Part 8

Some years ago, in an essay on Schopenhauer, the author, Mr. Saunders, remarked, "How the matter of which my arm is composed and that state of consciousness which I call my Will [imagine anyone calling Will a state of consciousness!] are conjoined is a mystery beyond the reach of Science, and the man who can solve it is the man for whom the world is waiting."

Well, if that be so, then the world need not wait any longer. The required explanation is offered to metaphysics by the scientific work of the physicians who built up and consolidated the modern doctrine of Energy. It is true that most of them have continued to postulate the reality of material bodies. For their purpose there was no real difficulty in doing so. What they required was a datum of configuration, a phenomenal basis upon which their calculations could proceed and in terms of which, as a point of origin, their statement of transmutations was made. The persistence of material bodies is a condition precedent to the phenomenal manifestations in which our Experience arises. Organic existence in every form and the world in which it arises presuppose the actuality of these. But dynamically they are merely the phenomenal result of certain permanent forces constantly in operation. To beings, if there be such, inhabiting the Ether there is little doubt but that a gravitation system like that of the sun and its planets must present a corporate rigidity and identity somewhat similar to that which cohering masses present to our intelligence. But, in terms of reality, Energy, potential and kinetic, containing within itself the potency which generates the actual and sustains the constant transmutation in which phenomena arise is the sole and only postulate.

The rise of meta-geometrical methods and other branches of scientific speculation have led in recent years to a considerable amount of very interesting inquiry into the nature of our fundamental geometrical conceptions. Strange to say, a large body of respectable mathematicians have been found to favour the extraordinary view that our mathematical conceptions are derived from Sensation. We do not propose here to discuss at length this idea. It is merely another form of the old sensationalist view of Knowledge, but we suggest that the conditions of the problem will readily appear in their true light and real nature whenever such inquirers realise the fact that our exertional activity is the source of our cognitions of the external, and that therefore our pure exertional activity is the source of the basal concepts of geometry.

Here lies the root of the distinction between pure and empirical science. The propositions of geometry, being derived from our own pure activity, are of the former class; the inductive conclusions of physical experimental science, being gathered by observation and measurement from sensible data, are empirical and approximate. A geometrical proposition--such, for example, as the assertion that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles--is not merely approximate. It has no dependence on measurement. It is absolutely true. It is ascertained deductively, and therefore measurement is not involved, and is never employed. Its truth is not ascertained by measurement. It is not verified by measurement. It in no degree depends upon the sensible figure. It is equally true for every human being whatever be the degree of accuracy of the figure by the aid of which he studies it, or indeed whether he studies it by figure or otherwise, as must necessarily be the case with the born blind.

There may be many different forms of energetic transmutation which may determine many other forms of space besides that form of tridimensional space in which our Activity is involved. For such, a different geometry may and will be applicable; but for the tridimensional conditions of our activity the proposition is necessary and absolute. No measurement of any stellar parallax, however minute and whatever the result might be, could have any bearing on its truth. Geometry is the science of the pure forms of our motor activity amidst corporeal bodies.

A useful illustration of our argument is to be drawn from a consideration of the question of phonetic spelling. Occasionally we find persons urging that all spelling should be an exact reproduction of sound. Indeed, an improved alphabet has been designed to enable the idea to be carried out with greater accuracy.

Now it is quite true that it is by their sound that we recognise or denote our words. Hence our alphabet was originally phonetic in principle, and indeed still is so, although the correspondence is imperfect. As the use of visible signs develops spelling seems to fall into certain fixed frames and to deviate more and more from pure phonetic simplicity. But why is this so? It is because the sounds are merely the symbols or indicators of the different forms of vocal articulation (vocal acts), and it is really as the symbols and indicators of these actions that they possess any meaning and acquire such permanence and identity as they have. The phonetic system, therefore, becomes in use subordinated to the expression of the acts by which are produced these radical vocables which constitute the essentials of rational Discourse.

In all this the process of the expression of words in spelling is a microcosmic counterpart of the process of cognition as we have tried to explain it.

It is noteworthy that the same thing necessarily happens in the case of any new system of spelling.

The most prominent advocates of phonetic spelling have been also the authors of a system of phonetic shorthand.

Like the written and printed alphabet of Europe, the alphabet of Phonography was made phonetic. Indeed it started off as a more nearly perfect phonetic system than the ordinary European alphabet. But as its use advances its employment undergoes the same change. The phonetic symbols are abbreviated by grammalogues and contractions, and this proceeds in accordance with a principle unconsciously recognised but which really depends on the same inherent necessity to preserve in a consistent form the expression of the radical vocables of Speech. Finally, in the hands of the expert stenographer the system of phonetic shorthand (though he still uses the sound as the guide and indicator of his actions) is as far removed from a pure phonetic representation as the ordinary method of spelling. Indeed, unless some such suprasensible and unifying principle were available, phonetic spelling would speedily perish in an infinity of degenerate variations.

We adduce this illustration as one which very well confirms our main argument. We have no desire to discuss on its merits the general question of Spelling Reform, which of course is quite apart from the attempt to establish a scheme of spelling on a purely phonetic basis. A more rational system of spelling is nevertheless an object worthy of all consideration.

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Intellectualism and sensationalism have both broken down. The world of speculation is anxiously looking for a new clue. Witness the pathetic eagerness with which it clutches at every floating straw. The innumerable "isms" by which it seeks ever and anon to keep itself afloat are most of them but the sometimes unrecognisable wreckage of the old systems drifting about under very inappropriate names. Such terms as Realism and Idealism are freely used (generally prefixing the adjective "new") by writers in philosophic periodicals in a sense which might make Plato, Aquinas, or Kant turn in their graves.

We see their votaries encumbered with the trappings of a futile erudition of the insignificant or clinging pathetically to the insecure relics of teleological doctrine, or, still less virile, seeking support in a return to the unscientific tales of supernatural spiritualism. Such efforts are vain.

Only by facing the facts with all their consequences, whatever these may be and whatever they may involve for the proudest aspirations of mankind--only thus can truth be attained. And lest any should say that we preach an unrelieved pessimism, let us remind such that Knowledge is not after all the source of Life, that another category and a different principle--that, namely, which we indicate under the term Love-divine--must have generated the potent current of Life, and that no one should close the door against the hopes of the human Intelligence until he has discovered what are the limits imposed upon what Perfect Love can do.

The question still remains whether mankind will be equal to the effort required to assimilate the essential truth. They very nearly failed to assimilate the Copernican cosmogony. For sixteen hundred years after it was first offered to mankind the race preferred to grope in the darkness and confinement of a false conception.

If they succeed in accomplishing the reception of the new truth, unheard-of progress may be looked for. If they fail, civilisation must disappear and humanity decline. There is no middle course. As Bacon remarked, in this theatre of man's life it is reserved only to God and angels to be lookers-on.

We know how stubbornly the Ptolemaic cosmogony still clings to our conceptions, how largely it still dominates--or till recently did dominate--the religious cosmography of the most civilised peoples.

In Philosophy our leading teachers seem as yet to have a very feeble appreciation of the new conditions. They turn greedily to the eloquent pages of L'Evolution creatrice, but however earnestly they search they cannot find there any definite solution of the difficulties of the age-old problem. They wander wearily through the mazes of psychological detail or wage almost childish logomachies over the interpretation of each other's essays. Philosophical magazines are filled with articles which reflect this state of the philosophic mind. Philosophical congresses meet and argue and go home; Gifford lecturers prelect; yet so far as can be seen there is little sign that the key has been grasped. The great fact remains obscured amidst a mass of words.

The elucidation of the problem of Knowledge demands certain improvements in our philosophic terminology. Language as a rule is a very unerring philosopher, and words shaped and polished by long usage generally express, more truly than those who use them realise, the essential reality of things. Yet these long-enduring errors of the ages which we have been discussing here have left their impress too on the terminology of Metaphysics.

Thought and Action are in common speech contrasted, and the distinction expresses an essential truth. But when we seek to say further that both of these are Activities, we are stating another truth in terms which are hardly consistent with the previously contrasted distinction. It might be better if Action and Active could be applied generally to both and if the term exertion could be substituted for Action in describing the forms of activity which we denominate motor. To that suggestion, however, there are also serious objections. The words derived from ago have historically a special application to the exertional and dynamic. We leave the question to our readers as one of which it is of considerable importance to find a satisfactory solution.

In the foregoing pages our object has been to illustrate the erroneous conceptions by which the theory of human cognition has been obscured and to explain briefly what we conceive to be the true solution. The argument in support of the doctrine here explained has been more fully presented by the present writer in an essay entitled The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge, to which the reader who desires to study the question further must now be referred.

FOOTNOTES:

THE DOCTRINE OF ENERGY[81:1]

The problem of Metaphysics--the nature of Reality--still presses for a solution. Agnosticism is but a cautious idealism--a timid phenomenalism. That philosophy, however named, which proclaims that the experience of life is nothing more than a vain show, a pantomime of sensations distinguished only from ideas by their greater intensity and distinctness, is not only a confession of failure. It is a denial of fact.

To know the nature of the Absolute as such, to present the Absolute to finite minds as it must be presented, if that be possible, to the Absolute itself, must ever remain impossible to man. But it is equally true that to attempt such a task has never been the urgent mission of Philosophy. The distinction between the Ideal and the Real, between the conceptual and the perceptual, is quite certainly and incessantly recognised. Agnosticism can neither deny the fact successfully, nor solve the speculative difficulties which its recognition raises up. The Real and the Ideal, essentially distinct yet mockingly similar, for ever blend and intermingle in the composite experience of life. Truly to discriminate and unravel these,--validly to separate the Ideal element which impregnates that Reality which we are for ever compelled to postulate and recognise, still remains the great problem of Philosophy--humbler perhaps and more practical, but not less profound than any vain attempt to discover to finite conception the Absolute as it is in itself. Therefore it is that the efforts of negative and agnostic criticism to dispense with the recognition of Reality as a necessary postulate of our activity are foredoomed to failure. They leave us not a solitude which we might pretend to be peace, but a seething sea of troubles urgently demanding a new attempt to reveal the unity which must underlie the infinite diversity of experience.

Such, indeed, seems to us the present position of Metaphysics; and, what is more important, it appears to react with increasing force upon the theories and investigations of Science.