,a ,,pluralistic ,,universe ,hibbert ,lectures at ,manchester ,college on the ,present ,situation in ,philosophy ,,by ,,william ,,james #aiji ,,contents ,,lecture ,i ,,the ,,types ,,of ,,philosophic ,,thinking #a ,our age is growing philosophical again1 #c4 ,change of tone since #ahfj1 #d4 ,empiricism and ,rationalism defined1 #g4 ,the process of ,philosophizing3 ,philosophers choose some part of the world to interpret the whole by1 #h4 ,they seek to make it seem less strange1 #aa4 ,their temperamental differences1 #ab4 ,their systems must be reasoned out1 #ac4 ,their tendency to over-technicality1 #ae4 ,excess of this in ,germany1 #ag4 ,the type of vision is the important thing in a philosopher1 #bj4 ,primitive thought1 #ba4 ,spiritualism and ,materialism3 ,spiritualism shows two types1 #bc4 ,theism and ,pantheism1 #bd4 ,theism makes a duality of ,man and ,god1 and leaves ,man an outsider1 #be4 ,pantheism identifies ,man with ,god1 #bi4 ,the contemporary tendency is towards ,pantheism1 #cj4 ,legitimacy of our demand to be essential in the ,universe1 #cc4 ,pluralism versus ,monism3 ,the 'each- form' and the 'all-form' of representing the world1 #cd4 ,professor ,jacks quoted1 #ce4 ,absolute ,idealism characterized1 #cf4 ,peculiarities of the finite consciousness which the ,absolute cannot share1 #ch4 ,the finite still remains outside of absolute reality1 #dj4 ,,lecture ,,ii ,,monistic ,,idealism #da ,recapitulation1 #dc4 ,radical ,pluralism is to be the thesis of these lectures1 #dd4 ,most philosophers contemn it1 #de4 ,foreignness to us of ,bradley's ,absolute1 #df4 ,spinoza and 'quatenus1'#dg4 ,difficulty of sympathizing with the ,absolute1 #dh4 ,idealistic attempt to interpret it1 #ej4 ,professor ,jones quoted1 #eb4 ,absolutist refutations of ,pluralism1 #ed4 ,criticism of ,lotze's proof of ,monism by the analysis of what interaction involves1 #ee4 ,vicious intellectualism defined1 #fj4 ,royce's alternative3 either the complete disunion or the absolute union of things1 #fa4 ,bradley's dialectic difficulties with relations1 #fi4 ,inefficiency of the ,absolute as a rationalizing remedy1 #ga4 ,tendency of ,rationalists to fly to extremes1 #gd4 ,the question of 'external' relations1 #gi4 ,transition to ,hegel1 #ia4 ,,lecture ,,iii ,,hegel ,,and ,,his ,,method #hc ,hegel's influence4 #he4 ,the type of his vision is impressionistic1 #hg4 ,the 'dialectic' element in reality1 #hh4 ,pluralism involves possible conflicts among things1 #ij4 ,hegel explains conflicts by the mutual contradictoriness of concepts1 #ia4 ,criticism of his attempt to transcend ordinary logic1 #ib4 ,examples of the 'dialectic' constitution of things1 #ie4 ,the rationalistic ideal3 propositions self-securing by means of double negation1 #aja4 ,sublimity of the conception1 #ajd4 ,criticism of ,hegel's account3 it involves vicious intellectualism1 #aje4 ,hegel is a seer rather than a reasoner1 #ajg4 ',the ,absolute' and ',god' are two different notions1 #aaj4 ,utility of the ,absolute in conferring mental peace1 #aad4 ,but this is counterbalanced by the peculiar paradoxes which it introduces into philosophy1 #aaf4 ,leibnitz and ,lotze on the 'fall' involved in the creation of the finite1 #aai4 ,joachim on the fall of truth into error1 #aba4 ,the world of the absolutist cannot be perfect1 #abc4 ,pluralistic conclusions1 #abe4 ,,lecture ,,iv ,,concerning ,,fechner #aca ,superhuman consciousness does not necessarily imply an absolute mind1 #acd4 ,thinness of contemporary absolutism1 #ace4 ,the tone of ,fechner's empiricist pantheism contrasted with that of the rationalistic sort1 #add4 ,fechner's life1 #ade4 ,his vision1 the 'daylight view1' #aej4 ,his way of reasoning by analogy1 #aea4 ,the whole universe animated1 #aeb4 ,his monistic formula is unessential1 #aec4 ,the ,earth-,soul1 #aef4 ,its differences from our souls1 #afj4 ,the earth as an angel1 #afd4 ,the ,plant-,soul1 #afe4 ,the logic used by ,fechner1 #afh4 ,his theory of immortality1 #agj4 ,the 'thickness' of his imagination1 #agc4 ,inferiority of the ordinary transcendentalist pantheism1 to his vision1 #agd4 ,,lecture ,v ,,the ,,compounding ,,of ,,consciousness #agi ,the assumption that states of mind may compound themselves1 #aha4 ,this assumption is held in common by naturalistic psychology1 by transcendental idealism1 and by ,fechner1 #ahd4 ,criticism of it by the present writer in a former book1 #ahh4 ,physical combinations1 so-called1 cannot be invoked as analogous1 #aid4 ,nevertheless1 combination must be postulated among the parts of the ,universe1 #aig4 ,the logical objections to admitting it1 #aih4 ,rationalistic treatment of the question brings us to an impasse1 #bjh4 ,a radical breach with intellectualism is required1 #bab4 ,transition to ,bergson's philosophy1 #bad4 ,abusive use of concepts1 #bai4 ,,lecture ,,vi ,,bergson ,,and ,,his ,,critique ,,of ,,intellectualism #bbc ,professor ,bergson's personality1 #bbe4 ,achilles and the tortoise1 #bbh4 ,not a sophism1 #bbi4 ,we make motion unintelligible when we treat it by static concepts1 #bcc4 ,conceptual treatment is nevertheless of immense practical use1 #bce4 ,the traditional rationalism gives an essentially static universe1 #bcg4 ,intolerableness of the intellectualist view1 #bdj4 ,no rationalist account is possible of action1 change1 or immediate life1 #bdd4 ,the function of concepts is practical rather than theoretical1 #bdg4 ,bergson remands us to intuition or sensational experience for the understanding of how life makes itself go1 #beb4 ,what ,bergson means by this1 #bee4 ,manyness in oneness must be admitted1 #bef4 ,what really exists is not things made1 but things in the making1 #bfc4 ,bergson's originality1 #bfd4 ,impotence of intellectualist logic to define a universe where change is continuous1 #bfg4 ,livingly1 things are their own others1 so that there is a sense in which ,hegel's logic is true1 #bgj4 ,,lecture ,,vii ,,the ,,continuity ,,of ,,experience #bge ,green's critique of ,sensationalism1 #bgh4 ,relations are as immediately felt as terms are1 #bhj4 ,the union of things is given in the immediate flux1 not in any conceptual reason that overcomes the flux's aboriginal incoherence1 #bhb4 ,the minima of experience as vehicles of continuity1 #bhd4 ,fallacy of the objections to self-compounding1 #bhf4 ,the concrete units of experience are 'their own others1' #bhg4 ,reality is confluent from next to next1 #bij4 ,intellectualism must be sincerely renounced1 #bia4 ,the ,absolute is only an hypothesis1 #bib4 ,fechner's ,god is not the ,absolute1 #bih4 ,the ,absolute solves no intellectualist difficulty1 #bif4 ,does superhuman consciousness probably exist8 #bih4 ,,lecture ,,viii ,,conclusions #cja ,specifically religious experiences occur1 #cjc4 ,their nature1 #cjd4 ,they corroborate the notion of a larger life of which we are a part1 #cjh4 ,this life must be finite if we are to escape the paradoxes of monism1 #caj4 ,god as a finite being1 #caa4 ,empiricism is a better ally than rationalism1 of religion1 #cac4 ,empirical proofs of larger mind may open the door to superstitions1 #cae4 ,but this objection should not be deemed fatal1 #caf4 ,our beliefs form parts of reality1 #cag4 ,in pluralistic empiricism our relation to ,god remains least foreign1 #cah4 ,the word 'rationality' had better be replaced by the word 'intimacy1' #cai4 ,monism and pluralism distinguished and defined1 #cba4 ,pluralism involves indeterminism1 #cbd4 ,all men use the 'faith-ladder' in reaching their decision1 #cbh4 ,conclusion1 #ccj4 ,,notes #ccc ,,appendices ,a4 ,,the ,,thing ,,and ,,its ,,relations #hdg ,b4 ,,the ,,experience ,,of ,,activity #hgj ,c4 ,,on ,,the ,,notion ,,of ,,reality ,,as ,,changing #hie ,,index #dja ,,lecture ,i ,,the ,,types ,,of ,,philosophic ,,thinking ,as these lectures are meant to be public1 and so few1 ,i have assumed all very special problems to be excluded1 and some topic of general interest required4 ,fortunately1 our age seems to be growing philosophical again--still in the ashes live the wonted fires4 ,oxford1 long the seed-bed1 for the english world1 of the idealism inspired by ,kant and ,hegel1 has recently become the nursery of a very different way of thinking4 ,even non-philosophers have begun to take an interest in a controversy over what is known as pluralism or humanism4 ,it looks a little as if the ancient english empirism1 so long put out of fashion here by nobler sounding germanic formulas1 might be repluming itself and getting ready for a stronger flight than ever4 ,it looks as if foundations were being sounded and examined afresh4 ,individuality outruns all classification1 yet we insist on classifying every one we meet under some general head4 ,as these heads usually suggest prejudicial associations to some hearer or other1 the life of philosophy largely consists of resentments at the classing1 and complaints of being misunderstood4 ,but there are signs of clearing up1 and1 on the whole1 less acrimony in discussion1 for which both ,oxford and ,harvard are partly to be thanked4 ,as ,i look back into the sixties1 ,mill1 ,bain1 and ,hamilton were the only official philosophers in ,britain4 ,spencer1 ,martineau1 and ,hodgson were just beginning4 ,in ,france1 the pupils of ,cousin were delving into history only1 and ,renouvier alone had an original system4 ,in ,germany1 the hegelian impetus had spent itself1 and1 apart from historical scholarship1 nothing but the materialistic controversy remained1 with such men as ,bchner and ,ulrici as its champions4 ,lotze and ,fechner were the sole original thinkers1 and ,fechner was not a professional philosopher at all4 ,the general impression made was of crude issues and oppositions1 of small subtlety and of a widely spread ignorance4 ,amateurishness was rampant4 ,samuel ,bailey's 'letters on the philosophy of the human mind1' published in #ahee1 are one of the ablest expressions of english associationism1 and a book of real power4 ,yet hear how he writes of ,kant3 ',no one1 after reading the extracts1 etc41 can be surprised to hear of a declaration by men of eminent abilities1 that1 after years of study1 they had not succeeded in gathering one clear idea from the speculations of ,kant4 ,i should have been almost surprised if they had4 ,in or about #ahah1 ,lord ,grenville1 when visiting the ,lakes of ,england1 observed to ,professor ,wilson that1 after five years' study of ,kant's philosophy1 he had not gathered from it one clear idea4 ,wilberforce1 about the same time1 made the same confession to another friend of my own4 ,i am endeavoring1 exclaims ,sir ,james ,mackintosh1 in the irritation1 evidently1 of baffled efforts1 to understand this accursed german philosophy4#a ,what ,oxford thinker would dare to print such naf and provincial-sounding citations of authority to-day8 ,the torch of learning passes from land to land as the spirit bloweth the flame4 ,the deepening of philosophic consciousness came to us english folk from ,germany1 as it will probably pass back ere long4 ,ferrier1 ,j4,h4 ,stirling1 and1 most of all1 ,t4,h4 ,green are to be thanked4 ,if asked to tell in broad strokes what the main doctrinal change has been1 ,i should call it a change from the crudity of the older english thinking1 its ultra-simplicity of mind1 both when it was religious and when it was anti-religious1 toward a rationalism derived in the first instance from ,germany1 but relieved from german technicality and shrillness1 and content to suggest1 and to remain vague1 and to be1 in1 the english fashion1 devout4 ,by the time ,t4,h4 ,green began at ,oxford1 the generation seemed to feel as if it had fed on the chopped straw of psychology and of associationism long enough1 and as if a little vastness1 even though it went with vagueness1 as of some moist wind from far away1 reminding us of our pre-natal sublimity1 would be welcome4 ,green's great point of attack was the disconnectedness of the reigning english sensationalism4 ,relating was the great intellectual activity for him1 and the key to this relating was believed by him to lodge itself at last in what most of you know as ,kant's unity of apperception1 transformed into a living spirit of the world4 ,hence a monism of a devout kind4 ,in some way we must be fallen angels1 one with intelligence as such2 and a great disdain for empiricism of the sensationalist sort has always characterized this school of thought1 which1 on the whole1 has reigned supreme at ,oxford and in the ,scottish universities until the present day4 ,but now there are signs of its giving way to a wave of revised empiricism4 ,i confess that ,i should be glad to see this latest wave prevail2 so--the sooner ,i am frank about it the better--,i hope to have my voice counted in its favor as one of the results of this lecture-course4 ,what do the terms empiricism and rationalism mean8 ,reduced to their most pregnant difference1 empiricism means the habit of explaining wholes by parts1 and rationalism means the habit of explaining parts by wholes4 ,rationalism thus preserves affinities with monism1 since wholeness goes with union1 while empiricism inclines to pluralistic views4 ,no philosophy can ever be anything but a summary sketch1 a picture of the world in abridgment1 a foreshortened bird's-eye view of the perspective of events4 ,and the first thing to notice is this1 that the only material we have at our disposal for making a picture of the whole world is supplied by the various portions of that world of which we have already had experience4 ,we can invent no new forms of conception1 applicable to the whole exclusively1 and not suggested originally by the parts4 ,all philosophers1 accordingly1 have conceived of the whole world after the analogy of some particular feature of it which has particularly captivated their attention4 ,thus1 the theists take their cue from manufacture1 the pantheists from growth4 ,for one man1 the world is like a thought or a grammatical sentence in which a thought is expressed4 ,for such a philosopher1 the whole must logically be prior to the parts2 for letters would never have been invented without syllables to spell1 or syllables without words to utter4 ,another man1 struck by the disconnectedness and mutual accidentality of so many of the world's details1 takes the universe as a whole to have been such a disconnectedness originally1 and supposes order to have been superinduced upon it in the second instance1 possibly by attrition and the gradual wearing away by internal friction of portions that originally interfered4 ,another will conceive the order as only a statistical appearance1 and the universe will be for him like a vast grab-bag with black and white balls in it1 of which we guess the quantities only probably1 by the frequency with which we experience their egress4 ,for another1 again1 there is no really inherent order1 but it is we who project order into the world by selecting objects and tracing relations so as to gratify our intellectual interests4 ,we carve out order by leaving the disorderly parts out2 and the world is conceived thus after the analogy of a forest or a block of marble from which parks or statues may be produced by eliminating irrelevant trees or chips of stone4 ,some thinkers follow suggestions from human life1 and treat the universe as if it were essentially a place in which ideals are realized4 ,others are more struck by its lower features1 and for them1 brute necessities express its character better4 ,all follow one analogy or another2 and all the analogies are with some one or other of the universe's subdivisions4 ,every one is nevertheless prone to claim that his conclusions are the only logical ones1 that they are necessities of universal reason1 they being all the while1 at bottom1 accidents more or less of personal vision which had far better be avowed as such2 for one man's vision may be much more valuable than another's1 and our visions are usually not only our most interesting but our most respectable contributions to the world in which we play our part4 ,what was reason given to men for1 said some eighteenth century writer1 except to enable them to find reasons for what they want to think and do8--and ,i think the history of philosophy largely bears him out1 ',the aim of knowledge1' says ,hegel1#b 'is to divest the objective world of its strangeness1 and to make us more at home in it4' ,different men find their minds more at home in very different fragments of the world4 ,let me make a few comments1 here1 on the curious antipathies which these partialities arouse4 ,they are sovereignly unjust1 for all the parties are human beings with the same essential interests1 and no one of them is the wholly perverse demon which another often imagines him to be4 ,both are loyal to the world that bears them2 neither wishes to spoil it2 neither wishes to regard it as an insane incoherence2 both want to keep it as a universe of some kind2 and their differences are all secondary to this deep agreement4 ,they may be only propensities to emphasize differently4 ,or one man may care for finality and security more than the other4 ,or their tastes in language may be different4 ,one may like a universe that lends itself to lofty and exalted characterization4 ,to another this may seem sentimental or rhetorical4 ,one may wish for the right to use a clerical vocabulary1 another a technical or professorial one4 ,a certain old farmer of my acquaintance in ,america was called a rascal by one of his neighbors4 ,he immediately smote the man1 saying1',i won't stand none of your diminutive epithets4' ,empiricist minds1 putting the parts before the whole1 appear to rationalists1 who start from the whole1 and consequently enjoy magniloquent privileges1 to use epithets offensively diminutive4 ,but all such differences are minor matters which ought to be subordinated in view of the fact that1 whether we be empiricists or rationalists1 we are1 ourselves1 parts of the universe and share the same one deep concern in its destinies4 ,we crave alike to feel more truly at home with it1 and to contribute our mite to its amelioration4 ,it would be pitiful if small aesthetic discords were to keep honest men asunder4 ,i shall myself have use for the diminutive epithets of empiricism4 ,but if you look behind the words at the spirit1 ,i am sure you will not find it matricidal4 ,i am as good a son as any rationalist among you to our common mother4 ,what troubles me more than this misapprehension is the genuine abstruseness of many of the matters ,i shall be obliged to talk about1 and the difficulty of making them intelligible at one hearing4 ,but there two pieces1 'zwei stcke1' as ,kant would have said1 in every philosophy--the final outlook1 belief1 or attitude to which it brings us1 and the reasonings by which that attitude is reached and mediated4 ,a philosophy1 as ,james ,ferrier used to tell us1 must indeed be true1 but that is the least of its requirements4 ,one may be true without being a philosopher1 true by guesswork or by revelation4 ,what distinguishes a philosopher's truth is that it is reasoned4 ,argument1 not supposition1 must have put it in his possession4 ,common men find themselves inheriting their beliefs1 they know not how4 ,they jump into them with both feet1 and stand there4 ,philosophers must do more2 they must first get reason's license for them2 and to the professional philosophic mind the operation of procuring the license is usually a thing of much more pith and moment than any particular beliefs to which the license may give the rights of access4 ,suppose1 for example1 that a philosopher believes in what is called free-will4 ,that a common man alongside of him should also share that belief1 possessing it by a sort of inborn intuition1 does not endear the man to the philosopher at all--he may even be ashamed to be associated with such a man4 ,what interests the philosopher is the particular premises on which the free-will he believes in is established1 the sense in which it is taken1 the objections it eludes1 the difficulties it takes account of1 in short the whole form and temper and manner and technical apparatus that goes with the belief in question4 ,a philosopher across the way who should use the same technical apparatus1 making the same distinctions1 etc41 but drawing opposite conclusions and denying free-will entirely1 would fascinate the first philosopher far more than would the naf co-believer4 ,their common technical interests would unite them more than their opposite conclusions separate them4 ,each would feel an essential consanguinity in the other1 would think of him1 write at him1 care for his good opinion4 ,the simple-minded believer in free-will would be disregarded by either4 ,neither as ally nor as opponent would his vote be counted4 ,in a measure this is doubtless as it should be1 but like all professionalism it can go to abusive extremes4 ,the end is after all more than the way1 in most things human1 and forms and methods may easily frustrate their own purpose4 ,the abuse of technicality is seen in the infrequency with which1 in philosophical literature1 metaphysical questions are discussed directly and on their own merits4 ,almost always they are handled as if through a heavy woolen curtain1 the veil of previous philosophers' opinions4 ,alternatives are wrapped in proper names1 as if it were indecent for a truth to go naked4 ,the late ,professor ,john ,grote of ,cambridge has some good remarks about this4 ',thought1' he says1'is not a professional matter1 not something for so-called philosophers only or for professed thinkers4 ,the best philosopher is the man who can think most simply4 444 ,i wish that people would consider that thought--and philosophy is no more than good and methodical thought--is a matter intimate to them1 a portion of their real selves 444 that they would value what they think1 and be interested in it4444 ,in my own opinion1' he goes on1 'there is something depressing in this weight of learning1 with nothing that can come into one's mind but one is told1 ,oh1 that is the opinion of such and such a person long ago4 444 ,i can conceive of nothing more noxious for students than to get into the habit of saying to themselves about their ordinary philosophic thought1 ,oh1 somebody must have thought it all before4'#c ,yet this is the habit most encouraged at our seats of learning4 ,you must tie your opinion to ,aristotle's or ,spinoza's2 you must define it by its distance from ,kant's2 you must refute your rival's view by identifying it with ,protagoras's4 ,thus does all spontaneity of thought1 all freshness of conception1 get destroyed4 ,everything you touch is shopworn4 ,the over-technicality and consequent dreariness of the younger disciples at our american universities is appalling4 ,it comes from too much following of german models and manners4 ,let me fervently express the hope that in this country you will hark back to the more humane english tradition4 ,american students have to regain direct relations with our subject by painful individual effort in later life4 ,some of us have done so4 ,some of the younger ones1 ,i fear1 never will1 so strong are the professional shop-habits already4 ,in a subject like philosophy it is really fatal to lose connexion with the open air of human nature1 and to think in terms of shop-tradition only4 ,in ,germany the forms are so professionalized that anybody who has gained a teaching chair and written a book1 however distorted and eccentric1 has the legal right to figure forever in the history of the subject like a fly in amber4 ,all later comers have the duty of quoting him and measuring their opinions with his opinion4 ,such are the rules of the professorial game--they think and write from each other and for each other and at each other exclusively4 ,with this exclusion of the open air all true perspective gets lost1 extremes and oddities count as much as sanities1 and command the same attention2 and if by chance any one writes popularly and about results only1 with his mind directly focussed on the subject1 it is reckoned oberflchliches zeug and ganz unwissenschaftlich4 ,professor ,paulsen has recently written some feeling lines about this over-professionalism1 from the reign of which in ,germany his own writings1 which sin by being 'literary1' have suffered loss of credit4 ,philosophy1 he says1 has long assumed in ,germany the character of being an esoteric and occult science4 ,there is a genuine fear of popularity4 ,simplicity of statement is deemed synonymous with hollowness and shallowness4 ,he recalls an old professor saying to him once3 ',yes1 we philosophers1 whenever we wish1 can go so far that in a couple of sentences we can put ourselves where nobody can follow us4' ,the professor said this with conscious pride1 but he ought to have been ashamed of it4 ,great as technique is1 results are greater4 ,to teach philosophy so that the pupils' interest in technique exceeds that in results is surely a vicious aberration4 ,it is bad form1 not good form1 in a discipline of such universal human interest4 ,moreover1 technique for technique1 doesn't ,david ,hume's technique set1 after all1 the kind of pattern most difficult to follow8 ,isn't it the most admirable8 ,the english mind1 thank heaven1 and the french mind1 are still kept1 by their aversion to crude technique and barbarism1 closer to truth's natural probabilities4 ,their literatures show fewer obvious falsities and monstrosities than that of ,germany4 ,think of the german literature of aesthetics1 with the preposterousness of such an unaesthetic personage as ,immanuel ,kant enthroned in its centre6 ,think of german books on religions-philosophie1 with the heart's battles translated into conceptual jargon and made dialectic4 ,the most persistent setter of questions1 feeler of objections1 insister on satisfactions1 is the religious life4 ,yet all its troubles can be treated with absurdly little technicality4 ,the wonder is that1 with their way of working philosophy1 individual ,germans should preserve any spontaneity of mind at all4 ,that they still manifest freshness and originality in so eminent a degree1 proves the indestructible richness of the german cerebral endowment4 ,let me repeat once more that a man's vision is the great fact about him4 ,who cares for ,carlyle's reasons1 or ,schopenhauer's1 or ,spencer's8 ,a philosophy is the expression of a man's intimate character1 and all definitions of the universe are but the deliberately adopted reactions of human characters upon it4 ,in the recent book from which ,i quoted the words of ,professor ,paulsen1 a book of successive chapters by various living german philosophers1#d we pass from one idiosyncratic personal atmosphere into another almost as if we were turning over a photograph album4 ,if we take the whole history of philosophy1 the systems reduce themselves to a few main types which1 under all the technical verbiage in which the ingenious intellect of man envelops them1 are just so many visions1 modes of feeling the whole push1 and seeing the whole drift of life1 forced on one by one's total character and experience1 and on the whole preferred--there is no other truthful word--as one's best working attitude4 ,cynical characters take one general attitude1 sympathetic characters another4 ,but no general attitude is possible towards the world as a whole1 until the intellect has developed considerable generalizing power and learned to take pleasure in synthetic formulas4 ,the thought of very primitive men has hardly any tincture of philosophy4 ,nature can have little unity for savages4 ,it is a ,walpurgis-nacht procession1 a checkered play of light and shadow1 a medley of impish and elfish friendly and inimical powers4 ',close to nature' though they live1 they are anything but ,wordsworthians4 ,if a bit of cosmic emotion ever thrills them1 it is likely to be at midnight1 when the camp smoke rises straight to the wicked full moon in the zenith1 and the forest is all whispering with witchery and danger4 ,the eeriness of the world1 the mischief and the manyness1 the littleness of the forces1 the magical surprises1 the unaccountability of every agent1 these surely are the characters most impressive at that stage of culture1 these communicate the thrills of curiosity and the earliest intellectual stirrings4 ,tempests and conflagrations1 pestilences and earthquakes1 reveal supramundane powers1 and instigate religious terror rather than philosophy4 ,nature1 more demonic than divine1 is above all things multifarious4 ,so many creatures that feed or threaten1 that help or crush1 so many beings to hate or love1 to understand or start at--which is on top and which subordinate8 ,who can tell8 ,they are co-ordinate1 rather1 and to adapt ourselves to them singly1 to 'square' the dangerous powers and keep the others friendly1 regardless of consistency or unity1 is the chief problem4 ,the symbol of nature at this stage1 as ,paulsen well says1 is the sphinx1 under whose nourishing breasts the tearing claws are visible4 ,but in due course of time the intellect awoke1 with its passion for generalizing1 simplifying1 and subordinating1 and then began those divergences of conception which all later experience seems rather to have deepened than to have effaced1 because objective nature has contributed to both sides impartially1 and has let the thinkers emphasize different parts of her1 and pile up opposite imaginary supplements4 ,perhaps the most interesting opposition is that which results from the clash between what ,i lately called the sympathetic and the cynical temper4 ,materialistic and spiritualistic philosophies are the rival types that result3 the former defining the world so as to leave man's soul upon it as a soil of outside passenger or alien1 while the latter insists that the intimate and human must surround and underlie the brutal4 ,this latter is the spiritual way of thinking4 ,now there are two very distinct types or stages in spiritualistic philosophy1 and my next purpose in this lecture is to make their contrast evident4 ,both types attain the sought-for intimacy of view1 but the one attains it somewhat less successfully than the other4 ,the generic term spiritualism1 which ,i began by using merely as the opposite of materialism1 thus subdivides into two species1 the more intimate one of which is monistic and the less intimate dualistic4 ,the dualistic species is the theism that reached its elaboration in the scholastic philosophy1 while the monistic species is the pantheism spoken of sometimes simply as idealism1 and sometimes as 'post-kantian' or 'absolute' idealism4 ,dualistic theism is professed as firmly as ever at all catholic seats of learning1 whereas it has of late years tended to disappear at our british and american universities1 and to be replaced by a monistic pantheism more or less open or disguised4 ,i have an impression that ever since ,t4,h4 ,green's time absolute idealism has been decidedly in the ascendent at ,oxford4 ,it is in the ascendent at my own university of ,harvard4 ,absolute idealism attains1 ,i said1 to the more intimate point of view2 but the statement needs some explanation4 ,so far as theism represents the world as ,god's world1 and ,god as what ,matthew ,arnold called a magnified non-natural man1 it would seem as if the inner quality of the world remained human1 and as if our relations with it might be intimate enough--for what is best in ourselves appears then also outside of ourselves1 and we and the universe are of the same spiritual species4 ,so far1 so good1 then2 and one might consequently ask1 ,what more of intimacy do you require8 ,to which the answer is that to be like a thing is not as intimate a relation as to be substantially fused into it1 to form one continuous soul and body with it2 and that pantheistic idealism1 making us entitatively one with ,god1 attains this higher reach of intimacy4 ,the theistic conception1 picturing ,god and his creation as entities distinct from each other1 still leaves the human subject outside of the deepest reality in the universe4 ,god is from eternity complete1 it says1 and sufficient unto himself2 he throws off the world by a free act and as an extraneous substance1 and he throws off man as a third substance1 extraneous to both the world and himself4 ,between them1 ,god says 'one1' the world says 'two1' and man says 'three1'--that is the orthodox theistic view4 ,and orthodox theism has been so jealous of ,god's glory that it has taken pains to exaggerate everything in the notion of him that could make for isolation and separateness4 ,page upon page in scholastic books go to prove that ,god is in no sense implicated by his creative act1 or involved in his creation4 ,that his relation to the creatures he has made should make any difference to him1 carry any consequence1 or qualify his being1 is repudiated as a pantheistic slur upon his self-sufficingness4 ,i said a moment ago that theism treats us and ,god as of the same species1 but from the orthodox point of view that was a slip of language4 ,god and his creatures are toto genere distinct in the scholastic theology1 they have absolutely nothing in common2 nay1 it degrades ,god to attribute to him any generic nature whatever2 he can be classed with nothing4 ,there is a sense1 then1 in which philosophic theism makes us outsiders and keeps us foreigners in relation to ,god1 in which1 at any rate1 his connexion with us appears as unilateral and not reciprocal4 ,his action can affect us1 but he can never be affected by our reaction4 ,our relation1 in short1 is not a strictly social relation4 ,of course in common men's religion the relation is believed to be social1 but that is only one of the many differences between religion and theology4 ,this essential dualism of the theistic view has all sorts of collateral consequences4 ,man being an outsider and a mere subject to ,god1 not his intimate partner1 a character of externality invades the field4 ,god is not heart of our heart and reason of our reason1 but our magistrate1 rather2 and mechanically to obey his commands1 however strange they may be1 remains our only moral duty4 ,conceptions of criminal law have in fact played a great part in defining our relations with him4 ,our relations with speculative truth show the same externality4 ,one of our duties is to know truth1 and rationalist thinkers have always assumed it to be our sovereign duty4 ,but in scholastic theism we find truth already instituted and established without our help1 complete apart from our knowing2 and the most we can do is to acknowledge it passively and adhere to it1 altho such adhesion as ours can make no jot of difference to what is adhered to4 ,the situation here again is radically dualistic4 ,it is not as if the world came to know itself1 or ,god came to know himself1 partly through us1 as pantheistic idealists have maintained1 but truth exists per se and absolutely1 by ,god's grace and decree1 no matter who of us knows it or is ignorant1 and it would continue to exist unaltered1 even though we finite knowers were all annihilated4 ,it has to be confessed that this dualism and lack of intimacy has always operated as a drag and handicap on ,christian thought4 ,orthodox theology has had to wage a steady fight within the schools against the various forms of pantheistic heresy which the mystical experiences of religious persons1 on the one hand1 and the formal or aesthetic superiorities of monism to dualism1 on the other1 kept producing4 ,god as intimate soul and reason of the universe has always seemed to some people a more worthy conception than ,god as external creator4 ,so conceived1 he appeared to unify the world more perfectly1 he made it less finite and mechanical1 and in comparison with such a ,god an external creator seemed more like the product of a childish fancy4 ,i have been told by ,hindoos that the great obstacle to the spread of ,christianity in their country is the puerility of our dogma of creation4 ,it has not sweep and infinity enough to meet the requirements of even the illiterate natives of ,india4 ,assuredly most members of this audience are ready to side with ,hinduism in this matter4 ,those of us who are sexagenarians have witnessed in our own persons one of those gradual mutations of intellectual climate1 due to innumerable influences1 that make the thought of a past generation seem as foreign to its successor as if it were the expression of a different race of men4 ,the theological machinery that spoke so livingly to our ancestors1 with its finite age of the world1 its creation out of nothing1 its juridical morality and eschatology1 its relish for rewards and punishments1 its treatment of ,god as an external contriver1 an 'intelligent and moral governor1' sounds as odd to most of us as if it were some outlandish savage religion4 ,the vaster vistas which scientific evolutionism has opened1 and the rising tide of social democratic ideals1 have changed the type of our imagination1 and the older monarchical theism is obsolete or obsolescent4 ,the place of the divine in the world must be more organic and intimate4 ,an external creator and his institutions may still be verbally confessed at ,church in formulas that linger by their mere inertia1 but the life is out of them1 we avoid dwelling on them1 the sincere heart of us is elsewhere4 ,i shall leave cynical materialism entirely out of our discussion as not calling for treatment before this present audience1 and ,i shall ignore old-fashioned dualistic theism for the same reason4 ,our contemporary mind having once for all grasped the possibility of a more intimate ,weltanschauung1 the only opinions quite worthy of arresting our attention will fall within the general scope of what may roughly be called the pantheistic field of vision1 the vision of ,god as the indwelling divine rather than the external creator1 and of human life as part and parcel of that deep reality4 ,as we have found that spiritualism in general breaks into a more intimate and a less intimate species1 so the more intimate species itself breaks into two subspecies1 of which the one is more monistic1 the other more pluralistic in form4 ,i say in form1 for our vocabulary gets unmanageable if we don't distinguish between form and substance here4 ,the inner life of things must be substantially akin anyhow to the tenderer parts of man's nature in any spiritualistic philosophy4 ,the word 'intimacy' probably covers the essential difference4 ,materialism holds the foreign in things to be more primary and lasting1 it sends us to a lonely corner with our intimacy4 ,the brutal aspects overlap and outwear2 refinement has the feebler and more ephemeral hold on reality4 ,from a pragmatic point of view the difference between living against a background of foreignness and one of intimacy means the difference between a general habit of wariness and one of trust4 ,one might call it a social difference1 for after all1 the common socius of us all is the great universe whose children we are4 ,if materialistic1 we must be suspicious of this socius1 cautious1 tense1 on guard4 ,if spiritualistic1 we may give way1 embrace1 and keep no ultimate fear4 ,the contrast is rough enough1 and can be cut across by all sorts of other divisions1 drawn from other points of view than that of foreignness and intimacy4 ,we have so many different businesses with nature that no one of them yields us an all-embracing clasp4 ,the philosophic attempt to define nature so that no one's business is left out1 so that no one lies outside the door saying ',where do ,i come in8' is sure in advance to fail4 ,the most a philosophy can hope for is not to lock out any interest forever4 ,no matter what doors it closes1 it must leave other doors open for the interests which it neglects4 ,i have begun by shutting ourselves up to intimacy and foreignness because that makes so generally interesting a contrast1 and because it will conveniently introduce a farther contrast to which ,i wish this hour to lead4 ,the majority of men are sympathetic4 ,comparatively few are cynics because they like cynicism1 and most of our existing materialists are such because they think the evidence of facts impels them1 or because they find the idealists they are in contact with too private and tender-minded2 so1 rather than join their company1 they fly to the opposite extreme4 ,i therefore propose to you to disregard materialists altogether for the present1 and to consider the sympathetic party alone4 ,it is normal1 ,i say1 to be sympathetic in the sense in which ,i use the term4 ,not to demand intimate relations with the universe1 and not to wish them satisfactory1 should be accounted signs of something wrong4 ,accordingly when minds of this type reach the philosophic level1 and seek some unification of their vision1 they find themselves compelled to correct that aboriginal appearance of things by which savages are not troubled4 ,that sphinx-like presence1 with its breasts and claws1 that first bald multifariousness1 is too discrepant an object for philosophic contemplation4 ,the intimacy and the foreignness cannot be written down as simply coexisting4 ,an order must be made2 and in that order the higher side of things must dominate4 ,the philosophy of the absolute agrees with the pluralistic philosophy which ,i am going to contrast with it in these lectures1 in that both identify human substance with the divine substance4 ,but whereas absolutism thinks that the said substance becomes fully divine only in the form of totality1 and is not its real self in any form but the all-form1 the pluralistic view which ,i prefer to adopt is willing to believe that there may ultimately never be an all-form at all1 that the substance of reality may never get totally collected1 that some of it may remain outside of the largest combination of it ever made1 and that a distributive form of reality1 the each-form1 is logically as acceptable and empirically as probable as the all-form commonly acquiesced in as so obviously the self-evident thing4 ,the contrast between these two forms of a reality which we will agree to suppose substantially spiritual is practically the topic of this course of lectures4 ,you see now what ,i mean by pantheism's two subspecies4 ,if we give to the monistic subspecies the name of philosophy of the absolute1 we may give that of radical empiricism to its pluralistic rival1 and it may be well to distinguish them occasionally later by these names4 ,as a convenient way of entering into the study of their differences1 ,i may refer to a recent article by ,professor ,jacks of ,manchester ,college4 ,professor ,jacks1 in some brilliant pages in the ',hibbert ,journal' for last ,october1 studies the relation between the universe and the philosopher who describes and defines it for us4 ,you may assume two cases1 he says4 ,either what the philosopher tells us is extraneous to the universe he is accounting for1 an indifferent parasitic outgrowth1 so to speak2 or the fact of his philosophizing is itself one of the things taken account of in the philosophy1 and self-included in the description4 ,in the former case the philosopher means by the universe everything except what his own presence brings2 in the latter case his philosophy is itself an intimate part of the universe1 and may be a part momentous enough to give a different turn to what the other parts signify4 ,it may be a supreme reaction of the universe upon itself by which it rises to self-comprehension4 ,it may handle itself differently in consequence of this event4 ,now both empiricism and absolutism bring the philosopher inside and make man intimate1 but the one being pluralistic and the other monistic1 they do so in differing ways that need much explanation4 ,let me then contrast the one with the other way of representing the status of the human thinker4 ,for monism the world is no collection1 but one great all-inclusive fact outside of which is nothing--nothing is its only alternative4 ,when the monism is idealistic1 this all-enveloping fact is represented as an absolute mind that makes the partial facts by thinking them1 just as we make objects in a dream by dreaming them1 or personages in a story by imagining them4 ,to be1 on this scheme1 is1 on the part of a finite thing1 to be an object for the absolute2 and on the part of the absolute it is to be the thinker of that assemblage of objects4 ,if we use the word 'content' here1 we see that the absolute and the world have an identical content4 ,the absolute is nothing but the knowledge of those objects2 the objects are nothing but what the absolute knows4 ,the world and the all-thinker thus compenetrate and soak each other up without residuum4 ,they are but two names for the same identical material1 considered now from the subjective1 and now from the objective point of view--gedanke and gedachtes1 as we would say if we were ,germans4 ,we philosophers naturally form part of the material1 on the monistic scheme4 ,the absolute makes us by thinking us1 and if we ourselves are enlightened enough to be believers in the absolute1 one may then say that our philosophizing is one of the ways in which the absolute is conscious of itself4 ,this is the full pantheistic scheme1 the identittsphilosophie1 the immanence of ,god in his creation1 a conception sublime from its tremendous unity4 ,and yet that unity is incomplete1 as closer examination will show4 ,the absolute and the world are one fact1 ,i said1 when materially considered4 ,our philosophy1 for example1 is not numerically distinct from the absolute's own knowledge of itself1 not a duplicate and copy of it1 it is part of that very knowledge1 is numerically identical with as much of it as our thought covers4 ,the absolute just is our philosophy1 along with everything else that is known1 in an act of knowing which 7to use the words of my gifted absolutist colleague ,royce7 forms in its wholeness one luminously transparent conscious moment4 ,but one as we are in this material sense with the absolute substance1 that being only the whole of us1 and we only the parts of it1 yet in a formal sense something like a pluralism breaks out4 ,when we speak of the absolute we take the one universal known material collectively or integrally2 when we speak of its objects1 of our finite selves1 etc41 we take that same identical material distributively and separately4 ,but what is the use of a thing's being only once if it can be taken twice over1 and if being taken in different ways makes different things true of it8 ,as the absolute takes me1 for example1 ,i appear with everything else in its field of perfect knowledge4 ,as ,i take myself1 ,i appear without most other things in my field of relative ignorance4 ,and practical differences result from its knowledge and my ignorance4 ,ignorance breeds mistake1 curiosity1 misfortune1 pain1 for me2 ,i suffer those consequences4 ,the absolute knows of those things1 of course1 for it knows me and my suffering1 but it doesn't itself suffer4 ,it can't be ignorant1 for simultaneous with its knowledge of each question goes its knowledge of each answer4 ,it can't be patient1 for it has to wait for nothing1 having everything at once in its possession4 ,it can't be surprised2 it can't be guilty4 ,no attribute connected with succession can be applied to it1 for it is all at once and wholly what it is1 'with the unity of a single instant1' and succession is not of it but in it1 for we are continually told that it is 'timeless4' ,things true of the world in its finite aspects1 then1 are not true of it in its infinite capacity4 ,qu finite and plural its accounts of itself to itself are different from what its account to itself qu infinite and one must be4 ,with this radical discrepancy between the absolute and the relative points of view1 it seems to me that almost as great a bar to intimacy between the divine and the human breaks out in pantheism as that which we found in monarchical theism1 and hoped that pantheism might not show4 ,we humans are incurably rooted in the temporal point of view4 ,the eternal's ways are utterly unlike our ways4 ',let us imitate the ,all1' said the original prospectus of that admirable ,chicago quarterly called the ',monist4' ,as if we could1 either in thought or conduct6 ,we are invincibly parts1 let us talk as we will1 and must always apprehend the absolute as if it were a foreign being4 ,if what ,i mean by this is not wholly clear to you at this point1 it ought to grow clearer as my lectures proceed4 ,,lecture ,,ii ,,monistic ,,idealism ,let me recall to you the programme which ,i indicated to you at our last meeting4 ,after agreeing not to consider materialism in any shape1 but to place ourselves straightway upon a more spiritualistic platform1 ,i pointed out three kinds of spiritual philosophy between which we are asked to choose4 ,the first way was that of the older dualistic theism1 with ourselves represented as a secondary order of substances created by ,god4 ,we found that this allowed of a degree of intimacy with the creative principle inferior to that implied in the pantheistic belief that we are substantially one with it1 and that the divine is therefore the most intimate of all our possessions1 heart of our heart1 in fact4 ,but we saw that this pantheistic belief could be held in two forms1 a monistic form which ,i called philosophy of the absolute1 and a pluralistic form which ,i called radical empiricism1 the former conceiving that the divine exists authentically only when the world is experienced all at once in its absolute totality1 whereas radical empiricism allows that the absolute sum-total of things may never be actually experienced or realized in that shape at all1 and that a disseminated1 distributed1 or incompletely unified appearance is the only form that reality may yet have achieved4 ,i may contrast the monistic and pluralistic forms in question as the 'all-form' and the 'each-form4' ,at the end of the last hour ,i animadverted on the fact that the all-form is so radically different from the each-form1 which is our human form of experiencing the world1 that the philosophy of the absolute1 so far as insight and understanding go1 leaves us almost as much outside of the divine being as dualistic theism does4 ,i believe that radical empiricism1 on the contrary1 holding to the each-form1 and making of ,god only one of the eaches1 affords the higher degree of intimacy4 ,the general thesis of these lectures ,i said would be a defence of the pluralistic against the monistic view4 ,think of the universe as existing solely in the each-form1 and you will have on the whole a more reasonable and satisfactory idea of it than if you insist on the all-form being necessary4 ,the rest of my lectures will do little more than make this thesis more concrete1 and ,i hope more persuasive4 ,it is curious how little countenance radical pluralism has ever had from philosophers4 ,whether materialistically or spiritualistically minded1 philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled4 ,they have substituted economical and orderly conceptions for the first sensible tangle2 and whether these were morally elevated or only intellectually neat they were at any rate always aesthetically pure and definite1 and aimed at ascribing to the world something clean and intellectual in the way of inner structure4 ,as compared with all these rationalizing pictures1 the pluralistic empiricism which ,i profess offers but a sorry appearance4 ,it is a turbid1 muddled1 gothic sort of an affair1 without a sweeping outline and with little pictorial nobility4 ,those of you who are accustomed to the classical constructions of reality may be excused if your first reaction upon it be absolute contempt--a shrug of the shoulders as if such ideas were unworthy of explicit refutation4 ,but one must have lived some time with a system to appreciate its merits4 ,perhaps a little more familiarity may mitigate your first surprise at such a programme as ,i offer4 ,first1 one word more than what ,i said last time about the relative foreignness of the divine principle in the philosophy of the absolute4 ,those of you who have read the last two chapters of ,mr4 ,bradley's wonderful book1 ',appearance and reality1' will remember what an elaborately foreign aspect his absolute is finally made to assume4 ,it is neither intelligence nor will1 neither a self nor a collection of selves1 neither truthful1 good1 nor beautiful1 as we understand these terms4 ,it is1 in short1 a metaphysical monster1 all that we are permitted to say of it being that whatever it is1 it is at any rate worth more 7worth more to itself1 that is7 than if any eulogistic adjectives of ours applied to it4 ,it is us1 and all other appearances1 but none of us as such1 for in it we are all 'transmuted1' and its own as-suchness is of another denomination altogether4 ,spinoza was the first great absolutist1 and the impossibility of being intimate with his ,god is universally recognized4 ,quatenus infinitus est he is other than what he is quatenus humanam mentem constituit4 ,spinoza's philosophy has been rightly said to be worked by the word quatenus4 ,conjunctions1 prepositions1 and adverbs play indeed the vital part in all philosophies2 and in contemporary idealism the words 'as' and 'qu' bear the burden of reconciling metaphysical unity with phenomenal diversity4 ,qu absolute the world is one and perfect1 qu relative it is many and faulty1 yet it is identically the self-same world--instead of talking of it as many facts1 we call it one fact in many aspects4 ,as absolute1 then1 or sub specie eternitatis1 or quatenus infinitus est1 the world repels our sympathy because it has no history4 ,as such1 the absolute neither acts nor suffers1 nor loves nor hates2 it has no needs1 desires1 or aspirations1 no failures or successes1 friends or enemies1 victories or defeats4 ,all such things pertain to the world qu relative1 in which our finite experiences lie1 and whose vicissitudes alone have power to arouse our interest4 ,what boots it to tell me that the absolute way is the true way1 and to exhort me1 as ,emerson says1 to lift mine eye up to its style1 and manners of the sky1 if the feat is impossible by definition8 ,i am finite once for all1 and all the categories of my sympathy are knit up with the finite world as such1 and with things that have a history4 ',aus dieser erde quellen meine freuden1 und ihre sonne scheinet meinen leiden4' ,i have neither eyes nor ears nor heart nor mind for anything of an opposite description1 and the stagnant felicity of the absolute's own perfection moves me as little as ,i move it4 ,if we were readers only of the cosmic novel1 things would be different3 we should then share the author's point of view and recognize villains to be as essential as heroes in the plot4 ,but we are not the readers but the very personages of the world-drama4 ,in your own eyes each of you here is its hero1 and the villains are your respective friends or enemies4 ,the tale which the absolute reader finds so perfect1 we spoil for one another through our several vital identifications with the destinies of the particular personages involved4 ,the doctrine on which the absolutists lay most stress is the absolute's 'timeless' character4 ,for pluralists1 on the other hand1 time remains as real as anything1 and nothing in the universe is great or static or eternal enough not to have some history4 ,but the world that each of us feels most intimately at home with is that of beings with histories that play into our history1 whom we can help in their vicissitudes even as they help us in ours4 ,this satisfaction the absolute denies us2 we can neither help nor hinder it1 for it stands outside of history4 ,it surely is a merit in a philosophy to make the very life we lead seem real and earnest4 ,pluralism1 in exorcising the absolute1 exorcises the great de-realizer of the only life we are at home in1 and thus redeems the nature of reality from essential foreignness4 ,every end1 reason1 motive1 object of desire or aversion1 ground of sorrow or joy that we feel is in the world of finite multifariousness1 for only in that world does anything really happen1 only there do events come to pass4 ,in one sense this is a far-fetched and rather childish objection1 for so much of the history of the finite is as formidably foreign to us as the static absolute can possibly be--in fact that entity derives its own foreignness largely from the bad character of the finite which it simultaneously is--that this sentimental reason for preferring the pluralistic view seems small4#a ,i shall return to the subject in my final lecture1 and meanwhile1 with your permission1 ,i will say no more about this objection4 ,the more so as the necessary foreignness of the absolute is cancelled emotionally by its attribute of totality1 which is universally considered to carry the further attribute of perfection in its train4 ',philosophy1' says a recent american philosopher1 'is humanity's hold on totality1' and there is no doubt that most of us find that the bare notion of an absolute all-one is inspiring4 ',i yielded myself to the perfect whole1' writes ,emerson2 and where can you find a more mind-dilating object8 ,a certain loyalty is called forth by the idea2 even if not proved actual1 it must be believed in somehow4 ,only an enemy of philosophy can speak lightly of it4 ,rationalism starts from the idea of such a whole and builds downward4 ,movement and change are absorbed into its immutability as forms of mere appearance4 ,when you accept this beatific vision of what is1 in contrast with what goes on1 you feel as if you had fulfilled an intellectual duty4 ',reality is not in its truest nature a process1' ,mr4 ,mc,taggart tells us1 'but a stable and timeless state4'#b ',the true knowledge of ,god begins1' ,hegel writes1 'when we know that things as they immediately are have no truth4'#c ',the consummation of the infinite aim1' he says elsewhere1 'consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem yet unaccomplished4 ,good and absolute goodness is eternally accomplishing itself in the world3 and the result is that it needs not wait upon us1 but is already 444 accomplished4 ,it is an illusion under which we live4 444 ,in the course of its process the ,idea makes itself that illusion1 by setting an antithesis to confront it1 and its action consists in getting rid of the illusion which it has created4'#d ,but abstract emotional appeals of any kind sound amateurish in the business that concerns us4 ,impressionistic philosophizing1 like impressionistic watchmaking or land-surveying1 is intolerable to experts4 ,serious discussion of the alternative before us forces me1 therefore1 to become more technical4 ,the great claim of the philosophy of the absolute is that the absolute is no hypothesis1 but a presupposition implicated in all thinking1 and needing only a little effort of analysis to be seen as a logical necessity4 ,i will therefore take it in this more rigorous character and see whether its claim is in effect so coercive4 ,it has seemed coercive to an enormous number of contemporaneous thinkers4 ,professor ,henry ,jones thus describes the range and influence of it upon the social and political life of the present time3#e ',for many years adherents of this way of thought have deeply interested the british public by their writings4 ,almost more important than their writings is the fact that they have occupied philosophical chairs in almost every university in the kingdom4 ,even the professional critics of idealism are for the most part idealists--after a fashion4 ,and when they are not1 they are as a rule more occupied with the refutation of idealism than with the construction of a better theory4 ,it follows from their position of academic authority1 were it from nothing else1 that idealism exercises an influence not easily measured upon the youth of the nation--upon those1 that is1 who from the educational opportunities they enjoy may naturally be expected to become the leaders of the nation's thought and practice4444 ,difficult as it is to measure the forces 444 it is hardly to be denied that the power exercised by ,bentham and the utilitarian school has1 for better or for worse1 passed into the hands of the idealists4444 ,the ,rhine has flowed into the ,thames is the warning note rung out by ,mr4 ,hobhouse4 ,carlyle introduced it1 bringing it as far as ,chelsea4 ,then ,jowett and ,thomas ,hill ,green1 and ,william ,wallace and ,lewis ,nettleship1 and ,arnold ,toynbee and ,david ,eitchie--to mention only those teachers whose voices now are silent--guided the waters into those upper reaches known locally as the ,isis4 ,john and ,edward ,caird brought them up the ,clyde1 ,hutchison ,stirling up the ,firth of ,forth4 ,they have passed up the ,mersey and up the ,severn and ,dee and ,don4 ,they pollute the bay of ,st4 ,andrews and swell the waters of the ,cam1 and have somehow crept overland into ,birmingham4 ,the stream of german idealism has been diffused over the academical world of ,great ,britain4 ,the disaster is universal4' ,evidently if weight of authority were all1 the truth of absolutism would be thus decided4 ,but let us first pass in review the general style of argumentation of that philosophy4 ,as ,i read it1 its favorite way of meeting pluralism and empiricism is by a reductio ad absurdum framed somewhat as follows3 ,you contend1 it says to the pluralist1 that things1 though in some respects connected1 are in other respects independent1 so that they are not members of one all-inclusive individual fact4 ,well1 your position is absurd on either point4 ,for admit in fact the slightest modicum of independence1 and you find 7if you will only think accurately7 that you have to admit more and more of it1 until at last nothing but an absolute chaos1 or the proved impossibility of any connexion whatever between the parts of the universe1 remains upon your hands4 ,admit1 on the other hand1 the most incipient minimum of relation between any two things1 and again you can't stop until you see that the absolute unity of all things is implied4 ,if we take the latter reductio ad absurdum first1 we find a good example of it in ,lotze's well-known proof of monism from the fact of interaction between finite things4 ,suppose1 ,lotze says in effect1 and for simplicity's sake ,i have to paraphrase him1 for his own words are too long to quote--many distinct beings a1 b1 c1 etc41 to exist independently of each other3 can a in that case ever act on b8 ,what is it to act8 ,is it not to exert an influence8 ,does the influence detach itself from a and find b8 ,if so1 it is a third fact1 and the problem is not how a acts1 but how its 'influence' acts on b4 ,by another influence perhaps8 ,and how in the end does the chain of influences find b rather than c unless b is somehow prefigured in them already8 ,and when they have found b1 how do they make b respond1 if b has nothing in common with them8 ,why don't they go right through b8 ,the change in b is a response1 due to b's capacity for taking account of a's influence1 and that again seems to prove that b's nature is somehow fitted to a's nature in advance4 ,a and b1 in short1 are not really as distinct as we at first supposed them1 not separated by a void4 ,were this so they would be mutually impenetrable1 or at least mutually irrelevant4 ,they would form two universes each living by itself1 making no difference to each other1 taking no account of each other1 much as the universe of your day dreams takes no account of mine4 ,they must therefore belong together beforehand1 be co-implicated already1 their natures must have an inborn mutual reference each to each4 ,lotze's own solution runs as follows3 ,the multiple independent things supposed cannot be real in that shape1 but all of them1 if reciprocal action is to be possible between them1 must be regarded as parts of a single real being1 ,m4 ,the pluralism with which our view began has to give place to a monism2 and the 'transeunt' interaction1 being unintelligible as such1 is to be understood as an immanent operation4#f ,the words 'immanent operation' seem here to mean that the single real being ,m1 of which a and b are members1 is the only thing that changes1 and that when it changes1 it changes inwardly and all over at once4 ,when part a in it changes1 consequently1 part b must also change1 but without the whole ,m changing this would not occur4 ,a pretty argument1 but a purely verbal one1 as ,i apprehend it4 ,call your a and b distinct1 they can't interact2 call them one1 they can4 ,for taken abstractly and without qualification the words 'distinct' and 'independent' suggest only disconnection4 ,if this be the only property of your a and b 7and it is the only property your words imply71 then of course1 since you can't deduce their mutual influence from it1 you can find no ground of its occurring between them4 ,your bare word 'separate1' contradicting your bare word 'joined1' seems to exclude connexion4 ,lotze's remedy for the impossibility thus verbally found is to change the first word4 ,if1 instead of calling a and b independent1 we now call them 'interdependent1' 'united1' or 'one1' he says1 these words do not contradict any sort of mutual influence that may be proposed4 ,if a and b are 'one1' and the one changes1 a and b of course must co-ordinately change4 ,what under the old name they couldn't do1 they now have license to do under the new name4 ,but ,i ask you whether giving the name of 'one' to the former 'many' makes us really understand the modus operandi of interaction any better4 ,we have now given verbal permission to the many to change all together1 if they can2 we have removed a verbal impossibility and substituted a verbal possibility1 but the new name1 with the possibility it suggests1 tells us nothing of the actual process by which real things that are one can and do change at all4 ,in point of fact abstract oneness as such doesn't change1 neither has it parts--any more than abstract independence as such interacts4 ,but then neither abstract oneness nor abstract independence exists2 only concrete real things exist1 which add to these properties the other properties which they possess1 to make up what we call their total nature4 ,to construe any one of their abstract names as making their total nature impossible is a misuse of the function of naming4 ,the real way of rescue from the abstract consequences of one name is not to fly to an opposite name1 equally abstract1 but rather to correct the first name by qualifying adjectives that restore some concreteness to the case4 ,don't take your 'independence' simpliciter1 as ,lotze does1 take it secundum quid4 ,only when we know what the process of interaction literally and concretely consists in can we tell whether beings independent in definite respects1 distinct1 for example1 in origin1 separate in place1 different in kind1 etc41 can or cannot interact4 ,the treating of a name as excluding from the fact named what the name's definition fails positively to include1 is what ,i call 'vicious intellectualism4' ,later ,i shall have more to say about this intellectualism1 but that ,lotze's argument is tainted by it ,i hardly think we can deny4 ,as well might you contend 7to use an instance from ,sigwart7 that a person whom you have once called an 'equestrian' is thereby forever made unable to walk on his own feet4 ,i almost feel as if ,i should apologize for criticising such subtle arguments in rapid lectures of this kind4 ,the criticisms have to be as abstract as the arguments1 and in exposing their unreality1 take on such an unreal sound themselves that a hearer not nursed in the intellectualist atmosphere knows not which of them to accuse4 ,but le vin est vers1 il faut le boire1 and ,i must cite a couple more instances before ,i stop4 ,if we are empiricists and go from parts to wholes1 we believe that beings may first exist and feed so to speak on their own existence1 and then secondarily become known to one another4 ,but philosophers of the absolute tell us that such independence of being from being known would1 if once admitted1 disintegrate the universe beyond all hope of mending4 ,the argument is one of ,professor ,royce's proofs that the only alternative we have is to choose the complete disunion of all things or their complete union in the absolute ,one4 ,take1 for instance1 the proverb 'a cat may look at a king' and adopt the realistic view that the king's being is independent of the cat's witnessing4 ,this assumption1 which amounts to saying that it need make no essential difference to the royal object whether the feline subject cognizes him or not1 that the cat may look away from him or may even be annihilated1 and the king remain unchanged1--this assumption1 ,i say1 is considered by my ingenious colleague to lead to the absurd practical consequence that the two beings can never later acquire any possible linkages or connexions1 but must remain eternally as if in different worlds4 ,for suppose any connexion whatever to ensue1 this connexion would simply be a third being additional to the cat and the king1 which would itself have to be linked to both by additional links before it could connect them1 and so on ad infinitum1 the argument1 you see1 being the same as ,lotze's about how a's influence does its influencing when it influences b4 ,in ,royce's own words1 if the king can be without the cat knowing him1 then king and cat 'can have no common features1 no ties1 no true relations2 they are separated1 each from the other1 by absolutely impassable chasms4 ,they can never come to get either ties or community of nature2 they are not in the same space1 nor in the same time1 nor in the same natural or spiritual order4'#g ,they form in short two unrelated universes1--which is the reductio ad absurdum required4 ,to escape this preposterous state of things we must accordingly revoke the original hypothesis4 ,the king and the cat are not indifferent to each other in the way supposed4 ,but if not in that way1 then in no way1 for connexion in that way carries connexion in other ways2 so that1 pursuing the reverse line of reasoning1 we end with the absolute itself as the smallest fact that can exist4 ,cat and king are co-involved1 they are a single fact in two names1 they can never have been absent from each other1 and they are both equally co-implicated with all the other facts of which the universe consists4 ,professor ,royce's proof that whoso admits the cat's witnessing the king at all must thereupon admit the integral absolute1 may be briefly put as follows3-- ,first1 to know the king1 the cat must intend that king1 must somehow pass over and lay hold of him individually and specifically4 ,the cat's idea1 in short1 must transcend the cat's own separate mind and somehow include the king1 for were the king utterly outside and independent of the cat1 the cat's pure other1 the beast's mind could touch the king in no wise4 ,this makes the cat much less distinct from the king than we had at first navely supposed4 ,there must be some prior continuity between them1 which continuity ,royce interprets idealistically as meaning a higher mind that owns them both as objects1 and owning them can also own any relation1 such as the supposed witnessing1 that may obtain between them4 ,taken purely pluralistically1 neither of them can own any part of a between1 because1 so taken1 each is supposed shut up to itself3 the fact of a between thus commits us to a higher knower4 ,but the higher knower that knows the two beings we start with proves to be the same knower that knows everything else4 ,for assume any third being1 the queen1 say1 and as the cat knew the king1 so let the king know his queen1 and let this second knowledge1 by the same reasoning1 require a higher knower as its presupposition4 ,that knower of the king's knowing must1 it is now contended1 be the same higher knower that was required for the cat's knowing2 for if you suppose otherwise1 you have no longer the same king4 ,this may not seem immediately obvious1 but if you follow the intellectualistic logic employed in all these reasonings1 ,i don't see how you can escape the admission4 ,if it be true that the independent or indifferent cannot be related1 for the abstract words 'independent' or 'indifferent' as such imply no relation1 then it is just as true that the king known by the cat cannot be the king that knows the queen1 for taken merely 'as such1' the abstract term 'what the cat knows' and the abstract term 'what knows the queen' are logically distinct4 ,the king thus logically breaks into two kings1 with nothing to connect them1 until a higher knower is introduced to recognize them as the self-same king concerned in any previous acts of knowledge which he may have brought about4 ,this he can do because he possesses all the terms as his own objects and can treat them as he will4 ,add any fourth or fifth term1 and you get a like result1 and so on1 until at last an all-owning knower1 otherwise called the absolute1 is reached4 ,the co-implicated 'through-and-through' world of monism thus stands proved by irrefutable logic1 and all pluralism appears as absurd4 ,the reasoning is pleasing from its ingenuity1 and it is almost a pity that so straight a bridge from abstract logic to concrete fact should not bear our weight4 ,to have the alternative forced upon us of admitting either finite things each cut off from all relation with its environment1 or else of accepting the integral absolute with no environment and all relations packed within itself1 would be too delicious a simplification4 ,but the purely verbal character of the operation is undisguised4 ,because the names of finite things and their relations are disjoined1 it doesn't follow that the realities named need a deus ex machina from on high to conjoin them4 ,the same things disjoined in one respect appear as conjoined in another4 ,naming the disjunction doesn't debar us from also naming the conjunction in a later modifying statement1 for the two are absolutely co-ordinate elements in the finite tissue of experience4 ,when at ,athens it was found self-contradictory that a boy could be both tall and short 7tall namely in respect of a child1 short in respect of a man71 the absolute had not yet been thought of1 but it might just as well have been invoked by ,socrates as by ,lotze or ,royce1 as a relief from his peculiar intellectualistic difficulty4 ,everywhere we find rationalists using the same kind of reasoning4 ,the primal whole which is their vision must be there not only as a fact but as a logical necessity4 ,it must be the minimum that can exist--either that absolute whole is there1 or there is absolutely nothing4 ,the logical proof alleged of the irrationality of supposing otherwise1 is that you can deny the whole only in words that implicitly assert it4 ,if you say 'parts1' of what are they parts8 ,if you call them a 'many1' that very word unifies them4 ,if you suppose them unrelated in any particular respect1 that 'respect' connects them2 and so on4 ,in short you fall into hopeless contradiction4 ,you must stay either at one extreme or the other4#h ',partly this and partly that1' partly rational1 for instance1 and partly irrational1 is no admissible description of the world4 ,if rationality be in it at all1 it must be in it throughout2 if irrationality be in it anywhere1 that also must pervade it throughout4 ,it must be wholly rational or wholly irrational1 pure universe or pure multiverse or nulliverse2 and reduced to this violent alternative1 no one's choice ought long to remain doubtful4 ,the individual absolute1 with its parts co-implicated through and through1 so that there is nothing in any part by which any other part can remain inwardly unaffected1 is the only rational supposition4 ,connexions of an external sort1 by which the many became merely continuous instead of being consubstantial1 would be an irrational supposition4 ,mr4 ,bradley is the pattern champion of this philosophy in extremis1 as one might call it1 for he shows an intolerance to pluralism so extreme that ,i fancy few of his readers have been able fully to share it4 ,his reasoning exemplifies everywhere what ,i call the vice of intellectualism1 for abstract terms are used by him as positively excluding all that their definition fails to include4 ,some ,greek sophists could deny that we may say that man is good1 for man1 they said1 means only man1 and good means only good1 and the word is can't be construed to identify such disparate meanings4 ,mr4 ,bradley revels in the same type of argument4 ,no adjective can rationally qualify a substantive1 he thinks1 for if distinct from the substantive1 it can't be united with it2 and if not distinct1 there is only one thing there1 and nothing left to unite4 ,our whole pluralistic procedure in using subjects and predicates as we do is fundamentally irrational1 an example of the desperation of our finite intellectual estate1 infected and undermined as that is by the separatist discursive forms which are our only categories1 but which absolute reality must somehow absorb into its unity and overcome4 ,readers of ',appearance and reality' will remember how ,mr4 ,bradley suffers from a difficulty identical with that to which ,lotze and ,royce fall a prey--how shall an influence influence8 how shall a relation relate8 ,any conjunctive relation between two phenomenal experiences a and b must1 in the intellectualist philosophy of these authors1 be itself a third entity2 and as such1 instead of bridging the one original chasm1 it can only create two smaller chasms1 each to be freshly bridged4 ,instead of hooking a to b1 it needs itself to be hooked by a fresh relation r to a and by another r to b4 ,these new relations are but two more entities which themselves require to be hitched in turn by four still newer relations--so behold the vertiginous regressus ad infinitum in full career4 ,since a regressus ad infinitum is deemed absurd1 the notion that relations come 'between' their terms must be given up4 ,no mere external go-between can logically connect4 ,what occurs must be more intimate4 ,the hooking must be a penetration1 a possession4 ,the relation must involve the terms1 each term must involve it1 and merging thus their being in it1 they must somehow merge their being in each other1 tho1 as they seem still phenomenally so separate1 we can never conceive exactly how it is that they are inwardly one4 ,the absolute1 however1 must be supposed able to perform the unifying feat in his own inscrutable fashion4 ,in old times1 whenever a philosopher was assailed for some particularly tough absurdity in his system1 he was wont to parry the attack by the argument from the divine omnipotence4 ',do you mean to limit ,god's power8' he would reply3 'do you mean to say that ,god could not1 if he would1 do this or that8' ,this retort was supposed to close the mouths of all objectors of properly decorous mind4 ,the functions of the bradleian absolute are in this particular identical with those of the theistic ,god4 ,suppositions treated as too absurd to pass muster in the finite world which we inhabit1 the absolute must be able to make good 'somehow' in his ineffable way4 ,first we hear ,mr4 ,bradley convicting things of absurdity2 next1 calling on the absolute to vouch for them quand mme4 ,invoked for no other duty1 that duty it must and shall perform4 ,the strangest discontinuity of our world of appearance with the supposed world of absolute reality is asserted both by ,bradley and by ,royce2 and both writers1 the latter with great ingenuity1 seek to soften the violence of the jolt4 ,but it remains violent all the same1 and is felt to be so by most readers4 ,whoever feels the violence strongly sees as on a diagram in just what the peculiarity of all this philosophy of the absolute consists4 ,first1 there is a healthy faith that the world must be rational and self-consistent4 ',all science1 all real knowledge1 all experience presuppose1' as ,mr4 ,ritchie writes1 'a coherent universe4' ,next1 we find a loyal clinging to the rationalist belief that sense-data and their associations are incoherent1 and that only in substituting a conceptual order for their order can truth be found4 ,third1 the substituted conceptions are treated intellectualistically1 that is as mutually exclusive and discontinuous1 so that the first innocent continuity of the flow of sense-experience is shattered for us without any higher conceptual continuity taking its place4 ,finally1 since this broken state of things is intolerable1 the absolute deus ex machina is called on to mend it in his own way1 since we cannot mend it in ours4 ,any other picture than this of post-kantian absolutism ,i am unable to frame4 ,i see the intellectualistic criticism destroying the immediately given coherence of the phenomenal world1 but unable to make its own conceptual substitutes cohere1 and ,i see the resort to the absolute for a coherence of a higher type4 ,the situation has dramatic liveliness1 but it is inwardly incoherent throughout1 and the question inevitably comes up whether a mistake may not somewhere have crept in in the process that has brought it about4 ,may not the remedy lie rather in revising the intellectualist criticism than in first adopting it and then trying to undo its consequences by an arbitrary act of faith in an unintelligible agent4 ,may not the flux of sensible experience itself contain a rationality that has been overlooked1 so that the real remedy would consist in harking back to it more intelligently1 and not in advancing in the opposite direction away from it and even away beyond the intellectualist criticism that disintegrates it1 to the pseudo-rationality of the supposed absolute point of view4 ,i myself believe that this is the real way to keep rationality in the world1 and that the traditional rationalism has always been facing in the wrong direction4 ,i hope in the end to make you share1 or at any rate respect1 this belief1 but there is much to talk of before we get to that point4 ,i employed the word 'violent' just now in describing the dramatic situation in which it pleases the philosophy of the absolute to make its camp4 ,i don't see how any one can help being struck in absolutist writings by that curious tendency to fly to violent extremes of which ,i have already said a word4 ,the universe must be rational2 well and good2 but how rational8 in what sense of that eulogistic but ambiguous word8--this would seem to be the next point to bring up4 ,there are surely degrees in rationality that might be discriminated and described4 ,things can be consistent or coherent in very diverse ways4 ,but no more in its conception of rationality than in its conception of relations can the monistic mind suffer the notion of more or less4 ,rationality is one and indivisible3 if not rational thus indivisibly1 the universe must be completely irrational1 and no shadings or mixtures or compromises can obtain4 ,mr4 ,mc,taggart writes1 in discussing the notion of a mixture3 ',the two principles1 of rationality and irrationality1 to which the universe is then referred1 will have to be absolutely separate and independent4 ,for if there were any common unity to which they should be referred1 it would be that unity and not its two manifestations which would be the ultimate explanation 444 and the theory1 having thus become monistic1'#i would resolve itself into the same alternative once more3 is the single principle rational through and through or not8 ',can a plurality of reals be possible8' asks ,mr4 ,bradley1 and answers1 ',no1 impossible4' ,for it would mean a number of beings not dependent on each other1 and this independence their plurality would contradict4 ,for to be 'many' is to be related1 the word having no meaning unless the units are somehow taken together1 and it is impossible to take them in a sort of unreal void1 so they must belong to a larger reality1 and so carry the essence of the units beyond their proper selves1 into a whole which possesses unity and is a larger system4#aj ,either absolute independence or absolute mutual dependence--this1 then1 is the only alternative allowed by these thinkers4 ,of course 'independence1' if absolute1 would be preposterous1 so the only conclusion allowable is that1 in ,ritchie's words1 'every single event is ultimately related to every other1 and determined by the whole to which it belongs4' ,the whole complete block-universe through-and-through1 therefore1 or no universe at all6 ,professor ,taylor is so naf in this habit of thinking only in extremes that he charges the pluralists with cutting the ground from under their own feet in not consistently following it themselves4 ,what pluralists say is that a universe really connected loosely1 after the pattern of our daily experience1 is possible1 and that for certain reasons it is the hypothesis to be preferred4 ,what ,professor ,taylor thinks they naturally must or should say is that any other sort of universe is logically impossible1 and that a totality of things interrelated like the world of the monists is not an hypothesis that can be seriously thought out at all4#aa ,meanwhile no sensible pluralist ever flies or wants to fly to this dogmatic extreme4 ,if chance is spoken of as an ingredient of the universe1 absolutists interpret it to mean that double sevens are as likely to be thrown out of a dice box as double sixes are4 ,if free-will is spoken of1 that must mean that an english general is as likely to eat his prisoners to-day as a ,maori chief was a hundred years ago4 ,it is as likely--,i am using ,mr4 ,mc,taggart's examples--that a majority of ,londoners will burn themselves alive to-morrow as that they will partake of food1 as likely that ,i shall be hanged for brushing my hair as for committing a murder1#ab and so forth1 through various suppositions that no indeterminist ever sees real reason to make4 ,this habit of thinking only in the most violent extremes reminds me of what ,mr4 ,wells says of the current objections to socialism1 in his wonderful little book1 ',new worlds for old4' ,the commonest vice of the human mind is its disposition to see everything as yes or no1 as black or white1 its incapacity for discrimination of intermediate shades4 ,so the critics agree to some hard and fast impossible definition of socialism1 and extract absurdities from it as a conjurer gets rabbits from a hat4 ,socialism abolishes property1 abolishes the family1 and the rest4 ,the method1 ,mr4 ,wells continues1 is always the same3 ,it is to assume that whatever the socialist postulates as desirable is wanted without limit of qualification1--for socialist read pluralist and the parallel holds good1--it is to imagine that whatever proposal is made by him is to be carried out by uncontrolled monomaniacs1 and so to make a picture of the socialist dream which can be presented to the simple-minded person in doubt--',this is socialism'--or pluralism1 as the case may be4 ',surely6--,,surely6 you don't want this6' ,how often have ,i been replied to1 when expressing doubts of the logical necessity of the absolute1 of flying to the opposite extreme3 ',but surely1 ,,surely there must be some connexion among things6' ,as if ,i must necessarily be an uncontrolled monomanic insanely denying any connexion whatever4 ,the whole question revolves in very truth about the word 'some4' ,radical empiricism and pluralism stand out for the legitimacy of the notion of some3 each part of the world is in some ways connected1 in some other ways not connected with its other parts1 and the ways can be discriminated1 for many of them are obvious1 and their differences are obvious to view4 ,absolutism1 on its side1 seems to hold that 'some' is a category ruinously infected with self-contradictoriness1 and that the only categories inwardly consistent and therefore pertinent to reality are 'all' and 'none4' ,the question runs into the still more general one with which ,mr4 ,bradley and later writers of the monistic school have made us abundantly familiar--the question1 namely1 whether all the relations with other things1 possible to a being1 are pre-included in its intrinsic nature and enter into its essence1 or whether1 in respect to some of these relations1 it can be without reference to them1 and1 if it ever does enter into them1 do so adventitiously and as it were by an after-thought4 ,this is the great question as to whether 'external' relations can exist4 ,they seem to1 undoubtedly4 ,my manuscript1 for example1 is 'on' the desk4 ,the relation of being 'on' doesn't seem to implicate or involve in any way the inner meaning of the manuscript or the inner structure of the desk--these objects engage in it only by their outsides1 it seems only a temporary accident in their respective histories4 ,moreover1 the 'on' fails to appear to our senses as one of those unintelligible 'betweens' that have to be separately hooked on the terms they pretend to connect4 ,all this innocent sense-appearance1 however1 we are told1 cannot pass muster in the eyes of reason4 ,it is a tissue of self-contradiction which only the complete absorption of the desk and the manuscript into the higher unity of a more absolute reality can overcome4 ,the reasoning by which this conclusion is supported is too subtle and complicated to be properly dealt with in a public lecture1 and you will thank me for not inviting you to consider it at all4#ac ,i feel the more free to pass it by now as ,i think that the cursory account of the absolutistic attitude which ,i have already given is sufficient for our present purpose1 and that my own verdict on the philosophy of the absolute as 'not proven'--please observe that ,i go no farther now--need not be backed by argument at every special point4 ,flanking operations are less costly and in some ways more effective than frontal attacks4 ,possibly you will yourselves think after hearing my remaining lectures that the alternative of an universe absolutely rational or absolutely irrational is forced and strained1 and that a via media exists which some of you may agree with me is to be preferred4 ,some rationality certainly does characterize our universe2 and1 weighing one kind with another1 we may deem that the incomplete kinds that appear are on the whole as acceptable as the through-and-through sort of rationality on which the monistic systematizers insist4 ,all the said systematizers who have written since ,hegel have owed their inspiration largely to him4 ,even when they have found no use for his particular triadic dialectic1 they have drawn confidence and courage from his authoritative and conquering tone4 ,i have said nothing about ,hegel in this lecture1 so ,i must repair the omission in the next4 ,,lecture ,,iii ,,hegel ,,and ,,his ,,method ,directly or indirectly1 that strange and powerful genius ,hegel has done more to strengthen idealistic pantheism in thoughtful circles than all other influences put together4 ,i must talk a little about him before drawing my final conclusions about the cogency of the arguments for the absolute4 ,in no philosophy is the fact that a philosopher's vision and the technique he uses in proof of it are two different things more palpably evident than in ,hegel4 ,the vision in his case was that of a world in which reason holds all things in solution and accounts for all the irrationality that superficially appears by taking it up as a 'moment' into itself4 ,this vision was so intense in ,hegel1 and the tone of authority with which he spoke from out of the midst of it was so weighty1 that the impression he made has never been effaced4 ,once dilated to the scale of the master's eye1 the disciples' sight could not contract to any lesser prospect4 ,the technique which ,hegel used to prove his vision was the so-called dialectic method1 but here his fortune has been quite contrary4 ,hardly a recent disciple has felt his particular applications of the method to be satisfactory4 ,many have let them drop entirely1 treating them rather as a sort of provisional stop-gap1 symbolic of what might some day prove possible of execution1 but having no literal cogency or value now4 ,yet these very same disciples hold to the vision itself as a revelation that can never pass away4 ,the case is curious and worthy of our study4 ,it is still more curious in that these same disciples1 altho they are usually willing to abandon any particular instance of the dialectic method to its critics1 are unshakably sure that in some shape the dialectic method is the key to truth4 ,what1 then1 is the dialectic method8 ,it is itself a part of the hegelian vision or intuition1 and a part that finds the strongest echo in empiricism and common sense4 ,great injustice is done to ,hegel by treating him as primarily a reasoner4 ,he is in reality a navely observant man1 only beset with a perverse preference for the use of technical and logical jargon4 ,he plants himself in the empirical flux of things and gets the impression of what happens4 ,his mind is in very truth impressionistic2 and his thought1 when once you put yourself at the animating centre of it1 is the easiest thing in the world to catch the pulse of and to follow4 ,any author is easy if you can catch the centre of his vision4 ,from the centre in ,hegel come those towering sentences of his that are comparable only to ,luther's1 as where1 speaking of the ontological proof of ,god's existence from the concept of him as the ens perfectissimum to which no attribute can be lacking1 he says3 ',it would be strange if the ,notion1 the very heart of the mind1 or1 in a word1 the concrete totality we call ,god1 were not rich enough to embrace so poor a category as ,being1 the very poorest and most abstract of all--for nothing can be more insignificant than ,being4' ,but if ,hegel's central thought is easy to catch1 his abominable habits of speech make his application of it to details exceedingly difficult to follow4 ,his passion for the slipshod in the way of sentences1 his unprincipled playing fast and loose with terms2 his dreadful vocabulary1 calling what completes a thing its 'negation1' for example2 his systematic refusal to let you know whether he is talking logic or physics or psychology1 his whole deliberately adopted policy of ambiguity and vagueness1 in short3 all these things make his present-day readers wish to tear their hair--or his--out in desperation4 ,like ,byron's corsair1 he has left a name 'to other times1 linked with one virtue and a thousand crimes4' ,the virtue was the vision1 which was really in two parts4 ,the first part was that reason is all-inclusive1 the second was that things are 'dialectic4' ,let me say a word about this second part of ,hegel's vision4 ,the impression that any naf person gets who plants himself innocently in the flux of things is that things are off their balance4 ,whatever equilibriums our finite experiences attain to are but provisional4 ,martinique volcanoes shatter our wordsworthian equilibrium with nature4 ,accidents1 either moral1 mental1 or physical1 break up the slowly built-up equilibriums men reach in family life and in their civic and professional relations4 ,intellectual enigmas frustrate our scientific systems1 and the ultimate cruelty of the universe upsets our religious attitudes and outlooks4 ,of no special system of good attained does the universe recognize the value as sacred4 ,down it tumbles1 over it goes1 to feed the ravenous appetite for destruction1 of the larger system of history in which it stood for a moment as a landing-place and stepping-stone4 ,this dogging of everything by its negative1 its fate1 its undoing1 this perpetual moving on to something future which shall supersede the present1 this is the hegelian intuition of the essential provisionality1 and consequent unreality1 of everything empirical and finite4 ,take any concrete finite thing and try to hold it fast4 ,you cannot1 for so held1 it proves not to be concrete at all1 but an arbitrary extract or abstract which you have made from the remainder of empirical reality4 ,the rest of things invades and overflows both it and you together1 and defeats your rash attempt4 ,any partial view whatever of the world tears the part out of its relations1 leaves out some truth concerning it1 is untrue of it1 falsifies it4 ,the full truth about anything involves more than that thing4 ,in the end nothing less than the whole of everything can be the truth of anything at all4 ,taken so far1 and taken in the rough1 ,hegel is not only harmless1 but accurate4 ,there is a dialectic movement in things1 if such it please you to call it1 one that the whole constitution of concrete life establishes2 but it is one that can be described and accounted for in terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in the monistic terms to which ,hegel finally reduced it4 ,pluralistic empiricism knows that everything is in an environment1 a surrounding world of other things1 and that if you leave it to work there it will inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors4 ,its rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by compromising some part of its original pretensions4 ,but ,hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in in a non-empirical light4 ,let the mental idea of the thing work in your thought all alone1 he fancied1 and just the same consequences will follow4 ,it will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it1 and can survive only by entering1 along with them1 into some kind of treaty4 ,this treaty will be an instance of the so-called 'higher synthesis' of everything with its negative2 and ,hegel's originality lay in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of concepts and treating it as the universal method by which every kind of life1 logical1 physical1 or psychological1 is mediated4 ,not to the sensible facts as such1 then1 did ,hegel point for the secret of what keeps existence going1 but rather to the conceptual way of treating them4 ,concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things that previous logicians had supposed1 but were germinative1 and passed beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent dialectic4 ,in ignoring each other as they do1 they virtually exclude and deny each other1 he thought1 and thus in a manner introduce each other4 ,so the dialectic logic1 according to him1 had to supersede the 'logic of identity' in which1 since ,aristotle1 all ,europe had been brought up4 ,this view of concepts is ,hegel's revolutionary performance2 but so studiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such1 or the sensible experiences and elements conceived1 that ,hegel really means to work with4 ,the only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of his procedure1 some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it4 ,i make no claim to understanding it1 ,i treat it merely impressionistically4 ,so treating it1 ,i regret that he should have called it by the name of logic4 ,clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world1 and refusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist picture of it1 it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that intellectualism had already pre-empted4 ,but he clung fast to the old rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all its squalid particulars1 and never tolerated the notion that the form of philosophy might be empirical only4 ,his own system had to be a product of eternal reason1 so the word 'logic1' with its suggestions of coercive necessity1 was the only word he could find natural4 ,he pretended therefore to be using the a priori method1 and to be working by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms--position1 negation1 reflection1 universal1 particular1 individual1 and the like4 ,but what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions1 which exceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categories in every instance of their use4 ,what he did with the category of negation was his most original stroke4 ,the orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically through the field of concepts only by going from the same to the same4 ,hegel felt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought2 he saw that in a fashion negation also relates things2 and he had the brilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advance from the different to the different as if it were also a necessity of thought4 ',the so-called maxim of identity1' he wrote1 'is supposed to be accepted by the consciousness of every one4 ,but the language which such a law demands1 a planet is a planet1 magnetism is magnetism1 mind is mind1 deserves to be called silliness4 ,no mind either speaks or thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law1 and no existence of any kind whatever conforms to it4 ,we must never view identity as abstract identity1 to the exclusion of all difference4 ,that is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what alone deserves the name of philosophy4 ,if thinking were no more than registering abstract identities1 it would be a most superfluous performance4 ,things and concepts are identical with themselves only in so far as at the same time they involve distinction4'#a ,the distinction that ,hegel has in mind here is naturally in the first instance distinction from all other things or concepts4 ,but in his hands this quickly develops into contradiction of them1 and finally1 reflected back upon itself1 into self-contradiction2 and the immanent self-contradictoriness of all finite concepts thenceforth becomes the propulsive logical force that moves the world4#b ',isolate a thing from all its relations1' says ,dr4 ,edward ,caird1#c expounding ,hegel1 'and try to assert it by itself2 you find that it has negated itself as well as its relations4 ,the thing in itself is nothing4' ,or1 to quote ,hegel's own words3 ',when we suppose an existent ,a1 and another1 ,b1 ,b is at first defined as the other4 ,but ,a is just as much the other of ,b4 ,both are others in the same fashion4444 ,other is the other by itself1 therefore the other of every other1 consequently the other of itself1 the simply unlike itself1 the self-negator1 the self-alterer1' etc4#d ,hegel writes elsewhere3 ',the finite1 as implicitly other than what it is1 is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being1 and to turn suddenly into its opposite4444 ,dialectic is the universal and irresistible power before which nothing can stay4444 ,summum jus1 summa injuria--to drive an abstract right to excess is to commit injustice4444 ,extreme anarchy and extreme despotism lead to one another4 ,pride comes before a fall4 ,too much wit outwits itself4 ,joy brings tears1 melancholy a sardonic smile4'#e ,to which one well might add that most human institutions1 by the purely technical and professional manner in which they come to be administered1 end by becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in view4 ,once catch well the knack of this scheme of thought and you are lucky if you ever get away from it4 ,it is all you can see4 ,let any one pronounce anything1 and your feeling of a contradiction being implied becomes a habit1 almost a motor habit in some persons who symbolize by a stereotyped gesture the position1 sublation1 and final reinstatement involved4 ,if you say 'two' or 'many1' your speech betrayeth you1 for the very name collects them into one4 ,if you express doubt1 your expression contradicts its content1 for the doubt itself is not doubted but affirmed4 ,if you say 'disorder1' what is that but a certain bad kind of order8 if you say 'indetermination1' you are determining just that4 ,if you say 'nothing but the unexpected happens1' the unexpected becomes what you expect4 ,if you say 'all things are relative1' to what is the all of them itself relative8 ,if you say 'no more1' you have said more already1 by implying a region in which no more is found2 to know a limit as such is consequently already to have got beyond it2 ,and so forth1 throughout as many examples as one cares to cite4 ,whatever you posit appears thus as one-sided1 and negates its other1 which1 being equally one-sided1 negates it2 and1 since this situation remains unstable1 the two contradictory terms have together1 according to ,hegel1 to engender a higher truth of which they both appear as indispensable members1 mutually mediating aspects of that higher concept of situation in thought4 ,every higher total1 however provisional and relative1 thus reconciles the contradictions which its parts1 abstracted from it1 prove implicitly to contain4 ,rationalism1 you remember1 is what ,i called the way of thinking that methodically subordinates parts to wholes1 so ,hegel here is rationalistic through and through4 ,the only whole by which all contradictions are reconciled is for him the absolute whole of wholes1 the all-inclusive reason to which ,hegel himself gave the name of the absolute ,idea1 but which ,i shall continue to call 'the absolute' purely and simply1 as ,i have done hitherto4 ,empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcile contradictions are innumerable1 so here again ,hegel's vision1 taken merely impressionistically1 agrees with countless facts4 ,somehow life does1 out of its total resources1 find ways of satisfying opposites at once4 ,this is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our civilization presents4 ,peace we secure by armaments1 liberty by laws and constitutions2 simplicity and naturalness are the consummate result of artificial breeding and training2 health1 strength1 and wealth are increased only by lavish use1 expense1 and wear4 ,our mistrust of mistrust engenders our commercial system of credit2 our tolerance of anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the only way of lessening their danger2 our charity has to say no to beggars in order not to defeat its own desires2 the true epicurean has to observe great sobriety2 the way to certainty lies through radical doubt2 virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its overcoming2 by obeying nature1 we command her1 etc4 ,the ethical and the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution4 ,you hate your enemy8--well1 forgive him1 and thereby heap coals of fire on his head2 to realize yourself1 renounce yourself2 to save your soul1 first lose it2 in short1 die to live4 ,from such massive examples one easily generalizes ,hegel's vision4 ,roughly1 his 'dialectic' picture is a fair account of a good deal of the world4 ,it sounds paradoxical1 but whenever you once place yourself at the point of view2 of any higher synthesis1 you see exactly how it does in a fashion take up opposites into itself4 ,as an example1 consider the conflict between our carnivorous appetites and hunting instincts and the sympathy with animals which our refinement is bringing in its train4 ,we have found how to reconcile these opposites most effectively by establishing game-laws and close seasons and by keeping domestic herds4 ,the creatures preserved thus are preserved for the sake of slaughter1 truly1 but if not preserved for that reason1 not one of them would be alive at all4 ,their will to live and our will to kill them thus harmoniously combine in this peculiar higher synthesis of domestication4 ,merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual1 ,hegel1 then1 is great and true4 ,but he aimed at being something far greater than an empirical reporter1 so ,i must say something about that essential aspect of his thought4 ,hegel was dominated by the notion of a truth that should prove incontrovertible1 binding on every one1 and certain1 which should be the truth1 one1 indivisible1 eternal1 objective1 and necessary1 to which all our particular thinking must lead as to its consummation4 ,this is the dogmatic ideal1 the postulate1 uncriticised1 undoubted1 and unchallenged1 of all rationalizers in philosophy4 ',i have never doubted1' a recent ,oxford writer says1 that truth is universal and single and timeless1 a single content or significance1 one and whole and complete4#f ,advance in thinking1 in the hegelian universe1 has1 in short1 to proceed by the apodictic words must be rather than by those inferior hypothetic words may be1 which are all that empiricists can use4 ,now ,hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through the field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played most beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something absolute and inconcussum in the way of truth4 ,it is easy to see how4 ,if you affirm anything1 for example that ,a is1 and simply leave the matter thus1 you leave it at the mercy of any one who may supervene and say 'not ,a1 but ,b is4' ,if he does say so1 your statement doesn't refute him1 it simply contradicts him1 just as his contradicts you4 ,the only way of making your affirmation about ,a self-securing is by getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible negations in advance4 ,the mere absence of negation is not enough2 it must be present1 but present with its fangs drawn4 ,what you posit as ,a must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous1 by having negated it in advance4 ,double negation is the only form of affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal4 ,simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for empiricists1 but unfit for rationalist use1 lying open as they do to every accidental contradictor1 and exposed to every puff of doubt4 ,the final truth must be something to which there is no imaginable alternative1 because it contains all its possible alternatives inside of itself as moments already taken account of and overcome4 ,whatever involves its own alternatives as elements of itself is1 in a phrase often repeated1 its 'own other1' made so by the methode der absoluten negativitt4 ,formally1 this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed as it were on its own liability to death1 so that1 death once dead for it1 there's no more dying then1 is the very fulfilment of the rationalistic aspiration4 ,that one and only whole1 with all its parts involved in it1 negating and making one another impossible if abstracted and taken singly1 but necessitating and holding one another in place if the whole of them be taken integrally1 is the literal ideal sought after2 it is the very diagram and picture of that notion of the truth with no outlying alternative1 to which nothing can be added1 nor from it anything withdrawn1 and all variations from which are absurd1 which so dominates the human imagination4 ,once we have taken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solves the world-old problem1 the older ways of proving the necessity of judgments cease to give us satisfaction4 ,hegel's way we think must be the right way4 ,the true must be essentially the self-reflecting self-contained recurrent1 that which secures itself by including its own other and negating it2 that makes a spherical system with no loose ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon2 that is forever rounded in and closed1 not strung along rectilinearly and open at its ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which ,hegel calls the world of the bad infinite1 and which is all that empiricism1 starting with simply posited single parts and elements1 is ever able to attain to4 ,no one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception4 ,it is surely in the grand style1 if there be such a thing as a grand style in philosophy4 ,for us1 however1 it remains1 so far1 a merely formal and diagrammatic conception2 for with the actual content of absolute truth1 as ,hegel materially tries to set it forth1 few disciples have been satisfied1 and ,i do not propose to refer at all to the concreter parts of his philosophy4 ,the main thing now is to grasp the generalized vision1 and feel the authority of the abstract scheme of a statement self-secured by involving double negation4 ,absolutists who make no use of ,hegel's own technique are really working by his method4 ,you remember the proofs of the absolute which ,i instanced in my last lecture1 ,lotze's and ,royce's proofs by reductio ad absurdum1 to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in things will logically work out into absolute union1 and any minimal disconnexion into absolute disunion1--these are really arguments framed on the hegelian pattern4 ,the truth is that which you implicitly affirm in the very attempt to deny it2 it is that from which every variation refutes itself by proving self-contradictory4 ,this is the supreme insight of rationalism1 and to-day the best must-be's of rationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate it to the hearer4 ,thus1 you see1 my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again and we can consider ,hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting the same system4 ,the next point ,i wish to dwell on is the part played by what ,i have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful system's structure4 ,rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by turning away from sensation to conception1 conception obviously giving the more universal and immutable picture4 ,intellectualism in the vicious sense ,i have already defined as the habit of assuming that a concept excludes from any reality conceived by its means everything not included in the concept's definition4 ,i called such intellectualism illegitimate as ,i found it used in ,lotze's1 ,royce's1 and ,bradley's proofs of the absolute 7which absolute ,i consequently held to be non-proven by their arguments71 and ,i left off by asserting my own belief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe1 describable only by the free use of the word 'some1' is a legitimate hypothesis4 ,now ,hegel himself1 in building up his method of double negation1 offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism4 ,every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of that thing and not a concept of anything else4 ,but ,hegel treats this not being a concept of anything else as if it were equivalent to the concept of anything else not being1 or in other words as if it were a denial or negation of everything else4 ,then1 as the other things1 thus implicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived1 also by the same law contradict it1 the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos4 ,if any one finds the process here to be a luminous one1 he must be left to the illumination1 he must remain an undisturbed hegelian4 ,what others feel as the intolerable ambiguity1 verbosity1 and unscrupulousness of the master's way of deducing things1 he will probably ascribe--since divine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret--to the 'difficulty' that habitually accompanies profundity4 ,for my own part1 there seems something grotesque and saugrenu in the pretension of a style so disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds1 to be the authentic mother-tongue of reason1 and to keep step more accurately than any other style does with the absolute's own ways of thinking4 ,i do not therefore take ,hegel's technical apparatus seriously at all4 ,i regard him rather as one of those numerous original seers who can never learn how to articulate4 ,his would-be coercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes2 but that does not in the least impugn the philosophic importance of his conception of the absolute1 if we take it merely hypothetically as one of the great types of cosmic vision4 ,taken thus hypothetically1 ,i wish to discuss it briefly4 ,but before doing so ,i must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the hegelian procedure4 ,the peculiarity is one which will come before us again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture1 so at present ,i only note it in passing4 ,hegel1 you remember1 considers that the immediate finite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their own others4 ,they are negated by what is external to them4 ,the absolute is true because it and it only has no external environment1 and has attained to being its own other4 7,these words sound queer enough1 but those of you who know something of ,hegel's text will follow them47 ,granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be its own other1 everything hinges on whether he is right in holding that the several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said to be in any wise their own others4 ,when conceptually or intellectualistically treated1 they of course cannot be their own others4 ,every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn't include1 and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for reality's concrete pulses1 the latter must square themselves with intellectualistic logic1 and no one of them in any sense can claim to be its own other4 ,if1 however1 the conceptual treatment of the flow of reality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to have a practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value1 then an independent empirical look into the constitution of reality's pulses might possibly show that some of them are their own others1 and indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is maintained to be so by ,hegel4 ,when we come to my sixth lecture1 on ,professor ,bergson1 ,i shall in effect defend this very view1 strengthening my thesis by his authority4 ,i am unwilling to say anything more about the point at this time1 and what ,i have just said of it is only a sort of surveyor's note of where our present position lies in the general framework of these lectures4 ,let us turn now at last to the great question of fact1 ,does the absolute exist or not8 to which all our previous discussion has been preliminary4 ,i may sum up that discussion by saying that whether there really be an absolute or not1 no one makes himself absurd or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it4 ,the charges of self-contradiction1 where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning1 rest on a vicious intellectualism4 ,i will not recapitulate my criticisms4 ,i will simply ask you to change the venue1 and to discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis4 ,as such1 is it more probable or more improbable8 ,but first of all ,i must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled4 ,that other object is the ',god' of common people in their religion1 and the creator-,god of orthodox christian theology4 ,only thoroughgoing monists or pantheists believe in the absolute4 ,the ,god of our popular ,christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system4 ,he and we stand outside of each other1 just as the devil1 the saints1 and the angels stand outside of both of us4 ,i can hardly conceive of anything more different from the absolute than the ,god1 say1 of ,david or of ,isaiah4 ,that ,god is an essentially finite being in the cosmos1 not with the cosmos in him1 and indeed he has a very local habitation there1 and very one-sided local and personal attachments4 ,if it should prove probable that the absolute does not exist1 it will not follow in the slightest degree that a ,god like that of ,david1 ,isaiah1 or ,jesus may not exist1 or may not be the most important existence in the universe for us to acknowledge4 ,i pray you1 then1 not to confound the two ideas as you listen to the criticisms ,i shall have to proffer4 ,i hold to the finite ,god1 for reasons which ,i shall touch on in the seventh of these lectures2 but ,i hold that his rival and competitor--,i feel almost tempted to say his enemy--the absolute1 is not only not forced on us by logic1 but that it is an improbable hypothesis4 ,the great claim made for the absolute is that by supposing it we make the world appear more rational4 ,any hypothesis that does that will always be accepted as more probably true than an hypothesis that makes the world appear irrational4 ,men are once for all so made that they prefer a rational world to believe in and to live in4 ,but rationality has at least four dimensions1 intellectual1 aesthetical1 moral1 and practical2 and to find a world rational to the maximal degree in all these respects simultaneously is no easy matter4 ,intellectually1 the world of mechanical materialism is the most rational1 for we subject its events to mathematical calculation4 ,but the mechanical world is ugly1 as arithmetic is ugly1 and it is non-moral4 ,morally1 the theistic world is rational enough1 but full of intellectual frustrations4 ,the practical world of affairs1 in its turn1 so supremely rational to the politician1 the military man1 or the man of conquering business-faculty that he never would vote to change the type of it1 is irrational to moral and artistic temperaments2 so that whatever demand for rationality we find satisfied by a philosophic hypothesis1 we are liable to find some other demand for rationality unsatisfied by the same hypothesis4 ,the rationality we gain in one coin we thus pay for in another2 and the problem accordingly seems at first sight to resolve itself into that of getting a conception which will yield the largest balance of rationality rather than one which will yield perfect rationality of every description4 ,in general1 it may be said that if a man's conception of the world lets loose any action in him that is easy1 or any faculty which he is fond of exercising1 he will deem it rational in so far forth1 be the faculty that of computing1 fighting1 lecturing1 classifying1 framing schematic tabulations1 getting the better end of a bargain1 patiently waiting and enduring1 preaching1 joke-making1 or what you like4 ,albeit the absolute is defined as being necessarily an embodiment of objectively perfect rationality1 it is fair to its english advocates to say that those who have espoused the hypothesis most concretely and seriously have usually avowed the irrationality to their own minds of certain elements in it4 ,probably the weightiest contribution to our feeling of the rationality of the universe which the notion of the absolute brings is the assurance that however disturbed the surface may be1 at bottom all is well with the cosmos--central peace abiding at the heart of endless agitation4 ,this conception is rational in many ways1 beautiful aesthetically1 beautiful intellectually 7could we only follow it into detail71 and beautiful morally1 if the enjoyment of security can be accounted moral4 ,practically it is less beautiful2 for1 as we saw in our last lecture1 in representing the deepest reality of the world as static and without a history1 it loosens the world's hold upon our sympathies and leaves the soul of it foreign4 ,nevertheless it does give peace1 and that kind of rationality is so paramountly demanded by men that to the end of time there will be absolutists1 men who choose belief in a static eternal1 rather than admit that the finite world of change and striving1 even with a ,god as one of the strivers1 is itself eternal4 ,for such minds ,professor ,royce's words will always be the truest3 ',the very presence of ill in the temporal order is the condition of the perfection of the eternal order4444 ,we long for the absolute only in so far as in us the absolute also longs1 and seeks through our very temporal striving1 the peace that is nowhere in time1 but only1 and yet absolutely1 in eternity4 ,were there no longing in time there would be no peace in eternity4444 ,god i4e4 the absolute who here in me aims at what ,i now temporally miss1 not only possesses in the eternal world the goal after which ,i strive1 but comes to possess it even through and because of my sorrow4 ,through this my tribulation the absolute triumph then is won4444 ,in the absolute ,i am fulfilled4 ,yet my very fulfilment demands and therefore can transcend this sorrow4'#g ,royce is particularly felicitous in his ability to cite parts of finite experience to which he finds his picture of this absolute experience analogous4 ,but it is hard to portray the absolute at all without rising into what might be called the 'inspired' style of language--,i use the word not ironically1 but prosaically and descriptively1 to designate the only literary form that goes with the kind of emotion that the absolute arouses4 ,one can follow the pathway of reasoning soberly enough1#h but the picture itself has to be effulgent4 ,this admirable faculty of transcending1 whilst inwardly preserving1 every contrariety1 is the absolute's characteristic form of rationality4 ,we are but syllables in the mouth of the ,lord2 if the whole sentence is divine1 each syllable is absolutely what it should be1 in spite of all appearances4 ,in making up the balance for or against absolutism1 this emotional value weights heavily the credit side of the account4 ,the trouble is that we are able to see so little into the positive detail of it1 and that if once admitted not to be coercively proven by the intellectualist arguments1 it remains only a hypothetic possibility4 ,on the debit side of the account the absolute1 taken seriously1 and not as a mere name for our right occasionally to drop the strenuous mood and take a moral holiday1 introduces all those tremendous irrationalities into the universe which a frankly pluralistic theism escapes1 but which have been flung as a reproach at every form of monistic theism or pantheism4 ,it introduces a speculative 'problem of evil' namely1 and leaves us wondering why the perfection of the absolute should require just such particular hideous forms of life as darken the day for our human imaginations4 ,if they were forced on it by something alien1 and to 'overcome' them the absolute had still to keep hold of them1 we could understand its feeling of triumph1 though we1 so far as we were ourselves among the elements overcome1 could acquiesce but sullenly in the resultant situation1 and would never just have chosen it as the most rational one conceivable4 ,but the absolute is represented as a being without environment1 upon which nothing alien can be forced1 and which has spontaneously chosen from within to give itself the spectacle of all that evil rather than a spectacle with less evil in it4#i ,its perfection is represented as the source of things1 and yet the first effect of that perfection is the tremendous imperfection of all finite experience4 ,in whatever sense the word 'rationality' may be taken1 it is vain to contend that the impression made on our finite minds by such a way of representing things is altogether rational4 ,theologians have felt its irrationality acutely1 and the 'fall1' the predestination1 and the election which the situation involves have given them more trouble than anything else in their attempt to pantheize ,christianity4 ,the whole business remains a puzzle1 both intellectually and morally4 ,grant that the spectacle or world-romance offered to itself by the absolute is in the absolute's eyes perfect4 ,why would not the world be more perfect by having the affair remain in just those terms1 and by not having any finite spectators to come in and add to what was perfect already their innumerable imperfect manners of seeing the same spectacle8 ,suppose the entire universe to consist of one superb copy of a book1 fit for the ideal reader4 ,is that universe improved or deteriorated by having myriads of garbled and misprinted separate leaves and chapters also created1 giving false impressions of the book to whoever looks at them8 ,to say the least1 the balance of rationality is not obviously in favor of such added mutilations4 ,so this question becomes urgent3 ,why1 the absolute's own total vision of things being so rational1 was it necessary to comminute it into all these coexisting inferior fragmentary visions8 ,leibnitz in his theodicy represents ,god as limited by an antecedent reason in things which makes certain combinations logically incompatible1 certain goods impossible4 ,he surveys in advance all the universes he might create1 and by an act of what ,leibnitz calls his antecedent will he chooses our actual world as the one in which the evil1 unhappily necessary anyhow1 is at its minimum4 ,it is the best of all the worlds that are possible1 therefore1 but by no means the most abstractly desirable world4 ,having made this mental choice1 ,god next proceeds to what ,leibnitz calls his act of consequent or decretory will3 he says ',fiat' and the world selected springs into objective being1 with all the finite creatures in it to suffer from its imperfections without sharing in its creator's atoning vision4 ,lotze has made some penetrating remarks on this conception of ,leibnitz's1 and they exactly fall in with what ,i say of the absolutist conception4 ,the world projected out of the creative mind by the fiat1 and existing in detachment from its author1 is a sphere of being where the parts realize themselves only singly4 ,if the divine value of them is evident only when they are collectively looked at1 then1 ,lotze rightly says1 the world surely becomes poorer and not richer for ,god's utterance of the fiat4 ,he might much better have remained contented with his merely antecedent choice of the scheme1 without following it up by a creative decree4 ,the scheme as such was admirable2 it could only lose by being translated into reality4#aj ,why1 ,i similarly ask1 should the absolute ever have lapsed from the perfection of its own integral experience of things1 and refracted itself into all our finite experiences8 ,it is but fair to recent english absolutists to say that many of them have confessed the imperfect rationality of the absolute from this point of view4 ,mr4 ,mc,taggart1 for example1 writes3 ',does not our very failure to perceive the perfection of the universe destroy it8 444 ,in so far as we do not see the perfection of the universe1 we are not perfect ourselves4 ,and as we are parts of the universe1 that cannot be perfect4'#aa ,and ,mr4 ,joachim finds just the same difficulty4 ,calling the hypothesis of the absolute by the name of the 'coherence theory of truth1' he calls the problem of understanding how the complete coherence of all things in the absolute should involve as a necessary moment in its self-maintenance the self-assertion of the finite minds1 a self-assertion which in its extreme form is error1--he calls this problem1 ,i say1 an insoluble puzzle4 ,if truth be the universal fons et origo1 how does error slip in8 ',the coherence theory of truth1' he concludes1 'may thus be said to suffer shipwreck at the very entrance of the harbor4'#ab ,yet in spite of this rather bad form of irrationality1 ,mr4 ,joachim stoutly asserts his 'immediate certainty'#ac of the theory shipwrecked1 the correctness of which he says he has 'never doubted4' ,this candid confession of a fixed attitude of faith in the absolute1 which even one's own criticisms and perplexities fail to disturb1 seems to me very significant4 ,not only empiricists1 but absolutists also1 would all1 if they were as candid as this author1 confess that the prime thing in their philosophy is their vision of a truth possible1 which they then employ their reasoning to convert1 as best it can1 into a certainty or probability4 ,i can imagine a believer in the absolute retorting at this point that he at any rate is not dealing with mere probabilities1 but that the nature of things logically requires the multitudinous erroneous copies1 and that therefore the universe cannot be the absolute's book alone4 ,for1 he will ask1 is not the absolute defined as the total consciousness of everything that is8 ,must not its field of view consist of parts8 ,and what can the parts of a total consciousness be unless they be fractional consciousnesses8 ,our finite minds must therefore coexist with the absolute mind4 ,we are its constituents1 and it cannot live without us4--,but if any one of you feels tempted to retort in this wise1 let me remind you that you are frankly employing pluralistic weapons1 and thereby giving up the absolutist cause4 ,the notion that the absolute is made of constituents on which its being depends is the rankest empiricism4 ,the absolute as such has objects1 not constituents1 and if the objects develop selfhoods upon their own several accounts1 those selfhoods must be set down as facts additional to the absolute consciousness1 and not as elements implicated in its definition4 ,the absolute is a rationalist conception4 ,rationalism goes from wholes to parts1 and always assumes wholes to be self-sufficing4#ad ,my conclusion1 so far1 then1 is this1 that altho the hypothesis of the absolute1 in yielding a certain kind of religious peace1 performs a most important rationalizing function1 it nevertheless1 from the intellectual point of view1 remains decidedly irrational4 ,the ideally perfect whole is certainly that whole of which the parts also are perfect--if we can depend on logic for anything1 we can depend on it for that definition4 ,the absolute is defined as the ideally perfect whole1 yet most of its parts1 if not all1 are admittedly imperfect4 ,evidently the conception lacks internal consistency1 and yields us a problem rather than a solution4 ,it creates a speculative puzzle1 the so-called mystery of evil and of error1 from which a pluralistic metaphysic is entirely free4 ,in any pluralistic metaphysic1 the problems that evil presents are practical1 not speculative4 ,not why evil should exist at all1 but how we can lessen the actual amount of it1 is the sole question we need there consider4 ',god1' in the religious life of ordinary men1 is the name not of the whole of things1 heaven forbid1 but only of the ideal tendency in things1 believed in as a superhuman person who calls us to co-operate in his purposes1 and who furthers ours if they are worthy4 ,he works in an external environment1 has limits1 and has enemies4 ,when ,john ,mill said that the notion of ,god's omnipotence must be given up1 if ,god is to be kept as a religious object1 he was surely accurately right2 yet so prevalent is the lazy monism that idly haunts the region of ,god's name1 that so simple and truthful a saying was generally treated as a paradox3 ,god1 it was said1 could not be finite4 ,i believe that the only ,god worthy of the name must be finite1 and ,i shall return to this point in a later lecture4 ,if the absolute exist in addition--and the hypothesis must1 in spite of its irrational features1 still be left open--then the absolute is only the wider cosmic whole of which our ,god is but the most ideal portion1 and which in the more usual human sense is hardly to be termed a religious hypothesis at all4 ',cosmic emotion' is the better name for the reaction it may awaken4 ,observe that all the irrationalities and puzzles which the absolute gives rise to1 and from which the finite ,god remains free1 are due to the fact that the absolute has nothing1 absolutely nothing1 outside of itself4 ,the finite ,god whom ,i contrast with it may conceivably have almost nothing outside of himself2 he may already have triumphed over and absorbed all but the minutest fraction of the universe2 but that fraction1 however small1 reduces him to the status of a relative being1 and in principle the universe is saved from all the irrationalities incidental to absolutism4 ,the only irrationality left would be the irrationality of which pluralism as such is accused1 and of this ,i hope to say a word more later4 ,i have tired you with so many subtleties in this lecture that ,i will add only two other counts to my indictment4 ,first1 then1 let me remind you that the absolute is useless for deductive purposes4 ,it gives us absolute safety if you will1 but it is compatible with every relative danger4 ,you cannot enter the phenomenal world with the notion of it in your grasp1 and name beforehand any detail which you are likely to meet there4 ,whatever the details of experience may prove to be1 after the fact of them the absolute will adopt them4 ,it is an hypothesis that functions retrospectively only1 not prospectively4 ,that1 whatever it may be1 will have been in point of fact the sort of world which the absolute was pleased to offer to itself as a spectacle4 ,again1 the absolute is always represented idealistically1 as the all-knower4 ,thinking this view consistently out leads one to frame an almost ridiculous conception of the absolute mind1 owing to the enormous mass of unprofitable information which it would then seem obliged to carry4 ,one of the many reductiones ad absurdum of pluralism by which idealism thinks it proves the absolute ,one is as follows3 ,let there be many facts2 but since on idealist principles facts exist only by being known1 the many facts will therefore mean many knowers4 ,but that there are so many knowers is itself a fact1 which in turn requires its knower1 so the one absolute knower has eventually to be brought in4 ,all facts lead to him4 ,if it be a fact that this table is not a chair1 not a rhinoceros1 not a logarithm1 not a mile away from the door1 not worth five hundred pounds sterling1 not a thousand centuries old1 the absolute must even now be articulately aware of all these negations4 ,along with what everything is it must also be conscious of everything which it is not4 ,this infinite atmosphere of explicit negativity--observe that it has to be explicit--around everything seems to us so useless an encumbrance as to make the absolute still more foreign to our sympathy4 ,furthermore1 if it be a fact that certain ideas are silly1 the absolute has to have already thought the silly ideas to establish them in silliness4 ,the rubbish in its mind would thus appear easily to outweigh in amount the more desirable material4 ,one would expect it fairly to burst with such an obesity1 plethora1 and superfoetation of useless information4#ae ,i will spare you further objections4 ,the sum of it all is that the absolute is not forced on our belief by logic1 that it involves features of irrationality peculiar to itself1 and that a thinker to whom it does not come as an 'immediate certainty' 7to use ,mr4 ,joachim's words71 is in no way bound to treat it as anything but an emotionally rather sublime hypothesis4 ,as such1 it might1 with all its defects1 be1 on account of its peace-conferring power and its formal grandeur1 more rational than anything else in the field4 ,but meanwhile the strung-along unfinished world in time is its rival3 reality ,,may exist in distributive form1 in the shape not of an all but of a set of eaches1 just as it seems to--this is the anti-absolutist hypothesis4 ,prima facie there is this in favor of the eaches1 that they are at any rate real enough to have made themselves at least appear to every one1 whereas the absolute has as yet appeared immediately to only a few mystics1 and indeed to them very ambiguously4 ,the advocates of the absolute assure us that any distributive form of being is infected and undermined by self-contradiction4 ,if we are unable to assimilate their arguments1 and we have been unable1 the only course we can take1 it seems to me1 is to let the absolute bury the absolute1 and to seek reality in more promising directions1 even among the details of the finite and the immediately given4 ,if these words of mine sound in bad taste to some of you1 or even sacrilegious1 ,i am sorry4 ,perhaps the impression may be mitigated by what ,i have to say in later lectures4 ,,lecture ,,iv ,,concerning ,,fechner ,the prestige of the absolute has rather crumbled in our hands4 ,the logical proofs of it miss fire2 the portraits which its best court-painters show of it are featureless and foggy in the extreme2 and1 apart from the cold comfort of assuring us that with it all is well1 and that to see that all is well with us also we need only rise to its eternal point of view1 it yields us no relief whatever4 ,it introduces1 on the contrary1 into philosophy and theology certain poisonous difficulties of which but for its intrusion we never should have heard4 ,but if we drop the absolute out of the world1 must we then conclude that the world contains nothing better in the way of consciousness than our consciousness8 ,is our whole instinctive belief in higher presences1 our persistent inner turning towards divine companionship1 to count for nothing8 ,is it but the pathetic illusion of beings with incorrigibly social and imaginative minds8 ,such a negative conclusion would1 ,i believe1 be desperately hasty1 a sort of pouring out of the child with the bath4 ,logically it is possible to believe in superhuman beings without identifying them with the absolute at all4 ,the treaty of offensive and defensive alliance which certain groups of the ,christian clergy have recently made with our transcendentalist philosophers seems to me to be based on a well-meaning but baleful mistake4 ,neither the ,jehovah of the old testament nor the heavenly father of the new has anything in common with the absolute except that they are all three greater than man2 and if you say that the notion of the absolute is what the gods of ,abraham1 of ,david1 and of ,jesus1 after first developing into each other1 were inevitably destined to develop into in more reflective and modern minds1 ,i reply that although in certain specifically philosophical minds this may have been the case1 in minds more properly to be termed religious the development has followed quite another path4 ,the whole history of evangelical ,christianity is there to prove it4 ,i propose in these lectures to plead for that other line of development4 ,to set the doctrine of the absolute in its proper framework1 so that it shall not fill the whole welkin and exclude all alternative possibilities of higher thought--as it seems to do for many students who approach it with a limited previous acquaintance with philosophy--,i will contrast it with a system which1 abstractly considered1 seems at first to have much in common with absolutism1 but which1 when taken concretely and temperamentally1 really stands at the opposite pole4 ,i refer to the philosophy of ,gustav ,theodor ,fechner1 a writer but little known as yet to ,english readers1 but destined1 ,i am persuaded1 to wield more and more influence as time goes on4 ,it is the intense concreteness of ,fechner1 his fertility of detail1 which fills me with an admiration which ,i should like to make this audience share4 ,among the philosophic cranks of my acquaintance in the past was a lady all the tenets of whose system ,i have forgotten except one4 ,had she been born in the ,ionian ,archipelago some three thousand years ago1 that one doctrine would probably have made her name sure of a place in every university curriculum and examination paper4 ,the world1 she said1 is composed of only two elements1 the ,thick1 namely1 and the ,thin4 ,no one can deny the truth of this analysis1 as far as it goes 7though in the light of our contemporary knowledge of nature it has itself a rather 'thin' sound71 and it is nowhere truer than in that part of the world called philosophy4 ,i am sure1 for example1 that many of you1 listening to what poor account ,i have been able to give of transcendental idealism1 have received an impression of its arguments being strangely thin1 and of the terms it leaves us with being shiveringly thin wrappings for so thick and burly a world as this4 ,some of you of course will charge the thinness to my exposition2 but thin as that has been1 ,i believe the doctrines reported on to have been thinner4 ,from ,green to ,haldane the absolute proposed to us to straighten out the confusions of the thicket of experience in which our life is passed remains a pure abstraction which hardly any one tries to make a whit concreter4 ,if we open ,green1 we get nothing but the transcendental ego of apperception 7,kant's name for the fact that to be counted in experience a thing has to be witnessed71 blown up into a sort of timeless soap-bubble large enough to mirror the whole universe4 ,nature1 ,green keeps insisting1 consists only in relations1 and these imply the action of a mind that is eternal2 a self-distinguishing consciousness which itself escapes from the relations by which it determines other things4 ,present to whatever is in succession1 it is not in succession itself4 ,if we take the ,cairds1 they tell us little more of the principle of the universe--it is always a return into the identity of the self from the difference of its objects4 ,it separates itself from them and so becomes conscious of them in their separation from one another1 while at the same time it binds them together as elements in one higher self-consciousness4 ,this seems the very quintessence of thinness2 and the matter hardly grows thicker when we gather1 after enormous amounts of reading1 that the great enveloping self in question is absolute reason as such1 and that as such it is characterized by the habit of using certain jejune 'categories' with which to perform its eminent relating work4 ,the whole active material of natural fact is tried out1 and only the barest intellectualistic formalism remains4 ,hegel tried1 as we saw1 to make the system concreter by making the relations between things 'dialectic1' but if we turn to those who use his name most worshipfully1 we find them giving up all the particulars of his attempt1 and simply praising his intention--much as in our manner we have praised it ourselves4 ,mr4 ,haldane1 for example1 in his wonderfully clever ,gifford lectures1 praises ,hegel to the skies1 but what he tells of him amounts to little more than this1 that 'the categories in which the mind arranges its experiences1 and gives meaning to them1 the universals in which the particulars are grasped in the individual1 are a logical chain1 in which the first presupposes the last1 and the last is its presupposition and its truth4' ,he hardly tries at all to thicken this thin logical scheme4 ,he says indeed that absolute mind in itself1 and absolute mind in its hetereity or otherness1 under the distinction which it sets up of itself from itself1 have as their real prius absolute mind in synthesis2 and1 this being absolute mind's true nature1 its dialectic character must show itself in such concrete forms as ,goethe's and ,wordsworth's poetry1 as well as in religious forms4 ',the nature of ,god1 the nature of absolute mind1 is to exhibit the triple movement of dialectic1 and so the nature of ,god as presented in religion must be a triplicity1 a trinity4' ,but beyond thus naming ,goethe and ,wordsworth and establishing the trinity1 ,mr4 ,haldane's ,hegelianism carries us hardly an inch into the concrete detail of the world we actually inhabit4 ,equally thin is ,mr4 ,taylor1 both in his principles and in their results4 ,following ,mr4 ,bradley1 he starts by assuring us that reality cannot be self-contradictory1 but to be related to anything really outside of one's self is to be self-contradictory1 so the ultimate reality must be a single all-inclusive systematic whole4 ,yet all he can say of this whole at the end of his excellently written book is that the notion of it 'can make no addition to our information and can of itself supply no motives for practical endeavor4' ,mr4 ,mc,taggart treats us to almost as thin a fare4 ',the main practical interest of ,hegel's philosophy1' he says1 'is to be found in the abstract certainty which the logic gives us that all reality is rational and righteous1 even when we cannot see in the least how it is so4444 ,not that it shows us how the facts around us are good1 not that it shows us how we can make them better1 but that it proves that they1 like other reality1 are sub specie eternitatis1 perfectly good1 and sub specie temporis1 destined to become perfectly good4' ,here again1 no detail whatever1 only the abstract certainty that whatever the detail may prove to be1 it will be good4 ,common non-dialectical men have already this certainty as a result of the generous vital enthusiasm about the universe with which they are born4 ,the peculiarity of transcendental philosophy is its sovereign contempt for merely vital functions like enthusiasm1 and its pretension to turn our simple and immediate trusts and faiths into the form of logically mediated certainties1 to question which would be absurd4 ,but the whole basis on which ,mr4 ,mc,taggart's own certainty so solidly rests1 settles down into the one nutshell of an assertion into which he puts ,hegel's gospel1 namely1 that in every bit of experience and thought1 however finite1 the whole of reality 7the absolute idea1 as ,hegel calls it7 is 'implicitly present4' ,this indeed is ,hegel's vision1 and ,hegel thought that the details of his dialectic proved its truth4 ,but disciples who treat the details of the proof as unsatisfactory and yet cling to the vision1 are surely1 in spite of their pretension to a more rational consciousness1 no better than common men with their enthusiasms or deliberately adopted faiths4 ,we have ourselves seen some of the weakness of the monistic proofs4 ,mr4 ,mc,taggart picks plenty of holes of his own in ,hegel's logic1 and finally concludes that 'all true philosophy must be mystical1 not indeed in its methods but in its final conclusions1' which is as much as to say that the rationalistic methods leave us in the lurch1 in spite of all their superiority1 and that in the end vision and faith must eke them out4 ,but how abstract and thin is here the vision1 to say nothing of the faith6 ,the whole of reality1 explicitly absent from our finite experiences1 must nevertheless be present in them all implicitly1 altho no one of us can ever see how--the bare word 'implicit' here bearing the whole pyramid of the monistic system on its slender point4 ,mr4 ,joachim's monistic system of truth rests on an even slenderer point4--,i have never doubted1' he says1 'that universal and timeless truth is a single content or significance1 one and whole and complete1' and he candidly confesses the failure of rationalistic attempts 'to raise this immediate certainty' to the level of reflective knowledge4 ,there is1 in short1 no mediation for him between the ,truth in capital letters and all the little 'lower-case' truths--and errors--which life presents4 ,the psychological fact that he never has 'doubted' is enough4 ,the whole monistic pyramid1 resting on points as thin as these1 seems to me to be a machtspruch1 a product of will far more than one of reason4 ,unity is good1 therefore things shall cohere2 they shall be one2 there shall be categories to make them one1 no matter what empirical disjunctions may appear4 ,in ,hegel's own writings1 the shall-be temper is ubiquitous and towering2 it overrides verbal and logical resistances alike4 ,hegel's error1 as ,professor ,royce so well says1 'lay not in introducing logic into passion1' as some people charge1 'but in conceiving the logic of passion as the only logic4444 ,he is thus suggestive1' ,royce says1 'but never final4 ,his system as a system has crumbled1 but his vital comprehension of our life remains forever4'#a ,that vital comprehension we have already seen4 ,it is that there is a sense in which real things are not merely their own bare selves1 but may vaguely be treated as also their own others1 and that ordinary logic1 since it denies this1 must be overcome4 ,ordinary logic denies this because it substitutes concepts for real things1 and concepts are their own bare selves and nothing else4 ,what ,royce calls ,hegel's 'system' was ,hegel's attempt to make us believe that he was working by concepts and grinding out a higher style of logic1 when in reality sensible experiences1 hypotheses1 and passion furnished him with all his results4 ,what ,i myself may mean by things being their own others1 we shall see in a later lecture4 ,it is now time to take our look at ,fechner1 whose thickness is a refreshing contrast to the thin1 abstract1 indigent1 and threadbare appearance1 the starving1 school-room aspect1 which the speculations of most of our absolutist philosophers present4 ,there is something really weird and uncanny in the contrast between the abstract pretensions of rationalism and what rationalistic methods concretely can do4 ,if the 'logical prius' of our mind were really the 'implicit presence' of the whole 'concrete universal1' the whole of reason1 or reality1 or spirit1 or the absolute idea1 or whatever it may be called1 in all our finite thinking1 and if this reason worked 7for example7 by the dialectical method1 doesn't it seem odd that in the greatest instance of rationalization mankind has known1 in 'science1' namely1 the dialectical method should never once have been tried8 ,not a solitary instance of the use of it in science occurs to my mind4 ,hypotheses1 and deductions from these1 controlled by sense-observations and analogies with what we know elsewhere1 are to be thanked for all of science's results4 ,fechner used no methods but these latter ones in arguing for his metaphysical conclusions about reality--but let me first rehearse a few of the facts about his life4 ,born in #ahja1 the son of a poor country pastor in ,saxony1 he lived from #ahag to #ahhg1 when he died1 seventy years therefore1 at ,leipzig1 a typical gelehrter of the old-fashioned german stripe4 ,his means were always scanty1 so his only extravagances could be in the way of thought1 but these were gorgeous ones4 ,he passed his medical examinations at ,leipzig ,university at the age of twenty-one1 but decided1 instead of becoming a doctor1 to devote himself to physical science4 ,it was ten years before he was made professor of physics1 although he soon was authorized to lecture4 ,meanwhile1 he had to make both ends meet1 and this he did by voluminous literary labors4 ,he translated1 for example1 the four volumes of ,biot's treatise on physics1 and the six of ,thnard's work on chemistry1 and took care of their enlarged editions later4 ,he edited repertories of chemistry and physics1 a pharmaceutical journal1 and an encyclopaedia in eight volumes1 of which he wrote about one third4 ,he published physical treatises and experimental investigations of his own1 especially in electricity4 ,electrical measurements1 as you know1 are the basis of electrical science1 and ,fechner's measurements in galvanism1 performed with the simplest self-made apparatus1 are classic to this day4 ,during this time he also published a number of half-philosophical1 half-humorous writings1 which have gone through several editions1 under the name of ,dr4 ,mises1 besides poems1 literary and artistic essays1 and other occasional articles4 ,but overwork1 poverty1 and an eye-trouble produced by his observations on after-images in the retina 7also a classic piece of investigation7 produced in ,fechner1 then about thirty-eight years old1 a terrific attack of nervous prostration with painful hyperaesthesia of all the functions1 from which he suffered three years1 cut off entirely from active life4 ,present-day medicine would have classed poor ,fechner's malady quickly enough1 as partly a habit-neurosis1 but its severity was such that in his day it was treated as a visitation incomprehensible in its malignity2 and when he suddenly began to get well1 both ,fechner and others treated the recovery as a sort of divine miracle4 ,this illness1 bringing ,fechner face to face with inner desperation1 made a great crisis in his life4 ',had ,i not then clung to the faith1' he writes1 'that clinging to faith would somehow or other work its reward1 so htte ich jene zeit nicht ausgehalten4' ,his religious and cosmological faiths saved him--thenceforward one great aim with him was to work out and communicate these faiths to the world4 ,he did so on the largest scale2 but he did many other things too ere he died4 ,a book on the atomic theory1 classic also2 four elaborate mathematical and experimental volumes on what he called psychophysics--many persons consider ,fechner to have practically founded scientific psychology in the first of these books2 a volume on organic evolution1 and two works on experimental aesthetics1 in which again ,fechner is considered by some judges to have laid the foundations of a new science1 must be included among these other performances4 ,of the more religious and philosophical works1 ,i shall immediately give a further account4 ,all ,leipzig mourned him when he died1 for he was the pattern of the ideal german scholar1 as daringly original in his thought as he was homely in his life1 a modest1 genial1 laborious slave to truth and learning1 and withal the owner of an admirable literary style of the vernacular sort4 ,the materialistic generation1 that in the fifties and sixties called his speculations fantastic1 had been replaced by one with greater liberty of imagination1 and a ,preyer1 a ,wundt1 a ,paulsen1 and a ,lasswitz could now speak of ,fechner as their master4 ,his mind was indeed one of those multitudinously organized cross-roads of truth which are occupied only at rare intervals by children of men1 and from which nothing is either too far or too near to be seen in due perspective4 ,patientest observation1 exactest mathematics1 shrewdest discrimination1 humanest feeling1 flourished in him on the largest scale1 with no apparent detriment to one another4 ,he was in fact a philosopher in the 'great' sense1 altho he cared so much less than most philosophers care for abstractions of the 'thin' order4 ,for him the abstract lived in the concrete1 and the hidden motive of all he did was to bring what he called the daylight view of the world into ever greater evidence1 that daylight view being this1 that the whole universe in its different spans and wave-lengths1 exclusions and envelopments1 is everywhere alive and conscious4 ,it has taken fifty years for his chief book1 ',zend-avesta1' to pass into a second edition 7#aija74 ',one swallow1' he cheerfully writes1 'does not make a summer4 ,but the first swallow would not come unless the summer were coming2 and for me that summer means my daylight view some time prevailing4' ,the original sin1 according to ,fechner1 of both our popular and our scientific thinking1 is our inveterate habit of regarding the spiritual not as the rule but as an exception in the midst of nature4 ,instead of believing our life to be fed at the breasts of the greater life1 our individuality to be sustained by the greater individuality1 which must necessarily have more consciousness and more independence than all that it brings forth1 we habitually treat whatever lies outside of our life as so much slag and ashes of life only2 or if we believe in a ,divine ,spirit1 we fancy him on the one side as bodiless1 and nature as soulless on the other4 ,what comfort1 or peace1 ,fechner asks1 can come from such a doctrine8 ,the flowers wither at its breath1 the stars turn into stone2 our own body grows unworthy of our spirit and sinks to a tenement for carnal senses only4 ,the book of nature turns into a volume on mechanics1 in which whatever has life is treated as a sort of anomaly2 a great chasm of separation yawns between us and all that is higher than ourselves2 and ,god becomes a thin nest of abstractions4 ,fechner's great instrument for vivifying the daylight view is analogy2 not a rationalistic argument is to be found in all his many pages--only reasonings like those which men continually use in practical life4 ,for example3 ,my house is built by some one1 the world too is built by some one4 ,the world is greater than my house1 it must be a greater some one who built the world4 ,my body moves by the influence of my feeling and will2 the sun1 moon1 sea1 and wind1 being themselves more powerful1 move by the influence of some more powerful feeling and will4 ,i live now1 and change from one day to another2 ,i shall live hereafter1 and change still more1 etc4 ,bain defines genius as the power of seeing analogies4 ,the number that ,fechner could perceive was prodigious2 but he insisted on the differences as well4 ,neglect to make allowance for these1 he said1 is the common fallacy in analogical reasoning4 ,most of us1 for example1 reasoning justly that1 since all the minds we know are connected with bodies1 therefore ,god's mind should be connected with a body1 proceed to suppose that that body must be just an animal body over again1 and paint an altogether human picture of ,god4 ,but all that the analogy comports is a body--the particular features of our body are adaptations to a habitat so different from ,god's that if ,god have a physical body at all1 it must be utterly different from ours in structure4 ,throughout his writings ,fechner makes difference and analogy walk abreast1 and by his extraordinary power of noticing both1 he converts what would ordinarily pass for objections to his conclusions into factors of their support4 ,the vaster orders of mind go with the vaster orders of body4 ,the entire earth on which we live must have1 according to ,fechner1 its own collective consciousness4 ,so must each sun1 moon1 and planet2 so must the whole solar system have its own wider consciousness1 in which the consciousness of our earth plays one part4 ,so has the entire starry system as such its consciousness2 and if that starry system be not the sum of all that is1 materially considered1 then that whole system1 along with whatever else may be1 is the body of that absolutely totalized consciousness of the universe to which men give the name of ,god4 ,speculatively ,fechner is thus a monist in his theology2 but there is room in his universe for every grade of spiritual being between man and the final all-inclusive ,god2 and in suggesting what the positive content of all this super-humanity may be1 he hardly lets his imagination fly beyond simple spirits of the planetary order4 ,the earth-soul he passionately believes in2 he treats the earth as our special human guardian angel2 we can pray to the earth as men pray to their saints2 but ,i think that in his system1 as in so many of the actual historic theologies1 the supreme ,god marks only a sort of limit of enclosure of the worlds above man4 ,he is left thin and abstract in his majesty1 men preferring to carry on their personal transactions with the many less remote and abstract messengers and mediators whom the divine order provides4 ,i shall ask later whether the abstractly monistic turn which ,fechner's speculations took was necessitated by logic4 ,i believe it not to have been required4 ,meanwhile let me lead you a little more into the detail of his thought4 ,inevitably one does him miserable injustice by summarizing and abridging him4 ,for altho the type of reasoning he employs is almost childlike for simplicity1 and his bare conclusions can be written on a single page1 the power of the man is due altogether to the profuseness of his concrete imagination1 to the multitude of the points which he considers successively1 to the cumulative effect of his learning1 of his thoroughness1 and of the ingenuity of his detail1 to his admirably homely style1 to the sincerity with which his pages glow1 and finally to the impression he gives of a man who doesn't live at second-hand1 but who sees1 who in fact speaks as one having authority1 and not as if he were one of the common herd of professorial philosophic scribes4 ,abstractly set down1 his most important conclusion for my purpose in these lectures is that the constitution of the world is identical throughout4 ,in ourselves1 visual consciousness goes with our eyes1 tactile consciousness with our skin4 ,but altho neither skin nor eye knows aught of the sensations of the other1 they come together and figure in some sort of relation and combination in the more inclusive consciousness which each of us names his self4 ,quite similarly1 then1 says ,fechner1 we must suppose that my consciousness of myself and yours of yourself1 altho in their immediacy they keep separate and know nothing of each other1 are yet known and used together in a higher consciousness1 that of the human race1 say1 into which they enter as constituent parts4 ,similarly1 the whole human and animal kingdoms come together as conditions of a consciousness of still wider scope4 ,this combines in the soul of the earth with the consciousness of the vegetable kingdom1 which in turn contributes its share of experience to that of the whole solar system1 and so on from synthesis to synthesis and height to height1 till an absolutely universal consciousness is reached4 ,a vast analogical series1 in which the basis of the analogy consists of facts directly observable in ourselves4 ,the supposition of an earth-consciousness meets a strong instinctive prejudice which ,fechner ingeniously tries to overcome4 ,man's mind is the highest consciousness upon the earth1 we think--the earth itself being in all ways man's inferior4 ,how should its consciousness1 if it have one1 be superior to his8 ,what are the marks of superiority which we are tempted to use here8 ,if we look more carefully into them1 ,fechner points out that the earth possesses each and all of them more perfectly than we4 ,he considers in detail the points of difference between us1 and shows them all to make for the earth's higher rank4 ,i will touch on only a few of these points4 ,one of them of course is independence of other external beings4 ,external to the earth are only the other heavenly bodies4 ,all the things on which we externally depend for life--air1 water1 plant and animal food1 fellow men1 etc4--are included in her as her constituent parts4 ,she is self-sufficing in a million respects in which we are not so4 ,we depend on her for almost everything1 she on us for but a small portion of her history4 ,she swings us in her orbit from winter to summer and revolves us from day into night and from night into day4 ,complexity in unity is another sign of superiority4 ,the total earth's complexity far exceeds that of any organism1 for she includes all our organisms in herself1 along with an infinite number of things that our organisms fail to include4 ,yet how simple and massive are the phases of her own proper life6 ,as the total bearing of any animal is sedate and tranquil compared with the agitation of its blood corpuscles1 so is the earth a sedate and tranquil being compared with the animals whom she supports4 ,to develop from within1 instead of being fashioned from without1 is also counted as something superior in men's eyes4 ,an egg is a higher style of being than a piece of clay which an external modeler makes into the image of a bird4 ,well1 the earth's history develops from within4 ,it is like that of a wonderful egg which the sun's heat1 like that of a mother-hen1 has stimulated to its cycles of evolutionary change4 ,individuality of type1 and difference from other beings of its type1 is another mark of rank4 ,the earth differs from every other planet1 and as a class planetary beings are extraordinarily distinct from other beings4 ,long ago the earth was called an animal2 but a planet is a higher class of being than either man or animal2 not only quantitatively greater1 like a vaster and more awkward whale or elephant1 but a being whose enormous size requires an altogether different plan of life4 ,our animal organization comes from our inferiority4 ,our need of moving to and fro1 of stretching our limbs and bending our bodies1 shows only our defect4 ,what are our legs but crutches1 by means of which1 with restless efforts1 we go hunting after the things we have not inside of ourselves4 ,but the earth is no such cripple2 why should she who already possesses within herself the things we so painfully pursue1 have limbs analogous to ours8 ,shall she mimic a small part of herself8 ,what need has she of arms1 with nothing to reach for8 of a neck1 with no head to carry8 of eyes or nose when she finds her way through space without either1 and has the millions of eyes of all her animals to guide their movements on her surface1 and all their noses to smell the flowers that grow8 ,for1 as we are ourselves a part of the earth1 so our organs are her organs4 ,she is1 as it were1 eye and ear over her whole extent--all that we see and hear in separation she sees and hears at once4 ,she brings forth living beings of countless kinds upon her surface1 and their multitudinous conscious relations with each other she takes up into her higher and more general conscious life4 ,most of us1 considering the theory that the whole terrestrial mass is animated as our bodies are1 make the mistake of working the analogy too literally1 and allowing for no differences4 ,if the earth be a sentient organism1 we say1 where are her brain and nerves8 ,what corresponds to her heart and lungs8 ,in other words1 we expect functions which she already performs through us1 to be performed outside of us again1 and in just the same way4 ,but we see perfectly well how the earth performs some of these functions in a way unlike our way4 ,if you speak of circulation1 what need has she of a heart when the sun keeps all the showers of rain that fall upon her and all the springs and brooks and rivers that irrigate her1 going8 ,what need has she of internal lungs1 when her whole sensitive surface is in living commerce with the atmosphere that clings to it8 ,the organ that gives us most trouble is the brain4 ,all the consciousness we directly know seems tied to brains4--,can there be consciousness1 we ask1 where there is no brain8 ,but our brain1 which primarily serves to correlate our muscular reactions with the external objects on which we depend1 performs a function which the earth performs in an entirely different way4 ,she has no proper muscles or limbs of her own1 and the only objects external to her are the other stars4 ,to these her whole mass reacts by most exquisite alterations in its total gait1 and by still more exquisite vibratory responses in its substance4 ,her ocean reflects the lights of heaven as in a mighty mirror1 her atmosphere refracts them like a monstrous lens1 the clouds and snow-fields combine them into white1 the woods and flowers disperse them into colors4 ,polarization1 interference1 absorption1 awaken sensibilities in matter of which our senses are too coarse to take any note4 ,for these cosmic relations of hers1 then1 she no more needs a special brain than she needs eyes or ears4 ,our brains do indeed unify and correlate innumerable functions4 ,our eyes know nothing of sound1 our ears nothing of light1 but1 having brains1 we can feel sound and light together1 and compare them4 ,we account for this by the fibres which in the brain connect the optical with the acoustic centre1 but just how these fibres bring together not only the sensations1 but the centres1 we fail to see4 ,but if fibres are indeed all that is needed to do that trick1 has not the earth pathways1 by which you and ,i are physically continuous1 more than enough to do for our two minds what the brain-fibres do for the sounds and sights in a single mind8 ,must every higher means of unification between things be a literal brain-fibre1 and go by that name8 ,cannot the earth-mind know otherwise the contents of our minds together8 ,fechner's imagination1 insisting on the differences as well as on the resemblances1 thus tries to make our picture of the whole earth's life more concrete4 ,he revels in the thought of its perfections4 ,to carry her precious freight through the hours and seasons what form could be more excellent than hers--being as it is horse1 wheels1 and wagon all in one4 ,think of her beauty--a shining ball1 sky-blue and sun-lit over one half1 the other bathed in starry night1 reflecting the heavens from all her waters1 myriads of lights and shadows in the folds of her mountains and windings of her valleys1 she would be a spectacle of rainbow glory1 could one only see her from afar as we see parts of her from her own mountain-tops4 ,every quality of landscape that has a name would then be visible in her at once--all that is delicate or graceful1 all that is quiet1 or wild1 or romantic1 or desolate1 or cheerful1 or luxuriant1 or fresh4 ,that landscape is her face--a peopled landscape1 too1 for men's eyes would appear in it like diamonds among the dew-drops4 ,green would be the dominant color1 but the blue atmosphere and the clouds would enfold her as a bride is shrouded in her veil--a veil the vapory transparent folds of which the earth1 through her ministers the winds1 never tires of laying and folding about herself anew4 ,every element has its own living denizens4 ,can the celestial ocean of ether1 whose waves are light1 in which the earth herself floats1 not have hers1 higher by as much as their element is higher1 swimming without fins1 flying without wings1 moving1 immense and tranquil1 as by a half-spiritual force through the half-spiritual sea which they inhabit1 rejoicing in the exchange of luminous influence with one another1 following the slightest pull of one another's attraction1 and harboring1 each of them1 an inexhaustible inward wealth8 ,men have always made fables about angels1 dwelling in the light1 needing no earthly food or drink1 messengers between ourselves and ,god4 ,here are actually existent beings1 dwelling in the light and moving through the sky1 needing neither food nor drink1 intermediaries between ,god and us1 obeying his commands4 ,so1 if the heavens really are the home of angels1 the heavenly bodies must be those very angels1 for other creatures there are none4 ,yes6 the earth is our great common guardian angel1 who watches over all our interests combined4 ,in a striking page ,fechner relates one of his moments of direct vision of this truth4 ',on a certain spring morning ,i went out to walk4 ,the fields were green1 the birds sang1 the dew glistened1 the smoke was rising1 here and there a man appeared2 a light as of transfiguration lay on all things4 ,it was only a little bit of the earth2 it was only one moment of her existence2 and yet as my look embraced her more and more it seemed to me not only so beautiful an idea1 but so true and clear a fact1 that she is an angel1 an angel so rich and fresh and flower-like1 and yet going her round in the skies so firmly and so at one with herself1 turning her whole living face to ,heaven1 and carrying me along with her into that ,heaven1 that ,i asked myself how the opinions of men could ever have so spun themselves away from life so far as to deem the earth only a dry clod1 and to seek for angels above it or about it in the emptiness of the sky1--only to find them nowhere4444 ,but such an experience as this passes for fantastic4 ,the earth is a globular body1 and what more she may be1 one can find in mineralogical cabinets4'#b ,where there is no vision the people perish4 ,few professorial philosophers have any vision4 ,fechner had vision1 and that is why one can read him over and over again1 and each time bring away a fresh sense of reality4 ,his earliest book was a vision of what the inner life of plants may be like4 ,he called it ',nanna4' ,in the development of animals the nervous system is the central fact4 ,plants develop centrifugally1 spread their organs abroad4 ,for that reason people suppose that they can have no consciousness1 for they lack the unity which the central nervous system provides4 ,but the plant's consciousness may be of another type1 being connected with other structures4 ,violins and pianos give out sounds because they have strings4 ,does it follow that nothing but strings can give out sound8 ,how then about flutes and organ-pipes8 ,of course their sounds are of a different quality1 and so may the consciousness of plants be of a quality correlated exclusively with the kind of organization that they possess4 ,nutrition1 respiration1 propagation take place in them without nerves4 ,in us these functions are conscious only in unusual states1 normally their consciousness is eclipsed by that which goes with the brain4 ,no such eclipse occurs in plants1 and their lower consciousness may therefore be all the more lively4 ,with nothing to do but to drink the light and air with their leaves1 to let their cells proliferate1 to feel their rootlets draw the sap1 is it conceivable that they should not consciously suffer if water1 light1 and air are suddenly withdrawn8 or that when the flowering and fertilization which are the culmination of their life take place1 they should not feel their own existence more intensely and enjoy something like what we call pleasure in ourselves8 ,does the water-lily1 rocking in her triple bath of water1 air1 and light1 relish in no wise her own beauty8 ,when the plant in our room turns to the light1 closes her blossoms in the dark1 responds to our watering or pruning by increase of size or change of shape and bloom1 who has the right to say she does not feel1 or that she plays a purely passive part8 ,truly plants can foresee nothing1 neither the scythe of the mower1 nor the hand extended to pluck their flowers4 ,they can neither run away nor cry out4 ,but this only proves how different their modes of feeling life must be from those of animals that live by eyes and ears and locomotive organs1 it does not prove that they have no mode of feeling life at all4 ,how scanty and scattered would sensation be on our globe1 if the feeling-life of plants were blotted from existence4 ,solitary would consciousness move through the woods in the shape of some deer or other quadruped1 or fly about the flowers in that of some insect1 but can we really suppose that the ,nature through which ,god's breath blows is such a barren wilderness as this8 ,i have probably by this time said enough to acquaint those of you who have never seen these metaphysical writings of ,fechner with their more general characteristics1 and ,i hope that some of you may now feel like reading them yourselves4#c ,the special thought of ,fechner's with which in these lectures ,i have most practical concern1 is his belief that the more inclusive forms of consciousness are in part constituted by the more limited forms4 ,not that they are the mere sum of the more limited forms4 ,as our mind is not the bare sum of our sights plus our sounds plus our pains1 but in adding these terms together also finds relations among them and weaves them into schemes and forms and objects of which no one sense in its separate estate knows anything1 so the earth-soul traces relations between the contents of my mind and the contents of yours of which neither of our separate minds is conscious4 ,it has schemes1 forms1 and objects proportionate to its wider field1 which our mental fields are far too narrow to cognize4 ,by ourselves we are simply out of relation with each other1 for it we are both of us there1 and different from each other1 which is a positive relation4 ,what we are without knowing1 it knows that we are4 ,we are closed against its world1 but that world is not closed against us4 ,it is as if the total universe of inner life had a sort of grain or direction1 a sort of valvular structure1 permitting knowledge to flow in one way only1 so that the wider might always have the narrower under observation1 but never the narrower the wider4 ,fechner's great analogy here is the relation of the senses to our individual minds4 ,when our eyes are open their sensations enter into our general mental life1 which grows incessantly by the addition of what they see4 ,close the eyes1 however1 and the visual additions stop1 nothing but thoughts and memories of the past visual experiences remain--in combination of course with the enormous stock of other thoughts and memories1 and with the data coming in from the senses not yet closed4 ,our eye-sensations of themselves know nothing of this enormous life into which they fall4 ,fechner thinks1 as any common man would think1 that they are taken into it directly when they occur1 and form part of it just as they are4 ,they don't stay outside and get represented inside by their copies4 ,it is only the memories and concepts of them that are copies2 the sensible perceptions themselves are taken in or walled out in their own proper persons according as the eyes are open or shut4 ,fechner likens our individual persons on the earth unto so many sense-organs of the earth's soul4 ,we add to its perceptive life so long as our own life lasts4 ,it absorbs our perceptions1 just as they occur1 into its larger sphere of knowledge1 and combines them with the other data there4 ,when one of us dies1 it is as if an eye of the world were closed1 for all perceptive contributions from that particular quarter cease4 ,but the memories and conceptual relations that have spun themselves round the perceptions of that person remain in the larger earth-life as distinct as ever1 and form new relations and grow and develop throughout all the future1 in the same way in which our own distinct objects of thought1 once stored in memory1 form new relations and develop throughout our whole finite life4 ,this is ,fechner's theory of immortality1 first published in the little ',bchlein des lebens nach dem tode1' in #ahcf1 and re-edited in greatly improved shape in the last volume of his ',zend-avesta4' ,we rise upon the earth as wavelets rise upon the ocean4 ,we grow out of her soil as leaves grow from a tree4 ,the wavelets catch the sunbeams separately1 the leaves stir when the branches do not move4 ,they realize their own events apart1 just as in our own consciousness1 when anything becomes emphatic1 the background fades from observation4 ,yet the event works back upon the background1 as the wavelet works upon the waves1 or as the leaf's movements work upon the sap inside the branch4 ,the whole sea and the whole tree are registers of what has happened1 and are different for the wave's and the leaf's action having occurred4 ,a grafted twig may modify its stock to the roots3--so our outlived private experiences1 impressed on the whole earth-mind as memories1 lead the immortal life of ideas there1 and become parts of the great system1 fully distinguished from one another1 just as we ourselves when alive were distinct1 realizing themselves no longer isolatedly1 but along with one another as so many partial systems1 entering thus into new combinations1 being affected by the perceptive experiences of those living then1 and affecting the living in their turn--altho they are so seldom recognized by living men to do so4 ,if you imagine that this entrance after the death of the body into a common life of higher type means a merging and loss of our distinct personality1 ,fechner asks you whether a visual sensation of our own exists in any sense less for itself or less distinctly1 when it enters into our higher relational consciousness and is there distinguished and defined4 --,but here ,i must stop my reporting and send you to his volumes4 ,thus is the universe alive1 according to this philosopher6 ,i think you will admit that he makes it more thickly alive than do the other philosophers who1 following rationalistic methods solely1 gain the same results1 but only in the thinnest outlines4 ,both ,fechner and ,professor ,royce1 for example1 believe ultimately in one all-inclusive mind4 ,both believe that we1 just as we stand here1 are constituent parts of that mind4 ,no other content has it than us1 with all the other creatures like or unlike us1 and the relations which it finds between us4 ,our eaches1 collected into one1 are substantively identical with its all1 tho the all is perfect while no each is perfect1 so that we have to admit that new qualities as well as unperceived relations accrue from the collective form4 ,it is thus superior to the distributive form4 ,but having reached this result1 ,royce 7tho his treatment of the subject on its moral side seems to me infinitely richer and thicker than that of any other contemporary idealistic philosopher7 leaves us very much to our own devices4 ,fechner1 on the contrary1 tries to trace the superiorities due to the more collective form in as much detail as he can4 ,he marks the various intermediary stages and halting places of collectivity1--as we are to our separate senses1 so is the earth to us1 so is the solar system to the earth1 etc41--and if1 in order to escape an infinitely long summation1 he posits a complete ,god as the all-container and leaves him about as indefinite in feature as the idealists leave their absolute1 he yet provides us with a very definite gate of approach to him in the shape of the earth-soul1 through which in the nature of things we must first make connexion with all the more enveloping superhuman realms1 and with which our more immediate religious commerce at any rate has to be carried on4 ,ordinary monistic idealism leaves everything intermediary out4 ,it recognizes only the extremes1 as if1 after the first rude face of the phenomenal world in all its particularity1 nothing but the supreme in all its perfection could be found4 ,first1 you and ,i1 just as we are in this room2 and the moment we get below that surface1 the unutterable absolute itself6 ,doesn't this show a singularly indigent imagination8 ,isn't this brave universe made on a richer pattern1 with room in it for a long hierarchy of beings8 ,materialistic science makes it infinitely richer in terms1 with its molecules1 and ether1 and electrons1 and what not4 ,absolute idealism1 thinking of reality only under intellectual forms1 knows not what to do with bodies of any grade1 and can make no use of any psychophysical analogy or correspondence4 ,the resultant thinness is startling when compared with the thickness and articulation of such a universe as ,fechner paints4 ,may not satisfaction with the rationalistic absolute as the alpha and omega1 and treatment of it in all its abstraction as an adequate religious object1 argue a certain native poverty of mental demand8 ,things reveal themselves soonest to those who most passionately want them1 for our need sharpens our wit4 ,to a mind content with little1 the much in the universe may always remain hid4 ,to be candid1 one of my reasons for saying so much about ,fechner has been to make the thinness of our current transcendentalism appear more evident by an effect of contrast4 ,scholasticism ran thick2 ,hegel himself ran thick2 but english and american transcendentalisms run thin4 ,if philosophy is more a matter of passionate vision than of logic1--and ,i believe it is1 logic only finding reasons for the vision afterwards1--must not such thinness come either from the vision being defective in the disciples1 or from their passion1 matched with ,fechner's or with ,hegel's own passion1 being as moonlight unto sunlight or as water unto wine8#d ,but ,i have also a much deeper reason for making ,fechner a part of my text4 ,his assumption that conscious experiences freely compound and separate themselves1 the same assumption by which absolutism explains the relation of our minds to the eternal mind1 and the same by which empiricism explains the composition of the human mind out of subordinate mental elements1 is not one which we ought to let pass without scrutiny4 ,i shall scrutinize it in the next lecture4 ,,lecture ,v ,,the ,,compounding ,,of ,,consciousness ,in my last lecture ,i gave a miserably scanty outline of the way of thinking of a philosopher remarkable for the almost unexampled richness of his imagination of details4 ,i owe to ,fechner's shade an apology for presenting him in a manner so unfair to the most essential quality of his genius2 but the time allotted is too short to say more about the particulars of his work1 so ,i proceed to the programme ,i suggested at the end of our last hour4 ,i wish to discuss the assumption that states of consciousness1 so-called1 can separate and combine themselves freely1 and keep their own identity unchanged while forming parts of simultaneous fields of experience of wider scope4 ,let me first explain just what ,i mean by this4 ,while you listen to my voice1 for example1 you are perhaps inattentive to some bodily sensation due to your clothing or your posture4 ,yet that sensation would seem probably to be there1 for in an instant1 by a change of attention1 you can have it in one field of consciousness with the voice4 ,it seems as if it existed first in a separate form1 and then as if1 without itself changing1 it combined with your other co-existent sensations4 ,it is after this analogy that pantheistic idealism thinks that we exist in the absolute4 ,the absolute1 it thinks1 makes the world by knowing the whole of it at once in one undivided eternal act4#a ,to 'be1' really to be1 is to be as it knows us to be1 along with everything else1 namely1 and clothed with the fulness of our meaning4 ,meanwhile we are at the same time not only really and as it knows us1 but also apparently1 for to our separate single selves we appear without most other things and unable to declare with any fulness what our own meaning is4 ,now the classic doctrine of pantheistic idealism1 from the ,upanishads down to ,josiah ,royce1 is that the finite knowers1 in spite of their apparent ignorance1 are one with the knower of the all4 ,in the most limited moments of our private experience1 the absolute idea1 as ,dr4 ,mc,taggart told us1 is implicitly contained4 ,the moments1 as ,royce says1 exist only in relation to it4 ,they are true or erroneous only through its overshadowing presence4 ,of the larger self that alone eternally is1 they are the organic parts4 ,they are1 only inasmuch as they are implicated in its being4 ,there is thus in reality but this one self1 consciously inclusive of all the lesser selves1 logos1 problem-solver1 and all-knower2 and ,royce ingeniously compares the ignorance that in our persons breaks out in the midst of its complete knowledge and isolates me from you and both of us from it1 to the inattention into which our finite minds are liable to fall with respect to such implicitly present details as those corporeal sensations to which ,i made allusion just now4 ,those sensations stand to our total private minds in the same relation in which our private minds stand to the absolute mind4 ,privacy means ignorance--,i still quote ,royce--and ignorance means inattention4 ,we are finite because our wills1 as such1 are only fragments of the absolute will2 because will means interest1 and an incomplete will means an incomplete interest2 and because incompleteness of interest means inattention to much that a fuller interest would bring us to perceive4#b ,in this account ,royce makes by far the manliest of the post-hegelian attempts to read some empirically apprehensible content into the notion of our relation to the absolute mind4 ,i have to admit1 now that ,i propose to you to scrutinize this assumption rather closely1 that trepidation seizes me4 ,the subject is a subtle and abstruse one4 ,it is one thing to delve into subtleties by one's self with pen in hand1 or to study out abstruse points in books1 but quite another thing to make a popular lecture out of them4 ,nevertheless ,i must not flinch from my task here1 for ,i think that this particular point forms perhaps the vital knot of the present philosophic situation1 and ,i imagine that the times are ripe1 or almost ripe1 for a serious attempt to be made at its untying4 ,it may perhaps help to lessen the arduousness of the subject if ,i put the first part of what ,i have to say in the form of a direct personal confession4 ,in the year #ahij ,i published a work on psychology in which it became my duty to discuss the value of a certain explanation of our higher mental states that had come into favor among the more biologically inclined psychologists4 ,suggested partly by the association of ideas1 and partly by the analogy of chemical compounds1 this opinion was that complex mental states are resultants of the self-compounding of simpler ones4 ,the ,mills had spoken of mental chemistry2 ,wundt of a 'psychic synthesis1' which might develop properties not contained in the elements2 and such writers as ,spencer1 ,taine1 ,fiske1 ,barratt1 and ,clifford had propounded a great evolutionary theory in which1 in the absence of souls1 selves1 or other principles of unity1 primordial units of mind-stuff or mind-dust were represented as summing themselves together in successive stages of compounding and re-compounding1 and thus engendering our higher and more complex states of mind4 ,the elementary feeling of ,a1 let us say1 and the elementary feeling of ,b1 when they occur in certain conditions1 combine1 according to this doctrine1 into a feeling of ,a-plus-,b1 and this in turn combines with a similarly generated feeling of ,c-plus-,d1 until at last the whole alphabet may appear together in one field of awareness1 without any other witnessing principle or principles beyond the feelings of the several letters themselves1 being supposed to exist4 ,what each of them witnesses separately1 'all' of them are supposed to witness in conjunction4 ,but their distributive knowledge doesn't give rise to their collective knowledge by any act1 it is their collective knowledge4 ,the lower forms of consciousness 'taken together' are the higher4 ,it1 'taken apart1' consists of nothing and is nothing but them4 ,this1 at least1 is the most obvious way of understanding the doctrine1 and is the way ,i understood it in the chapter in my psychology4 ,superficially looked at1 this seems just like the combination of ,h#b and ,o into water1 but looked at more closely1 the analogy halts badly4 ,when a chemist tells us that two atoms of hydrogen and one of oxygen combine themselves of their own accord into the new compound substance 'water1' he knows 7if he believes in the mechanical view of nature7 that this is only an elliptical statement for a more complex fact4 ,that fact is that when ,h#b and ,o1 instead of keeping far apart1 get into closer quarters1 say into the position ,h-,o-,h1 they affect surrounding bodies differently3 they now wet our skin1 dissolve sugar1 put out fire1 etc41 which they didn't in their former positions4 ',water' is but our name for what acts thus peculiarly4 ,but if the skin1 sugar1 and fire were absent1 no witness would speak of water at all4 ,he would still talk of the ,h and ,o distributively1 merely noting that they acted now in the new position ,h-,o-,h4 ,in the older psychologies the soul or self took the place of the sugar1 fire1 or skin4 ,the lower feelings produced effects on it1 and their apparent compounds were only its reactions4 ,as you tickle a man's face with a feather1 and he laughs1 so when you tickle his intellectual principle with a retinal feeling1 say1 and a muscular feeling at once1 it laughs responsively by its category of 'space1' but it would be false to treat the space as simply made of those simpler feelings4 ,it is rather a new and unique psychic creation which their combined action on the mind is able to evoke4 ,i found myself obliged1 in discussing the mind-dust theory1 to urge this last alternative view4 ,the so-called mental compounds are simple psychic reactions of a higher type4 ,the form itself of them1 ,i said1 is something new4 ,we can't say that awareness of the alphabet as such is nothing more than twenty-six awarenesses1 each of a separate letter2 for those are twenty-six distinct awarenesses1 of single letters without others1 while their so-called sum is one awareness1 of every letter with its comrades4 ,there is thus something new in the collective consciousness4 ,it knows the same letters1 indeed1 but it knows them in this novel way4 ,it is safer1 ,i said 7for ,i fought shy of admitting a self or soul or other agent of combination71 to treat the consciousness of the alphabet as a twenty-seventh fact1 the substitute and not the sum of the twenty-six simpler consciousnesses1 and to say that while under certain physiological conditions they alone are produced1 other more complex physiological conditions result in its production instead4 ,do not talk1 therefore1 ,i said1 of the higher states consisting of the simpler1 or being the same with them2 talk rather of their knowing the same things4 ,they are different mental facts1 but they apprehend1 each in its own peculiar way1 the same objective ,a1 ,b1 ,c1 and ,d4 ,the theory of combination1 ,i was forced to conclude1 is thus untenable1 being both logically nonsensical and practically unnecessary4 ,say what you will1 twelve thoughts1 each of a single word1 are not the self-same mental thing as one thought of the whole sentence4 ,the higher thoughts1 ,i insisted1 are psychic units1 not compounds2 but for all that1 they may know together as a collective multitude the very same objects which under other conditions are known separately by as many simple thoughts4 ,for many years ,i held rigorously to this view1#c and the reasons for doing so seemed to me during all those years to apply also to the opinion that the absolute mind stands to our minds in the relation of a whole to its parts4 ,if untenable in finite psychology1 that opinion ought to be untenable in metaphysics also4 ,the great transcendentalist metaphor has always been1 as ,i lately reminded you1 a grammatical sentence4 ,physically such a sentence is of course composed of clauses1 these of words1 the words of syllables1 and the syllables of letters4 ,we may take each word in1 yet not understand the sentence2 but if suddenly the meaning of the whole sentence flashes1 the sense of each word is taken up into that whole meaning4 ,just so1 according to our transcendentalist teachers1 the absolute mind thinks the whole sentence1 while we1 according to our rank as thinkers1 think a clause1 a word1 a syllable1 or a letter4 ,most of us are1 as ,i said1 mere syllables in the mouth of ,allah4 ,and as ,allah comes first in the order of being1 so comes first the entire sentence1 the logos that forms the eternal absolute thought4 ,students of language tell us that speech began with men's efforts to make statements4 ,the rude synthetic vocal utterances first used for this effect slowly got stereotyped1 and then much later got decomposed into grammatical parts4 ,it is not as if men had first invented letters and made syllables of them1 then made words of the syllables and sentences of the words2--they actually followed the reverse order4 ,so1 the transcendentalists affirm1 the complete absolute thought is the pre-condition of our thoughts1 and we finite creatures are only in so far as it owns us as its verbal fragments4 ,the metaphor is so beautiful1 and applies1 moreover1 so literally to such a multitude of the minor wholes of experience1 that by merely hearing it most of us are convinced that it must apply universally4 ,we see that no smallest raindrop can come into being without a whole shower1 no single feather without a whole bird1 neck and crop1 beak and tail1 coming into being simultaneously3 so we unhesitatingly lay down the law that no part of anything can be except so far as the whole also is4 ,and then1 since everything whatever is part of the whole universe1 and since 7if we are idealists7 nothing1 whether part or whole1 exists except for a witness1 we proceed to the conclusion that the unmitigated absolute as witness of the whole is the one sole ground of being of every partial fact1 the fact of our own existence included4 ,we think of ourselves as being only a few of the feathers1 so to speak1 which help to constitute that absolute bird4 ,extending the analogy of certain wholes1 of which we have familiar experience1 to the whole of wholes1 we easily become absolute idealists4 ,but if1 instead of yielding to the seductions of our metaphor1 be it sentence1 shower1 or bird1 we analyze more carefully the notion suggested by it that we are constituent parts of the absolute's eternal field of consciousness1 we find grave difficulties arising4 ,first1 the difficulty ,i found with the mind-dust theory4 ,if the absolute makes us by knowing us1 how can we exist otherwise than as it knows us8 ,but it knows each of us indivisibly from everything else4 ,yet if to exist means nothing but to be experienced1 as idealism affirms1 we surely exist otherwise1 for we experience ourselves ignorantly and in division4 ,we indeed differ from the absolute not only by defect1 but by excess4 ,our ignorances1 for example1 bring curiosities and doubts by which it cannot be troubled1 for it owns eternally the solution of every problem4 ,our impotence entails pains1 our imperfection sins1 which its perfection keeps at a distance4 ,what ,i said of the alphabet-form and the letters holds good of the absolute experience and our experiences4 ,their relation1 whatever it may be1 seems not to be that of identity4 ,it is impossible to reconcile the peculiarities of our experience with our being only the absolute's mental objects4 ,a ,god1 as distinguished from the absolute1 creates things by projecting them beyond himself as so many substances1 each endowed with perseity1 as the scholastics call it4 ,but objects of thought are not things per se4 ,they are there only for their thinker1 and only as he thinks them4 ,how1 then1 can they become severally alive on their own accounts and think themselves quite otherwise than as he thinks them8 ,it is as if the characters in a novel were to get up from the pages1 and walk away and transact business of their own outside of the author's story4 ,a third difficulty is this3 ,the bird-metaphor is physical1 but we see on reflection that in the physical world there is no real compounding4 ',wholes' are not realities there1 parts only are realities4 ',bird' is only our name for the physical fact of a certain grouping of organs1 just as ',charles's ,wain' is our name for a certain grouping of stars4 ,the 'whole1' be it bird or constellation1 is nothing but our vision1 nothing but an effect on our sensorium when a lot of things act on it together4 ,it is not realized by any organ or any star1 or experienced apart from the consciousness of an onlooker4#d ,in the physical world taken by itself there is thus no 'all1' there are only the 'eaches'--at least that is the 'scientific' view4 ,in the mental world1 on the contrary1 wholes do in point of fact realize themselves per se4 ,the meaning of the whole sentence is just as much a real experience as the feeling of each word is2 the absolute's experience is for itself1 as much as yours is for yourself or mine for myself4 ,so the feather-and-bird analogy won't work unless you make the absolute into a distinct sort of mental agent with a vision produced in it by our several minds analogous to the 'bird'-vision which the feathers1 beak1 etc41 produce in those same minds4 ,the 'whole1' which is its experience1 would then be its unifying reaction on our experiences1 and not those very experiences self-combined4 ,such a view as this would go with theism1 for the theistic ,god is a separate being2 but it would not go with pantheistic idealism1 the very essence of which is to insist that we are literally parts of ,god1 and he only ourselves in our totality--the word 'ourselves' here standing of course for all the universe's finite facts4 ,i am dragging you into depths unsuitable1 ,i fear1 for a rapid lecture4 ,such difficulties as these have to be teased out with a needle1 so to speak1 and lecturers should take only bird's-eye views4 ,the practical upshot of the matter1 however1 so far as ,i am concerned1 is this1 that if ,i had been lecturing on the absolute a very few years ago1 ,i should unhesitatingly have urged these difficulties1 and developed them at still greater length1 to show that the hypothesis of the absolute was not only non-coercive from the logical point of view1 but self-contradictory as well1 its notion that parts and whole are only two names for the same thing not bearing critical scrutiny4 ,if you stick to purely physical terms like stars1 there is no whole4 ,if you call the whole mental1 then the so-called whole1 instead of being one fact with the parts1 appears rather as the integral reaction on those parts of an independent higher witness1 such as the theistic ,god is supposed to be4 ,so long as this was the state of my own mind1 ,i could accept the notion of self-compounding in the supernal spheres of experience no more easily than in that chapter on mind-dust ,i had accepted it in the lower spheres4 ,i found myself compelled1 therefore1 to call the absolute impossible2 and the untrammelled freedom with which pantheistic or monistic idealists stepped over the logical barriers which ,lotze and others had set down long before ,i had--,i had done little more than quote these previous critics in my chapter--surprised me not a little1 and made me1 ,i have to confess1 both resentful and envious4 ,envious because in the bottom of my heart ,i wanted the same freedom myself1 for motives which ,i shall develop later2 and resentful because my absolutist friends seemed to me to be stealing the privilege of blowing both hot and cold4 ,to establish their absolute they used an intellectualist type of logic which they disregarded when employed against it4 ,it seemed to me that they ought at least to have mentioned the objections that had stopped me so completely4 ,i had yielded to them against my 'will to believe1' out of pure logical scrupulosity4 ,they1 professing to loathe the will to believe and to follow purest rationality1 had simply ignored them4 ,the method was easy1 but hardly to be called candid4 ,fechner indeed was candid enough1 for he had never thought of the objections1 but later writers1 like ,royce1 who should presumably have heard them1 had passed them by in silence4 ,i felt as if these philosophers were granting their will to believe in monism too easy a license4 ,my own conscience would permit me no such license4 ,so much for the personal confession by which you have allowed me to introduce the subject4 ,let us now consider it more objectively4 ,the fundamental difficulty ,i have found is the number of contradictions which idealistic monists seem to disregard4 ,in the first place they attribute to all existence a mental or experiential character1 but ,i find their simultaneous belief that the higher and the lower in the universe are entitatively identical1 incompatible with this character4 ,incompatible in consequence of the generally accepted doctrine that1 whether ,berkeley were right or not in saying of material existence that its esse is sentiri1 it is undoubtedly right to say of mental existence that its esse is sentiri or experiri4 ,if ,i feel pain1 it is just pain that ,i feel1 however ,i may have come by the feeling4 ,no one pretends that pain as such only appears like pain1 but in itself is different1 for to be as a mental experience is only to appear to some one4 ,the idealists in question ought then to do one of two things1 but they do neither4 ,they ought either to refute the notion that as mental states appear1 so they are2 or1 still keeping that notion1 they ought to admit a distinct agent of unification to do the work of the all-knower1 just as our respective souls or selves in popular philosophy do the work of partial knowers4 ,otherwise it is like a joint-stock company all shareholders and no treasurer or director4 ,if our finite minds formed a billion facts1 then its mind1 knowing our billion1 would make a universe composed of a billion and one facts4 ,but transcendental idealism is quite as unfriendly to active principles called souls as physiological psychology is1 ,kant having1 as it thinks1 definitively demolished them4 ,and altho some disciples speak of the transcendental ego of apperception 7which they celebrate as ,kant's most precious legacy to posterity7 as if it were a combining agent1 the drift of monistic authority is certainly in the direction of treating it as only an all-witness1 whose field of vision we finite witnesses do not cause1 but constitute rather4 ,we are the letters1 it is the alphabet2 we are the features1 it is the face2 not indeed as if either alphabet or face were something additional to the letters or the features1 but rather as if it were only another name for the very letters or features themselves4 ,the all-form assuredly differs from the each-form1 but the matter is the same in both1 and the each-form only an unaccountable appearance4 ,but this1 as you see1 contradicts the other idealist principle1 of a mental fact being just what it appears to be4 ,if their forms of appearance are so different1 the all and the eaches cannot be identical4 ,the way out 7unless1 indeed1 we are willing to discard the logic of identity altogether7 would seem to be frankly to write down the all and the eaches as two distinct orders of witness1 each minor witness being aware of its own 'content' solely1 while the greater witness knows the minor witnesses1 knows their whole content pooled together1 knows their relations to one another1 and knows of just how much each one of them is ignorant4 ,the two types of witnessing are here palpably non-identical4 ,we get a pluralism1 not a monism1 out of them4 ,in my psychology-chapter ,i had resorted openly to such pluralism1 treating each total field of consciousness as a distinct entity1 and maintaining that the higher fields merely supersede the lower functionally by knowing more about the same objects4 ,the monists themselves writhe like worms on the hook to escape pluralistic or at least dualistic language1 but they cannot escape it4 ,they speak of the eternal and the temporal 'points of view'2 of the universe in its infinite 'aspect' or in its finite 'capacity'2 they say that 'qu absolute' it is one thing1 'qu relative' another2 they contrast its 'truth' with its appearances2 they distinguish the total from the partial way of 'taking' it1 etc42 but they forget that1 on idealistic principles1 to make such distinctions is tantamount to making different beings1 or at any rate that varying points of view1 aspects1 appearances1 ways of taking1 and the like1 are meaningless phrases unless we suppose outside of the unchanging content of reality a diversity of witnesses who experience or take it variously1 the absolute mind being just the witness that takes it most completely4 ,for consider the matter one moment longer1 if you can4 ,ask what this notion implies1 of appearing differently from different points of view4 ,if there be no outside witness1 a thing can appear only to itself1 the eaches or parts to their several selves temporally1 the all or whole to itself eternally4 ,different 'selves' thus break out inside of what the absolutist insists to be intrinsically one fact4 ,but how can what is actually one be effectively so many8 ,put your witnesses anywhere1 whether outside or inside of what is witnessed1 in the last resort your witnesses must on idealistic principles be distinct1 for what is witnessed is different4 ,i fear that ,i am expressing myself with terrible obscurity--some of you1 ,i know1 are groaning over the logic-chopping4 ,be a pluralist or be a monist1 you say1 for heaven's sake1 no matter which1 so long as you stop arguing4 ,it reminds one of ,chesterton's epigram that the only thing that ever drives human beings insane is logic4 ,but whether ,i be sane or insane1 you cannot fail1 even tho you be transcendentalists yourselves1 to recognize to some degree by my trouble the difficulties that beset monistic idealism4 ,what boots it to call the parts and the whole the same body of experience1 when in the same breath you have to say that the all 'as such' means one sort of experience and each part 'as such' means another8 ,difficulties1 then1 so far1 but no stable solution as yet1 for ,i have been talking only critically4 ,you will probably be relieved to hear1 then1 that having rounded this corner1 ,i shall begin to consider what may be the possibilities of getting farther4 ,to clear the path1 ,i beg you first to note one point4 ,what has so troubled my logical conscience is not so much the absolute by itself as the whole class of suppositions of which it is the supreme example1 collective experiences namely1 claiming identity with their constituent parts1 yet experiencing things quite differently from these latter4 ,if any such collective experience can be1 then of course1 so far as the mere logic of the case goes1 the absolute may be4 ,in a previous lecture ,i have talked against the absolute from other points of view4 ,in this lecture ,i have meant merely to take it as the example most prominent at ,oxford of the thing which has given me such logical perplexity4 ,i don't logically see how a collective experience of any grade whatever can be treated as logically identical with a lot of distributive experiences4 ,they form two different concepts4 ,the absolute happens to be the only collective experience concerning which ,oxford idealists have urged the identity1 so ,i took it as my prerogative instance4 ,but ,fechner's earth-soul1 or any stage of being below or above that1 would have served my purpose just as well3 the same logical objection applies to these collective experiences as to the absolute4 ,so much1 then1 in order that you may not be confused about my strategical objective4 ,the real point to defend against the logic that ,i have used is the identity of the collective and distributive anyhow1 not the particular example of such identity known as the absolute4 ,so now for the directer question4 ,shall we say that every complex mental fact is a separate psychic entity succeeding upon a lot of other psychic entities which are erroneously called its parts1 and superseding them in function1 but not literally being composed of them8 ,this was the course ,i took in my psychology2 and if followed in theology1 we should have to deny the absolute as usually conceived1 and replace it by the ',god' of theism4 ,we should also have to deny ,fechner's 'earth-soul' and all other superhuman collections of experience of every grade1 so far at least as these are held to be compounded of our simpler souls in the way which ,fechner believed in2 and we should have to make all these denials in the name of the incorruptible logic of self-identity1 teaching us that to call a thing and its other the same is to commit the crime of self-contradiction4 ,but if we realize the whole philosophic situation thus produced1 we see that it is almost intolerable4 ,loyal to the logical kind of rationality1 it is disloyal to every other kind4 ,it makes the universe discontinuous4 ,these fields of experience that replace each other so punctually1 each knowing the same matter1 but in ever-widening contexts1 from simplest feeling up to absolute knowledge1 can they have no being in common when their cognitive function is so manifestly common8 ,the regular succession of them is on such terms an unintelligible miracle4 ,if you reply that their common object is of itself enough to make the many witnesses continuous1 the same implacable logic follows you--how can one and the same object appear so variously8 ,its diverse appearances break it into a plurality2 and our world of objects then falls into discontinuous pieces quite as much as did our world of subjects4 ,the resultant irrationality is really intolerable4 ,i said awhile ago that ,i was envious of ,fechner and the other pantheists because ,i myself wanted the same freedom that ,i saw them unscrupulously enjoying1 of letting mental fields compound themselves and so make the universe more continuous1 but that my conscience held me prisoner4 ,in my heart of hearts1 however1 ,i knew that my situation was absurd and could be only provisional4 ,that secret of a continuous life which the universe knows by heart and acts on every instant cannot be a contradiction incarnate4 ,if logic says it is one1 so much the worse for logic4 ,logic being the lesser thing1 the static incomplete abstraction1 must succumb to reality1 not reality to logic4 ,our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive1 like a pupa in its chrysalis4 ,it must at any cost keep on speaking terms with the universe that engendered it4 ,fechner1 ,royce1 and ,hegel seem on the truer path4 ,fechner has never heard of logic's veto1 ,royce hears the voice but cannily ignores the utterances1 ,hegel hears them but to spurn them--and all go on their way rejoicing4 ,shall we alone obey the veto8 ,sincerely1 and patiently as ,i could1 ,i struggled with the problem for years1 covering hundreds of sheets of paper with notes and memoranda and discussions with myself over the difficulty4 ,how can many consciousnesses be at the same time one consciousness8 ,how can one and the same identical fact experience itself so diversely8 ,the struggle was vain2 ,i found myself in an impasse4 ,i saw that ,i must either forswear that 'psychology without a soul' to which my whole psychological and kantian education had committed me1--,i must1 in short1 bring back distinct spiritual agents to know the mental states1 now singly and now in combination1 in a word bring back scholasticism and common sense--or else ,i must squarely confess the solution of the problem impossible1 and then either give up my intellectualistic logic1 the logic of identity1 and adopt some higher 7or lower7 form of rationality1 or1 finally1 face the fact that life is logically irrational4 ,sincerely1 this is the actual trilemma that confronts every one of us4 ,those of you who are scholastic-minded1 or simply common-sense minded1 will smile at the elaborate groans of my parturient mountain resulting in nothing but this mouse4 ,accept the spiritual agents1 for heaven's sake1 you will say1 and leave off your ridiculous pedantry4 ,let but our 'souls' combine our sensations by their intellectual faculties1 and let but ',god' replace the pantheistic world-soul1 and your wheels will go round again--you will enjoy both life and logic together4 ,this solution is obvious and ,i know that many of you will adopt it4 ,it is comfortable1 and all our habits of speech support it4 ,yet it is not for idle or fantastical reasons that the notion of the substantial soul1 so freely used by common men and the more popular philosophies1 has fallen upon such evil days1 and has no prestige in the eyes of critical thinkers4 ,it only shares the fate of other unrepresentable substances and principles4 ,they are without exception all so barren that to sincere inquirers they appear as little more than names masquerading--,wo die begriffe fehlen da stellt ein wort zur rechten zeit sich ein4 ,you see no deeper into the fact that a hundred sensations get compounded or known together by thinking that a 'soul' does the compounding than you see into a man's living eighty years by thinking of him as an octogenarian1 or into our having five fingers by calling us pentadactyls4 ,souls have worn out both themselves and their welcome1 that is the plain truth4 ,philosophy ought to get the manifolds of experience unified on principles less empty4 ,like the word 'cause1' the word 'soul' is but a theoretic stop-gap--it marks a place and claims it for a future explanation to occupy4 ,this being our post-humian and post-kantian state of mind1 ,i will ask your permission to leave the soul wholly out of the present discussion and to consider only the residual dilemma4 ,some day1 indeed1 souls may get their innings again in philosophy--,i am quite ready to admit that possibility--they form a category of thought too natural to the human mind to expire without prolonged resistance4 ,but if the belief in the soul ever does come to life after the many funeral-discourses which humian and kantian criticism have preached over it1 ,i am sure it will be only when some one has found in the term a pragmatic significance that has hitherto eluded observation4 ,when that champion speaks1 as he well may speak some day1 it will be time to consider souls more seriously4 ,let us leave out the soul1 then1 and confront what ,i just called the residual dilemma4 ,can we1 on the one hand1 give up the logic of identity8--can we1 on the other1 believe human experience to be fundamentally irrational8 ,neither is easy1 yet it would seem that we must do one or the other4 ,few philosophers have had the frankness fairly to admit the necessity of choosing between the 'horns' offered4 ,reality must be rational1 they have said1 and since the ordinary intellectualist logic is the only usual test of rationality1 reality and logic must agree 'somehow4' ,hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic1 saving a pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of the 'dialectic process4' ,bradley holds to the intellectualist logic1 and by dint of it convicts the human universe of being irrationality incarnate4 ,but what must be and can be1 is1 he says2 there must and can be relief from that irrationality2 and the absolute must already have got the relief in secret ways of its own1 impossible for us to guess at4 ,we of course get no relief1 so ,bradley's is a rather ascetic doctrine4 ,royce and ,taylor accept similar solutions1 only they emphasize the irrationality of our finite universe less than ,bradley does2 and ,royce in particular1 being unusually 'thick' for an idealist1 tries to bring the absolute's secret forms of relief more sympathetically home to our imagination4 ,well1 what must we do in this tragic predicament8 ,for my own part1 ,i have finally found myself compelled to give up the logic1 fairly1 squarely1 and irrevocably4 ,it has an imperishable use in human life1 but that use is not to make us theoretically acquainted with the essential nature of reality--just what it is ,i can perhaps suggest to you a little later4 ,reality1 life1 experience1 concreteness1 immediacy1 use what word you will1 exceeds our logic1 overflows and surrounds it4 ,if you like to employ words eulogistically1 as most men do1 and so encourage confusion1 you may say that reality obeys a higher logic1 or enjoys a higher rationality4 ,but ,i think that even eulogistic words should be used rather to distinguish than to commingle meanings1 so ,i prefer bluntly to call reality if not irrational then at least non-rational in its constitution1--and by reality here ,i mean reality where things happen1 all temporal reality without exception4 ,i myself find no good warrant for even suspecting the existence of any reality of a higher denomination than that distributed and strung-along and flowing sort of reality which we finite beings swim in4 ,that is the sort of reality given us1 and that is the sort with which logic is so incommensurable4 ,if there be any higher sort of reality--the 'absolute1' for example--that sort1 by the confession of those who believe in it1 is still less amenable to ordinary logic2 it transcends logic and is therefore still less rational in the intellectualist sense1 so it cannot help us to save our logic as an adequate definer and confiner of existence4 ,these sayings will sound queer and dark1 probably they will sound quite wild or childish in the absence of explanatory comment4 ,only the persuasion that ,i soon can explain them1 if not satisfactorily to all of you1 at least intelligibly1 emboldens me to state them thus baldly as a sort of programme4 ,please take them as a thesis1 therefore1 to be defended by later pleading4 ,i told you that ,i had long and sincerely wrestled with the dilemma4 ,i have now to confess 7and this will probably re-animate your interest7 that ,i should not now be emancipated1 not now subordinate logic with so very light a heart1 or throw it out of the deeper regions of philosophy to take its rightful and respectable place in the world of simple human practice1 if ,i had not been influenced by a comparatively young and very original french writer1 ,professor ,henri ,bergson4 ,reading his works is what has made me bold4 ,if ,i had not read ,bergson1 ,i should probably still be blackening endless pages of paper privately1 in the hope of making ends meet that were never meant to meet1 and trying to discover some mode of conceiving the behavior of reality which should leave no discrepancy between it and the accepted laws of the logic of identity4 ,it is certain1 at any rate1 that without the confidence which being able to lean on ,bergson's authority gives me ,i should never have ventured to urge these particular views of mine upon this ultra-critical audience4 ,i must therefore1 in order to make my own views more intelligible1 give some preliminary account of the bergsonian philosophy4 ,but here1 as in ,fechner's case1 ,i must confine myself only to the features that are essential to the present purpose1 and not entangle you in collateral details1 however interesting otherwise4 ,for our present purpose1 then1 the essential contribution of ,bergson to philosophy is his criticism of intellectualism4 ,in my opinion he has killed intellectualism definitively and without hope of recovery4 ,i don't see how it can ever revive again in its ancient platonizing rle of claiming to be the most authentic1 intimate1 and exhaustive definer of the nature of reality4 ,others1 as ,kant for example1 have denied intellectualism's pretensions to define reality an sich or in its absolute capacity2 but ,kant still leaves it laying down laws--and laws from which there is no appeal--to all our human experience2 while what ,bergson denies is that its methods give any adequate account of this human experience in its very finiteness4 ,just how ,bergson accomplishes all this ,i must try to tell in my imperfect way in the next lecture2 but since ,i have already used the words 'logic1' 'logic of identity1 intellectualistic logic1' and 'intellectualism' so often1 and sometimes used them as if they required no particular explanation1 it will be wise at this point to say at greater length than heretofore in what sense ,i take these terms when ,i claim that ,bergson has refuted their pretension to decide what reality can or cannot be4 ,just what ,i mean by intellectualism is therefore what ,i shall try to give a fuller idea of during the remainder of this present hour4 ,in recent controversies some participants have shown resentment at being classed as intellectualists4 ,i mean to use the word disparagingly1 but shall be sorry if it works offence4 ,intellectualism has its source in the faculty which gives us our chief superiority to the brutes1 our power1 namely1 of translating the crude flux of our merely feeling-experience into a conceptual order4 ,an immediate experience1 as yet unnamed or classed1 is a mere that that we undergo1 a thing that asks1 ',what am ,i8' ,when we name and class it1 we say for the first time what it is1 and all these whats are abstract names or concepts4 ,each concept means a particular kind of thing1 and as things seem once for all to have been created in kinds1 a far more efficient handling of a given bit of experience begins as soon as we have classed the various parts of it4 ,once classed1 a thing can be treated by the law of its class1 and the advantages are endless4 ,both theoretically and practically this power of framing abstract concepts is one of the sublimest of our human prerogatives4 ,we come back into the concrete from our journey into these abstractions1 with an increase both of vision and of power4 ,it is no wonder that earlier thinkers1 forgetting that concepts are only man-made extracts from the temporal flux1 should have ended by treating them as a superior type of being1 bright1 changeless1 true1 divine1 and utterly opposed in nature to the turbid1 restless lower world4 ,the latter then appears as but their corruption and falsification4 ,intellectualism in the vicious sense began when ,socrates and ,plato taught that what a thing really is1 is told us by its definition4 ,ever since ,socrates we have been taught that reality consists of essences1 not of appearances1 and that the essences of things are known whenever we know their definitions4 ,so first we identify the thing with a concept and then we identify the concept with a definition1 and only then1 inasmuch as the thing is whatever the definition expresses1 are we sure of apprehending the real essence of it or the full truth about it4 ,so far no harm is done4 ,the misuse of concepts begins with the habit of employing them privatively as well as positively1 using them not merely to assign properties to things1 but to deny the very properties with which the things sensibly present themselves4 ,logic can extract all its possible consequences from any definition1 and the logician who is unerbittlich consequent is often tempted1 when he cannot extract a certain property from a definition1 to deny that the concrete object to which the definition applies can possibly possess that property4 ,the definition that fails to yield it must exclude or negate it4 ,this is ,hegel's regular method of establishing his system4 ,it is but the old story1 of a useful practice first becoming a method1 then a habit1 and finally a tyranny that defeats the end it was used for4 ,concepts1 first employed to make things intelligible1 are clung to even when they make them unintelligible4 ,thus it comes that when once you have conceived things as 'independent1' you must proceed to deny the possibility of any connexion whatever among them1 because the notion of connexion is not contained in the definition of independence4 ,for a like reason you must deny any possible forms or modes of unity among things which you have begun by defining as a 'many4' ,we have cast a glance at ,hegel's and ,bradley's use of this sort of reasoning1 and you will remember ,sigwart's epigram that according to it a horseman can never in his life go on foot1 or a photographer ever do anything but photograph4 ,the classic extreme in this direction is the denial of the possibility of change1 and the consequent branding of the world of change as unreal1 by certain philosophers4 ,the definition of ,a is changeless1 so is the definition of ,b4 ,the one definition cannot change into the other1 so the notion that a concrete thing ,a should change into another concrete thing ,b is made ,out to be contrary to reason4 ,in ,mr4 ,bradley's difficulty in seeing how sugar can be sweet intellectualism outstrips itself and becomes openly a sort of verbalism4 ,sugar is just sugar and sweet is just sweet2 neither is the other2 nor can the word 'is' ever be understood to join any subject to its predicate rationally4 ,nothing 'between' things can connect them1 for 'between' is just that third thing1 'between1' and would need itself to be connected to the first and second things by two still finer betweens1 and so on ad infinitum4 ,the particular intellectualistic difficulty that had held my own thought so long in a vise was1 as we have seen at such tedious length1 the impossibility of understanding how 'your' experience and 'mine1' which 'as such' are defined as not conscious of each other1 can nevertheless at the same time be members of a world-experience defined expressly as having all its parts co-conscious1 or known together4 ,the definitions are contradictory1 so the things defined can in no way be united4 ,you see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make the world of our most accomplished philosophers4 ,neither as they use it nor as we use it does it do anything but make nature look irrational and seem impossible4 ,in my next lecture1 using ,bergson as my principal topic1 ,i shall enter into more concrete details and try1 by giving up intellectualism frankly1 to make1 if not the world1 at least my own general thesis1 less unintelligible4 ,,lecture ,,vi ,,bergson ,,and ,,his ,,critique ,,of ,,intellectualism ,i gave you a very stiff lecture last time1 and ,i fear that this one can be little less so4 ,the best way of entering into it will be to begin immediately with ,bergson's philosophy1 since ,i told you that that was what had led me personally to renounce the intellectualistic method and the current notion that logic is an adequate measure of what can or cannot be4 ,professor ,henri ,bergson is a young man1 comparatively1 as influential philosophers go1 having been born at ,paris in #ahei4 ,his career has been the perfectly routine one of a successful french professor4 ,entering the cole normale suprieure at the age of twenty-two1 he spent the next seventeen years teaching at lyces1 provincial or parisian1 until his fortieth year1 when he was made professor at the said cole normale4 ,since #aijj he has been professor at the ,college de ,france1 and member of the ,institute since #aijj4 ,so far as the outward facts go1 ,bergson's career has then been commonplace to the utmost4 ,neither one of ,taine's famous principles of explanation of great men1 the race1 the environment1 or the moment1 no1 nor all three together1 will explain that peculiar way of looking at things that constitutes his mental individuality4 ,originality in men dates from nothing previous1 other things date from it1 rather4 ,i have to confess that ,bergson's originality is so profuse that many of his ideas baffle me entirely4 ,i doubt whether any one understands him all over1 so to speak2 and ,i am sure that he would himself be the first to see that this must be1 and to confess that things which he himself has not yet thought out clearly1 had yet to be mentioned and have a tentative place assigned them in his philosophy4 ,many of us are profusely original1 in that no man can understand us--violently peculiar ways of looking at things are no great rarity4 ,the rarity is when great peculiarity of vision is allied with great lucidity and unusual command of all the classic expository apparatus4 ,bergson's resources in the way of erudition are remarkable1 and in the way of expression they are simply phenomenal4 ,this is why in ,france1 where l'art de bien dire counts for so much and is so sure of appreciation1 he has immediately taken so eminent a place in public esteem4 ,old-fashioned professors1 whom his ideas quite fail to satisfy1 nevertheless speak of his talent almost with bated breath1 while the youngsters flock to him as to a master4 ,if anything can make hard things easy to follow1 it is a style like ,bergson's4 ,a 'straightforward' style1 an american reviewer lately called it2 failing to see that such straightforwardness means a flexibility of verbal resource that follows the thought without a crease or wrinkle1 as elastic silk underclothing follows the movements of one's body4 ,the lucidity of ,bergson's way of putting things is what all readers are first struck by4 ,it seduces you and bribes you in advance to become his disciple4 ,it is a miracle1 and he a real magician4 ,m4 ,bergson1 if ,i am rightly informed1 came into philosophy through the gateway of mathematics4 ,the old antinomies of the infinite were1 ,i imagine1 the irritant that first woke his faculties from their dogmatic slumber4 ,you all remember ,zeno's famous paradox1 or sophism1 as many of our logic books still call it1 of ,achilles and the tortoise4 ,give that reptile ever so small an advance and the swift runner ,achilles can never overtake him1 much less get ahead of him2 for if space and time are infinitely divisible 7as our intellects tell us they must be71 by the time ,achilles reaches the tortoise's starting-point1 the tortoise has already got ahead of that starting-point1 and so on ad infinitum1 the interval between the pursuer and the pursued growing endlessly minuter1 but never becoming wholly obliterated4 ,the common way of showing up the sophism here is by pointing out the ambiguity of the expression 'never can overtake4' ,what the word 'never' falsely suggests1 it is said1 is an infinite duration of time2 what it really means is the inexhaustible number of the steps of which the overtaking must consist4 ,but if these steps are infinitely short1 a finite time will suffice for them2 and in point of fact they do rapidly converge1 whatever be the original interval or the contrasted speeds1 toward infinitesimal shortness4 ,this proportionality of the shortness of the times to that of the spaces required frees us1 it is claimed1 from the sophism which the word 'never' suggests4 ,but this criticism misses ,zeno's point entirely4 ,zeno would have been perfectly willing to grant that if the tortoise can be overtaken at all1 he can be overtaken in 7say7 twenty seconds1 but he would still have insisted that he can't be overtaken at all4 ,leave ,achilles and the tortoise out of the account altogether1 he would have said--they complicate the case unnecessarily4 ,take any single process of change whatever1 take the twenty seconds themselves elapsing4 ,if time be infinitely divisible1 and it must be so on intellectualist principles1 they simply cannot elapse1 their end cannot be reached2 for no matter how much of them has already elapsed1 before the remainder1 however minute1 can have wholly elapsed1 the earlier half of it must first have elapsed4 ,and this ever re-arising need of making the earlier half elapse first leaves time with always something to do before the last thing is done1 so that the last thing never gets done4 ,expressed in bare numbers1 it is like the convergent series #a_/b plus #a_/d plus #a_/h4441 of which the limit is one4 ,but this limit1 simply because it is a limit1 stands outside the series1 the value of which approaches it indefinitely but never touches it4 ,if in the natural world there were no other way of getting things save by such successive addition of their logically involved fractions1 no complete units or whole things would ever come into being1 for the fractions' sum would always leave a remainder4 ,but in point of fact nature doesn't make eggs by making first half an egg1 then a quarter1 then an eighth1 etc41 and adding them together4 ,she either makes a whole egg at once or none at all1 and so of all her other units4 ,it is only in the sphere of change1 then1 where one phase of a thing must needs come into being before another phase can come that ,zeno's paradox gives trouble4 ,and it gives trouble then only if the succession of steps of change be infinitely divisible4 ,if a bottle had to be emptied by an infinite number of successive decrements1 it is mathematically impossible that the emptying should ever positively terminate4 ,in point of fact1 however1 bottles and coffee-pots empty themselves by a finite number of decrements1 each of definite amount4 ,either a whole drop emerges or nothing emerges from the spout4 ,if all change went thus drop-wise1 so to speak1 if real time sprouted or grew by units of duration of determinate amount1 just as our perceptions of it grow by pulses1 there would be no zenonian paradoxes or kantian antinomies to trouble us4 ,all our sensible experiences1 as we get them immediately1 do thus change by discrete pulses of perception1 each of which keeps us saying 'more1 more1 more1' or 'less1 less1 less1' as the definite increments or diminutions make themselves felt4 ,the discreteness is still more obvious when1 instead of old things changing1 they cease1 or when altogether new things come4 ,fechner's term of the 'threshold1' which has played such a part in the psychology of perception1 is only one way of naming the quantitative discreteness in the change of all our sensible experiences4 ,they come to us in drops4 ,time itself comes in drops4 ,our ideal decomposition of the drops which are all that we feel into still finer fractions is but an incident in that great transformation of the perceptual order into a conceptual order of which ,i spoke in my last lecture4 ,it is made in the interest of our rationalizing intellect solely4 ,the times directly felt in the experiences of living subjects have originally no common measure4 ,let a lump of sugar melt in a glass1 to use one of ,m4 ,bergson's instances4 ,we feel the time to be long while waiting for the process to end1 but who knows how long or how short it feels to the sugar8 ,all felt times coexist and overlap or compenetrate each other thus vaguely1 but the artifice of plotting them on a common scale helps us to reduce their aboriginal confusion1 and it helps us still more to plot1 against the same scale1 the successive possible steps into which nature's various changes may be resolved1 either sensibly or conceivably4 ,we thus straighten out the aboriginal privacy and vagueness1 and can date things publicly1 as it were1 and by each other4 ,the notion of one objective and 'evenly flowing' time1 cut into numbered instants1 applies itself as a common measure to all the steps and phases1 no matter how many1 into which we cut the processes of nature4 ,they are now definitely contemporary1 or later or earlier one than another1 and we can handle them mathematically1 as we say1 and far better1 practically as well as theoretically1 for having thus correlated them one to one with each other on the common schematic or conceptual time-scale4 ,motion1 to take a good example1 is originally a turbid sensation1 of which the native shape is perhaps best preserved in the phenomenon of vertigo4 ,in vertigo we feel that movement is1 and is more or less violent or rapid1 more or less in this direction or that1 more or less alarming or sickening4 ,but a man subject to vertigo may gradually learn to co-ordinate his felt motion with his real position and that of other things1 and intellectualize it enough to succeed at last in walking without staggering4 ,the mathematical mind similarly organizes motion in its way1 putting it into a logical definition3 motion is now conceived as 'the occupancy of serially successive points of space at serially successive instants of time4' ,with such a definition we escape wholly from the turbid privacy of sense4 ,but do we not also escape from sense-reality altogether8 ,whatever motion really may be1 it surely is not static2 but the definition we have gained is of the absolutely static4 ,it gives a set of one-to-one relations between space-points and time-points1 which relations themselves are as fixed as the points are4 ,it gives positions assignable ad infinitum1 but how the body gets from one position to another it omits to mention4 ,the body gets there by moving1 of course2 but the conceived positions1 however numerously multiplied1 contain no element of movement1 so ,zeno1 using nothing but them in his discussion1 has no alternative but to say that our intellect repudiates motion as a non-reality4 ,intellectualism here does what ,i said it does--it makes experience less instead of more intelligible4 ,we of course need a stable scheme of concepts1 stably related with one another1 to lay hold of our experiences and to co-ordinate them withal4 ,when an experience comes with sufficient saliency to stand out1 we keep the thought of it for future use1 and store it in our conceptual system4 ,what does not of itself stand out1 we learn to cut out2 so the system grows completer1 and new reality1 as it comes1 gets named after and conceptually strung upon this or that element of it which we have already established4 ,the immutability of such an abstract system is its great practical merit2 the same identical terms and relations in it can always be recovered and referred to--change itself is just such an unalterable concept4 ,but all these abstract concepts are but as flowers gathered1 they are only moments dipped out from the stream of time1 snap-shots taken1 as by a kinetoscopic camera1 at a life that in its original coming is continuous4 ,useful as they are as samples of the garden1 or to re-enter the stream with1 or to insert in our revolving lantern1 they have no value but these practical values4 ,you cannot explain by them what makes any single phenomenon be or go--you merely dot out the path of appearances which it traverses4 ,for you cannot make continuous being out of discontinuities1 and your concepts are discontinuous4 ,the stages into which you analyze a change are states1 the change itself goes on between them4 ,it lies along their intervals1 inhabits what your definition fails to gather up1 and thus eludes conceptual explanation altogether4 ',when the mathematician1' ,bergson writes1 'calculates the state of a system at the end of a time t1 nothing need prevent him from supposing that betweenwhiles the universe vanishes1 in order suddenly to appear again at the due moment in the new configuration4 ,it is only the t-th moment that counts--that which flows throughout the intervals1 namely real time1 plays no part in his calculation4444 ,in short1 the world on which the mathematician operates is a world which dies and is born anew at every instant1 like the world which ,descartes thought of when he spoke of a continued creation4' ,to know adequately what really happens we ought1 ,bergson insists1 to see into the intervals1 but the mathematician sees only their extremities4 ,he fixes only a few results1 he dots a curve and then interpolates1 he substitutes a tracing for a reality4 ,this being so undeniably the case1 the history of the way in which philosophy has dealt with it is curious4 ,the ruling tradition in philosophy has always been the platonic and aristotelian belief that fixity is a nobler and worthier thing than change4 ,reality must be one and unalterable4 ,concepts1 being themselves fixities1 agree best with this fixed nature of truth1 so that for any knowledge of ours to be quite true it must be knowledge by universal concepts rather than by particular experiences1 for these notoriously are mutable and corruptible4 ,this is the tradition known as rationalism in philosophy1 and what ,i have called intellectualism is only the extreme application of it4 ,in spite of sceptics and empiricists1 in spite of ,protagoras1 ,hume1 and ,james ,mill1 rationalism has never been seriously questioned1 for its sharpest critics have always had a tender place in their hearts for it1 and have obeyed some of its mandates4 ,they have not been consistent2 they have played fast and loose with the enemy2 and ,bergson alone has been radical4 ,to show what ,i mean by this1 let me contrast his procedure with that of some of the transcendentalist philosophers whom ,i have lately mentioned4 ,coming after ,kant1 these pique themselves on being 'critical1' on building in fact upon ,kant's 'critique' of pure reason4 ,what that critique professed to establish was this1 that concepts do not apprehend reality1 but only such appearances as our senses feed out to them4 ,they give immutable intellectual forms to these appearances1 it is true1 but the reality an sich from which in ultimate resort the sense-appearances have to come remains forever unintelligible to our intellect4 ,take motion1 for example4 ,sensibly1 motion comes in drops1 waves1 or pulses2 either some actual amount of it1 or none1 being apprehended4 ,this amount is the datum or gabe which reality feeds out to our intellectual faculty2 but our intellect makes of it a task or aufgabe--this pun is one of the most memorable of ,kant's formulas--and insists that in every pulse of it an infinite number of successive minor pulses shall be ascertainable4 ,these minor pulses we can indeed go on to ascertain or to compute indefinitely if we have patience2 but it would contradict the definition of an infinite number to suppose the endless series of them to have actually counted themselves out piecemeal4 ,zeno made this manifest2 so the infinity which our intellect requires of the sense-datum is thus a future and potential rather than a past and actual infinity of structure4 ,the datum after it has made itself must be decomposable ad infinitum by our conception1 but of the steps by which that structure actually got composed we know nothing4 ,our intellect casts1 in short1 no ray of light on the processes by which experiences get made4 ,kant's monistic successors have in general found the data of immediate experience even more self-contradictory1 when intellectually treated1 than ,kant did4 ,not only the character of infinity involved in the relation of various empirical data to their 'conditions1' but the very notion that empirical things should be related to one another at all1 has seemed to them1 when the intellectualistic fit was upon them1 full of paradox and contradiction4 ,we saw in a former lecture numerous instances of this from ,hegel1 ,bradley1 ,royce1 and others4 ,we saw also where the solution of such an intolerable state of things was sought for by these authors4 ,whereas ,kant had placed it outside of and before our experience1 in the dinge an sich which are the causes of the latter1 his monistic successors all look for it either after experience1 as its absolute completion1 or else consider it to be even now implicit within experience as its ideal signification4 ,kant and his successors look1 in short1 in diametrically opposite directions4 ,do not be misled by ,kant's admission of theism into his system4 ,his ,god is the ordinary dualistic ,god of ,christianity1 to whom his philosophy simply opens the door2 he has nothing whatsoever in common with the 'absolute spirit' set up by his successors4 ,so far as this absolute spirit is logically derived from ,kant1 it is not from his ,god1 but from entirely different elements of his philosophy4 ,first from his notion that an unconditioned totality of the conditions of any experience must be assignable2 and then from his other notion that the presence of some witness1 or ego of apperception1 is the most universal of all the conditions in question4 ,the post-kantians make of the witness-condition what is called a concrete universal1 an individualized all-witness or world-self1 which shall imply in its rational constitution each and all of the other conditions put together1 and therefore necessitate each and all of the conditioned experiences4 ,abridgments like this of other men's opinions are very unsatisfactory1 they always work injustice2 but in this case those of you who are familiar with the literature will see immediately what ,i have in mind2 and to the others1 if there be any here1 it will suffice to say that what ,i am trying so pedantically to point out is only the fact that monistic idealists after ,kant have invariably sought relief from the supposed contradictions of our world of sense by looking forward toward an ens rationis conceived as its integration or logical completion1 while he looked backward toward non-rational dinge an sich conceived as its cause4 ,pluralistic empiricists1 on the other hand1 have remained in the world of sense1 either navely and because they overlooked the intellectualistic contradictions1 or because1 not able to ignore them1 they thought they could refute them by a superior use of the same intellectualistic logic4 ,thus it is that ,john ,mill pretends to refute the ,achilles-tortoise fallacy4 ,the important point to notice here is the intellectualist logic4 ,both sides treat it as authoritative1 but they do so capriciously3 the absolutists smashing the world of sense by its means1 the empiricists smashing the absolute--for the absolute1 they say1 is the quintessence of all logical contradictions4 ,neither side attains consistency4 ,the ,hegelians have to invoke a higher logic to supersede the purely destructive efforts of their first logic4 ,the empiricists use their logic against the absolute1 but refuse to use it against finite experience4 ,each party uses it or drops it to suit the vision it has faith in1 but neither impugns in principle its general theoretic authority4 ,bergson alone challenges its theoretic authority in principle4 ,he alone denies that mere conceptual logic can tell us what is impossible or possible in the world of being or fact2 and he does so for reasons which at the same time that they rule logic out from lordship over the whole of life1 establish a vast and definite sphere of influence where its sovereignty is indisputable4 ,bergson's own text1 felicitous as it is1 is too intricate for quotation1 so ,i must use my own inferior words in explaining what ,i mean by saying this4 ,in the first place1 logic1 giving primarily the relations between concepts as such1 and the relations between natural facts only secondarily or so far as the facts have been already identified with concepts and defined by them1 must of course stand or fall with the conceptual method4 ,but the conceptual method is a transformation which the flux of life undergoes at our hands in the interests of practice essentially and only subordinately in the interests of theory4 ,we live forward1 we understand backward1 said a danish writer2 and to understand life by concepts is to arrest its movement1 cutting it up into bits as if with scissors1 and immobilizing these in our logical herbarium where1 comparing them as dried specimens1 we can ascertain which of them statically includes or excludes which other4 ,this treatment supposes life to have already accomplished itself1 for the concepts1 being so many views taken after the fact1 are retrospective and post mortem4 ,nevertheless we can draw conclusions from them and project them into the future4 ,we cannot learn from them how life made itself go1 or how it will make itself go2 but1 on the supposition that its ways of making itself go are unchanging1 we can calculate what positions of imagined arrest it will exhibit hereafter under given conditions4 ,we can compute1 for instance1 at what point ,achilles will be1 and where the tortoise will be1 at the end of the twentieth minute4 ,achilles may then be at a point far ahead2 but the full detail of how he will have managed practically to get there our logic never gives us--we have seen1 indeed1 that it finds that its results contradict the facts of nature4 ,the computations which the other sciences make differ in no respect from those of mathematics4 ,the concepts used are all of them dots through which1 by interpolation or extrapolation1 curves are drawn1 while along the curves other dots are found as consequences4 ,the latest refinements of logic dispense with the curves altogether1 and deal solely with the dots and their correspondences each to each in various series4 ,the authors of these recent improvements tell us expressly that their aim is to abolish the last vestiges of intuition1 videlicet of concrete reality1 from the field of reasoning1 which then will operate literally on mental dots or bare abstract units of discourse1 and on the ways in which they may be strung in naked series4 ,this is all very esoteric1 and my own understanding of it is most likely misunderstanding4 ,so ,i speak here only by way of brief reminder to those who know4 ,for the rest of us it is enough to recognize this fact1 that altho by means of concepts cut out from the sensible flux of the past1 we can re-descend upon the future flux and1 making another cut1 say what particular thing is likely to be found there2 and that altho in this sense concepts give us knowledge1 and may be said to have some theoretic value 7especially when the particular thing foretold is one in which we take no present practical interest72 yet in the deeper sense of giving insight they have no theoretic value1 for they quite fail to connect us with the inner life of the flux1 or with the causes that govern its direction4 ,instead of being interpreters of reality1 concepts negate the inwardness of reality altogether4 ,they make the whole notion of a causal influence between finite things incomprehensible4 ,no real activities and indeed no real connexions of any kind can obtain if we follow the conceptual logic2 for to be distinguishable1 according to what ,i call intellectualism1 is to be incapable of connexion4 ,the work begun by ,zeno1 and continued by ,hume1 ,kant1 ,herbart1 ,hegel1 and ,bradley1 does not stop till sensible reality lies entirely disintegrated at the feet of 'reason4' ,of the 'absolute' reality which reason proposes to substitute for sensible reality ,i shall have more to say presently4 ,meanwhile you see what ,professor ,bergson means by insisting that the function of the intellect is practical rather than theoretical4 ,sensible reality is too concrete to be entirely manageable--look at the narrow range of it which is all that any animal1 living in it exclusively as he does1 is able to compass4 ,to get from one point in it to another we have to plough or wade through the whole intolerable interval4 ,no detail is spared us2 it is as bad as the barbed-wire complications at ,port ,arthur1 and we grow old and die in the process4 ,but with our faculty of abstracting and fixing concepts we are there in a second1 almost as if we controlled a fourth dimension1 skipping the intermediaries as by a divine winged power1 and getting at the exact point we require without entanglement with any context4 ,what we do in fact is to harness up reality in our conceptual systems in order to drive it the better4 ,this process is practical because all the termini to which we drive are particular termini1 even when they are facts of the mental order4 ,but the sciences in which the conceptual method chiefly celebrates its triumphs are those of space and matter1 where the transformations of external things are dealt with4 ,to deal with moral facts conceptually1 we have first to transform them1 substitute brain-diagrams or physical metaphors1 treat ideas as atoms1 interests as mechanical forces1 our conscious 'selves' as 'streams1' and the like4 ,paradoxical effect6 as ,bergson well remarks1 if our intellectual life were not practical but destined to reveal the inner natures4 ,one would then suppose that it would find itself most at home in the domain of its own intellectual realities4 ,but it is precisely there that it finds itself at the end of its tether4 ,we know the inner movements of our spirit only perceptually4 ,we feel them live in us1 but can give no distinct account of their elements1 nor definitely predict their future2 while things that lie along the world of space1 things of the sort that we literally handle1 are what our intellects cope with most successfully4 ,does not this confirm us in the view that the original and still surviving function of our intellectual life is to guide us in the practical adaptation of our expectancies and activities8 ,one can easily get into a verbal mess at this point1 and my own experience with pragmatism' makes me shrink from the dangers that lie in the word 'practical1' and far rather than stand out against you for that word1 ,i am quite willing to part company with ,professor ,bergson1 and to ascribe a primarily theoretical function to our intellect1 provided you on your part then agree to discriminate 'theoretic' or scientific knowledge from the deeper 'speculative' knowledge aspired to by most philosophers1 and concede that theoretic knowledge1 which is knowledge about things1 as distinguished from living or sympathetic acquaintance with them1 touches only the outer surface of reality4 ,the surface which theoretic knowledge taken in this sense covers may indeed be enormous in extent2 it may dot the whole diameter of space and time with its conceptual creations2 but it does not penetrate a millimeter into the solid dimension4 ,that inner dimension of reality is occupied by the activities that keep it going1 but the intellect1 speaking through ,hume1 ,kant ,co41 finds itself obliged to deny1 and persists in denying1 that activities have any intelligible existence4 ,what exists for thought1 we are told1 is at most the results that we illusorily ascribe to such activities1 strung along the surfaces of space and time by regeln der verknpfung1 laws of nature which state only coexistences and successions4#a ,thought deals thus solely with surfaces4 ,it can name the thickness of reality1 but it cannot fathom it1 and its insufficiency here is essential and permanent1 not temporary4 ,the only way in which to apprehend reality's thickness is either to experience it directly by being a part of reality one's self1 or to evoke it in imagination by sympathetically divining some one else's inner life4 ,but what we thus immediately experience or concretely divine is very limited in duration1 whereas abstractly we are able to conceive eternities4 ,could we feel a million years concretely as we now feel a passing minute1 we should have very little employment for our conceptual faculty4 ,we should know the whole period fully at every moment of its passage1 whereas we must now construct it laboriously by means of concepts which we project4 ,direct acquaintance and conceptual knowledge are thus complementary of each other2 each remedies the other's defects4 ,if what we care most about be the synoptic treatment of phenomena1 the vision of the far and the gathering of the scattered like1 we must follow the conceptual method4 ,but if1 as metaphysicians1 we are more curious about the inner nature of reality or about what really makes it go1 we must turn our backs upon our winged concepts altogether1 and bury ourselves in the thickness of those passing moments over the surface of which they fly1 and on particular points of which they occasionally rest and perch4 ,professor ,bergson thus inverts the traditional platonic doctrine absolutely4 ,instead of intellectual knowledge being the profounder1 he calls it the more superficial4 ,instead of being the only adequate knowledge1 it is grossly inadequate1 and its only superiority is the practical one of enabling us to make short cuts through experience and thereby to save time4 ,the one thing it cannot do is to reveal the nature of things--which last remark1 if not clear already1 will become clearer as ,i proceed4 ,dive back into the flux itself1 then1 ,bergson tells us1 if you wish to know reality1 that flux which ,platonism1 in its strange belief that only the immutable is excellent1 has always spurned2 turn your face toward sensation1 that flesh-bound thing which rationalism has always loaded with abuse4--,this1 you see1 is exactly the opposite remedy from that of looking forward into the absolute1 which our idealistic contemporaries prescribe4 ,it violates our mental habits1 being a kind of passive and receptive listening quite contrary to that effort to react noisily and verbally on everything1 which is our usual intellectual pose4 ,what1 then1 are the peculiar features in the perceptual flux which the conceptual translation so fatally leaves out8 ,the essence of life is its continuously changing character2 but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed1 and the only mode of making them coincide with life is by arbitrarily supposing positions of arrest therein4 ,with such arrests our concepts may be made congruent4 ,but these concepts are not parts of reality1 not real positions taken by it1 but suppositions rather1 notes taken by ourselves1 and you can no more dip up the substance of reality with them than you can dip up water with a net1 however finely meshed4 ,when we conceptualize1 we cut out and fix1 and exclude everything but what we have fixed4 ,a concept means a that-and-no-other4 ,conceptually1 time excludes space2 motion and rest exclude each other2 approach excludes contact2 presence excludes absence2 unity excludes plurality2 independence excludes relativity2 'mine' excludes 'yours'2 this connexion excludes that connexion--and so on indefinitely2 whereas in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what not4 ,past and future1 for example1 conceptually separated by the cut to which we give the name of present1 and defined as being the opposite sides of that cut1 are to some extent1 however brief1 co-present with each other throughout experience4 ,the literally present moment is a purely verbal supposition1 not a position2 the only present ever realized concretely being the 'passing moment' in which the dying rearward of time and its dawning future forever mix their lights4 ,say 'now' and it was even while you say it4 ,it is just intellectualism's attempt to substitute static cuts for units of experienced duration that makes real motion so unintelligible4 ,the conception of the first half of the interval between ,achilles and the tortoise excludes that of the last half1 and the mathematical necessity of traversing it separately before the last half is traversed stands permanently in the way of the last half ever being traversed4 ,meanwhile the living ,achilles 7who1 for the purposes of this discussion1 is only the abstract name of one phenomenon of impetus1 just as the tortoise is of another7 asks no leave of logic4 ,the velocity of his acts is an indivisible nature in them like the expansive tension in a spring compressed4 ,we define it conceptually as s_/t1 but the s and t are only artificial cuts made after the fact1 and indeed most artificial when we treat them in both runners as the same tracts of 'objective' space and time1 for the experienced spaces and times in which the tortoise inwardly lives are probably as different as his velocity from the same things in ,achilles4 ,the impetus of ,achilles is one concrete fact1 and carries space1 time1 and conquest over the inferior creature's motion indivisibly in it4 ,he perceives nothing1 while running1 of the mathematician's homogeneous time and space1 of the infinitely numerous succession of cuts in both1 or of their order4 ,end and beginning come for him in the one onrush1 and all that he actually experiences is that1 in the midst of a certain intense effort of his own1 the rival is in point of fact outstripped4 ,we are so inveterately wedded to the conceptual decomposition of life that ,i know that this will seem to you like putting muddiest confusion in place of clearest thought1 and relapsing into a molluscoid state of mind4 ,yet ,i ask you whether the absolute superiority of our higher thought is so very clear1 if all that it can find is impossibility in tasks which sense-experience so easily performs4 ,what makes you call real life confusion is that it presents1 as if they were dissolved in one another1 a lot of differents which conception breaks life's flow by keeping apart4 ,but are not differents actually dissolved in one another8 ,hasn't every bit of experience its quality1 its duration1 its extension1 its intensity1 its urgency1 its clearness1 and many aspects besides1 no one of which can exist in the isolation in which our verbalized logic keeps it8 ,they exist only durcheinander4 ,reality always is1 in ,m4 ,bergson's phrase1 an endosmosis or conflux of the same with the different3 they compenetrate and telescope4 ,for conceptual logic1 the same is nothing but the same1 and all sames with a third thing are the same with each other4 ,not so in concrete experience4 ,two spots on our skin1 each of which feels the same as a third spot when touched along with it1 are felt as different from each other4 ,two tones1 neither distinguishable from a third tone1 are perfectly distinct from each other4 ,the whole process of life is due to life's violation of our logical axioms4 ,take its continuity as an example4 ,terms like ,a and ,c appear to be connected by intermediaries1 by ,b for example4 ,intellectualism calls this absurd1 for ',b-connected-with-,a' is1 'as such1' a different term from ',b-connected-with-,c4' ,but real life laughs at logic's veto4 ,imagine a heavy log which takes two men to carry it4 ,first ,a and ,b take it4 ,then ,c takes hold and ,a drops off2 then ,d takes hold and ,b drops off1 so that ,c and ,d now bear it2 and so on4 ,the log meanwhile never drops1 and keeps its sameness throughout the journey4 ,even so it is with all our experiences4 ,their changes are not complete annihilations followed by complete creations of something absolutely novel4 ,there is partial decay and partial growth1 and all the while a nucleus of relative constancy from which what decays drops off1 and which takes into itself whatever is grafted on1 until at length something wholly different has taken its place4 ,in such a process we are as sure1 in spite of intellectualist logic with its 'as suches1' that it is the same nucleus which is able now to make connexion with what goes and again with what comes1 as we are sure that the same point can lie on diverse lines that intersect there4 ,without being one throughout1 such a universe is continuous4 ,its members interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions1 and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere4 ,the great clash of intellectualist logic with sensible experience is where the experience is that of influence exerted4 ,intellectualism denies 7as we saw in lecture ii7 that finite things can act on one another1 for all things1 once translated into concepts1 remain shut up to themselves4 ,to act on anything means to get into it somehow2 but that would mean to get out of one's self and be one's other1 which is self-contradictory1 etc4 ,meanwhile each of us actually is his own other to that extent1 livingly knowing how to perform the trick which logic tells us can't be done4 ,my thoughts animate and actuate this very body which you see and hear1 and thereby influence your thoughts4 ,the dynamic current somehow does get from me to you1 however numerous the intermediary conductors may have to be4 ,distinctions may be insulators in logic as much as they like1 but in life distinct things can and do commune together every moment4 ,the conflict of the two ways of knowing is best summed up in the intellectualist doctrine that 'the same cannot exist in many relations4' ,this follows of course from the concepts of the two relations being so distinct that 'what-is-in-the-one' means 'as such' something distinct from what 'what-is-in-the-other' means4 ,it is like ,mill's ironical saying1 that we should not think of ,newton as both an ,englishman and a mathematician1 because an ,englishman as such is not a mathematician and a mathematician as such is not an ,englishman4 ,but the real ,newton was somehow both things at once2 and throughout the whole finite universe each real thing proves to be many differents without undergoing the necessity of breaking into disconnected editions of itself4 ,these few indications will perhaps suffice to put you at the bergsonian point of view4 ,the immediate experience of life solves the problems which so baffle our conceptual intelligence3 ,how can what is manifold be one8 how can things get out of themselves8 how be their own others8 how be both distinct and connected8 how can they act on one another8 how be for others and yet for themselves8 how be absent and present at once8 ,the intellect asks these questions much as we might ask how anything can both separate and unite things1 or how sounds can grow more alike by continuing to grow more different4 ,if you already know space sensibly1 you can answer the former question by pointing to any interval in it1 long or short2 if you know the musical scale1 you can answer the latter by sounding an octave2 but then you must first have the sensible knowledge of these realities4 ,similarly ,bergson answers the intellectualist conundrums by pointing back to our various finite sensational experiences and saying1 ',lo1 even thus2 even so are these other problems solved livingly4' ,when you have broken the reality into concepts you never can reconstruct it in its wholeness4 ,out of no amount of discreteness can you manufacture the concrete4 ,but place yourself at a bound1 or d'emble1 as ,m4 ,bergson says1 inside of the living1 moving1 active thickness of the real1 and all the abstractions and distinctions are given into your hand3 you can now make the intellectualist substitutions to your heart's content4 ,install yourself in phenomenal movement1 for example1 and velocity1 succession1 dates1 positions1 and innumerable other things are given you in the bargain4 ,but with only an abstract succession of dates and positions you can never patch up movement itself4 ,it slips through their intervals and is lost4 ,so it is with every concrete thing1 however complicated4 ,our intellectual handling of it is a retrospective patchwork1 a post-mortem dissection1 and can follow any order we find most expedient4 ,we can make the thing seem self-contradictory whenever we wish to4 ,but place yourself at the point of view of the thing's interior doing1 and all these back-looking and conflicting conceptions lie harmoniously in your hand4 ,get at the expanding centre of a human character1 the lan vital of a man1 as ,bergson calls it1 by living sympathy1 and at a stroke you see how it makes those who see it from without interpret it in such diverse ways4 ,it is something that breaks into both honesty and dishonesty1 courage and cowardice1 stupidity and insight1 at the touch of varying circumstances1 and you feel exactly why and how it does this1 and never seek to identify it stably with any of these single abstractions4 ,only your intellectualist does that1--and you now also feel why he must do it to the end4 ,place yourself similarly at the centre of a man's philosophic vision and you understand at once all the different things it makes him write or say4 ,but keep outside1 use your post-mortem method1 try to build the philosophy up out of the single phrases1 taking first one and then another and seeking to make them fit1 and of course you fail4 ,you crawl over the thing like a myopic ant over a building1 tumbling into every microscopic crack or fissure1 finding nothing but inconsistencies1 and never suspecting that a centre exists4 ,i hope that some of the philosophers in this audience may occasionally have had something different from this intellectualist type of criticism applied to their own works6 ,what really exists is not things made but things in the making4 ,once made1 they are dead1 and an infinite number of alternative conceptual decompositions can be used in defining them4 ,but put yourself in the making by a stroke of intuitive sympathy with the thing and1 the whole range of possible decompositions coming at once into your possession1 you are no longer troubled with the question which of them is the more absolutely true4 ,reality falls in passing into conceptual analysis2 it mounts in living its own undivided life--it buds and bourgeons1 changes and creates4 ,once adopt the movement of this life in any given instance and you know what ,bergson calls the devenir rel by which the thing evolves and grows4 ,philosophy should seek this kind of living understanding of the movement of reality1 not follow science in vainly patching together fragments of its dead results4 ,thus much of ,m4 ,bergson's philosophy is sufficient for my purpose in these lectures1 so here ,i will stop1 leaving unnoticed all its other constituent features1 original and interesting tho they be4 ,you may say1 and doubtless some of you now are saying inwardly1 that his remanding us to sensation in this wise is only a regress1 a return to that ultra-crude empiricism which your own idealists since ,green have buried ten times over4 ,i confess that it is indeed a return to empiricism1 but ,i think that the return in such accomplished shape only proves the latter's immortal truth4 ,what won't stay buried must have some genuine life4 ,am anfang war die tat2 fact is a first2 to which all our conceptual handling comes as an inadequate second1 never its full equivalent4 ,when ,i read recent transcendentalist literature--,i must partly except my colleague ,royce6--,i get nothing but a sort of marking of time1 champing of jaws1 pawing of the ground1 and resettling into the same attitude1 like a weary horse in a stall with an empty manger4 ,it is but turning over the same few threadbare categories1 bringing the same objections1 and urging the same answers and solutions1 with never a new fact or a new horizon coming into sight4 ,but open ,bergson1 and new horizons loom on every page you read4 ,it is like the breath of the morning and the song of birds4 ,it tells of reality itself1 instead of merely reiterating what dusty-minded professors have written about what other previous professors have thought4 ,nothing in ,bergson is shop-worn or at second hand4 ,that he gives us no closed-in system will of course be fatal to him in intellectualist eyes4 ,he only evokes and invites2 but he first annuls the intellectualist veto1 so that we now join step with reality with a philosophical conscience never quite set free before4 ,as a french disciple of his well expresses it3 ',bergson claims of us first of all a certain inner catastrophe1 and not every one is capable of such a logical revolution4 ,but those who have once found themselves flexible enough for the execution of such a psychological change of front1 discover somehow that they can never return again to their ancient attitude of mind4 ,they are now ,bergsonians 444 and possess the principal thoughts of the master all at once4 ,they have understood in the fashion in which one loves1 they have caught the whole melody and can thereafter admire at their leisure the originality1 the fecundity1 and the imaginative genius with which its author develops1 transposes1 and varies in a thousand ways by the orchestration of his style and dialectic1 the original theme4'#b ,this1 scant as it is1 is all ,i have to say about ,bergson on this occasion--,i hope it may send some of you to his original text4 ,i must now turn back to the point where ,i found it advisable to appeal to his ideas4 ,you remember my own intellectualist difficulties in the last lecture1 about how a lot of separate consciousnesses can at the same time be one collective thing4 ,how1 ,i asked1 can one and the same identical content of experience1 of which on idealist principles the esse is to be felt1 be felt so diversely if itself be the only feeler8 ,the usual way of escape by 'quatenus' or 'as such' won't help us here if we are radical intellectualists1 ,i said1 for appearance-together is as such not appearance-apart1 the world qu many is not the world qu one1 as absolutism claims4 ,if we hold to ,hume's maxim1 which later intellectualism uses so well1 that whatever things are distinguished are as separate as if there were no manner of connexion between them1 there seemed no way out of the difficulty save by stepping outside of experience altogether and invoking different spiritual agents1 selves or souls1 to realize the diversity required4 ,but this rescue by 'scholastic entities' ,i was unwilling to accept any more than pantheistic idealists accept it4 ,yet1 to quote ,fechner's phrase again1 'nichts wirkliches kann unmglich sein1' the actual cannot be impossible1 and what is actual at every moment of our lives is the sort of thing which ,i now proceed to remind you of4 ,you can hear the vibration of an electric contact-maker1 smell the ozone1 see the sparks1 and feel the thrill1 co-consciously as it were or in one field of experience4 ,but you can also isolate any one of these sensations by shutting out the rest4 ,if you close your eyes1 hold your nose1 and remove your hand1 you can get the sensation of sound alone1 but it seems still the same sensation that it was2 and if you restore the action of the other organs1 the sound coalesces with the feeling1 the sight1 and the smell sensations again4 ,now the natural way of talking of all this#c is to say that certain sensations are experienced1 now singly1 and now together with other sensations1 in a common conscious field4 ,fluctuations of attention give analogous results4 ,we let a sensation in or keep it out by changing our attention2 and similarly we let an item of memory in or drop it out4 ,please don't raise the question here of how these changes come to pass4 ,the immediate condition is probably cerebral in every instance1 but it would be irrelevant now to consider it1 for now we are thinking only of results1 and ,i repeat that the natural way of thinking of them is that which intellectualist criticism finds so absurd4 ,the absurdity charged is that the self-same should function so differently1 now with and now without something else4 ,but this it sensibly seems to do4 ,this very desk which ,i strike with my hand strikes in turn your eyes4 ,it functions at once as a physical object in the outer world and as a mental object in our sundry mental worlds4 ,the very body of mine that my thought actuates is the body whose gestures are your visual object and to which you give my name4 ,the very log which ,john helped to carry is the log now borne by ,james4 ,the very girl you love is simultaneously entangled elsewhere4 ,the very place behind me is in front of you4 ,look where you will1 you gather only examples of the same amid the different1 and of different relations existing as it were in solution in the same thing4 ,qu this an experience is not the same as it is qu that1 truly enough2 but the qus are conceptual shots of ours at its post-mortem remains1 and in its sensational immediacy everything is all at once whatever different things it is at once at all4 ,it is before ,c and after ,a1 far from you and near to me1 without this associate and with that one1 active and passive1 physical and mental1 a whole of parts and part of a higher whole1 all simultaneously and without interference or need of doubling-up its being1 so long as we keep to what ,i call the 'immediate' point of view1 the point of view in which we follow our sensational life's continuity1 and to which all living language conforms4 ,it is only when you try--to continue using the hegelian vocabulary--to 'mediate' the immediate1 or to substitute concepts for sensational life1 that intellectualism celebrates its triumph and the immanent-self-contradictoriness of all this smooth-running finite experience gets proved4 ,of the oddity of inventing as a remedy for the inconveniences resulting from this situation a supernumerary conceptual object called an absolute1 into which you pack the self-same contradictions unreduced1 ,i will say something in the next lecture4 ,the absolute is said to perform its feats by taking up its other into itself4 ,but that is exactly what is done when every individual morsel of the sensational stream takes up the adjacent morsels by coalescing with them4 ,this is just what we mean by the stream's sensible continuity4 ,no element there cuts itself off from any other element1 as concepts cut themselves from concepts4 ,no part there is so small as not to be a place of conflux4 ,no part there is not really next its neighbors2 which means that there is literally nothing between2 which means again that no part goes exactly so far and no farther2 that no part absolutely excludes another1 but that they compenetrate and are cohesive2 that if you tear out one1 its roots bring out more with them2 that whatever is real is telescoped and diffused into other reals2 that1 in short1 every minutest thing is already its hegelian 'own other1' in the fullest sense of the term4 ,of course this sounds self-contradictory1 but as the immediate facts don't sound at all1 but simply are1 until we conceptualize and name them vocally1 the contradiction results only from the conceptual or discursive form being substituted for the real form4 ,but if1 as ,bergson shows1 that form is superimposed for practical ends only1 in order to let us jump about over life instead of wading through it2 and if it cannot even pretend to reveal anything of what life's inner nature is or ought to be2 why then we can turn a deaf ear to its accusations4 ,the resolve to turn the deaf ear is the inner crisis or 'catastrophe' of which ,m4 ,bergson's disciple whom ,i lately quoted spoke4 ,we are so subject to the philosophic tradition which treats logos or discursive thought generally as the sole avenue to truth1 that to fall back on raw unverbalized life as more of a revealer1 and to think of concepts as the merely practical things which ,bergson calls them1 comes very hard4 ,it is putting off our proud maturity of mind and becoming again as foolish little children in the eyes of reason4 ,but difficult as such a revolution is1 there is no other way1 ,i believe1 to the possession of reality1 and ,i permit myself to hope that some of you may share my opinion after you have heard my next lecture4 ,,lecture ,,vii ,,the ,,continuity ,,of ,,experience ,i fear that few of you will have been able to obey ,bergson's call upon you to look towards the sensational life for the fuller knowledge of reality1 or to sympathize with his attempt to limit the divine right of concepts to rule our mind absolutely4 ,it is too much like looking downward and not up4 ,philosophy1 you will say1 doesn't lie flat on its belly in the middle of experience1 in the very thick of its sand and gravel1 as this ,bergsonism does1 never getting a peep at anything from above4 ,philosophy is essentially the vision of things from above4 ,it doesn't simply feel the detail of things1 it comprehends their intelligible plan1 sees their forms and principles1 their categories and rules1 their order and necessity4 ,it takes the superior point of view of the architect4 ,is it conceivable that it should ever forsake that point of view and abandon itself to a slovenly life of immediate feeling8 ,to say nothing of your traditional ,oxford devotion to ,aristotle and ,plato1 the leaven of ,t4,h4 ,green probably works still too strongly here for his anti-sensationalism to be outgrown quickly4 ,green more than any one realized that knowledge about things was knowledge of their relations2 but nothing could persuade him that our sensational life could contain any relational element4 ,he followed the strict intellectualist method with sensations4 ,what they were not expressly defined as including1 they must exclude4 ,sensations are not defined as relations1 so in the end ,green thought that they could get related together only by the action on them from above of a 'self-distinguishing' absolute and eternal mind1 present to that which is related1 but not related itself4 ',a relation1' he said1 'is not contingent with the contingency of feeling4 ,it is permanent with the permanence of the combining and comparing thought which alone constitutes it4'#a ,in other words1 relations are purely conceptual objects1 and the sensational life as such cannot relate itself together4 ,sensation in itself1 ,green wrote1 is fleeting1 momentary1 unnameable 7because1 while we name it1 it has become another71 and for the same reason unknowable1 the very negation of knowability4 ,were there no permanent objects of conception for our sensations to be 'referred to1' there would be no significant names1 but only noises1 and a consistent sensationalism must be speechless4#b ,green's intellectualism was so earnest that it produced a natural and an inevitable effect4 ,but the atomistic and unrelated sensations which he had in mind were purely fictitious products of his rationalist fancy4 ,the psychology of our own day disavows them utterly1#c and ,green's laborious belaboring of poor old ,locke for not having first seen that his ideas of sensation were just that impracticable sort of thing1 and then fled to transcendental idealism as a remedy1--his belaboring of poor old ,locke for this1 ,i say1 is pathetic4 ,every examiner of the sensible life in concreto must see that relations of every sort1 of time1 space1 difference1 likeness1 change1 rate1 cause1 or what not1 are just as integral members of the sensational flux as terms are1 and that conjunctive relations are just as true members of the flux as disjunctive relations are4#d ,this is what in some recent writings of mine ,i have called the 'radically empiricist' doctrine 7in distinction from the doctrine of mental atoms which the name empiricism so often suggests74 ,intellectualistic critics of sensation insist that sensations are disjoined only4 ,radical empiricism insists that conjunctions between them are just as immediately given as disjunctions are1 and that relations1 whether disjunctive or conjunctive1 are in their original sensible givenness just as fleeting and momentary 7in ,green's words71 and just as 'particular1' as terms are4 ,later1 both terms and relations get universalized by being conceptualized and named4#e ,but all the thickness1 concreteness1 and individuality of experience exists in the immediate and relatively unnamed stages of it1 to the richness of which1 and to the standing inadequacy of our conceptions to match it1 ,professor ,bergson so emphatically calls our attention4 ,and now ,i am happy to say that we can begin to gather together some of the separate threads of our argument1 and see a little better the general kind of conclusion toward which we are tending4 ,pray go back with me to the lecture before the last1 and recall what ,i said about the difficulty of seeing how states of consciousness can compound themselves4 ,the difficulty seemed to be the same1 you remember1 whether we took it in psychology as the composition of finite states of mind out of simpler finite states1 or in metaphysics as the composition of the absolute mind out of finite minds in general4 ,it is the general conceptualist difficulty of any one thing being the same with many things1 either at once or in succession1 for the abstract concepts of oneness and manyness must needs exclude each other4 ,in the particular instance that we have dwelt on so long1 the one thing is the all-form of experience1 the many things are the each-forms of experience in you and me4 ,to call them the same we must treat them as if each were simultaneously its own other1 a feat on conceptualist principles impossible of performance4 ,on the principle of going behind the conceptual function altogether1 however1 and looking to the more primitive flux of the sensational life for reality's true shape1 a way is open to us1 as ,i tried in my last lecture to show4 ,not only the absolute is its own other1 but the simplest bits of immediate experience are their own others1 if that hegelian phrase be once for all allowed4 ,the concrete pulses of experience appear pent in by no such definite limits as our conceptual substitutes for them are confined by4 ,they run into one another continuously and seem to interpenetrate4 ,what in them is relation and what is matter related is hard to discern4 ,you feel no one of them as inwardly simple1 and no two as wholly without confluence where they touch4 ,there is no datum so small as not to show this mystery1 if mystery it be4 ,the tiniest feeling that we can possibly have comes with an earlier and a later part and with a sense of their continuous procession4 ,mr4 ,shadworth ,hodgson showed long ago that there is literally no such object as the present moment except as an unreal postulate of abstract thought4#f ,the 'passing' moment is1 as ,i already have reminded you1 the minimal fact1 with the 'apparition of difference' inside of it as well as outside4 ,if we do not feel both past and present in one field of feeling1 we feel them not at all4 ,we have the same many-in-one in the matter that fills the passing time4 ,the rush of our thought forward through its fringes is the everlasting peculiarity of its life4 ,we realize this life as something always off its balance1 something in transition1 something that shoots out of a darkness through a dawn into a brightness that we feel to be the dawn fulfilled4 ,in the very midst of the continuity our experience comes as an alteration4 ',yes1' we say at the full brightness1 'this is what ,i just meant4' ',no1' we feel at the dawning1 'this is not yet the full meaning1 there is more to come4' ,in every crescendo of sensation1 in every effort to recall1 in every progress towards the satisfaction of desire1 this succession of an emptiness and fulness that have reference to each other and are one flesh is the essence of the phenomenon4 ,in every hindrance of desire the sense of an ideal presence which is absent in fact1 of an absent1 in a word1 which the only function of the present is to mean1 is even more notoriously there4 ,and in the movement of pure thought we have the same phenomenon4 ,when ,i say ,socrates is mortal1 the moment ,socrates is incomplete2 it falls forward through the is which is pure movement1 into the mortal which is indeed bare mortal on the tongue1 but for the mind is that mortal1 the mortal ,socrates1 at last satisfactorily disposed of and told off4#g ,here1 then1 inside of the minimal pulses of experience1 is realized that very inner complexity which the transcendentalists say only the absolute can genuinely possess4 ,the gist of the matter is always the same--something ever goes indissolubly with something else4 ,you cannot separate the same from its other1 except by abandoning the real altogether and taking to the conceptual system4 ,what is immediately given in the single and particular instance is always something pooled and mutual1 something with no dark spot1 no point of ignorance4 ,no one elementary bit of reality is eclipsed from the next bit's point of view1 if only we take reality sensibly and in small enough pulses--and by us it has to be taken pulse-wise1 for our span of consciousness is too short to grasp the larger collectivity of things except nominally and abstractly4 ,no more of reality collected together at once is extant anywhere1 perhaps1 than in my experience of reading this page1 or in yours of listening2 yet within those bits of experience as they come to pass we get a fulness of content that no conceptual description can equal4 ,sensational experiences are their 'own others1' then1 both internally and externally4 ,inwardly they are one with their parts1 and outwardly they pass continuously into their next neighbors1 so that events separated by years of time in a man's life hang together unbrokenly by the intermediary events4 ,their names1 to be sure1 cut them into separate conceptual entities1 but no cuts existed in the continuum in which they originally came4 ,if1 with all this in our mind1 we turn to our own particular predicament1 we see that our old objection to the self-compounding of states of consciousness1 our accusation that it was impossible for purely logical reasons1 is unfounded in principle4 ,every smallest state of consciousness1 concretely taken1 overflows its own definition4 ,only concepts are self-identical2 only 'reason' deals with closed equations2 nature is but a name for excess2 every point in her opens out and runs into the more2 and the only question1 with reference to any point we may be considering1 is how far into the rest of nature we may have to go in order to get entirely beyond its overflow4 ,in the pulse of inner life immediately present now in each of us is a little past1 a little future1 a little awareness of our own body1 of each other's persons1 of these sublimities we are trying to talk about1 of the earth's geography and the direction of history1 of truth and error1 of good and bad1 and of who knows how much more8 ,feeling1 however dimly and subconsciously1 all these things1 your pulse of inner life is continuous with them1 belongs to them and they to it4 ,you can't identify it with either one of them rather than with the others1 for if you let it develop into no matter which of those directions1 what it develops into will look back on it and say1 ',that was the original germ of me4' ,in principle1 then1 the real units of our immediately-felt life are unlike the units that intellectualist logic holds to and makes its calculations with4 ,they are not separate from their own others1 and you have to take them at widely separated dates to find any two of them that seem unblent4 ,then indeed they do appear separate even as their concepts are separate2 a chasm yawns between them2 but the chasm itself is but an intellectualist fiction1 got by abstracting from the continuous sheet of experiences with which the intermediary time was filled4 ,it is like the log carried first by ,william and ,henry1 then by ,william1 ,henry1 and ,john1 then by ,henry and ,john1 then by ,john and ,peter1 and so on4 ,all real units of experience overlap4 ,let a row of equidistant dots on a sheet of paper symbolize the concepts by which we intellectualize the world4 ,let a ruler long enough to cover at least three dots stand for our sensible experience4 ,then the conceived changes of the sensible experience can be symbolized by sliding the ruler along the line of dots4 ,one concept after another will apply to it1 one after another drop away1 but it will always cover at least two of them1 and no dots less than three will ever adequately cover it4 ,you falsify it if you treat it conceptually1 or by the law of dots4 ,what is true here of successive states must also be true of simultaneous characters4 ,they also overlap each other with their being4 ,my present field of consciousness is a centre surrounded by a fringe that shades insensibly into a subconscious more4 ,i use three separate terms here to describe1 this fact2 but ,i might as well use three hundred1 for the fact is all shades and no boundaries4 ,which part of it properly is in my consciousness1 which out8 ,if ,i name what is out1 it already has come in4 ,the centre works in one way while the margins work in another1 and presently overpower the centre and are central themselves4 ,what we conceptually identify ourselves with and say we are thinking of at any time is the centre2 but our full self is the whole field1 with all those indefinitely radiating subconscious possibilities of increase that we can only feel without conceiving1 and can hardly begin to analyze4 ,the collective and the distributive ways of being coexist here1 for each part functions distinctly1 makes connexion with its own peculiar region in the still wider rest of experience and tends to draw us into that line1 and yet the whole is somehow felt as one pulse of our life1--not conceived so1 but felt so4 ,in principle1 then1 as ,i said1 intellectualism's edge is broken2 it can only approximate to reality1 and its logic is inapplicable to our inner life1 which spurns its vetoes and mocks at its impossibilities4 ,every bit of us at every moment is part and parcel of a wider self1 it quivers along various radii like the wind-rose on a compass1 and the actual in it is continuously one with possibles not yet in our present sight4#h ,and just as we are co-conscious with our own momentary margin1 may not we ourselves form the margin of some more really central self in things which is co-conscious with the whole of us8 ,may not you and ,i be confluent in a higher consciousness1 and confluently active there1 tho we now know it not8 ,i am tiring myself and you1 ,i know1 by vainly seeking to describe by concepts and words what ,i say at the same time exceeds either conceptualization or verbalization4 ,as long as one continues talking1 intellectualism remains in undisturbed possession of the field4 ,the return to life can't come about by talking4 ,it is an act2 to make you return to life1 ,i must set an example for your imitation1 ,i must deafen you to talk1 or to the importance of talk1 by showing you1 as ,bergson does1 that the concepts we talk with are made for purposes of practice and not for purposes of insight4 ,or ,i must point1 point to the mere that of life1 and you by inner sympathy must fill out the what for yourselves4 ,the minds of some of you1 ,i know1 will absolutely refuse to do so1 refuse to think in non-conceptualized terms4 ,i myself absolutely refused to do so for years together1 even after ,i knew that the denial of manyness-in-oneness by intellectualism must be false1 for the same reality does perform the most various functions at once4 ,but ,i hoped ever for a revised intellectualist way round the difficulty1 and it was only after reading ,bergson that ,i saw that to continue using the intellectualist method was itself the fault4 ,i saw that philosophy had been on a false scent ever since the days of ,socrates and ,plato1 that an intellectual answer to the intellectualist's difficulties will never come1 and that the real way out of them1 far from consisting in the discovery of such an answer1 consists in simply closing one's ears to the question4 ,when conceptualism summons life to justify itself in conceptual terms1 it is like a challenge addressed in a foreign language to some one who is absorbed in his own business2 it is irrelevant to him altogether--he may let it lie unnoticed4 ,i went thus through the 'inner catastrophe' of which ,i spoke in the last lecture2 ,i had literally come to the end of my conceptual stock-in-trade1 ,i was bankrupt intellectualistically1 and had to change my base4 ,no words of mine will probably convert you1 for words can be the names only of concepts4 ,but if any of you try sincerely and pertinaciously on your own separate accounts to intellectualize reality1 you may be similarly driven to a change of front4 ,i say no more3 ,i must leave life to teach the lesson4 ,we have now reached a point of view from which the self-compounding of mind in its smaller and more accessible portions seems a certain fact1 and in which the speculative assumption of a similar but wider compounding in remoter regions must be reckoned with as a legitimate hypothesis4 ,the absolute is not the impossible being ,i once thought it4 ,mental facts do function both singly and together1 at once1 and we finite minds may simultaneously be co-conscious with one another in a superhuman intelligence4 ,it is only the extravagant claims of coercive necessity on the absolute's part that have to be denied by a priori logic4 ,as an hypothesis trying to make itself probable on analogical and inductive grounds1 the absolute is entitled to a patient hearing4 ,which is as much as to say that our serious business from now onward lies with ,fechner and his method1 rather than with ,hegel1 ,royce1 or ,bradley4 ,fechner treats the superhuman consciousness he so fervently believes in as an hypothesis only1 which he then recommends by all the resources of induction and persuasion4 ,it is true that ,fechner himself is an absolutist in his books1 not actively but passively1 if ,i may say so4 ,he talks not only of the earth-soul and of the star-souls1 but of an integrated soul of all things in the cosmos without exception1 and this he calls ,god just as others call it the absolute4 ,nevertheless he thinks only of the subordinate superhuman souls1 and content with having made his obeisance once for all to the august total soul of the cosmos1 he leaves it in its lonely sublimity with no attempt to define its nature4 ,like the absolute1 it is 'out of range1' and not an object for distincter vision4 ,psychologically1 it seems to me that ,fechner's ,god is a lazy postulate of his1 rather than a part of his system positively thought out4 ,as we envelop our sight and hearing1 so the earth-soul envelops us1 and the star-soul the earth-soul1 until--what8 ,envelopment can't go on forever2 it must have an abschluss1 a total envelope must terminate the series1 so ,god is the name that ,fechner gives to this last all-enveloper4 ,but if nothing escapes this all-enveloper1 he is responsible for everything1 including evil1 and all the paradoxes and difficulties which ,i found in the absolute at the end of our third lecture recur undiminished4 ,fechner tries sincerely to grapple with the problem of evil1 but he always solves it in the leibnitzian fashion by making his ,god non-absolute1 placing him under conditions of 'metaphysical necessity' which even his omnipotence cannot violate4 ,his will has to struggle with conditions not imposed on that will by itself4 ,he tolerates provisionally what he has not created1 and then with endless patience tries to overcome it and live it down4 ,he has1 in short1 a history4 ,whenever ,fechner tries to represent him clearly1 his ,god becomes the ordinary ,god of theism1 and ceases to be the absolutely totalized all-enveloper4#i ,in this shape1 he represents the ideal element in things solely1 and is our champion and our helper and we his helpers1 against the bad parts of the universe4 ,fechner was in fact too little of a metaphysician to care for perfect formal consistency in these abstract regions4 ,he believed in ,god in the pluralistic manner1 but partly from convention and partly from what ,i should call intellectual laziness1 if laziness of any kind could be imputed to a ,fechner1 he let the usual monistic talk about him pass unchallenged4 ,i propose to you that we should discuss the question of ,god without entangling ourselves in advance in the monistic assumption4 ,is it probable that there is any superhuman consciousness at all1 in the first place8 ,when that is settled1 the further question whether its form be monistic or pluralistic is in order4 ,before advancing to either question1 however1 and ,i shall have to deal with both but very briefly after what has been said already1 let me finish our retrospective survey by one more remark about the curious logical situation of the absolutists4 ,for what have they invoked the absolute except as a being the peculiar inner form of which shall enable it to overcome the contradictions with which intellectualism has found the finite many as such to be infected8 ,the many-in-one character that1 as we have seen1 every smallest tract of finite experience offers1 is considered by intellectualism to be fatal to the reality of finite experience4 ,what can be distinguished1 it tells us1 is separate2 and what is separate is unrelated1 for a relation1 being a 'between1' would bring only a twofold separation4 ,hegel1 ,royce1 ,bradley1 and the ,oxford absolutists in general seem to agree about this logical absurdity of manyness-in-oneness in the only places where it is empirically found4 ,but see the curious tactics6 ,is the absurdity reduced in the absolute being whom they call in to relieve it8 ,quite otherwise1 for that being shows it on an infinitely greater scale1 and flaunts it in its very definition4 ,the fact of its not being related to any outward environment1 the fact that all relations are inside of itself1 doesn't save it1 for ,mr4 ,bradley's great argument against the finite is that in any given bit of it 7a bit of sugar1 for instance7 the presence of a plurality of characters 7whiteness and sweetness1 for example7 is self-contradictory2 so that in the final end all that the absolute's name appears to stand for is the persistent claim of outraged human nature that reality shall not be called absurd4 ,somewhere there must be an aspect of it guiltless of self-contradiction4 ,all we can see of the absolute1 meanwhile1 is guilty in the same way in which the finite is4 ,intellectualism sees what it calls the guilt1 when comminuted in the finite object2 but is too near-sighted to see it in the more enormous object4 ,yet the absolute's constitution1 if imagined at all1 has to be imagined after the analogy of some bit of finite experience4 ,take any real bit1 suppress its environment and then magnify it to monstrosity1 and you get identically the type of structure of the absolute4 ,it is obvious that all your difficulties here remain and go with you4 ,if the relative experience was inwardly absurd1 the absolute experience is infinitely more so4 ,intellectualism1 in short1 strains off the gnat1 but swallows the whole camel4 ,but this polemic against the absolute is as odious to me as it is to you1 so ,i will say no more about that being4 ,it is only one of those wills of the wisp1 those lights that do mislead the morn1 that have so often impeded the clear progress of philosophy1 so ,i will turn to the more general positive question of whether superhuman unities of consciousness should be considered as more probable or more improbable4 ,in a former lecture ,i went over some of the fechnerian reasons for their plausibility1 or reasons that at least replied to our more obvious grounds of doubt concerning them4 ,the numerous facts of divided or split human personality which the genius of certain medical men1 as ,janet1 ,freud1 ,prince1 ,sidis1 and others1 have unearthed were unknown in ,fechner's time1 and neither the phenomena of automatic writing and speech1 nor of mediumship and 'possession' generally1 had been recognized or studied as we now study them1 so ,fechner's stock of analogies is scant compared with our present one4 ,he did the best with what he had1 however4 ,for my own part ,i find in some of these abnormal or supernormal facts the strongest suggestions in favor of a superior co-consciousness being possible4 ,i doubt whether we shall ever understand some of them without using the very letter of ,fechner's conception of a great reservoir in which the memories of earth's inhabitants are pooled and preserved1 and from which1 when the threshold lowers or the valve opens1 information ordinarily shut out leaks into the mind of exceptional individuals among us4 ,but those regions of inquiry are perhaps too spook-haunted to interest an academic audience1 and the only evidence ,i feel it now decorous to bring to the support of ,fechner is drawn from ordinary religious experience4 ,i think it may be asserted that there are religious experiences of a specific nature1 not deducible by analogy or psychological reasoning from our other sorts of experience4 ,i think that they point with reasonable probability to the continuity of our consciousness with a wider spiritual environment from which the ordinary prudential man 7who is the only man that scientific psychology1 so called1 takes cognizance of7 is shut off4 ,i shall begin my final lecture by referring to them again briefly4 ,,lecture ,,viii ,,conclusions ,at the close of my last lecture ,i referred to the existence of religious experiences of a specific nature4 ,i must now explain just what ,i mean by such a claim4 ,briefly1 the facts ,i have in mind may all be described as experiences of an unexpected life succeeding upon death4 ,by this ,i don't mean immortality1 or the death of the body4 ,i mean the deathlike termination of certain mental processes within the individual's experience1 processes that run to failure1 and in some individuals1 at least1 eventuate in despair4 ,just as romantic love seems a comparatively recent literary invention1 so these experiences of a life that supervenes upon despair seem to have played no great part in official theology till ,luther's time2 and possibly the best way to indicate their character will be to point to a certain contrast between the inner life of ourselves and of the ancient ,greeks and ,romans4 ,mr4 ,chesterton1 ,i think1 says somewhere1 that the ,greeks and ,romans1 in all that concerned their moral life1 were an extraordinarily solemn set of folks4 ,the ,athenians thought that the very gods must admire the rectitude of ,phocion and ,aristides2 and those gentlemen themselves were apparently of much the same opinion4 ,cato's veracity was so impeccable that the extremest incredulity a ,roman could express of anything was to say1 ',i would not believe it even if ,cato had told me4' ,good was good1 and bad was bad1 for these people4 ,hypocrisy1 which church-,christianity brought in1 hardly existed2 the naturalistic system held firm2 its values showed no hollowness and brooked no irony4 ,the individual1 if virtuous enough1 could meet all possible requirements4 ,the pagan pride had never crumbled4 ,luther was the first moralist who broke with any effectiveness through the crust of all this naturalistic self-sufficiency1 thinking 7and possibly he was right7 that ,saint ,paul had done it already4 ,religious experience of the lutheran type brings all our naturalistic standards to bankruptcy4 ,you are strong only by being weak1 it shows4 ,you cannot live on pride or self-sufficingness4 ,there is a light in which all the naturally founded and currently accepted distinctions1 excellences1 and safeguards of our characters appear as utter childishness4 ,sincerely to give up one's conceit or hope of being good in one's own right is the only door to the universe's deeper reaches4 ,these deeper reaches are familiar to evangelical ,christianity and to what is nowadays becoming known as 'mind-cure' religion or 'new thought4' ,the phenomenon is that of new ranges of life succeeding on our most despairing moments4 ,there are resources in us that naturalism with its literal and legal virtues never recks of1 possibilities that take our breath away1 of another kind of happiness and power1 based on giving up our own will and letting something higher work for us1 and these seem to show a world wider than either physics or philistine ethics can imagine4 ,here is a world in which all is well1 in spite of certain forms of death1 indeed because of certain forms of death--death of hope1 death of strength1 death of responsibility1 of fear and worry1 competency and desert1 death of everything that paganism1 naturalism1 and legalism pin their faith on and tie their trust to4 ,reason1 operating on our other experiences1 even our psychological experiences1 would never have inferred these specifically religious experiences in advance of their actual coming4 ,she could not suspect their existence1 for they are discontinuous with the 'natural' experiences they succeed upon and invert their values4 ,but as they actually come and are given1 creation widens to the view of their recipients4 ,they suggest that our natural experience1 our strictly moralistic and prudential experience1 may be only a fragment of real human experience4 ,they soften nature's outlines and open out the strangest possibilities and perspectives4 ,this is why it seems to me that the logical understanding1 working in abstraction from such specifically religious experiences1 will always omit something1 and fail to reach completely adequate conclusions4 ,death and failure1 it will always say1 are death and failure simply1 and can nevermore be one with life2 so religious experience1 peculiarly so called1 needs1 in my opinion1 to be carefully considered and interpreted by every one who aspires to reason out a more complete philosophy4 ,the sort of belief that religious experience of this type naturally engenders in those who have it is fully in accord with ,fechner's theories4 ,to quote words which ,i have used elsewhere1 the believer finds that the tenderer parts of his personal life are continuous with a more of the same quality which is operative in the universe outside of him and which he can keep in working touch with1 and in a fashion get on board of and save himself1 when all his lower being has gone to pieces in the wreck4 ,in a word1 the believer is continuous1 to his own consciousness1 at any rate1 with a wider self from which saving experiences flow in4 ,those who have such experiences distinctly enough and often enough to live in the light of them remain quite unmoved by criticism1 from whatever quarter it may come1 be it academic or scientific1 or be it merely the voice of logical common sense4 ,they have had their vision and they know--that is enough--that we inhabit an invisible spiritual environment from which help comes1 our soul being mysteriously one with a larger soul whose instruments we are4 ,one may therefore plead1 ,i think1 that ,fechner's ideas are not without direct empirical verification4 ,there is at any rate one side of life which would be easily explicable if those ideas were true1 but of which there appears no clear explanation so long as we assume either with naturalism that human consciousness is the highest consciousness there is1 or with dualistic theism that there is a higher mind in the cosmos1 but that it is discontinuous with our own4 ,it has always been a matter of surprise with me that philosophers of the absolute should have shown so little interest in this department of life1 and so seldom put its phenomena in evidence1 even when it seemed obvious that personal experience of some kind must have made their confidence in their own vision so strong4 ,the logician's bias has always been too much with them4 ,they have preferred the thinner to the thicker method1 dialectical abstraction being so much more dignified and academic than the confused and unwholesome facts of personal biography4 ,in spite of rationalism's disdain for the particular1 the personal1 and the unwholesome1 the drift of all the evidence we have seems to me to sweep us very strongly towards the belief in some form of superhuman life with which we may1 unknown to ourselves1 be co-conscious4 ,we may be in the universe as dogs and cats are in our libraries1 seeing the books and hearing the conversation1 but having no inkling of the meaning of it all4 ,the intellectualist objections to this fall away when the authority of intellectualist logic is undermined by criticism1 and then the positive empirical evidence remains4 ,the analogies with ordinary psychology and with the facts of pathology1 with those of psychical research1 so called1 and with those of religious experience1 establish1 when taken together1 a decidedly formidable probability in favor of a general view of the world almost identical with ,fechner's4 ,the outlines of the superhuman consciousness thus made probable must remain1 however1 very vague1 and the number of functionally distinct 'selves' it comports and carries has to be left entirely problematic4 ,it may be polytheistically or it may be monotheistically conceived of4 ,fechner1 with his distinct earth-soul functioning as our guardian angel1 seems to me clearly polytheistic2 but the word 'polytheism' usually gives offence1 so perhaps it is better not to use it4 ,only one thing is certain1 and that is the result of our criticism of the absolute3 the only way to escape from the paradoxes and perplexities that a consistently thought-out monistic universe suffers from as from a species of auto-intoxication--the mystery of the 'fall' namely1 of reality lapsing into appearance1 truth into error1 perfection into imperfection2 of evil1 in short2 the mystery of universal determinism1 of the block-universe eternal and without a history1 etc42--the only way of escape1 ,i say1 from all this is to be frankly pluralistic and assume that the superhuman consciousness1 however vast it may be1 has itself an external environment1 and consequently is finite4 ,present day monism carefully repudiates complicity with spinozistic monism4 ,in that1 it explains1 the many get dissolved in the one and lost1 whereas in the improved idealistic form they get preserved in all their manyness as the one's eternal object4 ,the absolute itself is thus represented by absolutists as having a pluralistic object4 ,but if even the absolute has to have a pluralistic vision1 why should we ourselves hesitate to be pluralists on our own sole account8 ,why should we envelop our many with the 'one' that brings so much poison in its train8 ,the line of least resistance1 then1 as it seems to me1 both in theology and in philosophy1 is to accept1 along with the superhuman consciousness1 the notion that it is not all-embracing1 the notion1 in other words1 that there is a ,god1 but that he is finite1 either in power or in knowledge1 or in both at once4 ,these1 ,i need hardly tell you1 are the terms in which common men have usually carried on their active commerce with ,god2 and the monistic perfections that make the notion of him so paradoxical practically and morally are the colder addition of remote professorial minds operating in distans upon conceptual substitutes for him alone4 ,why cannot 'experience' and 'reason' meet on this common ground8 ,why cannot they compromise8 ,may not the godlessness usually but needlessly associated with the philosophy of immediate experience give way to a theism now seen to follow directly from that experience more widely taken8 and may not rationalism1 satisfied with seeing her a priori proofs of ,god so effectively replaced by empirical evidence1 abate something of her absolutist claims8 ,let ,god but have the least infinitesimal other of any kind beside him1 and empiricism and rationalism might strike hands in a lasting treaty of peace4 ,both might then leave abstract thinness behind them1 and seek together1 as scientific men seek1 by using all the analogies and data within reach1 to build up the most probable approximate idea of what the divine consciousness concretely may be like4 ,i venture to beg the younger ,oxford idealists to consider seriously this alternative4 ,few men are as qualified by their intellectual gifts to reap the harvests that seem certain to any one who1 like ,fechner and ,bergson1 will leave the thinner for the thicker path4 ,compromise and mediation are inseparable from the pluralistic philosophy4 ,only monistic dogmatism can say of any of its hypotheses1 ',it is either that or nothing2 take it or leave it just as it stands4' ,the type of monism prevalent at ,oxford has kept this steep and brittle attitude1 partly through the proverbial academic preference for thin and elegant logical solutions1 partly from a mistaken notion that the only solidly grounded basis for religion was along those lines4 ,if ,oxford men could be ignorant of anything1 it might almost seem that they had remained ignorant of the great empirical movement towards a pluralistic panpsychic view of the universe1 into which our own generation has been drawn1 and which threatens to short-circuit their methods entirely and become their religious rival unless they are willing to make themselves its allies4 ,yet1 wedded as they seem to be to the logical machinery and technical apparatus of absolutism1 ,i cannot but believe that their fidelity to the religious ideal in general is deeper still4 ,especially do ,i find it hard to believe that the more clerical adherents of the school would hold so fast to its particular machinery if only they could be made to think that religion could be secured in some other way4 ,let empiricism once become associated with religion1 as hitherto1 through some strange misunderstanding1 it has been associated with irreligion1 and ,i believe that a new era of religion as well as of philosophy will be ready to begin4 ,that great awakening of a new popular interest in philosophy1 which is so striking a phenomenon at the present day in all countries1 is undoubtedly due in part to religious demands4 ,as the authority of past tradition tends more and more to crumble1 men naturally turn a wistful ear to the authority of reason or to the evidence of present fact4 ,they will assuredly not be disappointed if they open their minds to what the thicker and more radical empiricism has to say4 ,i fully believe that such an empiricism is a more natural ally than dialectics ever were1 or can be1 of the religious life4 ,it is true that superstitions and wild-growing over-beliefs of all sorts will undoubtedly begin to abound if the notion of higher consciousnesses enveloping ours1 of fechnerian earth-souls and the like1 grows orthodox and fashionable2 still more will they superabound if science ever puts her approving stamp on the phenomena of which ,frederic ,myers so earnestly advocated the scientific recognition1 the phenomena of psychic research so-called--and ,i myself firmly believe that most of these phenomena are rooted in reality4 ,but ought one seriously to allow such a timid consideration as that to deter one from following the evident path of greatest religious promise8 ,since when1 in this mixed world1 was any good thing given us in purest outline and isolation8 ,one of the chief characteristics of life is life's redundancy4 ,the sole condition of our having anything1 no matter what1 is that we should have so much of it1 that we are fortunate if we do not grow sick of the sight and sound of it altogether4 ,everything is smothered in the litter that is fated to accompany it4 ,without too much you cannot have enough1 of anything4 ,lots of inferior books1 lots of bad statues1 lots of dull speeches1 of tenth-rate men and women1 as a condition of the few precious specimens in either kind being realized6 ,the gold-dust comes to birth with the quartz-sand all around it1 and this is as much a condition of religion as of any other excellent possession4 ,there must be extrication2 there must be competition for survival2 but the clay matrix and the noble gem must first come into being unsifted4 ,once extricated1 the gem can be examined separately1 conceptualized1 defined1 and insulated4 ,but this process of extrication cannot be short-circuited--or if it is1 you get the thin inferior abstractions which we have seen1 either the hollow unreal god of scholastic theology1 or the unintelligible pantheistic monster1 instead of the more living divine reality with which it appears certain that empirical methods tend to connect men in imagination4 ,arrived at this point1 ,i ask you to go back to my first lecture and remember1 if you can1 what ,i quoted there from your own ,professor ,jacks--what he said about the philosopher himself being taken up into the universe which he is accounting for4 ,this is the fechnerian as well as the hegelian view1 and thus our end rejoins harmoniously our beginning4 ,philosophies are intimate parts of the universe1 they express something of its own thought of itself4 ,a philosophy may indeed be a most momentous reaction of the universe upon itself4 ,it may1 as ,i said1 possess and handle itself differently in consequence of us philosophers1 with our theories1 being here2 it may trust itself or mistrust itself the more1 and1 by doing the one or the other1 deserve more the trust or the mistrust4 ,what mistrusts itself deserves mistrust4 ,this is the philosophy of humanism in the widest sense4 ,our philosophies swell the current of being1 add their character to it4 ,they are part of all that we have met1 of all that makes us be4 ,as a ,french philosopher says1 ',nous sommes du rel dans le rel4' ,our thoughts determine our acts1 and our acts redetermine the previous nature of the world4 ,thus does foreignness get banished from our world1 and far more so when we take the system of it pluralistically than when we take it monistically4 ,we are indeed internal parts of ,god and not external creations1 on any possible reading of the panpsychic system4 ,yet because ,god is not the absolute1 but is himself a part when the system is conceived pluralistically1 his functions can be taken as not wholly dissimilar to those of the other smaller parts1--as similar to our functions consequently4 ,having an environment1 being in time1 and working out a history just like ourselves1 he escapes from the foreignness from all that is human1 of the static timeless perfect absolute4 ,remember that one of our troubles with that was its essential foreignness and monstrosity--there really is no other word for it than that4 ,its having the all-inclusive form gave to it an essentially heterogeneous nature from ourselves4 ,and this great difference between absolutism and pluralism demands no difference in the universe's material content--it follows from a difference in the form alone4 ,the all-form or monistic form makes the foreignness result1 the each-form or pluralistic form leaves the intimacy undisturbed4 ,no matter what the content of the universe may be1 if you only allow that it is many everywhere and always1 that nothing real escapes from having an environment2 so far from defeating its rationality1 as the absolutists so unanimously pretend1 you leave it in possession of the maximum amount of rationality practically attainable by our minds4 ,your relations with it1 intellectual1 emotional1 and active1 remain fluent and congruous with your own nature's chief demands4 ,it would be a pity if the word 'rationality' were allowed to give us trouble here4 ,it is one of those eulogistic words that both sides claim--for almost no one is willing to advertise his philosophy as a system of irrationality4 ,but like most of the words which people used eulogistically1 the word 'rational' carries too many meanings4 ,the most objective one is that of the older logic--the connexion between two things is rational when you can infer one from the other1 mortal from ,socrates1 e4g42 and you can do that only when they have a quality in common4 ,but this kind of rationality is just that logic of identity which all disciples of ,hegel find insufficient4 ,they supersede it by the higher rationality of negation and contradiction and make the notion vague again4 ,then you get the aesthetic or teleologic kinds of rationality1 saying that whatever fits in any way1 whatever is beautiful or good1 whatever is purposive or gratifies desire1 is rational in so far forth4 ,then again1 according to ,hegel1 whatever is 'real' is rational4 ,i myself said awhile ago that whatever lets loose any action which we are fond of exerting seems rational4 ,it would be better to give up the word 'rational' altogether than to get into a merely verbal fight about who has the best right to keep it4 ,perhaps the words 'foreignness' and 'intimacy1' which ,i put forward in my first lecture1 express the contrast ,i insist on better than the words 'rationality' and 'irrationality'--let us stick to them1 then4 ,i now say that the notion of the 'one' breeds foreignness and that of the 'many' intimacy1 for reasons which ,i have urged at only too great length1 and with which1 whether they convince you or not1 ,i may suppose that you are now well acquainted4 ,but what at bottom is meant by calling the universe many or by calling it one8 ,pragmatically interpreted1 pluralism or the doctrine that it is many means only that the sundry parts of reality may be externally related4 ,everything you can think of1 however vast or inclusive1 has on the pluralistic view a genuinely 'external' environment of some sort or amount4 ,things are 'with' one another in many ways1 but nothing includes everything1 or dominates over everything4 ,the word 'and' trails along after every sentence4 ,something always escapes4 ',ever not quite' has to be said of the best attempts made anywhere in the universe at attaining all-inclusiveness4 ,the pluralistic world is thus more like a federal republic than like an empire or a kingdom4 ,however much may be collected1 however much may report itself as present at any effective centre of consciousness or action1 something else is self-governed and absent and unreduced to unity4 ,monism1 on the other hand1 insists that when you come down to reality as such1 to the reality of realities1 everything is present to everything else in one vast instantaneous co-implicated completeness--nothing can in any sense1 functional or substantial1 be really absent from anything else1 all things interpenetrate and telescope together in the great total conflux4 ,for pluralism1 all that we are required to admit as the constitution of reality is what we ourselves find empirically realized in every minimum of finite life4 ,briefly it is this1 that nothing real is absolutely simple1 that every smallest bit of experience is a multum in parvo plurally related1 that each relation is one aspect1 character1 or function1 way of its being taken1 or way of its taking something else2 and that a bit of reality when actively engaged in one of these relations is not by that very fact engaged in all the other relations simultaneously4 ,the relations are not all what the ,french call solidaires with one another4 ,without losing its identity a thing can either take up or drop another thing1 like the log ,i spoke of1 which by taking up new carriers and dropping old ones can travel anywhere with a light escort4 ,for monism1 on the contrary1 everything1 whether we realize it or not1 drags the whole universe along with itself and drops nothing4 ,the log starts and arrives with all its carriers supporting it4 ,if a thing were once disconnected1 it could never be connected again1 according to monism4 ,the pragmatic difference between the two systems is thus a definite one4 ,it is just thus1 that if a is once out of sight of b or out of touch with it1 or1 more briefly1 'out' of it at all1 then1 according to monism1 it must always remain so1 they can never get together2 whereas pluralism admits that on another occasion they may work together1 or in some way be connected again4 ,monism allows for no such things as 'other occasions' in reality--in real or absolute reality1 that is4 ,the difference ,i try to describe amounts1 you see1 to nothing more than the difference between what ,i formerly called the each-form and the all-form of reality4 ,pluralism lets things really exist in the each-form or distributively4 ,monism thinks that the all-form or collective-unit form is the only form that is rational4 ,the all-form allows of no taking up and dropping of connexions1 for in the all the parts are essentially and eternally co-implicated4 ,in the each-form1 on the contrary1 a thing may be connected by intermediary things1 with a thing with which it has no immediate or essential connexion4 ,it is thus at all times in many possible connexions which are not necessarily actualized at the moment4 ,they depend on which actual path of intermediation it may functionally strike into3 the word 'or' names a genuine reality4 ,thus1 as ,i speak here1 ,i may look ahead or to the right or to the left1 and in either case the intervening space and air and ether enable me to see the faces of a different portion of this audience4 ,my being here is independent of any one set of these faces4 ,if the each-form be the eternal form of reality no less than it is the form of temporal appearance1 we still have a coherent world1 and not an incarnate incoherence1 as is charged by so many absolutists4 ,our 'multiverse' still makes a 'universe'2 for every part1 tho it may not be in actual or immediate connexion1 is nevertheless in some possible or mediated connexion1 with every other part however remote1 through the fact that each part hangs together with its very next neighbors in inextricable interfusion4 ,the type of union1 it is true1 is different here from the monistic type of all-einheit4 ,it is not a universal co-implication1 or integration of all things durcheinander4 ,it is what ,i call the strung-along type1 the type of continuity1 contiguity1 or concatenation4 ,if you prefer greek words1 you may call it the synechistic type4 ,at all events1 you see that it forms a definitely conceivable alternative to the through-and-through unity of all things at once1 which is the type opposed to it by monism4 ,you see also that it stands or falls with the notion ,i have taken such pains to defend1 of the through-and-through union of adjacent minima of experience1 of the confluence of every passing moment of concretely felt experience with its immediately next neighbors4 ,the recognition of this fact of coalescence of next with next in concrete experience1 so that all the insulating cuts we make there are artificial products of the conceptualizing faculty1 is what distinguishes the empiricism which ,i call 'radical1' from the bugaboo empiricism of the traditional rationalist critics1 which 7rightly or wrongly7 is accused of chopping up experience into atomistic sensations1 incapable of union with one another until a purely intellectual principle has swooped down upon them from on high and folded them in its own conjunctive categories4 ,here1 then1 you have the plain alternative1 and the full mystery of the difference between pluralism and monism1 as clearly as ,i can set it forth on this occasion4 ,it packs up into a nutshell3--,is the manyness in oneness that indubitably characterizes the world we inhabit1 a property only of the absolute whole of things1 so that you must postulate that one-enormous-whole indivisibly as the prius of there being any many at all--in other words1 start with the rationalistic block-universe1 entire1 unmitigated1 and complete8--or can the finite elements have their own aboriginal forms of manyness in oneness1 and where they have no immediate oneness still be continued into one another by intermediary terms--each one of these terms being one with its next neighbors1 and yet the total 'oneness' never getting absolutely complete8 ,the alternative is definite4 ,it seems to me1 moreover1 that the two horns of it make pragmatically different ethical appeals--at least they may do so1 to certain individuals4 ,but if you consider the pluralistic horn to be intrinsically irrational1 self-contradictory1 and absurd1 ,i can now say no more in its defence4 ,having done what ,i could in my earlier lectures to break the edge of the intellectualistic reductiones ad absurdum1 ,i must leave the issue in your hands4 ,whatever ,i may say1 each of you will be sure to take pluralism or leave it1 just as your own sense of rationality moves and inclines4 ,the only thing ,i emphatically insist upon is that it is a fully co-ordinate hypothesis with monism4 ,this world may1 in the last resort1 be a block-universe2 but on the other hand it may be a universe only strung-along1 not rounded in and closed4 ,reality may exist distributively just as it sensibly seems to1 after all4 ,on that possibility ,i do insist4 ,one's general vision of the probable usually decides such alternatives4 ,they illustrate what ,i once wrote of as the 'will to believe4' ,in some of my lectures at ,harvard ,i have spoken of what ,i call the 'faith-ladder1' as something quite different from the sorites of the logic-books1 yet seeming to have an analogous form4 ,i think you will quickly recognize in yourselves1 as ,i describe it1 the mental process to which ,i give this name4 ,a conception of the world arises in you somehow1 no matter how4 ,is it true or not8 you ask4 ,it might be true somewhere1 you say1 for it is not self-contradictory4 ,it may be true1 you continue1 even here and now4 ,it is fit to be true1 it would be well if it were true1 it ought to be true1 you presently feel4 ,it must be true1 something persuasive in you whispers next2 and then--as a final result-- ,it shall be held for true1 you decide2 it shall be as if true1 for you4 ,and your acting thus may in certain special cases be a means of making it securely true in the end4 ,not one step in this process is logical1 yet it is the way in which monists and pluralists alike espouse and hold fast to their visions4 ,it is life exceeding logic1 it is the practical reason for which the theoretic reason finds arguments after the conclusion is once there4 ,in just this way do some of us hold to the unfinished pluralistic universe2 in just this way do others hold to the timeless universe eternally complete4 ,meanwhile the incompleteness of the pluralistic universe1 thus assumed and held to as the most probable hypothesis1 is also represented by the pluralistic philosophy as being self-reparative through us1 as getting its disconnections remedied in part by our behavior4 ',we use what we are and have1 to know2 and what we know1 to be and have still more4'#a ,thus do philosophy and reality1 theory and action1 work in the same circle indefinitely4 ,i have now finished these poor lectures1 and as you look back on them1 they doubtless seem rambling and inconclusive enough4 ,my only hope is that they may possibly have proved suggestive2 and if indeed they have been suggestive of one point of method1 ,i am almost willing to let all other suggestions go4 ,that point is that it is high time for the basis of discussion in these questions to be broadened and thickened up4 ,it is for that that ,i have brought in ,fechner and ,bergson1 and descriptive psychology and religious experiences1 and have ventured even to hint at psychical research and other wild beasts of the philosophic desert4 ,owing possibly to the fact that ,plato and ,aristotle1 with their intellectualism1 are the basis of philosophic study here1 the ,oxford brand of transcendentalism seems to me to have confined itself too exclusively to thin logical considerations1 that would hold good in all conceivable worlds1 worlds of an empirical constitution entirely different from ours4 ,it is as if the actual peculiarities of the world that is were entirely irrelevant to the content of truth4 ,but they cannot be irrelevant2 and the philosophy of the future must imitate the sciences in taking them more and more elaborately into account4 ,i urge some of the younger members of this learned audience to lay this hint to heart4 ,if you can do so effectively1 making still more concrete advances upon the path which ,fechner and ,bergson have so enticingly opened up1 if you can gather philosophic conclusions of any kind1 monistic or pluralistic1 from the particulars of life1 ,i will say1 as ,i now do say1 with the cheerfullest of hearts1 ',ring out1 ring out my mournful rhymes1 but ring the fuller minstrel in4' ,,notes ,,lecture ,i ,note #a1 page #e4--;,bailey3 op4 cit41 ,first ,series1 p4 #eb4 ,note #b1 page #aa4--,smaller ,logic1 #aid4 ,note #c1 page #af4--;,exploratio philosophica1 ,part ,i1 #ahfe1 pp4 xxxviii1 #acj4 ,note #d1 page #bj4--;,hinneberg3 ,die ,kultur der ,gegenwart3 ,systematische ,philosophie4 ,leipzig3 ,teubner1 #aijg4 ,,lecture ,,ii ,note #a1 page #ej4--,the difference is that the bad parts of this finite are eternal and essential for absolutists1 whereas pluralists may hope that they will eventually get sloughed off and become as if they had not been4 ,note #b1 page #ea4--,quoted by ,w4 ,wallace3 ,lectures and ,essays1 ,oxford1 #ahih1 p4 #efj4 ,note #c1 page #ea4--,logic1 tr4 ,wallace1 #ahgd1 p4 #aha4 ,note #d1 page #eb4--;,ibid41 p4 #cjd4 ,note #e1 page #ec4--;,contemporary ,review1 ,december1 #aijg1 vol4 #ib1 p4 #fah4 ,note #f1 page #eg4--,metaphysic1 sec4 #fi ff4 ,note #g1 page #fb4--,the ,world and the ,individual1 vol4 i1 pp4 #aca-acb4 ,note #h1 page #fg4--;,a good illustration of this is to be found in a controversy between ,mr4 ,bradley and the present writer1 in ,mind for #ahic1 ,mr4 ,bradley contending 7if ,i understood him rightly7 that 'resemblance' is an illegitimate category1 because it admits of degrees1 and that the only real relations in comparison are absolute identity and absolute non-comparability4 ,note #i1 page #ge4--,studies in the ,hegelian ,dialectic1 p4 #ahd4 ,note #aj1 page #ge4--;,appearance and ,reality1 #ahic1 pp4 #ada-adb4 ,note #aa1 page #gf4--;,cf4 ,elements of ,metaphysics1 p4 #hh4 ,note #ab1 page #gg4--,some ,dogmas of ,religion1 p4 #ahd4 ,note #ac1 page #hj4--;,for a more detailed criticism of ,mr4 ,bradley's intellectualism1 see ,appendix ,a4 ,,lecture ,,iii ,note #a1 page #id4--;,hegel1 ,smaller ,logic1 pp4 #ahd-ahe4 ,note #b1 page #ie4--;,cf4 ,hegel's fine vindication of this function of contradiction in his ,wissenschaft der ,logik1 ,bk4 ii1 sec4 #a1 chap1 ii1 ,c1 ,anmerkung #c4 ,note #c1 page #ie--;,hegel1 in ,blackwood's ,philosophical ,classics1 p4 #afb4 ,note #d1 page #ie--,wissenschaft der ,logik1 ,bk4 i1 sec4 #a1 chap1 ii1 ,b1 a4 ,note #e1 page #if--,wallace's translation of the ,smaller ,logic1 p4 #abh4 ,note #f1 page #aja--;,joachim1 ,the ,nature of ,truth1 ,oxford1 #aijf1 pp4 #bb1 #agh4 ,the argument in case the belief should be doubted would be the higher synthetic idea3 if two truths were possible1 the duality of that possibility would itself be the one truth that would unite them4 ,note #g1 page #aae4--,the ,world and the ,individual1 vol4 ii1 pp4 #che1 #chf1 #dji4 ,note #h1 page #aaf4--,the best uninspired argument 7again not ironical67 which ,i know is that in ,miss ,m4,w4 ,calkins's excellent book1 ,the ,persistent ,problems of ,philosophy1 ,macmillan1 #aijb4 ,note #i1 page #aag4--;,cf4 ,dr4 ,fuller's excellent article1' ,ethical monism and the problem of evil1' in the ,harvard ,journal of ,theology1 vol4 i1 ,no4 #b1 ,april1 #aijh4 ,note #aj1 page #abj4--,metaphysic1 sec4 #gi4 ,note #aa1 page #aba4--,studies in the ,hegelian ,dialectic1 secs4 #aej1 #aec4 ,note #ab1 page #aba4--,the ,nature of ,truth1 #aijf1 pp4 #agj-aga4 ,note #ac1 page #aba4--;,ibid41 p4 #agi4 ,note #ad1 page #abc4--,the psychological analogy that certain finite tracts of consciousness are composed of isolable parts added together1 cannot be used by absolutists as proof that such parts are essential elements of all consciousness4 ,other finite fields of consciousness seem in point of fact not to be similarly resolvable into isolable parts4 ,note #ae1 page #abh4--;,judging by the analogy of the relation which our central consciousness seems to bear to that of our spinal cord1 lower ganglia1 etc41 it would seem natural to suppose that in whatever superhuman mental synthesis there may be1 the neglect and elimination of certain contents of which we are conscious on the human level might be as characteristic a feature as is the combination and interweaving of other human contents4 ,,lecture ,,iv ,note #a1 page #adc4--,the ,spirit of ,modern ,philosophy1 p4 #bbg4 ,note #b1 page #afe4--;,fechner3 ber die ,seelenfrage1 #ahfa1 p4 #agj4 ,note #c1 page #afh4--;,fechner's latest summarizing of his views1 ,die ,tagesansicht gegenber der ,nachtansicht1 ,leipzig1 #ahgi1 is now1 ,i understand1 in process of translation4 ,his ,little ,book of ,life after ,death exists already in two ,american versions1 one published by ,little1 ,brown ,co41 ,boston1 the other by the ,open ,court ,co41 ,chicago4 ,note #d1 page #agf4--,mr4 ,bradley ought to be to some degree exempted from my attack in these last pages4 ,compare especially what he says of non-human consciousness in his ,appearance and ,reality1 pp4 #bfi-bgb4 ,,lecture ,v ,note #a1 page #ahb4--,royce3 ,the ,spirit of ,modern ,philosophy1 p4 #cgi4 ,note #b1 page #ahd4--,the ,world and the ,individual1 vol4 ii1 pp4 #eh-fb4 ,note #c1 page #aij4--;,i hold to it still as the best description of an enormous number of our higher fields of consciousness4 ,they demonstrably do not contain the lower states that know the same objects4 ,of other fields1 however this is not so true2 so1 in the ,psychological ,review for #ahie1 vol4 ii1 p4 #aje 7see especially pp4 #aai-abj71 ,i frankly withdrew1 in principle1 my former objection to talking of fields of consciousness being made of simpler 'parts1' leaving the facts to decide the question in each special case4 ,note #d1 page #aid4--;,i abstract from the consciousness attached to the whole itself1 if such consciousness be there4 ,,lecture ,,vi ,note #a1 page #bej4--;,for a more explicit vindication of the notion of activity1 see ,appendix ,b1 where ,i try to defend its recognition as a definite form of immediate experience against its rationalistic critics4 ,i subjoin here a few remarks destined to disarm some possible critics of ,professor ,bergson1 who1 to defend himself against misunderstandings of his meaning1 ought to amplify and more fully explain his statement that concepts have a practical but not a theoretical use4 ,understood in one way1 the thesis sounds indefensible1 for by concepts we certainly increase our knowledge about things1 and that seems a theoretical achievement1 whatever practical achievements may follow in its train4 ,indeed1 ,m4 ,bergson might seem to be easily refutable out of his own mouth4 ,his philosophy pretends1 if anything1 to give a better insight into truth than rationalistic philosophies give3 yet what is it in itself if not a conceptual system8 ,does its author not reason by concepts exclusively in his very attempt to show that they can give no insight8 ,to this particular objection1 at any rate1 it is easy to reply4 ,in using concepts of his own to discredit the theoretic claims of concepts generally1 ,bergson does not contradict1 but on the contrary emphatically illustrates his own view of their practical role1 for they serve in his hands only to 'orient' us1 to show us to what quarter we must practically turn if we wish to gain that completer insight into reality which he denies that they can give4 ,he directs our hopes away from them and towards the despised sensible flux4 ,what he reaches by their means is thus only a new practical attitude4 ,he but restores1 against the vetoes of intellectualist philosophy1 our naturally cordial relations with sensible experience and common sense4 ,this service is surely only practical2 but it is a service for which we may be almost immeasurably grateful4 ,to trust our senses again with a good philosophic conscience6--who ever conferred on us so valuable a freedom before8 ,by making certain distinctions and additions it seems easy to meet the other counts of the indictment4 ,concepts are realities of a new order1 with particular relations between them4 ,these relations are just as much directly perceived1 when we compare our various concepts1 as the distance between two sense-objects is perceived when we look at it4 ,conception is an operation which gives us material for new acts of perception1 then2 and when the results of these are written down1 we get those bodies of 'mental truth' 7as ,locke called it7 known as mathematics1 logic1 and a priori metaphysics4 ,to know all this truth is a theoretic achievement1 indeed1 but it is a narrow one2 for the relations between conceptual objects as such are only the static ones of bare comparison1 as difference or sameness1 congruity or contradiction1 inclusion or exclusion4 ,nothing happens in the realm of concepts2 relations there are 'eternal' only4 ,the theoretic gain fails so far1 therefore1 to touch even the outer hem of the real world1 the world of causal and dynamic relations1 of activity and history4 ,to gain insight into all that moving life1 ,bergson is right in turning us away from conception and towards perception4 ,by combining concepts with percepts1 we can draw maps of the distribution of other percepts in distant space and time4 ,to know this distribution is of course a theoretic achievement1 but the achievement is extremely limited1 it cannot be effected without percepts1 and even then what it yields is only static relations4 ,from maps we learn positions only1 and the position of a thing is but the slightest kind of truth about it2 but1 being indispensable for forming our plans of action1 the conceptual map-making has the enormous practical importance on which ,bergson so rightly insists4 ,but concepts1 it will be said1 do not only give us eternal truths of comparison and maps of the positions of things1 they bring new values into life4 ,in their mapping function they stand to perception in general in the same relation in which sight and hearing stand to touch--,spencer calls these higher senses only organs of anticipatory touch4 ,but our eyes and ears also open to us worlds of independent glory3 music and decorative art result1 and an incredible enhancement of life's value follows4 ,even so does the conceptual world bring new ranges of value and of motivation to our life4 ,its maps not only serve us practically1 but the mere mental possession of such vast pictures is of itself an inspiring good4 ,new interests and incitements1 and feelings of power1 sublimity1 and admiration are aroused4 ,abstractness per se seems to have a touch of ideality4 ,,royce',s 'loyalty to loyalty' is an excellent example4 ',causes1' as anti-slavery1 democracy1 liberty1 etc41 dwindle when realized in their sordid particulars4 ,the veritable 'cash-value' of the idea seems to cleave to it only in the abstract status4 ,truth at large1 as ,,royce contends1 in his ,philosophy of ,loyalty1 appears another thing altogether from the true particulars in which it is best to believe4 ,it transcends in value all those 'expediencies1' and is something to live for1 whether expedient or inexpedient4 ,truth with a big ,t is a 'momentous issue'2 truths in detail are 'poor scraps1' mere 'crumbling successes4' 7,op4 cit41 ,lecture ,,vii1 especially v47 ,is1 now1 such bringing into existence of a new value to be regarded as a theoretic achievement8 ,the question is a nice one1 for altho a value is in one sense an objective quality perceived1 the essence of that quality is its relation to the will1 and consists in its being a dynamogenic spur that makes our action different4 ,so far as their value-creating function goes1 it would thus appear that concepts connect themselves more with our active than with our theoretic life1 so here again ,bergson's formulation seems unobjectionable4 ,persons who have certain concepts are animated otherwise1 pursue their own vital careers differently4 ,it doesn't necessarily follow that they understand other vital careers more intimately4 ,again it may be said that we combine old concepts into new ones1 conceiving thus such realities as the ether1 ,god1 souls1 or what not1 of which our sensible life alone would leave us altogether ignorant4 ,this surely is an increase of our knowledge1 and may well be called a theoretical achievement4 ,yet here again ,bergson's criticisms hold good4 ,much as conception may tell us about such invisible objects1 it sheds no ray of light into their interior4 ,the completer1 indeed1 our definitions of ether-waves1 atoms1 ,gods1 or souls become1 the less instead of the more intelligible do they appear to us4 ,the learned in such things are consequently beginning more and more to ascribe a solely instrumental value to our concepts of them4 ,ether and molecules may be like co-ordinates and averages1 only so many crutches by the help of which we practically perform the operation of getting about among our sensible experiences4 ,we see from these considerations how easily the question of whether the function of concepts is theoretical or practical may grow into a logomachy4 ,it may be better from this point of view to refuse to recognize the alternative as a sharp one4 ,the sole thing that is certain in the midst of it all is that ,bergson is absolutely right in contending that the whole life of activity and change is inwardly impenetrable to conceptual treatment1 and that it opens itself only to sympathetic apprehension at the hands of immediate feeling4 ,all the whats as well as the thats of reality1 relational as well as terminal1 are in the end contents of immediate concrete perception4 ,yet the remoter unperceived arrangements1 temporal1 spatial1 and logical1 of these contents1 are also something that we need to know as well for the pleasure of the knowing as for the practical help4 ,we may call this need of arrangement a theoretic need or a practical need1 according as we choose to lay the emphasis2 but ,bergson is accurately right when he limits conceptual knowledge to arrangement1 and when he insists that arrangement is the mere skirt and skin of the whole of what we ought to know4 ,note #b1 page #bff4--;,gaston ,rageot1 ,revue ,philosophique1 vol4 lxiv1 p4 #he 7,july1 #aijg74 ,note #c1 page #bfh4--;,i have myself talked in other ways as plausibly as ,i could1 in my ,psychology1 and talked truly 7as ,i believe7 in certain selected cases2 but for other cases the natural way invincibly comes back4 ,,lecture ,,vii ,note #a1 page #bgh4--;,introduction to ,hume1 #ahgd1 p4 #aea4 ,note #b1 page #bgi4--;,ibid41 pp4 #af1 #ba1 #cf1 et passim4 ,note #c1 page #bgi4--,see1 inter alia1 the chapter on the ',stream of ,thought' in my own ,psychologies2 ,h4 ,cornelius1 ,psychologie1 #ahig1 chaps1 i and iii2 ,g4,h4 ,luquet1 ,ides ,gnrales de ,psychologie1 #aijf1 passim4 ,note #d1 page #bhj4--;,compare1 as to all this1 an article by the present writer1 entitled ',a world of pure experience1' in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 ,new ,york1 vol4 i1 pp4 #ecc1 #efa 7#aije74 ,note #e1 page #bhj4--;,green's attempt to discredit sensations by reminding us of their 'dumbness1' in that they do not come already named1 as concepts may be said to do1 only shows how intellectualism is dominated by verbality4 ,the unnamed appears in ,green as synonymous with the unreal4 ,note #f1 page #bhc4--,philosophy of ,reflection1 i1 #bdh ff4 ,note #g1 page #bhd4--,most of this paragraph is extracted from an address of mine before the ,american ,psychological ,association1 printed in the ,psychological ,review1 vol4 ii1 p4 #aje4 ,i take pleasure in the fact that already in #ahie ,i was so far advanced towards my present bergsonian position4 ,note #h1 page #bhi4--,the conscious self of the moment1 the central self1 is probably determined to this privileged position by its functional connexion with the body's imminent or present acts4 ,it is the present acting self4 ,tho the more that surrounds it may be 'subconscious' to us1 yet if in its 'collective capacity' it also exerts an active function1 it may be conscious in a wider way1 conscious1 as it were1 over our heads4 ,on the relations of consciousness to action see ,bergson's ,matire et ,mmoire1 passim1 especially chap4 i4 ,compare also the hints in ,mnsterberg's ,grundzge der ,psychologie1 chap1 xv2 those in my own ,principles of ,psychology1 vol4 ii1 pp4 #eha-eib2 and those in ,w4 ,mc,dougall's ,physiological ,psychology1 chap4 vii4 ,note #i1 page #bie4--;,compare ,zend-,avesta1 #b;d edition1 vol4 i1 pp4 #afe ff41 #aha1 #bjf1 #bdd ff41 etc42 ,die ,tagesansicht1 etc41 chap1 v1 #f2 and chap4 xv4 ,,lecture ,,viii ,note #a1 page #ccj4--;,blondel3 ,annales de ,philosophie ,chrtienne1 ,june1 #aijf1 p4 #bda4 ,,appendices ,,appendix ,a ,,the ,,thing ,,and ,,its ,,relations#a ,experience in its immediacy seems perfectly fluent4 ,the active sense of living which we all enjoy1 before reflection shatters our instinctive world for us1 is self-luminous and suggests no paradoxes4 ,its difficulties are disappointments and uncertainties4 ,they are not intellectual contradictions4 ,when the reflective intellect gets at work1 however1 it discovers incomprehensibilities in the flowing process4 ,distinguishing its elements and parts1 it gives them separate names1 and what it thus disjoins it cannot easily put together4 ,pyrrhonism accepts the irrationality and revels in its dialectic elaboration4 ,other philosophies try1 some by ignoring1 some by resisting1 and some by turning the dialectic procedure against itself1 negating its first negations1 to restore the fluent sense of life again1 and let redemption take the place of innocence4 ,the perfection with which any philosophy may do this is the measure of its human success and of its importance in philosophic history4 ,in an article entitled ',a world of pure experience1#b ,i tried my own hand sketchily at ,footnote #a3 ,reprinted from the ,journal of ,philosophy1 ,psychology1 and ,scientific ,methods1 vol4 ii1 ,new ,york1 #aije1 with slight verbal revision4 ,footnote #b3 ,journal of ,philosophy1 ,psychology1 and ,scientific ,methods1 vol4 i1 ,no4 #bj1 p4 #eff4 the problem1 resisting certain first steps of dialectics by insisting in a general way that the immediately experienced conjunctive relations are as real as anything else4 ,if my sketch is not to appear too nif1 ,i must come closer to details1 and in the present essay ,i propose to do so4 ,i ',pure experience' is the name which ,i gave to the immediate flux of life which furnishes the material to our later reflection with its conceptual categories4 ,only new-born babes1 or men in semi-coma from sleep1 drugs1 illnesses1 or blows1 may be assumed to have an experience pure in the literal sense of a that which is not yet any definite what1 tho ready to be all sorts of whats2 full both of oneness and of manyness1 but in respects that don't appear2 changing throughout1 yet so confusedly that its phases interpenetrate and no points1 either of distinction or of identity1 can be caught4 ,pure experience in this state is but another name for feeling or sensation4 ,but the flux of it no sooner comes than it tends to fill itself with emphases1 and these salient parts become identified and fixed and abstracted2 so that experience now flows as if shot through with adjectives and nouns and prepositions and conjunctions4 ,its purity is only a relative term1 meaning the proportional amount of unverbalized sensation which it still embodies4 ,far back as we go1 the flux1 both as a whole and in its parts1 is that of things conjunct and separated4 ,the great continua of time1 space1 and the self envelop everything1 betwixt them1 and flow together without interfering4 ,the things that they envelop come as separate in some ways and as continuous in others4 ,some sensations coalesce with some ideas1 and others are irreconcilable4 ,qualities compenetrate one space1 or exclude each other from it4 ,they cling together persistently in groups that move as units1 or else they separate4 ,their changes are abrupt or discontinuous2 and their kinds resemble or differ2 and1 as they do so1 they fall into either even or irregular series4 ,in all this the continuities and the discontinuities are absolutely co-ordinate matters of immediate feeling4 ,the conjunctions are as primordial elements of 'fact' as are the distinctions and disjunctions4 ,in the same act by which ,i feel that this passing minute is a new pulse of my life1 ,i feel that the old life continues into it1 and the feeling of continuance in no wise jars upon the simultaneous feeling of a novelty4 ,they1 too1 compenetrate harmoniously4 ,prepositions1 copulas1 and conjunctions1 'is1' 'isn't1' 'then1' 'before1' 'in1' 'on1' 'beside1' 'between1' 'next1' 'like1' 'unlike1' 'as1' 'but1' flower out of the stream of pure experience1 the stream of concretes or the sensational stream1 as naturally as nouns and adjectives do1 and they melt into it again as fluidly when we apply them to a new portion of the stream4 ,,ii ,if now we ask why we must translate experience from a more concrete or pure into a more intellectualized form1 filling it with ever more abounding conceptual distinctions1 rationalism and naturalism give different replies4 ,the rationalistic answer is that the theoretic life is absolute and its interests imperative2 that to understand is simply the duty of man2 and that who questions this need not be argued with1 for by the fact of arguing he gives away his case4 ,the naturalist answer is that the environment kills as well as sustains us1 and that the tendency of raw experience to extinguish the experient himself is lessened just in the degree in which the elements in it that have a practical bearing upon life are analyzed out of the continuum and verbally fixed and coupled together1 so that we may know what is in the wind for us and get ready to react in time4 ,had pure experience1 the naturalist says1 been always perfectly healthy1 there would never have arisen the necessity of isolating or verbalizing any of its terms4 ,we should just have experienced inarticulately and unintellectually enjoyed4 ,this leaning on 'reaction' in the naturalist account implies that1 whenever we intellectualize a relatively pure experience1 we ought to do so for the sake of redescending to the purer or more concrete level again2 and that if an intellect stays aloft among its abstract terms and generalized relations1 and does not reinsert itself with its conclusions into some particular point of the immediate stream of life1 it fails to finish out its function and leaves its normal race unrun4 ,most rationalists nowadays will agree that naturalism gives a true enough account of the way in which our intellect arose at first1 but they will deny these latter implications4 ,the case1 they will say1 resembles that of sexual love4 ,originating in the animal need of getting another generation born1 this passion has developed secondarily such imperious spiritual needs that1 if you ask why another generation ought to be born at all1 the answer is3 ',chiefly that love may go on4' ,just so with our intellect3 it originated as a practical means of serving life2 but it has developed incidentally the function of understanding absolute truth2 and life itself now seems to be given chiefly as a means by which that function may be prosecuted4 ,but truth and the understanding of it lie among the abstracts and universals1 so the intellect now carries on its higher business wholly in this region1 without any need of redescending into pure experience again4 ,if the contrasted tendencies which ,i thus designate as naturalistic and rationalistic are not recognized by the reader1 perhaps an example will make them more concrete4 ,mr4 ,bradley1 for instance1 is an ultra-rationalist4 ,he admits that our intellect is primarily practical1 but says that1 for philosophers1 the practical need is simply ,truth4#a ,truth1 moreover1 must be assumed 'consistent4' ,immediate experience has to be broken into subjects and qualities1 terms and relations1 to be understood as truth at all4 ,yet when so broken it is less consistent than ever4 ,taken raw1 it is all undistinguished4 ,intellectualized1 it is all distinction without oneness4 ',such an arrangement may work1 but the theoretic problem is not solved' 7p4 #bc74 ,the question is1 ',how the diversity can exist in harmony with the oneness' 7p4 #aah74 ,to go back to pure experience is unavailing4 ',mere feeling gives no answer to our riddle' 7p4 #ajd74 ,even if your intuition is a fact1 it is not an understanding4 ',it is a mere experience1 and furnishes no consistent view' 7pp4 #ajh-aji74 ,the experiences offered as facts or truths ',i find that my intellect rejects because they contradict themselves4 ,they offer a complex of diversities conjoined in a way which it feels is not its way and which it cannot repeat as its own4444 ,for to be satisfied1 my intellect must understand1 and it cannot understand by taking a congeries in the lump' 7p4 #egj74 ,so ,mr4 ,bradley1 in the sole interests of 'understanding' 7as he conceives that function71 turns his back on finite ,footnote #a3 ,appearance and ,reality1 pp4 #aeb-acc4 experience forever4 ,truth must lie in the opposite direction1 the direction of the absolute2 and this kind of rationalism and naturalism1 or 7as ,i will now call it7 pragmatism1 walk thenceforward upon opposite paths4 ,for the one1 those intellectual products are most true which1 turning their face towards the absolute1 come nearest to symbolizing its ways of uniting the many and the one4 ,for the other1 those are most true which most successfully dip back into the finite stream of feeling and grow most easily confluent with some particular wave or wavelet4 ,such confluence not only proves the intellectual operation to have been true 7as an addition may 'prove' that a subtraction is already rightly performed71 but it constitutes1 according to pragmatism1 all that we mean by calling it true4 ,only in so far as they lead us1 successfully or unsuccessfully1 into sensible experience again1 are our abstracts and universals true or false at all4 ,,iii ,in ,section the #fth of my article1 ',a world of pure experience1' ,i adopted in a general way the common-sense belief that one and the same world is cognized by our different minds2 but ,i left undiscussed the dialectical arguments which maintain that this is logically absurd4 ,the usual reason given for its being absurd is that it assumes one object 7to wit1 the world7 to stand in two relations at once2 to my mind1 namely1 and again to yours2 whereas a term taken in a second relation cannot logically be the same term which it was at first4 ,i have heard this reason urged so often in discussing with absolutists1 and it would destroy my radical empiricism so utterly1 if it were valid1 that ,i am bound to give it an attentive ear1 and seriously to search its strength4 ,for instance1 let the matter in dispute be a term ,m1 asserted to be on the one hand related to ,l1 and on the other to ,n2 and let the two cases of relation be symbolized by ,l--,m and ,m--,n respectively4 ,when1 now1 ,i assume that the experience may immediately come and be given in the shape ,l--,m--,n1 with no trace of doubling or internal fission in the ,m1 ,i am told that this is all a popular delusion2 that ,l--,m--,n logically means two different experiences1 ,l--,m and ,m--,n1 namely2 and that although the absolute may1 and indeed must1 from its superior point of view1 read its own kind of unity into ,m's two editions1 yet as elements in finite experience the two ,m's lie irretrievably asunder1 and the world between them is broken and unbridged4 ,in arguing this dialectic thesis1 one must avoid slipping from the logical into the physical point of view4 ,it would be easy1 in taking a concrete example to fix one's ideas by1 to choose one in which the letter ,m should stand for a collective noun of some sort1 which noun1 being related to ,l by one of its parts and to ,n by another1 would inwardly be two things when it stood outwardly in both relations4 ,thus1 one might say3 ',david ,hume1 who weighed so many stone by his body1 influences posterity by his doctrine4' ,the body and the doctrine are two things1 between which our finite minds can discover no real sameness1 though the same name covers both of them4 ,and then1 one might continue3 ',only an absolute is capable of uniting such a non-identity4' ,we must1 ,i say1 avoid this sort of example2 for the dialectic insight1 if true at all1 must apply to terms and relations universally4 ,it must be true of abstract units as well as of nouns collective2 and if we prove it by concrete examples1 we must take the simplest1 so as to avoid irrelevant material suggestions4 ,taken thus in all its generality1 the absolutist contention seems to use as its major premise ,hume's notion 'that all our distinct perceptions are distinct existences1 and that the mind never perceives any real connexion among distinct existences4' ,undoubtedly1 since we use two phrases in talking first about ',m's relation to ,l' and then again about ',m's relation to ,n1' we must be having1 or must have had1 two distinct perceptions2--and the rest would then seem to follow duly4 ,but the starting-point of the reasoning here seems to be the fact of the two phrases2 and this suggests that the argument may be merely verbal4 ,can it be that the whole dialectic achievement consists in attributing to the experience talked-about a constitution similar to that of the language in which we describe it8 ,must we assert the objective doubleness of the ,m merely because we have to name it twice over when we name its two relations8 ,candidly1 ,i can think of no other reason than this for the dialectic conclusion6#a for1 if we think1 not of our words1 but of any simple concrete matter which they may be held to signify1 the experience itself belies the paradox asserted4 ,we use indeed two separate concepts in analyzing our object1 but we know them all the while to be but substitutional1 and that the ,m in ,l--,m and the ,m in ,m--,n mean 7i4e41 are capable of leading to and terminating in7 one self-same piece1 ,m1 of sensible experience4 ,this persistent identity of certain units1 or emphases1 or points1 or objects1 or members--call them what you will--of the experience-continuum1 is just one of those conjunctive features of it1 on which ,i am obliged to insist so emphatically4 ,for samenesses are parts of experience's indefeasible structure4 ,when ,i hear a bell-stroke and1 as life flows on1 its after-image dies away1 ,i still hark back to it as 'that same ,footnote #a3 ,technically1 it seems classable as a 'fallacy of composition4' ,a duality1 predicable of the two wholes1 ,l--,m and ,m--,n1 is forthwith predicated of one of their parts1 ,m4 bell-stroke4' ,when ,i see a thing ,m1 with ,l to the left of it and ,n to the right of it1 ,i see it as one ,m2 and if you tell me ,i have had to 'take' it twice1 ,i reply that if ,i 'took' it a thousand times1 ,i should still see it as a unit4#a ,its unity is aboriginal1 just as the multiplicity of my successive takings is aboriginal4 ,it comes unbroken as that ,m1 as a singular which ,i encounter2 they come broken1 as those takings1 as my plurality of operations4 ,the unity and the separateness are strictly co-ordinate4 ,i do not easily fathom why my opponents should find the separateness so much more easily understandable that they must needs infect the whole of finite experience with it1 and relegate the unity 7now taken as a bare postulate and no longer as a thing positively perceivable7 to the region of the absolute's mysteries4 ,i do not easily fathom this1 ,i say1 for the said opponents are above mere verbal quibbling2 yet all that ,i can catch in their talk is the substitution of what is true of certain words for what is true of what they signify4 ,they stay with the words1--not returning to the stream of life whence all the meaning of them came1 and which is always ready to reabsorb them4 ,footnote #a3 ,i may perhaps refer here to my ,principles of ,psychology1 vol4 i1 pp4 #dei ff4 ,it really seems 'weird' to have to argue 7as ,i am forced now to do7 for the notion that it is one sheet of paper 7with its two surfaces and all that lies between7 which is both under my pen and on the table while ,i write--the 'claim' that it is two sheets seems so brazen4 ,yet ,i sometimes suspect the absolutists of sincerity6 ,,iv ,for aught this argument proves1 then1 we may continue to believe that one thing can be known by many knowers4 ,but the denial of one thing in many relations is but one application of a still profounder dialectic difficulty4 ,man can't be good1 said the sophists1 for man is man and good is good2 and ,hegel and ,herbart in their day1 more recently ,h4 ,spir1 and most recently and elaborately of all1 ,mr4 ,bradley1 inform us that a term can logically only be a punctiform unit1 and that not one of the conjunctive relations between things1 which experience seems to yield1 is rationally possible4 ,of course1 if true1 this cuts off radical empiricism without even a shilling4 ,radical empiricism takes conjunctive relations at their face-value1 holding them to be as real as the terms united by them4 ,the world it represents as a collection1 some parts of which are conjunctively and others disjunctively related4 ,two parts1 themselves disjoined1 may nevertheless hang together by intermediaries with which they are severally connected1 and the whole world eventually may hang together similarly1 inasmuch as some path of conjunctive transition by which to pass from one of its parts to another may always be discernible4 ,such determinately various hanging-together may be called concatenated union1 to distinguish it from the 'through-and-through' type of union1 'each in all and all in each' 7union of total conflux1 as one might call it71 which monistic systems hold to obtain when things are taken in their absolute reality4 ,in a concatenated world a partial conflux often is experienced4 ,our concepts and our sensations are confluent2 successive states of the same ego1 and feelings of the same body are confluent4 ,where the experience is not of conflux1 it may be of conterminousness 7things with but one thing between72 or of contiguousness 7nothing between72 or of likeness2 or of nearness2 or of simultaneousness2 or of in-ness2 or of on-ness2 or of for-ness2 or of simple with-ness2 or even of mere and-ness1 which last relation would make of however disjointed a world otherwise1 at any rate for that occasion a universe 'of discourse4' ,now ,mr4 ,bradley tells us that none of these relations1 as we actually experience them1 can possibly be real4#a ,my next duty1 accordingly1 must be to rescue radical empiricism from ,mr4 ,bradley4 ,fortunately1 as it seems to me1 his general contention1 that the very notion of relation is ,footnote #a3 ,here again the reader must beware of slipping from logical into phenomenal considerations4 ,it may well be that we attribute a certain relation falsely1 because the circumstances of the case1 being complex1 have deceived us4 ,at a railway station we may take our own train1 and not the one that fills our window1 to be moving4 ,we here put motion in the wrong place in the world1 but in its original place the motion is a part of reality4 ,what ,mr4 ,bradley means is nothing like this1 but rather that such things as motion are nowhere real1 and that1 even in their aboriginal and empirically incorrigible seats1 relations are impossible of comprehension4 unthinkable clearly1 has been successfully met by many critics4#a ,it is a burden to the flesh1 and an injustice both to readers and to the previous writers1 to repeat good arguments already printed4 ,so1 in noticing ,mr4 ,bradley1 ,i will confine myself to the interests of radical empiricism solely4 ,v ,the first duty of radical empiricism1 taking given conjunctions at their face-value1 is to class some of them as more intimate and some as more external4 ,when two terms are similar1 their very natures enter into the relation4 ,being what they are1 no matter where or when1 the likeness never can be denied1 if asserted4 ,it continues predicable as long as the terms continue4 ,other relations1 the where and the when1 for example1 seem adventitious4 ,the sheet of paper may be 'off' or 'on' the table1 for example2 and in either case the relation involves only the outside of its terms4 ,having an outside1 both of them1 they contribute by it to the relation4 ,it is external3 the term's inner nature is irrelevant to it4 ,any ,footnote #a3 ,particularly so by ,andrew ,seth ,pringle-,pattison1 in his ,man and the ,cosmos2 by ,l4,t4 ,hobhouse1 in chapter xii 7the ,validity of ,judgment7 of his ,theory of ,knowledge2 and by ,f4,c4,s4 ,schiller1 in his ,humanism1 ,essay ,,xi4 ,other fatal reviews 7in my opinion7 are ,hodder's1 in the ,psychological ,review1 vol4 i1 #cjg2 ,stout's1 in the ,proceedings of the ,aristotelian ,society1 #aija-jb1 p4 #a2 and ,mac,lennan's1 in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 etc41 vol4 i1 #djc4 book1 any table1 may fall into the relation1 which is created pro hac vice1 not by their existence1 but by their casual situation4 ,it is just because so many of the conjunctions of experience seem so external that a philosophy of pure experience must tend to pluralism in its ontology4 ,so far as things have space-relations1 for example1 we are free to imagine them with different origins even4 ,if they could get to be1 and get into space at all1 then they may have done so separately4 ,once there1 however1 they are additives to one another1 and1 with no prejudice to their natures1 all sorts of space-relations may supervene between them4 ,the question of how things could come to be1 anyhow1 is wholly different from the question what their relations1 once the being accomplished1 may consist in4 ,mr4 ,bradley now affirms that such external relations as the space-relations which we here talk of must hold of entirely different subjects from those of which the absence of such relations might a moment previously have been plausibly asserted4 ,not only is the situation different when the book is on the table1 but the book itself is different as a book1 from what it was when it was off the table4 ,he admits that 'such external relations ,footnote #a3 ,once more1 don't slip from logical into physical situations4 ,of course1 if the table be wet1 it will moisten the book1 or if it be slight enough and the book heavy enough1 the book will break it down4 ,but such collateral phenomena are not the point at issue4 ,the point is whether the successive relations 'on' and 'not-on' can rationally 7not physically7 hold of the same constant terms1 abstractly taken4 ,professor ,a4,e4 ,taylor drops from logical into material considerations when he instances color-contrast as a proof that ,a1 'as contra-distinguished from ,b1 is not the same thing as mere ,a not in any way affected' 7,elements of ,metaphysics1 #aijc1 p4 #ade74 ,note the substitution1 for 'related1' of the word 'affected1' which begs the whole question4 seem possible and even existing4444 ,that you do not alter what you compare or rearrange in space seems to common sense quite obvious1 and that on the other side there are as obvious difficulties does not occur to common sense at all4 ,and ,i will begin by pointing out these difficulties4444 ,there is a relation in the result1 and this relation1 we hear1 is to make no difference in its terms4 ,but1 if so1 to what does it make a difference8 doesn't it make a difference to us onlookers1 at least8 and what is the meaning and sense of qualifying the terms by it8 ,surely the meaning is to tell the truth about their relative position4#a ,if1 in short1 it is external to the terms1 how can it possibly be true of them8 ,is it the 'intimacy' suggested by the little word 'of1' here1 which ,i have underscored1 that is the root of ,mr4 ,bradley's trouble84444 ,if the terms from their inner nature do not enter into the relation1 then1 so far as they are concerned1 they seem related for no reason at all4444 ,things are spatially related1 first in one way1 and then become related in another way1 and yet in no way themselves ,footnote #a3 ,but 'is there any sense1' asks ,mr4 ,bradley1 peevishly1 on p4 #egi1 'and if so1 what sense1 in truth that is only outside and about things8' ,surely such a question may be left unanswered4 are altered2 for the relations1 it is said1 are but external4 ,but ,i reply that1 if so1 ,i cannot understand the leaving by the terms of one set of relations and their adoption of another fresh set4 ,the process and its result to the terms1 if they contribute nothing to it surely they contribute to it all there is 'of' it6 seem irrational throughout4 ,if 'irrational' here means simply 'non-rational1' or non-deducible from the essence of either term singly1 it is no reproach2 if it means 'contradicting' such essence1 ,mr4 ,bradley should show wherein and how4 ,but1 if they contribute anything1 they must surely be affected internally4 ,why so1 if they contribute only their surface8 ,in such relations as 'on1' 'a foot away1' 'between1' 'next1' etc41 only surfaces are in question4 444 ,if the terms contribute anything whatever1 then the terms are affected inwardly altered8 by the arrangement4444 ,that for working purposes we treat1 and do well to treat1 some relations as external merely1 ,i do not deny1 and that of course is not the question at issue here4 ,that question is 444 whether in the end and in principle a mere external relation i4e41 a relation which can change without forcing its terms to change their nature simultaneously is possible and forced on us by the facts4'#a ,mr4 ,bradley next reverts to the antinomies of space1 which1 according to him1 prove it to be unreal1 although it appears as so prolific a medium of external relations2 ,footnote #a3 ,appearance and ,reality1 #b;d edition1 pp4 #ege-egf4 and he then concludes that ',irrationality and externality cannot be the last truth about things4 ,somewhere there must be a reason why this and that appear together4 ,and this reason and reality must reside in the whole from which terms and relations are abstractions1 a whole in which their internal connexion must lie1 and out of which from the background appear those fresh results which never could have come from the premises' 7p4 #egg74 ,and he adds that ',where the whole is different1 the terms that qualify and contribute to it must so far be different4444 ,they are altered so far only how far8 farther than externally1 yet not through and through81 but still they are altered4444 ,i must insist that in each case the terms are qualified by their whole qualified how8--do their external relations1 situations1 dates1 etc41 changed as these are in the new whole1 fail to qualify them 'far' enough81 and that in the second case there is a whole which differs both logically and psychologically from the first whole2 and ,i urge that in contributing to the change the terms so far are altered' 7p4 #egi74 ,not merely the relations1 then1 but the terms are altered3 und zwar 'so far4' ,but just how far is the whole problem2 and 'through-and-through' would seem 7in spite of ,mr4 ,bradley's somewhat undecided utterances#a7 ,footnote #a3 ,i say 'undecided1' because1 apart from the 'so far1' which sounds terribly half-hearted1 there are passages in these very pages in which ,mr4 ,bradley admits the pluralistic thesis4 ,read1 for example1 what he says1 on p4 #egh1 of a billiard ball keeping its 'character' unchanged1 though1 in its change of place1 its 'existence' gets altered2 or what he says1 on p4 #egi1 of the possibility that an abstract quality ,a1 ,b1 or ,c1 in a thing1 'may throughout remain unchanged' although the thing be altered2 or his admission that in red-hairedness1 both as analyzed out of a man and when given with the rest of him1 there may be 'no change' 7p4 #ehj74 ,why does he immediately add that for the pluralist to plead the non-mutation of such abstractions would be an ignoratio elenchi8 ,it is impossible to admit it to be such4 ,the entire elenchus and inquest is just as to whether parts which you can abstract from existing wholes can also contribute to other wholes without changing their inner nature4 ,if they can thus mould various wholes into new gestalt-qualitten1 then it follows that the same elements are logically able to exist in different wholes whether physically able would depend on additional hypotheses2 that partial changes are thinkable1 and through-and-through change not a dialectic necessity2 that monism is only an hypothesis2 and that an additively constituted universe is a rationally respectable hypothesis also4 ,all the theses of radical empiricism1 in short1 follow4 to be the full bradleyan answer4 ,the 'whole' which he here treats as primary and determinative of each part's manner of 'contributing1' simply must1 when it alters1 alter in its entirety4 ,there must be total conflux of its parts1 each into and through each other4 ,the 'must' appears here as a ,machtspruch1 as an ipse dixit of ,mr4 ,bradley's absolutistically tempered 'understanding1' for he candidly confesses that how the parts do differ as they contribute to different wholes1 is unknown to him 7p4 #egh74 ,although ,i have every wish to comprehend the authority by which ,mr4 ,bradley's understanding speaks1 his words leave me wholly unconverted4 ',external relations' stand with their withers all unwrung1 and remain1 for aught he proves to the contrary1 not only practically workable1 but also perfectly intelligible factors of reality4 ,,vi ,mr4 ,bradley's understanding shows the most extraordinary power of perceiving separations and the most extraordinary impotence in comprehending conjunctions4 ,one would naturally say 'neither or both1' but not so ,mr4 ,bradley4 ,when a common man analyzes certain whats from out the stream of experience1 he understands their distinctness as thus isolated4 ,but this does not prevent him from equally well understanding their combination with each other as originally experienced in the concrete1 or their confluence with new sensible experiences in which they recur as 'the same4' ,returning into the stream of sensible presentation1 nouns and adjectives1 and thats and abstract whats1 grow confluent again1 and the word 'is' names all these experiences of conjunction4 ,mr4 ,bradley understands the isolation of the abstracts1 but to understand the combination is to him impossible4#a ',to understand a complex ,,ab1' he ,footnote #a3 ,so far as ,i catch his state of mind1 it is somewhat like this3 ',book1' 'table1' 'on'--how does the existence of these three abstract elements result in this book being livingly on this table8 ,why isn't the table on the book8 ,or why doesn't the 'on' connect itself with another book1 or something that is not a table8 ,mustn't something in each of the three elements already determine the two others to it1 so that they do not settle elsewhere or float vaguely8 ,mustn't the whole fact be prefigured in each part1 and exist de jure before it can exist de facto8 ,but1 if so1 in what can the jural existence consist1 if not in a spiritual miniature of the whole fact's constitution actuating2 every partial factor as its purpose8 ,but is this anything but the old metaphysical fallacy of looking behind a fact in esse for the ground of the fact1 and finding it in the shape of the very same fact in posse8 ,somewhere we must leave off with a constitution behind which there is nothing4 says1 ',i must begin with ,a or ,b4 ,and beginning1 say with ,a1 if ,i then merely find ,b1 ,i have either lost ,a1 or ,i have got beside ,a1 the word 'beside' seems here vital1 as meaning a conjunction 'external' and therefore unintelligible something else1 and in neither case have ,i understood4#a ,for my intellect cannot simply unite a diversity1 nor has it in itself any form or way of togetherness1 and you gain nothing if1 beside ,a and ,b1 you offer me their conjunction in fact4 ,for to my intellect that is no more than another external element4 ,and facts1 once for all1 are for my intellect not true unless they satisfy it4444 ,the intellect has in its nature no principle of mere togetherness' 7pp4 #egj1 #egb74 ,of course ,mr4 ,bradley has a right to define 'intellect' as the power by which we perceive separations but not unions--provided he give due notice to the reader4 ,but why then claim that such a maimed and amputated power must reign supreme in philosophy1 and accuse on its behoof the whole empirical world of irrationality8 ,it is true that he elsewhere 7p4 #efh7 attributes to the intellect a proprius motus of transition1 but says that ,footnote #a3 ,apply this to the case of 'book-on-table'6 ,w4,j4 when he looks for these transitions in the detail of living experience1 he 'is unable to verify such a solution' 7p4 #efi74 ,yet he never explains what the intellectual transitions would be like in case we had them4 ,he only defines them negatively--they are not spatial1 temporal1 predicative1 or causal2 or qualitatively or otherwise serial2 or in any way relational as we navely trace relations1 for relations separate terms1 and need themselves to be hooked on ad infinitum4 ,the nearest approach he makes to describing a truly intellectual transition is where he speaks of ,a and ,b as being 'united1 each from its own nature1 in a whole which is the nature of both alike' 7p4 #egj74 ,but this 7which1 pace ,mr4 ,bradley1 seems exquisitely analogous to 'taking a congeries in a lump1' if not to 'swamping'7 suggests nothing but that conflux which pure experience so abundantly offers1 as when 'space1' 'white1' and 'sweet' are confluent in a 'lump of sugar1' or kinesthetic1 dermal1 and optical sensations confluent in 'my hand4'#a ,all that ,i can verify in the transitions which ,mr4 ,bradley's intellect desiderates as its proprius motus is a reminiscence of these and other sensible conjunctions 7especially space-conjunctions71 ,footnote #a3 ,how meaningless is the contention that in such wholes 7or in 'book-on-table1' 'watch-in-pocket1' etc47 the relation is an additional entity between the terms1 needing itself to be related again to each6 ,both ,bradley 7,appearance and ,reality1 pp4 #cb-cc7 and ,royce 7,the ,world and the ,individual1 i1 #abh7 lovingly repeat this piece of profundity4 but a reminiscence so vague that its originals are not recognized4 ,bradley1 in short1 repeats the fable of the dog1 the bone1 and its image in the water4 ,with a world of particulars1 given in loveliest union1 in conjunction definitely various1 and variously definite1 the 'how' of which you 'understand' as soon as you see the fact of them1#a for there is no how except the constitution of the fact as given2 with all this given him1 ,i say1 in pure experience1 he asks for some ineffable union in the abstract instead1 which1 if he gained it1 would only be a duplicate of what he has already in his full possession4 ,surely he abuses the privilege which society grants to all of us philosophers1 of being puzzle-headed4 ,polemic writing like this is odious2 but with absolutism in possession in so many quarters1 omission to defend my radical empiricism against its best known champion would count as either superficiality or inability4 ,i have to conclude that its dialectic has not invalidated in the least degree the usual conjunctions by which the world1 as experienced1 hangs so variously together4 ,in particular it leaves an empirical theory of knowledge intact1 and lets us continue to believe with common sense that one object may be known1 if we have any ground for thinking that it is known1 to many knowers4 ,footnote #a3 ,the 'why' and the 'whence' are entirely other questions1 not under discussion1 as ,i understand ,mr4 ,bradley4 ,not how experience gets itself born1 but how it can be what it is after it is born1 is the puzzle4 ,,appendix ,b ,,the ,,experience ,,of ,,activity#a 444 ,mr4 ,bradley calls the question of activity a scandal to philosophy1 and if one turns to the current literature of the subject--his own writings included--one easily gathers what he means4 ,the opponents cannot even understand one another4 ,mr4 ,bradley says to ,mr4 ,ward3 ',i do not care what your oracle is1 and your preposterous psychology may here be gospel if you please2 444 but if the revelation does contain a meaning1 ,i will commit myself to this3 either the oracle is so confused that its signification is not discoverable1 or1 upon the other hand1 if it can be pinned down to any definite statement1 then that statement will be false4'#b ,mr4 ,ward in turn says of ,mr4 ,bradley3 ',i cannot even imagine the state of mind to which his description applies4444 ,it reads like an unintentional travesty of ,herbartian ,psychology by one who has tried to improve upon it without being at the pains to master it4' ,mnsterberg excludes a view opposed to his own by saying that with any one who holds it a verstndigung with him is 'grundstzlich ausgeschlossen'2 and ,royce1 ,footnote #a3 ,president's ,address before the ,american ,psychological ,association1 ,december1 #aijd4 ,reprinted from the ,psychological ,review1 vol4 xii1 #aije1 with slight verbal revision4 ,footnote #b3 ,appearance and ,reality1 p4 #aag4 ,obviously written at ,ward1 though ,ward's name is not mentioned4 in a review of ,stout1#a hauls him over the coals at great length for defending 'efficacy' in a way which ,i1 for one1 never gathered from reading him1 and which ,i have heard ,stout himself say was quite foreign to the intention of his text4 ,in these discussions distinct questions are habitually jumbled and different points of view are talked of durcheinander4 7#a7 ,there is a psychological question3 ,have we perceptions of activity8 and if so1 what are they like1 and when and where do we have them8 7#b7 ,there is a metaphysical question3 ,is there a fact of activity8 and if so1 what idea must we frame of it8 ,what is it like8 and what does it do1 if it does anything8 ,and finally there is a logical question3 7#c7 ,whence do we know activity8 ,by our own feelings of it solely8 or by some other source of information8 ,throughout page after page of the literature one knows not which of these questions is before one2 and mere description of the surface-show of experience is proffered as if it implicitly answered every one of them4 ,no one of the disputants1 moreover1 tries to show what pragmatic consequences his own view would carry1 or what assignable particular differences in any one's experience it would make if his adversary's were triumphant4 ,footnote #a3 ,mind1 ,n4,s41 ,,vi1 #cgi4 ,it seems to me that if radical empiricism be good for anything1 it ought1 with its pragmatic method and its principle of pure experience1 to be able to avoid such tangles1 or at least to simplify them somewhat4 ,the pragmatic method starts from the postulate that there is no difference of truth that doesn't make a difference of fact somewhere2 and it seeks to determine the meaning of all differences of opinion by making the discussion hinge as soon as possible upon some practical or particular issue4 ,the principle of pure experience is also a methodical postulate4 ,nothing shall be admitted as fact1 it says1 except what can be experienced at some definite time by some experient2 and for every feature of fact ever so experienced1 a definite place must be found somewhere in the final system of reality4 ,in other words3 ,everything real must be experienceable somewhere1 and every kind of thing experienced must somewhere be real4 ,armed with these rules of method1 let us see what face the problems of activity present to us4 ,by the principle of pure experience1 either the word 'activity' must have no meaning at all1 or else the original type and model of what it means must lie in some concrete kind of experience that can be definitely pointed out4 ,whatever ulterior judgments we may eventually come to make regarding activity1 that sort of thing will be what the judgments are about4 ,the first step to take1 then1 is to ask where in the stream of experience we seem to find what we speak of as activity4 ,what we are to think of the activity thus found will be a later question4 ,now it is obvious that we are tempted to affirm activity wherever we find anything going on4 ,taken in the broadest sense1 any apprehension of something doing1 is an experience of activity4 ,were our world describable only by the words 'nothing happening1' 'nothing changing1' 'nothing doing1' we should unquestionably call it an 'inactive' world4 ,bare activity1 then1 as we may call it1 means the bare fact of event or change4 ',change taking place' is a unique content of experience1 one of those 'conjunctive' objects which radical empiricism seeks so earnestly to rehabilitate and preserve4 ,the sense of activity is thus in the broadest and vaguest way synonymous with the sense of 'life4' ,we should feel our own subjective life at least1 even in noticing and proclaiming an otherwise inactive world4 ,our own reaction on its monotony would be the one thing experienced there in the form of something coming to pass4 ,this seems to be what certain writers have in mind when they insist that for an experient to be at all is to be active4 ,it seems to justify1 or at any rate to explain1 ,mr4 ,ward's expression that we are only as we are active1#a ,footnote #a3 ,naturalism and ,agnosticism1 vol4 ii1 p4 #bde4 ,one thinks naturally of the peripatetic actus primus and actus secundus here4 for we are only as experients2 and it rules out ,mr4 ,bradley's contention that 'there is no original experience of anything like activity4' ,what we ought to say about activities thus simply given1 whose they are1 what they effect1 or whether indeed they effect anything at all--these are later questions1 to be answered only when the field of experience is enlarged4 ,bare activity would thus be predicable1 though there were no definite direction1 no actor1 and no aim4 ,mere restless zigzag movement1 or a wild ideenflucht1 or rhapsodie der wahrnehmungen1 as ,kant would say1 would constitute an active as distinguished from an inactive world4 ,but in this actual world of ours1 as it is given1 a part at least of the activity comes with definite direction2 it comes with desire and sense of goal2 it comes complicated with resistances which it overcomes or succumbs to1 and with the efforts which the feeling of resistance so often provokes2 and it is in complex experiences like these that the notions of distinct agents1 and of passivity as opposed to activity arise4 ,here also the notion of causal efficacy comes to birth4 ,perhaps the most elaborate work ever done in descriptive psychology has been the analysis by various recent writers of the more complex activity-situations4 ,in their descriptions1 exquisitely subtle some of them1#a the activity appears as the gestalt-qualitt ,footnote #a3 ,their existence forms a curious commentary on ,professor ,munsterberg's dogma that will-attitudes are not describable4 ,he himself has contributed in a superior way to their description1 both in his ,willenshandlung1 and in his ,grundzge1 ,part ,,ii1 chap1 ix1 #g4 or the fundirte inhalt 7or as whatever else you may please to call the conjunctive form7 which the content falls into when we experience it in the ways which the describers set forth4 ,those factors in those relations are what we mean by activity-situations2 and to the possible enumeration and accumulation of their circumstances and ingredients there would seem to be no natural bound4 ,every hour of human life could contribute to the picture gallery2 and this is the only fault that one can find with such descriptive industry--where is it going to stop8 ,ought we to listen forever to verbal pictures of what we have already in concrete form in our own breasts8#a ,they never take us off the superficial plane4 ,we knew the facts already--less spread out and separated1 to be sure--but we knew them still4 ,we always felt our own activity1 for example1 as 'the expansion of an idea with which our ,self is identified1 against an obstacle'2 and the following out of such a definition through a multitude of cases elaborates the obvious so as to be little more than an exercise in synonymic speech4 ,all the descriptions have to trace familiar outlines1 and to use familiar terms4 ,the activity is1 for example1 ,footnote #a3 ,i ought myself to cry peccavi1 having been a voluminous sinner in my own chapter on the will4 attributed either to a physical or to a mental agent1 and is either aimless or directed4 ,if directed1 it shows tendency4 ,the tendency may or may not be resisted4 ,if not1 we call the activity immanent1 as when a body moves in empty space by its momentum1 or our thoughts wander at their own sweet will4 ,if resistance is met1 its agent complicates the situation4 ,if now1 in spite of resistance1 the original tendency continues1 effort makes its appearance1 and along with effort1 strain or squeeze4 ,will1 in the narrower sense of the word1 then comes upon the scene1 whenever1 along with the tendency1 the strain and squeeze are sustained4 ,but the resistance may be great enough to check the tendency1 or even to reverse its path4 ,in that case1 we 7if 'we' were the original agents or subjects of the tendency7 are overpowered4 ,the phenomenon turns into one of tension simply1 or of necessity succumbed--to1 according as the opposing power is only equal1 or is superior to ourselves4 ,whosoever describes an experience in such terms as these1 describes an experience of activity4 ,if the word have any meaning1 it must denote what there is found4 ,there is complete activity in its original and first intention4 ,what it is 'known-as' is what there appears4 ,the experiencer of such a situation possesses all that the idea contains4 ,he feels the tendency1 the obstacle1 the will1 the strain1 the triumph1 or the passive giving up1 just as he feels the time1 the space1 the swiftness or intensity1 the movement1 the weight and color1 the pain and pleasure1 the complexity1 or whatever remaining characters the situation may involve4 ,he goes through all that ever can be imagined where activity is supposed4 ,if we suppose activities to go on outside of our experience1 it is in forms like these that we must suppose them1 or else give them some other name2 for the word 'activity' has no imaginable content whatever save these experiences of process1 obstruction1 striving1 strain1 or release1 ultimate qualia as they are of the life given us to be known4 ,were this the end of the matter1 one might think that whenever we had successfully lived through an activity-situation we should have to be permitted1 without provoking contradiction1 to say that we had been really active1 that we had met real resistance and had really prevailed4 ,lotze somewhere says that to be an entity all that is necessary is to gelten as an entity1 to operate1 or be felt1 experienced1 recognized1 or in any way realized1 as such4 ,in our activity-experiences the activity assuredly fulfils ,lotze's demand4 ,it makes itself gelten4 ,it is witnessed at its work4 ,no matter what activities there may really be in this extraordinary universe of ours1 it is impossible for us to conceive of any one of them being either lived through or authentically known otherwise than in this dramatic shape of something sustaining a felt purpose against felt obstacles and overcoming or being overcome4 ,what 'sustaining' means here is clear to any one who has lived through the experience1 but to no one else2 just as 'loud1' 'red1' 'sweet1' mean something only to beings with ears1 eyes1 and tongues4 ,the percipi in these originals of experience is the esse2 the curtain is the picture4 ,if there is anything hiding in the background1 it ought not to be called activity1 but should get itself another name4 ,this seems so obviously true that one might well experience astonishment at finding so many of the ablest writers on the subject flatly denying that the activity we live through in these situations is real4 ,merely to feel active is not to be active1 in their sight4 ,the agents that appear in the experience are not real agents1 the resistances do not really resist1 the effects that appear are not really effects at all4#a ,it is evident from this that ,footnote #a3 ,verborum grati3',the feeling of activity is not able1 qu feeling1 to tell us anything about activity' 7,loveday3 ,mind1 ,n4,s41 ,x41 #djc72 ',a sensation or feeling or sense of activity 444 is not1 looked at in another way1 a feeling of activity at all4 ,it is a mere sensation shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity4444 ,whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity1 it1 as it comes first1 is not in itself an experience of activity at all4 ,it1 as it comes first1 is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer' 7,bradley1 ,appearance and ,reality1 #b;d edition1 p4 #fje72 ',in dem ttigkeitsgefhle leigt an sich nicht der geringste beweis fr das vorhandensein einer psychischen ttigkeit' 7,mnsterberg3 ,grundzge1 etc41 p4 #fg74 ,i could multiply similar quotations1 and would have introduced some of them into my text to make it more concrete1 save that the mingling of different points of view in most of these author's discussions 7not in ,mnsterberg's7 make it impossible to disentangle exactly what they mean4 ,i am sure in any case to be accused of misrepresenting them totally1 even in this note1 by omission of the context1 so the less ,i name names and the more ,i stick to abstract characterization of a merely possible style of opinion1 the safer it will be4 ,and apropos of misunderstandings1 ,i may add to this note a complaint on my own account4 ,professor ,stout1 in the excellent chapter on ',mental ,activity1' in vol4 i of his ,analytic ,psychology1 takes me to task for identifying spiritual activity with certain muscular feelings1 and gives quotations to bear him out4 ,they are from certain paragraphs on 'the ,self1' in which my attempt was to show what the central nucleus of the activities that we call 'ours' is4 ,i found it in certain intracephalic movements which we habitually oppose1 as 'subjective1' to the activities of the transcorporeal world4 ,i sought to show that there is no direct evidence that we feel the activity of an inner spiritual agent as such 7,i should now say the activity of 'consciousness' as such1 see my paper ',does consciousness exist8' in the ,journal of ,philosophy1 vol4 i1 p4 #dgg74 ,there are1 in fact1 three distinguishable 'activities' in the field of discussion3 the elementary activity involved in the mere that of experience1 in the fact that something is going on1 and the farther specification of this something into two whats1 an activity felt as 'ours1' and an activity ascribed to objects4 ,stout1 as ,i apprehend him1 identifies 'our' activity with that of the total experience-process1 and when ,i circumscribe it as a part thereof1 accuses me of treating it as a sort of external appendage to itself 7pp4 #afb-afc71 as if ,i 'separated the activity from the process which is active4' ,but all the processes in question are active1 and their activity is inseparable from their being4 ,my book raised only the question of which activity deserved the name of 'ours4' ,so far as we are 'persons1' and contrasted and opposed to an 'environment1' movements in our body figure as our activities2 and ,i am unable to find any other activities that are ours in this strictly personal sense4 ,there is a wider sense in which the whole 'choir of heaven and furniture of the earth1' and their activities1 are ours1 for they are our 'objects4' ,but 'we' are here only another name for the total process of experience1 another name for all that is1 in fact2 and ,i was dealing with the personal and individualized self exclusively in the passages with which ,professor ,stout finds fault4 ,the individualized self1 which ,i believe to be the only thing properly called self1 is a part of the content of the world experienced4 ,the world experienced 7otherwise called the 'field of consciousness'7 comes at all times with our body as its centre1 centre of vision1 centre of action1 centre of interest4 ,where the body is is 'here'2 when the body acts is 'now'2 what the body touches is 'this'2 all other things are 'there' and 'then' and 'that4' ,these words of emphasized position imply a systematization of things with reference to a focus of action and interest which lies in the body2 and the systematization is now so instinctive 7was it ever not so87 that no developed or active experience exists for us at all except in that ordered form4 ,so far as 'thoughts' and 'feelings' can be active1 their activity terminates in the activity of the body1 and only through first arousing its activities can they begin to change those of the rest of the world4 ,the body is the storm centre1 the origin of co-ordinates1 the constant place of stress in all that experience-train4 ,everything circles round it1 and is felt from its point of view4 ,the word ',i1' then1 is primarily a noun of position1 just like 'this' and 'here4' ,activities attached to 'this' position have prerogative emphasis1 and1 if activities have feelings1 must be felt in a peculiar way4 ,the word 'my' designates the kind of emphasis4 ,i see no inconsistency whatever in defending1 on the one hand1 'my' activities as unique and opposed to those of outer nature1 and1 on the other hand1 in affirming1 after introspection1 that they consist in movements in the head4 ,the 'my' of them is the emphasis1 the feeling of perspective-interest in which they are dyed4 mere descriptive analysis of any one of our activity-experiences is not the whole story1 that there is something still to tell about them that has led such able writers to conceive of a ,simon-pure activity1 of an activity an sich1 that does1 and doesn't merely appear to us to do1 and compared with whose real doing all this phenomenal activity is but a specious sham4 ,the metaphysical question opens here2 and ,i think that the state of mind of one possessed by it is often something like this3 ',it is all very well1' we may imagine him saying1 'to talk about certain experience-series taking on the form of feelings of activity1 just as they might take on musical or geometric forms4 ,suppose that they do so2 suppose that what we feel is a will to stand a strain4 ,does our feeling do more than record the fact that the strain is sustained8 ,the real activity1 meanwhile1 is the doing of the fact2 and what is the doing made of before the record is made8 ,what in the will enables it to act thus8 ,and these trains of experience themselves1 in which activities appear1 what makes them go at all8 ,does the activity in one bit of experience bring the next bit into being8 ,as an empiricist you cannot say so1 for you have just declared activity to be only a kind of synthetic object1 or conjunctive relation experienced between bits of experience already made4 ,but what made them at all8 ,what propels experience berhaupt into being8 ,there is the activity that operates2 the activity felt is only its superficial sign4' ,to the metaphysical question1 popped upon us in this way1 ,i must pay serious attention ere ,i end my remarks1 but1 before doing so1 let me show that without leaving the immediate reticulations of experience1 or asking what makes activity itself act1 we still find the distinction between less real and more real activities forced upon us1 and are driven to much soul-searching on the purely phenomenal plane4 ,we must not forget1 namely1 in talking of the ultimate character of our activity-experiences1 that each of them is but a portion of a wider world1 one link in the vast chain of processes of experience out of which history is made4 ,each partial process1 to him who lives through it1 defines itself by its origin and its goal2 but to an observer with a wider mind-span who should live outside of it1 that goal would appear but as a provisional halting-place1 and the subjectively felt activity would be seen to continue into objective activities that led far beyond4 ,we thus acquire a habit1 in discussing activity-experiences1 of defining them by their relation to something more4 ,if an experience be one of narrow span1 it will be mistaken as to what activity it is and whose4 ,you think that you are acting while you are only obeying some one's push4 ,you think you are doing this1 but you are doing something of which you do not dream4 ,for instance1 you think you are but drinking this glass2 but you are really creating the liver-cirrhosis that will end your days4 ,you think you are just driving this bargain1 but1 as ,stevenson says somewhere1 you are laying down a link in the policy of mankind4 ,generally speaking1 the onlooker1 with his wider field of vision1 regards the ultimate outcome of an activity as what it is more really doing2 and the most previous agent ascertainable1 being the first source of action1 he regards as the most real agent in the field4 ,the others but transmit that agent's impulse2 on him we put responsibility2 we name him when one asks us1 ',who's to blame8' ,but the most previous agents ascertainable1 instead of being of longer span1 are often of much shorter span than the activity in view4 ,brain-cells are our best example4 ,my brain-cells are believed to excite each other from next to next 7by contiguous transmission of katabolic alteration1 let us say71 and to have been doing so long before this present stretch of lecturing-activity on my part began4 ,if any one cell-group stops its activity1 the lecturing will cease or show disorder of form4 ,cessante causa1 cessat et effectus--does not this look as if the short-span brain activities were the more real activities1 and the lecturing activities on my part only their effects8 ,moreover1 as ,hume so clearly pointed out1 in my mental activity-situation the words physically to be uttered are represented as the activity's immediate goal4 ,these words1 however1 cannot be uttered without intermediate physical processes in the bulb and vagi nerves1 which processes nevertheless fail to figure in the mental activity-series at all4 ,that series1 therefore1 since it leaves out vitally real steps of action1 cannot represent the real activities4 ,it is something purely subjective2 the facts of activity are elsewhere4 ,they are something far more interstitial1 so to speak1 than what my feelings record4 ,the real facts of activity that have in point of fact been systematically pleaded for by philosophers have1 so far as my information goes1 been of three principal types4 ,the first type takes a consciousness of wider time-span than ours to be the vehicle of the more real activity4 ,its will is the agent1 and its purpose is the action done4 ,the second type assumes that 'ideas' struggling with one another are the agents1 and that the prevalence of one set of them is the action4 ,the third type believes that nerve-cells are the agents1 and that resultant motor discharges are the acts achieved4 ,now if we must de-realize our immediately felt activity-situations for the benefit of either of these types of substitute1 we ought to know what the substitution practically involves4 ,what practical difference ought it to make if1 instead of saying naively that ',i' am active now in delivering this address1 ,i say that a wider thinker is active1 or that certain ideas are active1 or that certain nerve-cells are active1 in producing the result8 ,this would be the pragmatic meaning of the three hypotheses4 ,let us take them in succession in seeking a reply4 ,if we assume a wider thinker1 it is evident that his purposes envelop mine4 ,i am really lecturing for him2 and altho ,i cannot surely know to what end1 yet if ,i take him religiously1 ,i can trust it to be a good end1 and willingly connive4 ,i can be happy in thinking that my activity transmits his impulse1 and that his ends prolong my own4 ,so long as ,i take him religiously1 in short1 he does not de-realize my activities4 ,he tends rather to corroborate the reality of them1 so long as ,i believe both them and him to be good4 ,when now we turn to ideas1 the case is different1 inasmuch as ideas are supposed by the association psychology to influence each other only from next to next4 ,the 'span' of an idea1 or pair of ideas1 is assumed to be much smaller instead of being larger than that of my total conscious field4 ,the same results may get worked out in both cases1 for this address is being given anyhow4 ,but the ideas supposed to 'really' work it out had no prevision of the whole of it2 and if ,i was lecturing for an absolute thinker in the former case1 so1 by similar reasoning1 are my ideas now lecturing for me1 that is1 accomplishing unwittingly a result which ,i approve and adopt4 ,but1 when this passing lecture is over1 there is nothing in the bare notion that ideas have been its agents that would seem to guarantee that my present purposes in lecturing will be prolonged4 ,i may have ulterior developments in view2 but there is no certainty that my ideas as such will wish to1 or be able to1 work them out4 ,the like is true if nerve-cells be the agents4 ,the activity of a nerve-cell must be conceived of as a tendency of exceedingly short reach1 an 'impulse' barely spanning the way to the next cell--for surely that amount of actual 'process' must be 'experienced' by the cells if what happens between them is to deserve the name of activity at all4 ,but here again the gross resultant1 as ,i perceive it1 is indifferent to the agents1 and neither wished or willed or foreseen4 ,their being agents now congruous with my will gives me no guarantee that like results will recur again from their activity4 ,in point of fact1 all sorts of other results do occur4 ,my mistakes1 impotencies1 perversions1 mental obstructions1 and frustrations generally1 are also results of the activity of cells4 ,altho these are letting me lecture now1 on other occasions they make me do things that ,i would willingly not do4 ,the question ,whose is the real activity8 is thus tantamount to the question ,what will be the actual results8 ,its interest is dramatic2 how will things work out8 ,if the agents are of one sort1 one way2 if of another sort1 they may work out very differently4 ,the pragmatic meaning of the various alternatives1 in short1 is great4 ,it makes more than a merely verbal difference which opinion we take up4 ,you see it is the old dispute come back6 ,materialism and teleology2 elementary short-span actions summing themselves 'blindly1' or far foreseen ideals coming with effort into act4 ,navely we believe1 and humanly and dramatically we like to believe1 that activities both of wider and of narrower span are at work in life together1 that both are real1 and that the long-span tendencies yoke the others in their service1 encouraging them in the right direction1 and damping them when they tend in other ways4 ,but how to represent clearly the modus operandi of such steering of small tendencies by large ones is a problem which metaphysical thinkers will have to ruminate upon for many years to come4 ,even if such control should eventually grow clearly picturable1 the question how far it is successfully exerted in this actual world can be answered only by investigating the details of fact4 ,no philosophic knowledge of the general nature and constitution of tendencies1 or of the relation of larger to smaller ones1 can help us to predict which of all the various competing tendencies that interest us in this universe are likeliest to prevail4 ,we know as an empirical fact that far-seeing tendencies often carry out their purpose1 but we know also that they are often defeated by the failure of some contemptibly small process on which success depends4 ,a little thrombus in a statesman's meningeal artery will throw an empire out of gear4 ,therefore ,i cannot even hint at any solution of the pragmatic issue4 ,i have only wished to show you that that issue is what gives the real interest to all inquiries into what kinds of activity may be real4 ,are the forces that really act in the world more foreseeing or more blind8 ,as between 'our' activities as 'we' experience them1 and those of our ideas1 or of our brain-cells1 the issue is well defined4 ,i said awhile back 7p4 #cha7 that ,i should return to the 'metaphysical' question before ending2 so1 with a few words about that1 ,i will now close my remarks4 ,in whatever form we hear this question propounded1 ,i think that it always arises from two things1 a belief that causality must be exerted in activity1 and a wonder as to how causality is made4 ,if we take an activity-situation at its face-value1 it seems as if we caught in flagrante delicto the very power that makes facts come and be4 ,i now am eagerly striving1 for example1 to get this truth which ,i seem half to perceive1 into words which shall make it show more clearly4 ,if the words come1 it will seem as if the striving itself had drawn or pulled them into actuality out from the state of merely possible being in which they were4 ,how is this feat performed8 ,how does the pulling pull8 ,how do ,i get my hold on words not yet existent1 and when they come1 by what means have ,i made them come8 ,really it is the problem of creation2 for in the end the question is3 ,how do ,i make them be8 ,real activities are those that really make things be1 without which the things are not1 and with which they are there4 ,activity1 so far as we merely feel it1 on the other hand1 is only an impression of ours1 it may be maintained2 and an impression is1 for all this way of thinking1 only a shadow of another fact4 ,arrived at this point1 ,i can do little more than indicate the principles on which1 as it seems to me1 a radically empirical philosophy is obliged to rely in handling such a dispute4 ,if there be real creative activities in being1 radical empiricism must say1 somewhere they must be immediately lived4 ,somewhere the that of efficacious causing and the what of it must be experienced in one1 just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now4 ,it boots not to say that our sensations are fallible4 ,they are indeed2 but to see the thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish cold as a specific nature from the universe4 ,cold is in the arctic circle if not here4 ,even so1 to feel that our train is moving when the train beside our window moves1 to see the moon through a telescope come twice as near1 or to see two pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope at them1 leaves motion1 nearness1 and solidity still in being--if not here1 yet each in its proper seat elsewhere4 ,and wherever the seat of real causality is1 as ultimately known 'for true' 7in nerve-processes1 if you will1 that cause our feelings of activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt71 a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other nature of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work4 ,exactly what appears there is what we mean by working1 tho we may later come to learn that working was not exactly there4 ,sustaining1 persevering1 striving1 paying with effort as we go1 hanging on1 and finally achieving our intention--this is action1 this is effectuation in the only shape in which1 by a pure experience-philosophy1 the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed4 ,here is creation in its first intention1 here is causality at work4#a ,to treat this offhand as the bare illusory ,footnote #a3 ,let me not be told that this contradicts a former article of mine1 ',does consciousness exist8' in the ,journal of ,philosophy for ,september #a1 #aijd 7see especially page #dhi71 in which it was said that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures1 the natures work 'energetically' on each other in the things 7fire burns1 water wets1 etc471 but not in the thoughts4 ,mental activity-trains are composed of thoughts1 yet their members do work on each other3 they check1 sustain1 and introduce4 ,they do so when the activity is merely associational as well as when effort is there4 ,but1 and this is my reply1 they do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize physically4 ,one thought in every developed activity-series is a desire or thought of purpose1 and all the other thoughts acquire a feeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this4 ,the interplay of these secondary tones 7among which 'interest1' 'difficulty1' and 'effort' figure7 runs the drama in the mental series4 ,in what we term the physical drama these qualities play absolutely no part4 ,the subject needs careful working out2 but ,i can see no inconsistency4 surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps1 is1 for the more empirical way of thinking1 only animism in another shape4 ,you explain your given fact by your 'principle1' but the principle itself1 when you look clearly at it1 turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact4 ,away from that one and only kind of fact your mind1 considering causality1 can never get4#a ,footnote #a3 ,i have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity4 ,since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems1 ,i should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages ,i have published on effort and on will is absolutely foreign to what ,i meant to express4 ,i owe all my doctrines on this subject to ,renouvier2 and ,renouvier1 as ,i understand him1 is 7or at any rate then was7 an out and out phenomenist1 a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous sense4 ,single clauses in my writing1 or sentences read out of their connexion1 may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy2 but ,i defy any one to show a single sentence which1 taken with its context1 should be naturally held to advocate that view4 ,the misinterpretation probably arose at first from my having defended 7after ,renouvier7 the indeterminism of our efforts4 ',free will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent4 ,as a matter of plain history1 the only 'free will' ,i have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations4 ,if an activity-process is the form of a whole 'field of consciousness1' and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique 7as is now commonly admitted71 but has its elements unique 7since in that situation they are all dyed in the total71 then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is not pure repetition1 as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires4 ,activity-situations come1 in short1 each with an original touch4 ,a 'principle' of free will1 if there were one1 would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena1 but ,i never saw1 nor do ,i now see1 what the principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand1 or why it ever should be invoked4 ,i conclude1 then1 that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature1 as a 'category1' if you like1 of reality1 is just what we feel it to be1 just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal4 ,we have the whole butt and being of it in our hands2 and the healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation1 or what makes action act1 and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located1 of which things are the true causal agents there1 and of what the more remote effects consist4 ,from this point of view the greater sublimity traditionally attributed to the metaphysical inquiry1 the grubbing inquiry1 entirely disappears4 ,if we could know what causation really and transcendentally is in itself1 the only use of the knowledge would be to help us to recognize an actual cause when we had one1 and so to track the future course of operations more intelligently out4 ,the mere abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other inquiry equally abstract4 ,causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else4 ,it lives1 apparently1 in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute1 or in man's unconquerable mind4 ,the worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements1 be these elements things1 or be they the conjunctions of things2 it exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process1 and in the meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out4 ,my colleague and master1 ,josiah ,royce1 in a page of his review of ,stout's ,analytic ,psychology1 in ,mind for #ahig1 has some fine words on this point with which ,i cordially agree4 ,i cannot agree with his separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether 7this ,i understand to be one contention of his71 for activities are efficacious whenever they are real activities at all4 ,but the inner nature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems1 ,i understand ,royce to say2 and the only point for us in solving them would be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeper problem of the course and meaning of the world of life4 ,life1 says our colleague1 is full of significance1 of meaning1 of success and of defeat1 of hoping and of striving1 of longing1 of desire1 and of inner value4 ,it is a total presence that embodies worth4 ,to live our own lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know the elements of things2 so even we psychologists must end on this pragmatic note4 ,the urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete4 ,they all are problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span activities4 ,when1 for example1 a number of 'ideas' 7to use the name traditional in psychology7 grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness1 do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider activities then experienced by the conscious subject8 ,and1 if so1 do the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly1 or do they exert control8 ,or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them and short-circuit their effects8 ,again1 when a mental activity-process and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same muscular movement1 does the mental process steer the neural processes or not8 ,or1 on the other hand1 does it independently short-circuit their effects8 ,such are the questions that we must begin with4 ,but so far am ,i from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions1 that ,i hardly yet can put them clearly4 ,they lead1 however1 into that region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation of which ,professors ,bergson and ,strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way4 ,the results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar1 and ,i understand them as yet but imperfectly2 but ,i cannot help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising1 and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails4 ,,appendix ,c ,,on ,,the ,,notion ,,of ,,reality ,,as ,,changing ,in my ,principles of ,psychology 7vol4 ii1 p4 #fdf7 ,i gave the name of the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a serial principle of which the foundation of logic1 the dictum de omni et nullo 7or1 as ,i expressed it1 the rule that what is of a kind is of that kind's kind71 is the most familiar instance4 ,more than the more is more than the less1 equals of equals are equal1 sames of the same are the same1 the cause of a cause is the cause of its effects1 are other examples of this serial law4 ,altho it applies infallibly and without restriction throughout certain abstract series1 where the 'sames1' 'causes1' etc41 spoken of1 are 'pure1' and have no properties save their sameness1 causality1 etc41 it cannot be applied offhand to concrete objects with numerous properties and relations1 for it is hard to trace a straight line of sameness1 causation1 or whatever it may be1 through a series of such objects without swerving into some 'respect' where the relation1 as pursued originally1 no longer holds3 the objects have so many 'aspects' that we are constantly deflected from our original direction1 and find1 we know not why1 that we are following something different from what we started with4 ,thus a cat is in a sense the same as a mouse-trap1 and a mouse-trap the same as a bird-cage2 but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a cat the same as a bird-cage4 ,commodore ,perry was in a sense the cause of the new rgime in ,japan1 and the new rgime was the cause of the russian ,douma2 but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding to ,perry as the cause of the ,douma3 the terms have grown too remote to have any real or practical relation to each other4 ,in every series of real terms1 not only do the terms themselves and their associates and environments change1 but we change1 and their meaning for us changes1 so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation continually come into view and appeal to our interest4 ,our earlier lines1 having grown irrelevant1 are then dropped4 ,the old terms can no longer be substituted nor the relations 'transferred1' because of so many new dimensions into which experience has opened4 ,instead of a straight line1 it now follows a zigzag2 and to keep it straight1 one must do violence to its spontaneous development4 ,not that one might not possibly1 by careful seeking 7tho ,i doubt it71 find some line in nature along which terms literally the same1 or causes causal in the same way1 might be serially strung without limit1 if one's interest lay in such finding4 ,within such lines our axioms might hold1 causes might cause their effect's effects1 etc42 but such lines themselves would1 if found1 only be partial members of a vast natural network1 within the other lines of which you could not say1 in any sense that a wise man or a sane man would ever think of1 in any sense that would not be concretely silly1 that the principle of skipt intermediaries still held good4 ,in the practical world1 the world whose significances we follow1 sames of the same are certainly not sames of one another2 and things constantly cause other things without being held responsible for everything of which those other things are causes4 ,professor ,bergson1 believing as he does in a heraclitean 'devenir rel1' ought1 if ,i rightly understand him1 positively to deny that in the actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification4 ,not only1 according to him1 do terms change1 so that after a certain time the very elements of things are no longer what they were1 but relations also change1 so as no longer to obtain in the same identical way between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones4 ,if this were really so1 then however indefinitely sames might still be substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure sameness1 in the world of real operations every line of sameness actually started and followed up would eventually give out1 and cease to be traceable any farther4 ,sames of the same1 in such a world1 will not always 7or rather1 in a strict sense will never7 be the same as one another1 for in such a world there is no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents4 ,nor in such a world will it be true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of the effect2 for if we follow lines of real causation1 instead of contenting ourselves with ,hume's and ,kant's eviscerated schematism1 we find that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions1#a that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely1 and that the principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only in abstracto4#b ,volumes i1 ii1 and iii of the ,monist 7#ahij-ahic7 contain a number of articles by ,mr4 ,charles ,s4 ,peirce1 articles the originality of which has apparently prevented their making an immediate impression1 but which1 if ,i mistake not1 will prove a gold-mine of ideas for thinkers of the coming generation4 ,mr4 ,peirce's views1 tho reached so differently1 are altogether congruous with ,bergson's4 ,both philosophers believe that the appearance of novelty in things is genuine4 ,to an observer standing outside of its generating causes1 novelty can appear only as so much 'chance'2 to one who stands inside it is the expression of 'free creative activity4' ,peirce's 'tychism' is thus practically synonymous with ,bergson's 'devenir rel4' ,the common objection to admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly in1 ex nihilo1 they shatter the world's rational continuity4 ,peirce meets this objection by combining his tychism ,footnote #a3 ,compare the douma with what ,perry aimed at4 ,footnote #b3 ,compare ,appendix ,b1 as to what ,i mean here by 'real' casual activity4 with an express doctrine of 'synechism' or continuity1 the two doctrines merging into the higher synthesis on which he bestows the name of 'agapasticism 7loc4 cit41 iii1 #ahh71 which means exactly the same thing as ,bergson's 'volution cratrice4' ,novelty1 as empirically found1 doesn't arrive by jumps and jolts1 it leaks in insensibly1 for adjacents in experience are always interfused1 the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going1 and even numerical distinctness being realized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed4 ,the intervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction1 and all the old identities at last give out1 for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut4 ,just so1 in a curve1 the same direction is never followed1 and the conception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by supposing it to do so for however short a time4 ,peirce speaks of an 'infinitesimal' tendency to diversification4 ,the mathematical notion of an infinitesimal contains1 in truth1 the whole paradox of the same and yet the nascent other1 of an identity that won't keep except so far as it keeps failing1 that won't transfer1 any more than the serial relations in question transfer1 when you apply them to reality instead of applying them to concepts alone4 ,a friend of mine has an idea1 which illustrates on such a magnified scale the impossibility of tracing the same line through reality1 that ,i will mention it here4 ,he thinks that nothing more is needed to make history 'scientific' than to get the content of any two epochs 7say the end of the thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth century7 accurately defined1 then accurately to define the direction of the change that led from the one epoch into the other1 and finally to prolong the line of that direction into the future4 ,so prolonging the line1 he thinks1 we ought to be able to define the actual state of things at any future date we please4 ,we all feel the essential unreality of such a conception of 'history' as this2 but if such a synechistic pluralism as ,peirce1 ,bergson1 and ,i believe in1 be what really exists1 every phenomenon of development1 even the simplest1 would prove equally rebellious to our science should the latter pretend to give us literally accurate instead of approximate1 or statistically generalized1 pictures of the development of reality4 ,i can give no further account of ,mr4 ,peirce's ideas in this note1 but ,i earnestly advise all students of ,bergson to compare them with those of the french philosopher4 ,,index ,,index ,,to ,,the ,,lectures ,absolute1 the1 #di1 #ajh-aji1 #aad ff41 #agc1 #age1 #aij ff41 #bjc1 #bga1 #bib ff41 #caa2 not the same as ,god1 #aaa1 #acd2 its rationality1 #aad f42 its irrationality1 #aag-abi2 difficulty of conceiving it1 #aie4 ,absolutism1 #cd1 #ch1 #dj1 #ed1 #gb f1 #gi1 #abb1 #caj4 ,see ,monism4 ,achilles and tortoise1 #bbh1 #bee4 ,all-form1 the1 #cd1 #cbd4 ,analogy1 #h1 #aea f4 ,angels1 #afd4 ,antinomies1 #bca1 #bci4 ,,aristides1 #cjd4 ,,bailey1 ,s41 #e4 ,,bergson1 ,h41 ,lecture ,,vi1 passim4 ,his characteristics1 #bbf f1 #bff4 ',between1' #gj4 ,block-universe1 #caj1 #cbh4 ,,bradley1 ,f4,h41 #df1 #fi1 #gi1 #baa1 #bbj1 #bif4 ,brain1 #afj4 ,,caird1 ,e41 #hi1 #ie1 #acg4 ,,cato1 #cjd4 ,causation1 #beh4 ,see ,influence4 ,change1 #bca1 #bec4 ,,chesterton1 #bjc1 #cjc4 ,compounding of mental states1 #afh1 #agc1 #ahf f41 #bfh1 #bha1 #bhd1 #bib1 #bif4 ,concepts1 #bag1 #bcd f4 ,conceptual method1 #bdc f41 #bdf1 #bec4 ,concrete reality1 #bhc1 #bhf4 ,confluence1 #cbf4 ,conflux1 #beg4 ,consciousness1 superhuman1 #aef1 #caj f42 its compound nature1 #afh1 #agc1 #ahf f41 #bhi4 ,continuity1 #bef f41 #cbe4 ,contradiction1 in ,hegel1 #hi f4 ,creation1 #bi1 #aai4 ,death1 #cjc4 ,degrees1 #gd4 ,dialectic method1 #hi4 ,difference1 #beg f4 ,diminutive epithets1 #ab1 #bd4 ,discreteness of change1 #bca4 ',each-form1' the1 #cd1 #cbe4 ,earth1 the1 in ,fechner's philosophy1 #aef2 is an angel1 #afd4 ,earth-soul1 #aeb f4 ,elan vital1 #bfb4 ,empiricism1 #bfd1 #bgg2 and religion1 #cad2 defined1 #g4 ,endosmosis1 #beg4 ,epithets4 ,see ,diminutive4 ,evil1 #caj4 ,experience1 #cab2 religious1 #cjg4 ,extremes1 #fg1 #gd4 ',faith-ladder1' #cbh4 ',fall1' the1 #aai1 #caj4 ,,fechner1 ,lecture ,,iv1 passim4 ,his life1 #ade-aej2 he reasons by analogy1 #aea2 his genius1 #aed2 compared with ,royce1 #agc1 #bjg2 not a genuine monist1 #bic2 his ,god2 and religious experience1 #cjh4 ,,ferrier1 ,jas41 #ac4 ,finite experience1 #ci1 #dh1 #ahb1 #aib-aic4 ,finiteness1 of ,god1 #aaa1 #abd1 #bid4 ,foreignness1 #ca4 ,german manner of philosophizing1 #ag4 ,,god1 #bd f41 #aaa1 #abd1 #aic1 #bdj1 #bid4 ,,green1 ,t4,h41 #f1 #bd1 #acg1 #bgh4 ,,haldane1 ,r4,b41 #ach4 ,,hegel1 ,lecture ,,iii1 passim1 #aa1 #he1 #bjg1 #baa1 #bai1 #bif4 ,his vision1 #hh1 #ih f41 #ajd2 his use of double negation1 #ajb2 his vicious intellectualism #ajf2 ,haldane on1 #ach2 ,mc,taggart on1 #adj2 ,royce on1 #adc4 ,,hodgson1 ,s4,h41 #bhb4 ,horse1 #bfe4 ,,hume1 #ai1 #bfg4 ,idealism1 #cf4 ,see ,absolutism4 ,identity1 #ic4 ,immortality1 ,fechner's view of1 #aga4 ',independent' beings1 #ee1 #eh4 ,indeterminism1 #gg4 ,infinity1 #bbi4 ,influence1 #beh1 #efa4 ,intellect1 its function is practical1 #bdg f41 #beb4 ,intellectualism1 vicious1 #fj1 #bah4 ,intellectualist logic1 #baf1 #bei1 #bfa4 ,intellectualist method1 #bia4 ,interaction1 #ef4 ,intimacy1 #ca4 ,irrationality1 #ha2 of the absolute1 #aag-abi4 ,,jacks1 ,l4,p41 #ce4 ,,joachim1 ,h41 #aba1 #ada4 ,,jones1 ,h41 #eb4 ,,kant1 #ai1 #aii1 #bch1 #bdj4 ,,leibnitz1 #aai4 ,life1 #ebc4 ,log1 #cbc4 ,logic1 #ib1 #baa2 ,intellectualist1 #bag1 #bdb4 ,,lotze1 #ee1 #abj4 ,,luther1 #cjd4 ,mc,t,a,g,g,a,r,t1 #ea1 #gd f41 #abj1 #adj f41 #ahc4 ,manyness in oneness1 #cbb4 ,see ,compounding4 ,mental chemistry1 #ahe4 ,,mill1 ,j4,s41 #bdb1 #bfj4 ,mind1 dust theory1 #ahi4 ,mind1 the eternal1 #acg4 ,see ,absolute4 ,monism1 #cf1 #aag1 #abe1 #bja1 #cac1 #cba f42 ,fechner's1 #aec4 ,see ,absolutism4 ,monomaniacs1 #gh4 ,motion1 #bcc1 #bch1 #bed2 ,zeno on1 #bbh4 ,,myers1 ,f4,w4,h41 #cae4 ,nature1 #ba1 #bhf4 ,negation1 #ic f42 double1 #ajb4 ,newton1 #bfj4 ,other1 #ie1 #cab2 'its own other1' #ajh f41 #bhb4 ,oxford1 #c1 #cac1 #cca4 ,pantheism1 #bd1 #bh4 ,,paulsen1 #ah1 #bb4 ,personality1 divided1 #bih4 ,philosophers1 their method1 #i2 their common desire1 #aa f42 they must reason1 #ac4 ,philosophies1 their types1 #bc1 #ca4 ,,phocion1 #cjd4 ,plant-soul1 #afe f4 ,pluralism1 #de1 #gf1 #gi1 #caa1 #cai1 #cba f4 ,polytheism1 #caj4 ,practical reason1 #cbi4 ,psychic synthesis1 #ahe4 ,see ,compounding4 ,psychical research1 #bii4 ',qu1' #ci1 #dg1 #bfg1 #bgj4 ',quatenus1' #dg1 #bfg4 ,rationalism defined1 #g1 #ih2 its thinness1 #add1 #bcg4 ,rationality1 #ha1 #aab f41 #cai f4 ,reality1 #bfb f41 #bfd1 #bhc f4 ,reason1 #bhf1 #cab4 ,relating1 #g4 ,relations1 #gj1 #bgh ff42 'external1' #hj4 ,religious experiences1 #cje f4 ,,ritchie1 #gb4 ,,royce1 #fa f41 #aae1 #agc1 #ahb f41 #aig1 #bjg1 #bab1 #bfe1 #bif4 ,same1 #bfi1 #bha4 ,savage philosophy1 #ba4 ,science1 #ade4 ,sensations1 #bgi4 ,socialism1 #gh4 ,,socrates1 #bhd4 ,soul1 #aii1 #bji4 ',some1' #gi4 ,sphinx1 #bb4 ,,spinoza1 #dg4 ,spiritualistic philosophy1 #bc4 ,sugar1 #bbj1 #bcb4 ,synthesis1 psychic4 ,see ,compounding4 ,,taylor1 ,a4,e41 #gf1 #aci1 #bab4 ,theism1 #bd4 ,thick1 the1 #acf4 ',thickness' of ,fechner's philosophy1 #add4 ,thin1 the1 #acf4 ,thinness of the current transcendentalism1 #add1 #agd f4 ,time1 #bcb4 ,units of reality1 #bhg4 ,vision1 in philosophy1 #bj4 ,,wells1 ,h4,g41 #gh4 ,will to believe1 #cbh4 ,witnesses1 as implied in experience1 #bjj4 ,,wundt1 ,w41 #ahe4 ,,zeno1 #bbh4