The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy Part 15

Where the parts of a conception seem thus to belong together by inward kins.h.i.+p, where the whole is defined in a way congruous with our powers of reaction, to see is to approve and to understand.

Much of the real seems at the first blush to follow a different law.

The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.

Each a.s.serts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest, which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do the materials lend themselves under certain circ.u.mstances to aesthetic manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached. I mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of s.p.a.ce. In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself, and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is not lost.

Consider, for example, s.p.a.ce. It is a unit. No force can in any way break, wound, or tear it. It has no joints between which you can pa.s.s your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split, Try to make a hole in s.p.a.ce by annihilating an inch of it. To make a hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive through s.p.a.ce except what is itself spatial?

But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, s.p.a.ce in its parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each part is one again, but only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the s.p.a.ce between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a dumb-bell both unites and divides the two b.a.l.l.s. But the union and the division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out of the s.p.a.ce between, it unites them by keeping them out of the s.p.a.ce beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.

Self-contradiction in s.p.a.ce could only ensue if one part tried to oust another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2] Beyond the parts we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the beyond is h.o.m.ogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law; so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from s.p.a.ce's womb.

Thus with s.p.a.ce our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the ego and of time. But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the standard set by our knowledge of s.p.a.ce is what governs our desire.[3]

Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised from other things and leave them unitary like the s.p.a.ce they fill?

Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.

But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we find the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins.

Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough. The laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion, all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get even that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be rationalized in some way.

But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of distinguis.h.i.+ng between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts of thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only differences, and ident.i.ties of thought the only ident.i.ties there are.

Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium quid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their existence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive, they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ calls for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268} in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling, as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost wholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, "I am that I am," and each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego, s.p.a.ce, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they possess.

It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction of the discontinuity. If the white must partake of s.p.a.ce, the heat of time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and s.p.a.ce, heat and time, mutually call for or help to create each other?

Yes; a few such _a priori_ couplings must be admitted. They are the axioms: no feeling except as occupying some s.p.a.ce and time, or as a moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like. But they are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill _this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the metaphysical axioms never existed at all.

The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pa.s.s over the facts of the world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the truth.

In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it, to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be the ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is absolute: "Either--or!" Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or poorer without any intermediate degrees pa.s.sed over; just as my wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible living in the suns.h.i.+ne, the 'unb.u.t.toning after supper and sleeping upon benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all their sudden completeness.

Must we then think that the world that fills s.p.a.ce and time can yield us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty s.p.a.ce and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly derived from the fact that the world is _in_ s.p.a.ce and time and 'partakes' of them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?

Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening itself? Can we gain no antic.i.p.atory a.s.surance that what is to come will have no strangeness? Is there no subst.i.tute, in short, for life but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth and thickness?

In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense finds no difficulty in acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet sit at the common table of s.p.a.ce and time?

To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as {271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.

Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at all. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.

After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe to me? By what insatiate conceit and l.u.s.t of intellectual despotism do I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the Lord's anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?

And shall it be given before they are given? _Data! gifts!_ something to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all, and, by means of the time and s.p.a.ce of which our minds and they partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.

There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must pause or rue it. 'Facts' are the bounds of human knowledge, set for it, not by it.

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Now, to a mind like Hegel's such pusillanimous twaddle sounds simply loathsome. Bounds that we can't overpa.s.s! Data! facts that say, "Hands off, till we are given"! possibilities we can't control! a banquet of which we merely share! Heavens, this is intolerable; such a world is no world for a philosopher to have to do with. He must have all or nothing. If the world cannot be rational in my sense, in the sense of unconditional surrender, I refuse to grant that it is rational at all. It is pure incoherence, a chaos, a nulliverse, to whose haphazard sway I will not truckle. But, no! this is not the world.

The world is philosophy's own,--a single block, of which, if she once get her teeth on any part, the whole shall inevitably become her prey and feed her all-devouring theoretic maw. Naught shall be but the necessities she creates and impossibilities; freedom shall mean freedom to obey her will, ideal and actual shall be one: she, and I as her champion, will be satisfied on no lower terms.

The insolence of sway, the _hubris_ on which G.o.ds take vengeance, is in temporal and spiritual matters usually admitted to be a vice. A Bonaparte and a Philip II. are called monsters. But when an _intellect_ is found insatiate enough to declare that all existence must bend the knee to its requirements, we do not call its owner a monster, but a philosophic prophet. May not this be all wrong? Is there any one of our functions exempted from the common lot of liability to excess? And where everything else must be contented with its part in the universe, shall the theorizing faculty ride rough-shod over the whole?

I confess I can see no _a priori_ reason for the exception. He who claims it must be judged by the {273} consequences of his acts, and by them alone. Let Hegel then confront the universe with his claim, and see how he can make the two match.

The universe absolutely refuses to let him travel without jolt. Time, s.p.a.ce, and his ego are continuous; so are degrees of heat, shades of light and color, and a few other serial things; so too do potatoes call for salt, and cranberries for sugar, in the taste of one who knows what salt and sugar are. But on the whole there is nought to soften the shock of surprise to his intelligence, as it pa.s.ses from one quality of being to another. Light is not heat, heat is not light; and to him who holds the one the other is not given till it give itself. Real being comes moreover and goes from any concept at its own sweet will, with no permission asked of the conceiver. In despair must Hegel lift vain hands of imprecation; and since he will take nothing but the whole, he must throw away even the part he might retain, and call the nature of things an _absolute_ muddle and incoherence.

But, hark! What wondrous strain is this that steals upon his ear?

Incoherence itself, may it not be the very sort of coherence I require?

Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sort of transparency? Is not jolt pa.s.sage? Is friction other than a kind of lubrication? Is not a chasm a filling?--a queer kind of filling, but a filling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together when their very falling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemed to disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problem stands solved. The paradoxical character of the notion could not fail to please a mind monstrous even in its native {274} Germany, where mental excess is endemic. Richard, for a moment brought to bay, is himself again. He vaults into the saddle, and from that time his career is that of a philosophic desperado,--one series of outrages upon the chast.i.ty of thought.

And can we not ourselves sympathize with his mood in some degree? The old receipts of squeezing the thistle and taking the bull by the horns have many applications. An evil frankly accepted loses half its sting and all its terror. The Stoics had their cheap and easy way of dealing with evil. _Call_ your woes goods, they said; refuse to _call_ your lost blessings by that name,--and you are happy. So of the unintelligibilities: call them means of intelligibility, and what further do you require? There is even a more legitimate excuse than that. In the exceedingness of the facts of life over our formulas lies a standing temptation at certain times to give up trying to say anything adequate about them, and to take refuge in wild and whirling words which but confess our impotence before their ineffability. Thus Baron Bunsen writes to his wife: "Nothing is near but the far; nothing true but the highest; nothing credible but the inconceivable; nothing so real as the impossible; nothing clear but the deepest; nothing so visible as the invisible; and no life is there but through death." Of these ecstatic moments the _credo quia impossibile_ is the cla.s.sical expression. Hegel's originality lies in his making their mood permanent and sacramental, and authorized to supersede all others,--not as a mystical bath and refuge for feeling when tired reason sickens of her intellectual responsibilities (thank Heaven! that bath is always ready), but as the very form of intellectual responsibility itself.

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And now after this long introduction, let me trace some of Hegel's ways of applying his discovery. His system resembles a mouse-trap, in which if you once pa.s.s the door you may be lost forever. Safety lies in not entering. Hegelians have anointed, so to speak, the entrance with various considerations which, stated in an abstract form, are so plausible as to slide us unresistingly and almost unwittingly through the fatal arch. It is not necessary to drink the ocean to know that it is salt; nor need a critic dissect a whole system after proving that its premises are rotten. I shall accordingly confine myself to a few of the points that captivate beginners most; and a.s.sume that if they break down, so must the system which they prop.

First of all, Hegel has to do utterly away with the sharing and partaking business he so much loathes. He will not call contradiction the glue in one place and ident.i.ty in another; that is too half-hearted. Contradiction must be a glue universal, and must derive its credit from being shown to be latently involved in cases that we hitherto supposed to embody pure continuity. Thus, the relations of an ego with its objects, of one time with another time, of one place with another place, of a cause with its effect, of a thing with its properties, and especially of parts with wholes, must be shown to involve contradiction. Contradiction, shown to lurk in the very heart of coherence and continuity, cannot after that be held to defeat them, and must be taken as the universal solvent,--or, rather, there is no longer any need of a solvent. To 'dissolve' things in ident.i.ty was the dream of earlier cruder schools. Hegel will show that their very difference is their ident.i.ty, and that {276} in the act of detachment the detachment is undone, and they fall into each other's arms.

Now, at the very outset it seems rather odd that a philosopher who pretends that the world is absolutely rational, or in other words that it can be completely understood, should fall back on a principle (the ident.i.ty of contradictories) which utterly defies understanding, and obliges him in fact to use the word 'understanding,' whenever it occurs in his pages, as a term of contempt. Take the case of s.p.a.ce we used above. The common man who looks at s.p.a.ce believes there is nothing in it to be acquainted with beyond what he sees; no hidden machinery, no secrets, nothing but the parts as they lie side by side and make the static whole. His intellect is satisfied with accepting s.p.a.ce as an ultimate genus of the given. But Hegel cries to him: "Dupe! dost thou not see it to be one nest of incompatibilities? Do not the unity of its wholeness and the diversity of its parts stand in patent contradiction? Does it not both unite and divide things; and but for this strange and irreconcilable activity, would it be at all? The hidden dynamism of self-contradiction is what incessantly produces the static appearance by which your sense is fooled."

But if the man ask how self-contradiction _can_ do all this, and how its dynamism may be seen to work, Hegel can only reply by showing him the s.p.a.ce itself and saying: "Lo, _thus_." In other words, instead of the principle of explanation being more intelligible than the thing to be explained, it is absolutely unintelligible if taken by itself, and must appeal to its pretended product to prove its existence. Surely, such a system of explaining _notum per ignotum_, of {277} making the _explicans_ borrow credentials from the _explicand_, and of creating paradoxes and impossibilities where none were suspected, is a strange candidate for the honor of being a complete rationalizer of the world.

The principle of the contradictoriness of ident.i.ty and the ident.i.ty of contradictories is the essence of the hegelian system. But what probably washes this principle down most with beginners is the combination in which its author works it with another principle which is by no means characteristic of his system, and which, for want of a better name, might be called the 'principle of totality.' This principle says that you cannot adequately know even a part until you know of what whole it forms a part. As Aristotle writes and Hegel loves to quote, an amputated hand is not even a hand. And as Tennyson says,--

"Little flower--but if I could understand What you are, root and all, and all in all, I should know what G.o.d and man is."

Obviously, until we have taken in all the relations, immediate or remote, into which the thing actually enters or potentially may enter, we do not know all _about_ the thing.

And obviously for such an exhaustive acquaintance with the thing, an acquaintance with every other thing, actual and potential, near and remote, is needed; so that it is quite fair to say that omniscience alone can completely know any one thing as it stands. Standing in a world of relations, that world must be known before the thing is fully known. This doctrine is of course an integral part of empiricism, an integral part of common-sense. Since when could good men not apprehend the pa.s.sing hour {278} in the light of life's larger sweep,--not grow dispa.s.sionate the more they stretched their view? Did the 'law of sharing' so little legitimate their procedure that a law of ident.i.ty of contradictories, forsooth, must be trumped up to give it scope? Out upon the idea!

Hume's account of causation is a good ill.u.s.tration of the way in which empiricism may use the principle of totality. We call something a cause; but we at the same time deny its effect to be in any latent way contained in or substantially identical with it. We thus cannot tell what its causality amounts to until its effect has actually supervened.

The effect, then, or something beyond the thing is what makes the thing to be so far as it is a cause. Humism thus says that its causality is something advent.i.tious and not necessarily given when its other attributes are there. Generalizing this, empiricism contends that we must everywhere distinguish between the intrinsic being of a thing and its relations, and, among these, between those that are essential to our knowing it at all and those that may be called advent.i.tious. The thing as actually present in a given world is there with _all_ its relations; for it to be known as it _there_ exists, they must be known too, and it and they form a single fact for any consciousness large enough to embrace that world as a unity. But what const.i.tutes this singleness of fact, this unity? Empiricism says, Nothing but the relation-yielding matrix in which the several items of the world find themselves embedded,--time, namely, and s.p.a.ce, and the mind of the knower. And it says that were some of the items quite different from what they are and others the same, still, for aught we can see, an equally unitary world might be, provided each {279} item were an object for consciousness and occupied a determinate point in s.p.a.ce and time.

All the advent.i.tious relations would in such a world be changed, along with the intrinsic natures and places of the beings between which they obtained; but the 'principle of totality' in knowledge would in no wise be affected.

But Hegelism dogmatically denies all this to be possible. In the first place it says there are no intrinsic natures that may change; in the second it says there are no advent.i.tious relations. When the relations of what we call a thing are told, no _caput mortuum_ of intrinsicality, no 'nature,' is left. The relations soak up all there is of the thing; the 'items' of the world are but _foci_ of relation with other _foci_ of relation; and all the relations are necessary. The unity of the world has nothing to do with any 'matrix.' The matrix and the items, each with all, make a unity, simply because each in truth is all the rest. The proof lies in the _hegelian_ principle of totality, which demands that if any one part be posited alone all the others shall forthwith _emanate_ from it and infallibly reproduce the whole. In the _modus operandi_ of the emanation comes in, as I said, that partners.h.i.+p of the principle of totality with that of the ident.i.ty of contradictories which so recommends the latter to beginners in Hegel's philosophy. To posit one item alone is to deny the rest; to deny them is to refer to them; to refer to them is to begin, at least, to bring them on the scene; and to begin is in the fulness of time to end.

If we call this a monism, Hegel is quick to cry, Not so! To say simply that the one item is the rest {280} of the universe is as false and one-sided as to say that it is simply itself. It is both and neither; and the only condition on which we gain the right to affirm that it is, is that we fail not to keep affirming all the while that it is not, as well. Thus the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of judgment or sentence. The world appears as a monism _and_ a pluralism, just as it appeared in our own introductory exposition.

But the trouble that keeps us and Hegel from ever joining hands over this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from those in which it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most abominates. The reader may decide which procedure helps his reason most. For my own part, the time-honored formula of empiricist pluralism, that the world cannot be set down in any single proposition, grows less instead of more intelligible when I add, "And yet the different propositions that express it are one!" The unity of the propositions is that of the mind that harbors them. Any one who insists that their diversity is in any way itself their unity, can only do so because he loves obscurity and mystification for their own pure sakes.

Where you meet with a contradiction among realities, Herbart used to say, it shows you have failed to make a real distinction. Hegel's sovereign method of going to work and saving all possible contradictions, lies in pertinaciously refusing to distinguish. He takes what is true of a term _secundum quid_, treats it as true of the same term _simpliciter_, and then, of course, applies it to the term _secundum aliud_. A {281} good example of this is found in the first triad. This triad shows that the mutability of the real world is due to the fact that being constantly negates itself; that whatever _is_ by the same act _is not_, and gets undone and swept away; and that thus the irremediable torrent of life about which so much rhetoric has been written has its roots in an ineluctable necessity which lies revealed to our logical reason. This notion of a being which forever stumbles over its own feet, and has to change in order to exist at all, is a very picturesque symbol of the reality, and is probably one of the points that make young readers feel as if a deep core of truth lay in the system.

But how is the reasoning done? Pure being is a.s.sumed, without determinations, being _secundum quid_. In this respect it agrees with nothing. Therefore _simpliciter_ it is nothing; wherever we find it, it is nothing; crowned with complete determinations then, or _secundum aliud_, it is nothing still, and _hebt sich auf_.

It is as if we said, Man without his clothes may be named 'the naked.'

Therefore man _simpliciter_ is the naked; and finally man with his hat, shoes, and overcoat on is the naked still.

Of course we may in this instance or any other repeat that the conclusion is strictly true, however comical it seems. Man within the clothes is naked, just as he is without them. Man would never have invented the clothes had he not been naked. The fact of his being clad at all does prove his essential nudity. And so in general,--the form of any judgment, being the addition of a predicate to a subject, shows that the subject has been conceived without the predicate, and thus by a strained metaphor may {282} be called the predicate's negation. Well and good! let the expression pa.s.s. But we must notice this. The judgment has now created a new subject, the naked-clad, and all propositions regarding this must be judged on their own merits; for those true of the old subject, 'the naked,' are no longer true of this one. For instance, we cannot say because the naked pure and simple must not enter the drawing-room or is in danger of taking cold, that the naked with his clothes on will also take cold or must stay in his bedroom. Hold to it eternally that the clad man _is_ still naked if it amuse you,--'tis designated in the bond; but the so-called contradiction is a sterile boon. Like Shylock's pound of flesh, it leads to no consequences. It does not ent.i.tle you to one drop of his Christian blood either in the way of catarrh, social exclusion, or what further results pure nakedness may involve.

In a version of the first step given by our foremost American Hegelian,[4] we find this playing with the necessary form of judgment.

Pure being, he says, has no determinations. But the having none is itself a determination. Wherefore pure being contradicts its own self, and so on. Why not take heed to the _meaning_ of what is said? When we make the predication concerning pure being, our meaning is merely the denial of all other determinations than the particular one we make.