The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
The parts seem, as Hegel has said, to be shot out of a pistol at us.
Each asserts itself as a simple brute fact, uncalled for by the rest,
which, so far as we can see, might even make a better system without
it. Arbitrary, foreign, jolting, discontinuous--are the adjectives by
which we are tempted to describe it. And yet from out the bosom of it
a partial ideality constantly arises which keeps alive our aspiration
that the whole may some day be construed in ideal form. Not only do
the materials lend themselves under certain circumstances to aesthetic
manipulation, but underlying their worst disjointedness are three great
continua in which for each of us reason's ideal is actually reached. I
mean the continua of memory or personal consciousness, of time and of
space. In {265} these great matrices of all we know, we are absolutely
at home. The things we meet are many, and yet are one; each is itself,
and yet all belong together; continuity reigns, yet individuality is
not lost.
Consider, for example, space. It is a unit. No force can in any way
break, wound, or tear it. It has no joints between which you can pass
your amputating knife, for it penetrates the knife and is not split,
Try to make a hole in space by annihilating an inch of it. To make a
hole you must drive something else through. But what can you drive
through space except what is itself spatial?
But notwithstanding it is this very paragon of unity, space in its
parts contains an infinite variety, and the unity and the variety do
not contradict each other, for they obtain in different respects. The
one is the whole, the many are the parts. Each part is one again, but
only one fraction; and part lies beside part in absolute nextness, the
very picture of peace and non-contradiction. It is true that the space
between two points both unites and divides them, just as the bar of a
dumb-bell both unites and divides the two balls. But the union and the
division are not _secundum idem_: it divides them by keeping them out
of the space between, it unites them by keeping them out of the space
beyond; so the double function presents no inconsistency.
Self-contradiction in space could only ensue if one part tried to oust
another from its position; but the notion of such an absurdity vanishes
in the framing, and cannot stay to vex the mind.[2] Beyond the parts
we see or think at any {266} given time extend further parts; but the
beyond is homogeneous with what is embraced, and follows the same law;
so that no surprises, no foreignness, can ever emerge from space's womb.
Thus with space our intelligence is absolutely intimate; it is
rationality and transparency incarnate. The same may be said of the
ego and of time. But if for simplicity's sake we ignore them, we may
truly say that when we desiderate rational knowledge of the world the
standard set by our knowledge of space is what governs our desire.[3]
Cannot the breaks, the jolts, the margin of foreignness, be exorcised
from other things and leave them unitary like the space they fill?
Could this be done, the philosophic kingdom of heaven would be at hand.
But the moment we turn to the material qualities {267} of being, we
find the continuity ruptured on every side. A fearful jolting begins.
Even if we simplify the world by reducing it to its mechanical bare
poles,--atoms and their motions,--the discontinuity is bad enough. The
laws of clash, the effects of distance upon attraction and repulsion,
all seem arbitrary collocations of data. The atoms themselves are so
many independent facts, the existence of any one of which in no wise
seems to involve the existence of the rest. We have not banished
discontinuity, we have only made it finer-grained. And to get even
that degree of rationality into the universe we have had to butcher a
great part of its contents. The secondary qualities we stripped off
from the reality and swept into the dust-bin labelled 'subjective
illusion,' still _as such_ are facts, and must themselves be
rationalized in some way.
But when we deal with facts believed to be purely subjective, we are
farther than ever from the goal. We have not now the refuge of
distinguishing between the 'reality' and its appearances. Facts of
thought being the only facts, differences of thought become the only
differences, and identities of thought the only identities there are.
Two thoughts that seem different are different to all eternity. We can
no longer speak of heat and light being reconciled in any _tertium
quid_ like wave-motion. For motion is motion, and light is light, and
heat heat forever, and their discontinuity is as absolute as their
existence. Together with the other attributes and things we conceive,
they make up Plato's realm of immutable ideas. Neither _per se_ calls
for the other, hatches it out, is its 'truth,' creates it, or has any
sort of inward community with it except that of being comparable {268}
in an ego and found more or less differing, or more or less resembling,
as the case may be. The world of qualities is a world of things almost
wholly discontinuous _inter se_. Each only says, "I am that I am," and
each says it on its own account and with absolute monotony. The
continuities of which they _partake_, in Plato's phrase, the ego,
space, and time, are for most of them the only grounds of union they
possess.
It might seem as if in the mere 'partaking' there lay a contradiction
of the discontinuity. If the white must partake of space, the heat of
time, and so forth,--do not whiteness and space, heat and time,
mutually call for or help to create each other?
Yes; a few such _à priori_ couplings must be admitted. They are the
axioms: no feeling except as occupying some space and time, or as a
moment in some ego; no motion but of something moved; no thought but of
an object; no time without a previous time,--and the like. But they
are limited in number, and they obtain only between excessively broad
genera of concepts, and leave quite undetermined what the
specifications of those genera shall be. What feeling shall fill
_this_ time, what substance execute _this_ motion, what qualities
combine in _this_ being, are as much unanswered questions as if the
metaphysical axioms never existed at all.
The existence of such syntheses as they are does then but slightly
mitigate the jolt, jolt, jolt we get when we pass over the facts of the
world. Everywhere indeterminate variables, subject only to these few
vague enveloping laws, independent in all besides.--such seems the
truth.
In yet another way, too, ideal and real are so far {269} apart that
their conjunction seems quite hopeless. To eat our cake and have it,
to lose our soul and save it, to enjoy the physical privileges of
selfishness and the moral luxury of altruism at the same time, would be
the ideal. But the real offers us these terms in the shape of mutually
exclusive alternatives of which only one can be true at once; so that
we must choose, and in choosing murder one possibility. The wrench is
absolute: "Either--or!" Just as whenever I bet a hundred dollars on an
event, there comes an instant when I am a hundred dollars richer or
poorer without any intermediate degrees passed over; just as my
wavering between a journey to Portland or to New York does not carry me
from Cambridge in a resultant direction in which both motions are
compounded, say to Albany, but at a given moment results in the
conjunction of reality in all its fulness for one alternative and
impossibility in all its fulness for the other,--so the bachelor joys
are utterly lost from the face of being for the married man, who must
henceforward find his account in something that is not them but is good
enough to make him forget them; so the careless and irresponsible
living in the sunshine, the 'unbuttoning after supper and sleeping upon
benches in the afternoon,' are stars that have set upon the path of him
who in good earnest makes himself a moralist. The transitions are
abrupt, absolute, truly shot out of a pistol; for while many
possibilities are called, the few that are chosen are chosen in all
their sudden completeness.
Must we then think that the world that fills space and time can yield
us no acquaintance of that high and perfect type yielded by empty space
and time themselves? Is what unity there is in the world {270} mainly
derived from the fact that the world is _in_ space and time and
'partakes' of them? Can no vision of it forestall the facts of it, or
know from some fractions the others before the others have arrived?
Are there real logically indeterminate possibilities which forbid there
being any equivalent for the happening of it all but the happening
itself? Can we gain no anticipatory assurance that what is to come
will have no strangeness? Is there no substitute, in short, for life
but the living itself in all its long-drawn weary length and breadth
and thickness?
In the negative reply to all these questions, a modest common-sense
finds no difficulty in acquiescing. To such a way of thinking the
notion of 'partaking' has a deep and real significance. Whoso partakes
of a thing enjoys his share, and comes into contact with the thing and
its other partakers. But he claims no more. His share in no wise
negates the thing or their share; nor does it preclude his possession
of reserved and private powers with which they have nothing to do, and
which are not all absorbed in the mere function of sharing. Why may
not the world be a sort of republican banquet of this sort, where all
the qualities of being respect one another's personal sacredness, yet
sit at the common table of space and time?
To me this view seems deeply probable. Things cohere, but the act of
cohesion itself implies but few conditions, and leaves the rest of
their qualifications indeterminate. As the first three notes of a tune
comport many endings, all melodious, but the tune is not named till a
particular ending has actually come,--so the parts actually known of
the universe may comport many ideally possible complements. But as
{271} the facts are not the complements, so the knowledge of the one is
not the knowledge of the other in anything but the few necessary
elements of which all must partake in order to be together at all.
Why, if one act of knowledge could from one point take in the total
perspective, with all mere possibilities abolished, should there ever
have been anything more than that act? Why duplicate it by the tedious
unrolling, inch by inch, of the foredone reality? No answer seems
possible. On the other hand, if we stipulate only a partial community
of partially independent powers, we see perfectly why no one part
controls the whole view, but each detail must come and be actually
given, before, in any special sense, it can be said to be determined at
all. This is the moral view, the view that gives to other powers the
same freedom it would have itself,--not the ridiculous 'freedom to do
right,' which in my mouth can only mean the freedom to do as _I_ think
right, but the freedom to do as _they_ think right, or wrong either.
After all, what accounts do the nether-most bounds of the universe owe
to me? By what insatiate conceit and lust of intellectual despotism do
I arrogate the right to know their secrets, and from my philosophic
throne to play the only airs they shall march to, as if I were the
Lord's anointed? Is not my knowing them at all a gift and not a right?
And shall it be given before they are given? _Data! gifts!_ something
to be thankful for! It is a gift that we can approach things at all,
and, by means of the time and space of which our minds and they
partake, alter our actions so as to meet them.
There are 'bounds of ord'nance' set for all things, where they must