The Problem of Truth
BY H. WILDON CARR
HONORARY D.LITT., DURHAM
PREFACE
A problem of philosophy is completely different from a problem of
science. In science we accept our subject-matter as it is presented in
unanalysed experience; in philosophy we examine the first principles
and ultimate questions that concern conscious experience itself. The
problem of truth is a problem of philosophy. It is not a problem of
merely historical interest, but a present problem--a living
controversy, the issue of which is undecided. Its present interest may
be said to centre round the doctrine of pragmatism, which some fifteen
years ago began to challenge the generally accepted principles of
philosophy. In expounding this problem of truth, my main purpose has
been to make clear to the reader the nature of a problem of philosophy
and to disclose the secret of its interest. My book presumes no
previous study of philosophy nor special knowledge of its problems.
The theories that I have shown in conflict on this question are, each
of them, held by some of the leaders of philosophy. In presenting
them, therefore, I have tried to let the full dialectical force of the
argument appear. I have indicated my own view, that the direction in
which the solution lies is in the new conception of life and the theory
of knowledge given to us in the philosophy of Bergson. If I am right,
the solution is not, like pragmatism, a doctrine of the nature of
truth, but a theory of knowledge in which {vi} the dilemma in regard to
truth does not arise. But, as always in philosophy, the solution of
one problem is the emergence of another. There is no finality.
My grateful acknowledgment is due to my friend Professor S. Alexander,
who kindly read my manuscript and assisted me with most valuable
suggestions, and also to my friend Dr. T. Percy Nunn for a similar
service.
H. WILDON CARR.
{vii}
CONTENTS
CHAP.
I. PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
II. APPEARANCE AND REALITY
III. THE LOGICAL THEORIES
IV. THE ABSOLUTE
V. PRAGMATISM
VI. UTILITY
VII. ILLUSION
VIII. THE PROBLEM OF ERROR
IX. CONCLUSION
BIBLIOGRAPHY
INDEX
{9}
THE PROBLEM OF TRUTH
CHAPTER I
PHYSICS AND METAPHYSICS
The progress of physical science leads to the continual discovery of
complexity in what is first apprehended as simple. The atom of
hydrogen, so long accepted as the ideal limit of simplicity, is now
suspected to be not the lowest unit in the scale of elements, and it is
no longer conceived, as it used to be, as structureless, but as an
individual system, comparable to a solar system, of electrical
components preserving an equilibrium probably only temporary. The same
tendency to discover complexity in what is first apprehended as simple
is evident in the study of philosophy. The more our simple and
ordinary notions are submitted to analysis, the more are profound
problems brought to consciousness. It is impossible to think that we
do not know what such an ordinary, simple notion as that of truth is;
yet the attempt to give a definition of its meaning brings quite
unexpected difficulties to light, and the widest divergence at the
present time between rival principles of philosophical interpretation
is in regard to a theory of the nature of truth. It is not a problem
that is pressed on us by any felt need, nor is anyone who does not feel
its interest called upon to occupy himself with it. We speak our
language before we know its {10} grammar, and we reason just as well
whether we have learnt the science of logic or not.
This science of Logic, or, as it is sometimes called, of Formal Logic,
was, until modern times, regarded as a quite simple account of the
principles that govern the exercise of our reasoning faculty, and of
the rules founded on those principles by following which truth was
attained and false opinion or error avoided. It was called formal
because it was supposed to have no relation to the matter of the
subject reasoned about, but only to the form which the reasoning must
take. A complete account of this formal science, as it was recognised
and accepted for many ages, might easily have been set forth within the
limits of a small volume such as this. But the development of modern
philosophy has wrought an extraordinary change. Anyone now who will
set himself the task of mastering all the problems that have been
raised round the question of the nature of logical process, will find
himself confronted with a vast library of special treatises, and
involved in discussions that embrace the whole of philosophy. The
special problem of truth that it is the object of this little volume to
explain is a quite modern question. It has been raised within the
present generation of philosophical writers, and is to-day, perhaps,
the chief controversy in which philosophers are engaged. But although
it is only in the last few years that controversy has been aroused on
this question, the problem is not new--it is indeed as old as
philosophy itself. In the fifth century before Christ, and in the
generation that immediately preceded Socrates, a famous philosopher,
Protagoras (481-411 B.C.) published a book with the title _The Truth_.
He had the misfortune, common at that time, to offend the religious
Athenians, {11} for he spoke slightingly of the gods, proposing to
"banish their existence or non-existence from writing and speech." He
was convicted of atheism, and his books were publicly burnt, and he
himself, then seventy years of age, was either banished or at least was
obliged to flee from Athens, and on his way to Sicily he lost his life
in a shipwreck. Our knowledge of this book of Protagoras is due to the
preservation of its argument by Plato in the dialogue "Theætetus."
Protagoras, we are there told, taught that "man is the measure of all
things--of the existence of things that are, and of the non-existence
of things that are not." "You have read him?" asks Socrates,
addressing Theætetus. "Oh yes, again and again," is Theætetus' reply.
Plato was entirely opposed to the doctrine that Protagoras taught. It
seemed to him to bring gods and men and tadpoles to one level as far as
truth was concerned; for he drew the deduction that if man is the
measure of all things, then to each man his own opinion is right.
Plato opposed to it the theory that truth is the vision of a pure
objective reality.
This same problem that exercised the ancient world is now again a chief
centre of philosophical interest, and the aim of this little book is
not to decide that question, but to serve as a guide and introduction
to those who desire to know what the question is that divides
philosophers to-day into the hostile camps of pragmatism and
intellectualism.
The subject is not likely to interest anyone who does not care for the
study of the exact definitions and abstract principles that lie at the
basis of science and philosophy. There are many who are engaged in the
study of the physical and natural sciences, and also many who devote
themselves to the social and political {12} sciences, who hold in
profound contempt the fine distinctions and intellectual subtleties
that seem to them the whole content of logic and metaphysic. The
attitude of the scientific mind is not difficult to understand. It has
recently been rather graphically expressed by a distinguished and
popular exponent of the principles of natural science. "One may regard
the utmost possibilities of the results of human knowledge as the
contents of a bracket, and place outside the bracket the factor _x_ to
represent those unknown and unknowable possibilities which the
imagination of man is never wearied of suggesting. This factor _x_ is
the plaything of the metaphysician."[1] This mathematical symbol of
the bracket, multiplied by _x_ to represent the unknown and unknowable
possibilities beyond it, will serve me to indicate with some exactness
the problem with which I am going to deal. The symbol is an expression
of the agnostic position. The popular caricature of the metaphysician
and his "plaything" we may disregard as a pure fiction. The unknowable
_x_ of the agnostic is not the "meta" or "beyond" of physics which the
metaphysician vainly seeks to know. The only "beyond" of physics is
consciousness or experience itself, and this is the subject-matter of
metaphysics. Our present problem is that of the bracket, not that of
the factor outside, if there is any such factor, nor yet the particular
nature of the contents within. There are, as we shall see, three views
that are possible of the nature of the bracket. In one view, it is
merely the conception of the extent which knowledge has attained or can
attain; it has no intimate relation to the knowledge, but marks
externally its limit. This is the view of the realist. In another
view, the whole of knowledge is intimately related {13} to its
particular parts; the things we know are not a mere collection or
aggregate of independent facts that we have discovered; the bracket
which contains our knowledge gives form to it, and relates organically
the dependent parts to the whole in one comprehensive individual
system. This is the view of the idealist. There is yet another view:
human knowledge is relative to human activity and its needs; the
bracket is the ever-changing limit of that activity--within it is all
that is relevant to human purpose and personality without it is all
that is irrelevant. This is the view of the pragmatist.
It is not only the scientific mind, but also the ethical and religious
mind, that is likely to be at least impatient, if not contemptuous, of
this inquiry. The question What is truth? will probably bring to
everyone's mind the words uttered by a Roman Procurator at the supreme
moment of a great world-tragedy. Pilate's question is usually
interpreted as the cynical jest of a judge indifferent to the
significance of the great cause he was trying--the expression of the
belief that there is no revelation of spiritual truth of the highest
importance for our human nature, or at least that there is no
infallible test by which it can be known. It is not this problem of
truth that we are now to discuss.
There are, on the other hand, many minds that can never rest satisfied
while they have accepted only, and not examined, the assumptions of
science and the values of social and political and religious ideals.
Their quest of first principles may appear to more practical natures a
harmless amusement or a useless waste of intellectual energy; but they
are responding to a deep need of our human nature, a need that, it may
be, is in its very nature insatiable--the need of intellectual
satisfaction. It is {14} the nature of this intellectual satisfaction
itself that is our problem of truth.
There are therefore two attitudes towards the problem of truth and
reality--that of the mind which brings a practical test to every
question, and that of the mind restless to gain by insight or by
speculation a clue to the mystery that enshrouds the meaning of
existence. The first attitude seems peculiarly to characterise the man
of science, who delights to think that the problem of reality is simple
and open to the meanest understanding. Between the plain man's view
and that of the man of high attainment in scientific research there is
for him only a difference of degree, and science seems almost to
require an apology if it does not directly enlarge our command over
nature. It would explain life and consciousness as the result of
chemical combination of material elements. Philosophy, on the other
hand, is the instinctive feeling that the secret of the universe is not
open and revealed to the plain man guided by common-sense experience
alone, even if to this experience be added the highest attainments of
scientific research. Either there is far more in matter than is
contained in the three-dimensional space it occupies, or else the
universe must owe its development to something beyond matter. The
universe must seem a poor thing indeed to a man who can think that
physical science does or can lay bare its meaning. It is the intense
desire to catch some glimpse of its meaning that leads the philosopher
to strive to transcend the actual world by following the speculative
bent of the reasoning power that his intellectual nature makes possible.
[1] Sir Kay Lankester.
{15}
CHAPTER II
APPEARANCE AND REALITY
Our conscious life is one unceasing change. From the first awakening
of consciousness to the actual present, no one moment has been the mere
repetition of another, and the moments which as we look back seem to
have made up our life are not separable elements of it but our own
divisions of a change that has been continuous. And as it has been, so
we know it will be until consciousness ceases with death.
Consciousness and life are in this respect one and the same, although
when we speak of our consciousness we think chiefly of a passive
receptivity, and when we speak of our life we think of an activity.
Consciousness as the unity of knowing and acting is a becoming. The
past is not left behind, it is with us in the form of memory; the
future is not a predetermined order which only a natural disability
prevents us from knowing, it is yet uncreated; conscious life is the
enduring present which grows with the past and makes the future.
This reality of consciousness is our continually changing experience.
But there is also another reality with which it seems to be in
necessary relation and also in complete contrast--this is the reality
of the material or physical universe. The world of physical reality
seems to be composed of a matter that cannot change in a space that is
absolutely unchangeable. This physical world seems made up of solid
things, formed out of matter. Change in physical science is only a
rearrangement of matter or an alteration of position in space.
This physical reality is not, as psychical reality is, {16} known to us
directly; it is an interpretation of our sense experience. Immediate
experience has objects, generally called sense data. These objects are
what we actually see in sensations of sight, what we actually hear in
sensations of sound, and so on; and they lead us to suppose or infer
physical objects--that is, objects that do not depend upon our
experience for their existence, but whose existence is the cause of our
having the experience. The process by which we infer the nature of the
external world from our felt experience is logical. It includes
perceiving, conceiving, thinking or reasoning. The object of the
logical process, the aim or ideal to which it seeks to attain, is
truth. Knowledge of reality is truth.
There are therefore two realities, the reality of our felt experience
from which all thinking sets out, and the reality which in thinking we
seek to know. The one reality is immediate; it is conscious experience
itself. The other reality is that which we infer from the fact of
experience, that by which we seek to explain our existence. The one we
feel, the other we think. If the difference between immediate
knowledge and mediate knowledge or inference lay in the feeling of
certainty alone or in the nature of belief, the distinction would not
be the difficult one that it is. The theories of idealism and realism
show how widely philosophers are divided on the subject. We are quite
as certain of some of the things that we can only infer as we are of
the things of which we are immediately aware. Wd cannot doubt, for
instance, that there are other persons besides ourselves, yet we can
have no distinct knowledge of any consciousness but one--our own. Our
knowledge that there are other minds is an inference from our
observation of the behaviour of some of the things we {17} directly
experience, and from the experience of our own consciousness. And even
those things which seem in direct relation to us--the things we see, or
hear, or touch--are immediately present in only a very small, perhaps
an infinitesimal, part of what we know and think of as their full
reality; all but this small part is inferred. From a momentary
sensation of sight, or sound, or touch we infer reality that far
exceeds anything actually given to us by the sensation.
Thinking is questioning experience. When our attention is suddenly
attracted by something--a flash of light, or a sound, or a twinge of
pain--consciously or unconsciously we say to ourself, What is that?
The _that_--a simple felt experience--contains a meaning, brings a
message, and we ask _what_? We distinguish the existence as an
appearance, and we seek to know the reality. The quest of the reality
which is made known to us by the appearance is the logical process of
thought. The end or purpose of this logical process is to replace the
immediate reality of the felt experience with a mediated-reality--that
is, a reality made known to us. Directly, therefore, that we begin to
think, the immediately present existence becomes an appearance, and
throughout the development of our thought it is taken to be something
that requires explanation. We seek to discover the reality which will
explain it.
It is in this distinction of appearance and reality that the problem of
truth arises. It does not depend upon any particular theory of
knowledge. The same fact is recognised by idealists and by realists.
Idealism may deny that the knowledge of independent reality is
possible; realism may insist that it is implied in the very fact of
consciousness itself--whichever is right, the reality which thinking
brings before the mind is quite {18} unlike and of a different order to
that which we immediately experience in feeling. And even if we know
nothing of philosophy, if we are ignorant of all theories of knowledge
and think of the nature of knowledge simply from the standpoint of the
natural man, the fact is essentially the same--the true reality of
things is something concealed from outward view, something to be found
out by science or by practical wisdom. Our knowledge of this reality
may be true, in this case only is it knowledge; or it may be false, in
which case it is not knowledge but opinion or error.
The reality then, the knowledge of which is truth, is not the immediate
reality of feeling but the inferred reality of thought. To have any
intelligible meaning, the affirmation that knowledge is true supposes
that there already exists a distinction between knowledge and the
reality known, between the being and the knowing of that which is
known. In immediate knowledge, in actual conscious felt experience
there is no such distinction, and therefore to affirm truth or error of
such knowledge is unmeaning. I cannot have a toothache without knowing
that I have it. In the actual felt toothache knowing and being are not
only inseparable--they are indistinguishable. If, however, I think of
my toothache as part of an independent order of reality, my knowledge
of it may be true or false. I am then thinking of it as the effect of
an exposed nerve, or of an abscess or of an inflammation--as something,
that is to say, that is conditioned independently of my consciousness
and that will cease to exist when the conditions are altered. In the
same way, when I behold a landscape, the blue expanse of sky and
variegated colour of the land which I actually experience are not
either true or false, they are immediate experience in {19} which
knowing is being and being is knowing. Truth and error only apply to
the interpretation of that experience, to the independent reality that
I infer from it. We can, then, distinguish two kinds of knowledge
which we may call immediate and mediate, or, better still, acquaintance
and description. Accordingly, when we say that something is, or when
we say of anything that it if real, we may mean either of two things.
We may mean that it is part of the changing existence that we actually
feel and that we call consciousness or life, or we may mean that it is
part of an independent order of things whose existence we think about
in order to explain, not what our feeling is (there can be no
explanation of this), but how it comes to exist. We know by
description a vast number of things with which we never can be actually
acquainted. Such, indeed, is the case with all the knowledge by which
we rule our lives and conceive the reality which environs us. Yet we
are absolutely dependent on the reality we know by acquaintance for all
our knowledge of these things. Not only is immediate sense experience
and the knowledge it gives us by acquaintance the only evidence we have
of the greater and wider reality, but we are dependent on it for the
terms wherewith to describe it, for the form in which to present it,
for the matter with which to compose it. And this is the real ground
of the study of philosophy, the justification of its standpoint. It is
this fact--this ultimate undeniable fact--that all reality of whatever
kind and in whatever way known, whether by thought or by feeling,
whether it is perceived or conceived, remembered or imagined, is in the
end composed of sense experience: it is this fact from which all the
problems of philosophy arise. It is this fact that our utilitarian men
of science find {20} themselves forced to recognise, however scornful
they may be of metaphysical methods and results.
The special problem of the nature of truth is concerned, then, with the
reality that we have distinguished as known by description, and
conceived by us as independent in its existence of the consciousness by
which we know it. What is the nature of the seal by which we stamp
this knowledge true?
CHAPTER III
THE LOGICAL THEORIES
Whoever cares to become acquainted with the difficulty of the problem
of truth must not be impatient of dialectical subtleties. There is a
well-known story in Boswell's _Life of Dr. Johnson_ which relates how
the Doctor refuted Berkeley's philosophy which affirmed the
non-existence of matter. "I observed," says Boswell, "that though we
are satisfied his doctrine is not true, it is impossible to refute it.
I shall never forget the alacrity with which Johnson answered, striking
his foot with mighty force against a large stone, till he rebounded
from it--'I refute it _thus_.'" Dr. Johnson is the representative of
robust common sense. It has very often turned out in metaphysical
disputes that the common-sense answer is the one that has been
justified in the end. Those who are impatient of metaphysics are,
therefore, not without reasonable ground; and indeed the strong belief
that the common-sense view will be justified in the end, however
powerful the sceptical doubt that seems to contradict it, however
startling the paradox that seems to be involved in it, is a possession
of the human mind without which the ordinary {21} practical conduct of
life would be impossible. When, then, we ask ourselves, What is truth?
the answer seems to be simple and obvious. Truth, we reply, is a
property of certain of our ideas; it means their agreement, as falsity
means their disagreement, with reality. If I say of anything that it
is so, then, if it is so, what I say is true; if it is not so, then
what I say is false. This simple definition of truth is one that is
universally accepted. No one really can deny it, for if he did he
would have nothing to appeal to to justify his own theory or condemn
another. The problem of truth is only raised when we ask, What does
the agreement of an idea with reality mean? If the reader will ask
himself that question, and carefully ponder it, he will see that there
is some difficulty in the answer to the simple question, What is truth?
The answer that will probably first of all suggest itself is that the
idea is a copy of the reality. And at once many experiences will seem
to confirm this view. Thus when we look at a landscape we know that
the lines of light which radiate from every point of it pass through
the lens of each of our eyes to be focussed on the retina, forming
there a small picture which is the exact counterpart of the reality.
If we look into another person's eye we may see there a picture of the
whole field of his vision reflected from his lens. It is true that
what we see is not what he sees, for that is on his retina, but the
analogy of this with a photographic camera, where we see the picture on
the ground glass, seems obvious and natural; and so we think of
knowledge, so far as it depends on the sense of vision, as consisting
in more or less vivid, more or less faded, copies of real things stored
up by the memory. But a very little reflection will convince us that
the truth of our ideas cannot consist in the fact {22} that they are
copies of realities, for clearly they are not copies in any possible
meaning of the term. Take, for example, this very illustration of
seeing a landscape: what we see is not a picture or copy of the
landscape, but the real landscape itself. We feel quite sure of this,
and with regard to the other sensations, those that come to us by
hearing, taste, smell, touch, it would seem highly absurd to suppose
that the ideas these sensations produce in us are copies of real
things. The pain of burning is not a copy of real fire, and the truth
of the judgment, Fire burns, does not consist in the fact that the
ideas denoted by the words "fire," "burns," faithfully copy certain
real things which are not ideas. And the whole notion is seen to be
absurd if we consider that, were it a fact that real things produce
copies of themselves in our mind, we could never know it was so--all
that we should have any knowledge of would be the copies, and whether
these were like or unlike the reality, or indeed whether there was any
reality for them to be like would, in the nature of the case, be
unknowable, and we could never ask the question.
If, then, our ideas are not copies of things, and if there are things
as well as ideas about things, it is quite clear that the ideas must
correspond to the things in some way that does not make them copies of
the things. The most familiar instance of correspondence is the
symbolism we use in mathematics. Are our ideas of this nature? And is
their truth their correspondence? Is a perfectly true idea one in
which there exists a point to point correspondence to the reality it
represents? At once there will occur to the mind a great number of
instances where this seems to be the case. A map of England is not a
copy of England such as, for example, a photograph might be if we were
to imagine it taken {23} from the moon. The correctness or the truth
of a map consists in the correspondence between the reality and the
diagram, which is an arbitrary sign of it. Throughout the whole of our
ordinary life we find that we make use of symbols and signs that are
not themselves either parts of or copies of the things for which they
stand. Language itself is of this nature, and there may be symbols of
symbols of symbols of real things. Written language is the arbitrary
visual sign of spoken language, and spoken language is the arbitrary
sign, it may be, of an experienced thing or of an abstract idea. Is,
then, this property of our ideas which we call truth the correspondence
of ideas with their objects, and is falsity the absence of this
correspondence? It cannot be so. To imagine that ideas can correspond
with realities is to forget that ideas simply are the knowledge of
realities; it is to slip into the notion that we know two kinds of
different things, first realities and secondly ideas, and that we can
compare together these two sorts of things. But it is at once evident
that if we could know realities without ideas, we should never need to
have recourse to ideas. It is simply ridiculous to suppose that the
relation between consciousness and reality which we call knowing is the
discovery of a correspondence between mental ideas and real things.
The two things that are related together in knowledge are not the idea
and its object, but the mind and its object. The idea of the object is
the knowledge of the object. There may be correspondence between
ideas, but not between ideas and independent things, for that supposes
that the mind knows the ideas and also knows the things and observes
the correspondence between them. And even if we suppose that ideas are
an independent kind of entity distinguishable and separable from
another kind {24} of entity that forms the real world, how could we
know that the two corresponded, for the one would only be inferred from
the other?
There is, however, a form of the correspondence theory of truth that is
presented in a way which avoids this difficulty. Truth, it is said, is
concerned not with the nature of things themselves but with our
judgments about them. Judgment is not concerned with the terms that
enter into relation--these are immediately experienced and
ultimate--but with the relations in which they stand to one another.
Thus, when we say John is the father of James, the truth of our
judgment does not consist in the adequacy of our ideas of John and
James, nor in the correspondence of our ideas with the realities, but
is concerned only with the relation that is affirmed to exist between
them. This relation is declared to be independent of or at least
external to the terms, and, so far as it is expressed in a judgment,
truth consists in its actual correspondence with fact. So if I say
John is the father of James, then, if John is the father of James, the
judgment is true, the affirmation is a truth; if he is not, it is
false, the affirmation is a falsehood. This view has the merit of
simplicity, and is sufficiently obvious almost to disarm criticism.
There is, indeed, little difficulty in accepting it if we are able to
take the view of the nature of the real universe which it assumes. The
theory is best described as pluralistic realism. It is the view that
the universe consists of or is composed of an aggregate of an infinite
number of entities. Some of these have a place in the space and time
series, and these exist. Some, on the other hand, are possibilities
which have not and may never have any actual existence. Entities that
have their place in the perceptual order of experience exist, {25} or
have existed, or will exist; but entities that are concepts, such as
goodness, beauty, truth, or that are abstract symbols like numbers,
geometrical figures, pure forms, do not exist, but are none the less
just as real as the entities that do exist. These entities are the
subject-matter of our judgments, and knowing is discovering the
relations in which they stand to one another. The whole significance
of this view lies in the doctrine that relations are external to the
entities that are related--they do not enter into and form part of the
nature of the entities. The difficulty of this view is just this
externality of the relation. It seems difficult to conceive what
nature is left in any entity deprived of all its relations. The
relation of father and son in the judgment, John is the father of
James, is so far part of the nature of the persons John and James, that
if the judgment is false then to that extent John and James are not the
actual persons John and James that they are thought to be. And this is
the case even in so purely external a relation as is expressed, say, in
the judgment, Edinburgh is East of Glasgow. It is difficult to discuss
any relation which can be said to be entirely indifferent to the nature
of its terms, and it is doubtful if anything whatever would be left of
a term abstracted from all its relations.
These difficulties have led to the formulation of an altogether
different theory, namely, the theory that truth does not consist in
correspondence between ideas and their real counterparts, but in the
consistence and internal harmony of the ideas themselves. It is named
the coherence theory. It will be recognised at once that there is very
much in common experience to support it. It is by the test of
consistency and coherence that we invariably judge the truth of
evidence. {26} Also it seems a very essential part of our intellectual
nature to reject as untrue and false any statement or any idea that is
self-contradictory or irreconcilable with the world of living
experience. But then, on the other hand, we by no means allow that
that must be true which does not exhibit logical contradiction and
inconsistency. It is a common enough experience that ideas prove false
though they have exhibited no inherent failure to harmonise with
surrounding circumstances nor any self-contradiction. The theory,
therefore, requires more than a cursory examination.
Thinking is the activity of our mind which discovers the order,
arrangement, and system in the reality that the senses reveal. Without
thought, our felt experience would be a chaos and not a world. The
philosopher Kant expressed this by saying that the understanding gives
unity to the manifold of sense. The understanding, he said, makes
nature. It does this by giving form to the matter which comes to it by
the senses. The mind is not a _tabula rasa_ upon which the external
world makes and leaves impressions, it is a relating activity which
arranges the matter it receives in forms. First of all there are space
and time, which are forms in which we receive all perceptual
experience, and then there are categories that are conceptual frames or
moulds by which we think of everything we experience as having definite
relations and belonging to a real order of existence. Substance,
causality, quality, and quantity are categories; they are universal
forms in which the mind arranges sense experience, and which constitute
the laws of nature, the order of the world. Space and time, and the
categories of the understanding Kant declared to be
transcendental--that is to say, they are the elements necessary to
experience which are not {27} themselves derived from experience, as,
for example, that every event has a cause. There are, he declared,
synthetic _a priori_ judgments--that is, judgments about experience
which are not themselves derived from experience, but, on the contrary,
the conditions that make experience possible. It is from this doctrine
of Kant that the whole of modern idealism takes its rise. Kant,
indeed, held that there are things-in-themselves, and to this extent he
was not himself an idealist, but he also held that things-in-themselves
are unknowable, and this is essentially the idealist position.
Clearly, if we hold the view that things-in-themselves are unknowable,
truth cannot be a correspondence between our ideas and these
things-in-themselves. Truth must be some quality of the ideas
themselves, and this can only be their logical consistency.
Consistency, because the ideas must be in agreement with one another;
and logical, because this consistency belongs to the thinking, and
logic is the science of thinking. Truth, in effect, is the ideal of
logical consistency. We experience in thinking an activity striving to
attain the knowledge of reality, and the belief, the feeling of
satisfaction that we experience when our thinking seems to attain the
knowledge of reality, is the harmony, the absence of contradiction, the
coherence, of our ideas themselves. This is the coherence theory. Let
us see what it implies as to the ultimate nature of truth and reality.
In both the theories we have now examined, truth is a logical character
of ideas. In the correspondence theory there is indeed supposed a
non-logical reality, but it is only in the ideas that there is the
conformity or correspondence which constitutes their truth. In the
coherence theory, reality is itself ideal, and the {28} ultimate ground
of everything is logical. This is the theory of truth that accords
with the idealist view, and this view finds its most perfect expression
in the theory of the Absolute. The Absolute is the idea of an object
that realises perfect logical consistency. This object logic itself
creates; if it be a necessary existence, then knowledge of it cannot be
other than truth. This view, on account of the supreme position that
it assigns to the intellect, and of the fundamental character with
which it invests the logical categories, has been named by those who
oppose it Intellectualism. It is important that it should be clearly
understood, and the next chapter will be devoted to its exposition.
CHAPTER IV
THE ABSOLUTE
A comparison of the two theories of truth examined in the last chapter
will show that, whereas both rest on a logical quality in ideas, the
first depends on an external view taken by the mind of an independent
non-mental reality, whereas the second depends on the discovery of an
inner meaning in experience itself. It is this inner meaning of
experience that we seek to know when asking any question concerning
reality. It is the development of this view, and what it implies as to
the ultimate nature of reality and truth, that we are now to examine.
When we ask questions about reality, we assume in the very inquiry that
reality is of a nature that experience reveals. Reality in its
ultimate nature may be logical--that is to say, of the nature of
reason, or it may {29} be non-logical--that is to say, of the nature of
feeling or will; but in either case it must be a nature of which
conscious experience can give us knowledge. If indeed we hold the view
which philosophers have often endeavoured to formulate, that reality is
unknowable, then there is no more to be said; for, whatever the picture
or the blank for a picture by which the mind tries to present this
unknowable reality, there can be no question in relation to it of the
nature and meaning of truth. An unknowable reality, as we shall show
later on, is to all intents and purposes non-existent reality. On the
other hand, if thinking leads to the knowledge of reality that we call
truth, it is because being and knowing are ultimately one, and this
unity can only be in conscious experience. This is the axiom on which
the idealist argument is based.
The theory of the Absolute is a logical argument of great dialectical
force. It is not an exaggeration to say that it is the greatest
dialectical triumph of modern philosophy. It is the most successful
expression of idealism. That this is not an extravagant estimate is
shown, I think, by the fact that, widespread and determined as is the
opposition it has had to encounter, criticism has been directed not so
much against its logic as against the basis of intellectualism on which
it rests. The very boldness of its claim and brilliance of its triumph
lead to the suspicion that the intellect cannot be the sole determining
factor of the ultimate nature of reality.
It will be easier to understand the theory of the Absolute if we first
of all notice, for the sake of afterwards comparing it, another
argument very famous in the history of philosophy--the argument to
prove the existence of God named after St. Anselm of Canterbury. {30}
It runs thus: We have in God the idea of a perfect being; the idea of a
perfect being includes the existence of that being, for not to exist is
to fall short of perfection; therefore God exists. The theological
form of this argument need raise no prejudice against it. It is of
very great intrinsic importance, and if it is wrong it is not easy to
point out wherein the fallacy lies. It may, of course, be denied that
we have or can have the idea of a perfect being--that is to say, that
we can present that idea to the mind with a positive content or meaning
as distinct from a merely negative or limiting idea. But this is
practically to admit the driving force of the argument, namely, that
there may be an idea of whose content or meaning existence forms part.
With regard to everything else the idea of existing is not existence.
There is absolutely no difference between the idea of a hundred dollars
and the idea of a hundred dollars existing, but there is the whole
difference between thought and reality in the idea of the hundred
dollars existing and the existence of the hundred dollars. Their
actual existence in no way depends on the perfection or imperfection of
my idea, nor in the inclusion of their existence in my idea. This is
sufficiently obvious in every case in which we are dealing with
perceptual reality, and in which we can, in the words of the
philosopher Hume, produce the impression which gives rise to the idea.
But there are some objects which by their very nature will not submit
to this test. No man hath seen God at any time, not because God is an
object existing under conditions and circumstances of place and time
impossible for us to realise by reason of the limitations of our finite
existence, but because God is an object in a different sense from that
which has a place in the perceptual order, and therefore it is affirmed
of God that the {31} idea involves existence. God is not an object of
perception, either actual or possible; nor in the strict sense is God a
concept--that is to say, a universal of which there may be particulars.
He is in a special sense the object of reason. If we believe that
there is a God, it is because our reason tells us that there must be.
God, in philosophy, is the idea of necessary existence, and the
argument runs: God must be, therefore is. If, then, we exclude from
the idea of God every mythological and theological element--if we mean
not Zeus nor Jehovah nor Brahma, but the first principle of
existence--then we may find in the St. Anselm argument the very ground
of theism.
I have explained this argument, which is of the class called
ontological because it is concerned with the fundamental question of
being, in order to give an instance of the kind of argument that has
given us the theory of the Absolute. I will now try to set that theory
before the reader, asking only that he will put himself into the
position of a plain man with no special acquaintance with philosophy,
but reflective and anxious to interpret the meaning of his ordinary
experience.
We have already seen that thinking is the questioning of experience,
and that the moment it begins it gives rise to a distinction between
appearance and reality. It is the asking _what?_ of every _that_ of
felt experience to which the mind attends. The world in which we find
ourselves is extended all around us in space and full of things which
affect us in various ways: some give us pleasure, others give us pain,
and we ourselves are things that affect other things as well as being
ourselves affected by them. When we think about the things in the
world in order to discover _what_ they really are, we very soon find
that we are liable to illusion and error. {32} Things turn out on
examination to be very different to what we first imagined them to be.
Our ideas, by which we try to understand the reality of things are just
so many attempts to correct and set right our illusions and errors.
And so the question arises, how far are our ideas about things truths
about reality? It is very soon evident that there are some qualities
of things that give rise to illusion and error much more readily than
others. The spatial qualities of things, solidity, shape, size, seem
to be real in a way that does not admit of doubt. We seem able to
apply to these qualities a test that is definite and absolute. On the
other hand, there seem to be effects of these things in us such as
their colour, taste, odour, sound, coldness, or heat, qualities that
are incessantly changing and a fruitful source of illusion and error.
We therefore distinguish the spatial qualities as primary, and consider
that they are the real things and different from their effects, which
we call their secondary qualities. And this is, perhaps, our most
ordinary test of reality. If, for example, we should think that
something we see is an unreal phantom, or a ghost, or some kind of
hallucination, and on going up to it find that it does actually occupy
space, we correct our opinion and say the thing is real. But the
spatial or primary qualities of a thing, although they may seem more
permanent and more essential to the reality of the thing than the
secondary qualities, are nevertheless only qualities. They are not the
thing itself, but ways in which it affects us. It seems to us that
these qualities must inhere in or belong to the thing, and so we try to
form the idea of the real thing as a substance or substratum which has
the qualities. This was a generally accepted notion until Berkeley
(1685-1763) showed how contradictory it is. So {33} simple and
convincing was his criticism of the notion, that never since has
material substance been put forward as an explanation of the reality of
the things we perceive. All that he did was to show how impossible and
contradictory it is to think that the reality of that which we perceive
is something in its nature imperceptible, for such must material
substance be apart from its sense qualities. How can that which we
perceive be something imperceptible? And if we reflect on it, we shall
surely agree that it is so--by the thing we mean its qualities, and
apart from the qualities there is no thing. We must try, then, in some
other way to reach the reality.
What, we shall now ask, can it be that binds together these sense
qualities so that we speak of them as a thing? There are two elements
that seem to enter into everything whatever that comes into our
experience, and which it seems to us would remain if everything in the
universe were annihilated. These are space and time. Are they
reality? Here we are met with a new kind of difficulty. It was
possible to dismiss material substance as a false idea, an idea of
something whose existence is impossible; but space and time are
certainly not false ideas. The difficulty about them is that we cannot
make our thought of them consistent--they are ideas that contain a
self-contradiction, or at least that lead to a self-contradiction when
we affirm them of reality. With the ideas of space and time are
closely linked the ideas of change, of movement, of causation, of
quality and quantity, and all of these exhibit this same puzzling
characteristic, that they seem to make us affirm what we deny and deny
what we affirm. I might fill this little book with illustrations of
the paradoxes that are involved in these ordinary working ideas.
Everyone is familiar with the difficulty involved in the {34} idea of
time. We must think there was a beginning, and we cannot think that
there was any moment to which there was no before. So also with space,
it is an infinite extension which we can only think of as a beyond to
every limit. This receding limit of the infinitely extensible space
involves the character of infinite divisibility, for if there are an
infinite number of points from which straight lines can be drawn
without intersecting one another to any fixed point there is therefore
no smallest space that cannot be further divided. The contradictions
that follow from these demonstrable contents of the idea of space are
endless. The relation of time to space is another source of
contradictory ideas. I shall perhaps, however, best make the meaning
of this self-contradictory character of our ordinary ideas clear by
following out a definite illustration. What is known as the antinomy
of motion is probably familiar to everyone from the well-known paradox
of the Greek philosopher Zeno. The flying arrow, he said, does not
move, because if it did it would be in two places at one and the same
time, and that is impossible. I will now put this same paradox of
movement in a form which, so far as I know, it has not been presented
before. My illustration will involve the idea of causation as well as
that of movement. If we suppose a space to be fully occupied, we shall
agree that nothing within that space can move without thereby
displacing whatever occupies the position into which it moves. That is
to say, the movement of any occupant of one position must cause the
displacement of the occupant of the new position into which he moves.
But on the other hand it is equally clear that the displacement of the
occupant of the new position is a prior condition of the possibility of
the movement of {35} the mover, for nothing can move unless there is an
unoccupied place for it to move into, and there is no unoccupied place
unless it has been vacated by its occupant before the movement begins.
We have therefore the clear contradiction that a thing can only move
when something else which it causes to move has already moved. Now if
we reflect on it we shall see that this is exactly the position we
occupy in our three-dimensional space. The space which surrounds us is
occupied, and therefore we cannot move until a way is made clear for
us, and nothing makes way for us unless we move. We cannot move
through stone walls because we cannot displace solid matter, but we can
move through air and water because we are able to displace these. The
problem is the same. My movement displaces the air, but there is no
movement until the air is displaced. Can we escape the contradiction
by supposing the displacement is the cause and the movement the effect.
Are we, like people in a theatre queue, only able to move from behind
forward as the place is vacated for us in front? In that case we
should be driven to the incredible supposition that the original cause
or condition of our movement is the previous movement of something at
the outskirts of our occupied space, that this somewhat moving into the
void made possible the movement of the occupant of the space next
adjoining, and so on until after a lapse of time which may be ages,
which may indeed be infinite, the possibility of movement is opened to
us. In fact we must believe that the effect of our movement--namely,
the displacement of the previous occupants from the positions we occupy
in moving--happened before it was caused. Now it is impossible for us
to believe either of the only two alternatives--either that we do not
really move but only {36} appear to do so, or that the displacement our
movement causes really precedes the movement. When we meet with a
direct self-contradiction in our thoughts about anything, we can only suppose that that about which we are thinking is in its nature nonsensical, or else that our ideas about it are wrong. |
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