The Church of St. Bunco Part 9

"Mother Eddy" and her flock "in Science" derive a considerable part of their income from a glib use of the word "Metaphysics." But what the "Church Scientist" has omitted to learn about the real import of that word would make a volume even larger than _Science and Health_.

As unreservedly admitted in our present essay, there is no trouble about a spiritual derivation of the universe. In the declaratory, religious form, the New Testament is a sufficient example of this doctrine. In the philosophical form the names of Plato and Aristotle, both of whom resolved all things into the principle of "Mind," summarized the subject for the ancient world. The modern world has now given three hundred years to the same theme, and, however well or ill aware of the fact, has reached the same end, but wholly without the a.s.sistance of any pushing, dodging adventuress, with a little set of abstract ideas and much screaming of "Science."

Leaving lighter themes for the moment, let us venture on a brief survey of this ground.

There are just two possible ways of a.n.a.lyzing things. One way is to set the world with its particulars before the eye, look at it, and accept what we see. Then we may go to work on phenomena, dissecting and generalizing.

This is the way of physics--a road that _never_ leads to _meta_-physics.

It is the common turnpike of material science--of "positivism." In it travel all such men, say, as Dr. Ernst Haeckel: also all such men as the late Parson John Jasper, the colored preacher of Virginia, who, seeing the sun move round the earth, settled the fact in that way.

The one other way of dissecting the universe is to examine the _means_ through which things are presented to us, and thus to ascertain what effect the means may have in the production and nature of the things. This method of investigation has ultimated in what has been summed up as "Scientific Idealism."

Scientific idealism is the knowledge which every one may get even from his first lessons in optics, that things of matter--the objects of our five senses--are const.i.tuted such through the structure and action of these senses themselves. That is to say, material things--whatever we see or feel, hear, taste or smell--while existent and real--while practically what every one takes them to be--are _made so_ through _relativity_. Or, as Kant put it, every "phenomenon"--meaning every object or fact of sensation--is a "_re_-presentation"; that is, some lot of effects on our sensuous nature, bound together into a unity of them, the unity thus formed becoming an object of awareness, a "percept."

Scientific idealism does not question the given duality of the cosmos, which appears to us as what we call "mind and matter." Here are _we_; out there, indubitably apart from us, are other things, involving another source. But scientific idealism has found that this source is itself quite other than the things we connect with it, and can properly be described in this connection only as _source of impact_. It has nothing to do with matter, in the common acceptation. It enters _into_ matter, being the ultimate non-ego, the objective background, of every phenomenon. But, in all material things, this background is _transformed_ by contact with subjective sense (in us or other organisms), and "matter" is really the fusion, the compound, the third term, of these two elemental principles.

This momentous truth, though mystically reached in the old tenet of India that "matter is illusion," and though touched understandingly by Carneades in Greece, was first clearly seen, in the manner of modern science, by the remarkably solid Englishman, Thomas Hobbes.

"Qualities called sensible" [said Hobbes] "are, in the object that causeth them, but so many several motions of the matter by which it presseth our organs diversely.... Because the image in vision, consisting of color and shape, is the knowledge we have of the qualities of the object of that sense, it is no hard matter for a man to fall into this opinion, that the same color and shape are the very qualities themselves."

But, concluded Hobbes:

"The subject wherein color and image are inherent is not the object or thing seen.... There is nothing without us (really) which we call an image or color.... The said image or color is but an apparition unto us of _the motion, agitation, or alteration, which the object worketh in the brain, or spirits, or some internal substance of the head_.... As in vision, so also in conceptions that arise from the other senses, the subject of their inference is not the object, but the sentient."

When John Locke began his great "Essay" on _The Human Understanding_, and posited mind in its first estate as a pa.s.sive nonent.i.ty--a "blank tablet"--he had no vital conception of scientific idealism. But, in the patient thinking of twenty years, such a man could not fail to come upon the law, though he saw it only in part, and did not work it out. This work was carried a great way beyond him, by the acute and learned Bishop Berkeley, who showed from practical science, especially through his investigation of "vision," that nothing in the universe has any actual being, apart from a universal element, that, wherever it may be posited, can alone be called Mind.

Since Berkeley, no philosophical thinker, perhaps, of any significance, anywhere in the world, has questioned the "ideality" of "material things."

Even Reid, as the philosopher of "common sense," declared that

"No man can conceive any sensation to resemble any known quality of bodies. Nor can any man show, by any good argument, that all our sensations might not have been as they are, though no body, nor quality of body, had ever existed."

Hume's comprehension of Scientific idealism was complete to his day, and was completely stated. He said:

"'Tis not our body we perceive when we regard our limbs and members, but certain impressions which enter by the senses; so that the ascribing a real and corporeal existence to these impressions, or to their objects, is an act of the mind difficult to explain."

The idealism of recent "materialistic" philosophers, such as Herbert Spencer and the school of "Positivists," has been most carefully expressed by John Stuart Mill, in his statement that "Matter is a Permanent Possibility of Sensation."

"If" [said Mr. Mill] "I am asked whether I believe in matter, I ask whether the questioner accepts this definition of it. If he does, I believe in matter; and so do all Berkeleians. In any other sense than this I do not."

For an easy, popular view of the principle of scientific idealism, perhaps nothing has been better said than by Thomas Carlyle, in his review of Novalis.

"To a transcendentalist [says Carlyle] matter has an existence, but only as a phenomenon. Were _we_ not there, neither would _it_ be there: it is a mere relation, or rather the result of a relation between our living souls and the great First Cause; and depends for its apparent qualities on our bodily and mental organs; having itself no intrinsic qualities; being, in the common sense of the word, nothing. The tree is green and hard, not of its own natural virtue, but simply because my eye and my hand are fashioned so as to discern such and such appearances under such and such conditions. Nay, as an idealist might say, even on the most popular grounds, _must_ it not be so? Bring a sentient being with eyes a little different, fingers ten times harder than mine, and to him that thing which I call tree shall be yellow and soft, as truly as to me it is green and hard. Form the nervous structure in all points the reverse of mine, and this same tree shall not be combustible and heat-producing, but dissoluble and cold-producing; not high and convex, but deep and concave; shall simply have _all_ properties exactly the reverse of those attributed to it. There is no tree there; but only a manifestation of power from something which is not _I_. The same is true of material nature at large, of the whole visible universe, with all its movements, figures, accidents and qualities."

Scientific idealism, as far as we have gone with it, has now become one of the "_exact_" sciences--as much so as physics. It has been simply the result of continuous and innumerable experiments in natural philosophy, for three centuries. There is no need of going into these physical particulars, after they have been put into the school-books of children and explained in popular lectures. One more quotation must suffice. Mr. G.

H. Lewes, in his _Biographical History of Philosophy_, tells us that

"The radical error of those who believe that we perceive things _as they are_, consists in mistaking a metaphor for a fact, and believing that the mind is a mirror in which external objects are reflected. But, as Bacon finely says, 'The human understanding is like an _unequal mirror_ to the rays of things, which, _mixing its own nature with the nature of things, distorts and perverts them_.' We attribute heat to fire, and color to the flower, heat and color being states of our consciousness, occasioned by the fire and the flower under certain conditions. Perception is nothing more than a _state of the percipient_, a state of consciousness.... Of every change in our sensation we are conscious, and in time we learn to give definite names and forms to the causes of these changes. But in the fact of consciousness there is nothing _beyond_ consciousness. In our perceptions we are conscious only of the changes which have taken place within us.... All we can do is to identify certain _external appearances_ with certain internal changes.... We conclude, therefore, that the world _per se_ in nowise resembles the world as it appears to us. Perception is an Effect; and its truth is not the truth of _resemblance_, but of _relation_.... Light, color, sound, taste, are all states of Consciousness; what they are beyond consciousness ... we cannot know, we cannot imagine, because we can only conceive them _as_ we know them.

Light, with its myriad forms and colors--Sound, with its thousand-fold life--make Nature what Nature appears to us. But they do not exist, _as such_, apart from our consciousness; they are invest.i.tures with which we clothe the world. Nature, in her insentient solitude is an eternal Darkness--an eternal Silence."

CHAPTER XII.

FURTHER a.n.a.lYSIS OF THE UNIVERSE.

In a previous chapter, some special reference has been made to a little German professor named Immanuel Kant. He was born at Konigsberg, in 1724.

In 1781 he wrote a book which he called "The Critique of Pure Reason."

This provokingly modest t.i.tle, as already said, covered, in reality, _the a.n.a.lysis of mind and matter, time and s.p.a.ce_. It was the most far-reaching piece of purely intellectual work that had ever been given to the world.

It has split the heads of hundreds of "philosophers." Certain thinkers have fancied they have thought beyond it, and have supposed it to be laid on the shelf of "deceased philosophy." Meanwhile, we are told, the universities "are returning to the study of Kant." Better still, some of them are even beginning to understand him. Here we shall take him straight, paying no attention to any of the side issues in which he was apt to cover himself up.[56]

Kant, so learned that he was said to "know everything," was completely acquainted with the whole trend of British philosophy, from John Locke to David Hume. He was saturated, too, with the physical sciences. So his first real step in his _Critique of Pure Reason_ was to found himself on the all-inclusive law of scientific idealism. Immanuel Kant did not fool with this law. He did not test it, prove it, and then let it slip out of a loose, greasy mind, as an airy nothing of no practical consequence. He grasped it, and held it, as the bed-rock of all thought and all things. It is a pity he omitted to say so at the very first touch of his work. But he said it clearly enough when he happened to get ready. Thus, for instance:[57]

"In order to prevent any misunderstanding, it will be requisite, in the first place, to recapitulate, as clearly as possible, what our opinion is with respect to _the fundamental nature of our sensuous cognition in general_. We have intended, then, to say that all our intuition is nothing but the re-presentation of phenomena; that the things which we intuite are not in themselves the same as our re-presentations of them in intuition, nor are their relations so const.i.tuted as they appear to us; and that _if we take away the subject, or even only the subjective const.i.tution of our senses in general_, then _not only the nature and relations of objects_ in s.p.a.ce and time, _but even s.p.a.ce and time themselves disappear_.... What may be the nature of objects considered as things in themselves, and without reference to the receptivity of our sensibility, is quite unknown to us."

Again, in closing his dissection of s.p.a.ce, Kant said:

"Objects are quite unknown to us in themselves, and _what we call outward objects_ are nothing else but mere _re-presentations of our sensibility_, whose form is s.p.a.ce, but whose real correlate, the thing in itself, is not known by means of these representations, nor ever can be, but respecting which, in experience, no inquiry is ever made."

Once more:

"The faculty of sensibility not only does not present us with any indistinct and confused cognition of objects as things in themselves, but, in fact, gives us _no knowledge of these_ at all. On the contrary, as soon as we abstract in thought _our own subjective nature_, the object re-presented, with the properties ascribed to it by sensuous intuition, _entirely disappears, because it was only this subjective nature that determined the form of the object as a phenomenon_."

After awhile, under the maddening caption of "The Possibility of a Conjunction of the Manifold Representations given by Sense,"[58] our German professor virtually crowded his whole work into this one paragraph:

"The manifold content in our re-presentations can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous--in other words, is nothing but susceptibility; and the form of this intuition can exist _a priori_ in our faculty of representation, without being anything else but the mode in which the subject is affected. But the conjunction (_conjunctio_) of a manifold in intuition never can be given by the senses; it cannot therefore be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition, for it is a spontaneous act of the faculty of re-presentation. And as we must, to distinguish it from sensibility, ent.i.tle this faculty _understanding_, so all conjunction, whether conscious or unconscious, be it of the manifold in intuition, sensuous or non-sensuous, or of several conceptions, is an act of the understanding. To this act we shall give the general appellation of _synthesis_, thereby to indicate, at the same time, that _we cannot represent anything as conjoined in the object without having previously conjoined it ourselves_."

As to comprehend this paragraph is to a.n.a.lyze the universe, let us grapple with it.

Impatient Dr. Sam. Johnson once kicked a stone to refute Berkeley. Let us take that stone, as a clump of matter, and treat it with the head instead of the foot.

"The manifold content in our re-presentations," says Kant, "can be given in an intuition which is merely sensuous." This means simply that the various properties of the "re-presentation" or "intuition" called a stone are "effects on the senses." The color, the texture, the weight, the size--every one of all such "material" attributes--exist, as they are, solely by relation to _me_, or to some other being in whom is organized the element of "sense." Matter is _made_ of impact--impact between its objective background ("the noumenon" or "noumena") and some sort or degree of subjectivity. Without these two terms, their product of interaction, their third term, matter, is _not_. So "the manifold content" of a "re-presentation"--or, what is the same thing, the properties of a material object--are "nothing but susceptibility."

By "the form of intuition," Kant meant, as he has repeatedly explained, the _plural quality_ of s.p.a.ce and time. s.p.a.ce is made of _s.p.a.ces_; time of _times_; and the plural contents (always such) of matter can only exist under the plural contents of s.p.a.ce and time--that is, in sections of s.p.a.ce and sequences of time, these sections and sequences being the intrinsic character, the divisible quality, the essential "form" of s.p.a.ce and time as total units or completed things. And the nature of s.p.a.ce and time need not be anything more _objective_ than the nature of matter in general, but can be derived, too, from "the mode in which the subject is affected."

"But," says Kant, "_all conjunction_" is "an act of the understanding,"

and "can not be contained in the pure form of sensuous intuition"; by which he means that time could never be a conjunct of times, s.p.a.ce a conjunct of s.p.a.ces, nor a stone the conjunct of its properties--each a "synthesis" of a "manifold content"--unless made so by the synthetical unity of _a priori_ mind.

Kant attributes "_unconscious_" action to the "_understanding_"--the unconscious action of "conjunction" or "synthesis." His phrase has been a perpetual stumbling-block to his readers, but he meant exactly what he said. Unconscious mental synthesis is what he afterward designated as "the synthesis of _apprehension_."

"By the term _synthesis_ of apprehension [said he], I understand the combination of the manifold in an empirical intuition, whereby perception, that is, empirical consciousness of the intuition (as phenomenon), is possible."

Kant talks of "making the empirical intuition of a house into a perception, by apprehension of the manifold contained therein," and says that "the _necessary unity of s.p.a.ce_ and of my _external sensuous intuition_ lies at the foundation of this act." The "manifold" contained in an "empirical intuition"--take the stone we have used for an example--is simply the diversity of "properties," const.i.tuting the object--the color, texture, size, weight, and the rest of them; and these properties are "effects of sense." Every one of them is a relation to subjectivity, a result of impact _on_ subjectivity, and is in the _object_ only as reflecting or _re_-presenting there the sensuous nature of a _subject_. But these various "effects on various senses," these merely subjective separates--how do they _get united_ into _one thing_? What const.i.tutes the unity of sensuous manifolds? Every phenomenon being an essential plurality--a lot of "sense-effects"--what closes together the various effects on various human senses, called the properties of a stone, into the one phenomenal object, the stone itself. To this end there must be some common subjective ground of those subjective things, "effects on sense." There must be some subjective unity in which those subjective pluralities all merge, for only as _merged_ do they get to be an _object_.

Now, a common subjective ground of various effects on various senses can only be a common _awareness of them_--a _synthetical unity of apprehension_, or just instinctive, automatic consciousness in the germ.

This must be common to all the senses together, and to each sense separately. What, for example, is seeing, but the simple awareness of sight? What is touch, but the simple awareness of feeling? What is any "intuition," which means any taking-in of any phenomenon, but a common awareness, however rudimental or developed, of some conjoined diversity of effects on sense?

It must be added here, as vital to the full comprehension of the genesis of matter, that not only every material object, like our example, the stone, is made of essential plurality of sense-effects, but that _every separate property_ of an object is also made of like plurality. No object, and no property of an object, is, or can be, single, unal, or, in other words, _anything_, until constructed so, in sense, by the "unconscious understanding" thereof--the synthetical unity of instinctive, automatic "apprehension." To realize this fact, it is only necessary to remember that every property of anything, say the hardness of a stone, is a compound relation between the impact of some ultimate non-ego on the sense of touch, and the peculiar nature of the sense itself: so the property of hardness must contain _essential diversity_, something from each of _two fundamental sources_. As Aristotle, from his ontological investigations, found that matter, if regarded as an absolute independence--an unrelated thing in itself--is _no thing_, but only chaotic indeterminateness--formless "potentiality"--so Kant, from his psychological inquiry--his dissection of phenomena as existent through perception--found the same truth in deeper significance. The _entire principle of unity_, Whether in a feeling, a thought, a material object, or the universe as a whole, _can only exist through the principle of mind_.

Here is the very bottom of the discoveries of Kant, and the basis, also, of all things.