BOOK II. Ontology—the General

ONTOLOGY—THE GENERAL STRUCTURE OF REALITY

CHAPTER I

REALITY AND EXPERIENCE

§ 1. In a sense “reality” for each of us means that of which he must take account if his special purposes are to find fulfilment. § 2. But ultimately the world must possess a structure of which all purposes, each in its own way, must take account. This is the “Ultimate Reality” or “Absolute” of Metaphysics. In Metaphysics we regard it from the special standpoint of the scientific intellect. There are other legitimate attitudes towards it, e.g., that of practical religion. § 3. The inseparability of reality from immediate experience involves the recognition of it as teleological and as uniquely individual. § 4. The experience within which all reality falls cannot be my own, nor yet the “collective” experience of the aggregate of conscious beings. It must be an individual experience which apprehends the totality of existence as the harmonious embodiment of a single “purpose.” The nearest analogue our own life presents to such a type of experience is to be found in the satisfied insight of personal love. § 5. The experience of such an “Absolute” must not be thought of as a mere reduplication of our own, or of the scientific hypotheses by which we co-ordinate facts for the purposes of inference. § 6. Our conception is closely connected with that of Berkeley, from which it differs by the stress it lays on the purposive and selective aspect of experience. § 7. Realism, both of the Agnostic and of the Dogmatic type, is incompatible with the meaning we have been led to attach to “Reality.” But Agnosticism is justified in insisting on the limitations of our knowledge of Reality, and Dogmatic Realism in rejecting the identification of Reality with experience as a merely cognitive function of finite percipients. § 8. Subjectivism, according to which all that I know is states of my own “consciousness,” is irreconcilable with the admitted facts of life, and arises from the psychological fallacy of “introjection.”

§ 1. In the preceding book we have seen that the very nature of the metaphysical problem predetermines the general character of the answer we are to give to it. What our intellect can accept as finally real, we saw, must be indissolubly one with actual experience, and it must be an internally coherent system. In the present book we have to discuss more in detail the structure which must belong to any reality possessing these general characteristics. The present chapter, then, will be devoted to an examination of the implications of the experiential character of real Being; in the next, we shall deal with the nature of its unity as a single system.

We may perhaps most conveniently begin our discussion with a re-definition of some of our principal terms. We have hitherto spoken of the object of metaphysical knowledge indifferently as “Being,” “What is,” “What truly exists,” and as “Reality,” “the ultimately real.” So far as it is possible to draw a distinction between these two sets of names for the same thing, we may say that each series lays special stress on a somewhat different aspect of our object. When we say that a thing “is” or “has Being,” we seem primarily to mean that it is an object for the knowing consciousness, that it has its place in the system of objects which coherent thought recognises. When we call the same object “real” or a “reality,” we lay the emphasis rather on the consideration that it is something of which we categorically must take account, whether we like it or not, if some purpose of our own is to get its fulfilment. Thus again the “non-existent” primarily means that which finds no place in the scheme of objects contemplated by consistent scientific thought; the “unreal,” that with which we have not, for any human purpose, to reckon.

This is what is often expressed by saying that reality means what is independent of our own will, what exercises resistance, what constrains or compels our recognition, whether we like it or not. Philosophers have pointed out that this way of putting the case is only half the truth. The “stubborn” facts or realities which, as we commonly say, force us to recognise them, only do so in consequence of the presence in us of definite interests and purposes which we cannot effect without adapting ourselves to the situation expressed by our statement of the “facts.” What lies entirely outside my interests and plans gets no kind of recognition from me; it is “unreal” for me precisely because I have no need to take account of it as a factor to be reckoned with in the pursuit of my special ends. Thus, so long as we use the term in a relative sense and with reference to the special ends of this or that particular agent, there may be as many different orders of “reality” as there are special purposes, and what is “real” for the agent inspired by one purpose may be unreal for his fellows whose purposes are different. Thus, for example, to an English Christian living at home in England the rules of “caste” in India are usually for all practical purposes unreal; he has no need to take their existence into account as a condition of the successful prosecution of any of his aims and interests; for him they have no more significance than the rules of legal procedure adopted in Wonderland. But for the historian of Indian society, the native Hindu Christian, and the devout worshipper of Shiva, the rules of caste are a true reality. Not one of the three can execute his special purposes without taking them into account and allowing them to operate in determining his way of proceeding to his goal. Again, the kind of reality which the rules of caste possess for each of our three men is different, in accord with the differences in their characteristic purposes. For the historian, they are real as a system of ideas which have influenced and do influence the conduct of the society of which he is writing the history, in such a way that without understanding them he cannot get a clear insight into the social structure of Hinduism. To the native Christian, they are real as a standing source of difficulty and a standing temptation to be false to his highest ideals of conduct. To the Shivaite, they are real as the divinely appointed means to bodily and spiritual purification from the evil that is in the world.

§ 2. So far, then, it might seem that “reality” is a purely relative term, and that our previous choice of ultimate freedom from contradiction as our standard of reality was an arbitrary one, due to the mere accident that our special purpose in sitting down to study Metaphysics is to think consistently. Of course, it might be said, whatever game you choose to play at, the rules of that particular game must be your supreme reality, so long as you are engaged in it. But it depends on your own choice what game you will play and how long you will keep at it. There is no game at which we all, irrespective of personal choice, have to play, and there is therefore no such thing as an ultimate reality which we must all recognise as such; there are only the special realities which correspond to our special individual purposes. You have no right to set up the particular rules of the game of scientific thought as a reality unconditionally demanding recognition from those who do not choose to play that particular game.

Such an argument would, however, be beside the point. It is true that the special nature of the facts which any one of us recognises as real depends on the special nature of his individual purposes. And it is true that, precisely because we are, to some extent, genuine individuals, no two men’s abiding purposes are identically the same. It is therefore true, so far as it goes, that Reality wears a different and an individual aspect for each of us. But it is emphatically not true that there is no identical character at all about the purposes and interests of different individuals. The very recognition of the fact that any one individual purpose or interest can only get expression by accommodating itself to a definite set of conditions, which constitute the reality corresponding to that purpose, carries with it the implication that the world is ultimately a system and not a chaos, or, in other words, that there is ultimately a certain constitution of things which, under one aspect or another, is of moment for all individuals, and must be taken into account by every kind of purpose that is to get fulfilment. If the world is systematic at all,—and unless it is so there is no place in it for definite purpose of any kind,—it must finally have a structure of such a kind that any purpose which ignores it will be defeated. All coherent pursuit of purpose, of whatever type, must therefore in the end rest on the recognition of some characteristics of the world-order which are unconditionally and absolutely to be taken into account by all individual agents, no matter what the special nature of their particular purposes. This is all that is meant when it is said that the reality investigated by Metaphysics is absolute, or when the object of metaphysical study is spoken of as the Absolute.

We may, in fact, conveniently define the Absolute as that structure of the world-system which any and every internally consistent purpose must recognise as the condition of its own fulfilment To deny the existence of an Absolute, thus defined, is in principle to reduce the world and life to a mere chaos. It is important, however, to bear in mind that in Metaphysics, though we are certainly concerned with the ultimate or absolute Reality, we are concerned with it from a special point of view. Our special purpose is to know, or to think coherently, about the conditions which all intelligent purpose has to recognise. Now this attitude of scientific investigation is clearly not the only one which we can take up towards the ultimately real. We may, for instance, seek to gain emotional harmony and peace of mind by yielding up the conduct of our practical life to the unquestioned guidance of what we directly feel to be the deepest and most abiding elements in the structure of the universe. This is the well-known attitude of practical religion. Primâ facie, while it seems to be just as permissible as the purely scientific attitude of the seeker after truth, the perennial “conflict of religion and science” is sufficient to show that the two are not identical. How they are related is a problem which we shall have, in outline, to consider towards the end of our inquiry; at present it is enough for our purpose to recognise them as divergent but primâ facie equally justified attitudes towards what must in the end be thought of as the same ultimate reality. As Mr. Bradley well says, there is no sin which is metaphysically less justifiable than the metaphysician’s own besetting sin of treating his special way of regarding the “Absolute” as the only legitimate one.

§ 3. To return to our detailed investigation of the connection between Reality as now defined for the metaphysician, and Experience. We can now see more completely than before why it is only in immediate experience that reality is to be found. Our reason for identifying reality with immediate experience has nothing to do with the theory according to which “sensations,” being the product of a something “without the mind,” are supposed to carry with them a direct certificate of the independent existence of their “external” cause. For we have seen: (1) that immediacy means simply indissoluble union with a whole of feeling, and that this immediacy belongs to every mental state as actually lived through; (2) that the dependence of sensations in particular on an “external” cause, is in no sense an immediate datum of experience, but a reflective hypothesis which, like all such hypotheses, demands examination and justification before it can be pronounced legitimate; (3) that it is a philosophical blunder to identify the real with the merely “independent” of ourselves. What is merely independent, as we have now seen, would for us be the merely unreal. Presence in immediate experience is a universal character of all that is real, because it is only in so far as anything is thus presented in immediate unity with the concrete life of feeling that it can be given as a condition or fact of which an individual interest must take account, on pain of not reaching accomplishment. Actual life, as we have already learned, is always a concrete unity of feeling in which the two distinguishable aspects of a psychical fact, its existence and its content, the that and the what, though distinguishable, are inseparable. Scientific reflection on the given we found to be always abstract, in the sense that its very essence is the mental separation of the content from the process. By such separation we mediately get to know the character of the separated content better, but our knowledge, with all its fulness, still remains abstract; it is still knowledge referring to and about an object outside itself. It is only when, as a result of the reflective process, we find fresh meaning in the individual process-content on its recurrence that we return once more to the concrete actuality of real existence.

Now, we may express this same result in another and an even more significant way. To say that reality is essentially one with immediate feeling, is only another way of saying that the real is essentially that which is of significance for the attainment of purpose. For feeling is essentially teleological, as we may see even in the case of simple pleasure and pain. Amid all the confusion and complexity of the psychological problems which can be raised about these most simple forms of feeling, one thing seems clear, that pleasure is essentially connected with unimpeded, pain with impeded, discharge of nervous activity. Pleasure seems to be inseparable from successful, pain from thwarted or baffled, tendency. And if we consider not so much the abstractions “pleasure in general,” “pain in general,” as a specific pleasure or pain, or again a complex emotional state, the case seems even clearer. Only a being whose behaviour is consciously or unconsciously determined by ends or purposes seems capable of finding existence, according as those purposes are advanced or hindered, pleasant or painful, glad or wretched, good or bad. Hence our original decision that reality is to be found in what is immediately experienced, as opposed to what is severed by subsequent reflective analysis from its union with feeling, and our later statement that that is real of which we are constrained to take account for the fulfilment of our purposes, fully coincide.

This point may perhaps be made clearer by a concrete example. Suppose that some purpose of more or less importance requires my immediate presence in the next town. Then the various routes by which I may reach that town become at once circumstances of which I have to take note and to which I must adapt my conduct, if my important purpose is not to be frustrated. It may be that there are alternative routes, or it may be that there is only one. In any case, and this is fundamental for us, the number of alternatives which my purpose leaves open to me will be strictly limited. I can, as a matter of mere mathematical possibility, go from A to B in an indefinite number of ways. If I have to make the journey in actual fact on a given day, and with existing means of transit, the theoretical infinity of possible ways is speedily reduced to, at the outside, two or three. For simplicity’s sake we will consider the case in which there happens to be only one available way. This one available way is “real” to me, as contrasted with the infinity of mathematically possible routes, precisely because the execution of my purpose restricts me to it and no other. The mathematically possible infinity of routes remain unreal just because they are thought of as all alike mere possibilities; no actual purpose limits me to some one or some definite number out of the infinity, and compels me to adapt myself to their peculiarities or fail of my end. They are “imaginary” or “merely possible” just for want of specific relation to an experience which is the expression of a definite purpose.

This illustration may lead us on to a further point of the utmost importance, for it illustrates the principle that the real as opposed to the merely “possible” or “merely thought of” is always individual. There was an indefinite number of mathematically conceivable ways from A to B; there was only one, or at least a precisely determinate number, by which I could fulfil a concrete individual purpose. (Thus, if I have to make the journey to B in a given time, I must take the route followed by the railway.) So universally it is a current common-place that while thought is general, the reality about which we think and of which we predicate the results of our thought is always individual. Now, what is the source or principle of this individuality of the real as opposed to the generality of the merely conceivable? It is precisely that connection of reality with actual purpose of which we have spoken. The results of thought are general because for the purposes of scientific thinking we isolate the what of experience from its that; we consider the character of what is presented to us apart from the unique purpose expressed in the experience in which it comes to us. In other words, the problems of scientific thought are all of the form, “How must our general purpose to make our thought and action coherent be carried out under such and such typical conditions?” never of the form, “Of what must I take account for the execution of this one definite purpose?” The reason for this difference is at once apparent. In making “this definite purpose” a topic for reflection, I have ipso facto abstracted its what from its that and converted it into a mere instance or example of a certain type. It was only while it remained this purpose as actually immanent in and determining the immediate experience of actual life that it was a completely determinate unique this; as reflected on it becomes a type of an indefinite number of similar possibilities.

Now, it is necessary here to observe very carefully that it is from the unique individuality of the purpose expressed in an actual experience that the objects or facts of immediate experience derive the individuality in virtue of which we contrast them with the generalities or abstract possibilities of science. It is the more necessary to dwell explicitly on this point, because there is a common but erroneous doctrine that the individuality of actual existence is derived from its occupying a particular place in the space and time orders. Scientific truth is general, it is often said, because it refers alike to all places and times; actual “fact” is individual because it is what is here and now. But we should be able to see that such an account directly inverts the real order of logical dependence. Mere position in space and time can never be a true “principle of individuation,” for the simple reason that one point in space and one moment in time, considered apart from the things and events which fill them, are, at any rate for our perception, indistinguishable from all other points and moments. It is, on the other hand, precisely by their correlation with unique stages in lives which are the embodiment of unique and individual purpose, that places and times and the things and events which occupy them become for us themselves unique and individual. Here, for me, means where I now am, and now, this unique and determinate stage in the execution of the purposes which, by their uniqueness, make me unique in the world. Thus we seem to have reached the significant conclusion that to say “Reality is experience” involves the further propositions, “Reality is through and through purposive” and “Reality is uniquely individual.”

§ 4. We have already seen that to identify reality with experience does not mean identifying it with my own experience just as it comes to me in actual life, still less with my own experience as I mentally reconstruct it in the light of some conscious or unconscious philosophical theory. My own experience, in fact, is very far from satisfying the conditions of completeness and harmony which we found in our last book to be essential to a “pure” or perfect experience. Its defectiveness is principally manifested in three ways. (1) As we have already seen, its contents are always fragmentary. It never contains more than the poorest fragment of the whole wealth of existence. The purposes or interests which make up my conscious life are narrowly limited. The major portion of the facts of the universe, i.e. of the conditions of which note has to be taken by its inhabitants if their aims are to be fulfilled, lie outside the range of my individual interests—at least, of those which I ever become explicitly aware. Hence, being without significance for my individual purposes, they do not directly enter into my special experience. I either know nothing of them at all, or know of them only indirectly and through the testimony of others for whose lives they have real and direct significance. And these others again are, in virtue of the individual interests which differentiate them from me, only partially cognisant of the same factual reality as I am.

(2) Again, my insight even into my own aims and interests is of a very limited kind. For one thing, it is only a fragment of them which is ever given in the form of what is immediately felt in an actual moment of experience. I have largely to interpret the actually felt by theoretical intellectual constructions which reach, in the form of memory, into the past, and, in the form of anticipation, into the future. And both these types of intellectual construction, though indispensable, are notoriously vitiated by fallacies. For another, even with the fullest aid of such intellectual construction, I never succeed in completely grasping the whole meaning of my life as the embodiment of a single coherent purpose. Many of my purposes never rise sufficiently into clear consciousness to be distinctly realised, and those that do often wear the appearance of having no systematic connection with one another. Small wonder, then, that the realities or “facts” of which I learn to take note for the execution of my aims more often than not appear to belong to a chaos rather than to the orderly system which we cannot help believing the world to be, could we see it as it truly is.

(3) Finally, I have the gravest grounds for the conviction that even of the realities of which I do take note I never perceive more than just those aspects which attract my attention just because they happen to be significant for my special interests. What startling experiences teach us in the case of our fellow-men may be true everywhere, namely, that everything that is has an infinity of sides to it, over and above those of which we become aware because of their special importance for our own purposes; there may be an infinite wealth of character in the most familiar things, to which we are blind only because, so to speak, it has no “economic value” for the human market. For all these reasons we are absolutely forbidden to identify our own limited experience with the experience of which we have said, that to be real is to be bound up with it, and to be bound up with it is to be real. Neither, again, can we identify this experience with the “collective experience” of the aggregate of human or other finite sentient beings in the universe. This is obvious for more reasons than one. To begin with, “collective experience,” if it has any meaning at all, is a contradictory expression. For experience, as we have seen, is essentially characterised by unique individuality of aim and interest; in this sense at least, a true experience must be that of an individual subject, and no collection or aggregate can be an individual subject. The so-called “collective experience” is not one experience at all, but simply an indefinite multiplicity of experience, thrown together under a single designation. And even if we could get over this difficulty, there remains a still more formidable one. The various experiences of finite individuals are all, we have said, fragmentary and more or less incoherent. You cannot, therefore, get an experience which is all-comprehensive and all-harmonious by adding them together. If their defect were merely their fragmentariness, it would be conceivable that, given an outside observer who could see all the fragments at once, they might constitute a whole by merely supplementing one another’s deficiencies. But our finite experiences are not only fragmentary, but also largely contradictory and internally chaotic. We may indeed believe that the contradictions are only apparent, and that if we could become fully conscious of our own inmost aims and purposes we should at the same moment be aware of all Reality as a harmonious system; but we never do, and we shall see later that just because of our finitude we never can, attain this completed insight into the significance of our own lives. Hence the experience for which all reality is present as a harmonious whole cannot be any mere duplicate of the partial and imperfect experiences which we possess.

We thus seem driven to assert the necessary existence of a superhuman experience to which the whole universe of being is directly present as a complete and harmonious system. For “reality” has been seen to have no meaning apart from presence in a sentient experience or whole of feeling, while it has also been seen infinitely to transcend all that can be given as directly present to any limited experience. If this conclusion is sound, our “Absolute” can now be said to be a conscious life which embraces the totality of existence, all at once, and in a perfect systematic unity, as the contents of its experience. Such a conception clearly has its difficulties; how such an all-containing experience must be thought to be related to the realm of physical nature, and again to our own finite experiences, are problems which we shall have to take up in our two succeeding books. We shall find them far from simple, and it is as well for us from the first to face the possibility that our knowledge of the character of the absolute experience may prove to be very limited and very tentative. That it is we seem compelled to assert by the very effort to give a coherent meaning to our notion of reality, but of what it is we may have to confess ourselves largely ignorant.

But we may at least go so far as this, at the present stage of our argument. However different an all-containing coherent experience may be in its detailed structure from our own piecemeal and largely incoherent experience, if it is to be experience at all, it must apprehend its contents in the general way which is characteristic of direct experience as such. It must take note or be aware of them, and it must—if it is to be a direct experience at all—be aware of them as exhibiting a structural unity which is the embodiment of a consistent plan or purpose. We have to think of it as containing in a systematic unity not only all the “facts” of which our various experiences have to take note, but all the purposes which they express. Hence it is natural for us, when we attempt to form some approximate concept of such an ultimate experience in terms of our own conscious life, to conceive it as the union of perfected knowledge in an indivisible whole with supreme will. We must, however, remember that, for such an experience, precisely because of its all-comprising character, the what and the that are inseparable. Hence its knowledge must be of the nature of direct insight into the individual structure of the world of fact, not of generalisation about possibilities, and its will must have the form of a purpose which, unlike our own, is always consciously expressed with perfect harmony and completeness in the “facts” of which it is aware. Hence knowledge and will, involving as they do for us discrepancy between the what and the that of experience, are not wholly satisfactory terms by which to characterise the life of the Absolute. The most adequate analogue to such a life will probably be found in the combination of direct insight with satisfied feeling which we experience in the relation of intimate and intelligent love between persons. The insight of love may be called “knowledge,” but it is knowledge of a quite other type than the hypothetical universals of science. I know my friend, not as one case of this or that general class about which certain propositions in Physiology, Psychology, or Ethics can be made, but as—for me at least—a unique individual centre of personal interest. Again, in my relations with my friend, so far as they remain those of satisfied love, my individual interests find their fullest embodiment. But the will to love is not first there in an unsatisfied form, and the embodiment afterwards added as the result of a process through means to an end. The purpose and its embodiment are throughout present together in an unbroken unity, and where this is not so, true mutual friendship does not as yet exist. After some such general fashion we shall best represent to ourselves the kind of consciousness which we must attribute to an all-embracing world-experience. Only, we must bear in mind that, owing to the fragmentariness of our own lives, the identity of purpose on which human friendship rests can never be close and intimate enough to be an adequate representative of the ultimate unity of all experience in the Absolute.

§ 5. It may be well to add a word of caution against a plausible fallacy here. If there is such an Absolute Experience as we have demanded, all the realities that we know as the contents of our environment must be present to it, and present to it as they really are in their completeness. But we must be careful not to suppose that “our” environment, as it appears to an experience which apprehends it as it really is, is a mere replica or reduplication of the way in which it appears to us. For example, I must not assume that what I perceive as a physical thing, made up of separable parts external to one another and apparently combined in a mechanical way into a whole which is a mere collection or aggregate of parts, is necessarily apprehended by the Absolute Experience as an aggregate of similar or corresponding parts. The thing as it appears to my limited insight may be no less different from the thing as apprehended in its true nature by such an experience, than your body, as it exists for my perception from your body as you apprehend it in organic sensation. In particular, we must not assume that things exist for the Absolute Experience in the form into which we analyse them for the purpose of general scientific theory, for instance, that physical things are for it assemblages of atoms or individual minds successions of “mental states.” In fact, without anticipating the results of succeeding books, we may safely say at once that this would be in principle impossible. For all scientific analysis is in its very nature general and hypothetical. It deals solely with types and abstract possibilities, never with the actual constitution of individual things. But all real existence is individual.

To put the same thing in a different way, scientific theory deals always with those features of the what of things of which we take note because of their significance for our human purposes. And in dealing with these features of things, it seeks to establish general laws of linkage between them of which we may avail ourselves, for the practical purpose of realising our various human interests. This practical motive, though often not apparent, implicitly controls our whole scientific procedure from first to last. Hence the one test of a scientific hypothesis is its success in enabling us to infer one set of facts from another set, Whether the intermediate links by which we pass from the one set to the other have any counterpart in the world of real experience or are mere creations of theory, like the “uninterpretable” symbols in a mathematical calculus, is from this point of view a matter of indifference. All we require of our hypothesis is that when you start with facts capable of experimental verification, the application of it shall lead to other facts capable of experimental verification. For this reason we may justifiably conclude that to any experience which is aware of things in their concrete individuality they must present aspects which are not represented in our scientific hypotheses, and again cannot appear to it as the precise counterpart of the schemes according to which we quite legitimately reconstruct them for the purpose of scientific investigation. We shall need to bear this in mind in future when we come to discuss the real character of what appears to us as the world of physical nature.

§ 6. The conclusion we have reached so far is largely identical with that of the anti-materialistic argument of Berkeley’s well-known Principles of Human Knowledge and Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous. But there is one important difference between the two results which will lead to momentous consequences. Berkeley’s argument against the independent existence of unperceived matter proceeds throughout on the principle that to be means to be present in an experience, and his exhibition of the contradictions into which the denial of this principle leads the supporter of scientific materialism remains the classic demonstration of the truth of the opposing or “idealistic” view. But it is to be noted that he works throughout with an inadequate conception of “experience” and “presence in experience.” He treats experience as equivalent to mere passive “awareness” of a quality presented to perception. To experience with him means simply to be conscious of a presented quality; experience is treated as having, in psychological terminology, a merely presentational character. Hence he is led to infer that the things with which experience confronts us are nothing more than complexes of presented qualities, or, as he phrases it, that their whole being consists in being perceived.

The full extent of the paradox which this identification of the esse of material things with percipi involves, will be more apparent when we come to deal in our next book with the problem of matter. At present I merely wish to call attention to one of its many aspects. On the theory that experience is purely passive and presentational, consisting merely in the reception of certain sensations, the question at once arises, What determines what in particular the sensations we at any given moment receive shall be? On the Berkeleian view, their order must be determined altogether from without by a principle foreign to the experience which, he assumes, has nothing to do but to cognise the qualities put before it. Hence he is led to appeal to the agency of God, whom he supposes directly and immediately to cause perceptions to succeed one another in my experience in a certain definite order. Now, apart from further difficulties of detail, this doctrine at once leads to the result that the attitude of God to the world of things is totally different from that of us who experience it. Experience is to me a purely passive receptivity of presentations; God’s relation to the presented objects, on the other hand, is one of active production. There is no common element in these fundamentally contrasted relations; hence it is really a paralogism when Berkeley allows himself to bring God under the same categories which he applies to the interpretation of human experience, and to attribute to Him a consciousness of the things which have been declared to be only the presentations His agency raises in the human mind.

Berkeley is, in fact, inconsistently combining two conflicting lines of thought. He argues, on the one hand, that since there must be some reason for the order in which presentations succeed one another in my mental life, that reason is to be found in a source independent of myself. This source he identifies with God, but, as far as the argument goes, it might equally well have been found, as by Locke, in the original constitution of matter; all that the argument requires is that it shall be placed in something outside the succession of presentations themselves. On the other hand, he also argues that since the existence of the physical world means simply the fact of its being presented to consciousness, when its contents cease to be present to my consciousness they must be present to that of God. And here again the objection might be suggested, that if presence to my own experience, while it lasts, is an adequate account of the esse of a thing, it does not appear why I should recognise the reality of any other experience. If I am to hold that disappearance from my experience does not destroy the reality of anything, I must logically also hold that its being, while I perceive it, is not exhausted by my awareness of it. Its esse cannot be merely percipi.

The complete solution of Berkeley’s difficulty would be premature at this point of our discussion. But we may at once point out its principal source. It arises from his failure to take adequate account of the purposive aspect of experience. Experience, as we have seen, is not mere awareness of a succession of presented objects, it is awareness of a succession determined by a controlling interest or purpose. The order of my experiences is not something simply given me from without, it is controlled and determined by subjective interest from within. Berkeley, in fact, omits selective attention from his psychological estimate of the contents of the human mind. He forgets that it is the interests for which I take note of facts that in the main determine which facts I shall take note of, an oversight which is the more remarkable, since he expressly lays stress on “activity” as the distinguishing property of “spirits.” When we make good the omission by emphasising the teleological aspect of experience, we see at once that the radical disparity between the relation of the supreme and the subordinate mind to the world of facts disappears. I do not simply receive my presented facts passively in an order determined for me from without by the supreme mind; in virtue of my power of selective attention, on a limited scale, and very imperfectly, I recreate the order of their succession for myself.

Again, recognition of the teleological aspect of all experience goes far to remove the dissatisfaction which we may reasonably feel with the other half of Berkeley’s argument. When I conceive of the “facts” of experience as merely objects presented to my apprehension, there seems no sufficient reason for holding that they exist except as so presented. But the moment I think of the succession of presented facts as itself determined by the subjective interests expressed in selective attention, the case becomes different. The very expression “selective attention” itself carries with it a reminder that the facts which respond to my interests are but a selection out of a larger whole. And my practical experience of the way in which my own most clearly defined and conscious purposes depend for their fulfilment upon connection with the interests and purposes of a wider social whole possessed of an organic unity, should help me to understand how the totality of interests and purposes determining the selective attention of different percipients can form, as we have held that it must, the harmonious and systematic unity of the absolute experience. The fuller working out of this line of thought must be left for later chapters, but it is hardly too much to say that the teleological character which experience possesses in virtue of its unity with feeling is the key to the idealistic interpretation of the universe.

Idealism, i.e. the doctrine that all reality is mental, as we shall have repeated opportunities of learning, becomes unintelligible when mental life is conceived of as a mere awareness of “given” presentations.

§ 7. We may now, before attempting to carry out in detail our general view of what is involved in being real, enumerate one or two philosophical doctrines about the nature of real existence which our conclusion as to the connection of reality with experience justifies us in setting aside. And, first of all, we can at once see that our previous result, if sound, proves fatal to all forms of what is commonly known as Realism. By Realism is meant the doctrine that the fundamental character of that which really is, as distinguished from that which is only imagined to be, is to be found in its independence of all relation to the experience of a subject. What exists at all, the realist holds, exists equally whether it is experienced or not. Neither the fact of its existence nor the kind of existence it possesses depends in any way upon its presence to an experience. Before it was experienced at all it had just the same kind of being that it has now you are experiencing it, and it will still be the same when it has passed out of experience. In a word, the circumstance that a mind—whether yours or mine or God’s is indifferent to the argument—is aware of it as one of the constituents of its experience, makes no difference to the reality of the real thing; experience is what is technically called a relation of one-sided dependence. That there may be experience at all, and that it may have this or that character, there must be real things of determinate character, but that there may be real things, it is not necessary that there should be experience. This is, in brief, the essence of the realist contention, and any philosophy which accepts it as valid is in its spirit a realist philosophy.

As to the number and nature of the supposed independent real things, very different views may be held and have been held by different representatives of Realism. Thus some realists have maintained the existence of a single ultimate reality, others of an indefinite plurality of independent “reals.” Parmenides, with his doctrine that the real world is a single uniform unchanging material sphere, is an instance in the ancient, and Mr. Herbert Spencer, with his Unknowable, an instance in the modern world of a realist of the former or “monistic” type. The ancient atomists, and in more recent times Leibnitz with his infinite plurality of independent and disconnected monads, and Herbart with his world of simple “reals,” afford the best known instances of a doctrine of pluralistic Realism. So again, the most diverse theories have been propounded as to the nature of the “reals.” Ancient and modern atomists have thought of them as material, and this is perhaps the form of realistic doctrine which appeals most readily to the ordinary imagination. But though a materialistic metaphysician is necessarily a realist, a realist need not be a materialist. Herbart thought of the independent “reals” as qualitatively simple beings of a nature not capable of further definition, Leibnitz as minds, while Agnostic philosophers of the type of Spencer conceive their ultimate reality as a sort of neutral tertium quid, neither mental nor material. The only point on which all the theories agree is that the reality of that which they recognise as true Being consists in its not depending for its existence or its character on relation to an experience. The differences of detail as to the number and nature of independent “reals,” though of great importance for our complete estimate of an individual realist’s philosophical position, do not affect our general verdict on the tenability of the first principle of Realism.

The one point of divergence among realists which may be considered as of more than secondary importance for our present purpose, is the difference between what we may call Agnostic and Dogmatic Realism. Agnostic Realism, while asserting the ultimate dependence of our experience upon a reality which exists independently of experience, denies that we can have any knowledge of the nature of this independent reality. The independent reality by which all experience is conditioned is, on this view, an Unknowable or Thing-in-itself, of which we are only logically entitled to say that it certainly is, but that we do not in the least know what it is. The doctrine of Agnostic Realism has probably never been carried out by any thinker with rigid consistency, but it forms a leading feature of the philosophy of Kant as expounded in his First Critique, and through Kant has passed into English thought as the foundation of the systems of Sir William Hamilton and Mr. Herbert Spencer.

Dogmatic Realism, of which Leibnitz and, at a later date, Herbart are the most important representatives in modern philosophy, on the contrary, while maintaining that real being is independent of experience, at the same time holds that it is possible to have positive knowledge not only of its existence but of its nature. In principle, both these forms of Realism have been already excluded by the argument of Book I. chap. 2, § 4. The supreme importance of the principle on which the argument rests may perhaps warrant us in once more briefly recurring to it. Our reasoning, it will be remembered, took the form of a challenge. Produce any instance you please, we said to the realist, whom we had not then learned to know by that name, of what you personally regard as reality, and we will undertake to show that it derives its reality for you from the very fact that it is not ultimately separable from the experience of a subject. A thing is real for you, and not merely imaginary, precisely because in some aspect of its character it enters into and affects your own experience. Or, what is the same thing in other words, it is real for you because it affects favourably or otherwise some subjective interest of your own. To be sure, the thing as it enters into your experience, as it affects your own subjective interests, is not the thing as it is in its fulness; it only touches your life through some one of its many sides. And this may lead you to argue that the real thing is the unexperienced “condition” of a modification of your experience. But then we had again to ask what you mean by saying that facts which you do not experience are real as “conditions” of what you do experience. And we saw that the only meaning we could attach to the reality of the “condition” was presence to an experience which transcends your own.

To this general argument we may add two corollaries or supplementary considerations, which, without introducing anything fresh, may help to make its full force more apparent.

(1) The argument, as originally presented, was concerned directly with the that of reality, the mere fact of its existence. But we may also state it, if we please, from the side of the what, the nature possessed by the real. You cannot affirm any doctrine about the real existence of anything without at the same time implying a doctrine about its nature. Even if you say “Reality is unknowable,” you are attributing something beyond mere independence of experience to your reality; you are asserting that what is thus independent possesses the further positive quality of transcending cognition. Now what, in logic, must be your ground for attributing this rather than any other quality to your independent reality? It can only be the fact or supposed fact—which is indeed regularly appealed to by the Agnostic as the foundation of his belief—that our experiences themselves are all found to be self-contradictory. There is no ground for taking the unknowability of Reality to be true unless you mean by it a character which belongs not to something which stands outside all experience, but to experience itself. The same contention applies to any other predicate which the realist affirms as true of his ultimate reality.

(2) Again, we may with effect present our argument in a negative form. Try, we may say, to think of the utterly unreal, and see how you will have to conceive it. Can you think of sheer unreality otherwise than as that of which no mind is ever aware, of which no purpose has ever to take account as a condition of its fulfilment? But to think of it thus is to attribute to it, as its definition, precisely that independence in which the realist finds the mark of ultimate reality. And if “independence” constitutes unreality, presence to and union with experience must be what constitutes reality.

Yet, however fatal this line of argument may be to the principle of the realistic contention, we ought not to be satisfied with such a mere general refutation. We must try to see what is the element of truth in the realistic views to which they owe the plausibility they have always possessed for minds of a certain type. In Philosophy we are never really rid of an error until we have learned how it arises and what modicum of truth it contains.

(1) Agnostic Realism. We may begin with Agnosticism, with which we ought now to have no serious difficulty. Agnostic Realism, as we have seen, is in principle a doubly self-contradictory theory. For it combines in one breath the irreconcilable declarations that the reality of things is unknowable and that it knows it to be so. Further, as we have just said, it makes alleged contradictions which only exist in and for experience, its sole ground for affirming that something, of which we can only specify that it is outside all experience, transcends cognition. To have grasped these two points is to have disposed of Agnosticism as a metaphysical theory.

Yet with all its defects Agnosticism still enshrines one piece of truth which the metaphysician is peculiarly prone to forget. Of all men the metaphysician, just because his special interest is to know something final and certain about Reality, is the most apt to exaggerate the amount of his certain knowledge. It is well to be reminded that the certainty with which we may say that Reality is experience is compatible with a very imperfect and limited theoretical insight into experience itself. In actual life this is a far from unfamiliar fact; the literature of common sense is full of observations to the effect that we never really know our own hearts, that the most difficult task of the sage is to understand himself, and so forth,—complaints which all turn on the point that even our own limited direct experience of our own meanings and purposes goes far beyond what we can at any moment express in the form of reflective knowledge. Yet it is easy, when we come to deal in Metaphysics with the nature of ultimate Reality, to forget this, and to suppose that the certainty with which we can say that the ultimately Real is an experience justifies us in wholesale dogmatising about the special character of that experience. As a protest against such exaggerated estimates of the extent of our theoretical knowledge of the nature of Reality, Agnosticism thus contains a germ of genuine and important truth, and arises from a justifiable reaction against the undue emphasising of the merely intellectual side of our experience, of which we have already seen, and shall hereafter still more fully see, ground to complain as a besetting weakness of the metaphysically minded.

(2) Dogmatic Realism, that is, Realism with admittedly knowable independent “reals,” is a much more workable doctrine, and in one of its forms, that of the so-called “naïve realism” which supposes the world of experienced things with all its perceived qualities to exist independently of any relation to an experiencing subject in precisely the same form in which we experience it, fairly represents the ordinary views of unphilosophical “common-sense” men. Nothing seems more obvious to “common sense” than that my perception of a thing does not bring it out of nothing into existence, and again does not create for it new qualities which it had not before. It is because the thing is already there, and has already such and such a nature, says “common sense,” that I perceive it as I do. Therefore the whole world of perceived things must exist independently in the same form in which they are perceived, as a condition of my perception of them.

When this view comes to be worked out as a philosophical theory, it usually undergoes some transformation. The fact of illusion, and the experimentally ascertained subjective differences between individual percipients, or between different states of the same percipient, make it hard for the realist who wishes to be scientific to maintain that all the perceived qualities of experienced things are equally independent of the experiencing subject. Reflection usually substitutes for the “naïve” realism of everyday life, a theory of “scientific” realism according to which the existence and some of the known properties of the experienced world are independent of the experiencing subject, while others are regarded as mere secondary effects arising from the action of an independent reality on the subject’s consciousness. With the further differences between the various types of scientific realism, according to the special properties which are held to belong to things independently of the percipient subject, we are not at present concerned.

It is, of course, clear that our general argument against the existence of any reality except as in an experience tells just as much against “naïve” realism and its more reflective outgrowth “scientific” realism as against Agnosticism. But the very plausibility and wide diffusion of realistic views of this type make it all the more necessary to reinforce our contention by showing what the truth Realism contains is, and just where it diverges from truth into fallacy. Nor is it specially difficult to do this. The important elements of truth contained in Realism seem to be in the main two. (i) It is certain that a thing may be real without being consciously present as a distinguishable aspect in my experience. Things do not begin to exist when I begin to be aware of them, or cease to exist when I cease to be aware of them. And again, the fact that I make mistakes and am subject to illusion shows that the qualities of things are not necessarily in reality what I take them to be. (2) Further, as is shown by the fact of my imperfect understanding of my own feelings and purposes, something may actually be an integral part of my own life as an experiencing subject without my clearly and consciously recognising it as such when I reflect on the contents of my experience.

But precisely how much do these two considerations prove? All that is established by the first is the point on which we have already insisted, that it is not my experience which constitutes Reality; and all that is established by the second, that experience, as we have already repeatedly seen, is not merely cognitive. But the admission of both these positions brings us not one step nearer the conclusion which the realist draws from them, that real existence is independent of all experience. Because it is easy to show that the reality of a thing does not depend on its being explicitly recognised by any one finite percipient or any aggregate of finite percipients, and again, that there is more in any experience of finite percipients than those percipients know, the realist thinks he may infer that there are realities which would still be real though they entered into no experience at all. But there is really no logical connection whatever between the premisses of this inference and the conclusion which is drawn from them.

This may be made clearer by a couple of examples. Take, to begin with, the case of the mental life of my fellow human beings. And, to state the case in the form in which it appears most favourable to the realist conclusion, let us imagine an Alexander Selkirk stranded on a barren rock in the midst of the ocean. The hopes and fears of our Selkirk are independent of my knowledge of them just as completely and in just the same sense in which the existence and conformation of the rock on which he is stranded are so. I and all other inhabitants of the earth may be just as ignorant of Selkirk’s existence and of what is passing in his mind as we are of the existence and geological structure of his rock. And again, what Selkirk explicitly cognises of his own inner life may bear as small a proportion to the whole as what he explicitly cognises of the properties of his rock to the whole nature of the rock. Yet all this in no wise shows that Selkirk’s hopes and fears and the rest of his mental life are not experience or have a reality “independent of experience.” Hopes and fears which are not experience, not psychical matter of fact, would indeed be a contradiction in set terms. And what the argument fails to prove of Selkirk’s mental life, it fails, for the same reason, to prove of Selkirk’s rock.

We may pass from the case of the mental life of a fellow-man to the case of unperceived physical reality. A recent realist philosopher, Mr. L. T. Hobhouse, has brought forward as a clear instance of an independent physical reality, the case of a railway train just emerging from a tunnel. I do not perceive the train, he says, until it issues from the tunnel, but it was just as real while it was running through the tunnel. Its reality is therefore independent of the question whether it is perceived or not. But, in the first place, the argument requires that the train shall be empty; it must be a runaway train without driver, guard, or passengers, if the conditions presumed in the premisses are to be fulfilled. And, in the second place, we may retort that even an empty runaway train must have been despatched from somewhere by somebody. It must stand in some relation to the general scheme of purposes and interests expressed in our system of railway traffic, and it is precisely this connection, with a scheme of purposes and interests, which makes the runaway train a reality and not a mere fiction of an ingenious philosopher’s imagination. If Mr. Hobhouse’s argument proves the independent reality of the train in the tunnel, it ought equally to prove, and does equally prove, the independent existence of Selkirk’s fluctuations from hope to despair and back again on his isolated rock. And precisely because it proves both conclusions equally, the sort of independence it establishes cannot be independence of experience. Like all realist arguments, it turns on the identification of experience with the cognitive aspect of experience, an identification too often suggested by the language of the “idealists” themselves.

§ 8. The persistent vitality of Realism is due to its protest against the fallacies of an opposing theory which has of late especially found favour with some distinguished students of natural science, and which we may conveniently call Subjectivism. Realism, as we saw, started from the true premisses, that there are real facts of which my experience does not make me explicitly aware, and that my cognition even of my own experience is incomplete, and argued to the false conclusion that there are therefore realities independent of any experience. Subjectivism reasons in the opposite way. It asserts truly that there is no reality outside experience, and then falsely concludes that I can know of no reality except my own cognitive states. Its favourite formula are expressions such as, “We know only the modifications of our own consciousness,” “All we know is our own perceptions,” “Nothing exists but states of consciousness.” These formulæ are not all obviously identical in meaning, but the exponents of Subjectivism seem to use them without any conscious distinction, and we shall probably do the theory no injustice if we criticise it on the assumption that the expressions are meant to be of identical signification.

Now it is clear that the logical consequences of the subjectivist doctrine are so subversive of all the practical assumptions upon which daily life is based, that they should require the most stringent proof before we give our assent to them. If Subjectivism is true, it follows immediately that not merely the “whole choir of heaven and furniture of earth,” but the whole of humanity, so far as I have any knowledge of its existence, is a mere subjective affection of my own “consciousness,” or, as the scientific subjectivist usually, for some not very obvious reason, prefers to say, of my own brain. Every argument which the subjectivist can produce to show that “things” are, for my knowledge at any rate, “modifications of my own consciousness,” applies to the case of my fellow-men with as much force as to the case of the inorganic world. The logical inference from the subjectivist’s premisses, an inference which he is rarely or never willing to draw, would be that he is himself the sole real being in a world of phantoms, not one of which can with any certainty be said to correspond to a real object. And conversely, any valid ground for recognising the existence of my fellow-men as more than “states of my own consciousness,” must equally afford ground for admitting the reality, in the same general sense, of the rest of the world of things familiar to us from the experiences of everyday life. For if any one of the things composing the world of practical life has a reality which is not dependent upon its presence to my particular experience, then there is the same reason for believing that every other such thing has a like reality, unless there happen to be special grounds for regarding the perception to which it is present as an hallucination.

We must not, however, simply dismiss the subjectivist theory in this summary way. We must examine the doctrine in detail sufficiently to discover where the fallacy comes in, how it arises, and what modicum of sound philosophic insight it may possibly contain. To take these three points in logical order—

(a) The current arguments for Subjectivism are often so stated as to confuse together two quite distinct positions. When it is said that what we perceive is “our own subjective states,” the meaning intended may be either that there is, at least so far as I am able to know, no real existence in the universe except that of my “states of consciousness”; or again, that there are such realities, but that the properties which I perceive do not belong to them in their own nature but are only subjective effects of their action upon my “consciousness,” or, if you prefer to speak in physiological language upon my nervous system. Now, many of the arguments commonly urged by the subjectivist would at most only prove the second conclusion, in which the subjectivist agrees to a large extent with the scientific realist. Thus it is an ignoratio elenchi to reason as if the facts of hallucination, illusion, and discrepancy between the reports of different percipients or different sense-organs of the same percipient gave any support to the special doctrine of Subjectivism. These facts, which, as we have seen, are equally appealed to by scientific realists, prove no more than that we do not always perceive the world of things as it is, and as it must be thought of if we would think truly,—in other words, that there is such a thing as error.

Now the problem “How is it possible for us to think or perceive falsely?” is, as the student of Greek philosophy knows, both difficult and important. But the existence of error in no way shows that the things which I perceive are “states of my own consciousness”; on the contrary, error is harder to explain on the subjectivist theory than on any other. For if what I perceive has some kind of existence distinct from the mere fact of my perceiving it, there is at least a possibility of understanding how the reality and my perception of it may be discrepant; but if the existence of a thing is only another name for the fact that I perceive it, it seems impossible that I should perceive anything except as it is. On the subjectivist theory, as Plato showed in the Theaetetus, every percipient being ought, at every moment of his existence, to be infallible.

We may confine our attention, then, to the grounds which the subjectivist alleges for the former conclusion, that nothing can be known to exist except my own “states of consciousness,” and may dismiss the whole problem of erroneous perception as irrelevant to the question. Now the general argument for Subjectivism, however differently it may be stated by different writers, consists, in principle, of a single allegation. It is alleged as a fact in the Psychology of cognition, that things are immediately perceived by us as modifications of our own sensibility, or “states of our own consciousness,” and that it is therefore impossible to get behind this ultimate condition of all perception. Against this psychological doctrine we have to urge (1) that it is in flagrant contradiction with the certain facts of actual life; and (2) that, as a doctrine in Psychology, it is demonstrably false.

(1) There are certain realities, admitted by the subjectivist himself, which are manifestly not “states of my consciousness,” and of which I yet, as the subjectivist himself admits, have a genuine though imperfect knowledge; such realities are, e.g., the ends and purposes of my fellow-men, and again many of my own ends and purposes. It is allowed on all hands that I can know not only the fact of the existence of other men, but also, to some extent at least, the character of their various purposes and interests. This is involved, for instance, in the simple fact that when I read a letter it is normally possible for me to understand the writer’s meaning. It is equally involved in the fact that I can know the truth of any ordinary historical matter of fact, e.g., the date of the great fire of London. Neither the date of the fire of London nor the meaning of my correspondent’s sentences is a “state of my consciousness” in any intelligible sense of the words, yet both are typical instances of the kind of facts of which our ordinary knowledge of the world of everyday life and practice wholly consists. And what is true of facts relating to the deeds and purposes of others is equally true of my own deeds and purposes. The facts which make up my own life cannot, without violence to language, be reduced to “states of my consciousness.” For instance, I may know that I have a certain temperament or disposition, e.g., that I am irascible by temperament or of a sentimental disposition; but though my knowing these truths about myself may in a sense be called a state of my consciousness, the truths themselves cannot be called “states of my consciousness” without a serious logical fallacy of equivocal middle term.

(2) This will be made clearer by a consideration of the psychological principle invoked by the subjectivist. What the subjectivist means when he says that in perception I am aware only of the states, or subjective modifications, of my own consciousness, is that the object of which each perceptive state is aware is simply itself as a perceptive state; the perception perceives itself and nothing else. E.g., when I say I see red, what I am really aware of is that I am in a state of perceiving red; when I say I hear a noise, what I am aware of is that I am in a state of hearing a noise, and so universally. Now this is so far from being a truth, that it is absolutely and demonstrably false. We may, in fact, definitely lay it down that the one thing of which no one, except the introspective psychologist, is ever aware is his own perceptive state in the act of perceiving, and that, even in the case of the psychologist who sets himself purposely to study his own states, no perceptive state ever perceives itself. What I am aware of when I look at a red surface is not “myself-as-perceiving-red,” but the splash of red colour itself. When I see a man, I do not perceive “myself-as-seeing-a-man,” but I perceive the other man. So when I take a resolution to act in a certain way or realise that I am in a certain mood, what I am directly aware of is not “myself-as-forming-the-resolution” or “myself-as-in-the-mood,” but the resolution or the mood. Even when, as an introspective psychologist, I sit down to study the formation of resolutions or the peculiarities of emotional moods by reflection on my own experience, the state in which I study the formation of a resolution or the nature of a mood is not itself the state of resolving or of experiencing the mood in question. We cannot too strongly insist that, if by “self-consciousness” is meant a cognitive state which is its own object, there is no such thing, and it is a psychological impossibility that there should be any such thing, as self-consciousness. No cognitive state ever has itself for its own object. Every cognitive state has for its object something other than itself.

Even where I make an assertion about my subjective condition, as when I say “I know I am very angry,” the state of knowing about my feeling is as distinct from the feeling itself as the state of knowing that I see red is from the red colour that I see. What the subjectivist does is to confuse the two. Because the act of knowing is itself a state of the knowing subject, and because in some cases the knowledge may again have reference to some other state of the same subject, he infers that what I know at any moment is my own subjective condition in the act of knowing. In other and more technical words, he confuses the cognitive act or state with its own object. To what absurd results this confusion would lead him, if he were logical in the inferences he makes from it, we have already seen. We can now see that psychologically the confusion is a double one. (1) The subjectivist confuses experience with mere awareness of a presented content. He ignores the presence of the true “subjective” factor of selective attention throughout experience, and is thus led to forget that all experiences imply an element which is in the experiencing mind but not presented to it. (2) And in confining his attention to the presentational aspect of experience, he goes on to confound the presented content with the fact of its presentation. As against this second confusion it is essential to a true theory of knowledge to emphasise three points of distinction between the presented content or object of a cognitive state and the state itself, considered as a process in the history of an experiencing subject. (1) The cognitive state is never its own object, it refers to or cognises an object distinct from its own existence as a psychical occurrence. This is the truth which Realism distorts into the doctrine that the object of knowledge must have a reality of “independent of” experience. (2) The object of knowledge is never created by the occurrence of the psychical state in which a particular percipient becomes aware of its existence. This is just as true of so-called “merely ideal” objects as of physical things. The properties of the natural logarithms or of the circular functions in trigonometry are just as independent of my knowledge of them as the qualities of the trees and animals I should see if I turned from my writing desk and looked out at the window. (3) The object of knowledge has always a character of which only a fragment is ever presented to my perception or reflection in any cognitive state. Every cognitive state refers to or stands for a great deal more than it directly means to me.

(3) The origin of the subjectivist fallacy, as has been brilliantly shown by Avenarius, is to be found in the “intrasubjective intercourse” of a plurality of percipients capable of communicating their experience to each other. So long as I am dealing solely with myself as an experiencing being and my relation to my own environment, there is no possibility of a subjectivist interpretation. In my own direct experience I have to do neither with “mental states” nor with mere “objects of cognition,” but with things which in various ways by their interference assist or hinder the accomplishment of my various purposes, and of which I have therefore to take note, so as to adapt my ways of reaching my ends to their ways of behaviour. Hence the “natural” view of the world, for a single experiencing being, would be that of “naïve realism,” to which the things forming my environment are real in precisely the same sense in which I am real myself. But as soon as I have to take account of the experiences of other percipients, there arises an inevitable fallacy which leads to philosophical consequences of the gravest kind. Starting with the assumption that the things I perceive are the real things, I feel a difficulty as to how the same things can be perceived by the other percipients around me. E.g., if the sun I see is the real sun, what about the sun seen by some one else? Instead of finding the true explanation, that all the percipients are in relation to a common environment which is independent of its presence to any one percipient’s experience, I very naturally fall into the mistake of thinking the things perceived by other men to be “ideas” or “percepts” of the real things perceived by me. These perceptual copies of the real things I, for obvious reasons, locate somewhere “in” the organisms of my fellow-percipients. Then I go on to interpret my own experience in terms of the theory I originally devised to meet the case of my fellow-men, and infer that what I myself perceive is a set of “percepts” or “ideas” produced “in” my organism by a reality “outside” all experience. And it is then an easy step to the final conclusion that, inasmuch as all known and knowable things are mere “ideas in some one’s head,” nothing else exists. Subjectivism is thus the last step in the development of the fallacy which begins with what Avenarius calls “introjection.” Just as we learned that the existence of our fellow-men is the cardinal fact of experience which affords the most immediate refutation of the subjectivist theory, so the original source of the subjectivist fallacy is failure to recognise their experience as being on the same level of reality as our own.

(4) We need not say much on the element of truth which Subjectivism preserves in a distorted form. We have seen that, as against Realism, Subjectivism is right in maintaining the indissoluble unity of real being with experience, though it twists this truth into an absurdity by first identifying experience with my own limited and imperfect experience and then giving a false psychological interpretation of the nature of that experience itself. How a reality can be independent of presentation in my experience and yet be in its very nature dependent upon experience for its existence and character, has already been sufficiently illustrated. But we may perhaps say that even in the identification of experience with my own experience there is an underlying substratum of genuine philosophic truth. For, as we have more than once insisted, there is manifestly a great deal more in my own experience than what is at any time present as the object of conscious cognition. Or, as Mr. Bradley is fond of putting it, there is always more in my mind than before it. I am never fully aware at any moment even of the full nature of my own purposes and feelings. This is why the deceitfulness of my own heart has become a common-place of religious self-examination as well as of worldly wisdom.

Again, every increase of insight into our own real feelings and purposes involves increased insight into the feelings and purposes of the other feeling beings with whom we stand in the various relations of social intercourse. Hence it might fairly be contended that fully to know your own meaning, fully to understand what you want, would imply complete insight into the structure of the whole world of reality,—in fact, that self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe must ultimately be the same thing. The systematic unity of the whole world of experience may be so complete that there is nothing in it anywhere which does not correspond to some element in the experience of every one of its members. Each member may, like the monads of Leibnitz, represent the whole system though at very different levels of coherency and from very different points of view. But such a conception, though it would concede to Subjectivism that whatever forms a part of the system of real being somehow falls within my individual experience, would take as the foundation of its assertion that very distinction between what is implicitly present in my experience and what is explicitly before it which Subjectivism consistently ignores. Whether the doctrine as thus re-stated can be affirmed as more than a fascinating possibility, we shall be better able to judge when we have discussed in our next chapter the systematic unity of Reality.

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 13, 14; T. Case, Physical Realism, pt. 1; L. T. Hobhouse, The Theory of Knowledge, pt. 3, chap. 3, The Conception of External Reality; H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. i. chap. 7 (pp. 207-231 of vol. i. in Eng. trans.); J. S. Mackenzie, Outlines of Metaphysics, bk. i. chap. 3, Theories of Metaphysics; J. Royce, The World and the Individual, First Series (Lecture on the First Conception of Being).

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Footnote 31:

See, in particular, Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, Lecture 1, for a telling elaboration of this thought. I should note that I do not myself use the term “existence,” as is sometimes done, with special restriction to the sense of presence as a sensible event at a particular point of space and time. When so used, it is, of course, much narrower in scope than the term “Being.”

Footnote 32:

Compare the brilliant but not altogether convincing argument of Professor James, in The Will to Believe.

Footnote 33:

See the whole treatment of question of feeling in Dr. Stout’s Manual of Psychology. I do not, of course, mean that “consciousness of activity” successful or thwarted as a fact precedes and conditions pleasure-pain. On the contrary, it is a familiar fact of experience that we often learn what our purposes are for the first time by the pain which attends their defeat. E.g., a man may first realise that he is, and has been, in love by his pain at his mistress’s preference of a rival suitor. And nothing seems more certain than that many pleasures are quite independent of “actual conation,” as Plato long ago recognised.

I must take this opportunity to guard once for all against some plausible misconceptions. (a) When I speak of feeling as “purposive” or “teleological,” I do not mean to make what, to my own mind, would be the monstrous assumption, that it necessarily presupposes conscious anticipation of its guiding end or purpose. All that I mean is that the processes of conscious life are as a matter of fact only intelligible with reference to the results in which they culminate and which they serve to maintain; or again, that they all involve the kind of continuity of interest which belong to attention. (b) If attentive interest is not necessarily actual conation, actual conscious effort, still less is it necessarily actual will. For me, as for Mr. Bradley (see his article in Mind for October 1902), where there is no ideal anticipation of the result of a process there is neither actual desire nor actual will. And since I cannot see that all attention implies ideal anticpation, I certainly could not agree with Prof. Royce that ultimate Reality is simply the “internal meaning of an idea.”

My own meaning will be made clearer by reference to the illustration given at the beginning of this note. A man first realises that he has been in love because he feels pained at a rival’s success. So far as this is so, I should say, there has been no actual conation, and a fortiori, no actual will or desire. But—and this is my point—he would not feel the pain unless the success of the rival thwarted the successful issue of a specific psychophysical tendency of an essentially forward-reaching or teleological kind. The failure may for the first time make him aware of the presence of the tendency, but it must previously have been there as a condition of its own failure.

Footnote 34:

This qualification has to be added to avoid prejudging the very difficult question whether “position” itself is “relative” or “absolute.” Fortunately our argument is independent of the determination of the problem. Even if there should be differences between points as “absolute” as the difference between red and blue, our contention would retain its force.

Footnote 35:

For otherwise the facts which lay outside the purposes or interests of the Absolute would be “foreign” facts “given” from without and not in systematic harmony with its experience as a whole. The complete systematic unity of all facts would thus fall outside what was to be, ex hypothesi, an all-containing experience. Q.E.A.

Footnote 36:

For further reflections upon the unsatisfactoriness of such a conception of the Absolute as the “union of Thought and Will,” see Bk. IV. chap. 6, § 1, where it is shown that knowledge and will alike, as actual knowledge and actual will, belong only to finite beings.

Footnote 37:

I.e. if will be taken strictly to mean an actual volition, love and a “will to love” cannot co-exist; if we take will improperly to mean a “standing” interest of purpose, the case is different.

Footnote 38:

The student of the history of Philosophy will be reminded of the grounds on which Spinoza objects to ascribe “intellect” and “will” in the proper sense of the terms to his God, as well as of the “knowledge of the third or intuitive kind” and the “infinite intellectual love” of God for Himself which are so prominent in the fifth part of the Ethics. Similar considerations have sometimes led to a preference for the term “organic” rather than “purposive” or “teleological,” as expressive of the ultimate unity of experience. The word “organic,” however, might suggest biological conceptions of growth, dependence on an external environment, etc., which would be out of place. But the student may compare with what has been said of the “purposive” character of individuality Spinoza’s conception of the being of a thing as a conatus in suo esse perseverandi.

Footnote 39:

For a full examination of the relation between reality and scientific symbolism, consult Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, part 1. The more clearly it is realised that scientific hypotheses are essentially a system of mathematical symbolism, the more impossible it becomes to suppose that they deal directly with the concrete nature of things.

Footnote 40:

In Principles of Human Knowledge, §§ 70-75, Berkeley indeed seems on the very verge of denying that God Himself “perceives” the “ideas” which by His action He excites in us. But at § 139 we find that a “spirit” means “that which perceives ideas, and wills and reasons about them,” and in the third Dialogue it is expressly stated that sensible things are “perceived by God” [Works, Edit. in Bohn’s Libraries, vol. i. p. 368]. In fact, from the psychological standpoint of Berkeleian sensationalism, to deny God’s possession of “ideas” (i.e. sense-contents) would have been tantamount to denying His spirituality.

Footnote 41:

Unfortunately Berkeley, like so many philosophers, thought of “activity” as primarily an external relation between a “cause” and the material on which it “works.” This is probably why he failed to realise the “active” character of the perceptual process.

Footnote 42:

The reader will do well to compare with the whole of the foregoing section the treatment of perception as essentially teleological in Dr. Stout’s Manual of Psychology,^3 bk. iii. pt. 1, chap. 2.

I need hardly observe that recognition of the fundamental significance of purpose and selection for mental life does not of itself entail the adoption of “voluntarist” views in Psychology. What is fundamental for real mental life may perfectly well admit of analysis into hypothetical simpler elements for the purpose of the psychologist. Thus the admission that all mental life is teleological and selective need not involve the adoption of such metaphysical theories of activity as are adversely criticised by Mr. Bradley in his Appearance and Reality, chap. 7, or the introduction of a peculiar “consciousness of activity” as an unanalysable datum into Psychology. The antithesis between the actualities of life and the data of Psychology maintained by Prof. Münsterberg in his Psychology and Life, and Grundzüge der Psychologie, if untenable in the extreme form in which he states it, is important as a corrective of the opposite tendency to treat as ultimate for psychological analysis whatever is of supreme importance for life.

Footnote 43:

Thing-in-itself, i.e. not affected by the—according to this doctrine—extraneous conditions imposed upon it by relation to an experiencing mind.

Footnote 44:

The inconsistencies of both Kant and Spencer will illustrate the reluctance of the human mind to acquiesce in a genuine Agnosticism. In the Critique of Pure Reason itself Kant so far contradicts himself as to treat the Thing-in-itself as the cause of sensation, though it is a fundamental doctrine of his system that the concept of causal relation can only be legitimately applied to connect facts inside experience; and in a later work, the Critique of Judgment, he tentatively suggests its identity with Will. Of Mr. Spencer it has been truly said (I believe by Mr. F. C. S. Schiller in Riddles of the Sphinx) that in the course of his ten volumes of Synthetic Philosophy he speaks much more positively about the nature of the Unknowable than dogmatic theology ventures to speak about the nature of God.

Footnote 45:

The sceptics of antiquity, who were more alive to this contradiction than most of our modern Agnostics, tried to evade the difficulty by saying that they maintained the unknowability of things not as a demonstrated certainty, but as a “probable opinion.” But this distinction is itself illogical, for unless some propositions are certain there is no ground for considering any one proposition more probable than another. E.g. if I know that a die with six faces has four pips on each of two faces, and five pips on only one, I can logically say “it is probable that with this die four will be thrown oftener than five.” If I am totally uncertain what number of pips is marked on the various faces, I cannot regard one throw as more probable than another.

Footnote 46:

E.g., peculiarities of the individual’s colour-spectrum, total and partial colour-blindness, variations in sensibility to musical pitch, etc., etc.

Footnote 47:

The best known and most popular version of the theory is that of Locke and of a great deal of our popular science, according to which the “primary” qualities of matter, i.e. those which have to be treated as fundamental in the physical sciences, are independently real, while the rest are mere effects produced by their action on our sense-organs. The more thorough-going metaphysical doctrines of realists like Leibnitz and Herbart, being much further removed from the “naïve realism” of unreflective common sense, have never enjoyed the same currency.

Footnote 48:

Compare Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii. p. 178 ff., and Royce, World and Individual, First Series, Lect. 3. Prof. Royce’s treatment of Realism, though interesting and suggestive, is perhaps a little too much of a “short and easy way” with the antagonist to be quite convincing. Mr. Hobhouse’s anti-idealistic argument (Theory of Knowledge, 517-539) seems to me only to hold good against the “Subjectivism” discussed in our next section, but the reader will do well to examine it thoroughly for himself.

Footnote 49:

We might also suitably call it Presentationism, if the name were not already appropriated in a different sense as distinctive of certain psychological theories. The English reader will find a confused but typical exposition of Subjectivism in the opening chapters of Prof. Karl Pearson’s Grammar of Science. Subjectivist writers usually call themselves “idealists,” and regard themselves as disciples of Berkeley and Hume. Berkeley was, however, a subjectivist, if at all, only in respect to the physical world, while Hume’s conclusions are purely sceptical. The reader of Prof. Pearson must carefully observe that the “descriptive” theory of physical science has no special connection with Subjectivism, and is, in fact, held by philosophers like Profs. Ward and Royce, who are not subjectivists.

Footnote 50:

On the existence of my fellow-men as the one real proof of the objective existence of the physical world, see Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, essay on “Nature, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness,” and “Mind and Nature,” by the present writer, in International Journal of Ethics for October 1902. In the latter essay I have, I think, sufficiently exposed the flimsy reasoning by which subjectivists attempt to justify belief in the existence of other human beings from the subjectivist point of view.

Footnote 51:

The self-knowledge which is a fact in real life, as distinguished from the fictitious self-consciousness of some psychologists, is quite a different thing and involves two distinct acts of cognition: (1) the awareness of certain objects of cognition, and (2) the recognition of those objects as in some way qualifying my “self.” And the “self” which I recognise as thus qualified is again no immediate datum of experience, but a largely hypothetical intellectual construction, as we shall have opportunity to see later on.

This is perhaps the place to add the further remark, that if we would be rigidly accurate in psychological terminology, we ought to banish the very expression “consciousness” or “state of consciousness” from our language. What are really given in experience are attentive processes with a certain common character. We abstract this character and give it the name of “consciousness,” and then fall into the blunder of calling the concrete processes “states” or “modifications” of this abstraction, just as in dealing with physical things we first make abstraction of their common properties, under the name of “matter,” and then talk as if the things themselves were “forms” of “matter”. Properly speaking, there are physical things and there are minds, but there are no such things in the actual world as “matter” and “consciousness,” and we do well to avoid using the words where we can help it.

Footnote 52:

See Der Menschliche Weltbegriff, pp. 21-62; and, for the merely English reader, Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, vol. ii p. 168 ff.

Footnote 53:

This is true even in what seems at first the the exceptional case of advance in mere theoretical insight. The more clearly you realise the character of the problems which your own intellectual pursuits lead up to and the nature of their solution, the clearer becomes your insight into the problems and purposes of other workers in the same field.

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