Part 6

From the first it was foredoomed to failure, and had no prospect of succeeding where Plato--equipped with armour from the same forge--had already failed.

* * * * *

Kantianism like Platonism failed because it still left the sensible unaccounted for. Not only did it fail to tell us whence came these sensations which, however transitory and unreal, constantly saluted our consciousness and largely constituted our Experience; it failed also to show us how they could be brought into relation with the faculty of Knowledge.

Finding its elemental forms in the structure of the organ of Knowledge, it failed to tell us how we ever managed by means of these to get beyond our own subjective states, or how we ever came to think that there was a World outside of the individual consciousness, by the categories of which, according to them, our cognitions of such a World were called into being. For if Reality were unknowable except by and through the categories, then our Knowledge of Reality was the creature of our own mental activity, and we must still remain unable to understand why we should suppose that we had got beyond ourselves.

These defects of Kantianism were early recognised by Schopenhauer, who also appears to have realised that what was wanted was another and a new key to unlock the gateway of Knowledge.

Knowledge was in essence an affirmation or series of affirmations about a real World distinct from the Knower. It was surely now obvious that the warrant for such affirmations and the source of their validity must come from somewhere beyond the cognitive faculty itself. The source upon which men again and again have seemed to fall back is Sensation; but Sensation being transitory and dependent for its existence upon its being felt can really give us no help. Some other, some self-existent thing is wanted, and with considerable insight Schopenhauer suggested that the key was to be found in the Will.

But this theory, though it has lately attracted considerable attention, can hardly be claimed as offering any definite prospect of a solution. Its cardinal defect is that it still fails to show how the sensible arises. It is supposed to be generated out of pure Volition, but no causal nexus, no direct connection of any kind is immediately apparent between the two, and Schopenhauer in developing his theory did nothing to supply the want. The doctrine cannot therefore be regarded as more than a helpful stepping-stone to the true answer.

* * * * *

In recent years various forms of opportunist philosophies under the names of Pragmatism, Pluralism, etc., have endeavoured to elude the pressure of the dilemma and to solace mankind for the failure of Kantianism by advising them to accept Experience as it is. But though such a counsel of resignation may in a popular sense of the term be regarded as philosophical it can hardly be accepted as a solution.

* * * * *

We find, then, that since man first began to inquire reflectively upon the nature of his cognitive faculty his speculation has followed one or other of two great lines or divisions of theory, neither of which has been found to afford intellectual satisfaction.

We have (1) the theory that seeks in some way or other to derive the real constituents of Science from the constitution of the cognitive faculty itself. To this theory, which has inspired one whole stream of speculation from Plato to Hegel, there are at least two absolutely fatal objections.

(a) It fails altogether to account for the sensible presentation which however fluent and unstable appears to stand in a direct and even unique relation to the real. It fails to let us understand how that relation arises, how the sensible is generated, or how it enters into our consciousness.

(b) We are unable under this theory to discover how we ever reach a Knowledge of the real World, how we can get beyond ourselves, how if the Mind in its search for truth is perpetually intercepted by its own forms it can ever furnish us with any genuine cognitions of the external.

(2) We have the theory that the essential forms of Reality are to be found in the Object and are thence supplied to the Understanding, which plays the part merely of a receptive surface or tabula rasa.

In the hands of Aristotle this doctrine took the form of an affirmation that Nature must be regarded as an energetic process containing within itself the potency by which it perpetually generated the actual.

Promising as it was in Aristotle's hands, this speculation was not carried forward or assimilated by his immediate successors. Indeed, it was practically forgotten until the intellectual revival of the sixteenth century, which inaugurated the foundations of modern Science. However little the fact may have been consciously recognised even by the leaders of scientific discovery, this was the conception of Nature which inspired and sustained the scientific advance. In the department of philosophic speculation, however, it appeared only under the debased and misleading form of a belief that the sensible presentation was the true source of the contents of Cognition, that it was from Sensation that the Mind of Man derived the whole fabric of Science. "Penser c'est sentir" was the form in which it was expressed by Condillac, but was equally the view which commended itself to Berkeley, at least in his early writings, to Hume, and to a whole army of successors down to J. S. Mill.

We hope we have already sufficiently emphasised the falsity of such a view. Obviously, if the Mind were merely the passive recipient of a stream of impressions, no sort of rational Discourse, no scientific or cognitive effort could ever have been stimulated into activity, and the very ideas of causality and relation, indeed all that we associate with the exercise of the understanding, could never have been called into being.

Upon neither of these views of the nature of Knowledge can we arrive at any consistent or intelligible conception of its genesis, nature, or method of operation.

What, then, must we do? It is hardly doubtful that if we are to make any progress we must find another and a new key whereby to unlock the double door that bars the entrance to the inner shrine of truth.

Now the fundamental, or at least a fundamental error characteristic of all these various efforts after a solution is to be found in the fact that they view the World as a static thing rather than as a kinetic process.

The World to vision seems a great still thing in or on which no doubt innumerable bodies are moving to and fro, but which itself--the fundamental thing--is solid and unchanging. But this is an illusion. The seemingly unchanging features are changeless only in the monotony of their constant mutation.

Cohering masses are rigid in respect only of the constancy of the dynamic process of transmutation in which cohesion consists. The sun shines eternally steady only in consequence of the ceaseless kinetic energies which give it being.

What we are ever doing in rational Discourse, what Knowledge constantly accomplishes, is to furnish an account, a reproduction of a series of operations. The World is a process--an activity. That was recognised as long ago as the days of Heracleitus, but his disciples did not--although we think there is good ground for believing that he did[60:1]--his disciples did not realise that a process, whilst it implies constant flux and change, implies also something permanent even in its mutations, something which undergoes the change and sustains the flow.

To understand a thing is to discover how it operates. The eternal forms of things are laws of natural action. Such are the law of gravitation, the laws of optics or of chemical combination. A static picture unless so interpreted must be at once valueless and meaningless.

It follows that Thought and Discourse, in furnishing us with Knowledge, must themselves be active, and must in some way or other reproduce the activity of Nature. Thought, in short, is an Activity which reproduces the activity of things, the activity in which the phenomena of Nature arise.

But how do we arrive at any apprehension of Natural Action? What informs us that Nature is a potency ever operative? What suggests to us the conception of potency at all? We reply that we arrive at the idea of potent action because we are ourselves active beings. Our organism maintains itself by constant physiological activities. These are the permanent constancies of transmutation which constitute the organism.

But superimposed upon these there are our voluntary exertional activities. By these latter we necessarily mingle with and indeed participate in the action of the natural forces which (as we usually say) surround us, but which in point of fact do more than surround us. The disparate grouping of natural bodies in vision blinds us to the fact that we are really not merely surrounded by but are mingled with and participate in the dynamic system.[61:1] We are continually pressing with our weight upon the bodies on which we rest, we are continually exerting or resisting the pressure of so-called adhering masses--resistance-points in one dynamic system of which we are ourselves a part. Thus it is that in our exertional action we reveal to our consciousness not only the forms of our own activity but the forms of the dynamic system which contains and yet transcends the Sensible and the Ideal.