stimulus ; and
the fact that many of its other earliest movements are unsuccessful
would then go to show that it, like man, only gradually acquires an
ordered knowledge of that remaining part of the spatial world which
lies outside the direction of its glance. Again, the small amount of
experience we possess respecting the rise of an optical idea of space
in persons born blind and afterwards operated on, will not suffice to
decide the question. In all cases the patient has already learnt,
through touch and movement, to find his way in the spatial world.
Doubtless the ideas of space thus developed may be very unlike the
space that manifests itself to a man who can see : for a touch can
apprehend only a few points at once, and can only approach distant
objects by means of considerable movements ; and therefore the space
of the blind man may be not so much what we mean by space,
as an artificial system of conceptions of movement, time and effort :
and, as a matter of fact, the few reports we possess tell us of the
astonishment with which the blind man, after a successful opera
tion, learns what the appearance of space or the spatial world is.
Still, in spite of such differences, we cannot tell to what extent this
previous practice may assist the formation of the visual perception
which ensues : in any case it cannot be analogous to the first forma
tion of all ideas of space ; and finally, there is even a difficulty in
discovering what it really is that is seen at first, since the patient who
is just beginning to see, cannot express his first experience in the
language of sight.
287. There are many questions which psychological optics would
have to settle respecting the further development of the spatial ideas :
CHAPTER iv.] The idea of Depth. 501
but it is not the business of metaphysic to discuss them. I will only
briefly remark that there is no foundation for any of those views
which ascribe to the soul an original tendency to project its impres
sions outwards, and that in one particular way and in no other;
all this has to be learnt through the combination of experiences.
How it is actually learnt piece by piece we cannot discover ; how it
may be learnt, it is easy to understand in a general way; but there are
particular points in the process which cannot at present be understood
at all. What we have accounted for so far is nothing more than the
arrangement of the points in the field of vision, the internal drawing
of the total image ; but this image itself as a whole has as yet no place
and no position, for the perception of the total space, in which its place
and position are to be, is still entirely wanting. The movements of
the eye as it opens, shuts, and turns, make the seen image appear, dis
appear, and change. We therefore naturally associate this image with
the eye in such a way that we conceive it as lying in any case in
front of us — to use the later language of the developed perception
of space : what is behind us — an expression which at this stage has
really no meaning — does not exist at all, and has no more to do with
space than the general feeling we have in the hand or foot has
to do with clearness or dimness. And so it would remain, if we
could not move our bodies and could only turn our eyes to a very
slight extent. But as soon as we have learnt to turn on our axis and
to refer the consequent feelings of movement to their true cause,
the movement, we discover that our first field of vision a b c, instead
of suddenly disappearing altogether, passes successively into bed,
cde . . . xyz, yza> zad, and a be. The unbroken series of images
which returns into itself awakes in us the idea of a complete circular
space with no gaps in it ; and this idea, by the help of similar
movements of the eye in other directions, soon passes into the
ordinary perception of the spherical space that surrounds us on all
sides.
At the same time, this idea could neither arise nor attain any clear
ness unless the idea of the third spatial dimension, that of depth,
were being simultaneously formed. In its own nature the soul has
certainly no impulse to project its visual impressions outwards ; it does
not yet know this 'outside'; and in any case it could not project
anything merely generally outwards, it could only project impressions
into a definite distance ; and that definite distance it has as yet no
means of determining. Just as little is it possible, as has been
supposed, for the soul to represent its impressions as lying directly on
5O2 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
the eye ; for this again means simply the negation of distance, and
distance must be known if it is to be negated. The simple fact is
really that the impressions are there, and are seen, but they have
no assignable position in the third spatial direction, for this is still
unknown. That there is such a third direction, we learn only from
experience ; and we learn it most easily from our finding ourselves
moving throtigh the images we see, and from the fact that, in con
sequence of this movement, the single images undergo various dis
placements, some of them being hidden, and others which were
hidden coming into view. And this greatly increases the difficulty of
applying the general idea we have thus acquired, in estimating the
degree of distance in any particular case ; a problem which we leave
to physiology and the special psychology of sense-perception.
Lastly, I will touch very briefly on one vexed question ; why do we
see objects upright, although the image of them on the retina is
upside down? We must remember that we do not observe the
image on our eye with a second eye, which further could com
pare its own position with the position of the object. There is
nothing before us but the image itself; all the geometrical relations
of the picture on the retina utterly disappear as it passes into
consciousness ; and, in the same way, the fact that as a whole it has
a certain position in the eye does not in the least prejudge the
question how it is to appear later in a spatial perception gained
through some further means. We are absolutely dependent on this
other perception. If there were only a seen space, we could give no
answer at all to the question what is above and what is beneath in
that space. These expressions have a meaning only if we presuppose
another idea of space, an idea for which these two directions are not
merely generally opposed to one another, but are uninterchangeably
different. When we have this idea, and not till then, we can say that
that in the visual world is ' above/ the image of which we find or have
to seek in the fixed direction towards the ' above ' of the other space.
It is our muscular feeling or general sense which (even when unaided
by the sense of sight) instructs us respecting the position of our body,
that gives us the other perception of space. For, the body being in
its usual upright position, the downward direction means the direction
of weight, and when we oppose our forces to it the result is a number
of feelings of effort ; and by these feelings the downward direction in
this other, non-visual, perception of space is uniformly and uninter
changeably distinguished from the upward. Consequently, if a and b
are places in the field of vision, b appears to us as beneath at when
CHAPTER iv.] Localisation by sense of Touch. 503
the sight or touch of b is attained through a movement which, in the
language of the muscular sense, is a downward movement ; or when
(our body being upright) the image of b always enters the field of
vision along with the images of the lower parts of our body, and never
along with those of the upper. This last requirement is satisfied by
what is commonly called the reversed position of the image on the
retina, since the imaging surface of the eye lies behind the centre of
rotation ; and it would equally be satisfied by an upright position of
the image, if that image arose in front of the centre of motion and on
the anterior convex surface of the eye. Thus there is a contradiction
between the reports of the eyes and of the muscular sense when we
use an inverting telescope which gives an upright position to the image
on the retina. In such a case, even if we have no other visual image
to compare with the telescopic one, we at once notice an opposition
to the reports of the muscular sense : we feel that in order to reach
the tops of the trees we see, we should have to move our hand in
a direction which, for that sense, is downward.
288. I have still to mention that localisation of impressions which
we obtain through the sense of touch. Here again the basis of our
view is given by E. H. Weber's attempts to fix experimentally the con
ditions under which we can distinguish two impressions on the skin,
which are qualitatively alike but locally different. The skin is lightly
touched with the two blunted points of a pair of compasses: and
the experiments showed that the extent to which the two points have
to be separated in order to be distinguished as two, is very different
at different parts of the body. For the finger-ends, the edges of the
lips, the tip of the tongue, a distance of half a line suffices : while at
many parts of the arm, leg, and back, one of twenty lines is necessary.
An explanation seemed to be offered at once by the structure of the
nerve-fibres. The sensory nerve-fibre, though isolated and unramified
during its conduction, separates at its peripheral end into a number
of short branches, and so distributes itself over a small space of the
skin for the purpose of receiving stimuli from without. It was thought,
then, that all the excitations which affect one of these nerve-ends simul
taneously would, through the unity of the fibre which has to conduct
them further, be destined to form one resultant, and to be incapable
of being distinguished from one another. If, again, these excitations
occurred one after the other, they might be distinguished in their
qualitative character, but would give no ground for local distinctions.
On the other hand it was supposed, if two impressions fell on two
different nerve-spaces, this alone would not make it possible to
504 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
distinguish them as two : this possibility arising only if, between the two
stimulated spaces, there lay one or more of such spaces which remained
unstimulated. This last supposition is in any case inadmissible ; for
at every moment there are a great many unstimulated nerve-fibres ;
if any particular ones among them are to be used for the purpose of
distinguishing two impressions a and t>, there must be something in
them which shows that they lie between the two stimulated nerve-
spaces ; and this presupposes the possibility of accomplishing what
has to be explained, the localisation of the sensations.
In other respects too the point of view described fails to give
a sufficient basis for this localisation. Nor was this exactly its pur
pose : it was intended only to explain why two impressions can some
times be distinguished and sometimes not. But even in this point I
found myself unable to accept it. Two points of the compasses which
when they touch the skin simultaneously give only one impression,
often leave two distinguishable impressions when they are laid against
the skin in turn ; and their two impressions appear as locally distinct,
though no accurate estimate of the distance can be given ; moreover,
within one radius of sensation the onward movement of a point can
be distinguished from its continued pressure on the same spot. Lastly,
the conduction of the excitations by the same or by different nerve-
fibres did not seem to me to decide anything ; the partitions of the
fibres are not continued into consciousness, and there all the im
pressions must in the end come together, qualitatively distinguishable,
if they were different, and indistinguishable if they were not. But
neither for the like impressions nor for the unlike did the theory
assign any ground of local separation, still less any clue by means of
which each of them might have its own place given to it.
289. Thus I found myself obliged in this case, no less than in that
of the impressions of sight, to look for local signs, abiding certi
ficates of local origin ; these local signs would be attached, in the
form of qualitatively distinguishable extra-impressions TT, K, p, to all
excitations A, B, C, according to the particular spots p, q, r of the
skin which they affect. Let us suppose that a stimulus, strictly limited
in its local extent— say the prick of a needle— affects the spot p.
Owing to the connexion between different parts of the skin it is
impossible that the operation of this stimulus should be confined to
a point destitute of any extension: whatever alteration it produces
directly at the point of contact will produce in the neighbourhood of
that point a number of little stretchings, pressings, and displacements.
Now, though there is a general uniformity in the structure of the skin, it
CHAPTER iv.] Local differ ences of Toiick-sensatwn. 505
is by no means exactly alike at all parts of the body. The epidermis is
thicker at one place, finer at another ; when the skin is attached to the
points of bones it is stretched, at other places the extent of its possible
displacement is greater. It differs again not less widely according to
the nature of its substratum : it is not the same when spread over a
cushion of fat as when it is stretched over bones, flesh, or cavities.
Lastly, at different places in the body these various situations may
pass into one another either suddenly or slowly. We may therefore
perhaps assume that at any point p in the body the wave n- of little
extra-agitations, called forth by the stimulation of that point, will
differ from any other wave < which accompanies the stimulation of a
spot q. But these extra-excitations would avail us nothing if they
simply occurred without becoming objects of our perception ; and
this last requisite will depend on the distribution of the nerve-fibres.
Let us suppose a case. Within the field of distribution of one and
the same fibre, let / q r be the single ends of that fibre : then the
local sign TT of the spot p will consist in the sensations of those extra-
impressions which the direct stimulation of p calls up in its neighbour-
O hood, and the conduction of which to consciousness is secured by the
f nerve-terminations q and r that receive them. Now if the structure
of the skin within this field of distribution were perfectly uniform, the
nerve-fibre which unites p q r would reach precisely the same final
state whichever of these terminations were the place directly stimu
lated : the impressions could not be distinguished, whether they were
simultaneous or successive. But if the structure of the skin varies
within this field, the stimulation of/ will produce different extra-
excitations in q and r from those which the same stimulation of q will
produce in p and r. Accordingly, if one and the same impression A
affects different places in succession, the uniting fibre will bring this
impression to consciousness in company with different local signs IT <
p • and we shall have a motive for the separation of three sensations,
although as yet no motive for a definite localisation of them. If the
impressions are simultaneous, the uniting fibre may either conduct
them side by side without intermixture, or it may be only capable of
conducting a single resultant of their influences : which of these
alternatives is correct is a question we cannot discuss.
Let us now return to the other idea. Let p q r stand for three
different nerve-fibres ; but let the stimulus A act on a spot of the
tissue where there is no nerve-termination : then the effect produced
must distribute itself until it finds a nerve-termination on which it can
discharge itself. Now if in the whole field of p q r the structure of
506 The Formation of our Ideas of Space. [BOOK in.
the skin was uniform, I should say that it matters nothing whether it
is one or two of these fibres that receive the like impressions, which
would be accompanied by like local signs ; for in no case could the
impressions be distinguished, and the only use of the multiplicity of
the fibres would be the general one of securing the entrance of the
stimuli into the nervous system ; for there can be no doubt that the
excitation of the tissue could not propagate itself to any very con
siderable distance. On the other hand, if the texture and state of the
skin within this whole field varies rapidly, the different local signs
which arise at point after point would be useless unless there are a
great number of closely congregated nerve-terminations, each of which
can receive the wave of excitation of a small circuit, before that wave
has lost its characteristic peculiarity by meeting with others which
began at different places and spread over the same field. It seems to
me that these suppositions answer to the results of observation. On
the back and trunk there are long stretches where the structure of the
skin is uniform, and here impressions can only be distinguished when
they are separated by wide distances. In the case of the arm and leg,
the power of distinction is duller when the stimuli follow another in
the direction of the longitudinal axis of those limbs — the direction of
the underlying muscles ; it is sharper when the stimuli are arranged
round the limb, in which case the skin is supported alternately and in
different ways by the swell of the muscles and the spaces that inter
vene between them.
290. The name local signs, in its proper sense, cannot be given
to these extra-excitations themselves, but only to the sensations they
occasion. Now it strikes us at once that there is one of our postulates
which those sensations altogether fail to satisfy. It is true that they
differ in quality, while at the same time they admit of resemblances ;
for example, if we touch any part of the skin that is stretched above a
bone, whether it be the forehead, the knee-cap, or the heel, feelings
are distinctly aroused which have a common tone. But these feelings
are not qu_ant.itatiyely rateable members of a series or system of series.
They cannot therefore serve directly to fix the locality of their causes ;
and, besides, what we require in this case is not the localisation of the
sensations within an absolute space, but within that variable surface of
the body, to the various points of which they are to be referred. We
must have learnt the shape of this surface beforehand, and have dis
covered through observation to what point / in it that impression A
belongs, which is characterised by the local sign ?r : until this is done
we cannot refer a second stimulus B TT to the same point in the surface
CHAPTER iv.] How can Touch-feelings form a series ? 507
of the body. This can be done easily enough if we can use our eyes ;
but how is it to be accomplished by the blind man, who, beyond these
feelings, has nothing to help him except movement ? Without doubt
the help that movement gives him is of decisive importance ; but how
it is possible to use this help is not so easy to understand as is often
supposed. While the movement is going on, we have of course a
certain definite feeling which accompanies it ; but then this feeling is
in itself nothing but a manner in which we are affected ; it itself does
not tell us — we have to guess — that it is caused by a movement of
the limbs. This discovery, again, is easy when we can use our eyes,
and so notice that our hand is changing its place while we are
experiencing the muscular feeling ; but the blind man has to make
out in some other way that the alteration of his general feeling is not
a mere change of his internal state, but depends on the variable rela
tion into which he or his bodily organs enter towards a series of
permanent external objects.
Now it seems to me that the condition which makes such a know
ledge as this attainable, consists in this, — that the skin, like the eye,
has a number of sensitive and moveable points. If an organ of touch
in the shape of an antenna possessed in its tip the sole point at which
the skin of the whole body was sensitive ; and if its capacities were
strictly limited at every moment to the power of bringing one single
object-point A to perception, the result would be that, when a move
ment of this organ led from A to £, the perception of A would alto
gether disappear and the wholly new perception of B would take its
place. No doubt while this was going on a muscular feeling x would
have been experienced ; but how could it occur to us to interpret that
feeling as the effect of a spatial movement ? However often we passed
from A to B and from B to A, and experienced the feelings + x, we
should never discover what those feelings really signified ; this transi
tion would remain a perfectly mysterious process, of which all we knew
would be that it transformed our idea A into B. On the other hand,
if the hand, like the eye, can feel the three impressions A B C at
once ; if this image of pressure changes during the movement by
regular stages into BCD, CDE\ and if by a movement in the
opposite direction we can again reach the parts that have disappeared,
or grasp them with one hand while the other moves away from them,
these facts must certainly tend to suggest the idea that the muscular
feelings which accompany the succession of sensations arise from a
variable relation of ourselves towards independent objects — that is,
from movement. As soon as this is discovered, it is possible — in a
508 The Formation of our Ideas of Space.
way which I need not further describe— for the limitless variety of
combination between the sensations of that part of the body which
touches, and the not less sensitive part which is touched, to conduct
us to a knowledge of the surface of our body, and to the localisation
and arrangement of our single sensations in that surface.
CHAPTER V.
The Physical basis of Mental Activity.
IN passing on to consider the forms in which soul and body act on
one another, I must observe that there are a number of special ques
tions for the answers to which there is not as yet any sufficient
foundation ; and of these I do not consider it my duty to treat. All
that can be considered proper to this metaphysical discussion are the
fundamental conceptions used by various theories in interpreting the
facts. We may leave out of sight an infinity of so-called experiences,
all of which are not by any means equally well attested, and which
alter every day with the progress of observation. They will gradually
define the object of some future theory, but, so far at least, they do
not contribute to the criticism of these metaphysical foundations.
291. It has been said that the soul is the same thing ideally that
the body is really ; or that the two are the different sides of a single
whole. Such wide expressions will not give us what we want. When
once we have distinguished body and soul as two parties between
which manifold interactions take place, we need ideas more definite
and more capable of being pictured, in order to conceive the pro
cesses through which these reciprocal influences make themselves felt.
And among the questions which require a clear and unambiguous
answer is that concerning the spatial relations of the soul — the
question, to adopt the current phraseology, of the seat of the soul.
There was a time when some philosophers looked down with pity on
the maladroitness supposed to be involved in the very asking of this
question. Nevertheless, unprejudiced persons will always raise it
afresh ; and therefore it must be answered and not ignored. I might
attempt to answer it at once, by connecting it with the preceding
discussions ; but I prefer to leave them out of sight, and to repeat the
considerations by which on other occasions I have attempted to
indicate my view. Let us take, then, the various ideas which are
really intelligible to us respecting the spatial relations of anything
5 1 o The Physical basis of Mental Activity. [ BOOK m.
capable of action, and which we are in the habit of applying to them,
and ask which of them answers to the special case of the human soul.
292. To be in a place means simply and solely to exert action
from that place and to experience the actions or effects that reach
that place : if we put these two powers out of sight, it is impossible
to attach any meaning to the assertion that a thing is at this place p
and is not at that other place g, where, as at /, it neither exerts nor
experiences any action. Now it is possible to conceive an existence
standing in a direct, and at the same time an identical, relation of
interaction with all the other elements of the world. There is one
case in which this is a current idea ; it expresses what we mean by
the omnipresence of God. No element of the world needs to travel
a long road, or to call in the help of other things in order to bring
its own state to the presence and knowledge of God ; nor have the
divine influences to make a journey in order to reach distant things :
the interaction here is perfectly direct. But then it is also one and
the same in all cases, and has not different degrees ; at any rate there
is no measure of distance, according to which the interaction is
necessarily stronger or weaker ; the only reason why its work may be
greater in one case than in another is that the meaning of things, or
of what goes on in things, gives a reason for an interaction of greater
weight in one instance and of less weight in another. In this alone
consists our conception of omnipresence : the infinite spatial ex
tension which forms the theatre of that omnipresence we are far
from ascribing to God as an attribute of His nature ; and on the
other hand we see no contradiction between the plurality of the
points at which His activity manifests itself, and the perfect unity of
His nature.
Now the attempt has often been made to ascribe this omnipresence
to the soul, within the limits, that is, of the body in which it resides :
andjthe cause of this mistaken idea is most commonly to be found in
the aesthetic impression which makes it seem as though the whole of
the body were penetrated by a psychical life, and every part of it were
the immediate seat of sensation and a direct organ of the will. But
there are some simple physiological facts which show us that this
beautiful semblance of omnipresence is the result of a number of
intermediating agencies ; that the soul knows nothing of the stimuli
that reach the body, and loses its power of setting up movements the
moment the continuity of the conducting nerve is broken ; that there
fore the space within which body and soul act directly on one
another is limited, and must be found somewhere, though we cannot
CHAPTER V.] Soilt S direct aCtlOH JlOW limited? 51 I
yet define its limits, within the central portions to which all im
pressions are conducted, and from which all impulses to voluntary
movements start. We may refuse to believe this ; we may answer
that a natural feeling tells us all that the soul feels directly in the
touching hand, and that this natural feeling cannot be created by such
intervening agencies. But the objection will not help us. There are
certain peculiar double feelings of contact which arise when we touch
an object with an instrument held in the hand ; but we do not con
sider ourselves justified in concluding from this that the soul can
occasionally prolong its activity to the end of a stick or a probe.
And yet we fancy that we have a direct feeling at that point of their
contact with a foreign body.
293. The natural sciences have familiarised us with the idea of
another interaction, which is direct, but also graduated. This is our
notion of the attractive and repellent fundamental forces of masses.
These forces need no intermediation ; they send their action to infinite
distances, whether the space traversed by that action is full or empty;
but the intensity of the action diminishes with the increase of the dis
tance. If we applied this notion to the present case, we should con
ceive of the seat of the soul as a point, or at least as a limited district
of the brain, on which the interactions of the soul with the surround
ing parts would be at the maximum of intensity, while the further
they left it behind the more they would diminish in strength, although
actually extending to infinity. But a sober observation finds no
witness to this outward activity. The slightest intervening space that
separates things from our senses makes them simply non-existent to
us, except where there are verifiable processes through which we act
on things indirectly, and they on us, and which therefore help us over
this spatial interval. Any amount of freedom being permitted in sup
positions of this kind, the assumption might be suggested that the
force of the soul diminishes in the ratio of a very high power of the
distance ; in this case it might exert no observable influence upon
the lengths of nerve which extend even a slight distance from its
mysterious seat. All that is certain is that, however close to the root
of the nerve a breach of its continuity may be, the outgoing force
of the soul is never able to produce on the other side of this breach
the effects which it commonly produces in the nerve. But, be this
as it may, to assume that there is a fixed limit — whether the surface
of the body, or the smaller zone within which the roots of the nerves
lie — at which the outgoing force ceases to operate, is simply equiva
lent to a surrender of this whole point of view. There is nothing in
5 1 2 The Physical basis of Mental Activity, t BOOK in.
one spherical surface of empty space that can make it, rather than
any other such surface, the limit at which an activity ceases to diffuse
itself. If there is any such limit, the reason of its existence must lie
in the fact that the force does not stream outward aimlessly through
empty space, but that there are other real conditions on which its
activity and the absence of its activity depend.
294. But it is not worth while to pursue any further this idea of
limited action at a distance. There is a more decided view, which
has always been preferred to it, and to which many natural processes
bear witness. According to this view, action never takes place ex
cept in contact, and therefore we must assume one single seat of the
soul, fixed or variable, in the form of a point ; and apart from other
reasons a local habitation of this kind appeared most suited to that,
which is immaterial and a unity. Yet this idea was at once found to
involve a crowd of difficulties. Let us first suppose the seat of the
soul to be, not changeable but fixed. In this case we must assume
either that all the nerve-fibres join at this point of intersection, or else
that there is a formless space— whether parenchyma or cavity — into
which all nervous excitations discharge themselves, and are able to
reach the soul which resides at some point of this space. But as to
the point of intersection, anatomy, instead of discovering it, has simply
made its existence incredible ; and as little is it possible to discover a
formless space, having edges where all the nerve-fibres terminate, and
offering a field within which the excitations of these fibres can spread
until they reach the soul. It might possibly be the case that the soul
needs no such primary assembly of all the primitive fibres, but stands
in direct interaction with a few of them, which would be, as it were,
the delegates of the rest : but, so far, we know of no anatomical
fact which makes this probable. Secondly, then, we may suppose that
the place where the soul resides is not fixed but moveable. This
idea leads us back to the notion of limited action at a distance. At
any given moment the soul would have to be at the particular spot,
where an excitation is arriving — an excitation which cannot become a
sensation unless the soul is there ; and if it is to be at this spot, it
must have been already acted upon from this spot and so induced to
move to it. Finally, if the soul is to impart an impulse to the root of
a motor nerve, it must move to the spot from which it can exert this
impulse : but as the motor nerve is not yet active it cannot solicit the
soul to move to this spot, and therefore the soul must itself choose its
line of movement and follow it: and this implies a knowledge of
locality which no one will admit.
CHAPTER v.] Action no t dependent on Position. 513
But is all this really necessary ? Is it really necessary to assume any
one of these alternatives ? — either that the activity of the soul pene
trates indiscriminately the whole body or that it penetrates, again
indiscriminately but with decreasing intensity, space simply as space;
or finally that the soul is confined to one point and acts only in con
tact? The root of all these difficulties seems to be a confusion in our
idea of the nature of an acting force and of the relation of this force
to space. And there is no lack of other examples which will enable
us to arrive at a more correct conception.
295. Any force arises between two elements out of a relation of
their qualitative natures; a relation which makes an interaction
necessary for them, but only for them and their like. It is altogether
a mistake to regard a force as a hunger for action, spreading itself
throughout a space and seizing indiscriminately on everything it finds
in that space. We should do better to think of the magnetic force,
which within the provinces over which it extends operates on no
bodies but those which can be magnetised, and remains indifferent to
those with which, though they lie within the same space, it has no
elective affinity. Or we may think of the chemical reagents which,
when poured into a fluid, pass without acting by the substances which
are indifferent to them, while they supplement those with which their
chemical nature makes it necessary for them to join. These examples
prove nothing, and the idea they are meant to illustrate is intelligible
without them, but they enable us to picture it. It is not their spatial
position that compels the elements to act on .one another or makes
such interaction impossible ; but it is their own natures and the relations
between them that make some elements indifferent to each other and
impel others to a vigorous copartnership. If we apply this general
idea to the present case, our first assertion must be this : wherever
the soul may have its local habitation (for it may be still held that we
must assume that it has such a habitation), the extension of its activity
will not be determined by its position there : this position will not
confine the soul to an interaction with those nerve-elements which
surround and touch that habitation: nor will its activity start from
this centre, and, like a physical force acting in distant, extend with a
decreasing intensity to all the elements which are grouped at an
increasing distance around that centre. On the contrary, wherever
there are elements with which the nature of the soul enables and
compels it to interact, there it will be present and active ; wherever
there is no such summons to action, there it will not be or will appear
not to be.
VOL. i. L 1
5 1 4 The Physical basis of Mental Activity, t BOOK m.
Now doubtless it is pleasant to the imagination to represent the
elements that stand in this sympathetic relation to the soul as in
spatial proximity to one another, and, where this is possible, to picture
a small extended province of the brain, best of all, a single point,
where they are all assembled. But there is no necessity in real earnest
for tl^is hypothesis. We have reached the conviction that spatial
positions and spatial distances are not in themselves conditions of the
exercise or non-exercise of forces, and that they form such conditions
only because they themselves are the manifestation of forces1 which
are already active and determine the continuance and progress of the
action. We have seen that to be in a place means nothing but to
exert action and to be affected by action in that place, and that the
sufficient grounds of this action and affection lie nowhere but in the
intelligible relations of existences in themselves non-spatial. With
this conviction of this insight we can now take up again, in a better
defined shape, the idea of that omnipresence of the soul in the body
which, as we explained in dealing with it, we could not help rejecting.
The soul stands in that direct interaction which has no gradation, not
with the whole of the world nor yet with the whole of the body, but
with a limited number of elements ; those elements, namely* which
are assigned in the order of things as the most direct links of com
munication in the commerce of the soul with the rest of the world.
On the other hand there is nothing against the supposition that these
elements, on account of other objects which they have to serve, are
distributed in space ; and that there are a number of separate points in
the brain which form so many seats of the soul. Each of these would
be of equal value with the rest ; at each of them the soul would be
present, with equil completeness, but not therefore without any dis
tinction; rather we might suppose that at each of them the soul
exercises one of those diverse activities which ought never to have
been compressed into the formless idea of merely a single outgoing
force. In using the current conception of omnipresence we refused
to attribute to God, as a predicate of His nature, the infinite cubic
extension which His activity fills ; and we could see no danger to the
unity of His nature in the infinite number of distinct points which
form the theatre of that activity,: and there is just as little conflict
between the unity of the soul and the multiplicity of its spatial habita
tions. Each of them is simply an expression, in the language of our
spatial perception, for one of the manifold relations in which the soul
as taking part in the intelligible connexion of things is at one and the
1 [Cp. §§ 116 and 203.]
CHAPTER v.] Where the Soul acts on the Brain. 515
same time involved. Our imagination naturally and unavoidably
symbolises this unity, no less than the variety, in a spatial way. We
shall therefore be inclined to oppose to these many places a single
one which is really and truly the seat of the soul. Perhaps it will be
the fixed geometrical central point of all the rest ; perhaps it will be
a variable central point, and then we must conceive it to be determined
not geometrically but dynamically as the joint result of the spatial co
ordinates of the distinct places on the one hand and the intensities
of the psychical activities going on in them at the given time on the
other. Such ideas do no harm and they act as supports to our per
ception : but they have no objective meaning ; for the point arrived
at by such a calculation as the above, would not express a real fixed
position of the soul in that point at the given moment, nor would it
give us grounds for determining anything whatever as to the behaviour
of the soul in the next succeeding moment.
296. But our view has to meet an objection coming from another
side, and will therefore have to undergo another and a final revision.
Observation discloses no such differences among the elements of the
brain as would give some few points in it the exclusive privilege of
forming the seat of the soul. And yet we have to suppose the existence
of such a special qualification. For if we were to widen our idea into
the supposition that the soul can stand in the direct relation of inter
action, above described, with all the constituent parts of the brain,
the laboriously intricate structure we find in it would become wholly
unintelligible. But is it necessary, is it even possible, to suppose that a
real existence A stands once for all in the relation of interaction with
other real existences B and C, simply because B is B and C is C, while
it stands in no such relation with D and E, just because they are D and
El In the first place, what is it that makes B to be B and C to be C
but this : that under different conditions (these conditions forming a
series) B experiences the states ^ /32 /33 . . . , and not y1 y.2 y3 . . . ,
whereas under the same conditions C experiences the latter states and
never the former ? And, in the second place, we have to suppose that
at one time an interaction takes place between A and B, and at
another time does not take place; and yet what would this inter
action mean, if A and B were simply A and B, and if A did not
undergo certain variable states c^ or a2, which formed signals to B to
realise forthwith ^ or /3.2, and no other of the states possible to it ?
Without doubt, then, our conception was still incomplete, when we
sought to place the soul S in a direct and ungraduated connexion of
interaction with different nerve-elements BCD, considered simply as
Ll2
5 1 6 T/ie Physical basis of Mental Activity, t BOOK HI.
such. Things cannot stimulate one another in respect of their un
changing natures ; they can only be stimulated in respect of what goes
on in them, and that reciprocally. Accordingly it is the events ft y 8
which occur in B C D that, in virtue of their occurrence, make these
points and no other points the seats or localities of a direct interaction
with the soul.
Starting from this point of view, then, we should be led in con
sistency to the following metaphysical conception of the significance of
the central organs. The interlacing of the nerve-fibres serves two ends.
First, it has to act upon the excitations which arrive from without
through the organs of sense, so to connect, separate, and arrange
them, that as the result there arise those final states £ y 8, which now
for the first time, and in their present shape, are in a condition to be
brought to the knowledge of the soul, or by which alone it is capable
of being stimulated. The second function is the converse of this.
The excitations which come from the inner nature of the soul, have
to be transformed into physical occurrences in such an order and
arrangement, that their centrifugal action on the moveable members
of the body will allow of an influence, answering to a conceived end,
on the shape of the external world. At the point where these duties
are fulfilled, lies a seat of the active soul, the locality of one of the
different functions, in the connected whole of which its life consists.
In an earlier passage I spoke of this point of view as one of the
hypotheses which might be framed in accordance with the facts to be
explained : it will now be seen that it is only the continuation of our
ontological views. We have left far behind us the theory which
conceived the world as based on a number of elements, beings, or
atoms, which simply ' are ' and form a primary fact, and between
which we then suppose actions to take place, the nature and
occurrence of these actions being thus of necessity grounded in
something external to the fixed existence of the primal elements.
We found that there is nothing in the fullest sense actual but the
one reality which is in eternal motion, and in the development of
which any member of the whole is connected with any other only
in accordance with the meaning of the whole, and stands in no such
connexion where the meaning of the whole does not warrant it. It
is only this connexion of events that gives to single stable conjunctions
of these manifold occurrences the appearance in our eyes of beings
with an independent existence ; in reality these conjunctions are only
the meeting points, or crossing points, of in-going and out-going
actions, which the significance of the course of events keeps in
CH AFTER v.i Precise functions of organs unknown. 517
being, and they form actual beings or existences only when, like the
soul, they do not simply appear to others as such centres, but really
make themselves such centres by opposing themselves, in conscious
ness and action, to the external world.
297. From the preceding account of the functions of the central
nervous organs we might conclude that their only business is to bring
about the commerce of the soul with the external world ; the internal
activity of the mind would seem not to need their co-operation.
Taken as a whole, I do not disclaim this inference, though it must be
limited in essential respects ; rather I regret that no further explana
tion is possible regarding those other operations, in which it is agreed
on all hands that the help of the body is needed. There are a very
large number of cases in which unfortunately we are not simply
unable to point out the means which would render the required
service, but we do not even know exactly what services are required.
And I mean this admission to apply not only to my own view, but to
many others which would be very unwilling to make a like confession.
We studied the retina of the eye, and the nerve-terminations found in
it : dioptrics revealed to us the passage of the rays of light, and their
point of meeting on the nerve-terminations: What more did we
want ? Were we not in complete possession of all the conditions (so
far as they can be fulfilled in the eye) implied in the occurrence of
visual perception ? And yet further investigation has discovered new
layers of a strange structure in the retina, of the use of which we
know nothing, and which yet can scarcely be useless. It is certain
then that we made a mistake in supposing our knowlege to be
complete, when we cannot tell the function of what is afterwards
discovered : and yet even now we cannot guess what part it was we
overlooked in the work the eye has to perform. Now in the case of
the brain we are equally at a loss : it is not merely that in the greater
part of its structure we find everywhere arrangements of the most
remarkable kind, and yet cannot tell their purpose : but even where
experience has disclosed to us with sufficient certainty the existence
of relations between psychical functions and particular parts of the
brain, we cannot get further than this very general result : no one can
specify the exact physical function their elements have to perform in
order that this or that definite expression of psychical activity may be
possible. Thus we talk in a highly perfunctory way of organs of this
or that mental faculty, without knowing very well what there is to
prevent the soul from manifesting itself without this organ, what
intelligible properties there are which enable this organ to supply
5 1 8 The Physical basis of Mental Activity. [ BOOK in.
the conditions lacking to the soul, and lastly in what way the soul is
enabled to make use of this organ as its instrument. This last idea
indeed, the idea of an instrument, is the most unsuitable of all that
could possibly be applied to the case. We may call the limbs of the
body instruments : for though we do not know how they follow out
our ideas, we are at any rate able consciously to connect the move
ments, which we do not understand in detail, so that they form the
means of carrying out an intention. But when we are told that man
cannot think with a frozen brain, it is only the obliging preposition
' with ' that gives these words the appearance of meaning something ;
for it seems to indicate that we are able to understand how gloriously
thought goes to work with an unfrozen brain as its instrument. If for
the preposition we substitute the conditional sentence which forms its
real meaning, — 'z/"the brain is frozen, man cannot think,' — the words
remind us only of what is perfectly familiar, the many conditions on
which life in general and therefore every mental activity depends, but
they tell us absolutely nothing of the nature of the service which these
conditions render to the realisation of these activities. Nothing can
help us over this state of ignorance, but the multiplication of exact
observations : all that remains for us to do here is to touch on the few
general ideas which we should wish not to be neglected when the new
knowledge we hope for comes to be interpreted.
298. The older psychology used to speak of a sensorium commune :
but it was not able to point it out, and the motive for assuming its
existence was probably only an indefinite desire for a place where all
sensations could be collected into a common consciousness. It may
be that in this matter we are in the position described in the last
section : perhaps there really is some function we have overlooked,
which is necessary to this end, and has to be performed by the
physical organs. But all that is certain is that we do not know of any
such function. So long, therefore, as we cannot point to definite
processes of modification, to which all impressions must submit before
they can become objects of consciousness, we have no ground at all
for supposing such a place of assembly for these impressions.
Modern physiology has sometimes spoken of a motorium commune,
and supposed it to be found in the cerebellum. But the movements
of the body show the utmost degree of variety ; and their classification
under the head of movements connects them no more closely with
one another than with other functions of the mind to which they are
conjoined in the economy of our life. We may suppose that the
manifold excitations of the muscles, which each species of animal
CHAPTER v.] The ' motorium commune/ 5 1 9
needs for its characteristic kind of locomotion, and for the preserva
tion of its equilibrium in different positions of the body, are really
dependent on a central organ, which compels them to occur in
company, and grouped in a way that answers this special purpose.
But I know no reason why we should make the same centre a con
dition of all the other movements, which are excited for other
purposes and by other occasions in the various limbs of the body.
Thus the idea of this general motory organ, again, seems to me to
owe its origin to a logical division of the psychical activities, and not
to a consideration of the connexion in which these activities have to
stand in supporting each other for the purposes of life. It is much
more likely that sensory and motor nerves are combined with one
another in various ways, so as to form central points for whole
complexes of exertions dependent on one another. Even the motorium
to which we ascribed the preservation of the equilibrium, would be
unable to perform its task unless it received at every instant an
impression of the threatening position which it has to counteract by a
compensating movement. And even if it is possible for this move
ment to be carried out in a perfectly mechanical way, and without the
participation of the soul, it is, in the ordinary course of events, at the
same time an object of our perception. It seems to me probable,
therefore, that this organ, too, consists in a systematic connexion of
sensory and motor fibres ; although the former do not always com
municate their excitations to consciousness, but sometimes simply
produce a movement by transferring their excitation to motor fibres.
Now among the organs which I should suppose to be formed in this
way, I should place first an organ of the perception of space : and I
am completely satisfied, although utterly unable to prove it, that in all
the higher kinds of animals this organ, dedicated in each case to a
function which appears everywhere the same, forms a considerable
part of the brain. If the hypotheses I have ventured respecting the
local signs of the sensations of sight be correct, the function of this
organ would be to connect the optical impressions with the motor
impulses of the eye. But how this function can be performed,
and in what form the efficient connexion of the sensory and motor
nerves is established, — these are questions on which I will offer no
conjecture.
299. In the second division of the functions of the central organs—
those functions which consist in the physical working out of the
internal impulses of the soul — there is one process with respect to
which the observations of the most recent times seem to have led to a
520 The Physical basis of Mental Activity. [ BOOK m.
secure result. It has been proved with sufficient certainty that an
organ of language is to be found at a particular spot in the large
hemispheres of the human brain. In order to understand the office of
this organ, let us glance at the different modes in which our move
ments in general arise. I put aside the purposeless twitchings which
occur in particular muscles, owing to internal irritations for the most
part unknown to us : but even with respect to the movements which
we produce at will in accordance with our intentions, we must confess
that we do not understand how they take place. We do not know by
nature either the structure of the limbs which gives the movement its
form, or the position of the muscles and nerves which carry it into
execution. Even if we did, there would remain a further question as
to which we are still in darkness, and which science also is not at
present able to answer : what is it exactly that we have to do, if we
are to give to the nerve that first impulse which produces in all this
preparatory mechanism the desired state of activity? It takes the
newly-born animal but a short time to acquire that control over its
limbs which characterises the genus to which it belongs ; and this fact
compels us to assume, not merely a succession of chance experiences
which gradually teach the animal that its limbs can be used, but also
internal impulses which call these experiences into being. On the one
hand, the external stimuli, by transferring their excitations to motor
nerves, will at once call forth connected groups of movements
combined in conformity with their common end ; on the other hand,
the central apparatus, on which this combination depends, may be
stimulated to activity from within by variable states of the body. The
sensory excitation then will produce in consciousness a sensation of
the stimulus, and at the same time the movement that occurs will
produce in consciousness the sensation of its occurrence, and the per
ception of its result ; and in this way the soul, playing at present the
part of a mere spectator, will have acquired the different elements of
an association which it can reproduce at a later time with a view to
its own ends. The soul cannot always produce of itself the efficient
primary state that would recreate the movement: sometimes this
movement demands, for its repetition, the complete reproduction of
the corporeal stimulus from which it sprang originally as a true reflex
movement. For example, up to a certain point one can imitate
coughing and sneezing at will, but one cannot bring about an actual
sneezing or vomiting without a fresh operation of their physical
excitants. Even the movements which depend on states of emotion
are only to a slight extent conjoined to the renewal of the mere ideas
CHAPTER v.] Psychical initiative of Motion. 521
of a pain or pleasure ; they depend on the renewal of the pain and
pleasure themselves. I refer to the familiar facts of bodily expression
and gesture — an endowment due to nature, and not to our invention —
involuntary manifestations of its internal psychical states, which the
soul simply witnesses without willing them, and, for the most part,
without being able to hinder them.
300. But what is the starting-point which the soul must produce
in order that the motor mechanism may execute exactly that move
ment which at the given instant answers to the psychical intention ? I
speak simply of a starting-point, because we certainly cannot suppose
that the soul exerts an independent and conscious control over the
details of the process, and metes out to the particular nerve-fibres,
which must be called into action in the given case, those precise
quantities of excitation which will secure the direction and strength of
the desired movement. In place of thus generating homogeneous
impulses, and merely giving them different directions in different
instances, it has to produce for different movements A and B
qualitatively different internal states a and /3; and these, instead of
being guided by it, seek and find their way for themselves, simply
because they are themselves and no other states. Let a and b be two
different motor central points, of which a connects into a whole the
single excitations necessary to A, and b those necessary to B : then a
will find its efficient response only in a, /3 only in b, while to other
nerves they will remain indifferent. If, again, both movements A and
B depend on the same central point, only that they depend on
different degrees of its excitation, then the strength of a and 3 will
determine also the strength of this excitation. If, lastly, one move
ment requires the simultaneous activity of both organs, then the
internal state y, which is to set up that activity, must contain the two
components a and /3, and these two components will determine the
share taken by a and b in the joint-result they have to produce. This
view of the origin of movement corresponds but little to ordinary
notions ; it leads us back to the often-repeated idea, that the ultimate
ground or reason of every action or effect lies in the fact that the two
elements which stand in this relation of interaction exist for one
another directly — that they stand, if the word may be used, in a direct
sympathetic rapport, which makes each receptive to the moods of the
other. There may be many intermediating processes producing the
conditions on which this rapport depends, or removing the hindrances
to it, but they are all mere preparations for the action ; the action
itself, which comes when they are finished, cannot be explained in its
522 The Physical basis of Mental Activity. [BOOK in.
turn by a similar machinery, between every pair of whose parts this
immediate sympathy would again be necessary, Our theory presents
difficulties to the imagination only if we take in literal earnest the
expression in which the internal state a or /3 is described as finding
its way to a or b. The internal state has not really any way to traverse ;
for the soul in which it arises is not placed at some distant spot in
space, from whence it has to send out its influence in search of the
organs that are to serve it. The soul, without its unity being on that
account endangered, is itself everywhere present where, in the con
nexion of all things, its own states have attached to them the
consequent states of other elements.
301. When the soul then reproduces within itself these starting-
points, they proceed, without any further interference or knowledge
on its part, and in obedience to a mechanism which was not invented
by us and remains concealed from us, to produce as a final result the
actual movement. We now naturally ask the further question in what
precisely do these starting-points consist? A very close approach
has already been made to our view when it is asserted that, if the
movement is to become actual, we must will, not the movement itself,
but the end of it, and that then the movement will take place of itself.
But the question is, What is this willing of the end? The imitative
movements with which the devout spectator accompanies the actions
of the fencer or skittle-player, or by which an unskilful narrator tries
to portray the objects he speaks of, might convince us that, in the
absence of hindrances, the mere idea of a movement passes of itself
into the actual movement. And if we take this point of view, we may
really leave the influence of the will out of account. For whatever
else it may consist in, and whatever positive contribution, over and
above the mere absence of resistance, it may make to our movements,
still its function in reference to a given movement a, distinguished
from another b, will consist essentially in this, — that it favours the
definite ground or reason a or /3, which leads to the one or the other
of these movements ; and the nature of this starting-point or ground
is precisely the question we were concerned with. On the other hand,
I certainly do not think we need look for this starting-point in the
idea, at any rate not in the visual ideas of the movement ; although
innumerable little acts of our daily life are directly conjoined, without
any consideration or resolution of the will, to the ideas arising in us
of a possible and desirable movement ; and though they even seem
to be conjoined, without the intermediation of an idea at all, to the
mere perception of the object with which the act may deal. Taken
CHAPTER v.] A feeling produces Innervalion. 523
by itself the visual idea would signify nothing more than the some
what abstract fact that a moveable limb is at this moment at the spot
p in space, and at the next moment at the spot q ; but it would contain
none of the concrete interest for us which is given to this fact by
the circumstance that we are the cause of the visual idea and that our
limbs are the object, whose spatial positions are in question. Thus
the starting-point or state, which the soul has to reproduce in itself
in order that, conversely, the actual movement may be conjoined to
that state is not, I conceive, the idea of the movement, but rather the
feeling which we experience during the execution of the movement
and in consequence of its execution. It is common in physiology
now to speak of feelings of innervation, but I should not choose that
name to describe what I mean. The case is not, I think, that there
is an act, consisting in an influencing of the nerve, and directed now
here and now there, but in other respects always of the same nature; and
that this act is on the one hand what we feel, and on the other hand
what according to the direction given to it produces this movement
a or that movement b. The case is rather that this feeling itself, its
mere unhindered existence, constitutes that internal condition of the
soul which effects an innervation proceeding from it and affecting in
all cases a particular complex of nerves. There are some very simple
facts of experience which seem to me to confirm this view. A
beginner finds it difficult to hit a certain musical note or a given
uttered sound, and then there is this special difficulty that the neces
sary movements are not completely visible ; but we also find that any
other movement which is at all complicated, continues, even though it
be fully measured by the eye, to be difficult to us until we have once
succeeded in it. Then we know how we must/^/ if we wish to
repeat it, and that feeling ?r, — or, to state the matter as we did in the
case of the local signs, that first link TTO in the series of momentary
muscular feelings which followed one another during the actual
movement, — has to be reproduced if the movement is to be repeated;
and we consider the movement to be successful, and to answer our
intention, if the repeated series TT is identical with the series we
remember.
302. If, taking these results as our presuppositions, we now return
to the organ of language, our account will be as follows : the idea of
that which we wish to designate awakes the idea of the sound of its
name, and this idea awakes the idea of the muscular feeling TT which
is necessary to the utterance of the name ; and to this last idea is
conjoined the movements of the organs of speech. But here we
524 The Physical basis of Mental Activity. \ BOOK in.
come to a standstill; we cannot determine what contributions the
organ has to make to this end. Since the feeling TT arose from the
physical excitations experienced by the muscles when first the move
ment was executed, it seems a tenable hypothesis that the reawakening
of this feeling in the soul must produce (to begin with) a general
state of physical excitation in the organ, and that this state then,
in conformity with the structure and internal states of the organ,
divides into the various components which give their particular
impulses to the executing nerves and muscles. The morbid phenomena
produced by an injury to the organ, as well as many simple pheno
mena of daily life — those of passion, intoxication, and others — show
that this chain of processes may be interrupted at various points ;
there may be a correct image of the object, though the idea of sound
united with it is false ; or the latter may be still distinct to us, but
we are annoyed to find that the spoken word does not correspond
with it. But these disturbances again give us no exact information
respecting the function of the organ in its healthy state. It is easy
to talk of telegraphic conductions and perverted connexions of
them, but this is nothing but a way of picturing the observed facts ;
and images are useless unless one can confront every single line of
them with the real process which corresponds to them point for point.
The other movements of the body are subject to similar disturbances ;
but these I must leave to the pathological works in which interesting
descriptions of them may be found. Whatever anatomical basis is
given to that feeling which instructs us respecting the position, the
movement, and the amount of exertion of our limbs, the fact remains
that, wherever this feeling is diminished or disappears, we find it
difficult or impossible to execute movements, the idea of which is
none the less present to consciousness, as the idea of a task to be
accomplished.
303. Phrenology has attempted to connect with corporeal bases
the activities commonly ascribed to the higher faculties of the mind.
We cannot say that the observations on which this attempt rests have
no significance ; but phrenology should have confined its efforts to
talents whose nature is unambiguous, such as can scarcely conceal
themselves where they really exist, and never can be simulated where
they do not. It was of little use to speak offhand of peculiarities of
disposition and character, respecting which our knowledge of man
kind is easily deceived, and which, where they are actually present,
may owe their existence to the co-operation of very various influences
of life and education. If this limitation were observed, an accurate
CHAPTER V. ] Phrenology. 525
comparison might then give us, not indeed an explanatory theory,
but trustworthy information establishing a connexion between parti
cular facts of bodily and of mental development. These facts would
then have to be interpreted ; and we cannot tell what the result of a
conscientious attempt to interpret them would be. But at any rate
it is quite impossible to put any faith in the cherished notion that
every one of the capacities and inclinations enumerated in the phreno
logical plans has a local subdivision of the brain assigned to it as its
particular organ : for each of these peculiarities, considered psycho
logically, is the final outcome of the co-operation of a number of
more general psychical functions, and any one of them is distinguished
from any other by the different proportions in which the manifesta
tions of these more general activities co-operate. It is only in the
case of these general activities that phrenology can hope to discover
a dependence on the structure of the brain or skull ; and even this
hope depends on the very doubtful assumption that fundamental
faculties, whose business is a constant and close interaction, would
find their needs answered by a localisation of their organs at different
spatial positions.
But I pass from these questions, for no one can decide them ; I may
hold it to be in general a natural assumption that, supposing a material
mass to be necessary to the manifestation of a mental function, that
manifestation will be more intense according to the size of the
mass ; but for the higher mental life I believe much more im
portance is to be attached to the quantity, multiplicity, and intensity
of the stimuli afforded by the body to the excitation of an activity,
which in its innermost nature or work seems neither to need nor
to be accessible to any further physical help. But the contri
butions which the bodily organisation thus makes to the vivacity
and colouring of the psychical life, need not consist exclusively in
structural relations of the brain. They may come from all parts
of the body ; from those delicate mechanical and chemical dif
ferences of texture which are not less real because we imperfectly
describe them as contrasts between tense and lax fibres; from the
architecture of the whole which allows to one organ a more extensive
and to another a less extensive development. For all these pecu
liarities of the solid parts give a special stamp to the play of the
functions and the mixture of the fluids, and in this way they are
continually bringing to consciousness a large quantity of small
stimuli, the total effect of which is that dominating tone or general
feeling, under whose influence the labour of the mental forces is
526 The Physical basis of Mental Activity. [BOOK in.
always carried on. A part of these bodily influences we know by
the name of the temperaments, which need not be described here, and
the definite assignment of which to physical bases has never yet been
achieved. As peculiar forms taken by our internal states, in accord
ance with which the excitability of our ideas, emotions, and efforts, is
greater or smaller, one-sided or many-sided, passing or continuous,
and their changes are slower or more rapid, the temperaments
condition in the most extensive way the whole course of mental
development. And although the body does not by the physical forces
of its masses directly create the faculties of the soul, it forms
in this indirect manner one of the powers which control their
exercise.
304. We in no way share the view which conceives the activities
of the soul materialistically as an effect of its bodily organs, and, as
a matter of fact, every attempt hitherto made to connect its higher
functions with given substrates has proved fruitless : yet there are
many facts which require us to consider the general dependence of
consciousness on states of the body. The name consciousness cannot
now be withdrawn from use ; but it has this inconvenience, that it
seems to represent as an independent existence something which is
really only possible in inseparable union with those variable states
which we conceive as occurrences happening to it. We all know
that consciousness *, or being conscious, means only being conscious
in oneself of something ; the idea of consciousness is incomplete if we
omit from it either the subject, or the something which this subject
knows or is conscious of. But in handling special questions we often
forget this, and lapse into various fancies ; sometimes we imagine a
bodily organ, which prepares consciousness in general for the use of
a soul which is to employ it, in application to a content that may
come into it; sometimes we dream of a special faculty of the soul
itself which produces the same curious result ; or at any rate we figure
consciousness itself as the natural and constant state of the mind —
a state which is not, properly speaking, unreal and inoperative even
when it is completely prevented from appearing. In opposition to
these ideas we are ready to admit that it is only in the moment of a
sensation that consciousness exists as that activity of the soul which
directs itself to the content felt ; and that it forms a continuous state only
in so far as the multiplicity of simultaneous or successive exertions of
this activity does itself, as before described 2, form the object or exciting
1 [The German word das Bewusstsein, -which we translate 'consciousness,' means
literally ' conscious-being,' or ' the being conscious.'] 2 [Sect. 271.]
CHAPTER v.] The cause of unconsciousness. 527
cause of a new act of representation — an act by which we form an
idea of this multiplicity. Accordingly we should agree that a soul
which never experienced a first stimulus from without, would never,
as we say, awake to consciousness : but the question remains whether,
when once the play of this internal activity has been started, it can
carry on an independent existence, or whether it remains as dependent
on bodily causes for its continuance as it was for its excitation.
Now the states of unconsciousness offered to observation by natural
sleep, swooning, diseases, and injuries of the central organs, have
made the conclusion seem probable to many minds that nothing but
the constant continuance of physical processes contains productive
conditions of consciousness. By this we need not understand that
the activity, in which consciousness at every moment of its actual
presence consists, is the private and peculiar product of a bodily
organ ; the functions of this organ may be no more than stimuli
which, but for the particular nature of the soul, would be unable to
win from it an activity which is possible to it alone : yet, even so, this
activity will still be the production of the organ, so long as its exercise
has for its indispensable cause the excitation of that organ. Now on
a previous occasion1 I thought it necessary to remind my readers
that the cessation of an activity previously in a state of exercise can,
generally speaking, be explained in either, of two ways ; it may be that
the productive conditions of. its appearance are absent, or, again, that
there is a hindering force which opposes its exercise. None of the
phenomena mentioned above seemed to me to preclude the second
of these ideas. When a sudden fright interrupts consciousness, the
physical impression made on the senses by the fact that causes terror
may be perfectly harmless3 and the reason of our disquietude lies in
the interpretation which our judgment puts on the perception : in this
case we can see no reason why this psychical movement should not be
the direct cause which makes the soul incapable of a continuance
of its consciousness, no reason for the supposition that the bodily
fainting, which can have its cause only in itself, must intervene and
produce, as a secondary effect, the loss of mental activity. When
disease slowly clouds over the consciousness, this final result is
commonly preceded by a series of feelings of discomfort in which we
can see the beginning of the check that is going on, just as in health
trifling depressions of mind make a continuance of mental activity
distressing though not impossible. But it is not, we may generally
say, necessary that the influences which check consciousness should
1 [See Lotze's Medidnische Psychologic (Leipsic, 1852), § 388 ff]
528 The Physical basis of Mental A ctivity. t BOOK in.
at the beginning of their hindering action be themselves an object of
our consciousness. We must remember that of that which is going
on in our nerves and of the mode of their influence on the soul we
experience nothing: it is only the final result of these processes,
the sensation, or the feeling of pleasure and pain, that appears in
consciousness ; and, when it does appear, it tells us nothing of the
mode in which it was brought about. In the same way then, when
bodily excitations, instead of producing consciousness, check it,
it is possible for their action to remain unnoticed until unconsciousness
suddenly supervenes. Injuries of the brain, lastly, can hardly be
defined with any probability as the clean disappearance of an organ
and the excitation dependent on it; they will probably always in
clude positive changes in the organs that remain, and in the activity
of those organs, and from these organs they will develope forces that
check consciousness.
These were the general remarks on which I formerly relied ; but at
bottom they only had a significance in opposition to the view which
took consciousness to be the direct product of the work of a bodily
organ, and they have not much to say against the other view which
conceives activities, in their own nature mental, to be evoked anew in
every moment by the constant excitation of the nerves, and to be
capable of continuance in this way alone. Many facts, which have
been more accurately observed in late years, favour this idea. We
know that animals can be sent to sleep, if a compulsion, lasting some
little time but causing no pain, deprives them of all movement, and if
at the same time all external sense-stimuli are shut out, and so any
new sensation prevented : it follows that the internal changes con
ditioned by the transformation of substances by tissue-change, and
by nutrition, are not sufficient to preserve in them the waking state
which preceded the experiment. It is not quite safe to argue from
brutes to men ; but in any case it is certain enough that men too fall
asleep from ennui, and quite lately a remarkable case of prolonged
anaesthesia (Dr. Strumpell, Deutsches Arch. f. Klin. Med. XXII) has
proved that in the case of men also the same experimental conditions
that were applied to animals can rapidly produce sleep. Nevertheless
it remains doubtful whether all these facts tell us anything new, or
whether they only present, no doubt in highly remarkable circum
stances, what we knew before. With regard to the animals success
fully experimented on, we do not know whether there is any impulse
in them tending to extend the course of their ideas in any con
siderable degree beyond the contents of their sensuous perception;
CHAPTER v.i Has Memory a Corporeal Basis f 529
in the case of ennui, we know that for the moment this impulse is
absent, while the sensations of the special senses are not absent, and
it is only the lack of interest in them that removes the stimulus to
follow up what is perceived with an attention that would find relations
in it. Thus we seem to have found nothing but what needs no
explanation : where the external and internal impulses which stir the
soul to activity are absent, this activity is absent, and the lack of it
may form the point of departure for that further depression of nervous
irritability by which at last sleep is distinguished from waking.
305. Before I attempt to give some final view on this subject, I
have still to mention that alternation of consciousness and uncon
sciousness which is presented to us in the forgetting of ideas and their
recollection. Everyone knows the views which regard memory and
recollection as possible only by means of a corporeal basis ; according
to this view some physical trace of every perception must have
remained in the brain, a trace which, it would be admitted, would
gradually entirely disappear if no occasion for its renewal occurred.
It would be unjust to require a closer description of these abiding
impressions ; but a consideration of the precise requirements they
must fulfil does not, as it seems to me, reveal the advantages which
this hypothesis is thought to possess when compared with a theory
which regards these processes as merely psychical. I raise no objec
tion to the idea that the simultaneous stimuli traversing the brain in
extraordinary numbers, leave behind them an equal number of traces
which do not intermix : that for a moment, at least, these traces can
remain unintermixed is proved by the fact that they help us to form
an equally large number of separate perceptions ; but this very fact at
the same time proves that the unity of the psychical subject holding
these perceptions together in its consciousness, is, no less than the
brain, capable of a simultaneous multiplicity of states which remain
apart from one another. This, however, was the very point respecting
which these theories at starting expressed mistrust : a material system,
consisting of a large number of parts, seemed to them better adapted
to the purpose of receiving and preserving a number of impressions
than the indivisible unity of an immaterial substance. But the theory
does not get rid of the necessity of ascribing these capacities to such
a substance, as well as to the brain ; unless indeed we are prepared
to return to the old mistake of confusing a multiplicity of impressions
distributed in the brain with the perception of this multiplicity. As
we proceed, the duties demanded alike of brain and soul are multiplied
at the same rate for both. If we approach an object, there is only one
VOL. i. Mm
5 so The Physical basis of Mental A ctivity. i BOOK m.
point of it — that which our glance continuously fixes — that throws its
image constantly on one and the same element of the retina ; all the
other points, as the apparent size of the object increases with our
approach to it, make their impression from moment to moment on
fresh spots in the nerve. Thus, if this one object is to be perceived,
countless images must be represented within a short time, and that in
such a manner that every part a of the object leaves traces in countless
elements pqr . . . of the brain, while each of these elements again receives
such traces impressed upon it by all the parts abc . . . . An intermixture
of these latter images would be of no service to the act of representing
the object ; each single material atom will in its turn have to preserve
countless impressions without intermixture — the very same task which
this theory refused to entrust to the unity of the soul — and on both
sides the functions to be performed multiply immeasurably when,
instead of one object, there are many to be perceived.
But the important point was not this preservation itself, but the
service it can render to memory when only a part a b of a composite
image is given by a new perception, and the parts cde which belong
to it have to be supplied. If we suppose that the new impression a b
now affects the same nerve-elements p and q which it affected before,
it is conceivable that the trace of it still remaining may be somehow
called to life again in those elements ; but how does it come about
that p and q renew in other nerve-elements, r and s, the traces of the
impressions c and d which formerly affected them — these impressions
c and d being precisely those which united with a and b will form the
image that has to be recollected ? It may be answered that the
psychological view of the matter equally demands that a peculiar
connexion should be established between those impressions which
occur simultaneously, or, if successively, with no intervening link :
that the very same solidarity obtains between the abiding remnants of
the nerve-excitations ; that, if time be conceived as a line of abscissa's
those of equal abscissa form such an associated group. And this
stratified deposition of the impressions, supposing it admitted, might
indeed explain why their reproduction would take the direction from
a b only to c d, and not to any / q belonging to another stratum ; but
the mechanical possibility of the process itself which takes this direction
would remain in obscurity. For we cannot misuse the metaphor to
such an extent as to regard the simultaneous states of all the nerve
elements as a connected stratum, the continuity of which produces the
result that a vibration of one point sets all the rest vibrating in those
forms in which they formerly vibrated in this stratum, and not in those
CHAPTER v.] Memory and ' General Feeling! 531
forms in which they vibrated in other strata. It could be nothing but
the nature of the impressions a and b that in its turn revives the others
c and d which are connected with them : and since there is no reason
why a by itself or b by itself should reproduce c or d any more than
many other impressions, it can be nothing but the concurrent existence
of a and b that limits the selection to those impressions that really
belong to them. This implies not only that the single nerve-elements
in which a and b are revivified, interact on each other, so that the fact
of the concurrent existence of those two impressions is transformed
into an efficient resultant, by which the reawakening of c and d can be
brought about ; but, over and above this, those nerve-elements which
are now to contribute c and d, can only add this definite contribution
to the whole, if the fact of the previous simultaneity of their im
pressions c and d with a and b has left behind in them, too, a
permanent disposition to answer this and no other solicitation with
this and no other response.
I will not pursue the investigation further. Its final outcome seems
to me clear : the hypothesis must transfer to every single nerve-
atom precisely the same capacity of an ordered association and
reproduction of all successive states which the psychological view
claims for the soul. How these two occurrences (this association and
reproduction) come about we have confessed that we do not know ;
but it is utterly vain to hope that a physical construction can enable
us to understand them without presupposing that the same enigmatical
process is repeated in every element of matter.
306. These considerations would all be useless, if interruption of
memory occasioned by bodily suffering admitted of no explanation
whatever in consonance with our views. Unfortunately I cannot
maintain that what I have been saying makes such a satisfactory
explanation possible ; but this does not seem to me to diminish
the impossibility of those other views which localise particular groups
of ideas or particular remembrances off-hand at definite places in the
central organs. All that we can, properly speaking, be said to observe
is not an absence of memory, but merely the incapacity to reproduce
ideas, which, according to the ordinary view, may nevertheless still be
present as unconscious ideas, only that the associations are wanting,
by help of which they might be restored to consciousness. This
account, apart from a further definition, would do no more than
explain the total forgetting of ideas of which there is nothing what
ever to remind us ; whereas in the cases of morbid interruption of
memory, the sensuous perceptions frequently go on unhindered, and
M m 2
532 The Physical basis of Mental A ctivity. t BOOK in.
bring with them a quantity of impressions, associated in manifold
ways with the forgotten ideas : and yet the restoration of these ideas
to memory does not take place.
There is only one supposition that I can suggest, and I am not sure
myself whether it does not push to exaggeration a conception which
in itself is valid. Ideas are connected not only with one another, but
also in the closest way with the general feeling g of our total state at
the moment of their origin. If g changes into y, and it is impossible
to us to experience g again, the way is barred which might lead our
memory back to the ideas connected with g : in whatever numbers
single ideas among these may be reproduced by new perceptions,
still the common bond is absent, which connected them together as
our states, and thus made those contents of theirs, which in them
selves were reciprocally indifferent,.capable of reciprocal re-excitation.
It is in this way that I should attempt to interpret the facts that, when
we have recovered from severe illness, we do not remember what we
experienced while it lasted, or while, before its outbreak, our general
feeling was already changed ; that, when we are free from the
paroxysm of fever, we do not remember sets of ideas which ac
company it, and that in particular cases these sets of ideas are carried
on when the next paroxysm occurs, owing to the return of the morbid
general feeling: that unusual depression sometimes brings long-
forgotten things to remembrance, while in other cases of the same
kind things familiar to us affect us so little that they seem like some
thing new, unknown, and unconnected with the whole of our life. It
is far harder to apply this explanation to those defects of memory
that occur with regard to a certain definite subject-matter of our
ideas ; e. g. the forgetting of proper names, of a series of scientific
conceptions, of a foreign language. But here again what other course
is open to us than to refer these cases, so far as they are confirmed by
observations, to similar causes ? It is impossible to conceive of the
activities which are here impeded as assigned to different organs;
they could only be assigned to different ways of working on the part
of the organs : we should have to come back to a general depression
of the organs, preventing them from executing a group of functions,
which, though they belong to one another, do not disclose even such
a similarity of physical work as would correspond to their intellectual
connexion, and would make it a matter of course that they should all
be interrupted together. In that case there would be no greater im
possibility in the further supposition, that this physical depression has
for its consequence a mental general feeling, different from and super-
CHAPTER v.j Substantiality of Soicl criticised. 533
seding that which ordinarily accompanies these mental operations.
For that which moves and forms connexions in us is not abstract
truths : the course of our thoughts is always a course of our states, and
every particular form of our intellectual activity gives us the feeling of
a peculiar mental posture, which reacts again on the bodily general
feeling. If a change originally set up in this latter feeling makes its
mental echo impossible, the mental activities will be checked in their
turn by the conflict of the tone of feeling which they find in existence
with that which should normally accompany them.
307. Efforts to assign to the soul a sphere in which its activity
should be independent of the body, commonly proceed from the
desire to secure its substantiality, and thereby its endless continuance;
though in reality the certainty with which we can infer the latter from
the former is strictly proportionate to the energy with which at starting
we have chosen to identify the two. No such motives have guided our
present investigation : indeed what use would there be in securing to
the soul all the rights of substance, if the exercise of these rights is
not equally unrestrained ? But no theories can change the facts.
Whether we see in the central organs the creative causes of mental
activity, or only, on occasion, the causes which impede it, in either
case the facts remain, that a state of perpetual wakefulness is im
possible to us ; that the exhaustion of the body brings with it the total
cessation of mental life ; that, conversely, this life, in some way, what
ever that way may be, consumes the forces of the body ; that diseases
and injuries of the brain either cripple particular faculties, or sink us
in a complete mental night. When, then, we joined in the efforts
alluded to, it was not. with the hope of finding in the intrinsic sub
stantiality of the soul any warrant for an independence of which so
little does as a fact exist ; but in the certainty that, even if exact
observation should prove the activity of the soul to be still more
closely bound up, than it is now proved to be, with the body and its
agitations, still this dependence could in no way alter the essence of
our conviction ; and that essential conviction is that a world of atoms,
and movements of atoms, can never develope from itself a trace of
mental life; that it forms, on the contrary, nothing more than a
system of occasions, which win from another and a unique basis the
manifestation of an activity possible to that basis alone.
But even this expression of our view must after all be once more
modified. We found it impossible to conceive the world as built up
out of a disconnected multiplicity of real elements of matter : just as
little, on the other side, have we considered the individual souls on
MD13
534 The Physical basis of Mental Activity. [BOOK in.
which this system of occasions acts, to be indestructible existences ;
both they and these occasions meant to us simply actions of the one
genuine being or existence, only that they are gifted with the strange
capacity, which no knowledge can further explain, of feeling and
knowing themselves as active centres of a life which goes out from
them. Only because they do this, only in so far as they do this, did
we give them the name of existences or substances. Still we have so
named them ; and now the question arises whether it would not — but
for the exigencies of imagination — be better to avoid even that name
and the inferences into which it will never cease to seduce men. Be
ginning by speaking of the souls as existences, we go on to speak of
their states, and we even venture to talk of such states as betray
nothing whatever of the essential nature of that to which we ascribe
them. Thus we have not scrupled, any more than any psychology
has so far scrupled, to use the supposition of unconscious ideas, or of
unconscious states, which ideas have left behind, and which become
ideas again. Is it really necessary that they should so be left behind,
and can we gather any intelligible notion from these words unless we
take refuge, as men always naturally and inevitably have done, in the
crassest metaphors of impressions that have altered a spatial shape, or
of movements that are not conceivable except in space ? There was
nothing to compel us to these suppositions but the observed fact that
previous ideas return into consciousness : but is there no other way
in which that which once was can be the determining ground of that
which will be, except by continuing to be instead of passing away ?
And if the soul in a perfectly dreamless sleep thinks, feels, and wills
nothing, is the soul then at all, and what is it ? How often has the
answer been given, that if this could ever happen, the soul would
have no being ! Why have we not had the courage to. say that, as
often as this happens, the soul is not ? Doubtless, if the soul were
alone in the world, it would be impossible to understand an alterna
tion of its existence and non-existence : but why should not its life
be a melody with pauses, while the primal eternal source still acts,
of which the existence and activity of the soul is a single deed, and
from which that existence and activity arose ? From it again the soul
would once more arise, and its new existence would be the consistent
continuation of the old, so soon as those pauses are gone by, during
which the conditions of its reappearance were being produced by other
deeds of the same primal being.
CHAPTER v.] The World not mere Number. 535
Conclusion.
I have ventured on these final hints because I wished to give a last
and a full statement of that requirement which I believe we must lay
on ourselves, — the total renunciation of our desire to answer meta
physical questions by the way of mathematico-mechanical construc
tion. There can be no need for me to express yet again the complete
respect I feel for the physical sciences, for their developed method
and their intellectual force ; the efforts of Metaphysic cannot in any
way compare with their brilliant results. But it has sometimes be
fallen the investigation of Nature itself, that, at points which for long
it thought itself warranted in using as the simplest foundations of its
theories, it has discovered a whole world, new and never surmised, of
internal formation and movement; and in this world it has at the
same time discovered the explanation of occurrences, which had pre
viously been connected, in a bare and external way, with these
seemingly simple points of departure. It is a like discovery that
Metaphysic has always sought, only the distance which separated its
goal from anything that can become the object of direct observation
was still greater. It sought the reasons or causes on which the fact
depends, that we are able to pursue with confidence throughout the
whole realm they govern the fundamental conceptions of the natural
sciences, and which at the same time would determine the limits of
this realm. It is a true saying that God has ordered all things by
measure and number, but what he ordered was not measures and
numbers themselves, but that which deserved or required to possess
them. It was not a meaningless and inessential reality, whose
only purpose would have been to support mathematical relations,
and to supply some sort of denomination * for abstract numbers :
but the meaning of the world is what conies first ; it is not simply
something which subjected itself to the order established; rather
from it alone comes the need of that order and the form in
which it is realised. All those laws which can be designated by the
common name of mathematical mechanics, whatever that name in
cludes of eternal and self-evident truths, and of laws which as a
matter of fact are everywhere valid, — all these exist, not on their own
authority, nor as a baseless destiny to which reality is compelled to
bow. They are (to use such language as men can) only the first con
sequences which, in the pursuit of its end, the living and active mean-
» [Cp. §2 14, end.]
536 • The Physical basis of Mental A ctivity.
ing of the world has laid at the foundation of all particular realities
as a command embracing them all. We do not know this meaning
in all its fulness, and therefore we cannot deduce from it what we can
only attempt, in one universal conviction, to retrace to it. But even
the effort to do this forces upon us a chain of ideas so far-reaching
that I gladly confess the imperfections which, without doubt, can be
laid to the charge of this attempt of mine. When, now several de
cades since, I ventured on a still more imperfect attempt, I closed it
with the dictum that the true beginning of Metaphysic lies in Ethics.
I admit that the expression is not exact; but I still feel certain of
being on the right track, when I seek in that which should be the
ground of that which is. What seems unacceptable in this view it
will perhaps be possible to justify in another connexion : now, after I
have already perhaps too long claimed the attention of my reader,
I close my essay without any feeling of infallibility, with the wish
that I may not everywhere have been in error, and, for the rest, with
the Oriental proverb — God knows better.
*>v-t #--<-*v'
INDEX.
'Absolute motion,' 280 ff.
' Accidental views ' (Herbart), 136.
Action (at a distance), 316.
Albumen, 394.
Anaesthesia, 528.
Antinomies (Kantian), 181 ff., 242 ff.
Aristotle, 18, 56, 59, 81, 393, 402.
Articular surfaces, 397.
Association of Ideas, 465 ff.
Atomism, 325 ff.
Attention, 475, 478.
Attraction, 313, 346, 348.
Avogadro, 391.
Baer (K. E. von), 403.
Binary combinations, 394.
Brain, injuries of, 528.
Categories, 18.
• Causa transient,' 102.
Cause (opp. 'Reason'), 95.
Cause (and effect), 104 ff.
Cellulose, 394.
' Cessante Causa — ,' 277.
Checking of Ideas by Ideas, 460, 467.
Chemistry, 390.
Comparison, conditions of, 471,
Conceptions (universal), 478.
Consequent, 82 ff.
Conservation (of Mass), 363,
— (of Force), 367 ff.
Constancy (of Mass), 337.
— (of the sum of motions), 364.
Contact, 101.
Content («/»&*//')» ^ note.
Continuity, Law of, 271.
Contradiction, Law of, 304.
Cosmology, 20.
Darwin, 415.
Depth, Idea of, 501.
Descartes, 202, 298.
' Deutsches Archiv fiir Klin. Med!
quoted, 528.
Dialectic method, 16.
Difference (quantitative) Idea of, 471.
' Dim' Ideas, 462, cp. 479, 480.
Disappearance of Sensations, 459.
Distance (and force), 346, 356.
Distinction, of points by Touch, 503.
Drobisch, 211.
, 8 1.
Effect (and Cause), 104 ff.
Electricity, 390.
'Element* dcr Psychophysik ' (Fechner),
442.
Emotions (and the Interest of Ideas),
465.
fvepyeia, 8 1.
Epicurean Physics, 393.
Equality, note, 47.
Equality of Cause and Effect, 104.
Equivalence, 338, 371.
Euclidean Geometry, 208.
Experience, 2, 3.
Extra-impressions, or Local Signs, 487ff.
Eye, how we estimate movement of, 496.
Fechner, ' Atomenlehre? 325, 426, 436.
— 'Element* der Psychophysik] 442 ff.
— and Weber, 454.
Feeling (' Gefiihl'"), in the reproduction
' of Ideas, 458.
— in initiation of action, 523.
— and Memory, 531.
Fichte, 167.
538
Index.
Force, 307.
— (and Distance), 346 ff.
— (and Time), 358 ff.
— (a single) 369 ff.
— (vital), 393 ff.
Formulae, for consciousness, 473.
Freedom, 1568".
Generic Idea, 402.
Geometry, 208, 221 ff.
Geulinx, 119.
Gravitation, 348 ff., 511.
' Grund] 95.
Hegel, 131, 154 ff., 204 ff., 301.
Helmholtz, 222 ff.
Heraclitus, 81, 85, 118.
Herbart, 35 ff., 43, 53-5, 99, 100, 136,
331, 350, 410, 460, 472, 474 ff.
I/AT;, 60.
Idea (' Vorstellung"1}, usage defined, 461.
— (universal), 472, 478.
Idealism, 72, 157*?.
Identity, 47 note, 48.
— Law of, 79.
— Idea of, 471.
Impulse (' Tricb '), 394.
Infinite divisibility, 184.
Infinity (of world in space), 182 ff.
' Innervation,' 523.
' Interest ' of Ideas, 464, 479.
Irritability, 398.
Kant, 18, 203 ff, 238, 243, 302 ff., 341,
427 ff.
— (Trans. Aesth. quoted\ 1 79.
Kinds, 408.
Lambert, 304.
Law, 4-6.
Leibnitz, 113 ff., 138 ff., 331, 341.
Lichtenberg, 369.
'Life and Vital Energy' (Essay by
Author), 392.
Life, a Principle of, 397.
Like, 47 note.
Likeness, idea of, 4^1.
Local Signs, 487 ff.
— in Vision, 494 ff.
— in Touch, 503 ff.
Logic (Author's), 141, 277.
Lucretius, 327, 399.
Machines, 397.
Mass, 337ff., 363 ff.
Mechanism, 383 ff.
' Mcdicinische Psychologic ' (Author's),
420, 436, 527.
Memory, alleged physical basis of, 5 29 ff.
— Interruptions of, 531 ff.
fir) ov, 63.
Metaphysic, I, 2, 7.
' Mikrokosmus ' (Author's), 172, 414,
420, 427.
Monads, 113 ff.
Monism, 164.
Motions (the sum of), 364.
' Motorium Commune? 519.
Muscular sense, 502.
Mythology, mathematical, 473.
Natural Kinds, 408.
Nature, our idea of, 335, 400.
Nerve-fibres, Isolation of, 483, 486.
Nervous organs, central, 516.
Necessity, I56ff.
Objective, cp. note, 17.
Occasional causes, 98.
Occasionalism, 1 1 1 ff.
Ontology, 20.
Opposite ideas, association of, a fiction,
466.
Organs, special in Brain, 517.
Organ of Space-perception, 519.
— Language, 520.
Organic Life, 415.
OVK Ol', 64.
Pain, sec Pleasure.
Parallel lines, 220, 225.
Parallelogram of Motions, 291 ff.
'Parmenides' (of Plato), 131.
Parsimony (Principle of), 373 ff.
Perception of Space, 285 ff., 476.
Persistence, law of, 275.
Phrenology, 524ff.
Plato, I, 60, 72, quoted 131.
Pleasure, affects course of Ideas, 465.
Pluralism, 164.
Poisson, quoted, 290, 291.
Index.
539
' Position"* {'P. oder Setzung*}, 32 note,
63 ff.
Predicates in Plato, 72.
'Pre-established Harmony,' 113.
Psychical Mechanism, 472.
Psychology, 13, 20, 418, (Herbart's) 474.
Psycho-Physical Mechanism, 436.
' Qualitative Atomism,' 332.
Qualities, Herbart's 'simple Qualities,'
43 ff-
Quality, 307.
Quaternary Combinations, 394.
Radiation (of force), 346 ff.
Ratio (sufficient), 87.
Rational Psychology, 418.
Reactions of the soul, grades of, 475.
Realism, 72, 163.
Reason (and Consequent), 82 ff.
Reason (opp. Cause), 95.
Reflex motion of Eye, 494.
Relation, or Reference, an act of mind,
470, and note.
Relativity, 283.
Reproduction of Ideas in order, 467 ff.
Repulsion, 313, 348 ff.
* Res extensa? 298.
' Res cogitans] 298.
Riemann, quoted, 235, 236.
Satisfaction, offeree (Herbart), 350.
Schelling, 155, 203, 301.
Self-preservation, of soul (Herbart), 474.
Sensation, 24 ff.
' Sensorium Commune? 518.
Similars, association of, 466.
Socrates, 131.
Solidity (Lambert), 304.
Sophists, 73.
Soul, the Seat of, 509 ff.
— Interrupted existence of, 534 ff.
Spatial image, reproduction of, 468.
Space-perception, 285 ff., 476.
— of blind, 500.
— organ of, 519 ff.
Specific energies, 450.
Spinoza, 91, 202, 299.
Square of distance, 346, 356.
Stahl, 401.
Stimuli of Sense, 445 ff.
Stream of Time, 239.
' Streitschriften,' (Author's), quoted, 474.
Strength of Ideas, 461-5, 479.
Striimpell, Dr. (quoted}, 528.
Subjectivity of Sensation, 449.
Substance, 76.
' Substantial Forms,' 393.
Substantiality of Soul, 533.
Successive Synthesis, 245.
Sufficient Reason, 81.
Ternary Combinations, 394.
Thing (for use of 'Ding' and ' Sache,'
v. 17 note), 17, 57 ff., 166 ff.
ri fa elvai, 59.
Time, Idea of, 476.
TO ri cffri, 59.
Touch, localisation by, 503 ff.
Transeunt action, 87 ff.
' Transient* (Causa), 102.
Treviranus, 393.
Triangle (sum of its angles), 221.
Type, 402.
'Unconscious' Ideas, 464.
Unconsciousness, 527ff.
Unity of the soul, 440.
Universal conceptions, 478.
'Up' and ' Down, ' relative to Gravity, 502 .
'Ursache? 95.
Vision, erect, 502.
Vital Force, 393.
'Vocation of Man' (Fichte), 167.
Von Baer, 403.
'Vorstellung' (Idea), defined, 461.
Wagner (Rudolph, Hand- Dictionary of
Physiology), 392.
Weber's Law, 454.
Weber on Localisation by sense of
Touch, 503.
Weisse, 155, 208.
Whole, parts of same associated, 467.
' Wirkung? 95.
Yellow spot of Retina, 494.
Zeno, 131, -291.
' Zusammen"1 (in Herbart), 100.
THE END.
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