The Approach to Philosophy Part 14

[251:16] Quoted from Voltaire's London _Letter on the English_, by Lange: _Op. cit._, II, p. 18.

[251:17] Quoted by Lange: _Op. cit._, II, p. 113.

[252:18] The phrase "psycho-physical parallelism," current in psychology, may mean automatism of the kind expounded above, and may also mean dualism. It is used commonly as a methodological principle to signify that no causal relationship between mind and body, but one of _correspondence_, is to be looked for in empirical psychology. Cf. - 99.

[255:19] Quoted by Ward: _Op. cit._, I, p. 18.

[256:20] There are times when Huxley, _e. g._, would seem to be on the verge of the Berkeleyan idealism. Cf. Chap. IX.

[256:21] For the case of Karl Pearson, read his _Grammar of Science_, Chap. II.

[261:22] Pater: _The Renaissance_, pp. 249-250.

[262:23] Hobbes: _Leviathan,_ Chap. XV.

[265:24] Quoted from Balfour: _Foundations of Belief_, pp. 29-31.

[265:25] Ferguson: _Religion of Democracy_, p. 10.

[266:26] Haeckel: _Op. cit._, p. 344.

[266:27] Huxley: _Evolution and Ethics_, p. 45. _Collected Essays_, Vol.

IX.

CHAPTER IX

SUBJECTIVISM[267:1]

[Sidenote: Subjectivism Originally a.s.sociated with Relativism and Scepticism.]

- 126. When, in the year 1710, Bishop Berkeley maintained the thesis of empirical idealism, having rediscovered it and announced it with a justifiable sense of originality, he provoked a kind of critical judgment that was keenly annoying if not entirely surprising to him. In refuting the conception of material substance and demonstrating the dependence of being upon mind, he at once sought, as he did repeatedly in later years, to establish the world of practical belief, and so to reconcile metaphysics and common-sense. Yet he found himself hailed as a fool and a sceptic. In answer to an inquiry concerning the reception of his book in London, his friend Sir John Percival wrote as follows:

"I did but name the subject matter of your book of _Principles_ to some ingenious friends of mine and they immediately treated it with ridicule, at the same time refusing to read it, which I have not yet got one to do. A physician of my acquaintance undertook to discover your person, and argued you must needs be mad, and that you ought to take remedies. A bishop pitied you, that a desire of starting something new should put you upon such an undertaking. Another told me that you are not gone so far as another gentleman in town, who a.s.serts not only that there is no such thing as Matter, but that we ourselves have no being at all."[268:2]

There can be no doubt but that the idea of the dependence of real things upon their appearance to the individual is a paradox to common-sense. It is a paradox because it seems to reverse the theoretical instinct itself, and to define the real in those very terms which disciplined thought learns to neglect. In the early history of thought the nature of the thinker himself is recognized as that which is likely to distort truth rather than that which conditions it. When the wise man, the devotee of truth, first makes his appearance, his authority is acknowledged because he has renounced himself. As witness of the universal being he purges himself of whatever is peculiar to his own individuality, or even to his human nature. In the aloofness of his meditation he escapes the cloud of opinion and prejudice that obscures the vision of the common man. In short, the element of belief dependent upon the thinker himself is the dross which must be refined away in order to obtain the pure truth. When, then, in the critical epoch of the Greek sophists, Protagoras declares that there is no belief that is not of this character, his philosophy is promptly recognized as scepticism.

Protagoras argues that sense qualities are clearly dependent upon the actual operations of the senses, and that all knowledge reduces ultimately to these terms.

"The senses are variously named hearing, seeing, smelling; there is the sense of heat, cold, pleasure, pain, desire, fear, and many more which are named, as well as innumerable others which have no name; _with each of them there is born an object of sense_,--all sorts of colors born with all sorts of sight and sounds in like manner with hearing, and other objects with the other senses."[269:3]

If the objects are "born with" the senses, it follows that they are born with and appertain to the individual perceiver.

"Either show, if you can, that our sensations are not relative and individual, or, if you admit that they are individual, prove that this does not involve the consequence that the appearance becomes, or, if you like to say, is to the individual only."[270:4]

The same motif is thus rendered by Walter Pater in the Conclusion of his "Renaissance":

"At first sight experience seems to bury us under a flood of external objects, pressing upon us with a sharp and importunate reality, calling us out of ourselves in a thousand forms of action. But when reflexion begins to act upon those objects they are dissipated under its influence; the cohesive force seems suspended like a trick of magic; each object is loosed into a group of impressions--color, odor, texture--in the mind of the observer. . . . Experience, already reduced to a swarm of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of these impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world."

The Protagorean generalization is due to the reflection that all experience is some individual experience, that no subject of discourse escapes the imputation of belonging to some individual's private history. The individual must start with his own experiences and ideas, and he can never get beyond them, for he cannot see outside his own vision, or even think outside his own mind. The scepticism of this theory is explicit, and the formulas of Protagoras--the famous "_Man is the measure of all things_," and the more exact formula, "_The truth is what appears to each man at each time_"[271:5]--have been the articles of scepticism throughout the history of thought.

[Sidenote: Phenomenalism and Spiritualism.]

- 127. There is, therefore, nothing really surprising in the reception accorded the "new philosophy" of Bishop Berkeley. A sceptical relativism is the earliest phase of subjectivism, and its avoidance at once becomes the most urgent problem of any philosophy which proposes to proceed forth from this principle. And this problem Berkeley meets with great adroitness and a wise recognition of difficulties. But his sanguine temperament and speculative interest impel him to what he regards as the extension of his first principle, the reintroduction of the conception of substance under the form of spirit, and of the objective order of nature under the form of the mind of G.o.d. In short, there are two motives at work in him, side by side: the epistemological motive, restricting reality to perceptions and thoughts, and the metaphysical-religious motive, leading him eventually to the definition of reality in terms of perceiving and thinking spirits. And from the time of Berkeley these two principles, _phenomenalism_ and _spiritualism_, have remained as distinct and alternating phases of subjectivism. The former is its critical and dialectical conception, the latter its constructive and practical conception.

[Sidenote: Phenomenalism as Maintained by Berkeley. The Problem Inherited from Descartes and Locke.]

- 128. As _phenomenalism_ has its cla.s.sic statement and proof in the writings of Berkeley, we shall do well to return to these. The fact that this philosopher wished to be regarded as the prophet of common-sense has already been mentioned. This purpose reveals itself explicitly in the series of "Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous." The form in which Berkeley here advances his thesis is further determined by the manner in which the lines were drawn in his day of thought. The world of enlightened public opinion was then threefold, consisting of G.o.d, physical nature, and the soul. In the early years of the seventeenth century Descartes had sharply distinguished between the two substances--mind, with its attribute of thought; and body, with its attribute of extension--and divided the finite world between them. G.o.d was regarded as the infinite and sustaining cause of both. Stated in the terms of epistemology, the object of clear thinking is the physical cosmos, the subject of clear thinking the immortal soul. The realm of perception, wherein the mind is subjected to the body, embarra.s.ses the Cartesian system, and has no clear t.i.tle to any place in it. And without attaching cognitive importance to this realm, the system is utterly dogmatic in its epistemology.[273:6] For what one substance thinks, must be a.s.sumed to be somehow true of another quite independent substance without any medium of communication. Now between Descartes and Berkeley appeared the sober and questioning "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," by John Locke. This is an interesting combination (they cannot be said to blend) of traditional metaphysics and revolutionary epistemology. The universe still consists of G.o.d, the immortal thinking soul, and a corporeal nature, the object of its thought. But, except for certain proofs of G.o.d and self, knowledge is entirely reduced to the perceptual type, to sensations, or ideas directly imparted to the mind by the objects themselves. To escape dogmatism it is maintained that the real is what is _observed to be present_. But Locke thinks the qualities so discovered belong in part to the perceiver and in part to the substance outside the mind. Color is a case of the former, a "secondary quality"; and extension a case of the latter, a "primary quality." And evidently the above empirical test of knowledge is not equally well met in these two cases. When I see a red object I know that red exists, for it is observed to be present, and I make no claim for it beyond the present. But when I note that the red object is square, I am supposed to know a property that will continue to exist in the object after I have closed my eyes or turned to something else. Here my claim exceeds my observation, and the empirical principle adopted at the outset would seem to be violated. Berkeley develops his philosophy from this criticism. His refutation of material substance is intended as a full acceptance of the implications of the new empirical epistemology.

Knowledge is to be all of the perceptual type, where what is known is directly presented; and, in conformity with this principle, being is to be restricted to the content of the living pulses of experience.

[Sidenote: The Refutation of Material Substance.]

- 129. Berkeley, then, beginning with the threefold world of Descartes and of common-sense, proposes to apply Locke's theory of knowledge to the discomfiture of corporeal nature. It was a radical doctrine, because it meant for him and for his contemporaries the denial of all finite objects outside the mind. But at the same time it meant a restoration of the h.o.m.ogeneity of experience, the reestablishment of the qualitative world of every-day living, and so had its basis of appeal to common-sense. The encounter between Hylas, the advocate of the traditional philosophy, and Philonous, who represents the author himself, begins with an exchange of the charge of innovation.

_Hyl._ I am glad to find there was nothing in the accounts I heard of you.

_Phil._ Pray, what were those?

_Hyl._ You were represented, in last night's conversation, as one who maintained the most extravagant opinion that ever entered into the mind of man, to wit, that there is no such thing as _material substance_ in the world.

_Phil._ That there is no such thing as what _philosophers_ call _material substance_, I am seriously persuaded: but if I were made to see anything absurd or sceptical in this, I should then have the same reason to renounce this that I imagine I have now to reject the contrary opinion.

_Hyl._ What! can anything be more fantastical, more repugnant to Common-Sense, or a more manifest piece of Scepticism, than to believe there is no such thing as _matter_?

_Phil._ Softly, good Hylas. What if it should prove that you, who hold there is, are, by virtue of that opinion, a greater sceptic, and maintain more paradoxes and repugnances to Common-Sense, than I who believe no such thing?[276:7]

Philonous now proceeds with his case. Beginning by obtaining from Hylas the admission that pleasure and pain are essentially relative and subjective, he argues that sensations such as heat, since they are inseparable from these feelings, must be similarly regarded. And he is about to annex other qualities in turn to this core of subjectivity, when Hylas enters a general demurrer:

"Hold, Philonous, I now see what it was deluded me all this time. You asked me whether heat and cold, sweetness and bitterness, were not particular sorts of pleasure and pain; to which I answered simply that they were. Whereas I should have thus distinguished:--those qualities as perceived by us, are pleasures or pains; but not as existing in the external objects. We must not therefore conclude absolutely, that there is no heat in the fire, or sweetness in the sugar, but only that heat or sweetness, as perceived by us, are not in the fire or sugar."[276:8]

[Sidenote: The Application of the Epistemological Principle.]

- 130. Here the argument touches upon profound issues. Philonous now a.s.sumes the extreme empirical contention _that knowledge applies only to its own psychological moment, that its object in no way extends beyond that individual situation which we call the state of knowing_. The full import of such an epistemology Berkeley never recognized, but he is clearly employing it here, and the overthrow of Hylas is inevitable so long as he does not challenge it or turn it against his opponent. This, however, as a protagonist of Berkeley's own making, he fails to do, and he plays into Philonous's hands by admitting that what is known only in perception must for that reason _consist_ in perception. He frankly owns "that it is vain to stand out any longer," that "colors, sounds, tastes, in a word, all those termed _secondary qualities_, have certainly no existence without the mind."[277:9]

Hylas has now arrived at the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. "Extension, Figure, Solidity, Gravity, Motion, and Rest" are the attributes of an external substance which is the cause of sensations. But the same epistemological principle readily reduces these also to dependence on mind, for, like the secondary qualities, their content is given only in perception. Hylas is then driven to defend a general material substratum, which is the cause of ideas, but to which none of the definite content of these ideas can be attributed. In short, he has put all the content of knowledge on the one side, and admitted its inseparability from the perceiving spirit, and left the being of things standing empty and forlorn on the other. This amounts, as Philonous reminds him, to the denial of the reality of the known world.

"You are therefore, by your principles, forced to deny the _reality_ of sensible things; since you made it to consist in an absolute existence exterior to the mind. That is to say, you are a downright sceptic. So I have gained my point, which was to show your principles led to Scepticism."[278:10]

[Sidenote: The Refutation of a Conceived Corporeal World.]

- 131. Having advanced the direct empiricist argument for phenomenalism, Berkeley now gives the rationalistic motive an opportunity to express itself in the queries of Hylas as to whether there be not an "absolute extension," somehow abstracted by thought from the relativities of perception. Is there not at least a _conceivable_ world independent of perception?

The answers of Philonous throw much light upon the Berkeleyan position.

He admits that thought is capable of separating the primary from the secondary qualities in certain _operations_, but at the same time denies that this is forming an idea of them as separate.

"I acknowledge, Hylas, it is not difficult to form general propositions and reasonings about those qualities, without mentioning any other; and, in this sense, to consider or treat of them abstractedly. But, how doth it follow that, because I can p.r.o.nounce the word _motion_ by itself, I can form the idea of it in my mind exclusive of body? or, because theorems may be made of extension and figures, without any mention of _great_ or _small_, or any other sensible mode or quality, that therefore it is possible such an abstract idea of extension, without any particular size or figure, or sensible quality, should be distinctly formed, and apprehended by the mind? Mathematicians treat of quant.i.ty, without regarding what other sensible qualities it is attended with, as being altogether indifferent to their demonstrations. But, when laying aside the words, they contemplate the bare ideas, I believe you will find, they are not the pure abstracted ideas of extension."[279:11]