An Introduction to Philosophy Part 26

We may judge science fairly well without ourselves being scientists, but it is not possible to judge philosophy without being to some extent a philosopher.

In other words, the conclusions of reflective thought must be judged by following the process and discovering its cogency or the reverse.

Thus, when the philosopher lays before us an argument to prove that we must regard the only ultimate reality in the world as unknowable, and must abandon our theistic convictions, how shall we make a decision as to whether he is right or is wrong? May we expect that the day will come when he will be justified or condemned as is the astronomer on the day predicted for an eclipse? Neither the philosophy of Locke, nor that of Descartes, nor that of Kant, can be vindicated as can a prediction touching an eclipse of the sun. To judge these men, we must learn to think with them, to survey the road by which they travel; and this we cannot do until we have learned the art.

Whether we like to admit it or not, we must admit, if we are fair-minded and intelligent, that philosophy cannot speak with the same authority as science, where science has been able to verify its results. There are, of course, scientific hypotheses and speculations which should be regarded as being quite as uncertain as anything brought forward by the philosophers. But, admitting this, the fact remains that there is a difference between the two fields as a whole, and that the philosopher should learn not to speak with an a.s.sumption of authority. No final philosophy has been attained, so palpably firm in its foundation, and so admittedly trustworthy in its construction, that we are justified in saying: Now we need never go back to the past unless to gratify the historic interest. It is a weakness of young men, and of older men of partisan temper, to feel very sure of matters which, in the nature of things, must remain uncertain.

Since these things are so, and since men possess the power of reflection in very varying degree, it is not surprising that we find it worth while to turn back and study the thoughts of those who have had a genius for reflection, even though they lived at a time when modern science was awaiting its birth. Some things cannot be known until other things are known; often there must be a vast collection of individual facts before the generalizations of science can come into being. But many of the problems with which reflective thought is still struggling have not been furthered in the least by information which has been collected during the centuries which have elapsed since they were attacked by the early Greek philosophers.

Thus, we are still discussing the distinction between "appearance" and "reality," and many and varied are the opinions at which philosophers arrive. But Thales, who heads the list of the Greek philosophers, had quite enough material, given in his own experience, to enable him to solve this problem as well as any modern philosopher, had he been able to use the material. He who is familiar with the history of philosophy will recognize that, although one may smile at Augustine's accounts of the races of men, and of the spontaneous generation of small animals, no one has a right to despise his profound reflections upon the nature of time and the problems which arise out of its character as past, present, and future.

The fact is that metaphysics does not lag behind because of our lack of material to work with. The difficulties we have to face are nothing else than the difficulties of reflective thought. Why can we not tell clearly what we mean when we use the word "self," or speak of "knowledge," or insist that we know an "external world"? Are we not concerned with the most familiar of experiences? To be sure we are--with experiences familiarly, but vaguely and una.n.a.lytically, known and, hence, only half known. All these experiences the great men of the past had as well as we; and if they had greater powers of reflection, perhaps they saw more deeply into them than we do. At any rate, we cannot afford to a.s.sume that they did not.

One thing, however, I must not omit to mention. Although one man cannot turn over bodily the results of his reflection to another, it by no means follows that he cannot give the other a helping hand, or warn him of dangers by himself stumbling into pitfalls, as the case may be.

We have an indefinite advantage over the solitary thinkers who opened up the paths of reflection, for we have the benefit of their teaching.

And this brings me to a consideration which I must discuss in the next section.

85. THE VALUE OF DIFFERENT POINTS OF VIEW.--The man who has not read is like the man who has not traveled--he is not an intelligent critic, for he has nothing with which to compare what falls within the little circle of his experiences. That the prevailing architecture of a town is ugly can scarcely impress one who is acquainted with no other town.

If we live in a community in which men's manners are not good, and their standard of living not the highest, our attention does not dwell much upon the fact, unless some contrasted experience wakes within us a clear consciousness of the difference. That to which we are accustomed we accept uncritically and unreflectively. It is difficult for us to see it somewhat as one might see it to whom it came as a new experience.

Of course, there may be in the one town buildings of more and of less architectural beauty; and there may be in the one community differences of opinion that furnish intellectual stimulus and keep awake the critical spirit. Still, there is such a thing as a prevalent type of architecture, and there is such a thing as the spirit of the times. He who is carried along by the spirit of the age may easily conclude that what is, is right, because he hears few raise their voices in protest.

To estimate justly the type of thought in which he has been brought up, he must have something with which to compare it. He must stand at a distance, and try to judge it as he would judge a type of doctrine presented to him for the first rime. And in the accomplishment of this task he can find no greater aid than the study of the history of philosophy.

It is at first something of a shock to a man to discover that a.s.sumptions which he has been accustomed to make without question have been frankly repudiated by men quite as clever as he, and, perhaps, more critical. It opens the eyes to see that his standards of worth have been weighed by others and have been found wanting. It may well incline him to reexamine reasonings in which he has detected no flaw, when he finds that acute minds have tried them before, and have declared them faulty.

Nor can it be without its influence upon his judgment of the significance of a doctrine, when it becomes plain to him that this significance can scarcely be fully comprehended until the history of the doctrine is known. For example, he thinks of the mind as somehow in the body, as interacting with it, as a substance, and as immaterial.

In the course of his reading it begins to dawn upon his consciousness that he has not thought all this out for himself; he has taken these notions from others, who in turn have had them from their predecessors.

He begins to realize that he is not resting upon evidence independently found in his own experience, but has upon his hands a sheaf of opinions which are the echoes of old philosophies, and whose rise and development can be traced over the stretch of the centuries. Can he help asking himself, when he sees this, whether the opinions in question express the truth and the whole truth? Is he not forced to take the critical att.i.tude toward them?

And when he views the succession of systems which pa.s.s in review before him, noting how a truth may be dimly seen by one writer, denied by another, taken up again and made clearer by a third, and so on, how can he avoid the reflection that, as there was some error mixed with the truth presented in earlier systems, so there probably is some error in whatever may happen to be the form of doctrine generally received in his own time? The evolution of humanity is not yet at an end; men still struggle to see clearly, and fall short of the ideal; it must be a good thing to be freed from the dogmatic a.s.sumption of finality natural to the man of limited outlook. In studying the history of philosophy sympathetically we are not merely calling to our aid critics who possess the advantage of seeing things from a different point of view, but we are reminding ourselves that we, too, are human and fallible.

86. PHILOSOPHY AS POETRY, AND PHILOSOPHY AS SCIENCE.--The recognition of the truth that the problems of reflection do not admit of easy solution and that verification can scarcely be expected as it can in the fields of the special sciences, need not, even when it is brought home to us, as it is apt to be, by the study of the history of philosophy, lead us to believe that philosophies are like the fashions, a something gotten up to suit the taste of the day, and to be dismissed without regret as soon as that taste changes.

Philosophy is sometimes compared with poetry. It is argued that each age must have its own poetry, even though it be inferior to that which it has inherited from the past. Just so, it is said, each age must have its own philosophy, and the philosophy of an earlier age will not satisfy its demands. The implication is that in dealing with philosophy we are not concerned with what is true or untrue in itself considered, but with what is satisfying to us or the reverse.

Now, it would sound absurd to say that each age must have its own geometry or its own physics. The fact that it has long been known that the sum of the interior angles of a plane triangle is equal to two right angles, does not warrant me in repudiating that truth; nor am I justified in doing so, and in believing the opposite, merely because I find the statement uninteresting or distasteful. When we are dealing with such matters as these, we recognize that truth is truth, and that, if we mistake it or refuse to recognize it, so much the worse for us.

Is it otherwise in philosophy? Is it a perfectly proper thing that, in one age, men should be idealists, and in another, materialists; in one, theists, and in another, agnostics? Is the distinction between true and false nothing else than the distinction between what is in harmony with the spirit of the times and what is not?

That it is natural that there should be such fluctuations of opinion, we may freely admit. Many things influence a man to embrace a given type of doctrine, and, as we have seen, verification is a difficult problem. But have we here, any more than in other fields, the right to a.s.sume that a doctrine was true at a given time merely because it _seemed_ to men true at that time, or because they found it pleasing?

The history of science reveals that many things have long been believed to be true, and, indeed, to be bound up with what were regarded as the highest interests of man, and that these same things have later been discovered to be false--not false merely for a later age, but false for all time; as false when they were believed in as when they were exploded and known to be exploded. No man of sense believes that the Ptolemaic system was true for a while, and that then the Copernican became true. We say that the former only _seemed_ true, and that the enthusiasm of its adherents was a mistaken enthusiasm.

It is well to remember that philosophies are brought forward because it is believed or hoped that they are true. A fairy tale may be recited and may be approved, although no one dreams of attaching faith to the events narrated in it. But a philosophy attempts to give us some account of the nature of the world in which we live. If the philosopher frankly abandons the attempt to tell us what is true, and with a Celtic generosity addresses himself to the task of saying what will be agreeable to us, he loses his right to the t.i.tle. It is not enough that he stirs our emotions, and works up his unrealities into something resembling a poem. It is not primarily his task to please, as it is not the task of the serious worker in science to please those whom he is called upon to instruct. Truth is truth, whether it be scientific truth or philosophical truth. And error, no matter how agreeable or how nicely adjusted to the temper of the times, is always error. If it is error in a field in which the detection and exposure of error is difficult, it is the more dangerous, and the more should we be on our guard against it.

We may, then, accept the lesson of the history of philosophy, to wit, that we have no right to regard any given doctrine as final in such a sense that it need no longer be held tentatively and as subject to possible revision; but we need not, on that account, deny that philosophy is, what it has in the past been believed to be, an earnest search for truth. A philosophy that did not even profess to be this would not be listened to at all. It would be regarded as too trivial to merit serious attention. If we take the word "science" in the broad sense to indicate a knowledge of the truth more exact and satisfactory than that which obtains in common life, we may say that every philosophy worthy of the name is, at least, an attempt at scientific knowledge. Of course, this sense of the word "science" should not be confused with that in which it has been used elsewhere in this volume.

87. HOW TO READ THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY.--He who takes up the history of philosophy for the first time is apt to be impressed with the fact that he is reading something that might not inaptly be called the history of human error.

It begins with crude and, to the superficial spectator, seemingly childish attempts in the field of physical science. There are clever guesses at the nature of the physical world, but the boldest of speculations are entered upon with no apparent recognition of the difficulty of the task undertaken, and with no realization of the need for caution. Somewhat later a different cla.s.s of problems makes its appearance--the problems which have to do with the mind and with the nature of knowledge, reflective problems which scarcely seem to have come fairly within the horizon of the earliest thinkers.

These problems even the beginner may be willing to recognize as philosophical; but he may conscientiously harbor a doubt as to the desirability of spending time upon the solutions which are offered.

System rises after system, and confronts him with what appear to be new questions and new answers. It seems as though each philosopher were constructing a world for himself independently, and commanding him to accept it, without first convincing him of his right to a.s.sume this tone of authority and to set up for an oracle. In all this conflict of opinions where shall we seek for truth? Why should we accept one man as a teacher rather than another? Is not the lesson to be gathered from the whole procession of systems best summed up in the dictum of Protagoras: "Man is the measure of all things"--each has his own truth, and this need not be truth to another?

This, I say, is a first impression and a natural one. I hasten to add: this should not be the last impression of those who read with thoughtful attention.

One thing should be emphasized at the outset: nothing will so often bear rereading as the history of philosophy. When we go over the ground after we have obtained a first acquaintance with the teachings of the different philosophers, we begin to realize that what we have in our hands is, in a sense, a connected whole. We see that if Plato and Aristotle had not lived, we could not have had the philosophy which pa.s.sed current in the Middle Ages and furnished a foundation for the teachings of the Church. We realize that without this latter we could not have had Descartes, and without Descartes we could not have had Locke and Berkeley and Hume. And had not these lived, we should not have had Kant and his successors. Other philosophies we should undoubtedly have had, for the busy mind of man must produce something.

But whatever glimpses at the truth these men have vouchsafed us have been guaranteed by the order of development in which they have stood.

They could not independently have written the books that have come down to us.

This should be evident from what has been said earlier in this chapter and elsewhere in this book. Let us bear in mind that a philosopher draws his material from two sources. First of all, he has the experience of the mind and the world which is the common property of us all. But it is, as we have seen, by no means easy to use this material. It is vastly difficult to reflect. It is fatally easy to misconceive what presents itself in our experience. With the most earnest effort to describe what lies before us, we give a false description, and we mislead ourselves and others.

In the second place, the philosopher has the interpretations of experience which he has inherited from his predecessors. The influence of these is enormous. Each age has, to a large extent, its problems already formulated or half formulated for it. Every man must have ancestors, of some sort, if he is to appear upon this earthly stage at all; and a wholly independent philosopher is as impossible a creature as an ancestorless man. We have seen how Descartes (section 60) tried to repudiate his debt to the past, and how little successful he was in doing so.

Now, we make a mistake if we overlook the genius of the individual thinker. The history of speculative thought has many times taken a turn which can only be accounted for by taking into consideration the genius for reflective thought possessed by some great mind. In the crucible of such an intellect, old truths take on a new aspect, familiar facts acquire a new and a richer meaning. But we also make a mistake if we fail to see in the writings of such a man one of the stages which has been reached in the gradual evolution of human thought, if we fail to realize that each philosophy is to a great extent the product of the past.

When one comes to understand these things, the history of philosophy no longer presents itself as a mere agglomeration of arbitrary and independent systems. And an attentive reading gives us a further key to the interpretation of what seemed inexplicable. We find that there may be distinct and different streams of thought, which, for a while, run parallel without commingling their waters. For centuries the Epicurean followed his own tradition, and walked in the footsteps of his own master. The Stoic was of sterner stuff, and he chose to travel another path. To this day there are adherents of the old church philosophy, Neo-Scholastics, whose ways of thinking can only be understood when we have some knowledge of Aristotle and of his influence upon men during the Middle Ages. We ourselves may be Kantians or Hegelians, and the man at our elbow may recognize as his spiritual father Comte or Spencer.

It does not follow that, because one system follows another in chronological order, it is its lineal descendant. But some ancestor a system always has, and if we have the requisite learning and ingenuity, we need not find it impossible to explain why this thinker or that was influenced to give his thought the peculiar turn that characterizes it.

Sometimes many influences have conspired to attain the result, and it is no small pleasure to address oneself to the task of disentangling the threads which enter into the fabric.

Moreover, as we read thus with discrimination, we begin to see that the great men of the past have not spoken without appearing to have sufficient reason for their utterances in the light of the times in which they lived. We may make it a rule that, when they seem to be speaking arbitrarily, to be laying before us reasonings that are not reasonings, dogmas for which no excuse seems to be offered, the fault lies in our lack of comprehension. Until we can understand how a man, living in a certain century, and breathing a certain moral and intellectual atmosphere, could have said what he did, we should a.s.sume that we have read his words, but not his real thought. For the latter there is always a psychological, if not a logical, justification.

And this brings me to the question of the language in which the philosophers have expressed their thoughts. The more attentively one reads the history of philosophy, the clearer it becomes that the number of problems with which the philosophers have occupied themselves is not overwhelmingly great. If each philosophy which confronts us seems to us quite new and strange, it is because we have not arrived at the stage at which it is possible for us to recognize old friends with new faces. The same old problems, the problems which must ever present themselves to reflective thought, recur again and again. The form is more or less changed, and the answers which are given to them are not, of course, always the same. Each age expresses itself in a somewhat different way. But sometimes the solution proposed for a given problem is almost the same in substance, even when the two thinkers we are contrasting belong to centuries which lie far apart. In this case, only our own inability to strip off the husk and reach the fruit itself prevents us from seeing that we have before us nothing really new.

Thus, if we read the history of philosophy with patience and with discrimination, it grows luminous. We come to feel nearer to the men of the past. We see that we may learn from their successes and from their failures; and if we are capable of drawing a moral at all, we apply the lesson to ourselves.

CHAPTER XXIV

SOME PRACTICAL ADMONITIONS

88. BE PREPARED TO ENTER UPON A NEW WAY OF LOOKING AT THINGS.--We have seen that reflective thought tries to a.n.a.lyze experience and to attain to a clear view of the elements that make it up--to realize vividly what is the very texture of the known world, and what is the nature of knowledge. It is possible to live to old age, as many do, without even a suspicion that there may be such a knowledge as this, and nevertheless to possess a large measure of rather vague but very serviceable information about both minds and bodies.

It is something of a shock to learn that a mult.i.tude of questions may be asked touching the most familiar things in our experience, and that our comprehension of those things may be so vague that we grope in vain for an answer. s.p.a.ce, time, matter, minds, realities,--with these things we have to do every day. Can it be that we do not know what they are? Then we must be blind, indeed. How shall we set about enlightening our ignorance?

Not as we have enlightened our ignorance heretofore. We have added fact to fact; but our task now is to gain a new light on all facts, to see them from a different point of view; not so much to extend our knowledge as to deepen it.

It seems scarcely necessary to point out that our world, when looked at for the first time in this new way, may seem to be a new and strange world. The real things of our experience may appear to melt away, to be dissolved by reflection into mere shadows and unrealities. Well do I remember the consternation with which, when almost a schoolboy, I first made my acquaintance with John Stuart Mill's doctrine that the things about us are "permanent possibilities of sensation." To Mill, of course, chairs and tables were still chairs and tables, but to me they became ghosts, inhabitants of a phantom world, to find oneself in which was a matter of the gravest concern.

I suspect that this sense of the unreality of things comes often to those who have entered upon the path of reflection, It may be a comfort to such to realize that it is rather a thing to be expected. How can one feel at home in a world which one has entered for the first time?

One cannot become a philosopher and remain exactly the man that one was before. Men have tried to do it,--Thomas Reid is a notable instance (section 50); but the result is that one simply does not become a philosopher. It is not possible to gain a new and a deeper insight into the nature of things, and yet to see things just as one saw them before one attained to this.

If, then, we are willing to study philosophy at all, we must be willing to embrace new views of the world, if there seem to be good reasons for so doing. And if at first we suffer from a sense of bewilderment, we must have patience, and must wait to see whether time and practice may not do something toward removing our distress. It may be that we have only half understood what has been revealed to us.

89. BE WILLING TO CONSIDER POSSIBILITIES WHICH AT FIRST STRIKE ONE AS ABSURD.--It must be confessed that the philosophers have sometimes brought forward doctrines which seem repellent to good sense, and little in harmony with the experience of the world which we have all our lives enjoyed. Shall we on this account turn our backs upon them and refuse them an impartial hearing?

Thus, the idealist maintains that there is no existence save psychical existence; that the material things about us are really mental things.