The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
barren union of all things in one substance, on the one hand; that of
Hume, with his equally barren 'looseness and separateness' of
everything, on the other,--neither philosopher owning any strict and
systematic disciples to-day, each being to posterity a warning as well
as a stimulus,--show us that the only possible philosophy must be a
compromise between an abstract monotony and a concrete heterogeneity.
But the only way to mediate between diversity and unity is to class the
diverse items as cases of a common essence which you discover in them.
Classification of things into extensive 'kinds' is thus the first step;
and classification of their relations and conduct into extensive 'laws'
is the last step, in their philosophic unification. A completed
theoretic philosophy can thus never be anything more than a completed
classification of the world's ingredients; and its results must always
be abstract, since the basis of every classification is the abstract
essence embedded in the living fact,--the rest of the living fact being
for the time ignored by the classifier. This means that none of our
explanations are complete. They subsume things under heads wider or
more familiar; but the last heads, whether of things or of their
connections, are mere abstract genera, data which we just find in
things and write down.
When, for example, we think that we have rationally explained the
connection of the facts _A_ and _B_ by classing both under their common
attribute _x_, it is obvious that we have really explained only so much
of these items as _is x_. To explain the connection of choke-damp and
suffocation by the lack of oxygen is {68} to leave untouched all the
other peculiarities both of choke-damp and of suffocation,--such as
convulsions and agony on the one hand, density and explosibility on the
other. In a word, so far as _A_ and _B_ contain _l_, _m_, _n_, and
_o_, _p_, _q,_ respectively, in addition to _x_, they are not explained
by _x_. Each additional particularity makes its distinct appeal. A
single explanation of a fact only explains it from a single point of
view. The entire fact is not accounted for until each and all of its
characters have been classed with their likes elsewhere. To apply this
now to the case of the universe, we see that the explanation of the
world by molecular movements explains it only so far as it actually
_is_ such movements. To invoke the 'Unknowable' explains only so much
as is unknowable, 'Thought' only so much as is thought, 'God' only so
much as is God. _Which_ thought? _Which_ God?--are questions that
have to be answered by bringing in again the residual data from which
the general term was abstracted. All those data that cannot be
analytically identified with the attribute invoked as universal
principle, remain as independent kinds or natures, associated
empirically with the said attribute but devoid of rational kinship with
it.
Hence the unsatisfactoriness of all our speculations. On the one hand,
so far as they retain any multiplicity in their terms, they fail to get
us out of the empirical sand-heap world; on the other, so far as they
eliminate multiplicity the practical man despises their empty
barrenness. The most they can say is that the elements of the world
are such and such, and that each is identical with itself wherever
found; but the question Where is it found? the practical man is left to
answer by his own wit. Which, of all the {69} essences, shall here and
now be held the essence of this concrete thing, the fundamental
philosophy never attempts to decide. We are thus led to the conclusion
that the simple classification of things is, on the one hand, the best
possible theoretic philosophy, but is, on the other, a most miserable
and inadequate substitute for the fulness of the truth. It is a
monstrous abridgment of life, which, like all abridgments is got by the
absolute loss and casting out of real matter. This is why so few human
beings truly care for philosophy. The particular determinations which
she ignores are the real matter exciting needs, quite as potent and
authoritative as hers. What does the moral enthusiast care for
philosophical ethics? Why does the _AEsthetik_ of every German
philosopher appear to the artist an abomination of desolation?
Grau, theurer Freund, ist alle Theorie
Und grün des Lebens goldner Baum.
The entire man, who feels all needs by turns, will take nothing as an
equivalent for life but the fulness of living itself. Since the
essences of things are as a matter of fact disseminated through the
whole extent of time and space, it is in their spread-outness and
alternation that he will enjoy them. When weary of the concrete clash
and dust and pettiness, he will refresh himself by a bath in the
eternal springs, or fortify himself by a look at the immutable natures.
But he will only be a visitor, not a dweller in the region; he will
never carry the philosophic yoke upon his shoulders, and when tired of
the gray monotony of her problems and insipid spaciousness of her
results, will always escape gleefully into the teeming and dramatic
richness of the concrete world.
{70}
So our study turns back here to its beginning. Every way of
classifying a thing is but a way of handling it for some particular
purpose. Conceptions, 'kinds,' are teleological instruments. No
abstract concept can be a valid substitute for a concrete reality
except with reference to a particular interest in the conceiver. The
interest of theoretic rationality, the relief of identification, is but
one of a thousand human purposes. When others rear their heads, it
must pack up its little bundle and retire till its turn recurs. The
exaggerated dignity and value that philosophers have claimed for their
solutions is thus greatly reduced. The only virtue their theoretic
conception need have is simplicity, and a simple conception is an
equivalent for the world only so far as the world is simple,--the world
meanwhile, whatever simplicity it may harbor, being also a mightily
complex affair. Enough simplicity remains, however, and enough urgency
in our craving to reach it, to make the theoretic function one of the
most invincible of human impulses. The quest of the fewest elements of
things is an ideal that some will follow, as long as there are men to
think at all.
But suppose the goal attained. Suppose that at last we have a system
unified in the sense that has been explained. Our world can now be
conceived simply, and our mind enjoys the relief. Our universal
concept has made the concrete chaos rational. But now I ask, Can that
which is the ground of rationality in all else be itself properly
called rational? It would seem at first sight that it might. One is
tempted at any rate to say that, since the craving for rationality is
appeased by the identification of one {71} thing with another, a datum
which left nothing else outstanding might quench that craving
definitively, or be rational _in se_. No otherness being left to annoy
us, we should sit down at peace. In other words, as the theoretic
tranquillity of the boor results from his spinning no further
considerations about his chaotic universe, so any datum whatever
(provided it were simple, clear, and ultimate) ought to banish puzzle
from the universe of the philosopher and confer peace, inasmuch as
there would then be for him absolutely no further considerations to
spin.
This in fact is what some persons think. Professor Bain says,--
"A difficulty is solved, a mystery unriddled, when it can be shown to
resemble something else; to be an example of a fact already known.
Mystery is isolation, exception, or it may be apparent contradiction:
the resolution of the mystery is found in assimilation, identity,
fraternity. When all things are assimilated, so far as assimilation
can go, so far as likeness holds, there is an end to explanation; there
is an end to what the mind can do, or can intelligently desire.... The
path of science as exhibited in modern ages is toward generality, wider
and wider, until we reach the highest, the widest laws of every
department of things; there explanation is finished, mystery ends,
perfect vision is gained."
But, unfortunately, this first answer will not hold. Our mind is so
wedded to the process of seeing an _other_ beside every item of its
experience, that when the notion of an absolute datum is presented to
it, it goes through its usual procedure and remains pointing at the
void beyond, as if in that lay further matter for contemplation. In
short, it spins for itself the further positive consideration of a
nonentity {72} enveloping the being of its datum; and as that leads
nowhere, back recoils the thought toward its datum again. But there is
no natural bridge between nonentity and this particular datum, and the
thought stands oscillating to and fro, wondering "Why was there
anything but nonentity; why just this universal datum and not another?"
and finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. Indeed, Bain's words are so
untrue that in reflecting men it is just when the attempt to fuse the
manifold into a single totality has been most successful, when the
conception of the universe as a unique fact is nearest its perfection,
that the craving for further explanation, the ontological
wonder-sickness, arises in its extremest form. As Schopenhauer says,
"The uneasiness which keeps the never-resting clock of metaphysics in
motion, is the consciousness that the non-existence of this world is
just as possible as its existence."
The notion of nonentity may thus be called the parent of the
philosophic craving in its subtilest and profoundest sense. Absolute
existence is absolute mystery, for its relations with the nothing
remain unmediated to our understanding. One philosopher only has
pretended to throw a logical bridge over this chasm. Hegel, by trying
to show that nonentity and concrete being are linked together by a
series of identities of a synthetic kind, binds everything conceivable
into a unity, with no outlying notion to disturb the free rotary
circulation of the mind within its bounds. Since such unchecked
movement gives the feeling of rationality, he must be held, if he has
succeeded, to have eternally and absolutely quenched all rational
demands.
But for those who deem Hegel's heroic effort to {73} have failed,
nought remains but to confess that when all things have been unified to
the supreme degree, the notion of a possible other than the actual may
still haunt our imagination and prey upon our system. The bottom of
being is left logically opaque to us, as something which we simply come
upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and
wonder as little as possible. The philosopher's logical tranquillity
is thus in essence no other than the boor's. They differ only as to
the point at which each refuses to let further considerations upset the
absoluteness of the data he assumes. The boor does so immediately, and
is liable at any moment to the ravages of many kinds of doubt. The
philosopher does not do so till unity has been reached, and is
warranted against the inroads of those considerations, but only
practically, not essentially, secure from the blighting breath of the
ultimate Why? If he cannot exorcise this question, he must ignore or
blink it, and, assuming the data of his system as something given, and
the gift as ultimate, simply proceed to a life of contemplation or of
action based on it. There is no doubt that this acting on an opaque
necessity is accompanied by a certain pleasure. See the reverence of
Carlyle for brute fact: "There is an infinite significance in fact."
"Necessity," says Dühring, and he means not rational but given