CHAPTER II. The Problem of Matter

THE PROBLEM OF MATTER

§ 1. The physical order, because dependent for its perceived qualities on the sense-organs of the percipient, must be the appearance of a more ultimate reality which is non-physical. § 2. Berkeley’s criticism is fatal to the identification of this reality with “material substance.” The logical consequence of Berkeley’s doctrine that the esse of sensible things is percipi would be the subjectivist view that the physical order is only a complex of presentations. § 3. But this is clearly not the case with that part of the physical order which consists of the bodies of my fellow-men. These have an existence, as centres of feeling, over and above their existence as presentations to my senses. § 4. As the bodies of my fellows are connected in one system with the rest of the physical order, that order as a whole must have the same kind of reality which belongs to them. It must be the presentation to our sense of a system or complex of systems of experiencing subjects; the apparent absence of life and purpose from inorganic nature must be due to our inability to enter into a direct communion of interest with its members. § 5. Some consequences of this view.

§ 1. In the preceding chapter we have very briefly indicated the nature of the steps by which reflective thought comes to distinguish sharply between a physical and a psychical order of existence. The physical order, when the concept has been brought into its complete shape by the inclusion of my own body and all its parts, is thought of as a system comprising all the bodies in the universe, that is, all the existences which are of the same kind as those which I directly perceive by means of the special senses. Now, with regard to the whole physical order thus conceived two things seem fairly obvious upon the least reflection, that it does not depend for its existence upon the fact of my actually perceiving it, and that it does depend upon my perception for all the qualities and relations which I find in it. Its that appears independent of the percipient, but its what, on the other hand, essentially dependent on and relative to the structure of the perceiving organ. As we have already seen, the familiar experience of the variations in perception which accompany differences in the permanent structure or temporary functioning of the organs of sense led, very early in the history of Philosophy, to the recognition of this relativity, so far as the so-called “secondary” qualities, i.e. those which can only be perceived by one special sense-organ, are concerned. We have also seen sufficiently (in Bk. II. chap. 4) that the same consideration holds equally good of those “primary” qualities which are perceptible by more senses than one, and have probably for that reason been so often supposed to be unaffected by this relativity to a perceiving organ.

Without wasting the reader’s time by unnecessary repetition of our former reasoning, it may be worth while to point out here how this thorough-going relativity of the qualities of the physical order to a percipient organ leads directly to the indefinite regress, the apparently invariable consequence of all contradictions in Metaphysics, when we try to take those qualities as independently real. I perceive the properties of physical existence by special sense-organs, and the properties as perceived are conditioned by the structure of those organs. But each sense-organ is itself a member of the physical order, and as such is perceived by and dependent for its perceived qualities upon another organ. This second sense-organ in its turn is also a member of the physical order, and is perceived by a third, or by the first organ again. And there is no end to this mutual dependence. The physical order, as a whole, must be a “state” of my nervous system, which is itself a part of that order. We shall see more fully in our final Book, when we come to discuss the problem of Mind and Body, that this contradiction is an inevitable result of the inconsistency involved in the inclusion of my own body in the physical order, an inconsistency which is, in its turn, a necessary consequence of the hard-and-fast separation of the two orders of existence.

Considerations of this kind have led to the general recognition that the physical order must be regarded as phenomenal, as the manifestation to sense-perception of a reality which is in its own nature inaccessible to sense-perception, and therefore, in the strictest sense of the words, not physical. When we ask, however, how this non-physical reality of which the physical order is the phenomenal manifestation to our senses, is to be thought of, we find ourselves at once plunged into the same difficulties which we have already met, in a more general form, in discussing the concept of Substance. Popular thought, and science so far as it is content to accept the notions of popular thought without criticism, have commonly fallen back on the idea of the non-phenomenal ground of the physical order as an unperceived “substratum.” To this substratum it has given the name of matter, and has thus interpreted the physical order as the effect produced by the causal action of an unperceived matter upon our sense-organs, or rather, to speak with more precision, upon their unknown material substratum. Frequently, as might have been expected, the attempt has been made to identify this substratum with those of the known qualities of the physical order which appear least liable to modification with the varying states of the percipient organs, and lend themselves most readily to measurement and calculation, the so-called “primary” qualities of mechanical science. This is the standpoint adopted by Newton and, in the main, by Locke, and largely through the influence of their work still remains the most familiar to the ordinary English mind. But the inconsistencies we have already found inherent in such a conception of Substance as is here presupposed, so inevitably make themselves felt upon any serious examination, that the doctrine regularly appears in the history of thought as a mere temporary halting-place in the advance to the more radical notion of matter as the entirely unknown non-phenomenal substratum of the sensible properties of bodies.

§ 2. This latter notion is again manifestly open to all the objections previously brought against the more general concept of substance as an unknown substratum or support of properties. It is from these objections that Berkeley’s famous criticism of the concept of matter, the most original attempt at a constructive theory of the real nature of the physical order in the history of English Philosophy, starts. Berkeley first takes the identification of material substance with the primary qualities of body, which Locke had made current in English speculation, and shows, by insisting upon the relativity of perceived quality to percipient organ, that it is untenable. Having thus driven his opponent to surrender this identification, and to define matter as the unknown substratum of the physical order, he proceeds to argue that this notion of an unknown substratum is both useless and unintelligible. It is useless, because our knowledge of the actual properties and processes of the physical order can neither be extended nor made clearer by the addition of an unknowable; it is unintelligible, because we can give no account to ourselves of the nature of the “support” supposed to be bestowed by the substratum or the properties.

Material substance being thus dismissed as an unmeaning fiction, what is left as the reality of the physical order? According to Berkeley, nothing but the actual presentations, or “ideas,” in which the percipient subject is aware of the properties of bodies. A body is simply such a complex of presentations to a percipient; except as so presented it has no existence. As Berkeley is fond of putting it, the esse of the material thing is simply percipi, the fact of its being presented. But just when we expect Berkeley to accept the complete subjectivist contention that bodies are simply “states of the percipients’ consciousness” and nothing more, he remembers that he has to account both for the fact that we cannot perceive what we please and where we please, but that our perceptions form an order largely independent of our own choice, and for the deep-seated conviction of the common-sense mind that things do not cease to exist when my perception of them is interrupted. To reconcile his theory with these apparently conflicting facts, he has recourse, as is the custom of philosophers and others in a difficulty, to divine assistance. The continued existence of the physical world in the intervals of perception, and its systematic character and partial independence of our volition, he explains by the hypotheses that God produces perceptions in us in a fixed order, and that God continues to be aware of the system of presentations which I call the physical world, when my perception of it is suspended. The same explanation would, of course, have to be invoked to account for the existence of physical realities which no human subject perceives.

It is fairly obvious that the two halves of Berkeley’s theory will not fit together into a coherent whole. If the whole esse of physical things is merely percipi, there can be no reason why I should suppose them to exist at all except in so far as and so long as they are presented to my perception. The whole hypothesis of an omnipresent divine perception which remains aware of the contents that have vanished from my own perception, thus becomes purely gratuitous. It also labours under the disadvantage of being, on Berkeley’s theory, internally inconsistent. For if it is necessary to invoke the agency of God to account for the occurrence of presentations to my experience, it is not clear why we have not to suppose a second deity who causes the series of presentations in the experience of God, and so on indefinitely. On the other hand, if God’s experience may be taken as uncaused, it is not clear why my own experience might not have been taken so in the first instance, and the introduction of God into the theory avoided. Thus the logical outcome of the doctrine that the esse of physical things is merely percipi, would have been either Solipsism, the doctrine according to which I have no certain knowledge of any existence except my own, everything else being a mere state or modification of myself; or the Humian scepticism, which resolves my own existence, as well as that of the external world, into a mere sequence of fleeting mental processes. Conversely, if I have adequate reason to believe that any member of the physical order whatever is more than a presentation, and has an existence in some sense independent of my perception, I have no right to declare of any member of that order, unless for special reasons, that its being consists merely in being perceived.

§ 3. Why, then, did Berkeley, as a matter of fact, accept neither the solipsist nor the sceptical conclusion? Why does he, after all, credit the members of the physical order with an existence independent of the fact of my perceiving them, and thus introduce a patent contradiction into his system? It is not hard to see the reasons by which he must have been influenced. The whole physical order cannot be dismissed as a mere subjective illusion, because there are some members of it which undoubtedly have an existence independent of the fact of being perceived by my sense-organs. Such members are my own body and the bodies of my fellow-men.

Both my own body and those of my fellow-men, as they are perceived by the various special senses, belong to the physical order, and share its qualities. But over and above its existence as a member of the perceived physical order, my own body has further another quite different kind of existence. It is, in so far as I perceive its parts, as I do other bodily existence, by the sensations of the various special sense-organs, a complex of presentations, like everything else in the physical world. But my body is not merely an object presented to me by the organs of the special senses; it is also something which I feel as a whole in common or organic sensation, and in the changing organic thrills of my various emotional moods. This unique feeling of my body as a whole accompanies every moment of my conscious life and gives each its peculiar tone, and there seems to be no doubt that it forms the foundation of the sense of personal identity. If we recollect the essentially teleological character of feeling, we shall be inclined to say that my body as thus apprehended is nothing other than myself as a striving purposive individual, and that my experience of it is the same thing as the experience of my purposive attitudes towards my environment. It is, in fact, this experience of my body as apprehended by immediate feeling, that Psychology describes as the “subject” of the various “mental states” of which it formulates the laws. For Metaphysics, it does not seem too much to say, this double existence of my own body, as a presented object about which I have knowledge in the same way as about everything else, and as an immediately felt unity, affords the key to the whole problem of the “independent” existence of a reality beyond my own presentations. To see how this comes about, we must first consider the influence it has on our conception of one very special part of the physical order, the bodies of our fellows.

The bodies of our fellow-men are, of course, from one point of view complexes of presentations which we receive through our sense-organs; so far their esse, as Berkeley would have said, is percipi. But all practical communion with my fellows through the various institutions of society is based upon the conviction that, over and above their existence as presentation-complexes, or contents of my perceptive states, the bodies of my fellows have the same kind of existence as directly apprehended in immediate feeling which I ascribe to my own. In other words, all practical life is a mere illusion, unless my fellow-men are, like myself, centres of purposive experience. By the existence independent of my own perception which I ascribe to them, I mean precisely existence as feeling purposive beings. Hence, unless all social life is an illusion, there is at least one part of the physical order, external to myself, of which the esse is not mere percipi, but percipere, or rather sentire. If my fellow-men are more than complexes of presentations or “ideas in my head,” then the subjectivist reduction of all reality to states of my “consciousness” breaks down, at least for this part of the physical order. Hence the acceptance or rejection of the subjectivist theory will ultimately depend on the nature of the evidence for the independent existence of human feelings and purposes beyond my own.

On what grounds, then, do we attribute such “independent” existence as experiencing subjects to our fellows? According to the current subjectivist explanation, we have here a conclusion based on the argument from the analogy between the structure of my own body, as presented in sense-perception, and those of others. I infer that other men have a mental life like my own, because of the visible resemblances between their physical structure and my own, and this inference receives additional support from every fresh increase in our anatomical and physiological knowledge of the human frame. But, being an argument from analogy, it can never amount to a true scientific induction, and the existence of human experience, not my own, must always remain for the subjectivist a probability and can never become a certainty.

I am convinced that this popular and superficially plausible view is radically false, and that its logical consequence, the belief that the real existence of our fellows is less certain than our own, is a grave philosophical error. That the argument from analogy is no sufficient basis for the belief in human experience beyond my own, can easily be seen from the following considerations:—(1) As ordinarily stated, the data of the supposed inference do not actually exist. For what I perceive is not, as the subjectivist assumes, three terms—my own mental life, my own anatomical structure, and the anatomy of my neighbour, but two, my own mental life and my neighbour’s anatomy. If I cannot be sure of the reality of my neighbour’s experience until I have compared the anatomy and physiology of his organism with that of my own, I shall have to remain in doubt at least until science can devise a mechanism by which I can see my own nervous system. At present one of the terms on which the analogical argument is said to be based, namely, my own internal physical structure, has to be mostly taken on trust. It would be little less than the truth to invert the subjectivist’s position, and say that, until science can devise means for seeing our own brains, we infer the resemblance of our own anatomy to our neighbour’s from the previously known resemblance of his inner experience and ours.

(2) And even supposing this difficulty already surmounted, as it conceivably will be in the future, there is a still more serious flaw in the presumed analogical inference. If I once have good ground for the conviction that similarity of inner experience is attended by similarity of physical structure, then of course I can in any special case treat the degree of structural resemblance between one organism and another as a sufficient reason for inferring a like degree of resemblance between the corresponding inner experiences. But upon what grounds is the general principle itself based? Obviously, if my own inner experience is the only one known to me originally, I have absolutely no means of judging whether the external resemblances between my own organism and yours afford reason for crediting you with an inner experience like my own or not. If the inference by analogy is to have any force whatever in a particular case, I must already know independently that likeness of outward form and likeness of inner experience at least in some cases go together. The plausibility of the usual subjectivist account of the way in which we come to ascribe real existence to our fellows, is simply due to its tacitly ignoring this vital point.

How, then, do we actually learn the existence of feeling purposive experience outside our own? The answer is obvious. We learn it by the very same process by which we come to the clear consciousness of ourselves. It is a pure blunder in the subjectivist psychology to assume that somehow the fact of my own existence as a centre of experience is a primitive revelation. It is by the process of putting our purposes into act that we come to be aware of them as our purposes, as the meaning of our lives, the secrets of what we want of the world. And, from the very fact of our existence in a society, every step in the execution of a purpose or the satisfaction of a want involves the adjustment of our own purposive acts to those of the other members of our social whole. To realise your own ends, you have to take note of the partly coincident, partly conflicting, ends of your social fellows, precisely as you have to take note of your own. You cannot come to the knowledge of the one without coming by the same route and in the same degree to the knowledge of the other. Precisely because our lives and purposes are not self-contained, self-explaining wholes, we cannot possibly know our own meaning except in so far as we know the meaning of our immediate fellows. Self-knowledge, apart from the knowledge of myself as a being with aims and purposes conditioned by those of like beings in social relations with myself, is an empty and senseless word.

The recent psychological studies of the part which imitation plays in all learning make this result still more palpably manifest. For they reveal the fact that, to an enormous extent, it is by first repeating without conscious aim of its own the significant purposive acts of others that a child first comes to behave with conscious significance itself. It is largely by learning what others mean when they utter a word or execute a movement that the child comes to know his own meaning in using the same word or performing the same movement. Thus we may confidently say that the reality of purposive significant experience which is not my own is as directly certain as the reality of my own experience, and that the knowledge of both realities is inevitably gained together in the process of coming to clear insight into my own practical aims and interests. The inner experience of my fellows is indubitably real to the same degree as my own, because the very existence of my own purposive life is meaningless apart from the equal existence of theirs.

§ 4. We may now apply the results obtained in the previous section to the general question as to the “independent” existence of the physical order. In doing so we observe two consequences of the highest importance. (1) Now that we have found that at least a part of that order, namely, the bodies of our fellow-men, are not mere complexes of presentations in our own experience, but have a further existence as themselves experiencing subjects, and are so far “independent” of their actual presentation in our own experience, we can no longer conclude, from the dependence of the physical order for its sensible properties upon presentation to ourselves, that it has no further existence of its own. If one part of that order, which as presented stands on the same footing with the rest, and is, like it, dependent on presentation for its sensible properties, is certainly known to be more than a mere presentation-complex, the same may at least be true of other parts. We can no longer assert of any part of the physical order, without special proof, that its esse is merely percipi.

We may go a step further. Not only may other parts of the physical order possess a reality beyond the mere fact of being presented to our sense-perception, but they must. For (a) we have to take note, for the obtaining of our own practical ends, of the factors in our material environment precisely as we have to take note of the purposive behaviour not our own which forms our social environment. Just as our own inner life has no coherent significance except as part of a wider whole of purposive human life, so human society as a system of significant conduct directed to the attainment of ends, cannot be understood without reference to its non-human surroundings and conditions. To understand my own experience, reference must be made to the aims, ideals, beliefs, etc. of the social whole in which I am a member; and to understand these, reference has again to be made to geographical, climatic, economical, and other conditions. Thus of the physical order at large, no less than of that special part of it which consists of the bodies of my fellows, it is true to say that its existence means a great deal more than the fact of its presentation. Unperceived physical existence must be real if I am myself real, because my own inner life is unintelligible without reference to it.

(b) This conclusion is further strengthened by the evidence supplied by the various sciences, that human life forms part of a great system characterised by evolution or development. If one part of a connected historical development is more than a complex of presentations, the other stages of that development cannot possibly be mere presentation-complexes. Against any “Idealism” which is mere Subjectivism or Presentationism calling itself by a less suspicious name, it would be a sound and fair argument to contend that it reduces evolution to a dream, and must therefore be false.

It cannot, then, be true of the physical order as a whole, that it has no reality beyond the fact of its presentation to my senses. Elements in it not so presented must yet have reality, inasmuch as my own inner life requires the recognition of their reality as a fundamental condition of the realisation of my own “subjective” ends. As the facts of hallucination, “suggestion,” and subjective sensation show, what appears to us as an element in the physical order may sometimes have no reality beyond the fact of its appearance; there may be presented contents of which it would be true to say that their esse is percipi. But the very possibility of distinguishing such hallucinatory presentations from others as illusory, is enough to prove that this cannot be true of the whole physical order. It is precisely because physical existence in general is something more than a collective hallucination, that we are able in Psychology to recognise the occurrence of such hallucinations. As has been already observed, you are never justified in dismissing an apparent fact of the physical order as mere presentation without any further reality behind it, unless you can produce special grounds for making this inference based upon the circumstances of the special case.

(2) The second important consequence of our previous conclusion is this,—We have now seen what was really meant, in the crucial case of our fellow-men, by maintaining an existence “independent” of the fact of presentation to our sense-organs. Their “independent” existence meant existence as centres of experience, as feeling, purposive beings. The whole concept of “independent” existence was thus social in its origin. We have also seen that the grounds on which an “independent” existence must be ascribed to the rest of the physical order are essentially of the same kind as those on which we asserted the “independent” existence of our fellow-men. It appears patent, then, that “independent” existence must have the same general sense in both cases. It can and must mean the existence of centres of sentient purposive experience. If we are serious in holding that the esse of the physical order, like that of ourselves and our fellows, is not mere percipi, we must hold that it is percipere or sentire. What appears to us in sense-perception as physical nature must be a community, or a complex of communities of sentient experiencing beings: behind the appearance the reality must be of the same general type as that which we, for the same reasons, assert to be behind the appearances we call the bodies of our fellows.

This conclusion is not in the least invalidated by our own inability to say what in particular are the special types of sentient experience which correspond to that part of the physical order which lies outside the narrow circle of our own immediate human and animal congeners. Our failure to detect specific forms of sentience and purpose in what we commonly call “inorganic” nature, need mean no more than that we are here dealing with types of experience too remote from our own for detection. The apparent deadness and purposelessness of so much of nature may easily be illustrated by comparison with the apparent senselessness of a composition in a language of which we are personally ignorant. Much of nature presumably appears lifeless and purposeless to us for the same reason that the speech of a foreigner seems senseless jargon to a rustic who knows no language but his own.

It would be easy, but superfluous, to develop these ideas more in detail by the free use of imaginative conjecture. The one point of vital principle involved is that on which we have already insisted, that existence “independent” of sense-perception has only one intelligible meaning. Hence it must have this same meaning whenever we are compelled to ascribe to any part of the perceived physical order a reality which goes beyond the mere fact of its being perceived. The assertion that the physical order, though dependent for its perceived qualities upon the presence of a percipient with sense-organs of a particular type, is not dependent on any such relation for its existence, if it is to have any definite meaning at all, must mean for us that that order is phenomenal of, or is the appearance to our special human sense-organs of, a system or complex of systems of beings possessing the same general kind of sentient purposive experience as ourselves, though conceivably infinitely various in the degree of clearness with which they are aware of their own subjective aims and interests, and in the special nature of those interests.

§ 5. We may end this chapter by drawing certain conclusions which follow naturally from the acceptance of this doctrine. (1) It is clear that the result we have reached by analysis of what is implied in the “independent” existence of the physical order agrees with our previous conclusions as to the general structure of Reality. For we saw in our last Book that it seemed necessary to hold not only that Reality as a whole forms a single individual experience, but also that it is composed of members or elements which are themselves sentient experiences of varying degrees of individuality. And in our discussion of the unity of the thing we saw reason to hold that nothing but a sentient experience can be individual; thus we had already convinced ourselves that if there are things which are more than complexes of presentations arbitrarily thrown together for the convenience of human percipients in dealing with them as unities, those things must be sentient experiences on subjects of some kind. We have now inferred from the actual consideration of the physical order that it does, in point of fact, consist of things of this kind. Our result may thus be said to amount in principle to the logical application to physical existence of the previously ascertained conclusion, that only what is to some degree truly individual can be real.

It is interesting to contrast with this consequence of our metaphysical attempt to interpret the course of physical nature, the result which inevitably follows from consistent adherence to the procedure of descriptive science. The whole procedure of descriptive science depends upon our willingness to shelve, for certain purposes, the problem wherein consists the reality of the physical order, and to concentrate our interest upon the task of adequately and with the greatest possible economy of hypothesis describing the system of presented contents in which it reveals itself to our senses. For purely descriptive purposes, our sole interest in the physical order is to know according to what laws of sequence one presented content follows upon another. Hence, so long as we can establish such laws of connection between presented contents, it is for purely scientific purposes indifferent how we imagine the Reality in which the sequence of presentation has its ground. Whether we think of it as a system of finite subjects, the will of a personal Deity, a complex of primary qualities, or an unknown substratum, or whether we decline to raise any question whatever about the matter, the results are the same, so long as our sole object is to exhibit the sequence of presented sense-contents as regulated by laws which admit of calculation. Science can go its way in entire indifference to all these alternative metaphysical interpretations of the Reality which is behind the phenomenal order.

The logical consequence of this absorption in the problem of describing the phenomenal sequence of events, apart from inquiry into their ground, is that the more thoroughly the task is carried out the more completely does individuality disappear from the physical order as scientifically described. Everyday thought looks on the physical order as composed of interacting things, each of which is a unique individual; current science, with its insistence on the uniform behaviour of the different elements of the material world, inevitably dissolves this appearance of individuality. In the more familiar atomic theories, though the differences between the behaviour of the atoms of different elements are still retained as ultimate, the atoms of the same element are commonly thought of as exact replicas of each other, devoid of all individual uniqueness of behaviour. And in the attempts of contemporary science to get behind atomism, and to reduce all material existence to motions in a homogeneous medium, we see a still more radical consequence of the exclusive adoption of an attitude of description. Individuality has here disappeared entirely, except in so far as the origination of differential motion in a perfectly homogeneous medium remains an ultimate inexplicability which has to be accepted as a fact, but cannot be reconciled with the theoretical assumptions which have led to the insistence upon the homogeneity of the supposed medium.

The logical reason for this progressive elimination of individuality from scientific descriptions of the processes of the physical order should now be manifest. If all individuality is that of individual subjects of experience, it is clear that in disregarding the question of the metaphysical ground of the physical order we have already in principle excluded all that gives it individuality from our purview; the more rigorously logical our procedure in dealing exclusively with the phenomenal contents of the physical order, the less room is left for any recognition of an element of individuality within it. Our purpose to describe the phenomenal logically involves description in purely general terms. It is only when, in Metaphysics, we seek to convert description of the phenomenal into interpretation of it as the appearance to sense of a more ultimate Reality, that the principle of the individuality of all real existence can come once more to its rights.

(2) It is perhaps necessary at this point to repeat, with special reference to the interpretation of the physical order, what has already been said of all interpretation of the detail of existence by reference to its ground. We must be careful not to assume that lines of division which we find it convenient for practical or scientific purposes to draw between things, correspond to the more vital distinctions between the different individual subjects of experience which we have seen reason to regard as the more real existences of which the physical order is phenomenal. This is, e.g., an error which is committed by confident theories of the animation of matter which attribute a “soul” to each chemical atom. We must remember that many of the divisions between things which we adopt in our descriptive science may be merely subjective demarcations, convenient for our own special purposes but possibly not answering to any more fundamental distinctions founded on the nature of the realities of the physical order themselves. It does not in the least follow from our view of nature as the manifestation to our senses of a system of sentient individuals, that the relations between those individuals are adequately represented by the relations between the different factors of the material world as it is constructed in our various scientific hypotheses.

Thus, e.g., our own self-knowledge and knowledge of our fellows show that in some sense there is a single experience corresponding to what, for physical science, is the enormous complex of elements forming the dominant centres of the human nervous system. But apart from our direct insight into human experience, if we only knew the human nervous system as we know a part of inorganic nature, we should be quite unable to determine that this particular complex was thus connected with an individual experience. In general we have to admit that, except for that small portion of physical nature in which we can directly read purposive experience of a type specially akin to our own, we are quite unable to say with any confidence how nature is organised, and what portions of it are “organic” to an individual experience. This caution must be constantly borne in mind if we are to avoid the abuse of our general theory of the meaning of the physical order in the interests of “spiritualistic” and other superstitions. It may also serve to guard against over-hasty “Philosophies of Nature,” like those of Schelling and Hegel, which start with the unproved assumption that approximation to the human external form of organisation is a trustworthy indication of the degree in which intelligent experience is present in physical nature.

(3) One more point may receive passing notice. It is clear that if physical nature is really a society or a number of societies of experiencing subjects, we must admit that, from the special character of our human experience with its peculiar interests and purposes, we are normally debarred from social communion with any members of the system except those who are most akin in their special type of purposive life to ourselves. Of the vast majority of the constituents of the physical order it must always be true that, while we may be convinced, on grounds of general metaphysical theory, that they possess the character we have ascribed to them, we have no means of verifying this conclusion in specific cases by the actual direct recognition of the individual life to which they belong, and consequent establishment of actual social relations with them. Yet it does not follow that we are always absolutely debarred from such direct social relations with extra-human sentient life. The “threshold of intercommunicability” between physical nature and human intelligence may conceivably be liable to fluctuations under conditions at present almost entirely unknown. Conceivably the type of experience represented in literature by the great poets to whom the sentient purposive character of physical nature has appealed with the force of a direct revelation of truth, and known in some degree to most men in certain moods, may depend upon a psychological lowering of this threshold. It is thus at least a possibility that the poet’s “communion with nature” may be more than a metaphor, and may represent some degree of a social relation as real as our more normal relations with our human fellows and the higher animals. It may be true that in the relations of man with nature, as in his relations with man, it is the identity of purpose and interest we call love which is the great remover of barriers.

(4) It should hardly be needful to point out that such a view of the meaning of nature as has been defended in this chapter is in no way opposed to, or designed to set artificial restrictions on, the unfettered development of descriptive physical science. Whatever our view of the ultimate nature of the physical order, it is equally necessary on any theory for the practical control of natural processes in the service of man to formulate laws of connection between these processes. And the work of formulating those laws can only be satisfactorily done when the analysis of the physical order as a system of sense-contents is carried on with complete disregard of all metaphysical problems as to its non-phenomenal ground. It would not even be correct to say that, if our metaphysical interpretation is valid, the view of nature presented in descriptive physical science is untrue. For a proposition is never untrue simply because it is not the whole truth, but only when, not being the whole truth, it is mistakenly taken to be so. If we sometimes speak in Philosophy as though whatever is less than the whole truth must be untrue, that is because we mean it is untrue for our special purposes as metaphysicians, whose business is not to stop short of the whole truth. For purposes of another kind it may be not only true, but the truth.

Our metaphysical interpretation of the physical order is no more incompatible with full belief in the value and validity for their own purposes of the results of abstract descriptive science, than the recognition of the singleness and purposiveness of a human experience with the equal recognition of the value of physiological and anatomical investigation into the functions and mechanism of the human body. Of course a man, as he really exists, is something quite different from the physiologist’s or anatomist’s object of study. No man is a mere walking specimen of the “human organism”; every man is really first and foremost a purposive sentient agent. But this consideration in no way affects the practical value of anatomical and physiological research into the structure of the man as he appears in another man’s system of sense-presentations. What is true in this case is, of course, equally applicable in all others.

We have yet to discuss the most serious stumbling-block in the way of the idealist interpretation of nature, the apparent conformity of its processes to rigid laws of sequence, which at first sight might seem to exclude the possibility of their being really the acts of purposive subjects. This difficulty will form the topic of our succeeding chapter.

Consult further:—F. H. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 22; L. T. Hobhouse, Theory of Knowledge, pt. 3, chap. 3; H. Lotze, Metaphysic, bk. ii. chaps. 5, 6; H. Münsterberg, Grundzüge der Psychologie, i. pp. 65-92; K. Pearson, Grammar of Science, chap. 2 (The Facts of Science), 8 (Matter) [mainly written from the “phenomenalist” standpoint, but with unconscious lapses into a more materialistic view]; J. Royce, Nature, Consciousness, and Self-Consciousness” (in Studies of Good and Evil); The World and the Individual, Second Series, Lect. 4; J. Ward, Naturalism and Agnosticism, Lects. 1-5, 14, 19. Of the older philosophical literature, Descartes, Meditation 6; Leibnitz, Monadology and New System; Locke, Essays, bk. iv. chap. 11; Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism,” in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, in addition to the already cited works of Berkeley will probably be found most important.

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Footnote 119:

This definition of the physical order approximates very closely to that adopted by Prof. Münsterberg in his Grundzüge der Psychologie, vol. i. pp. 65-77. Prof. Münsterberg defines a physical fact as one which is directly accessible to the perception of a plurality of sentient individuals, as opposed to the psychical fact which can be directly experienced only by one individual. It must be remembered, of course, that my body as directly experienced in “common sensation” and “emotional mood” belongs to the psychical order. It is only my body as perceptible by other men that is a member of the physical order.

Footnote 120:

Cf. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, chap. 22, pp. 260-267 (1st ed.). The attempts which have been made to exempt “primary” qualities from this relativity do not seem to demand serious criticism. The argument in the text applies as directly to extension and shape as to colour or smell. It is not defensible to contend, as Mr. Hobhouse does, that qualities, whether primary or secondary, depend on the percipient organ only for their perception, not for their existence. The contention rests upon taking two aspects of experience which are always given together, the that and the what of a sense-content, and arguing that because these two aspects of a single whole can be distinguished, therefore the one can exist in actual separation from the other. It would be quite as logical to infer by the same method and from the same premisses that there can be a perceptive state without any content, as that the contents can exist as we know them, apart from the state.

Footnote 121:

See particularly the detailed statement of his contention and the elaborate examination of objections in the Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, which form a commentary on the briefer exposition of Principles of Human Knowledge, §§ 1-134.

Footnote 122:

See the fuller exposition of this line of argument in Royce, Studies in Good and Evil, essay on “Nature, Consciousness and Self-Consciousness,” to which I am largely indebted throughout the present chapter, and for a detailed criticism of the alleged “analogical” inference the closely related reasoning of my own essay on “Mind and Nature” in International Journal of Ethics, October 1902. The similar but briefer criticism in Royce, The World and the Individual, Second Series, lecture 4, “Physical and Social Reality,” p. 170, I had not had the opportunity to study when the above was written. For the whole subject of imitation, see in particular Professor Baldwin’s Mental Development in the Child and the Race.

Footnote 123:

For a study of the significance of the “partial independence” of the physical world on my will as a factor in producing belief in its “external reality,” see Stout, Manual of Psychology,^3 bk. iii. pt. 2, chaps. 1-2, “The Perception of External Reality.”

Footnote 124:

The doctrine of degrees of reality must be borne in mind throughout this discussion. The reality of which the physical order is phenomenal may itself be phenomenal of a higher reality.

Footnote 125:

Societies would be the more natural supposition. We have no reason to deny that the various types of non-human intelligence may be cut off from social intercourse with each other, as they are from intercourse with ourselves.

Footnote 126:

That is, there are degrees of truth as well as of reality, and the two do not necessarily coincide. The degree of truth a doctrine contains cannot be determined apart from consideration of the purpose it is meant to fulfil. For the special purposes of Metaphysics, the purpose of thinking of the world in a finally consistent way, whatever is not the whole truth is untrue. But what the metaphysician regards as the lesser truth may be the higher truth relatively to other purposes than his own. Compare the doctrine of Dr. Stout’s essay on “Error” in Personal Idealism.

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