Part 7

Ité ité la réa Ité ité la réalité La réa la réa Té té La réa Li Té La réalité Il y avait une fois LA RÉALITÉ.

Such is the manifesto of Super-realism, “the Freudian period,” as the addicts of the stream of consciousness call it, “to the realistic misconception.” Their title, I have said, is a pretty mistake for sub-realism; but they are not mistaken in their claim to have reached a kind of absolute. At least I cannot imagine what lower level of imbecility may still be honoured with the name of art.

(If any votary of “pure art” chances to read this essay, he will say: So Keats and Milton were treated by critics of their age.)

One of the hardest things for a student to learn, which yet, if he could but know it at the beginning, would save him from endless perplexities and perhaps from final despair, is just the simple fact that brain-power is no guarantee for rightness of thinking, that on the contrary a restlessly outreaching mind, unchecked by the humility of common sense, is more than likely to lead its owner into bogs of duplicity if not into the bottomless pit of fatuity, that, to repeat the phrase of Bacon, himself a shining example, the intellectus sibi permissus is the easiest of all dupes for the Demon of the Absolute. There has been no more powerful intellect for the past hundred years than Kant’s; I doubt if any writer ever filled the world with more confusion of thought or clouded the truth with a thicker dust of obscurity. And it is in this spirit of distrust, not incompatible with a kind of admiration, that I criticise the works of one who to-day has reached the pinnacle of fame as a thinker.

Professor Whitehead’s philosophy spans the double field of religion and science; and in each of these, I presume to say, he has come by the circuitous ways of abstract reasoning to conclusions that in a lesser man would be regarded as preposterous. If such a statement shocks you or sounds disrespectful, take yourself the argument of his Religion in the Making and strip it to the bones. You will find that it proceeds from the definition of religion as “the longing for justification,” and is directed by the fact that “to-day there is but one religious dogma in debate: What do you mean by ‘God’?” Upon this basis, then, Mr. Whitehead undertakes to find such a meaning for the word “God” as will satisfy man’s “longing for justification.” Such a simplification of the religious problem will strike some inquirers as high-handed, but I let that pass; it has at least whatever merits appertain to simplicity. And I admit ungrudgingly that in the course of his lectures Mr. Whitehead makes many shrewd observations on the deeper mysteries of human life. Memorable passages might be quoted, for instance such sentences as these, that touch the Crocean metaphysic on the quick: “To be an actual thing is to be limited,” “Thus rightness of limitation is essential for growth of reality,” “Unlimited possibility and abstract creativity can procure nothing.”

But in the end how does Mr. Whitehead reply to his own question: “What do you mean by ‘God’?” For convenience’ sake I quote this summary of his answer from a eulogistic article in the Hibbert Journal for July 1927:

All being does this [i.e., “comes to a focus in each thing”] because it is its nature so to do. This inherent nature of all being is God. All being does this because it is organised according to the principle of concretion. All being does this because of a certain order or character which pervades it. That order pervading the universe that makes it concrete is God. God is not himself concrete, says Whitehead, but he is the principle which constitutes the concreteness of things.

That is to say, in still simpler language: An individual object is not cut off from the universe, but stands in some relation to all other objects and owes its character to this relationship; this is so because it is the nature of things to be so; such is the law of “concretion,” and the “principle of concretion” is God.

Now, apart from the final clause, a plain man might suggest that the argument, so relieved of the obscurantism of metaphysical jargon, is more true than original--true to the point of insipidity. As for the conclusion, no doubt, so left in its native jargon, it comes with the shock of originality; but has it sense? Will any man admit that the God whom he worships and to whom he prays--and without worship and prayer the use of the word “God” is a pure solecism--is no more than the “principle of concretion” in the universe? Has such a definition any bearing on religion as the “longing for justification”? Is it anything more than a phantom of abstract science surreptitiously substituted for the object of faith? The fact is that between the last clause of the argument and what precedes there is a sheer hiatus. It is the age-old fallacy of metaphysics: you take a word used in ordinary speech (“God”) with a perfectly clear connotation; you define the word in a manner to suit your convenience (“the principle of concretion”); you prove that there is something in the nature of things corresponding to your definition, and then casually assume that your proof holds good of the word in its popular sense. It is the oft-repeated adventure of the Absolute: you wrap a common-place up in abstract terminology, and then in that fog of language you find yourself precipitated into an abyss of nonsense (that the “longing for justification” is satisfied by belief in “the inherent nature of all being”).

But this is by the way. Our present topic is rather Mr. Whitehead’s philosophy of science, which is his real concern, and in which the terms “God” and “religion” are manifestly unwarranted intrusions. Here, again, to the student of contemporary thought Mr. Whitehead’s Science and the Modern World must be in many ways a welcome book. His comments on the connexion between the poets and the physical theories of their day are illuminating and bring to the subject a knowledge not often found in the literary critic. And I for one am much beholden to him for his treatment of the ghastly relic of materialism bequeathed to us by our fathers--I would almost say his indecent burial of it, were the epithet indecent applicable to the disposal of a corpse which has remained too long above ground. And very cleverly he directs his attack to the two points where the mechanistic philosophy is most vulnerable--its apparent simplicity and its presumptive regard of facts.

There was indeed at first sight a seductive simplicity about the theories of Huxley and his militant brothers. It is so easy to say that the world is nothing but a machine nicely constructed of atoms, running smoothly and undeviatingly under the mechanical laws of motion; to deny that anything new or incalculable ever breaks in to disarrange the regularity demanded by science; to dispose of the passions and appetites and the very consciousness of man as mere products of atomical reaction. It was the kind of simplification that promised to solve for us all the annoying problems of life, exactly the kind of bait that the Demon of the Absolute loves to dangle before a mind unprotected by the humility of common sense. Certainly if ever any group of men had a cosmic footrule in their pockets, it was this particular group of mid-Victorians who married the atheistical philosophy of the eighteenth century to the physical discoveries of the nineteenth. Unfortunately, what seemed a process of simplification has led step by step to such a complexity of adjustments to keep the machine going that long ago the plain man, if he dared, would have scouted the whole conception as a fantastic dream. And here Mr. Whitehead, by virtue of his standing as a mathematician, speaks with an authority for which the plain man must be very grateful. “The physical doctrine of the atom,” he says, “has got into a state which is strongly suggestive of the epicycles of astronomy before Copernicus.” In all conscience, is it not true that to accept the more recent developments of scientific mechanism requires about the same sort of credulity as was demanded of the theologian in the Middle Ages when asked to debate the number of angels who could stand together on the point of a needle?

And as the mechanistic theory, when used to explain the inner workings of matter, instead of simplifying science, breaks down under a weight of infinite complications, so, when applied to the nature of man, it shatters itself on what Mr. Whitehead rightly calls certain “stubborn and irreducible facts”--the most stubborn and irreducible of these facts being, as every unperverted mind knows, that we are not pure machines, and that any argument which would subject the human will and consciousness to the mechanical laws of motion is void because based on false premises. Against the high-handed assumptions of Darwinian materialism and the fanatical dogmatism of its votaries (relics of which still circulate in the backwaters of the biological laboratory), as against all forms of complacent obscurantism, whether theological or scientific, “Oliver Cromwell’s cry echoes down the ages: ‘My brethren, by the bowels of Christ I beseech you, bethink you that you may be mistaken.’”

It is the bare truth that one must rake the records of history to discover a more complete and abject subservience to the Demon of the Absolute than that of the philosophy, falsely called science, of the period now closing. And, as I say, any one who clings to common sense must be thankful to Mr. Whitehead for lending his authority as a scientist to the unlocking of these shackles. But then, why should so masterly an intellect, again like Luther’s drunken man, topple over on the other side into a contrary but equally impossible absolutism? Why? “The only way of mitigating mechanism,” he says, “is by the discovery that it is not mechanism.” And so, instead of admitting humbly that mechanism is mechanism while beside it there exists something of a totally different nature, and that the ultimate nexus between these two fields of experience surpasses our comprehension, he must demonstrate mechanism out of the world altogether. In his philosophy there will be no more solid obstinate material things such as go to the making of machines, but only “events.” Time and space, which used to be regarded as modes of perception, become internal components of things; value, which used to be a name for our conscious estimation of what we could do with things or for their effect on our spiritual life, now proves to be “the intrinsic reality of an event.” There is, you see, an entire reversal of the mechanistic hypothesis. Formerly it was held that the human soul obeys the same laws as a stone; now we are to believe that a stone is of the same nature as the soul. In either case we avoid the discomfort of a paradoxical dualism and reduce the world to a monism which may plausibly call itself science, though as a matter of fact Mr. Whitehead’s theory, if carried out, would simply abolish science.

And it is clear enough that the new monism is open to precisely the same criticism as was that of the mechanists which it looks to supplant. Aiming ostensibly to simplify, it really renders the nature of things incomprehensibly complex. Promising to release us from the known paradox of a world composed of two irreconcilable classes of things, it ends by forcing a perfectly arbitrary paradox upon us in its definition of inanimate objects. To define a stone as an event consisting of a bundle of time, space, value, and relationships, does not seem to me to be moving in the direction of lucid simplicity. “What is the sense,” Mr. Whitehead asks, “of talking about a mechanical explanation when you do not know what you mean by mechanics?” And the question is entirely pertinent, if by the word “mechanics” we mean slyly to imply something more than the observed actions and reactions of material bodies in motion. Mr. Whitehead therefore discards the “traditional scientific materialism” for an “alternative doctrine of organism,” that is, for a “theory of organic mechanism.” Well and good. But is it unkind to ask the use of talking about an organical explanation when you do not know what you mean by “organism,” or to hint that no very clear idea will be evoked by joining together two unknown quantities, “organism” and “mechanism,” and calling the world an “organic mechanism”?

And again, what of the “stubborn and irreducible facts,” in whose name Mr. Whitehead attacks the rationalism of the Huxleyites and their predecessors of the eighteenth century? If we are to cast away their imposing structure of logic as unreasonable for the simple reason that, after all is said, we still know that the human mind (or soul, if you please) is something other than a stone, shall we swallow the contrary theory, which has not even the virtue of logic, and which transfers human qualities to a stone? Aristotle made the proper and sufficient distinction long ago, when he said that a stone obeys laws and a man forms habits: you may throw a stone into the air a thousand times and it will continue to do the same thing, whereas a man learns by experience. But alas for those “stubborn and irreducible facts”! How bravely we all summon them to our aid! How desperately we run from them when they appear!

But if this merging together of the animate and the inanimate in a new naturalism makes a travesty of the inorganic world, its real menace is that, equally with the older naturalism, it reacts to deprive humanity of what is distinctly human. The solid objects of “our naïve experience” have been made organic by a kind of relaxation into fluid composites of time and space and value and relationships; they have evaporated into a semblance of psychical events (the very term “events” indeed is little more than an awkward translation of Berkeley’s “ideas in the mind”), and the peculiar note of an event is its transitoriness: “one all-pervasive fact, inherent in the character of what is real, is the transition of things, the passage one to another.” Thus it happens that the organic and the inorganic worlds flow together in an indistinguishable flux, wherein the soul also, dissolved by association into a complex of relationships, loses that central permanence of entity which used to be held to mark the dignity of man. Nor, if we look beyond, is there anywhere “an ultimate reality” to which we can appeal “for the removal of perplexity,” but only an endless concurrence of events. “In the place of Aristotle’s God as Prime Mover [itself a conception, one might suppose, far enough removed from ‘our naïve experience’ into the abyss of abstraction], we require God as the Principle of Concretion”--not a person, not an entity of any sort, nor even a law apparently, but a mere name for the fact that concrete groups of qualities are everlastingly forming and reforming in the infinite vortex of existence. A cynic might distinguish between the old naturalism and the naturalism now proposed to take its place by saying that under the régime of the former true science might flourish but no humanism or religion, whereas the metaphysical naturalism of Mr. Whitehead would leave us neither true science nor humanism and religion, but only mathematics. The Demon of the Absolute, whether he appears as the advocate of a mechanical fatalism or of the universal flux of relativity, is brother germane to Apollyon, the Destroyer.

The curious thing in all this farrago of insight and error is the superstitious hold of the word science on a mind otherwise so awakened. Mr. Whitehead perceives that one scientific hypothesis swallows up another--as indeed he could not fail to see that his own hypothesis turns its predecessor upside down; he admits with engaging candour that one and all they rest on a “naïve faith” which cannot be verified and is “indifferent to refutation”; yet he clings fanatically to the scientific attitude as possessing a monopoly of truth and honesty. “When,” he says, “Darwin or Einstein proclaim theories which modify our ideas, it is a triumph for science. We do not go about saying that there is another defeat for science, because its old ideas have been abandoned. We know that another step of scientific insight has been gained.”

I suspect that an utter confusion of thought has arisen here from the ambiguity of a word--as has happened immemorially with metaphysicians better and worse than Mr. Whitehead. Science as an accumulation and classification and utilisation of observed facts may go on from victory to victory; but science as a name for such hypothetical theories of time and space, matter and motion and life, as those broached by the Darwinians of the nineteenth century, or the Einsteinian relativists of the twentieth, is not a progress in insight but a lapse from one naïve assumption to another in a vicious circle of self-contradicting monisms. It really is not easy to understand the state of mind of one, cognisant of the history of thought, who urges us to seek relief from the present débâcle--Mr. Whitehead himself places our intellectual and spiritual level lower than it has ever been since the Dark Ages--by introducing the hypothetical method of science into religion. This is his analysis of the present condition of the popular mind: “A scientific realism, based on mechanism, is conjoined with an unwavering belief in the world of men and of the higher animals as being composed of self-determining organisms. This radical inconsistency at the basis of modern thought accounts for much that is half-hearted and wavering in our civilisation.” My reading of history is different. I should assert that our vacillating half-heartedness is the inevitable outcome of the endeavour, persistent since the naturalistic invasion of the Renaissance, to flee from the paradox of life to some philosophy which will merge, no matter how, the mechanical and the human together. I should assert that the only escape from our muddle is to overthrow this idol of Unity, this Demon of the Absolute, this abortion sprung from the union of science and metaphysics, and to submit ourselves humbly to the stubborn and irreducible fact that a stone and the human soul cannot be brought under the same definition.

There are two laws discrete Not reconciled,-- Law for man, and law for thing; The last builds town and fleet, But it runs wild, And doth the man unking.

For legitimate science one may have the deepest respect. But to scientific absolutism masquerading as religion, one may say justly and truly what was said so unjustly and cruelly to Keats: Back to your gallipots!

FOOTNOTES

Sections IV and V of the title essay in The Demon of the Absolute (New Shelburne Essays, Vol. I), 1928; reprinted with the kind permission of the author and of the Princeton University Press. Section IV (I, as here reprinted) concerns “The Fetish of Pure Art” and section V (II) “The Fetish of Pure Science.”

Nuovi Saggi di Estetica, 1920.

La Deshumanización del Arte, Madrid, 1925.

Alegrarse o sufrir con los destinos humanos que, tal vez, la obra de arte nos refiere o presenta, es cosa muy diferente del verdadero goce artistico. Más aún: esa ocupación con lo humano de la obra es, en principio, incompatible con la estricta fruición estética.

Masterpieces of Chikamatsu, the Japanese Shakespeare, translated by Asataro Miyamori, p. 48.

Modern Painting, by Frank Jewett Mather, Jr., p. 375.

There are passages in Mr. Whitehead’s books in which the word “God” is used properly, even nobly, with its religious connotation; and indeed, as Professor A. E. Taylor has shown in the Dublin Review for July 1927, part of the difficulty in grasping his argument is owing to this intellectual double-dealing. But in the end the conception of God as a physical law, or impersonal principle, quite wins out.