Part 4

III

THE TWO TYPICAL THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE

The evolution of living organisms is in general a gradual and continuous process. But it is nevertheless true that it presents well-marked stages and can best be described by reference to these. Frequently, moreover, the meaning and true nature of the movement at one stage is only revealed after a subsequent stage has been reached.

The development of a brain or cerebrum marks one important advance. The presence of this organ renders possible to the animal in varying degree what are called representations of objects, and the faculty of making such representations appears to be a condition precedent to the development of deliberation, volition, and purposive action as opposed to reflex or instinctive activity. The latter is specially characteristic of other orders of organic existence such as the Articulata--being remarkably exemplified in the activities of the social insects such as the bee.

The advent of man with his faculty of Discourse may be regarded as marking another distinct stage in the evolutionary movement--a stage, moreover, the operations of which throw light upon the whole nature of cerebral representations. The faculty of rational Discourse, as Max Mueller pointed out, is denominated in Greek by the word +logos+, applicable at once to the mental activity and to its appropriate expression in speech. Discourse is an instrument by means of which man has been enabled to construct his whole system of representations of the world in which he lives, the system of what is commonly called his Knowledge. Human Knowledge just is the body of man's representations of his Experience in the world of which he forms a part. It is not necessary to insist here on the gradual but remarkable growth and extension which Human Knowledge has undergone during the last two thousand years. Concurrently with its extension man's ability to control the forces of Nature has been enlarged and increased. At the same time, however, that extension has rendered possible false developments and aberrations to which the more limited representations of the brute are less liable.

With the faculty of rational Discourse constantly striving to extend the bounds of Knowledge, man came in time to attempt to give an account not only of the immediate objects which surround him, but of the whole choir of Heaven and furniture of Earth. In this advance the Greeks took a leading part.

When we first make acquaintance through historical records with the intellectual activity of the Greek mind, we find it engaged in the construction of various such schemes for an explanation of the world--usually called cosmogonies.

It was at this stage of intellectual progress that what we might call an interruption occurred in the normal process of evolution. Great intellectual activity had for some time prevailed in the Greek communities; several men of conspicuous genius--notably Heracleitus and Parmenides--had carried speculation as to the origin and nature of the world to a height hitherto undreamt of. These achievements and the consciousness of continual progress had engendered in Athens particularly what might be called an epidemic of intellectual pride.

On this scene Socrates appeared, plain, blunt, critical. His teaching was in effect an appeal to men to reflect: to turn their attention away from the world which they were supposed to be explaining to the contemplation of their own Minds by which the explanation was furnished. +gnothi seauton+ was his motto. All explanations of the Universe or of Experience were, as he showed, vain unless the Cognitive Faculty by which they were constructed were operating truly. In particular, the process of Rational Discourse implied the use of concrete general terms, which were recognised to be the essential instruments of Cognition. Socrates therefore devoted his attention specially to a critical examination of these general terms and also of the abstract terms which were the familiar instruments of Discourse.

The Greeks of that day were endowed with a singular clearness of intellectual vision. They readily recognised that Knowledge was an intellectual process; they appreciated the activity of Thought or Rational Discourse as essential to its formation. They quite understood that Knowledge is not of the nature of a photograph--a resemblant pictorial reproduction of the data furnished by sensation. Only very casually and occasionally do we ever attempt to supply ourselves with a resemblant reproduction of our sensations. Obviously such a reproduction would only be of value memorially and could tell us nothing new.

These early Greeks realised this, and they appear to have realised also pretty clearly that it would be impossible by means of such pictorial impressions to establish any community of Knowledge. It is of the essence of Knowledge that it is something which can be communicated to, and which is the common possession of, several individuals. That can never be true of sensation. We can never tell whether our sensations are the same as those of other people--never at any rate by means of sensations themselves; never unless and until such sensations have been inter-related by some other instrument. A mere photographic reproduction of sensation is thus quite useless as a means of Knowledge.

In some way or other general terms supply the common bond. The recognition of this fact was one of the great results of the Socratic discussion. This explains the immense importance which Socrates naturally attached to the criticism of general and abstract terms.

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The work of Socrates in this direction was immediately taken up and carried much further by Plato. Plato maintained that these general and abstract terms were in truth the names of ideas (+eide+) with which the mind is naturally furnished, and further that these ideas corresponded to and typified the eternal forms of things--the essential constituents of the real world. Knowledge was possible because there were such eternal forms or ideal elements--the archetypes--of which the +eide+ were the counterparts and representations.

Knowledge, Plato held, was concerned solely with these eternal forms, not with sensation at all. The sensible world was in a state of constant flux and could not be the object of true science. Its apprehension was effected by a faculty or capacity (Republic, v. 478-79) midway between Knowledge and nescience to which he applied the term +doxa+, frequently translated opinion, but which in this connection would be much more accurately rendered, sensible impression, or even perception. At any rate, the term opinion is a very unhappy one, and does not convey the true meaning at all, for no voluntary intellective act on the part of the subject was implied by the term. Now intelligence in constructing a scheme of Knowledge is active. The ideas are the instruments of this activity.

Plato's doctrine of ideas was probably designed or conceived by him as affording an explanation also of the community of Knowledge. He emphasised the fluent instability of the sensible impression, and as we have already pointed out, sensation in itself labours also under this drawback that it contains and affords no common nexus whereby the conceptions or perceptions of one man can be compared or related with those of another.

Indeed, if Experience were composed solely of sensations, each individual would be an isolated solipsistic unit--incapable of rational Discourse or communication with his fellow-men. To cure this defect, Plato offered the ideas--universal forms common to the intelligence of every rational being. Not only would they render possible a common Knowledge of Reality--the existence of such ideas would necessarily also give permanence, fixity, law, and order to our intellectual activity. Our Knowledge would not be a mere random succession of impressions, but a definitely determined organic unity.

In all this argument it must be remembered Plato never said or suggested that the intellect of man--thus equipped with ideal forms--was thereby enabled to become, or did become, the creator of the world by and in which each one believes himself to be surrounded and included. He always distinguished between Idea and Reality, between Thought and Thing. The ideas were types of the forms immanent in things themselves. It has been said by some scholars that he generally distinguished between the two by the employment of distinct terms, applying +eidos+ to the mental conception and +idea+ to the substantial form. This verbal distinction was accepted by many scholars of the epoch of Liddell and Scott and Davies and Vaughan. A reference to this distinction in the present writer's essay on The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge provoked at the instance of one critic the allegation that it is not borne out by a critical study of the Platonic texts. That is a matter of little moment and one upon which the writer cannot claim to pronounce. The important point is that in one way or another Plato undoubtedly distinguished between and indeed contrasted the idea and the substantial form. No trace of the solipsism which results from their being confounded and which has ultimately brought to destruction the imposing edifice of Hegelian Thought is to be found in his writings.

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The Platonic doctrine of ideas speedily found an energetic critic in Aristotle. In Aristotle's view, it was quite unnecessary and unwarrantable to postulate the existence in the Mind of ideal forms or counterparts of the substantial forms of Reality. This, according to him, was a wholly unnecessary reduplication. He was content to believe that the mind found and recognised the essential forms of things when they were presented to it in perceptive Experience. Universalia in re were conceived by him as sufficiently explaining the genesis of cognition without the postulation of any such universalia extra rem.

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To the Platonic doctrine he offered the further objection that the eternal forms of things which that doctrine affirmed and which it declared to be represented in their ideal types were necessarily impotential. There was no generative power in the pure activity of Thought. If, therefore, the essentials of Reality were ideal, it followed that they also were impotent, and incapable of causative efficacy. The sensible world, however, was a fluent and perpetually generated stream, which required some potent cause to uphold it.

The eternal Reality which sustained the world was for him an Energy constantly generating the actual, and no conception which failed to provide for this process of causative generation of the things of Sense could in his view adequately account for the phenomena of Nature nor consequently could constitute the system of science.

In this argument Aristotle undoubtedly expressed a profound truth, but it may perhaps be admitted that he rather failed to appreciate fully the difficulty which the Platonic doctrine was designed to meet--that, namely, of providing some sort of common nexus or unifying principle by which the validity of Knowledge could be maintained. For he had no certain means of showing that the potent energy of Nature was unitary and homogeneous.

He is frequently described as a sensationalist, but such a view is certainly incorrect. This, however, may be admitted--that he sought the essentials of Reality not in the Mind but in the Object. It may be fairly claimed that to this extent he occupied common ground with the sensationalists, in that he was an adherent of the tabula rasa view of the Mind, expressed in the maxim:--

Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit in sensu.

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Plato and Aristotle may be taken as typical of the two principal intellectual tendencies which have characterised all subsequent speculation--the Platonist, he who finds in the constitution of the Mind the eternal principles or at least the types of the eternal principles of Reality; the Aristotelian, he for whom these seem to reside in the object and, in the act of Cognition, are merely impressed upon, transferred to, presented to, or otherwise introduced into or apprehended by the Mind.