The Life of Reason Part 4

The psychological a.n.a.lysis on which these partial or total negations were founded was in a general way admirable; the necessary artifices to which it had recourse in distinguis.h.i.+ng simple and complex ideas, principles of a.s.sociation and inference, were nothing but premonitions of what a physiological psychology would do in referring the mental process to its organic and external supports; for experience has no other divisions than those it creates in itself by distinguis.h.i.+ng its objects and its organs. Reference to external conditions, though seldom explicit in these writers, who imagined they could appeal to an introspection not revealing the external world, was pervasive in them; as, for instance, where Hume made his fundamental distinction between impressions and ideas, where the discrimination was based nominally on relative vividness and priority in time, but really on causation respectively by outer objects or by spontaneous processes in the brain.

[Sidenote: Hume's gratuitous scepticism.]

Hume it was who carried this psychological a.n.a.lysis to its goal, giving it greater simplicity and universal scope; and he had also the further advantage of not nursing any metaphysical changeling of his own to subst.i.tute for the legitimate offspring of human understanding. His curiosity was purer and his scepticism more impartial, so that he laid bare the natural habits and necessary fictions of thought with singular lucidity, and sufficient accuracy for general purposes. But the malice of a psychology intended as a weapon against superst.i.tion here recoils on science itself. Hume, like Berkeley, was extremely young, scarce five-and-twenty, when he wrote his most incisive work; he was not ready to propose in theory that test of ideas by their utility which in practice he and the whole English school have instinctively adopted. An ulterior test of validity would not have seemed to him satisfactory, for though inclined to rebellion and positivism he was still the pupil of that mythical philosophy which attributed the value of things to their origin rather than to their uses, because it had first, in its parabolic way, erected the highest good into a First Cause. Still breathing, in spite of himself, this atmosphere of materialised Platonism, Hume could not discover the true origin of anything without imagining that he had destroyed its value. A natural child meant for him an illegitimate one; his philosophy had not yet reached the wisdom of that French lady who asked if all children were not natural. The outcome of his psychology and criticism seemed accordingly to be an inhibition of reason; he was left free to choose between the distractions of backgammon and "sitting down in a forlorn scepticism."

In his first youth, while disintegrating reflection still overpowered the active interests of his mind, Hume seems to have had some moments of genuine suspense and doubt: but with years and prosperity the normal habits of inference which he had so acutely a.n.a.lysed a.s.serted themselves in his own person and he yielded to the "tendency to feign" so far at least as to believe languidly in the histories he wrote, the compliments he received, and the succulent dinners he devoured. There is a kind of courtesy in scepticism. It would be an offence against polite conventions to press our doubts too far and question the permanence of our estates, our neighbours' independent existence, or even the justification of a good bishop's faith and income. Against metaphysicians, and even against bishops, sarcasm was not without its savour; but the line must be drawn somewhere by a gentleman and a man of the world. Hume found no obstacle in his speculations to the adoption of all necessary and useful conceptions in the sphere to which he limited his mature interests. That he never extended this liberty to believe into more speculative and comprehensive regions was due simply to a voluntary superficiality in his thought. Had he been interested in the rationality of things he would have laboured to discover it, as he laboured to discover that historical truth or that political utility to which his interests happened to attach.

[Sidenote: Kant's subst.i.tute for knowledge.]

Kant, like Berkeley, had a private mysticism in reserve to raise upon the ruins of science and common-sense. Knowledge was to be removed to make way for faith. This task is ambiguous, and the equivocation involved in it is perhaps the deepest of those confusions with which German metaphysics has since struggled, and which have made it waver between the deepest introspection and the dreariest mythology. To subst.i.tute faith for knowledge might mean to teach the intellect humility, to make it aware of its theoretic and transitive function as a faculty for hypothesis and rational fiction, building a bridge of methodical inferences and ideal unities between fact and fact, between endeavour and satisfaction. It might be to remind us, sprinkling over us, as it were, the Lenten ashes of an intellectual contrition, that our thoughts are air even as our bodies are dust, momentary vehicles and products of an immortal vitality in G.o.d and in nature, which fosters and illumines us for a moment before it lapses into other forms.

Had Kant proposed to humble and concentrate into a practical faith _the same natural ideas_ which had previously been taken for absolute knowledge, his intention would have been innocent, his conclusions wise, and his a.n.a.lysis free from venom and _arriere-pensee_. Man, because of his finite and propulsive nature and because he is a pilgrim and a traveller throughout his life, is obliged to have faith: the absent, the hidden, the eventual, is the necessary object of his concern. But what else shall his faith rest in except in what the necessary forms of his perception present to him and what the indispensable categories of his understanding help him to conceive? What possible objects are there for faith except objects of a possible experience? What else should a practical and moral philosophy concern itself with, except the governance and betterment of the real world? It is surely by using his only possible forms of perception and his inevitable categories of understanding that man may yet learn, as he has partly learned already, to live and prosper in the universe. Had Kant's criticism amounted simply to such a confession of the tentative, practical, and hypothetical nature of human reason, it would have been wholly acceptable to the wise; and its appeal to faith would have been nothing but an expression of natural vitality and courage, just as its criticism of knowledge would have been nothing but a better acquaintance with self. This faith would have called the forces of impulse and pa.s.sion to reason's support, not to its betrayal. Faith would have meant faith in the intellect, a faith naturally expressing man's practical and ideal nature, and the only faith yet sanctioned by its fruits.

[Sidenote: False subjectivity attributed to reason.]

Side by side with this reinstatement of reason, however, which was not absent from Kant's system in its critical phase and in its application to science, there lurked in his subst.i.tution of faith for knowledge another and sinister intention. He wished to blast as insignificant, because "subjective," the whole structure of human intelligence, with all the lessons of experience and all the triumphs of human skill, and to attach absolute validity instead to certain echoes of his rigoristic religious education. These notions were surely just as subjective, and far more local and transitory, than the common machinery of thought; and it was actually proclaimed to be an evidence of their sublimity that they remained entirely without practical sanction in the form of success or of happiness. The "categorical imperative" was a shadow of the ten commandments; the postulates of practical reason were the minimal tenets of the most abstract Protestantism. These fossils, found unaccountably imbedded in the old man's mind, he regarded as the evidences of an inward but supernatural revelation.

[Sidenote: Chimerical reconstruction.]

Only the quaint severity of Kant's education and character can make intelligible to us the restraint he exercised in making supernatural postulates. All he a.s.serted was his inscrutable moral imperative and a G.o.d to reward with the pleasures of the next world those who had been Puritans in this. But the same principle could obviously be applied to other cherished imaginations: there is no superst.i.tion which it might not justify in the eyes of men accustomed to see in that superst.i.tion the sanction of their morality. For the "practical" proofs of freedom, immortality, and Providence--of which all evidence in reason or experience had previously been denied--exceed in perfunctory sophistry anything that can be imagined. Yet this lamentable epilogue was in truth the guiding thought of the whole investigation. Nature had been proved a figment of human imagination so that, once rid of all but a mock allegiance to her facts and laws, we might be free to invent any world we chose and believe it to be absolutely real and independent of our nature. Strange prepossession, that while part of human life and mind was to be an avenue to reality and to put men in relation to external and eternal things, the whole of human life and mind should not be able to do so! Conceptions rooted in the very elements of our being, in our senses, intellect, and imagination, which had shaped themselves through many generations under a constant fire of observation and disillusion, these were to be called subjective, not only in the sense in which all knowledge must obviously be so, since it is knowledge that someone possesses and has gained, but subjective in a disparaging sense, and in contrast to some better form of knowledge. But what better form of knowledge is this? If it be a knowledge of things as they really are and not as they appear, we must remember that reality means what the intellect infers from the data of sense; and yet the principles of such inference, by which the distinction between appearance and reality is first inst.i.tuted, are precisely the principles now to be discarded as subjective and of merely empirical validity.

"Merely empirical" is a vicious phrase: what is other than empirical is less than empirical, and what is not relative to eventual experience is something given only in present fancy. The G.o.ds of genuine religion, for instance, are terms in a continual experience: the pure in heart may see G.o.d. If the better and less subjective principle be said to be the moral law, we must remember that the moral law which has practical importance and true dignity deals with facts and forces of the natural world, that it expresses interests and aspirations in which man's fate in time and s.p.a.ce, with his pains, pleasures, and all other empirical feelings, is concerned. This was not the moral law to which Kant appealed, for this is a part of the warp and woof of nature. His moral law was a personal superst.i.tion, irrelevant to the impulse and need of the world. His notions of the supernatural were those of his sect and generation, and did not pa.s.s to his more influential disciples: what was transmitted was simply the contempt for sense and understanding and the practice, authorised by his modest example, of building air-castles in the great clearing which the Critique was supposed to have made.

It is noticeable in the series of philosophers from Hobbes to Kant that as the metaphysical residuum diminished the critical and psychological machinery increased in volume and value. In Hobbes and Locke, with the beginnings of empirical psychology, there is mixed an abstract materialism; in Berkeley, with an extension of a.n.a.lytic criticism, a popular and childlike theology, entirely without rational development; in Hume, with a completed survey of human habits of ideation, a withdrawal into practical conventions; and in Kant, with the conception of the creative understanding firmly grasped and elaborately worked out, a flight from the natural world altogether.

[Sidenote: The Critique a word on mental architecture.]

The Critique, in spite of some artificialities and pedantries in arrangement, presented a conception never before attained of the rich architecture of reason. It revealed the intricate organisation, comparable to that of the body, possessed by that fine web of intentions and counter-intentions whose pulsations are our thoughts. The dynamic logic of intelligence was laid bare, and the hierarchy of ideas, if not always correctly traced, was at least manifested in its principle. It was as great an enlargement of Hume's work as Hume's had been of Locke's or Locke's of Hobbes's. And the very fact that the metaphysical residuum practically disappeared--for the weak reconstruction in the second Critique may be dismissed as irrelevant--renders the work essentially valid, essentially a description of something real. It is therefore a great source of instruction and a good compendium or store-house for the problems of mind. But the work has been much overestimated. It is the product of a confused though laborious mind. It contains contradictions not merely incidental, such as any great novel work must retain (since no man can at once remodel his whole vocabulary and opinions) but contradictions absolutely fundamental and inexcusable, like that between the transcendental function of intellect and its limited authority, or that between the efficacy of things-in-themselves and their unknowability.

Kant's a.s.sumptions and his conclusions, his superst.i.tions and his wisdom, alternate without neutralising each other.

[Sidenote: Incoherences.]

That experience is a product of two factors is an a.s.sumption made by Kant. It rests on a psychological a.n.a.logy, namely on the fact that organ and stimulus are both necessary to sensation. That experience is the substance or matter of nature, which is a construction in thought, is Kant's conclusion, based on intrinsic logical a.n.a.lysis. Here experience is evidently viewed as something uncaused and without conditions, being itself the source and condition of all thinkable objects. The relation between the transcendental function of experience and its empirical causes Kant never understood. The transcendentalism which--if we have it at all--must be fundamental, he made derivative; and the realism, which must then be derivative, he made absolute.

Therefore his metaphysics remained fabulous and his idealism sceptical or malicious.

Ask what can be meant by "conditions of experience" and Kant's bewildering puzzle solves itself at the word. Condition, like cause, is a term that covers a confusion between dialectical and natural connections. The conditions of experience, in the dialectical sense, are the characteristics a thing must have to deserve the name of experience; in other words, its conditions are its nominal essence. If experience be used in a loose sense to mean any given fact or consciousness in general, the condition of experience is merely immediacy. If it be used, as it often is in empirical writers, for the shock of sense, its conditions are two: a sensitive organ and an object capable of stimulating it. If finally experience be given its highest and most pregnant import and mean a fund of knowledge gathered by living, the condition of experience is intelligence. Taking the word in this last sense, Kant showed in a confused but essentially conclusive fas.h.i.+on that only by the application of categories to immediate data could knowledge of an ordered universe arise; or, in other language, that knowledge is a vista, that it has a perspective, since it is the presence to a given thought of a diffused and articulated landscape. The categories are the principles of interpretation by which the flat datum acquires this perspective in thought and becomes representative of a whole system of successive or collateral existences.

The circ.u.mstance that experience, in the second sense, is a term reserved for what has certain natural conditions, namely, for the spark flying from the contact of stimulus and organ, led Kant to s.h.i.+ft his point of view, and to talk half the time about conditions in the sense of natural causes or needful antecedents. Intelligence is not an antecedent of thought and knowledge but their character and logical energy. Synthesis is not a natural but only a dialectical condition of pregnant experience; it does not introduce such experience but const.i.tutes it. Nevertheless, the whole skeleton and dialectical mould of experience came to figure, in Kant's mythology, as machinery behind the scenes, as a system of non-natural efficient forces, as a partner in a marriage the issue of which was human thought. The idea could thus suggest itself--favoured also by remembering inopportunely the actual psychological situation--that all experience, in every sense of the word, had supernatural antecedents, and that the dialectical conditions of experience, in the highest sense, were efficient conditions of experience in the lowest.

[Sidenote: Nature the true system of conditions.]

It is hardly necessary to observe that absolute experience can have no natural conditions. Existence in the abstract can have no cause; for every real condition would have to be a factor in absolute experience, and every cause would be something existent. Of course there is a modest and non-exhaustive experience--that is, any particular sensation, thought, or life--which it would be preposterous to deny was subject to natural conditions. Saint Lawrence's experience of being roasted, for instance, had conditions; some of them were the fire, the decree of the court, and his own stalwart Christianity. But these conditions are other parts or objects of conceivable experience which, as we have learned, fall into a system with the part we say they condition. In our groping and inferential thought one part may become a ground for expecting or supposing the other. Nature is then the sum total of its own conditions; the whole object, the parts observed _plus_ the parts interpolated, is the self-existent fact. The mind, in its empirical flux, is a part of this complex; to say it is its own condition or that of the other objects is a grotesque falsehood. A babe's casual sensation of light is a condition neither of his own existence nor of his mother's. The true conditions are those other parts of the world without which, as we find by experience, sensations of light do not appear.

Had Kant been trained in a better school of philosophy he might have felt that the phrase "subjective conditions" is a contradiction in terms. When we find ourselves compelled to go behind the actual and imagine something antecedent or latent to pave the way for it, we are _ipso facto_ conceiving the potential, that is, the "objective" world.

All antecedents, by transcendental necessity, are therefore objective and all conditions natural. An imagined potentiality that holds together the episodes which are actual in consciousness is the very definition of an object or thing. Nature is the sum total of things potentially observable, some observed actually, others interpolated hypothetically; and common-sense is right as against Kant's subjectivism in regarding nature as the condition of mind and not mind as the condition of nature.

This is not to say that experience and feeling are not the only given existence, from which the material part of nature, something essentially dynamic and potential, must be intelligently inferred. But are not "conditions" inferred? Are they not, in their deepest essence, potentialities and powers? Kant's fabled conditions also are inferred; but they are inferred illegitimately since the "subjective" ones are dialectical characters turned into antecedents, while the thing-in-itself is a natural object without a natural function.

Experience alone being given, it is the ground from which its conditions are inferred: its conditions, therefore, are empirical. The secondary position of nature goes with the secondary position of all causes, objects, conditions, and ideals. To have made the conditions of experience metaphysical, and prior in the order of knowledge to experience itself, was simply a piece of surviving Platonism. The form was hypostasised into an agent, and mythical machinery was imagined to impress that form on whatever happened to have it.

All this was opposed to Kant's own discovery and to his critical doctrine which showed that the world (which is the complex of those conditions which experience a.s.signs to itself as it develops and progresses in knowledge) is not before experience in the order of knowledge, but after it. His fundamental oversight and contradiction lay in not seeing that the concept of a set of conditions was the precise and exact concept of nature, which he consequently reduplicated, having one nature before experience and another after. The first thus became mythical and the second illusory: for the first, said to condition experience, was a set of verbal ghosts, while the second, which alone could be observed or discovered scientifically, was declared fict.i.tious.

The truth is that the single nature or set of conditions for experience which the intellect constructs is the object of our thoughts and perceptions ideally completed. This is neither mythical nor illusory. It is, strictly speaking, in its system and in many of its parts, hypothetical; but the hypothesis is absolutely safe. At whatever point we test it, we find the experience we expect, and the inferences thence made by the intellect are verified in sense at every moment of existence.

[Sidenote: Artificial pathos in subjectivism.]

The ambiguity in Kant's doctrine makes him a confusing representative of that criticism of perception which malicious psychology has to offer.

When the mind has made its great discovery; when it has recognised independent objects, and thus taken a first step in its rational life, we need to know unequivocally whether this step is a false or a true one. If it be false, reason is itself misleading, since a hypothesis indispensable in the intellectual mastery of experience is a false hypothesis and the detail of experience has no substructure. Now Kant's answer was that the discovery of objects was a true and valid discovery in the field of experience; there were, scientifically speaking, causes for perception which could be inferred from perception by thought. But this inference was not true absolutely or metaphysically because there was a real world beyond possible experience, and there were oracles, not intellectual, by which knowledge of that unrealisable world might be obtained. This mysticism undid the intellectualism which characterised Kant's system in its scientific and empirical application; so that the justification for the use of such categories as that of cause and substance (categories by which the idea of reality is const.i.tuted) was invalidated by the counter-a.s.sertion that empirical reality was not true reality but, being an object reached by inferential thought, was merely an idea. Nor was the true reality appearance itself in its crude immediacy, as sceptics would think; it was a realm of objects present to a supposed intuitive thought, that is, to a non-inferential inference or non-discursive discourse.

So that while Kant insisted on the point, which hardly needed pressing, that it is mind that discovers empirical reality by making inferences from the data of sense, he admitted at the same time that such use of understanding is legitimate and even necessary, and that the idea of nature so framed his empirical truth. There remained, however, a sense that this empirical truth was somehow insufficient and illusory.

Understanding was a superficial faculty, and we might by other and oracular methods arrive at a reality that was not empirical. Why any reality--such as G.o.d, for instance--should not be just as empirical as the other side of the moon, if experience suggested it and reason discovered it, or why, if not suggested by experience and discovered by reason, anything should be called a reality at all or should hold for a moment a man's waking attention--that is what Kant never tells us and never himself knew.

Clearer upon this question of perception is the position of Berkeley; we may therefore take him as a fair representative of those critics who seek to invalidate the discovery of material objects.

[Sidenote: Berkeley's algebra of perception.]

Our ideas, said Berkeley, were in our minds; the material world was patched together out of our ideas; it therefore existed only in our minds. To the suggestion that the idea of the external world is of course in our minds, but that our minds have constructed it by treating sensations as effects of a permanent substance distributed in a permanent s.p.a.ce, he would reply that this means nothing, because "substance," "permanence," and "s.p.a.ce" are non-existent ideas, _i.e.,_ they are not images in sense. They might, however, be "notions" like that of "spirit," which Berkeley ingenuously admitted into his system, to be, mysteriously enough, _that which has_ ideas. Or they might be (what would do just as well for our purpose) that which he elsewhere called them, algebraic signs used to facilitate the operations of thought. This is, indeed, what they are, if we take the word algebraic in a loose enough sense. They are like algebraic signs in being, in respect of their object or signification, not concrete images but terms in a mental process, elements in a method of inference. Why, then, denounce them? They could be used with all confidence to lead us back to the concrete values for which they stood and to the relations which they enabled us to state and discover. Experience would thus be furnished with an intelligible structure and articulation, and a psychological a.n.a.lysis would be made of knowledge into its sensuous material and its ideal objects. What, then, was Berkeley's objection to these algebraic methods of inference and to the notions of s.p.a.ce, matter, independent existence, and efficient causality which these methods involve?

[Sidenote: Horror of physics.]

What he abhorred was the belief that such methods of interpreting experience were ultimate and truly valid, and that by thinking after the fas.h.i.+on of "mathematical atheists" we could understand experience as well as it can be understood. If the flux of ideas had no other key to it than that system of a.s.sociations and algebraic subst.i.tutions which is called the natural world we should indeed know just as well what to expect in practice and should receive the same education in perception and reflection; but what difference would there be between such an idealist and the most pestilential materialist, save his even greater wariness and scepticism? Berkeley at this time--long before days of "Siris" and tar-water--was too ignorant and hasty to understand how inane all spiritual or poetic ideals would be did they not express man's tragic dependence on nature and his congruous development in her bosom.

He lived in an age when the study and dominion of external things no longer served directly spiritual uses. The middle-men had appeared, those spirits in whom the pursuit of the true and the practical never leads to possession of the good, but loses itself, like a river in sand, amid irrational habits and pa.s.sions. He was accordingly repelled by whatever philosophy was in him, no less than by his religious prejudices, from submergence in external interests, and he could see no better way of vindicating the supremacy of moral goods than to deny the reality of matter, the finality of science, and the constructive powers of reason altogether. With honest English empiricism he saw that science had nothing absolute or sacrosanct about it, and rightly placed the value of theory in its humane uses; but the complementary truth escaped him altogether that only the free and contemplative expression of reason, of which science is a chief part, can render anything else humane, useful, or practical. He was accordingly a party man in philosophy, where partisans.h.i.+p is treason, and opposed the work of reason in the theoretical field, hoping thus to advance it in the moral.

[Sidenote: Puerility in morals.]

Of the moral field he had, it need hardly be added, a quite childish and perfunctory conception. There the prayer-book and the catechism could solve every problem. He lacked the feeling, possessed by all large and mature minds, that there would be no intelligibility or value in things divine were they not interpretations and sublimations of things natural. To master the real world was an ancient and not too promising ambition: it suited his youthful radicalism better to exorcise or to cajole it. He sought to refresh the world with a water-spout of idealism, as if to change the names of things could change their values.

Away with all arid investigation, away with the cold algebra of sense and reason, and let us have instead a direct conversation with heaven, an unclouded vision of the purposes and goodness of G.o.d; as if there were any other way of understanding the sources of human happiness than to study the ways of nature and man.

Converse with G.o.d has been the life of many a wiser and sadder philosopher than Berkeley; but they, like Plato, for instance, or Spinoza, have made experience the subject as well as the language of that intercourse, and have thus given the divine revelation some degree of pertinence and articulation. Berkeley in his positive doctrine was satisfied with the vaguest generalities; he made no effort to find out how the consciousness that G.o.d is the direct author of our incidental perceptions is to help us to deal with them; what other insights and principles are to be subst.i.tuted for those that disclose the economy of nature; how the moral difficulties incident to an absolute providentialism are to be met, or how the existence and influence of fellow-minds is to be defended. So that to a piety inspired by conventional theology and a psychology that refused to pa.s.s, except grudgingly and unintelligently, beyond the sensuous stratum, Berkeley had nothing to add by way of philosophy. An insignificant repet.i.tion of the truism that ideas are all "in the mind" const.i.tuted his total wisdom. To be was to be perceived. That was the great maxim by virtue of which we were asked, if not to refrain from conceiving nature at all, which was perhaps impossible at so late a stage in human development, at least to refrain from regarding our necessary thoughts on nature as true or rational. Intelligence was but a false method of imagination by which G.o.d trained us in action and thought; for it was apparently impossible to endow us with a true method that would serve that end. And what shall we think of the critical ac.u.men or practical wisdom of a philosopher who dreamed of some other criterion of truth than necessary implication in thought and action?

[Sidenote: Truism and sophism.]

In the melodramatic fas.h.i.+on so common in what is called philosophy we may delight ourselves with such flashes of lightning as this: _esse est percipi_. The truth of this paradox lies in the fact that through perception alone can we get at being--a modest and familiar notion which makes, as Plato's "Theaetetus" shows, not a bad point of departure for a serious theory of knowledge. The sophistical intent of it, however, is to deny our right to make a distinction which in fact we do make and which the speaker himself is making as he utters the phrase; for he would not be so proud of himself if he thought he was thundering a tautology. If a thing were never perceived, or inferred from perception, we should indeed never know that it existed; but once perceived or inferred it may be more conducive to comprehension and practical competence to regard it as existing independently of our perception; and our ability to make this supposition is registered in the difference between the two words _to be_ and _to be perceived_--words which are by no means synonymous but designate two very different relations of things in thought. Such idealism at one fell swoop, through a collapse of a.s.sertive intellect and a withdrawal of reason into self-consciousness, has the puzzling character of any clever pun, that suspends the fancy between two incompatible but irresistible meanings. The art of such sophistry is to choose for an axiom some ambiguous phrase which taken in one sense is a truism and taken in another is an absurdity; and then, by showing the truth of that truism, to give out that the absurdity has also been proved. It is a truism to say that I am the only seat or locus of my ideas, and that whatever I know is known by me; it is an absurdity to say that I am the only object of my thought and perception.

[Sidenote: Reality is the practical made intelligible.]

To confuse the instrument with its function and the operation with its meaning has been a persistent foible in modern philosophy. It could thus come about that the function of intelligence should be altogether misconceived and in consequence denied, when it was discovered that figments of reason could never become elements of sense but must always remain, as of course they should, ideal and regulative objects, and therefore objects to which a practical and energetic intellect will tend to give the name of realities. Matter is a reality to the practical intellect because it is a necessary and ideal term in the mastery of experience; while negligible sensations, like dreams, are called illusions by the same authority because, though actual enough while they last, they have no sustained function and no right to practical dominion.

Let us imagine Berkeley addressing himself to that infant or animal consciousness which first used the category of substance and pa.s.sed from its perceptions to the notion of an independent thing. "Beware, my child," he would have said, "you are taking a dangerous step, one which may hereafter produce a mult.i.tude of mathematical atheists, not to speak of cloisterfuls of scholastic triflers. Your ideas can exist only in your mind; if you suffer yourself to imagine them materialised in mid-air and subsisting when you do not perceive them, you will commit a great impiety. If you unthinkingly believe that when you shut your eyes the world continues to exist until you open them again, you will inevitably be hurried into an infinity of metaphysical quibbles about the discrete and the continuous, and you will be so bewildered and deafened by perpetual controversies that the clear light of the gospel will be extinguished in your soul." "But," that tender Peripatetic might answer, "I cannot forget the things about me when I shut my eyes: I know and almost feel their persistent presence, and I always find them again, upon trial, just as they were before, or just in that condition to which the operation of natural causes would have brought them in my absence.

If I believe they remain and suffer steady and imperceptible transformation, I know what to expect, and the event does not deceive me; but if I had to resolve upon action before knowing whether the conditions for action were to exist or no, I should never understand what sort of a world I lived in."

"Ah, my child," the good Bishop would reply, "you misunderstand me. You may indeed, nay, you must, live and think _as if_ everything remained independently real. That is part of your education for heaven, which G.o.d in his goodness provides for you in this life. He will send into your soul at every moment the impressions needed to verify your necessary hypotheses and support your humble and prudent expectations. Only you must not attribute that constancy to the things themselves which is due to steadfastness in the designs of Providence. _Think and act_ as if a material world existed, but do not for a moment _believe_ it to exist."

[Sidenote: Vain "realities" and trustworthy "fictions."]

With this advice, coming rea.s.suringly from the combined forces of scepticism and religion, we may leave the embryonic mind to its own devices, satisfied that even according to the most malicious psychologists its first step toward the comprehension of experience is one it may congratulate itself on having taken and which, for the present at least, it is not called upon to retrace. The Life of Reason is not concerned with speculation about unthinkable and gratuitous "realities"; it seeks merely to attain those conceptions which are necessary and appropriate to man in his acting and thinking. The first among these, underlying all arts and philosophies alike, is the indispensable conception of permanent external objects, forming in their congeries, s.h.i.+fts, and secret animation the system and life of nature.

NOTE--There is a larger question raised by Berkeley's arguments which I have not attempted to discuss here, namely, whether knowledge is possible at all, and whether any mental representation can be supposed to inform us about anything.

Berkeley of course a.s.sumed this power in that he continued to believe in G.o.d, in other spirits, in the continuity of experience, and in its discoverable laws. His objection to material objects, therefore, could not consistently be that they are objects of knowledge rather than absolute feelings, exhausted by their momentary possession in consciousness. It could only be that they are unthinkable and invalid objects, in which the materials of sense are given a mode of existence inconsistent with their nature. But if the only criticism to which material objects were obnoxious were a dialectical criticism, such as that contained in Kant's antinomies, the royal road to idealism coveted by Berkeley would be blocked; to be an idea in the mind would not involve lack of cognitive and representative value in that idea. The fact that material objects were represented or conceived would not of itself prove that they could not have a real existence. It would be necessary, to prove their unreality, to study their nature and function and to compare them with such conceptions as those of Providence and a spirit-world in order to determine their relative validity. Such a critical comparison would have augured ill for Berkeley's prejudices; what its result might have been we can see in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. In order to escape such evil omens and prevent the collapse of his mystical paradoxes, Berkeley keeps in reserve a much more insidious weapon, the sceptical doubt as to the representative character of anything mental, the possible illusiveness of all knowledge. This doubt he invokes in all those turns of thought and phrase in which he suggests that if an idea is in the mind it cannot have its counterpart elsewhere, and that a given cognition exhausts and contains its object. There are, then, two separate maxims in his philosophy, one held consistently, viz., that nothing can be known which is different in character or nature from the object present to the thinking mind; the other, held incidentally and inconsistently, since it is destructive of all predication and knowledge, viz., that nothing can exist beyond the mind which is similar in nature or character to the "ideas" within it; or, to put the same thing in other words, that nothing can be revealed by an idea which is different from that idea in point of existence. The first maxim does not contradict the existence of external objects in s.p.a.ce; the second contradicts every conception that the human mind can ever form, the most airy no less than the grossest. No idealist can go so far as to deny that his memory represents his past experience by inward similarity and conscious intention, or, if he prefers this language, that the moments or aspects of the divine mind represent one another and their general system. Else the idealist's philosophy itself would be an insignificant and momentary illusion.