The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy
other; nor does true philosophy ever mean by identity capacity for
substitution." This sounds suspiciously like the good and the naughty
infinite, or rather like the mysteries of the Trinity and the
Eucharist. To the unsentimental mind there are but two sorts of
identity,--total identity and partial identity. Where the identity is
total, the things can be substituted wholly for one another. Where
substitution is impossible, it must be that the identity is incomplete.
It is the duty of the student then to ascertain the exact _quid,
secundum_ which it obtains, as we have tried to do above. Even the
Catholic will tell you that when he believes in the {286} identity of
the wafer with Christ's body, he does not mean in all respects,--so
that he might use it to exhibit muscular fibre, or a cook make it smell
like baked meat in the oven. He means that in the one sole respect of
nourishing his being in a certain way, it is identical with and can be
substituted for the very body of his Redeemer.
'The knowledge of opposites is one,' is one of the hegelian first
principles, of which the preceding are perhaps only derivatives. Here
again Hegelism takes 'knowledge' _simpliciter_, and substituting it for
knowledge in a particular respect, avails itself of the confusion to
cover other respects never originally implied. When the knowledge of a
thing is given us, we no doubt think that the thing may or must have an
opposite. This postulate of something opposite we may call a
'knowledge of the opposite' if we like; but it is a knowledge of it in
only that one single respect, that it is something opposite. No number
of opposites to a quality we have never directly experienced could ever
lead us positively to infer what that quality is. There is a jolt
between the negation of them and the actual positing of it in its
proper shape, that twenty logics of Hegel harnessed abreast cannot
drive us smoothly over.
The use of the maxim 'All determination is negation' is the fattest and
most full-blown application of the method of refusing to distinguish.
Taken in its vague confusion, it probably does more than anything else
to produce the sort of flicker and dazzle which are the first mental
conditions for the reception of Hegel's system. The word 'negation'
taken _simpliciter_ is treated as if it covered an indefinite number of
{287} _secundums_, culminating in the very peculiar one of
self-negation. Whence finally the conclusion is drawn that assertions
are universally self-contradictory. As this is an important matter, it
seems worth while to treat it a little minutely.
When I measure out a pint, say of milk, and so determine it, what do I
do? I virtually make two assertions regarding it,--it is this pint; it
is not those other gallons. One of these is an affirmation, the other
a negation. Both have a common subject; but the predicates being
mutually exclusive, the two assertions lie beside each other in endless
peace.
I may with propriety be said to make assertions more remote
still,--assertions of which those other gallons are the subject. As it
is not they, so are they not the pint which it is. The determination
"this is the pint" carries with it the negation,--"those are not the
pints." Here we have the same predicate; but the subjects are
exclusive of each other, so there is again endless peace. In both
couples of propositions negation and affirmation are _secundum aliud_:
this is _a_; this is n't not-_a_. This kind of negation involved in
determination cannot possibly be what Hegel wants for his purposes.
The table is not the chair, the fireplace is not the cupboard,--these
are literal expressions of the law of identity and contradiction, those
principles of the abstracting and separating understanding for which
Hegel has so sovereign a contempt, and which his logic is meant to
supersede.
And accordingly Hegelians pursue the subject further, saying there is
in every determination an element of real conflict. Do you not in
determining the milk to be this pint exclude it forever from the chance
of being those gallons, frustrate it from {288} expansion? And so do
you not equally exclude them from the being which it now maintains as
its own?
Assuredly if you had been hearing of a land flowing with milk and
honey, and had gone there with unlimited expectations of the rivers the
milk would fill; and if you found there was but this single pint in the
whole country,--the determination of the pint would exclude another
determination which your mind had previously made of the milk. There
would be a real conflict resulting in the victory of one side. The
rivers would be negated by the single pint being affirmed; and as
rivers and pint are affirmed of the same milk (first as supposed and
then as found), the contradiction would be complete.
But it is a contradiction that can never by any chance occur in real
nature or being. It can only occur between a false representation of a
being and the true idea of the being when actually cognized. The first
got into a place where it had no rights and had to be ousted. But in
_rerum naturâ_ things do not get into one another's logical places.
The gallons first spoken of never say, "We are the pint;" the pint
never says, "I am the gallons." It never tries to expand; and so there
is no chance for anything to exclude or negate it. It thus remains
affirmed absolutely.
Can it be believed in the teeth of these elementary truths that the
principle _determinatio negatio_ is held throughout Hegel to imply an
active contradiction, conflict, and exclusion? Do the horse-cars
jingling outside negate me writing in this room? Do I, reader, negate
you? Of course, if I say, "Reader, we are two, and therefore I am
two," I negate you, for I am actually thrusting a part into the seat of
the whole. {289} The orthodox logic expresses the fallacy by saying
the we is taken by me distributively instead of collectively; but as
long as I do not make this blunder, and am content with my part, we all
are safe. In _rerum naturâ_, parts remain parts. Can you imagine one
position in space trying to get into the place of another position and
having to be 'contradicted' by that other? Can you imagine your
thought of an object trying to dispossess the real object from its
being, and so being negated by it? The great, the sacred law of
partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel
cannot possibly understand. All or nothing is his one idea. For him
each point of space, of time, each feeling in the ego, each quality of
being, is clamoring, "I am the all,--there is nought else but me."
This clamor is its essence, which has to be negated in another act
which gives it its true determination. What there is of affirmative in
this determination is thus the mere residuum left from the negation by
others of the negation it originally applied to them.
But why talk of residuum? The Kilkenny cats of fable could leave a
residuum in the shape of their undevoured tails. But the Kilkenny cats
of existence as it appears in the pages of Hegel are all-devouring, and
leave no residuum. Such is the unexampled fury of their onslaught that
they get clean out of themselves and into each other, nay more, pass
right through each other, and then "return into themselves" ready for
another round, as insatiate, but as inconclusive, as the one that went
before.
If I characterized Hegel's own mood as _hubris_, the insolence of
excess, what shall I say of the mood he ascribes to being? Man makes
the gods in his {290} image; and Hegel, in daring to insult the
spotless _sôphrosune_ of space and time, the bound-respecters, in
branding as strife that law of sharing under whose sacred keeping, like
a strain of music, like an odor of incense (as Emerson says), the dance
of the atoms goes forward still, seems to me but to manifest his own
deformity.
This leads me to animadvert on an erroneous inference which hegelian
idealism makes from the form of the negative judgment. Every negation,
it says, must be an intellectual act. Even the most _naïf_ realism
will hardly pretend that the non-table as such exists _in se_ after the
same fashion as the table does. But table and non-table, since they
are given to our thought together, must be consubstantial. Try to make
the position or affirmation of the table as simple as you can, it is
also the negation of the non-table; and thus positive being itself
seems after all but a function of intelligence, like negation.
Idealism is proved, realism is unthinkable. Now I have not myself the
least objection to idealism,--an hypothesis which voluminous
considerations make plausible, and whose difficulties may be cleared
away any day by new discriminations or discoveries. But I object to
proving by these patent ready-made _à priori_ methods that which can
only be the fruit of a wide and patient induction. For the truth is
that our affirmations and negations do not stand on the same footing at
all, and are anything but consubstantial. An affirmation says
something about an objective existence. A negation says something
_about an affirmation_,--namely, that it is false. There are no
negative predicates or falsities in nature. Being makes no false
hypotheses that have {291} to be contradicted. The only denials she
can be in any way construed to perform are denials of our errors. This
shows plainly enough that denial must be of something mental, since the
thing denied is always a fiction. "The table is not the chair"
supposes the speaker to have been playing with the false notion that it
may have been the chair. But affirmation may perfectly well be of
something having no such necessary and constitutive relation to
thought. Whether it really is of such a thing is for harder
considerations to decide.
If idealism be true, the great question that presents itself is whether
its truth involve the necessity of an infinite, unitary, and omniscient
consciousness, or whether a republic of semi-detached consciousnesses
will do,--consciousnesses united by a certain common fund of
representations, but each possessing a private store which the others
do not share. Either hypothesis is to me conceivable. But whether the
egos be one or many, the _nextness_ of representations to one another
within them is the principle of unification of the universe. To be
thus consciously next to some other representation is the condition to
which each representation must submit, under penalty of being excluded
from this universe, and like Lord Dundreary's bird 'flocking all
alone,' and forming a separate universe by itself. But this is only a
condition of which the representations _partake_; it leaves all their
other determinations undecided. To say, because representation _b_
cannot be in the same universe with _a_ without being _a's neighbor_;
that therefore _a_ possesses, involves, or necessitates _b_, hide and
hair, flesh and fell, all appurtenances and belongings,--is {292} only
the silly hegelian all-or-nothing insatiateness once more.
Hegel's own logic, with all the senseless hocus-pocus of its triads,
utterly fails to prove his position. The only evident compulsion which
representations exert upon one another is compulsion to submit to the
conditions of entrance into the same universe with them--the conditions
of continuity, of selfhood, space, and time--under penalty of being
excluded. But what this universe shall be is a matter of fact which we
cannot decide till we know what representations _have_ submitted to
these its sole conditions. The conditions themselves impose no further
requirements. In short, the notion that real contingency and ambiguity
may be features of the real world is a perfectly unimpeachable