CHAPTER IV. The World of Things—(1) Substance,

THE WORLD OF THINGS—(1) SUBSTANCE, QUALITY, AND RELATION

§ 1. The natural or pre-scientific view of the world regards it as a plurality of “things,” each possessing qualities, standing in relation to others, and interacting with them. § 2. Hence arise four problems: those of the Unity of the Thing, of Substance and Quality, of Relation, of Causality. § 3. No simple answer can be given to the question, What is one thing? The Unity of the Thing is one of teleological structure, and this is a matter of degree, and also largely of our own subjective point of view. § 4. Substance and Quality. The identification of the substance of things with their primary qualities, though useful in physical science, is metaphysically unjustifiable. § 5. Substance as an “unknowable substratum of qualities” adds nothing to our understanding of their connection. § 6. The thing cannot be a mere collection of qualities without internal unity. § 7. The conception of a thing as the law or mode of relation of its states useful but metaphysically unsatisfactory. Ultimately the many can be contained in the one only by “representation;” the unity in things must be that of an individual experience. § 8. Relation. We can neither reduce qualities to relations nor relations to qualities. § 9. Again, the attempt to conceive Reality as qualities in relation leads to the indefinite regress. §10. We cannot escape this difficulty by taking all relations as “external.” And Professor Royce’s vindication of the indefinite regress seems to depend on the uncriticised application of the inadequate category of whole and part to ultimate Reality. The union of the one and the many in concrete experience is ultra-relational. SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE: Dr. Stout’s reply to Mr. Bradley.

§ 1. When we turn from the inquiry into the structure of Reality as it must be conceived by a consistent Philosophy, to consider the aspect in which it appears to ordinary non-philosophical thought, the systematic unity which has demanded our attention in the two preceding chapters seems to be replaced by a bewildering and almost incalculable variety. According to the naïve pre-scientific theory of existence to which the experiences of practical life naturally give rise, and which serves as the point of departure for all the more scientific and systematic theories of the physicist, the psychologist, and the metaphysician, the world is composed of a multitude of apparently independent things, partly animated, like ourselves, partly inanimate. Each of these things, while in some sense a unit, is thought of as possessing an indefinite multiplicity of qualities or properties, as capable of standing in a variety of relations to other things, and as acting upon other things and being influenced by them in a variety of ways.

In all these respects, it should be observed, the naïvely realistic thought of the pre-scientific mind treats what from a more developed point of view would be distinguished as mental and physical existences alike. Human persons, like the other things of which my environment is composed, are thought of as being at once units and the possessors of diverse properties, as capable of a variety of relations to one another and to other things, and as interacting with each other and the rest of the environment. The recognition of the psychical as an order distinct from the physical, with its momentous consequences for general metaphysical theory, belongs to a later and much more sophisticated stage of intellectual development. Also, it must be noted, for the naïvely realistic intelligence, I am myself thought of as simply one object or thing in an environment of things of a similar nature, and my relations to that environment are conceived as being of the same type as the relations between its various component parts. I too am, for my own thought, so long as it remains at this primitive level, simply a thing with numerous properties, in various relations to other things, and interacting with them in diverse ways.

We have called this exceedingly primitive way of conceiving the nature of existence “pre-scientific,” on the ground that both in the mental development of the individual and in that of a community of individuals it precedes even the most tentative conscious efforts to organise thought about the world into a coherent whole. All scientific and philosophical constructions may be regarded as so many artificial modifications of this earlier point of view, instituted and carried out for the purpose of rendering it more coherent and systematic. At the same time, our use of the epithet “pre-scientific” must not be allowed to mislead. The “pre-scientific” view may and does co-exist in the same mind with the various modifications of it which arise in the effort to think consistently. We are all of us habitually “naïve realists” in respect of those aspects of the world of experience which lie outside the limits of our personal scientific studies; and even as regards those aspects of existence in respect of which our theoretical views may be of a much more developed type, we habitually relapse into the “pre-scientific” attitude when our immediate object is practical success in action rather than logical consistency in thinking. For the purposes of everyday life, the most “advanced” man of science is content to be a naïve realist outside his laboratory.

Again, pre-scientific as the primitive attitude towards existence is, in the sense of being unaffected by the deliberate effort after system and coherency of thought, it is so far scientific as to be a real though rudimentary and unconscious product of our intellectual need for order and system of some kind in our thought about things. It is a genuine though an unconscious result of our earliest reflection on the course of experience, and thus a true thought-construction, not a passive reproduction of a merely “given” material. It performs in rudimentary fashion, and without explicit purpose, the same task of systematising experience which the various scientific and philosophical theories of the more developed mind undertake more elaborately and with conscious intent. It is thus pre-scientific, but not properly speaking unscientific.

As the mass of ascertained fact accumulates and reflection upon it becomes more systematic and deliberate, our primitive conception of the systematic nature of the real inevitably proves unsatisfactory for two reasons. New facts are discovered which we cannot fit into the old scheme without modification of its structure, and, again, the concepts in terms of which the scheme was originally constructed prove on examination to be themselves obscure and ambiguous in their meaning. There is thus a double motive perpetually operative in bringing about reconstruction of the original scheme. To the various sciences it falls in the main to devise such alteration of the old schematism as is necessary for the inclusion of fresh facts; it is the special province of metaphysical criticism to examine the various terms both of the original scheme and its subsequent modifications, with a view to determining how far they form an ultimately intelligible and coherent system.

§ 2. When we scrutinise the original “pre-scientific” theory of the world from this point of view, we shall find that its four leading features give rise to four metaphysical problems of great generality and considerable difficulty. The conception of the world as made up of a multiplicity of things, each of which is one, gives rise to the problem of the unity of the thing; the plurality of the qualities, and again of the relations ascribed to the single thing, gives rise to the problems of Substance and Quality and of Relation; the belief in the interaction between different things finally gives rise to the exceptionally important and difficult problem of Causality. The four problems are not altogether disconnected; in particular, it is hard to discuss the sense in which a thing can be spoken of as “one,” without at the same time raising the question how the “one” thing stands to its many properties, and again discussing the general meaning of relation. And the problem of Causality may be raised in so general a form as to include the other three. Still, for the sake of having a definite order of discussion, it will be well to take them as far as may be separately, and to proceed from the simpler to the more complex. When we have indicated in outline our solution of these problems, we shall have to ask what is the general conception of a thing which our results establish, and whether and on what grounds we are warranted in believing in the actual existence of things answering to our conception. The present chapter will be devoted to the examination of the first three problems; in the succeeding chapter we shall discuss the meaning of Causality, and indicate our general conclusion as to the existence of “things.” With this result our survey of the general structure of Reality will be completed, and we shall then proceed in our third and fourth books to examine the most important of the special problems suggested by the existence of physical nature and conscious mind respectively.

§ 3. The Unity of the Thing.—The problem we have to face is as follows: in what sense do we call any thing “one thing,” and what gives it its character as a unity? It is obvious that we may attack this question from either of two rather different points of view. We may ask either, why do we mark off just this portion of our environment from all the rest as a single thing among many things; or, again, how is the oneness which we predicate of any part of the environment so marked off compatible with the multiplicity of its properties? The question we propose to deal with in this section is the former of the two just propounded; the latter shall be dealt with next as the problem of substance and its qualities. What, then, do we mean by the unity which we ascribe to whatever we recognise as one thing among a multiplicity of others? We have, in a way, implicitly answered this question already by the result arrived at in our discussion of the character of the elements or constituents of the system of Reality. But whereas, in our former investigation, we started from the general notion of Reality as a systematic whole of experience, and went on to ask what character is imposed on the elements of such a system by their presence in it as its elements, we have now to raise the same question from the other side; starting with our everyday recognition of our environment as divided into things, we have to ask how far these things possess the character which must belong to the genuinely individual members of an individual whole of subordinate individuals.

For the purpose of the inquiry we must begin by taking the term thing in the same wide and ambiguous sense in which everyday thought and discourse use it. We must reckon among the things which are the topic of discussion, human persons, animals, plants, greater and smaller inorganic masses, in a word, whatever the most matter-of-fact common-sense thinking recognises as possessed of a character in virtue of which it can as a whole determine the course of experience at a given moment. The character or aspect in virtue of which such a whole determines the course of experience in this one special way rather than another, is by this definition excluded from our conception of a thing; it is not the thing itself but its quality or property or relation to some other thing, and forms the subject of our second and third problems. Thus we may say of a thing, in the sense in which we are using the term, that it is what has existence as a whole here and now in the series of experiences, though in saying so we must be careful to bear in mind that the here and now of the thing’s existence are not indivisible points of space or time, but continuous stretches of extension and duration. Now, when we ask in what sense such a thing is one, and why we mark off the limits which separate the one thing from the other things just where we do, it at once becomes apparent that the oneness is a matter of degree. We seem at first sight able with comparatively little difficulty to decide that the organism of a human being or of one of the higher animals is one thing; when we come to deal with the lower organisms which consist of loosely aggregated colonies of largely independently functioning cells, we begin to feel more diffidence in pronouncing what is one organism, though we still think we can say what is one cell. So, in dealing with inanimate masses, while we might be ready to say without much misgiving that a machine of our own construction is one, we should find it much harder to decide whether what we perceive as a mere inorganic mass is one or many, and harder still to give reasons for our decision in a particular case. And even in the cases where our decision is most unhesitatingly pronounced, subsequent reflection will show that the matter may not be so obvious as it seems. For instance, a pair of separated Siamese twins would undoubtedly be generally held to be two organisms and not one; but whether they were one or two before the severance is a question we should find it easier to ask than to answer.

When we try to detect some common principle in our various judgments as to whether a thing is one thing or several, the following results seem to emerge:—(1) A thing is clearly not made one, as is sometimes assumed, by the possession of an unbroken contour or an uninterrupted temporal existence. The succession of my mental states may make up one mental life, and again my organism from the cradle to the grave may be pronounced in some sense one, though no one can prove that there are no gaps in their temporal existence. Again, even if we leave out of account the corpuscular theories of body according to which every thing that looks to us like a spatially continuous whole with an unbroken contour is really composed of discrete particles with interstices between them, it is abundantly clear that common sense regards as one thing the parts of a system which works as a connected whole, quite independently of the existence or non-existence of immediate contact between them.

(2) Again, the unity of the one thing does not depend upon identity of material, whatever that phrase may mean. My organism still remains one thing, though its material is constantly changing by the loss of some elements and the acquisition of others.

(3) On the positive side, it is clear that the unity we attribute to one thing is that of teleological structure. A thing is one or many according to the point of view from which you look at it, i.e. according to the idea or purpose in the light of which you study it. That is one thing which functions as one, in other words, which is the systematic embodiment of a coherent scheme of structure. Thus, when we are considering the whole of an organism as subservient to the realisation of a unique individual aim or interest, the organism is necessarily judged to be one, because in respect of that interest it behaves as a whole; when we are studying the specific mode of reaction of a particular nerve, for instance, the same organism just as naturally appears to us a multiplicity of distinct but interconnected things. Similarly, a system of material particles appears one thing to us so long as our interest in the system is directed to those ways in which it behaves as one, e.g., the exchanges of energy between it and other systems external to it. Generally we may say that whatever is called one is called so because it is the systematic expression of a single aim or interest. A thing, in fact, is one just in so far as it has the character we ascribed, in our last chapter, to a finite individual. Its unity is never merely numerical, but always qualitative, the unity of coherent structure.

Even in our rough-and-ready way of treating continuity of contour as evidence of oneness in inanimate and apparently structureless masses, we may detect the influence of this principle. We judge the sensibly continuous mass to be one rather than many things, because in many obvious respects it functions as one (e.g., in respect of its weight, the simultaneous displacement of its parts in rotation or translation through space). Also, no doubt, our judgment is influenced by the analogy of our own bodies, which are sensibly continuous. We project in imagination into the sensibly continuous inanimate mass the same kind of teleological unity which we find in our own mental life. The sensibly discontinuous, on the other hand (e.g., two inorganic masses separated by an apparently empty interval), is judged to be many things rather than one, because, in imagination, we project such an inner mental life into each of the discontinuous parts.

If all this is so, it would follow that the line of demarcation between one thing and another can never be drawn with hard and fast precision. For if one thing ultimately means one individual, the embodiment of a unique self-consistent idea, the only thing which is fully and absolutely one will be the infinite individual Reality itself. The extent to which any lesser portion of the whole can be pronounced one thing will depend on the extent to which it exhibits self-contained systematic individuality, and thus will be a matter of degree. The highest kind of finite unity we can conceive will be that of a life which is the conscious progressive realisation of coherent purpose. Such a life is one not merely for the outside observer who detects its underlying unity of aim, but for itself. Its oneness may thus be said to be both objective and subjective. Thus the more completely our own inner life is the systematic expression of consistent purpose, the greater the right with which we may regard ourselves as being each truly “one thing” and as such truly individual. But when we remember how far what any one of us calls “his” inner life is from exhibiting such complete internal coherency of structure, we shall realise that even in the highest case the unity is still a matter of degree.

This is still more palpably the case with the lower forms of organic life. Not to speak of the well-known puzzles which arise when we seek to determine whether a creature which is a colony of largely independent cells is one animal or many, our difficulties begin as soon as we have to deal with any type of life below the most fully self-conscious. We can say, to some extent, that a human character is one so long as it is the conscious expression of systematic purpose, but it is less easy to say in what sense we call an animal’s conscious life one. The absence of anything like systematic unity of aim and interest from the life of animal impulse makes it appear, at least at first sight, more reasonable to speak of it as a bundle or collection of distinct impulses and instincts rather than as one. If, in spite of this, we still habitually speak and think of the particular higher animal as one rather than many, the reason no doubt is that we tacitly ascribe to it something like the conscious unity of interest which we find in our own mental life, though with a diminished clearness.

When we come to the inanimate world, it seems to become purely a matter of our own subjective interest what we shall call one thing and what we shall call many. That is one which may be regarded as acting as one whole in respect of its bearing upon any interest of ours; that many which, in respect of our interests, does not behave as a whole. Thus, except where we are dealing with forms of life to which we can with more or less plausibility ascribe some degree of conscious unity of aim and interest, there seems no valid reason for drawing the line between different things in one place rather than in another, except reasons of convenience. It is important to bear this in mind in applying our idealistic theory of existence to the case of the inanimate world. If the foundations of the idealistic theory are sound, every real existence must be a finite individual experience of some order of individuality, and this must of course hold good of that part of existence which appears to us as the inanimate world. The inanimate world must be—as we shall see more fully in the succeeding book—a system of individual experiences, which appears to us lifeless and purposeless merely because the kind of life it possesses is too far removed from our own for us to recognise it. But we must most carefully observe that the line of demarcation between the different individual experiences which constitute the reality of that world need not in the least coincide everywhere with the line which we, for purposes of our own, draw between different things.

§ 4. The Problem of Substance and Quality.—More important, in the history of metaphysical theory, has been the other aspect of the problem of the unity of things. What we call one thing is said, in spite of its unity, to have many qualities. It is, e.g., at once round, white, shiny, and hard, or at once green, soft, and rough. Now, what do we understand by the it to which these numerous attributes are alike ascribed, and how does it possess them? To use the traditional technical names, what is the substance to which the several qualities belong or in which they inhere, and what is the manner of their inherence? The full difficulty of this problem may be most easily exhibited by considering the ways in which popular thought commonly tries to solve it.

(1) One of the commonest and most obvious solutions is to identify the “substance” which has the qualities (or, to use the more general scholastic expression, the accidents) with some one group of the thing’s properties which we regard as specially important or permanent. The “substance” is then taken to be just this group of “primary” qualities, and is said to have or possess the less permanent “secondary qualities.” For obvious reasons, the “primary” qualities have in modern Philosophy usually been identified, as by Galileo, Descartes, and Locke, with those mathematical properties of body which are of fundamental importance for the science of mechanical Physics. And usually, though not always, the way in which the substance, as thus defined, has the secondary qualities, has been further explained by saying that these latter are subjective changes in our sensibility produced by the action of the primary qualities upon our various sense-organs. Neither of these special views is, however, necessarily involved in the identification of the substance of things with their fundamental qualities. The essential principle of the theory consists simply in the recognition of some groups of qualities as of primary importance, and the identification of the one “substance” which has the many properties with this group.

Now, it would be impertinent for us to raise any objection to the use of such a theory as a working hypothesis in the physical sciences, so long as it does in those sciences the work for which it is required. The object of the physical sciences as a body is simply to enable us to describe and calculate the course of events in nature with the highest degree of accuracy and the least complicated set of formulæ. If this end is most successfully attained by treating a certain group of the properties of sensible things as of primary importance and all the rest as mere derivatives of them, this fact of itself affords sufficient justification for the scientific use of the distinction. For the special objects of physical science any group of properties which thus lends itself to the purposes of description and calculation is of primary importance. But it is no less true that its importance for physical purposes does not afford the least ground for regarding it as equally valuable as a solution of the metaphysical problem of the meaning of substance. For instance, one reason why the mathematical properties of body are of such supreme importance for Physics is that in respect of them bodies can be treated as differing not in kind but only in number. This is why they are of such inestimable service as the basis of our calculations as to the behaviour of things. But it might very well be that the true nature of things is most fully manifested just in those points in which they are different in kind; from the standpoint of the metaphysician, a view of non-human nature, however serviceable, which rests entirely upon the aspects in which things are most alike, may be as superficial as the statistical sociologist’s view of human nature. The true being of a concrete thing may be as inadequately expressed by its mathematical properties as the true character of an individual man by a list of anthropometrical results.

In point of fact, we can readily see that the distinction between “primary” and “secondary” qualities, when propounded as an answer to the problem about substance, leaves us just where we were before. For (1) we ascribe the primary qualities to the “substance” of the thing in just the same fashion as the secondary. The thing is of such and such a configuration, is of such and such a mass, is solid, etc.; just as it is rough, or heavy, or green. Or, again, it has configuration, mass, solidity; just as it has weight, taste, colour. Hence the old problem breaks out again with respect to the primary qualities themselves, however the list of them may be constructed. Again we have to ask, what is the it which possesses shape, mass, velocity, etc.?

(2) Moreover, the theory fails to explain the nature of that “possession” of the secondary qualities which it ascribes to the group of primary qualities. In what way, we ask, do the primary qualities have or possess the secondary? The only serious attempt to answer this question seems to be that of the numerous philosophers (Descartes, Galileo, Locke, etc.) who treat the secondary qualities as “subjective” effects of the primary qualities upon our sense-organs. Now, this familiar solution of the problem seems deficient in logic. For the one solid argument which has been advanced in favour of the subjectivity of secondary qualities seems to be the contention that they cannot be perceived without sense-organs of a special type. Colours, it is said, exist only for an eye, sounds for an ear, taste for a tongue, and so forth. And differences of structure or temporary condition in the sense-organ lead to the perception of different secondary qualities, as when, to take the stock examples, everything looks yellow to the jaundiced eye, the same water feels warm to one hand and cold to the other, and so forth.

But these considerations seem just as applicable to the supposed “primary” as to the “secondary” qualities of things. Geometrical form, for instance, is imperceptible apart from sight or touch; motion, again, and consequently change of configuration, and similarly mass, which is a ratio of accelerations, require either sight or touch for their perception. Of course, we can think of motions and masses which we are not actually perceiving, just as we can think of an absent colour or smell, and in both cases we can in reasoning about motions or masses or colours or smells abstract altogether from the presence of a percipient. But this does not affect the fact that the mathematical qualities of body are just as dependent for perception upon the presence of a percipient with suitable sense-organs as anything else. Configurations, extensions, and motions which no one perceives by sight or touch or any other sense are exactly in the same case as a colour which no one sees or a sound which no one hears. The argument from the indispensability of a perceiving organ ought logically to tell just as much in the one case as the other.

Again, and this is a point of the first importance, experience never gives us the “primary quality” by itself. What we get in actual experience is always the conjunction of primary and secondary qualities in a concrete perception. Thus we never perceive extension apart from some special visual or tactual filling of the “secondary” kind. The extended has always some quality of colour, or texture, or resistance. An extension which is totally devoid of colour, tactual quality, and everything which belongs to the so-called sensible, non-mathematical, or “secondary” properties of body, is an unreal abstraction, got by leaving out an aspect which in actual experience appears inseparable from it, and therefore presumably illegitimate. Illegitimate, that is, when offered as an account of the fundamental reality of body, however useful for the special purposes of natural science. Thus the attempt to take the so-called primary qualities as the unitary “substance” which has or “possesses” the secondary qualities, and to dispose of these latter as “subjective,” leads to no satisfactory result. The former, too, must be merely qualities possessed by a more ultimate substance.

§ 5. Hence it constantly happens that the same writers who treat substance as identical with the primary qualities of things, alternate this view with another according to which substance is an unknowable unit of which we can say no more than that it, whatever it may be, is what is presupposed in all propositions about the behaviour of things as the “unknown substratum” of their various qualities. According to this view, the many qualities of the thing in some inexplicable manner “flow” either from the nature of its own unknown substratum or substance, or from the relations in which this substratum stands with that of other things. Our knowledge is then held to be confined to these consequences of the unknown ultimate character of real things; we are ignorant, it is said, of the substance both of physical and of mental existence, we know only its attributes or manifestations. Or it is otherwise phrased thus: we do not know what things really are, we know only their effects on one another and on our own senses. This is, for instance, the view represented by those portions of Locke’s Essay in which emphasis is laid upon our inability in the last resort to know the true substance of things.

Now, such a general doctrine as this is manifestly open to grave objections. (1) If we are serious in maintaining the unknowable character of the substratum of a thing’s qualities, it is hard to see how the assertion of its existence can be any addition to our knowledge of the thing. To say that we are entirely ignorant of the nature of this substratum only amounts to saying in other words, that we have really no idea how the many qualities can be qualities of a single thing. If this is so, it does not appear what we gain by talking of the single thing at all as the owner or possessor of its qualities. It would, we might think, be better to abandon the confessedly unintelligible notion of a single substratum in which the qualities “inhere,” and say that the thing, for our intellect, is simply the many qualities themselves. How this view would have to be reconciled with the tacit assumption of the thing’s unity as a substance, which underlies all the judgments in which its attributes are predicated of it, we shall have to discuss more fully in the next section.

(2) A still more serious difficulty remains behind. Not only is an “unknowable substratum of qualities” a superfluous luxury in metaphysical theory, but the nature of the supposed relation between such a substratum and the attributes which “flow” from it is unintelligible. We can understand neither what a substance or substratum totally devoid of qualities could possibly be, nor yet how the various qualities of the world of things presented to our experience could “flow” as secondary consequences from one or more such substrata. We cannot conceive how things could first “be” without this being of theirs possessing any definite character, and then subsequently, in virtue of their relations among themselves, give rise to their qualities or characteristic modes of being. Nothing can be at all without being in some determinate way, and this “being in some determinate way” is precisely what we mean by the qualities of a thing. A thing cannot be without behaving in special ways towards its environment, and these special ways of behaving are the thing’s qualities. We cannot, therefore, divorce the being or that of a thing from its determinate mode of being or what, and regard the latter as something which supervenes on or is derived from the former, or the former as something which can exist without and apart from the latter. Things are not first there and afterwards in some mysterious way clothed with qualities; their qualities are simply their special way of being there. As Lotze well puts it, all such attempts to formulate a theory of the way in which the what of things flows from a mere that, are attempts to answer the absurd question how Being is made. The notion that things have a that or substance prior to their what or quality, and consisting simply in “being” which is not this or that determinate mode of being, is thus unmeaning as well as superfluous.

§ 6. Accordingly the whole notion of a substantial unity in things behind the multiplicity of their states or qualities has been regarded with disfavour by many students of positive science. The qualities being all that interests us in things, and the notion of an indeterminate substratum contradictory, we ought, it is argued, to identify the thing and the series of its states and qualities without more ado. From this point of view the thing ceases to be an unknown somewhat, which in some mysterious way has properties; it becomes the properties themselves thought of as a collection. It is no longer the unperceived this which has warmth, redness, etc., it is the warmth, the redness, and the rest of the sensible qualities taken collectively. For phenomenalist Metaphysics, as for associationist Psychology, the thing is a “bundle of attributes” and nothing more.

When we ask how, if a “thing” is merely the series or sum of its attributes, and possesses no underlying unity to which the attributes belong, the whole of our ordinary language about things comes to be constructed on the contrary assumption, how it is that we always talk and think as if every “bundle” of attributes were owned by something of which we can say that it has the quality, we are met by the phenomenalist with a reference to Psychology. Owing to the fact, which Phenomenalism and Associationism are content to accept as ultimate, that sensible qualities are always presented to our perception in definite groups, it is argued that the thought of any one member of such a group is enough to revive by association the thought of the other qualities which have regularly been presented simultaneously with itself or in immediate succession to it. Hence, because thus associated in our perception, the group comes naturally, though illegitimately, by one of those mental fictions of which Hume treats so fully, to be thought of as one, though it is actually a discrete multiplicity. The unity of the thing thus lies not in itself, but solely in our way of perceiving and thinking.

A more recent version of the same doctrine, which avoids the old associationist mistake of treating perception as a merely passive reception of a given material, is that the unity of the one subject of many predicates is ultimately derived from the unity of our own acts of attention. The qualities appear to belong to “one” thing because we attend to them together as one in a single moment of attention. Thus the unity of substance which common sense believes itself to find in its objects has really been put into them by the perceiving mind itself. What is “given” to it is a disconnected plurality of qualities; by attending to groups of them as one it makes those groups into the attributes of a single reality. This is the essence of the doctrine of Kant, according to which the concept of “substance” is simply one form of the “synthetic unity of apperception” i.e. the process by which we project the unity of our own acts of attention into their objects, and thus create an orderly world for our own thought out of sensations which as they are given to us are a chaos. In principle, Kant’s doctrine, though intended as a refutation of Hume’s Associationism, only differs from Hume’s in the stress it rightly lays on the element of subjective interest in perception; the two theories agree on the main point, that the bond which unites the many qualities of sense perception into one thing is a subjective one,—in Hume’s expressive phrase, a “fiction of the mind.”

With the psychological aspects of this doctrine we are not directly concerned in the present inquiry. For us the problem is not by what precise steps the mind comes to “feign” a unity in its objects which is not really there, but whether this conception of a feigned or subjective unity imposed by the mind upon a number of actually disconnected qualities is itself ultimately intelligible. Thus the metaphysical issue may be narrowed down to the following question: Can we intelligibly hold that a thing is in reality simply a number of qualities, not in their own nature connected, which we arbitrarily regard for our own purposes as one? In other words, can we say the thing is simply identical with its qualities considered as a mere sum or collection, and any further unity of the kind the old Metaphysics denotes by “substance” a mental addition of our own to the facts?

Now there are two considerations—both ultimately reducible in principle to one—which seem fatal to the identification of a thing with its qualities, considered as merely discrete. (1) There can be no doubt that it is largely true to say that a given group of qualities appear to us to be the qualities of one thing because we attend to them as one. And again, attention is undoubtedly determined by, or, to put it in a better way, is an expression of, our own subjective interests. But these considerations do not in the least show that attention is purely arbitrary. If we take any group of qualities to form one thing because we attend to it as one, it is equally true that we attend to it as one because it affects our subjective purposes or interests as one. That group of qualities is “one thing” for us which functions as one in its bearing upon our subjective interests. What particular interest we consider in pronouncing such a group one, in what interest we attend to it, may be largely independent of the qualities of the group, but the fact that the group does function as one in respect to this interest is no “fiction” or creation of our own thought; it is the expression of the nature of the group itself, and is independent of “our mind” in precisely the same sense in which the existence and character of any single member of the group of qualities is independent. There is no sense in assigning the single quality to “the given,” and the union of the qualities into a single group to “the work of the mind”; in one sense both are the “work of the mind,” in another both are the expression of the nature of the “given.”

(2) Again, the insufficiency of the simple identification of the thing with its qualities considered as a mere collection, may be illustrated by considering what the group of qualities must contain. The group of qualities is obviously never present in its entirety at any moment of experience. For the majority of what we call the qualities of a thing are simply the ways in which the “thing” behaves in the presence of various other things, its modes of reaction upon a number of stimuli. Now, at any moment of the “thing’s” existence it is only actually reacting upon a few of the possible stimuli, and thus only exhibiting a few of its qualities. The vast majority of its qualities are at any moment what Locke calls “powers,” i.e. ways in which it would behave if certain absent conditions were fulfilled. Thus the thing to which we ascribe a number of predicates as its qualities is never the actual group of predicates themselves. Grass is green, but its greenness is not a fact in the dark; the sun is capable of melting the wax, and this capacity qualifies it permanently, but it does not actually melt the wax unless the wax is there, and various other conditions are also given; a man is temperamently choleric, but he is not actually at every moment of his existence in a passion. He is only predisposed to fly into a passion readily on the occurrence of provocation. Most of a thing’s qualities thus are mere possibilities; the nature of the thing is to act in this or that way under certain definite conditions which may or may not be realised in actual existence. Thus the collection of qualities with which Phenomenalism identifies a thing has itself no real existence as a collection. The collection is just as much a “fiction of the mind” as the unity which we attribute to it. Yet the fact that the thing’s qualities are mainly mere possibilities does not destroy the existence of the thing. It actually is, and is somehow qualified by these possibilities. And for that very reason its existence cannot be identified with the actual realisation of these possibilities in a group or collection of events. We might add as a further consideration, that the number of such possibilities is indefinite, including not only the ways in which the thing has behaved or will behave on the occurrence of conditions at present non-existent, but also all the ways in which it would behave on the occurrence of conditions which are never realised in actual existence. But the previous argument is already in itself sufficient, the moment its significance is fairly grasped, to dispose of the notion that anything can be merely identical with a group of actually existing sensible qualities. The being of the things must be sought not in the actual existence of the group of sensible qualities, but in the law or laws stating the qualities which would be exhibited in response to varying sets of conditions.

§ 7. Considerations of this kind compel us to forego the attempt to find the substance or being of a thing in the mere sequence of its different states considered as an aggregate. To make Phenomenalism workable, we are forced to say at least that the thing or substance to which the various attributes are assigned is the “law of its states,” or again is “the mode of relation of its various qualities.” Such a definition has obviously a great advantage over either of the two we have just rejected. It is superior to the conception of the thing as an unknown substratum of qualities, since it explicitly excludes the absurd notion of a world of things which first are, without being in any determinate way, and then subsequently set up determinate ways of existing among themselves. For a law, while not the same thing as the mere collection of occurrences in which it is realised, has no existence of its own apart from the series of occurrences which conform to it. Again, every law is a statement of possibilities, a formula describing the lines which the course of events will follow if certain conditions are operative; no law is a mere register of actually observed sequences. Hence, in defining the thing as the “law of its states,” we avoid the difficulty dealt with in the last paragraph, that the collection of the thing’s states never actually exists as a “given” collection. Thus for ordinary practical purposes the definition is probably a satisfactory one.

Yet it should be evident that in calling the thing the “law” of its states, we merely repeat the metaphysical problem of the unity of substance without offering any solution of it. For, not to dwell on the minor difficulty that we might find it impossible to formulate a single law connecting all the ways in which one thing reacts upon others, and thus ought more properly to speak in the plural of the laws of the states, we are now left with two distinct elements or aspects of the being of the thing, namely, the successive states and the law of their succession, and how these two aspects are united the theory fails to explain. We have the variety and multiplicity on the one hand in the states or qualities of the thing, its unity on the other in the form of the law connecting these states, but how the variety belongs to or is possessed by the unity we know no better than before. Thus the old problem of substance returns upon us; the many qualities must somehow be the qualities of a single thing, but precisely how are we to conceive this union of the one and the many?

At this point light seems to be thrown on the puzzle by the doctrine of Leibnitz, that the only way in which a unity can, without ceasing to be such, contain an indefinite multiplicity is by “representation.” Experience, in fact, presents us with only one example of a unity which remains indubitably one while embracing an indefinite multiplicity of detail, namely, the structure of our experience itself. For the single experience regularly consists of a multiplicity of mental states, both “focal” and “marginal,” simultaneous and successive, which are nevertheless felt as one single whole because they form the expression of a coherent purpose or interest. And this conscious unity of feeling, determined by reference to a unique interest, is the only instance to which we can point when we desire to show by an actual illustration how what is many can at the same time be one. If we can think of the thing’s qualities and the law of their connection as standing to one another in the same way as the detailed series of acts embodying a subjective interest of our own, and the interest itself which by its unity confers a felt unity on the series, we can in principle comprehend how the many qualities belong to the one thing. In that case the thing will be one “substance” as the embodiment of an individual experience, determined by a unique subjective interest, and therefore possessing the unity of immediate feeling. Its many qualities will “belong” to it in the same sense in which the various constituents of an experience thus unified by immediate feeling are said to “belong” to the single experience they constitute. And thus our idealistic interpretation of the general nature of Reality will be found to contain the solution of the problem of Substance and Quality.

Now it is fairly clear that some such idealistic solution is already contained in germ in the pre-scientific view of the world of things. There can be little doubt that our original notion of the unity of the thing as contrasted with the multiplicity of its qualities has been obtained by “introjectively” ascribing to whatever groups of qualities act upon us as one in respect of some interest of our own, the same conscious unity of feeling which we know in ourselves and our fellows. We shall have frequent opportunities, as we proceed, of discovering the enormous extent to which the whole pre-scientific view of the world is based upon the interpretation of all existence in terms of our own. Systematic Idealism will thus gradually be found to be no more than the consistent and deliberate carrying through of that anthropomorphic interpretation of Reality which lies at the bottom of all man’s attempts to make his surroundings intelligible to himself. It will follow, if our general attitude towards the problem of substance is tenable, that only what we have already defined as an individual experience can truly be called a “substance,” and that such experiences are “substances,” if the word is to be retained in our philosophical vocabulary, to the same degree to which they are truly individual. And thus we should be led in the end to the distinction between the one infinite substance which forms the whole of Reality and the finite and imperfect substances which are its components.

Again, we should have once more to remember that since, in general, we call that group of qualities one which acts on our interests as one, and our insight into those interests themselves is limited and confused, the boundaries assigned by us to the group of qualities we ascribe to a single substance as “its” states will be more or less arbitrary, and dependent upon the degree of our actual insight. It is possible for us to group together as states of the same thing qualities which a profounder insight would have disjoined, and vice versâ. And in the end, if all that is is contained in a single coherent self-determined system, it is clear that, speaking rigorously, there will ultimately be only one “substance”—the central nature or principle of the system itself—of which all subordinate aspects or parts of existence will be the attributes.

§ 8. The Problem of Relation.—More perplexing than the problem of Substance and its Qualities is the question to which the pre-scientific assumption that the world consists of a number of interrelated things gives rise. This problem of Relation becomes still more prominent when reflection upon the problem of Substance and Quality has made it manifest that what we call the qualities of things are one and all dependent upon their relations either to our perceptive organs or to other things. Put quite simply the problem is as follows: Things stand in a variety of relations to one another, and what we commonly call the qualities of each are dependent on (a) its modes of relation to other things, (b) its relation to our percipient organism. Again, the various qualities of one thing stand in relation among themselves. To begin with, they all exhibit the relations of identity and difference. They all so far possess a common nature as to be capable of being compared in respect of the special ways in which they manifest that nature, and are thus so far identical; again, they can be discriminated and distinguished, and are so far in the relation of difference. Further, the qualities of one thing are interconnected, as we have already seen, by various special laws or modes of relation, which exhibit the changes in the behaviour of the thing corresponding to changes in the surrounding circumstances.

Thus Phenomenalism, when it has banished the notion of a substantial unity in things, has to identify the world of things, as we have already seen, with qualities in relation to one another. But now the question arises, How are we to understand the conception of qualities in relation? Can we, on the one hand, reduce all qualities to relations or all relations to qualities, or, on the other, can we form an intelligible idea of the way in which a single whole or system can be formed by the union of the two? There are, of course, other questions of great though relatively secondary importance connected with the problem of relation, e.g., the question as to the number of ultimately irreducible kinds of relation, but the scope of the present work will permit of nothing beyond a brief discussion of the central difficulty. We will take the various alternatives in order.

(1) Philosophers have often been tempted to evade the difficulty of showing how qualities and relations together can make up a system by suppressing one member of the antithesis altogether. Thus it has been maintained, on the one hand, that the world of real things consists entirely of simple unrelated qualities, and that what we call relations between these qualities are merely our own subjective ways of apprehending them. On the other hand, it has been suggested that there may be nothing in the real world except relations, and that what we call qualities of various kinds are nothing but forms of relation. But neither of these views seems seriously tenable.

For (a) reality cannot consist of mere relations. Every relation implies two or more terms which are related. And these terms cannot be created by the relation itself. In every relation the terms have some character of their own over and beyond the mere property of being terms in that relation. Thus, to take a simple example, the successive terms of the series of ordinal numbers express in themselves nothing beyond determinate position in an ordered series, but when they are applied to the actual arrangement of any content in serial order, that content is (c) not created by the arrangement of it in an ordered series of terms, and (b) is dependent for the actual order of its terms upon some positive character of its own. In other words, whenever you actually count you count something other than the names of the numbers you employ, and you count it in an order which depends on the character of the particular things counted. And so generally of all relations. A question has been raised which presents considerable difficulty and cannot be discussed here, whether there are or are not merely external relations (i.e. relations which are independent of the special qualities of their terms). But even if we admit that there may be such merely external relations, which do not depend upon the nature of the terms between which they subsist, it is at least clear that there cannot be relations without any terms, and that the terms are not created out of nothing by the relation between them. Perhaps it might be rejoined that what I call the terms of a certain relation, though no doubt not created by that particular relation, may be themselves analysed into other relations, and those again into others ad indefinitum. Thus it might be said that the term A of the relation A-B may no doubt have a quality of its own which is not created by this relation. But this quality, call it A{1}, is found on analysis to be resoluble into the relation C-D, and the quality C{1} of C again into the relation E-F, and so on without end. This would not, however, amount to a reduction of qualities to mere relations. For it would give us, as the unit of our scheme of things, a pair of terms or qualities in relation; and however often we repeated the process of analysis, we should still always be left with the same type of triad, two terms and a relation, as the result of analysis. Whatever its worth, this particular solution falls under our second alternative, and must be considered in connection with it.

(2) But again, it is even more manifest that we cannot reduce all reality to qualities, and dismiss the relations between them as simply our subjective mode of apprehension. This line of thought is capable of being worked out in two slightly different ways. We might hold that what really exists is disconnected simple qualities, each distinct from all others as red is from sweet, or loud from hot, and that the whole network of relations by which everyday and scientific thought bring these “reals” into connection is a mere intellectual scaffolding to which nothing in the real world corresponds. Something like this would be the logical outcome of the Humian doctrine that all relations are “the work of the mind,” and that reality is the residuum left after we have removed from our conception of the world everything which is of our own mental fabrication. The grounds upon which this doctrine was advanced by Hume and his followers have already been destroyed by the progress of Psychology and the consequent abandonment of the old hard-and-fast distinction between sensation and mental construction. It was the belief of Hume, and apparently of Kant, that what is given in “sensation” is single uncompounded qualities, and that all relations between these psychical atoms are produced by a subsequent process of subjective synthesis. But the advance of Psychology, by leading to the recognition that sensation itself is a continuous process containing a multiplicity of “marginal” elements which in all sorts of ways modify the character of its central or “focal” element, has made it impossible any longer to maintain an absolute distinction between the sensory and the intellectual factor in cognition.

And apart from the illusory nature of the distinction on which the theory was based, it is sufficiently condemned for Metaphysics by its own inherent absurdity. For the fundamental presupposition of Metaphysics, as of all serious science, is that Reality is a coherent system. But, according to the view which regards relations as pure “fictions of the mind,” just that element in our thought which gives it its systematic character is an unwarranted addition of our own to the real. Order and system are in fact, on this view, mere illusion. And, as has often been pointed out by the critics of Hume, it is quite inconceivable how, in a world where nothing but disconnected simple qualities exist, the illusion should ever have arisen. If even our own inner life is simply incoherent, it is quite impossible to see how we can ever have come, even by a fiction, to read system into the world of fact.

A more plausible attempt to reduce all relations to qualities proceeds on the following lines. Relations, it is said, are of subjective manufacture, but they are, for all that, not mere fictions. For every relation between two terms, say A and B, is based upon the presence in A and B of certain qualities, which are called the fundamenta relationis or basis of the relation. These qualities may be the same in both the terms, in which case the relation is called symmetrical; such a case is that, e.g., of the equality of A and B, a relation having for its fundamentum the fact that A and B have both the same magnitude. Here the real fact is taken to be that A has this magnitude, and again that B has it. The subjective addition to the facts is thought to come in in the voluntary comparison of A and B in respect of this property and the consequent assertion of their equality. Or the qualities which are the foundation of the relation may be different in each of the terms, in which case the relation is technically called asymmetrical. Examples of such asymmetrical relations are, e.g., A greater than B, B less than A, or again, A father to B, B son to A. Here the actual facts would be taken to be A possessed of magnitude x, B of magnitude x-y, A qualified by the circumstance of begetting B, B by the circumstance of being begotten by A. The subjective addition would come in, as before, when we brought A and B under one joint of view by comparing them in respect of these properties.

The inherent difficulties of the reduction of relations to qualities are, however, only thinly disguised in this version of the doctrine. To argue that the establishment of judgments of relation presupposes subjective comparison of the related terms from a more or less arbitrarily chosen point of view, is metaphysically irrelevant. The whole question is as to whether the result of the process is to make things more intelligible as a systematic whole; if it is, the subjectivity of the process is no ground for discrediting the result as truth about the real. If it is not, the philosophers who insist on the subjectivity of relations should explain how we can coherently think of a systematic whole of reality in terms of quality apart from relation. This they have never been able to do, and that for obvious reasons. It is manifestly impossible to give any intelligible account of the qualities which we recognise as fundamenta of relations without introducing previous relations. Thus the possession of the common magnitude x may be assigned as the foundation of the relation of equality between A and B; but when we ask what is meant by predicating of A and B possession of the magnitude x, we find that we are thrown back upon a relation between A, B, and some third term S, which we take as our unit of measurement. A and B are both of magnitude x because each contains S, let us say, x times exactly. So again the fact “A begetter of B” was assigned as the fundamentum of the asymmetrical relation of paternity between A and B, and the same fact under another name as the fundamentum of the asymmetrical relation of filiation between B and A.

But now what is meant by saying that the same fact qualifies A and B in different ways? Any answer to this question plunges us back at once into a perfect network of relations. For first, that a fact x may be known to qualify A and B differently, A and B must themselves be discriminated, i.e. they must be compared and found different, and without relation difference is unmeaning. For ultimately two terms are different only when they also possess a common character which admits of their comparison with reference to a common standard. Thus only things which are like can be different, and the problem of the relation of their likeness to their difference is inevitably forced upon us by the very existence of the difference. And similarly, the common fact x qualifies either term in a definite way, which can be discriminated from the ways in which other facts qualify the same term, and this discrimination leads in precisely the same manner to the assertion of various relations among the different qualities of A and again of B.

It is not difficult to see the common source of the difficulties which beset both the attempt to reduce all reality to qualities, and the attempt to identify it with mere relations. In actual experience our world always comes to us as at once many and one, never as merely single nor as merely discrete. If you pay exclusive regard to the aspect of unity and interconnection, you will naturally be tempted to dwell on the relations between your elements to the exclusion of the various elements themselves; if you think solely of the aspect of variety, it is equally natural to treat the elements as real and their relations as fictions. But in either case you arbitrarily concentrate your attention on a single aspect of the experienced fact taken in isolation from the other, and are thus led to results which are bound to collide with the whole facts. A true view, if possible at all, can only be got by impartial adherence to the whole of the facts.

§ 9. We are thus brought to the second of our alternatives. Can we conceive of Reality as qualities in relation or qualities and their relations? This is really, in a somewhat more developed form, the same problem as that suggested by the definition of a thing as the “law of its states.” We are now to take the qualities as fixed terms with a character of their own which stand in or support further relations, and we have to ask if the view of the world thus formulated is entirely intelligible. And it speedily becomes clear that such a view is confronted by a formidable difficulty. For suppose that A and B are two qualities which stand in any relation C. (For simplicity’s sake we might suppose this relation C to be, e.g., that of being discriminated, and we might take as instances of A and B, say, two definitely discriminated shades of the same colour.) Then A and B, standing in the relation C, are not identical with A and B as they would be apart from this relation. (A, for instance, as qualified by contradistinction from B, is not the same thing as mere A not in any way affected by B, a fact which is frequently brought home to us with startling force by the effects of contrast.) At the same time the relation C cannot create its own terms; A, which is qualified in some special way by its standing to B in the relation C, may also exist out of this relation, and the mere fact of our recognising it as A shows that, both in the relation C and outside it, it has a recognisable identical character. (E.g., A as discriminated from B is not precisely the same thing as A before discrimination, but the difference of A from B has not been created by the act of discrimination; it must previously have been different in order to be discriminated.)

Thus we seem forced to split up the quality A, which we took as one of the terms of our relation, into two aspects, A (A{1}) the quality as it was before the establishment of the relation, and A (A{2}) the quality as it is after the establishment of the relation. And the two aspects thus discovered in what we took for the single quality A must again be somehow in relation to one another. Hence within A (A{1}) and A (A{2}) itself the same process will be repeated, and what we began by regarding as the fixed terms of the relation will turn out to be themselves systems of qualities in relation, and this process will have no limit. The classification of the contents of experience into fixed terms with relations between them, it is contended, is no solution of the problem how the experienced world can be both one and many but a mere restatement of it. “We have to take reality as many and to take it as one, and to avoid contradiction.... And we succeed, but succeed merely by shutting the eye which if left open would condemn us.” Hence the conclusion is drawn that “a relational way of thought ... must give appearance and not truth. It is a makeshift, a device, a mere practical compromise, most necessary but in the end most indefensible.”

§ 10. The foregoing reasoning, which has been condensed from the fuller exposition in Mr. F. H. Bradley’s Appearance and Reality, demands most careful examination, as the consequence to which it leads is of supreme importance for our whole metaphysical view of the nature of ultimate Reality. If the conclusion of Mr. Bradley is sound, it is clear that our discursive thought with its scheme of predication, which is from first to last relational, can never give us adequate insight into the nature of the union of the one and the many. We shall then have to conclude that it is not in thought about Reality, but in some mode of experience, if such there is, which enables us to transcend the separation of subject from predicate, and is therefore suprarelational, that we come nearest to experiencing the real as it really is. We should thus be more or less in sympathy with the traditional Mysticism which has always made the transcending of the distinction of subject from predicate the keynote of its special way of experiencing the Divine. On the other hand, if the relational scheme of ordinary knowledge could be defended as a self-consistent way of regarding the facts, we should have the advantage of being able to construe the absolute Experience in terms of our own intellectual life much more completely than Mysticism allows.

How, then, might the interpretation of the world as a system of qualities in relation be defended against Mr. Bradley’s powerful formulation of the mystic’s objection, and what is the worth of the defence? Two possible lines of argument suggest themselves as sufficiently plausible to call for examination. (1) The edge of the objection would be turned, as far as it rests upon the unsatisfactoriness of the indefinite regress, if we could regard all relations as “external,” that is, as making no difference in the qualities they relate. Now, some relations, it has been asserted, are merely external, e.g., relations of position and again of sense in the geometrical meaning of the word (like the difference between a right-hand and a left-hand glove). Why, then, may this not ultimately be the case with all relations? But if all relations are external, we can no longer argue that the related terms must contain a further relation between themselves as the basis and themselves as the result of the first relation, and so the whole anti-relational case falls to the ground.

Such a view seems, however, to suffer from fatal deficiencies. For (a) it is at least hard to see how any relation can be ultimately external to its terms. For you cannot hold two terms in a relation of any sort without discriminating them; until they are at least discriminated as two they cannot be terms with a relation between them. Thus discrimination, and therefore the relation of distinction, is fundamental in all relation. But where we can distinguish there must already be in the discriminated terms some difference to afford a basis for discrimination. Only what is already different can be distinguished. And with this admission the door is once more opened for the indefinite regress.

(b) And even if this were not so, it seems unthinkable that all relations should be in the end external to their terms. If no relation in the end makes any difference to its terms, and thus has no foundation in their nature, it becomes a standing miracle how or why the terms should enter into relations to which they are all the time absolutely indifferent. The logical consequence of such a view would surely be the dismissal of all relations as pure illusion, and the reduction of real existence to a chaos of disconnected reals which we by some inexplicable intellectual perversity persist in taking for a system. The now universally recognised failure of Herbart’s attempt to work out a theory of Realism on these lines seems ominous for the success of any future doctrine of the same kind.

(2) Much more subtle is the line of thought suggested by Professor Royce in the Supplementary Essay appended to his book, The World and the Individual, First Series. Professor Royce admits the indefinite regress as an inevitable consequence of the reduction of the world to terms in relation, but denies that it affects the soundness of the reduction. On the contrary, he regards it rather as a proof of the positive correctness of the interpretation of existence which gives rise to it. His argument, which is based upon the modern doctrine of infinite series, may be briefly summarised as follows:—It is a recognised characteristic of an infinite series (and of no others) that it can be adequately “represented” by a part of itself. That is to say, if you take any infinite series you please, you can always construct a second series such that it consists of a selection, and only of a selection, from the terms of the first series, and that every term is derived from and answers to the corresponding term of the first series according to a definite law. And this second series, as it is easy to prove, is itself infinite, and therefore capable of being itself represented adequately in a third series derived from it in the same manner as it was derived from the first, and so on indefinitely.

For instance, let the first series be the infinite series of the natural integers 1, 2, 3, 4, ... then if, e.g., we construct a second series, 1^2, 2^2, 3^2 ... of the second powers of these integers, the terms of this second series are derived by a definite law from those of the first to which they correspond, and again they constitute a selection out of the terms of the first series. Every one of them is a term of the first series, but there are also terms of the first series which are not repeated in the second. Again, if we make a third series from the second in the same way as the second was made from the first, by taking the terms (1^2)^2, (2^2)^2, (3^2)^2, and so on, the terms of this third series fulfil the same conditions; they correspond according to a fixed law with the terms of the second, and are also themselves a selection from those terms. And thus we may go on without end to construct successive infinite series each of which “adequately represents” the preceding one. And we are led into this indefinite regress by the very attempt to carry out consistently a single definite principle of correspondence between our original infinite series and its first derivative. In constructing the first derived series in our illustration 1^2, 2^2, 3^2 ... we necessarily also construct the series (1^2)^2, (2^2)^2, (3^2)^2, ... and the other successive derivatives. Therefore Prof. Royce claims that any consistent attempt to make an orderly arrangement of the terms of an infinite whole must lead to the indefinite repetition of itself. Hence that each term of every relation on analysis turns out itself to consist of terms in relation, is no valid objection to the soundness of our principle of interpretation, but a necessary consequence of the infinity of Reality. Any consistent attempt to exhibit an infinite whole as an orderly system of terms must lead to the indefinite regress.

Now it strikes one at once that Professor Royce’s conclusion is in danger of proving too much. You certainly do not show a method of dealing with facts to be sound by showing that it leads to the indefinite regress. It is a common experience that the liar who tells his first lie must tell a second to back it, and a third to support the second, and so on indefinitely. And you cannot put a quart of liquor into a pint pot without first putting half the quart into half the space, and so forth ad indefinitum. Yet these considerations do not prove that lying or putting quarts of liquor into pint pots is a consistent way of dealing with reality. A purpose may lead in execution to the indefinite regress because it is self-contradictory and therefore self-defeating, as these familiar illustrations suggest. And this raises the question whether the purpose to arrange an infinite whole in an ordered system of terms may not lead to the indefinite regress for the same reason, namely, that the treatment of a true whole as a sequence of terms is incompatible with its real nature. It is at least worth while to ask whether Professor Royce’s own treatment of the subject does not contain indications that this is actually the case.

To begin with, we may note one point of some importance in reference to which Prof. Royce’s language is at least ambiguous. He speaks of the indefinite succession of infinite series which arise from the single purpose of “representing” the series of natural integers adequately by a selection out of itself as if they could be actually constructed in pursuance of this purpose. But this is clearly not the case. All that you can actually do is to construct the various series implicitly by giving a rule for their formation. The actual construction of the series would be a typical instance of a self-defeating and therefore internally contradictory purpose, inasmuch as it would involve the actual completion of an unending process. Hence we seem forced to make a distinction which Prof. Royce has perhaps unduly neglected. If your purpose of ordering the number series on a definite plan means no more than the formulation of a rule for obtaining any required number of terms of the successive series, it can be executed, but does not involve the indefinite regress; if it means the actual completion of the process of formation of the series, it does involve the indefinite regress, but is therefore self-contradictory and cannot be realised in act. Similarly, we may say of the scheme of qualities in relation, that if it is taken for no more than a rule for the systematic arrangement and organisation of a finite material, it does not involve the completion of an infinite process, and is both workable and useful; but if presented as an account of the way in which a completed all-embracing and perfectly harmonious experience of the whole of Reality is internally organised, it involves the completion of the infinite process, and is therefore self-contradictory and finally inadequate.

This reflection may serve to lead up to another which seems to take us into the heart of the matter. The researches upon which Prof. Royce’s defence of the relational scheme is based were in the first instance investigations into the significance of the number-series. As such they start with the conception of a system which is a whole of parts external to one another as the object of inquiry. Consequently, while such investigations are of the highest philosophical importance as bringing out the implications of this concept, they are only valid as an analysis of ultimate Reality, provided that the concept of whole and part is an adequate expression of the way in which the whole Reality is present in its constituents and they in it. But if, as we ourselves urged in a previous chapter, the conception of a whole of parts is entirely inadequate to express the intimate union between the absolute experience and finite experiences, the proof that the indefinite process is logically implied in the relation of whole and part does not show it to belong to the structure of ultimate Reality. Rather, we should be inclined to urge, the fact that the relational scheme leads to the indefinite process proves that the conception of whole and part upon which it is based does not truly represent the mode of union between a completed experience and its components. And therefore the attempt to interpret this union in terms of the number-series cannot stand the test of criticism.

At the same time, Professor Royce’s argument in any case throws considerable light upon the problem of relation. For it shows why the attempt to construct the world as a system of qualities in relation leads to the indefinite regress. For a complete experience embodying at one stroke the whole of existence, such a construction would, as we have seen, because essentially incomplete, be impossible. But when we try to piece together the data of our fragmentary experience into a connected whole, we inevitably have to start with more or less isolated facts as fixed terms and weld them together by a relation. In doing so we unavoidably put ourselves at the point of view from which the numerical series arises; we unavoidably treat existence as if it were a whole of mutually external parts. And so the indefinite regress involved in the nature of the number-system inevitably parades the whole of our discursive and relational thinking about existence. But its presence is due to the inadequacy of the conception of Reality with which discursive thought has to work.

On the whole, then, it seems that Prof. Royce’s investigations only make it more apparent than before that the relational scheme which discursive thought uses does not adequately express the true nature of the real, and that the mystics of all ages have been so far justified in their contention that the form of our experience which presents the truest analogy to the experience of the Absolute must be supra-relational, or, in other words, that the most real type of finite experience must be one which transcends the distinction of subject and predicate. To admit this is, however, not to admit that we are altogether ignorant how the one and the many are united in Reality. For there are many other types of human experience besides that which is dominated by the discursive and relational intellect.

In immediate simple feeling we have obviously a type of conscious experience in which distinction and relation have as yet not emerged. And I have tried in Bk. I. chap. 2 to show how in the direct intuition of an æsthetic whole by trained artistic perception we have at a higher level an experience which contains the results of an elaborate process of distinction and relation, but contains them in a way which transcends the relational form and reverts in its directness to the unity of immediate feeling. While again we have in the personal love which is one with mutual insight a form of experience that, if translated into the language of the intellect, would require for its description a whole world of relations and predicates, and is yet, as experienced, an intimate unity no relational scheme can more than faintly adumbrate. And it is worthy of consideration that religious emotion in all ages has borrowed from these forms of experience its favourite expressions for the highest modes of communion between the finite and the infinite, the “beatific vision,” the “love of God,” etc.

It seems indeed as if the function of the mere intellect were always that of a necessary and valuable intermediary between a lower and a higher level of immediate apprehension. It breaks up, by the relations and distinctions it introduces, the original union of the what and the that of simple feeling, and proceeds to make the what, which it deals with in its isolation, ever more and more complex. But the ultimate issue of the process is only reached and its ultimate aim only satisfied so far as it conducts us at a higher stage of mental development to the direct intuition of a richer and more comprehensive whole in the immediate unity of its that and its what. The besetting philosophical sin of the mere mystic is not so much his refusal to accept the work of the mere intellect as the highest and truest type of human experience, as his tendency to satisfy his demand for the fuller union of the what with the that by reverting to the lower forms of immediacy upon which intellectual reflection has not done its work, instead of pressing on to the higher in which the effect of that work is preserved though its form is transcended.

These reflections may serve to obviate the objection that to reject the relational scheme when it is offered as the ultimate truth is to deny the value and significance of the scientific work we accomplish by means of it. Though the scheme of relations cannot adequately express the mode of union between the finite and the infinite, there is no fresh addition to the system of relations into which scientific analysis translates the real world of experience that does not increase our knowledge of what the real world must contain, though it may fail to explain how it contains it. And, in conclusion, let it be remembered that it is true not only of the religious mystic’s special experience of union with deity, but of all direct experience, that the relational scheme is quite inadequate to explain how it holds its double aspects, its unity and its multiplicity, its that and its what, in complete interpenetration. For no living experience is a mere whole of parts, and none, therefore, can be fully represented by a scheme based upon the concept of whole and part.

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chaps. 1-3, 15, 27; L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge, pp. 172-181 (Qualities and Relations), 540-557 (Substance); H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. i. chap. 1 (The Being of Things), chap. 2 (The Quality of Things), chap. 3 (The Real and Reality); J. Royce, The World and the Individual, First Series, Supplementary Essay; B. Russell, “The Concept of Order” (Mind, January 1901), and article on “Position in Space and Time” (Mind, July 1901); G. F. Stout, “Alleged Self-contradictions in the Concept of Relation” (Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, New Series, vol. ii. pp. 1-14, with the accompanying discussion, pp. 15-24).

-----------------------

SUPPLEMENTARY NOTE TO CHAPTER IV.

DR. STOUT’S REPLY TO MR. BRADLEY’S CRITICISM OF THE CONCEPT OF RELATION.

Since the preceding chapter was written, I have had the opportunity of studying Dr. Stout’s paper in the current volume of Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society. I have not thought it necessary to make any alterations in the text of Chapter 4, in consequence of Dr. Stout’s criticism, but I may perhaps be permitted to add the following remarks, which must not be regarded as a systematic appreciation or examination of Dr. Stout’s views. The latter, as he himself pleads, cannot indeed be finally judged until he has worked out the theory of Predication for which his present paper merely prepares the way.

1. Dr. Stout begins by admitting what to my own mind is the essence of the anti-relational argument. “No relation or system of relations can ever constitute a self-subsistent and self-contained Reality. The all-inclusive universe cannot ultimately consist in (? of) a collection of interrelated terms” (op. cit., p. 2). This being once conceded, I should have thought it an inevitable consequence that a “collection of interrelated terms” cannot give us the final truth about the nature of anything. For the whole idealist contention, as I understand it and have tried to sustain it in the present work, is that the structure of the whole is so repeated in any and every one of its members that what is not the truth about the whole is never the ultimate truth about anything. precisely because there is ultimately nothing apart from the whole, and the whole again is nothing apart from its members. So much, I had thought, we have all learned from Hegel, and therefore Dr. Stout’s dilemma that any proposition asserting relation (p. 5) must be false, unless the relational scheme, so long as it is not affirmed of the ultimate whole itself, gives us truth, does not seem to me to possess any real cogency. With Mr. Bradley himself, as quoted by Dr. Stout, I should urge that if the relational scheme is not itself internally discrepant, there remains no valid ground for disputing its applicability to the whole.

2. Dr. Stout’s introduction into a “relational unity” of the third term,—relatedness does not seem to me to remove the difficulties inherent in our problem. And the illustration by which he supports it appears to be unsound. He argues that when my hat is on my head this state of things implies (1) the two related terms, the hat and the head,(2) a relation of on and under. (3) the fact that the terms stand in this relation—their relatedness. For (1) and (2) by themselves would be compatible with my hat being on the peg and my head bare. But surely there is here a confusion between the relation of above and below, and the very different relation of on and under. The latter relation includes, as the former does not, immediate contact as part of its meaning. If there are (1) a hat and a head, and (2) the relation on and under—in this sense—between the two, there is surely no need of a third factor to complete the concrete actuality of “hat on head.” If the hat is not actually on the head, then (2), the supposed relation, is not there at all. And if (2) is there the whole fact is already there. In a word, Dr. Stout seems to me to count in the concrete fact of “thing exhibiting related aspects” as a third constituent in itself, precisely as popular Logic sometimes counts in the actual judgment, under the name of Copula, as one factor of itself.

Then to Dr. Stout’s use of his distinction between the relation and the fact of relatedness, I think it may be replied that it leaves us precisely where we were before. The hat is qualified by being on the head, the head by being in or under the hat, and hat and head together by the relation of on and under between them. But how these various aspects of the fact are to be combined in a single consistent view we are no nearer knowing.

3. The endless regress. I think it will be seen from the preceding chapter that in my own view a genuine endless regress is evidence of the falsity of the conception which gives rise to it, and that I hold this on the ground that the endless regress always presupposes the self-contradictory purpose to sum an admittedly infinite series. Hence I could not concur, so far as I can see at present, in Dr. Stout’s distinction between the endless regress which does and that which does not involve self-contradiction. As to his illustration of endless regress of the second kind, the infinite divisibility of space (p. 11), I should have thought that there is no actual endless regress in question until you substitute for infinite divisibility infinite actual subdivision, and that when you make this substitution it commits you at once to the self-contradictory completion of an unending task. (Cf. what was said above, § 10, with reference to infinite numerical series.)

4. Dr. Stout goes on to deny that there is any endless regress, self-contradictory or not, involved in the relational scheme. According to him, what connects the relation with its terms is not another relation (which would of course give rise to an endless regress), but their relatedness, which is “a common adjective both of the relation and the terms” (p. 11). I have already explained why this solution appears to me merely to repeat the problem. The relatedness, so far as I can see, is a name for the concrete fact with its double aspect of quality and relation, and I cannot understand how mere insistence upon the concrete unity of the fact makes the conjunction of its aspects more intelligible.

5. Dr. Stout further supports his contention by a theory of the nature of continuous connection which I have perhaps failed to understand. Replying in anticipation to the possible objection of an opponent, that if the “relatedness” connects the terms with their relation there must be a second link to connect the term with its relatedness, he says “there is no intermediate link and there is need for none. For the connection is continuous, and has its ground in that ultimate continuity which is presupposed by all relational unity” (p. 12, cf. pp. 2-4). And, as he has previously told us, “so far as there is continuous connection there is nothing between [i.e. between the connected terms], and there is therefore no relation.”

Now there seems to me to be a contradiction latent here. Continuous connection, of course, implies distinct but connected terms which form a series. Where there are no such distinct terms there is nothing to connect. Now it is, as I understand it, part of the very nature of a continuous series that any two terms of the series have always a number of possible intermediate terms between them. And therefore, in a continuous series, there are no immediately adjacent terms. Dr. Stout’s own illustration brings this out—

│ │ │ ──────┼──────┼──────┼────── β │ α │ a │ b M

In a diagram like the accompanying b and β are, he argues, “mediately conjoined,” but a and α are “immediately co-adjacent.” Surely Dr. Stout forgets here that what can be intelligibly called “co-adjacent” are not lines but points or positions on the lines. And between any point in α and any point in a there are a plurality of intermediate positions, except for the special case of the extreme left point of a and the extreme right point of α. These, of course, coalesce in the single point M, and there is therefore no connection, mediate or immediate, left in this case. The illustration, I think, may serve to reveal a serious discrepancy in Dr. Stout’s theory. He sees that relations presuppose a unity which is supra-relational, and which he calls “continuous,” on the ground of its supra-relational character. At the same time, to save the relational scheme from condemnation as leading to the endless regress, he has to turn this supra-relational unity itself into a sort of relation by calling it an immediate connection between adjacent terms, and thus ascribing to it the fundamental character of a discontinuous series. And I cannot help regarding this procedure as unconscious evidence to the truth of the principle, that what is not the truth about the whole of Reality is not ultimately the truth about any reality.

-----

Footnote 73:

See the admirable account of the “natural conception” of the world in the final chapter of Avenarius, Der Menschliche Weltbegriff.

Footnote 74:

May I say here once for all, that when I oppose practice to intellectual speculation, I must be understood to mean by practice the alteration by myself of some datum of given existence. The activity of thought is thus for me not practical, precisely because the “truths” which I know or contemplate are not quà truths given existences operated upon and altered by the act of thinking.

Footnote 75:

Such a view of the mental life of the animal seems to have been actually held, for instance, by the late Professor T. H. Green. Yet see Green, Works, ii. 217.

Footnote 76:

Strictly speaking, the “solidity” or “impenetrability” of the ultimate particles of matter, which is with Locke and Newton one of the most prominent “primary” qualities, is not a “mathematical” property, but it still owes its inclusion in the list to the conviction of these philosophers that it is, like extension and form, fundamentally important for mathematical Physics. The explanation of the “secondary” qualities as subjective appears to go back to Democritus.

Footnote 77:

See the further elaboration of this analogy in Bk. III. chap. 3, § 2 ff.

Footnote 78:

Professor Sidgwick’s defence of the Lockian view (Philosophy: its Scope and Relations, p. 63 ff.) seems to me to ignore the point at issue. namely, that in any sense in which “secondary” qualities get their meaning from the content of sensation, primary qualities do the same. The whole point is that the sensation is not merely (as process) the occasion of our cognition of, e.g., hardness or softness, but also (as content) furnishes the very meaning of “hard” or “soft.” Cf. with what follows, Appearance and Reality, chap. 1.

Footnote 79:

The former alternative is that of scholasticism; in modern science the latter has been more or less consciously adopted by those thinkers who retain the notion of substances. The various qualities are on this view consequences of the relations in which each substance stands (a) to other interacting substances, and (b) in particular to the unknown substratum of our “consciousness.”

Footnote 80:

See chaps. 1 and 2 of bk. i. of his Metaphysic.

Footnote 81:

The reader who desires to study Kant’s doctrine in detail may begin by taking up Kant’s own Prolegomena to the Study of any future Metaphysic, which may be profitably consulted even by those who find the Critique of Pure Reason too diffuse and technical. The latest and cheapest translation is that included in the Open Court Publishing Co.’s series of Philosophical Classics.

Footnote 82:

“Arbitrarily” because it is, as all recent psychology insists, the direction of our attention which determines what qualities shall be presented together, and thus become “associated.”

Footnote 83:

In Psychology this comes out in the rejection by the best recent writers of the whole associationist account of the process of perception, according to which the perception of a thing as a whole was taken to mean the actual presence in sensation of one of its qualities plus the reinstatement by association of the “ideas” of the others. For the modern doctrine of the perception of a whole, as distinct from the mere perception of its constituent parts, consult Stout, Analytic Psychology, bk. i. chap. 3, or Manual of Psychology,^3 bk. i. chap. 3.

Footnote 84:

This is just as true of the so-called primary qualities of things as of any others. Thus the mass and again the kinetic energy of a conservative material system are properly names for the way in which the system will behave under determinate conditions, not of modes of behaviour which are necessarily actually exhibited throughout its existence. The laws of motion, again, are statements of the same hypothetical kind about the way in which, as we believe, particles move if certain conditions are fulfilled. The doctrine according to which all events in the physical world are actual motions, rests on no more than a metaphysical blunder of a peculiarly barbarous kind. Cf. Stallo, Concepts and Theories of Modern Physics, chaps. 10-12.

Footnote 85:

Thus, e.g., so fundamental a proposition in our current mechanical science as the “first law of motion” is avowedly a statement as to what would be the behaviour of things under a condition which, so far as we know, is never actually realised. On the thing as the “law of its states,” see Lotze, Metaphysic, I. 3. 32 ff. (Eng. trans., vol. i. p. 88 ff.), and L. T. Hobhouse, The Theory of Knowledge, pp. 545-557.

Footnote 86:

Mr. Hobhouse (op. cit., p. 541 ff.) thinks that the solution is simply that those qualities belong to one “substance,” which are apprehended together as occupying one space. As a working criterion of what we mean by one bodily thing, this account seems satisfactory, and has probably suggested itself spontaneously to most of us. But it leaves untouched the more fundamental question how the identification of a certain sight-space with a certain touch-space is effected, and what are the motives which lead to it. Mr. Hobhouse is content to take the identification as “given in adult perception,” but it seems to me to emerge from his own good account of the matter that it is the still more primitive apprehension of my own body as a felt unity upon which the synthesis between sight and touch spaces is based. If so, the ultimate source of the “unity of substance” must be sought deeper than Mr. Hobhouse is willing to go for it. And quaere, whether his account, if accepted as ultimate, would not lead to the identification of substance with space? For the difficulties which arise when you say the substance is the space and its filling of qualities, see Appearance and Reality, chap. 2, pp. 19, 20 (1st ed.).

Footnote 87:

Monadology, §§ 8-16, 57-62.

Footnote 88:

This is true even where we merely count a number of qualitatively equivalent units in order to ascertain their sum. It is their positive character of being qualitatively equivalent which makes it permissible in this case to take any one of them indifferently as first, any other as second, etc. Whenever you apply the numerical series to the arrangement in order of the qualitatively dissimilar, the nature of your material as related to the character of your special interest in it decides for you what you shall call first, second, third, etc.

Footnote 89:

As to the possibility of relations which are in this sense external to their terms, see B. Russell, The Philosophy of Leibniz, p. 130, and the articles by the same writer in Mind for January and July 1901.

Footnote 90:

See the elaborate discussion of the relational scheme implied in any assertion of difference in Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, lect 2.

Footnote 91:

Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 3. Compare also chap. 15, “Thought and Reality.”

Footnote 92:

The reader who desires further knowledge of the researches in the theory of Numbers upon which Prof. Royce’s doctrine is based, may profitably consult Dedekind, Was sind und was sollen die Zahlen, and Couturat, L’Infini Mathématique.

Footnote 93:

Professor Royce’s own illustration of the map of England executed upon a portion of the surface of the country is really a typical instance of a self-contradictory purpose. He argues that such a map, to be theoretically perfect, must contain a reduced facsimile of itself as part of the country mapped, and this again another, and so on indefinitely. But the whole force of the reasoning depends on overlooking the distinction between the surface of England as it is before the map is made, and the surface of England as altered by the presence of the map. Prof. Royce assumes that you set out to represent in the map a state of things which can in fact have no existence until after the map is made. The previous existence of the map at a certain spot is falsely taken to be one of the conditions to which the map-maker is to conform in executing it. Every one of the supposed “maps within the map” will thus involve distortion and misrepresentation of the district it proposes to map. It is as if Hamlet had chosen “Hamlet” as the subject of the “play within the play.” The professor’s illustration thus does less than justice to his theory.

Footnote 94:

The fundamental defect in Professor Royce’s reasoning seems to me to lie in the tacit transition from the notion of an infinite series to that of an infinite completed sum. Thus he speaks of the series of prime numbers as a “whole” being present at once to the mind of God. But are the prime numbers, or any other infinite series, an actual sum at all? They are surely not proved to be so by the existence of general truths about any prime number.

Footnote 95:

See, e.g., Dedekind, op. cit., § 2: “It frequently happens that different things a, b, c ... are apprehended upon whatsoever occasion under a common point of view, mentally put together, and it is then said that they form a system; the things a, b, c ... are named the elements of the system”; and § 3 (definitions of whole and part).

Footnote 96:

Ante, Bk. II. chap. 2, § 5.

Footnote 97:

It is no answer to this view to urge that as soon as the intellect undertakes to reflect upon and describe Reality it unavoidably does so in relational terms. For it is our contention that the same intellect which uses these relational methods sees why they are inadequate, and to some extent at least how they are ultimately merged in a higher type of experience. Thus the systematic use of the intellect in Metaphysics itself leads to the conviction that the mere intellect is not the whole of Reality. Or, in still more paradoxical language, the highest truth for the mere intellect is the thought of Reality as an ordered system. But all such order is based in the end on the number-series with its category of whole and part, and cannot, therefore, be a perfectly adequate representation of a supra-relational Reality. Hence Truth, from its own nature, can never be quite the same thing as Reality.

Footnote 98:

Or does Dr. Stout merely mean that there may be a hat and a head, and also a relation of on and under (e.g., between the hat and the peg), and yet my hat not be on my head? If this is his meaning, I reply we have not really got the relation and its terms; if the hat is not on the head, hat and head are not terms in the relation at all. I do not see why, on his own principles, Dr. Stout should not add a fourth factor to his analysis, namely, qualifiedness, or the fact that the qualities are there, and so on indefinitely.

Footnote 99:

If you consider the lines a and α, as Dr. Stout prefers to do, I should have thought two views possible. (a) There are not two lines at all, but one, the “junction” at M being merely ideal. Then there remains nothing to connect and there is no relation of “immediate connection.” Or (b), the junction may be taken as real, and then you have a perfectly ordinary case of relation, the terms being the terminated lines a and α, and the relation being one of contact at M. On every ground (a) seems to me the right view, but it is incompatible with the reduction of continuity to “immediate connection.” Thus the source of the difficulty is that (1) immediate connection can only hold between the immediately successive terms of a discontinuous series, and yet (2) cannot hold between them precisely because they are discontinuous.

-----