Movements of Thought in the Nineteenth Century
Appendix: French Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century
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THE background of philosophy in France in the nineteenth century is, in one sense, the background of all philosophy in the nineteenth century, that of revolution and the varying reactions to it in the different communities of Europe. One reaction was found in Germany in the Romantic idealism of Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. In England the reaction was determined by the so-called Industrial Revolution. In France the background was that of a defeated Revolution -- a Revolution that had suffered a double defeat. The undertaking to establish a society or a state on a rational basis, an enterprise for which Rousseau's Contrat social furnished a model, broke down because it was found impossible to build an adequate concrete political structure on the abstract rights of man. It was defeated in the second sense because the imperialism which sprang out of this failure got its expression in Napoleon's military genius. This produced a reaction in the whole of Europe in the form of an attempt to turn the clock back. It is this double defeat more than anything else, perhaps, that characterizes the peculiar atmosphere of France during the last century.
In one respect the Revolution had been a success from the point of view of the French. It had put the land into the hands of the peasantry. The land was and remained the great source of wealth in France. The French peasantry had been fighting to get control of it. They had been carrying on lawsuits with the feudal owners of the land. And it was the peasant who was successful in the cultivation of the land. There was a marked difference between agriculture in France and in England. In England, successful agriculture was carried on by landowners who
(419) farmed large tracts. The whole tendency was to break up the small holdings and bring them under the control of a single man who would put through the improved methods of agriculture which were characteristic of England in the latter part of the eighteenth century. In France, on the other hand, the owners of the land took no interest in the cultivation of it. They were absentee landlords; they sought only the rents, which they spent in Paris. Agriculture fell back to the peasant, and he was eminently successful in his agricultural processes. He had an intense love for the land itself. He wanted to get it for himself. The whole class of yeomen had disappeared in England, and there was no passion on the part of the English peasant to get hold of the land and work it himself. The French peasant had this passion, a love for agriculture; and when he got the land, he worked it successfully. The passage of the land into the hands of the peasantry was one of the most fundamental and important results of the Revolution in France, and it was a result which could not be overthrown or put aside. In many respects it was possible to return to the old order, but even the rulers themselves with all their armies could not take the land away from the peasant. He remained in possession.
This was a result of importance to France in determining the attitude of the French nation, but it did not show itself in the reflective processes of the French nation. Those of the French people who were articulate, who could express themselves in art and literature, in philosophy and science, were not immediately touched by this change. It did not affect them.
The changes that took place in England were changes that put the control of the land into the hands of the large landowners, the men who were the controlling political body. The landowners were represented in Parliament. They had been in ,control of England ever since the Revolution in 1689. This ,party, with its control over the land, was the controlling power in England and gave the cue, in one way or another, to all the thinking, to all the artistic expression, to science and philosophy, during the eighteenth century. It was a minority of the
(420) English people, but it was a minority that was in control and that regarded itself as having got its liberty through a marvelous constitution. Its advantages were almost lyrically sung by Burke. It was the constitution of a monarchy, but of a monarchy which was under the control of Parliament. And this Parliament represented the nation, but secondarily the landowners, who bore the prestige of the people themselves. Parliament had the possibility of developing in the direction of democracy. Its possibilities worked out later in the extension of the franchise in England. But at the end of the eighteenth century the power was in the hands of the squirearchy itself, which owned the land and held the power.
Growing up in England, however, was a new class, a class which had put itself in opposition to this control of the squirearchy, the class of industrial entrepreneurs and financiers. The Industrial Revolution that was going on in England was one which, while it increased the wealth of the nation and brought groups of men into prominence and a sort of power, still left the control in the hands of Parliament and of the men who made efforts to buy holdings in order to become a part of the controlling squirearchy of England. So the ideas and ideals of the eighteenth century about the control of the land were maintained during the years of the nineteenth century. The reconstruction that was taking place was not deep; but it was through the class of mill-owners and manufacturers and financiers that this change, such as it was, took place at all. It was brought about through the labor movement which began early in the century and which presented a new social problem to England.
That is the picture that we have of the development which was taking place in England as over against what was occurring in France. In France the land itself had passed into the hands of the peasantry, out of the hands of the nobility. The nobility were largely deprived of the land they had had in the past. They became a landless aristocracy. Many of them were provided with estates; but as a class the aristocracy was ousted from the land, and the peasantry came into possession of it and
(421) it was the first source of wealth in France. Land being the primary source of wealth, and being so effectively cultivated by the peasants, the wealth from it increased. The land itself, with the wealth that went with it, represented the inarticulate part of French society, a group that had espoused revolution to get control of the land. It had been swept on by the abstract ideas of Rousseau, but its interests lay not in political reconstruction but in rights that the peasants themselves had got by entering into their new holdings. The peasants having attained that result, their interest in the Revolution largely subsided, after the excitement of Napoleonic imperialism.
Thus the changes that took place during the early part of the nineteenth century in France were changes that were not motivated by the mass of the French people. They were largely revolutions in Paris; they took place in Paris and the other large communities. There was no interest in them that took hold of the French people as a whole. The people had planted themselves on the soil and were, for the time being, satisfied with the exploitation of their new possessions. This situation did not lead to any profound reconstruction from the point of view of the thought of the world, such as that which took place in Germany, in Italy, and in England during the Industrial Revolution. The people themselves had changed the attitude when, from being feudal tenants, they had become the owners of the soil, and their attention was turned back to the political movements going on. That is the feeling one has with reference to the changes that took place in France. They were superficial in character, for the great number of the people in France were not interested in them. The thought out of which they developed, the expressions that were given to the national life, were expressions which did not reach down in the great masses of the French people themselves.
The changes that had taken place in Germany were more profound, because the Revolution continued to be felt in Germany. The small states - the small dynastic states-were too numerous to be reconstituted. Many had to pass over into the
(422) control of the larger states. Here a political change was going on which affected the mass of the community in a profound fashion. Particularly, it brought liberty to the great states in the German part of Europe. First of all to Austria and then to Prussia, those two states which became rivals. That movement went on finally to the formation of the German Empire. It was a movement which was profound because for the first time it was bringing German nationalism to articulate expression. It is that which lies behind Romantic idealism. France and England and Spain had attained nationalist sentiment and consciousness two centuries earlier. But Germany was divided up into dynastic states. The principle of the organization of these states was dynastic, not national. It did not turn about the national heritage of the people. They were of the same race, had the same traditions. But they were subjects of different dynasties, and it was about these that the organization of the communities gathered. For a time an attempt was made to turn the clock back through control of Europe by Metternich, backed by the czar. This control laid emphasis against all these small dynasties and their communities; but the map of Europe could not be reconstituted as it was before the Revolution and before Napoleonic pressure in the Rhine districts. The small dynastic states had been broken down. Their people had been affected by their contact with the French. The ferment of the Revolution had been more active there than elsewhere in Europe. People in that part of Europe continued to feel tendencies toward that national expression which, during the war of liberation, found its most effective expression through the Prussian state. It was a Prussian state which was a means of bringing to successful consciousness a sense of nationalism.
The great exponent of nationalism at that period was Fichte in his addresses to the German people. These were not to the Prussians as such; they were addressed to the German people. Fichte undertook to bring to the German people the awareness that their peculiar nature was a part of their peculiar heritage.
(423) He pointed out what their task in the civilization of a feudal world was and was to be. It was the efficiency of the Prussian administration that gave a certain popular character to this uplift which took place in the struggle to throw the French out of Germany. The Prussian state could take over the institutions and developments as though they were the expression of the German nation, though they were not such politically. Prussia could give instruction, and the army could be made a national institution. The schools and the army were the two institutions by means of which the Prussian people and the Germans in general, so far as they were affected by what was going on in Germany as a whole, got control of governmental authority. This authority was in direct control. It was in control in so far as it fostered the spread of intelligence, the development of public schools, and the undertaking to make the intelligence of the community in some sense the director of the life of the state itself. Frederick the Great undertook to develop a state which was eminently intelligent. But a new end was brought into the life of the people with the institution of a national army which should take in all those that were capable of bearing arms. As was the case with the school, the whole of the youth of Germany should be brought into the army, in which they would be trained for their national life. Prussia, therefore, although it was an autocratic state, although all the power belonged to the monarch, as such, was a state which was undertaking to train its citizenry not for fighting alone but for intelligent political life. During the period of the war of nationalization there was an intense national life which spread from Prussia throughout Germany. That was the spirit which got its expression in the Romantic philosophy. Thus, while this philosophy was a system of great profundity, while it lay beyond the comprehension of the masses of the people, it was also an expression of the spiritual life that came up from the people themselves.
On the other hand, in England we have a development in which the national movement was brought into the life of the community, of the masses, not through those that owned the
(424) land but by the urban laborers, the factory laborers. They had been brought together in organizations, in trade-unions, that gave a sense of understanding which the masses of the people had never had before in England. The labor movement reached all the way down into English society. It was a movement which got its expression in industrial strife, and that industrial strife got its expression in Parliament. As a result, the development of English democracy throughout the nineteenth century had been what it so evidently is today, a national movement. That movement also got its expression in a philosophy, that of the utilitarians, Bentham and the Mills. It was a philosophy which was capable of a simple statement; it was one that could find its place among the trade-unions themselves, one that could get its expression in the movement toward free trade, in the demand for cheap bread, and the demand for internationalism by way of free trade. It was a movement that was connected with the political and philosophical thought of the community itself, reaching out beyond England to other communities.
It is in contrast with those two countries-England and Germany-that I want to put the French community. The result of the political revolution was of profound importance for the French people. France, like Germany, was affected in some degree by the Industrial Revolution. But France was not as much affected as Germany. In Germany there arose the socialist theory which took hold of the masses of the people, for in Germany the factory system worked itself out earlier and gave the background for the development of the Marxian doctrine. But in France the wealth lay in the soil. The manufacturing in France was of luxuries. The products did not get into the wholesale markets. In England the peasants had been loosened from the soil. They were free to go to the city. When England began the development of coal and iron, she had a supply of labor that was glad to work at starvation wages. In France the peasantry were satisfied to remain on the soil. There was little of the large production which was essential for the development of the national labor movement as such. This movement got its
(425) expression in trade-unionism in England and in socialism in Germany. Both were popular movements; both got into politics. But the labor of the French peasant was not affected by the political situation. It was only in so far as taxation bore on him that he was interested in the political situation as such.
As I have said, the attempt during the nineteenth century was to put the clock back. In France men returned to the spiritual order of the church, the Catholic church. Nationalism, so far as it expressed itself, was a chronological expression. France went back to the medieval situation, not exactly as the Germans went back to it or as the English went back to it, in a romantic attitude, but to find an expression of the society of France itself. The Revolution had been a failure politically. From the point of view of its transfer of the land to the peasant it had been a success, but politically it had been a failure. It failed to reorganize society on the rational lines that had been its goal. The religion of reason, which went with the French Revolution, had a life of only a few duties, and, when the latter failed, men drifted back to the church, which again became the center of the life of the community as such when men turned back in a romantic fashion to the medieval period, but with the sophisticated attitude that belongs to the beginning of the nineteenth century. They went back to rediscover in the medieval period something which they felt they had lost, something which was different from the experience of those who lived during the medieval centuries. That life had been a direct life. The attitude of the romanticist when he returned to it was one of appreciation and enjoyment. It was an aesthetic reaction. All the paraphernalia of the religious service was looked at from the point of view of men who had been estranged from it and returned to it, and who undertook to appreciate it with the new attitude that they had gained. They were playing the roles of people in the medieval period.
Another phase of the Revolution in France must be kept in mind. France exhausted itself emotionally in the Napoleonic period. The enthusiasm in the French armies had arisen out of
(426) the sentiment of defense against the outsider. Here you have the peasants with the same sentiment as that found later in the Russian peasants, who, without interest in the government as such, were determined to hold on to the land which they had secured. They were ready to fight battles against invaders and protect themselves. They proved themselves the most effective infantry in Europe, 'and they had a great general. Out of this arose Napoleonism in France. It became identified with Napoleon himself. He was not a dynast; he did not represent the history of France. The justification for his position was that he made possible a larger community that otherwise would not have existed. He brought together people separated socially, geographically, but who still recognized themselves as belonging to the same community because they were subjects of the same monarch. The dynast, the emperor, had been the center of the social organization during the medieval period. He was the symbol of Europe as a single society. While having slight political power., he stood as an impressive symbol of a larger community -- a community that was surpassed only by the church, one which might take in the whole human race, which was organized about the church. The dynast in the position of the emperor was the political symbol of that larger community.
We must go back to France or England in the feudal period to realize what the monarchy meant. Means of communication were slight, customs were different, different dialects were spoken. There was no organization, no France, no England as a whole; but through the monarch it was possible for the feudal tenant, the serf, to recognize himself as having a relation to everyone else inside the national bounds. Running up the line to the monarch was a community made up of parts, of different elements, that were hostile to each other. Thus, only the monarchy made possible national life in Napoleon's opposition to the feudal order. In France the Bourbons, and in England the Plantagenets, were able to root out the feudal order and make a national life possible. We must remember this in order to recognize the importance of the dynasty Napoleon wanted to step
(427) into. This would have identified France with himself. But he could not do it, for his hold on the people was not a historic hold. He represented a revolution; he had overthrown the old state and broken down the principle of authority; and when he undertook to place himself on the historic throne of France and make himself the representative of the line of the oldest dynastic family in Europe and to make his peace with the people which had the longest tradition in Europe, he failed. All the emotional life that he was able to arouse had been spent in the glory which victory produced, in a sense of enlargement that came with the enlarged empire. It was impossible that this should remain. The country broke away; and when France came back to its own boundaries, Napoleon was a stranger. He could not be the symbol of national life. He undertook to carry over the efficiency of the Prussian state. He showed a genius comparable 'to his military genius in the reorganization of the state on the basis of an autocracy which undertook to control everything. The schools were turned into barracks. There was the same training of the child that there was of the soldier in the army. The whole state was organized with great efficiency, and Napoleon was the center of it all. He undertook to pass over into the field of the arts, to get an expression for the principle of his state in the field of philosophy, to direct the life of the community itself. He gathered about himself literary men and women. The philosophers, he thought, could be utilized in the organization of France as the monarchy of Napoleon. But in all this he failed.
The one hold he had on the community was that of his military genius and success. The Revolution had done its work. It had overturned the earlier state, and Napoleon could not set up that state again arbitrarily. The emotion of the French people was exhausted. They had been on a long military debauch. Their operations in the field, the glory of their victories, the plunder they had brought back from Europe, were the signs of that debauch, and they were exhausted. The one pre-eminent change which had taken place besides the breakdown of Na-
(428) -poleon's hold was the passage of the land into the hands of the peasant, and the peasant was now indifferent to what went on. The masses of the people were outside of the life that went on among the intellectuals. There was no connection between the literary, philosophical thought of the time and the mass of the French peasantry. Napoleon had almost decimated France by filling his army with those who could bear arms; he had materially weakened her physically; he had decreased the population of France by his continual warfare. But those who were left remained on the soil and were satisfied, so that when the Bourbons were put on the throne and undertook to turn the clock back they found that France was exhausted and the mass of the citizens were indifferent to what went on. Thus, while there was a rich life in Germany and nationalism expressed itself in vivid ways -- national literature sprang up there and science flourished in a remarkable degree in France there was the deadness of the morning after. There was the interest of the people in the soil itself. They were looking down and not up. They were satisfied with what they had and were not looking ahead. They did not wish to carry on the life of the old Napoleonic state. I think it is necessary to appreciate this situation in order that we may realize the comparative poverty of spiritual development in France as compared with that which took place in Germany and in England.
II
The enthusiasm of the Romantic period, as it turned back to the medieval period, was expressed in England and in Germany. In France what occurred was the return of an army which was melancholy and defeated. The great expression of the romantic movement in France was religious. In this connection there are two or three figures of importance for the time. De Bonald and De Maistre represented a return to the philosophy of the people -an attempt to restate the medieval philosophy, that which belonged to the period of the twelfth and thirteenth century. They restated it from the standpoint of France in the nine-
(429) -teenth century. They were both men of imagination, men of very great intellectual power and of supreme devotion. They took the fact of the religious organization of the community most seriously. What they undertook to show was that no community could exist except through religion; that the only bond that could hold men together was the church; that the church was the presupposition of society. They found themselves not in touch with the historical development of the church in France itself however. The Gallican movement in France, which answered to the Reformation, left the monarch in power within a national church. That movement was, of course, entirely outside of the conception of life represented by De Bonald and De Maistre. They fell back onto the conception of the Holy Roman Empire as representing the single community of Christendom. In its time it was the oldest possible organization of Christendom as such. Europe had been broken into feudal states which were more or less hostile toward each other. Only from the point of view of the church could all the tenants, the serfs , the underlings, conceive of themselves as belonging to a single community. There was, in the medieval period, the presupposition that society must have a religious basis. Only the church could make Christendom possible. However, the further the development of this organization went, the more it tended toward the national church, and rulers undertook to get control of it within their own boundary. So far as the church represented the spiritual organization of the community, the state insisted on having its hands on it. So Louis XIV and Henry VIII were acting logically when they undertook to set up national churches inside the Catholic church. That was possible in France; in England it was not possible, and a complete separation took place. The return of De Bonald and De Maistre to the Catholic tradition, their attempt to revive the conception of the thirteenth century, was an inevitable failure. They influenced religious schools and convinced those who did not need to be convinced, but the mass of the people was not touched by them.
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Chateaubriand came forward with a work which was superficial as compared with the arguments of De Bonald and De Maistre. He presented Christianity as a civilizing power, a humanizing power; he appealed to the aesthetic phase of Christianity and called out the aesthetic response in the process of worship itself; his was essentially a sentimental reaction. For the time being, however, it had very considerable influence in Paris among the intellectuals. It was distinctly a romantic movement, but not one which had its roots in the past life of the community. Chateaubriand failed to connect with De Bonald and De Maistre. The latter were undertaking to bring. back the church of the thirteenth century; the former, to bring men into the church of the nineteenth century, a church which was Gallican, national, and opportunistic in its relations to Napoleon; a church which had lost the philosophy of its earlier life; a church which did not have the consciousness of being the organizing principle in the whole of Europe. That proud consciousness did belong to the people, and its hierarchy could be aroused again in the nineteenth century. But the only approach Chateaubriand could make to the church was on the sentimental side. De Bonald and De Maistre represented an interest in the development of the church itself. Their doctrine was planted in the dogma of the church; Chateaubriand appealed to the ritual.
III
The philosophy of the French Revolution was represented in the pre-revolutionary days by Voltaire and Rousseau. The group of men who gathered about them were called Encyclopedists, after the Encyclopedists who represented the Enlightenment in France, The philosophy which lay back of them was imported from England. Voltaire had carried over from England the philosophy of Locke and put it on French soil. In this period those who were found within this school were called "idealogues." They stood for the ultimacy of a state of consciousness, an impression, a sensation. What Locke undertook
(431) to do was to analyze experience into simple elements, and then to find how our experience, especially our collective experience, arose.
It is interesting to see that It was the philosophy of Locke that was carried over to France rather than that of Berkeley and that of Hume, both of whom represented developments of the Lockian philosophy. But the transplantation of this English philosophy by Voltaire and others was taken from Locke. To see this is to see that the hold French thought got of this philosophy was superficial. The development that went on from Locke through Berkeley and Hume was an essential, logical development. The contradictions which were involved in the Lockian statement came out in the subjective idealism of Berkeley and in the criticism of Hume. For Locke, all our knowledge falls into sensations and impressions -- those of the outer sense, and those of the inner sense. The outer appears to us in our sensations and contacts-those of color, sound, taste, and odor. The inner impressions are those that come from our processes of thought, from our emotional life, from the action of desire and of will. From Locke's standpoint, the mind is a mosaic of these impressions. His interest was to take our ideas, or presuppositions of thought, and break them up into ultimate elements, and then to show the connections that lie between these ultimate elements. The first orientation was that of a philosopher who is fighting the doctrine of innate ideas, a sort of superficial neo-Platonism of the time, one which was used by the church and by political philosophers. This philosophy lost the profundity of the Platonism from which it sprang. It located the idea, as such, in the mind and presented the mind as a tablet on which were written certain fundamental ideas. Locke's ideas were oriented by his opposition to the doctrine of innate ideas, His position was that there was nothing in the mind that had not previously been in the senses. Everything was reduced to sensations, to impressions. The memory had impressions of the outer sense and also the inner sense.
Ideology and the philosophy which it presented in France
(432) were brought over from England through the translation of the works of Locke, without the recognition of the development which had taken place as represented by Berkeley and Hume. The emphasis lay upon analysis, so-called. The interest behind this was the elimination of the abstract idea. You remember, in one sense, these three were all nominalists. They assumed that the abstract idea, the universal, had no further existence than was found in the association of certain symbols with different individual things. The problem involved in the similarity between particular things was passed over. They insisted that in the process of thinking the mind was dealing with particulars and with the association of these particulars with each other.
The interest in the problem which the French of this period had was in getting rid of the abstractions about which religious, ecclesiastical, and governmental theories gathered. Was there such a thing as absolute divine right? Were there such things as transubstantiation, ideas of which could only be presented in terms of particular objects? The theology, the political science, of the period dealt with speculations from these particular objects. Did these abstractions have a unity in themselves, or did one have to come back to particular experience? The Idealogues welcomed a philosophy which analyzed experience into ultimate elements of sensation, which came back simply to particular experiences as such and advanced the abstractions which were built into the theories and political doctrines of the time. The ideological philosophy was regarded, then, as the philosophy of the Revolution. It was used by Voltaire in his attacks on the church; by Rousseau, and those who were influenced by Rousseau, in showing that the state was actually an organization of individuals. As they conceived of it, the state existed only in the contract between individuals, There was no such thing as the unity of the state as such. There were the individuals that made up the state and the relationship that existed between these individuals. You see how this simplified the problem, especially as it involved an attack on the whole institution. From the standpoint of the medieval period there
(433) were universals. These universals existed in the mind of God; on earth, in our own minds. About these universals the whole doctrine of the church and state was gathered. If one could attack those universals and substitute for them individuals and their experience and the relations that existed between them, one could exorcise those abstract units and come back to what seemed the immediate situation, that is, to men and women associated in various ways. The universals were to be found in the images of these men, in their particular relations. These were to be brought into the mind. Institutional organizations were to be analyzed into the physical relationships of people. The problem of empirical philosophy as it appeared in England and in France was, then, essentially this.
That this philosophy did not bring about political revolution in England, as in France, was due to the difference in the political situation. In a certain sense, that revolution had been going on in England ever since the Puritan Revolution. The people were conscious of a change taking place. There had been the institution of Parliament, with its representation in the counties. However inadequate that might be for the absolute power of the crown, the crown was no longer necessary for holding together an English community. Parliament with its powers accomplished what the crown had accomplished. The revolution was taking place. Furthermore, England was, after all, a Protestant community. There was a state church; there were also dissenting bodies; and a large proportion of the population of England was found in these dissenting churches. They were free to carry out their own process of worship. There was no organization or group of people in an ecclesiastical organization that undertook to determine what their ideas of the world should be. The people were free to formulate their own theology. They were, of course, subject to various political disabilities, but still they could carry on their own religious life. That battle had been fought through; and they were left, in that sense, free. The revolution had, in its essentials, taken place in England.
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The French thinkers were satisfied with the application of this empiricism. This does not mean that the French mind was less profound in itself. You have only to turn back to the period of the Renaissance to realize how profound a philosophical power the French mind has. This attitude indicates that the interest of the French mind was turned toward the revolution, a revolution which, as I have said, had in its essentials already happened in England. The problem, then, was a different problem. The philosophy was one which could be used by individuals, by the revolutionists, for the disintegration of the institutions which they were trying to pull down. It could be used for the theory of the reconstruction of the institutions that they proposed to put in their place. Philosophy existed in their minds for that purpose; and when they had mastered the idea enough to be able to use it in this analysis, they had no further interest in it. Their interest lay in the revolution they were undertaking; it did not lie immediately in philosophy itself.
IV
After the revolution, when the restoration took place, there appeared philosophies of the church, reconstructions of the doctrine of the institution built on the previous ideas of the church and state. These were formulated by De Bonald and De Maistre, as we have already mentioned; and they were consistent and very able doctrines. They turned on the empirical philosophy of the time and insisted that it was skeptical, that it made knowledge impossible, that it reduced man to a simple congeries of separate sensations. It was known as "sensualism" instead of the philosophy of sensation. Man was reduced to the sensations out of which he was built up, and nature was reduced to the set of experiences that people had.
For a time, ideology remained the philosophy as far as philosophy existed in France. It had sunk to a very low ebb. It almost disappeared from the universities. But where it was taught, it was taught in terms of ideology. There were, however, those that were interested in carrying this philosophy
(435) through to certain skeptical results like those of Hume. But even they were rather interested in the psychological problem and wanted a psychological analysis revealed. Cabanis and De Tracy pointed out that there were elements in experience of which Hume took no account, elements which did not appear in the analysis of substance and of cause. This content was the content of activity. If the analysis had been carried through to that point, it would have gone on to criticize Hume's skepticism as reducing experience to a set of instantaneous presents. These men made their statement in terms of factors present in activity itself and in an analysis of conception as involving something besides passivity. They recognized that in perception we are passive so far as the qualities of sensation are concerned. But, they said, our knowledge of these involves an act, and this act is something more than mere association. In that respect they were taking a step in advance. They were advancing toward the psychology of education as distinct from the psychology of association. In one sense they were advancing ahead of their time. In England it is not until after the period, or during the later period, of John Stuart Mill that the theory of education is recognized.
The interest in this type of analysis in France took quite different forms. The sensationalism of Condillac was the philosophy of the Revolution. It was an attempt to get back to ultimate elements so that they might be reconstructed. His interest was in the analysis of the governing ideas in the French community. What was wished was to get back to more primitive, immediate elements so that a plan of reconstruction could be set up. The reconstruction of the Revolution was a failure, of course. The analytic discussion of the older ideas was successful. It is this difference in attitude which one must keep in mind in comparing these philosophies. The result, from the philosophical standpoint, was that the position of Condillac seems superficial. He was not interested in such problems as Hume was interested in. He was interested in the immediate application that could be made of this analysis in testing and over-
(436) -throwing the structure of church and state. After the revolution, with its
failure, came the restoration and the philosophy of the reaction. That philosophy was
expressed by men who did not simply accept ideas but who undertook to formulate them with
their implications. It had, however, a definite political and practical social interest at
that time, just as the philosophy of Condillac had had a political and social interest.
The later philosophy was naturally the direct opposite of the revolution. It denied the
rights of man-there were no such things as rights which inhere in the individual; it
denied the independent existence of the individual; it went back to a society which was
organized for the church on the authoritarian basis. It was quite powerfully presented. It
represented, however, the philosophy of reaction; and, beyond its rather successful attack
on the philosophy of sensationalism, it had no political effect in French thought. It was
succeeded by a new movement whose chief figure was Guyau, with a connecting link in
Royer-Collard.
V
Royer-Collard was a lawyer by profession. He became a philosopher late in life. What he brought to French thought was the attitude of the Scottish common-sense school, the school of reason. This school was that of the individualists, and was the dominant philosophy in American colleges fifty years ago. As indicated by the term "common sense," it appealed to the common judgment of the community as carrying with it a conclusion which should be accepted, and accepted as final, as that which is always true. Of course, there must be some sort of philosophical background in so abstract a statement as this; and this was found in what was a different statement of the process of knowledge itself. The doctrine of knowledge as it appeared in the empirical school is found in the relationship of impressions and ideas. In the first place, the empiricists would say that having an idea or impression and knowing an idea or impression are the same thing. It is there in consciousness; that is all there is to it. It carries its own existence with it. The impressions are
(437) connected with memory images. By the process of association they are connected with other impressions that occur at the same time. If one sees an object with which he is familiar, there arise other impressions with which he is familiar and which are like it; there arise impressions of other things that have been associated with it in space and time in the past. When one observes a place, certain memories of persons he has seen there appear. This relation of ideas and impressions to others comes to take the place of knowledge, or what we mean by knowledge. Knowledge is reduced to the relations of the impressions and ideas to each other as they lie in the mind.
It was assumed by the rationalists that we have, besides that knowledge of things which is present in the mind, knowledge of things to which this refers. Beyond our immediate experience there are things that appear in that experience. For example, there was the assumption that we know there is such a thing as "matter." Our experience of matter is only in our sensations. They lie in the mind. But there is back of these sensations some substance that we call "matter." We experience our own experiences. We have memory of our own experiences. But we are supposed to know that back of these states of consciousness lies a mind, a conscious mind, a substantial spiritual something in which these experiences inhere. And we are supposed to know that there are causal relations, as well as substantial relations, in the world. We have a set of ideas such as those of unity, multiplicity; we have all the logical concepts as such; and we are supposed to know that they unify our knowledge. And from these ideas and concepts we deduce results that follow or not because of the nature of the laws indicated. That is, it was assumed that we have a knowledge of what lies beyond the impresssions. What the empirical school did was to carry back, step by step, all this inference of something beyond experience to the simple relationship of impressions and ideas that lie inside of experience.
The most striking result of this analysis was Hume's attempt to show that the causal relation of things was nothing but the
(438) pictures that arise in our mind -- a succession of impressions one after another. If in the past we find one event following another and this has been repeated, then we expect that it will happen again. That is all there is to the law of causality. It does not show that every cause must have a certain effect, every effect a cause; that there must be like causes for like effects; that there must be an adequate cause for every effect. We do not know this as a law of the universe. What we find is this fixed expectation -- an expectation that comes so frequently, so unconsciously, that we are not aware of it. When the sun rises, there will be day; when it sets, there will be night. If we follow the course of these events, there will be only certain anticipated results. You can see the result of all this was to resolve knowledge as such into the mere relation of impressions and ideas to each other, remembering that I am using the term "idea" in Hume's sense as merely the copy of the impression. Every image must, of course, be of the same character as the impression itself.
The change that is involved in the position of Reid and the Scottish school is to bring back knowledge as the immediate relationship between the mind and an object. Reid recognizes what has been called the "inner sense." According to Reid, we can have knowledge of something that is not given in the state of consciousness itself. The intuitional character of the Scottish school of philosophy lies in this: With experience we have an immediate knowledge of something that is not given in the state of consciousness, in the mind, at the time. In this sense the school seems to hark back to Locke's position. What the intuitional school said was that we have an immediate intuition of the table as extended and as solid; that this knowledge as such is an immediate relationship between the mind and the object. There is no association of common impressions and ideas with other impressions and ideas. There is a cognition of something that is not in a given state of consciousness. If the Scottish school were asked to explain this, they would say you cannot go behind it. We just know. Ask them to explain seeing, or vision, or color, or sound, or taste, or odor. They are
(439) there; we know them. That is a position that you cannot overthrow. But this school had to recognize that matter does not have the characters which appear in our vision, in our hearing, in our taste, in our sense of temperature. That which answers to color is motion; that which answers to odor is change; what answers to sound are vibrations of the air. Now these physical characters are not what appear in experience. Color, sound taste, and odor are not motion; they are not chemical structure' So, the Scottish school had to answer the assumption that these lie in the mind and are applied to physical things that we immediately know. In these experiences we are subject to all sorts of possible errors. The extended matter is there; sound, color, taste, depend on surroundings. Put it in one surrounding, and matter has color; in another, it has not. There are possibilities, then, of error; and the Scottish thinkers had no way of accounting for them.
Royer-Collard carried over into French philosophy the doctrine of common sense, but he gave a somewhat different interpretation to it. He dealt with common sense in so far as there is uniformity in everyone's judgment. This recalls Kant's assumption or implication that minds have universal character. It is not simply that they have common forms but that there is some general consciousness of which all the different minds are different expressions. This is an implication of a good deal of the Kantian doctrine, although Kant himself did not carry it out. He avoided these implications so far as he could. Something of this sort becomes evident in the statement which Royer-Collard made of the common-sense school. He comes back to the statement, to the assumption, that we have immediate knowledge of that which is outside of ourselves and that that knowledge is simply given; it is there, We can verify what is immediately given by common sense-that in which everybody else agrees. This French transportation of the doctrine of common sense across the channel carried with it an assumption of a common consciousness in which different minds agree, from which, in some sense, different minds arise. The characteristics which be-
(440) -long to this common experience are given, in a certain sense, in advance of that which takes place in the separate experience. Thus we have a statement in France of the Kantian transcendentalism -the logical priority of certain characters of the mind. That is one striking difference between the doctrine of the Scottish school of Reid and his followers as it appeared in the British Isles and the doctrine as introduced in France.
There is another character also that belonged to this philosophy and which became emphasized later. That is the element of activity, especially in our normative states. This arises in some sense out of a criticism of the empirical school. As we have seen for the empiricists having an idea and knowing it or having an impression and knowing it are the same thing. There is no difference. So far as our impressions are concerned, what they insisted on was that we are passive. You open a door to enter a room. If you have never been there before, you do not know what you are going to see, what the furniture will be, what the decorations will be. Furthermore, you have no initiative in the matter. You open the door, there is a light in the room, and you see what is in it; but you are quite passive in that experience. The experience which will come to you is something of which you will be aware, but you will have done nothing about it. Having sensation and knowing are the same thing from the point of view of the empirical school.
What the French school insisted on with growing emphasis was the distinction between cognition and perception. They admitted that, as far as the sensations are concerned, we are quite passive. No one can, by willing, have a sensation of a certain type any more than he can add a cubit to his stature. If the object is there and the eyes open, one will have a sensation, one is passive in regard to it. The act of cognition, on the other hand, is not passive. It is knowing. If my relationship to this table is not simply the presence in my mind of a set of impressions but is a knowledge that the table is there, then that knowledge is the result of an active process. It is not a simple report of a set of sensations. What that means is that the mere
(441) having of a set of perceptions is different from knowing the table. In the latter the analysis must be carried on farther if one is to say that the case is correct. Getting a glimpse of a face, one sees an acquaintance. When he meets the person he finds it is someone else whom he has never met. He has made a mistake. Our perceptual process and conceptional processes are passive in regard to the elements over which we have no control. But we are continually building things up. If we are taking certain experiences from the past, we have at the time relatively few impressions that are immediate. We are experiencing what the last impressions meant and what they imply for the future. We start off with an image, a sensation; and we expect something. We bind the whole thing in our perception. We set up the objects we look for next.
There were, then, these two elements in this French school; the taking-over of the Scottish school with its immediate knowledge of something, the acceptance of common sense, as, in a certain sense, the criterion of that which we are sure we know; and, in the second place, the emphasis on the presence of activity. It is these factors that distinguish the sensationalists of the period and represent the difference between them and the Ideologues on the one hand and the eclecticism of Cousin on the other.
VI
One point I want to impress on you is that all French philosophy of the period had a political bias. It is only natural that that should be the case. France had been overthrown by political speculation in a certain sense. The French Revolution was called the revolution of the philosophers-Rousseau, Voltaire. They were the philosophers of revolution. When the Revolution had been carried out, the reaction came, and with it a philosophy that undertook to put back the old world. Then there grew up a liberal school that tried to establish something on the political side like that already achieved in England. In England you find a philosophical detachment. The constitution seems to reflect a permanent political order. There were relative
(442) freedom and development. People were at liberty to speculate without asking for the political implications of their speculations, but that was not the situation in France.
I want to call your attention again to the fact that the stream of French life was flowing not through Paris but through the experience of the peasants. They represented the mass of the French people, and through the revolution they had got the soil and were occupied in the cultivation of it with a passion that belonged to the life of the French peasants. In this they are different from the English peasants. They were satisfied. They were not interested in what was going on in Paris. Thus, much of the thought of the period was superficial, as far as the consciousness of the French as a whole is concerned. This is characteristic of the whole period in France. The changes taking place in England went all the way through; and although there the expressions are the expressions of the upper class, they were felt by the whole country. A minority was in control, but their control affected the life of the whole group. They carried the community with them, and they had a sense of the racial life that they were directing. The profoundest experience in the French public lay below the surface; and what took place on the surface, while it was picturesque and had back of it men of talent and ability, did not represent the deeper currents. It has been only very slowly that the French people have passed over into political life, passed over by means of institutions which were brought in from the outside, which were not their own.
The movement from this earlier position to which I have just referred took place by way of Royer-Collard. He made a common consciousness, rather than a common assent, the characteristic of the process of knowledge. It was a movement, as I pointed out, that lies within the Kantian movement. It goes back to something that is transcendent. It implies a common character which belongs to all consciousness, to all intelligence-something which is logically there in advance of cognitive experiences themselves. This was not worked out in any such metaphysical theory as it finally received in the German
(443) idealists, but it is definitely implied; and what Royer-Collard came back to in his lectures is something that is common in the attitude of everyone, something that is common in consciousness itself. It was a test of what is true.
The other feature of his philosophy to which I have referred and which was emphasized by other writers was that of activity, and here he was in advance of the English movement. His emphasis was placed upon the ego, upon the self. For him ego has substance, which is soul. If you deal with it in terms of substance, it is that in which states of consciousness exist. But the soul is more especially that which organizes experience or that which is a statement of a process of organization. The soul, you may say, is an ego; but it is a substantial ego in which inhere the different states of consciousness whose faculties express themselves in the conduct of the individual. But the soul lies back of the states of consciousness as a substance which is unknowable and as a function whose faculties express the soul lying behind the idea. The act of volition takes place; the man is responsible for what he does; but the process of volition itself is the self. The self has wanted; has felt; has been affected. That is the ego of the older metaphysics, especially with its teleological implications. This principle of the activity of the soul comes into the process of consciousness as something that is going on, not as something that is simply an expression of a substantial entity that lies back behind the sensation. It is something that is going on.
Here Royer-Collard simply gives an emphasis to a phase of experience; he does not work out his doctrine. We have only a report on his so-called "second year" in philosophy, and his influence was one that came to those who listened to his lectures rather than those who read his book. But lie makes a connecting link between the philosophy of the revolution, which was destructive in character, and the latter thought. The point at which he may be said definitely to depart in his emphasis, at least from the philosophy which he had taken over, was in this conception of a common consciousness and common will, and
(444) not in the concept of an activity going on in experience itself which, therefore, is not stated in terms of associations which are already there, and which is not to be stated in terms of a substance. For the psychology of association the process as such has already taken place; the association is simply an inference of organization which is already there. You bring up things by association. You are allowing a relationship which is already in existence to apply itself. You have met a person at a certain place; you pass the place, and the memory of the previous event comes back to you. You are allowing the structure which is already there simply to express itself. It is not a process; it is not an activity in itself. The psychology of Royer-Collard, as it expressed itself later, comes back to what is going on. It is the impulse that is taking place expressing itself. That is found in attention as such. It creates relationships, sets up relationships, or) in finding relations, organizes them. It is active in a manner in which activity cannot be found in the associational statement. But it is this activity which is emphasized at this period.
It is the activity which gathers about the ego, the self, as it represents an interest in the study of the self in its psychological experiences, which has been characteristic of French thought from that time on. We find also, an interest in memoirs, an interest of the sort which gets expression in Montaigne; but that is a characteristic of the French of an earlier period. They, too, were looking for an activity which goes on in the inner life of the individual. They make use of introspection, but as a different process from that used by John Stuart Mill. The difference has to do with emphasis again, with the sort of problem for which introspection is used. Introspection is still used by the English school in the interest of the solution of the epistemological problem. It come-, back to an analysis of sensation and perception. The interest in the French school comes back to the life of the individual himself, at this period to the salvation, the glorification, the affirmation, of himself. It took account of the record of the experience of philosophy as it goes back into the past. That interest in history is also characteristic of the Ro-
(445) -mantic movement. Introspection as we connect it with this earlier psychology is a distinct affair. It has to do with experimentation that starts off with extreme abstractions and qualitatively susceptible differences. It is a different affair from the introspection of the English thinkers and writers of this period. Those who were working under the general idea of introspection were endeavoring to get back to their own selves, to find out what they were, and to try to evaluate themselves. It represents a process of evaluation of spiritual experiences rather than the process of locating certain cognitive experiences.
VII
Every philosophy and every philosopher appearing in France during this period has a political status. This is notable in the figure Cousin. He had a career in which there was difficulty. He expressed the attitude of the monarchy of Louis Philippe and the school of the bourgeoisie, of those who were seeking security and still were attempting to hold on to that which was valuable from the standpoint of the Revolution. They did not break with the Revolution, as the reactionary school had. They insisted that what it undertook to achieve -- liberty -- was essential to the life of the individual, to the life of the soul. But it was a liberty which had to be stated in terms of conditions under which it could be expressed. It was a school which was endeavoring to gather together what was valuable in the thought of the period that had gone before it and also another French school that was moving outside of its own border to get what was valuable in the thought of other nations. It took over not only the empiricism which the philosophy of the revolution had brought in from the English empirical school but also the interpretation of the Scottish school's doctrine to which I have referred. Then Cousin went farther afield into Germany and studied the new Continental philosophical doctrine that was arising, and undertook to get the outline of the philosophy of Kant and also to realize what was going on in the German Romantic school. This school set up what, in the sense
(446) that I have already indicated, you may call a "transcendentalism." This was presented in the philosophy of Royer-Collard. There is a certain structure of things belonging to a common consciousness which is a presupposition of the act of knowledge. It is something given in advance in the mind that determines the character of the object itself. The French thinkers did not take this doctrine in the skeptical sense in which it is presented in Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. It was taken as the test of that which could be verified; in the sense in which it was presented in the Scottish school-what is common is true.
The figures in Germany that most attracted Cousin and other writers of the time were Schelling and Hegel. It is interesting to see the different reactions to the Romantic philosophers. In England a class movement fastened on Fichte, rather than Schelling, although Schelling had a reverberation in Coleridge. Carlyle responded to Kant and Fichte; Cousin, to Kant and Schelling. There is perhaps an outlet of the French aesthetic nature in the philosophy which gathered about the aesthetic response as presented by Schelling. It was, however, also a presentation of nature as having the objectivity of the mind itself. This made the philosophy of Schelling attractive to Cousin and other thinkers of the time.
The other expression to which I have referred, that of activity, found its statement in a psychological method which was affirmed as the method of this philosophy. It is the expression, of course, of Romantic idealism. This was developed in Germany in the affirmation of the absolute philosophy, in the statement that our own selves are simply aspects of the Absolute Self. This carrying-back of experience, objective experience, to the Self found its expression in French philosophy in the assumption that the philosophical method is essentially a psychological method. If one did make a consistent philosophical system on this basis, he would find himself in the position of the German Romantic idealists, as that appears in Hegel's phenomenology. This metaphysical statement, however, was not taken over and made use of by the French philosophers. They
(447) insisted that the study of the self as it appears in introspection is the method of which philosophy makes use. This philosophy had, in some sense, fortified itself with the Kantian position., The structure of the mind determines the structure of the world. The problem of getting from the mind over into the world it knows is a problem which must first be faced; but it presumably has built its bridges by means of the Kantian assumption, connected, of course, in a certain sense with the assumptions of the Scottish school. It has already made its established contact with the world. The structure of the world and of the mind are in some sense the same. The former will be studied, then, in the mind, as it can be got at most readily there. The method given is psychological. That is the French interpretation of Romantic idealism as it was seen in Germany. That idealism, of course, had a late after-birth in England in the neo-Hegelian movement. But the influence of Hegel, as it appeared in Carlyle and Coleridge and men of that sort, was literary. In France the definite inference from this idealism came especially by way of the Kantian philosophy of Cousin, but it had none of the air of abandon of the Romantic idealistic philosophy in Germany. It was carefully regimented. It dealt with a mind which has definite faculties. It takes over the problems which Kant had thrown up in the doctrine of a common consciousness in which are given the forms of mind which are also the forms of matter. By this method men could turn back to study themselves with a feeling that the study of the self was also a study of the world; that the same drama was present in the mind as in nature; that nature was free, an odyssey of spirit. One could study nature, its reality, its structure, in some sense, in our own minds.
Another characteristic which was present in this school, one which led to greater fruitfulness, was the interest in history. The Romantic school affected all Europe in this same fashion. It was the essence of the Romantic movement to return to the past from the point of view of the self-consciousness of the Ro-
(448) -mantic period, to become aware of itself in terms of the past. We have a Romantic interest expressed in Voltaire in the renewed interest in the more primitive conditions of society. We have it in the reaction of a national consciousness, a national soul, which definitely has that which is comparable to the history of the individual. The work of Hegel in going back to the expression of racial and national community consciousness expressed itself early in philosophy. The interest of the school of Royer-Collard in the history of philosophy also reflected the same spirit. But it is not a history of philosophy which is the statement of the other side of a theory of metaphysical logic, as was the case with Hegel. Hegel presented the development of the categories as they take place in our thought and the development of these categories as they take place in history as two sides of a single process. The study we find in France has more feudal interest behind it. It is interested in men, and it led to very important advances. It is an acute critical study of Greek philosophy, particularly of Plato. It was interested in the building-up of a school of philosophical thought that was not committed to a metaphysical interpretation. Its statement was not the reflection of a single philosophical doctrine.
The philosophical doctrine of Cousin, on the other hand, was tenuous and superficial. It never seriously had a real interest in the study of earlier philosophy and in the presentation of it on the basis of actual documents and their interpretation in terms of historical criticism. You find that sort of systematic interest existing in German philosophy that has gotten beyond the period of Romantic idealism. Something of the spirit of that idealism is still found in such a work as Zeller's History of Greek Philosophy. It also passed over into the interpretation of history in the Marxian movement. It has its reflection in the interpretation of history in the formulation of the Hegelian doctrine of the state. It has less detachment than French history of philosophy, as reflected in the uncertainty of the philosophical presuppositions of the French thinkers.
(449)
VIII
There is another figure of more importance to us than Cousin, though he made relatively little stir at the time. This is Comte, I have presented Royer-Collard and the philosophy of the revolution. Comte has his connection with the philosophy of reaction, that of the church in the reactionary period. He has his revolutionary aspects, but it is the other that is the taproot of his philosophy. If we are going to understand the man, we must realize that.
The philosophy of the early period, the philosophy of the revolution, that of De Maistre and DeBonald -- the philosophy of the Restoration, that of Royer-Collard -- which was the philosophy of the bourgeois monarchy, were all practical in some sense. Another element, however, was forcing its way in and was setting the temper for the later philosophical thought. This element was science, a science which was not political. The connection between philosophy and science is a connection which may be made either through a cosmology (a theory of the physical universe) or through methodology (the attempt to present the world as a whole, to organize all the different sciences into a single science, to criticize the concepts of the different sciences from the standpoint of others). This attempt is one which we find in all philosophy. The scientist is occupied with his own particular field. This is especially true of modern, specialized science. And the very restriction of the fields of the different sciences set up what may be called "organic relationships" between them. You cannot consider a biological field by itself without putting it into relationship with the physical environment in which the organism is found. You cannot concentrate your attention on the digestive tract of an animal without taking into account the whole life of that animal. You must relate the one in its organic functioning with the other. You cannot, in a physical sense, take up the consideration of physics as over against chemistry without setting up relationships between the different fields. Thus the scientists themselves feel the necessity of this interrelationship. It gets its fullest expression on the
(450) philosophical side, and in every generation there have been philosophical scientists or philosophers who are familiar with the science of the period. There have always been those who endeavor to present a concept of the world as a whole, with the interrelationship of the different sciences.
It is possible, however, for philosophy to approach science not through a conception of the different scientific fields but from the point of view of the scientific method. The scientific method in the Greek period was not different from the method of philosophy. Plato was educating his young men, so that they would become guardians or philosopher-kings, by giving them work on geometry. The method of geometry was the method of the philosopher. It was a process of deduction from the very nature of the ideas with which the geometrician or philosopher dealt. Aristotle, entering the field of biology, carried into the philosophical field a new method, the development of a teleological concept of matter as potentiality and substance, as the realization of matter in form. This concept he brought over from science. It was a conception which he used both in his studies of animals and plants and in his consideration of metaphysics. He drew no line between philosophy and science, as far as method was concerned. Both Plato and Aristotle regard themselves as philosophers in so far as they are astronomers and biologists. There was but a single field with a single method.
The Renaissance introduced a new method which was distinct from the philosophy of its time. Bacon presented it as an inductive method which was not one of Aristotelian induction. It appeared sharply in the work of the great scientists of the period as the experimental method. What was peculiarly scientific in it, as distinct from the philosophical method of the time, was that it dealt with that which was taking place not in terms of the substance of things but in terms of events as they took place. Galileo registered this in his statement of it as a new science. He called it "dynamics." Aristotle's treatment of falling bodies was that the nature of heavy bodies was to move toward the earth. He deduced their velocity from their weight: the
(450) more they weighed, the greater their velocity. He started with the object and deduced from that what the nature of the process must be. What Galileo undertook to do was to find out what the velocity of the object was in fact. If you take that method over into biology, you come to a statement of the physiological organism in terms of its functions. You ask what a digestive tract is. Instead of starting off with the form of the stomach, you start off with the digestive tract and state its nature in terms of the function it has to carry out. Then you can see why it has a certain form, why it has a different function. You state your problem in such terms that you can define it in terms of the process going on. This is just the opposite of what you find in the Aristotelian science and philosophy, where you get the nature of the object first and define its processes in terms of the nature of the object itself.
What I want to point out in this connection is that our modern scientific method abstracts from the things which had been philosophically, metaphysically defined, and occupies itself with what is happening. It has brought on what we now call the "event" as the object of observation. We do not observe, as Aristotle observed, to see through the process to what the nature of the object itself is. We observe to see what changes take place, what motions are going on, and at what velocities. That is the character of the observation; and that is also true, of course, in the biological world as far as it has its modern expression in evolution. Observation can be directed toward that which is taking place and can, to that extent, be abstracted from the nature of the thing itself. That is, it can ignore metaphysics. Aristotelian science was bound up with its metaphysics. Our biology, until evolution set it free, was bound up with metaphysics, It could explain species only in terms of creation, But an evolution which explains the development of form is free from such a metaphysical statement. Well then, the point that I am making is that modern science is interested in what happens as distinct from the thing which was supposed to be responsible for the nature of the happening. And when it comes
(452) to the statement of the thing, it defines it in terms of the process going on. It is free from metaphysics.
Now, the reflection of this in philosophy appears in positivism. Positivism is the statement of reality in terms of so-called "phenomena." These are the things that happen, that which is going on. Positivism abstracts the process, the event, from the nature of the things that are involved in what is going on. That such a process of knowledge should be possible is, of course, due to the experimental method. This method presents a test by means of which you can consider by themselves what the philosopher calls "phenomena" and still standardize your knowledge. These are the two characters of scientific method which put it in such an independent place as over against philosophy: it can abstract from the nature of what is involved in the process of the world; it can in that way free itself from metaphysics in so far as it studies phenomena. The philosopher has no method by means of which he can contest its claims. The experimental method set the scientist free from the philosopher.
The attempt to carry this method into philosophy is found in positivism, which undertakes to deal with phenomena. They are called "phenomena" in the philosophic sense; "facts" in the scientific sense. A fact is something that happens, takes place. There is no problem of a certain "nature" in what is taking place. Put it in philosophical terms, and it is something happening that has a relation to a noumenon that lies back of it. Positivism deals with what is there, what is positive and directly experienced, whose processes the mind can follow. It was Comte who undertook to carry over this method into philosophy. He was by no means free from metaphysical taint, but he is the one who gave the first definite philosophical statement to the more descriptive aspect of science. He was the first one to make the attempt to build up philosophy along the lines of the scientific method.
It follows, of course, that such a method is hypothetical. What one does is to follow a curve, so to speak. On the basis of
(453) observation, one assumes or makes the hypothesis that the curve Is of a certain character. If It Is of that character, then a body moving in such a path would have to be at such and such a point at such and such a time, and one could observe and make sure that the body was at that point in its process. The hypothesis is justified, in so far as that movement of the body is concerned; but there may be something in it that the scientist has not been able to determine. In that case it may later be necessary to reconstruct the hypothesis. That is, the scientific method is essentially hypothetical. It is a method of extrapolation, a way of determining what the result may be and justifying one's theory by means of that result. Of course, one can never make a complete statement of all that is involved in anything that happens. In some sense everything is involved in everything that happens. Consequently, the theory must be hypothetical. The experimental method, as applied by science, always implies that a theory is hypothetical.
What positivism undertook to do was to deal with that which falls within the field of philosophic thought as we deal with scientific data, in terms of scientific method. There we deal with the event as it appears. The event as it appears for the scientist, the observer, is the sensation in consciousness. The scientist takes the event as something by itself. Then he finds out what other events are connected with it, finds what uniformity may be discovered, and forms a hypothesis of the way in which these events will be associated with each other. He tests this hypothesis by future events and establishes a theory, but a theory which still remains hypothetical in character. The assumption here is that knowledge is to be obtained only through the observation of events and the testing of hypotheses as they appear in experience, and that the immediate object of knowledge is the event and the thing. Here we have a philosophy which is positivistic in character. If we cannot treat entities in terms of metaphysical things, we can deal with them at least as far as our experience is concerned. The matter that lies back of the qualities of the chair is something that does not
(454) enter into experience. It is not positive knowledge. This is a statement which is of the same general character as that of Hume. As far as his account of what we have in our cognitive experience is concerned, Hume comes back to impressions and ideas and the analysis of them. In thinking of the substance of things, he says we have uniformities which reveal themselves in our experience in terms of habit; and that is what Hume was interested in the relation of events in experience to the socalled "laws of nature."
In the case of positivism, of the form in which it was espoused by Comte, the interest does not lie primarily in reducing nature and its uniformities to associated ideas. What Comte was interested in was the relation between the events as they take place. He did not bring up the question as to where those events take place, whether in the mind or in the world, whether there is something that answers to them as they take place in the mind. He said here are the events; we call some subjective, some objective. Let us find the uniformity of their happening, not only for an observational science but also for philosophy. Comte was particularly interested in the appearance of this method and its relationship to the formal metaphysical content which should lie behind it. He went back into the history of thought to the Greek period, with its metaphysical method, and asked what lies behind it. He showed the interpretation of the world in terms of gods, of magic influences of spirits, and then showed how Greek philosophy, becoming rationalistic, advanced beyond this concept of gods to the concept of certain natures which belong to things. Such a statement as that which Aristotle gives is partly theological and partly metaphysical. He assumed, for example, that the nature of the heavenly bodies is divine. Ile assumed that there must be some sort of a divine being that directs the motion of all planetary bodies. They are gods, such gods as the Greeks had conceived, but deprived of the anthropomorphic aspects we find in mythology. Aristotle conceived of them as responsible for the motions of the heavenly bodies, although he assumed that these bodies, by na-
(455) -ture, move in circular orbits and with uniform velocities. On the face of the earth this teleological element largely disappears, and you have heavy bodies whose tendency is to move toward the center of the earth. Aristotle did not conceive of these as directed by divine beings. From the standpoint of nature, there is no very great difference between assuming that the growth of a tree is due to a dryad or to a certain metaphysical substance which belongs by nature to the tree. The growth of trees is such as it is. You can think of it in pictorial form, show it as it is, a living tree. You can think of the force of the tree as that which comes from a living being or from an inherent force of nature that tends to develop itself in a certain way. There is a certain nature in the acorn which, given an opportunity, will develop into a sapling and then into an oak.
A scientific statement is a natural development of the theological statement. The intermediate, metaphysical statement is, of course, free from all the anthropomorphic characters of the theological statement. It does not have to be brought inside of the sphere of magic. The mind is free in that respect. But still it is bound to the definition which it gives of the nature of the object itself. Having given that definition, it can deduce certain necessary qualities from it. So we find that the Aristotelian metaphysics regards not a growing science but a completed science. Aristotle was the Encyclopedist of his period. He gathered into his statements all that could be known, and put it in terms of the nature of the things that make up the world, things that we find in the world when put in their necessary logical relations to each other. Such a statement has a certain finality about it, provided it is carried out by a genius, like Aristotle, who is able to gather together and organize a great body of diverse material. If the Summation has been a very complete one, there is no invitation to anyone to carry it further. That is what is striking, but with such a complete science interest lapses.
The type of problem which comes with the work of Galileo, as expressing the experimental method, is essentially one which
(456) comes from the method of research science, not from the science of the Encyclopedists, not from the type that we sometimes call "systematic." There are certain fields into which this new method has entered comparatively late. Biology, to go back for a generation or a little more perhaps, took into itself everything that men knew; and anything that they did not know, at the time, could be added to it. There were certain groupings of plants-the genera, the families, and their species and subspecies. There was a principle of organization, a principle which was worked out in the eighteenth century by Linnaeus. Into this system could be introduced any new species that might be found, but the system itself did not carry with it any proof.
That is not a research science. Research science has come into biology only with evolution, for the conception of evolution deals with species not as ultimate metaphysical entities but as something that arises out of conditions. Experience, instead of being of such and such a metaphysical entity, becomes a problem. That is, of course, presented to us in Darwin's great work. What is the origin of species? This question indicates a new line of approach. The earlier concept was that characters and species were given in the creation of the plant or animal. God gave to the plants and animals a certain nature for their preservation. The whole life-history of plants and animals shows the development of this nature. The cataloguing system enables us to give them their characters and place them in a complete science. A scientific problem is itself not a statement that here is the oak, the ox, the tiger. It is rather the question: "Why is the oak there; why is it oak instead of another tree; what is the meaning of this species?"
In what I have been giving, you have a very vivid illustration of the passage from the metaphysical over to what Comte would call the "positivistic state." There are, said Comte, these three stages of development, the theological, the metaphysical, the positivistic. And he said this is true not only of communities but of individuals. A child lives in a world of magical things and persons. He loves things that meet his wishes, and
(457) he hates things that hurt him. And then comes the later period when he gives up these magical implications and takes to hard and fixed definitions of things. The objects about him have certain natures. They are not to be looked at from the point of view of a fairy tale. It is a common-sense attitude if you like, but an attitude which in itself is metaphysical in that each thing has a certain nature that distinguishes it from other things. Because of its nature, it has certain qualities; and the child utilizes these qualities. It is the common-sense attitude which all persons of adult years reflect in regard to the objects about them. The natural definition of a chair is that it is something having certain necessary qualities - it has hardness, a certain form, and other qualities - inhering in a certain nature. That metaphysical statement is nothing but the abstract formulation of our attitude toward all things as they exist about us. Then we advance to the positivistic, the scientific, stage as Comte stated it. Such a statement as that which had been given of the nature of the chair is recognized as utterly incomplete. What is there that gives to wood its particular strength? For example, how does it compare with iron or steel? We depart from the metaphysical attitude when we ask: "What happens when we do this, that, and the other thing to the object?" We try to find certain uniformities by means of which we can determine what will happen. We have passed out of a world of fixed things as such and come back to data which we can get in experience. We have to distinguish between what the scientist refers to as "hard facts" and the objects about us. Persons are said to " come up against hard facts." Their theory comes in conflict with a fact. But the fact against which the theory comes in conflict is a happening of some sort, it is a happening which is not the happening that we anticipated from a certain theory. Given a certain theory, we expect certain happenings; and then something else happens. It is the contradiction in experience that is the hard fact of science.
That is the phase that we need to keep in mind in getting the scientific method as it appears in such a system as that of
(458) Comte. What one is dealing with is a set of events that take place in experience. In those events you find uniformities; they never get a final statement, however. Given the statement, we have a theory; we are then able to determine what the results will be on the basis of that theory. If something else happens, then the theory must be reconstructed. The world is a world of events, of things that are going on. The scientist's attitude is the expression of the positivistic statement that succeeds the medieval statement. This exemplifies the three-stage theory of Comte. As communities and as individuals we pass through three stages - the theological, the metaphysical, and the scientific. From the point of view of philosophy, the importance of the view lies, you see, in the statement of the object of knowledge. Is one considering substance or is one considering events that are taking place, what philosophers would call "phenomena"? Is knowledge occupied with these or with something that these reveal? Is our observation a finding, an isolation, of a certain nature or form that lies back of it all? Or is it occupied with the phenomena themselves? It is a question as to what the function of knowledge is.
IX
The important characteristic of Comte's doctrine was its recognition of what we may term the "philosophical import" of scientific method. As I have indicated, the scientific method recognized the object of knowledge in the experience of the individual, in that which is ordinarily termed the "fact." If one is to identify the fact, he must do it in terms of his experience. It is, of course, true that the observer states his observation in such terms that it can also be made an object by others and so be tested by them. Me tries to give it a universal form, hut still he comes back eventually to the account which he gives of his observation as such.
What is not recognized in the positivistic doctrine is that the observation is always one that has an element of novelty in it. That is, it is in some sense unusual. It is observed because it is distinct in some way from the expected experience. One does
(459) not observe that which is to be expected. One notes it; one recognizes it. We recognize what we expect, and give attention only to that which differs from that which is expected. If one reaches for a tool that he is after and it is in its expected place, or for a book in its place on the shelf, all he gives attention to is that the object is of the type that he expects to find. He gives as little attention as is necessary in order to identify it. More than this would mean loss of effort and time. One does not stop to examine the expression of his friend unless there is something unusual about it. He sees only enough to identify him. Ordinarily, then, we would not speak of an observer as one who merely recognizes. Observation implies careful noting of all the details of the object. It is true that you do not observe everything about anything. What one does is to observe all that enables one to assure himself that the object is not exactly what one expects. One reaches for a tool, thinking he is going to pick up a hammer, and finds it is a chisel; and he pays attention to find why it was that he made the mistake. He observes the character of a plant that misled him. His observation is given to that which distinguishes it from the expected thing. These are the facts of science-those observations that enable us to determine characters that would not have been anticipated. One may also, of course, give attention to objects that seem quite familiar. That is what is implied. You are looking for something that will strike your attention as in some sense unusual.
The positivistic doctrine assumes that our objects are given in such observation, and that is the logical weakness of positivism. It assumes that the world is made up, so to speak, out of facts, is made tip out of those objects that appear in the experience of the scientific observer. Must objects we regard simply as they identify themselves. The objects of scientific observation answer to a detailed analysis, which implies an interest of some sort. We can explain this position in terms of the method to which I refer, by saying that the objects of science do not always have behind them implicit or explicit problems. In other words, sci-
(460) -ence is really research science. Research always implies a problem. Where there is nothing of this sort, we are not engaged in research. There is a type of thinking which is not problematical -- that of carrying out a habitual act, of attending a machine with which you are familiar, for example. That sort of concentrated attention is given simply to those stimuli that will enable us to carry out a well-formed habit. There we have concentrated attention, but it is not occupied with the proceedings of our research science. It is occupied in a world where one is awake only to the next stimulus that is necessary to carry on an activity that more or less runs itself.
A further step which Comte did not recognize, because it belongs to a later period, is the evolutionary one which undertakes to see how these forms, these experiences, arise. Evolutionary doctrine started off with the life-process, and undertook to account for the appearance of species themselves. It carries us back to a world in which the nature of the object, the experience as such, arises. Neither Comte nor John Stuart Mill, who would be the corresponding figure in England, was influenced by evolutionary doctrine to any great degree. Mill was also, to all intents and purposes, a positivist. He, too, assumed that the analysis that the scientist makes of an object reveals the characters of things, reveals the elements of things, the parts of things; and if we want to know the world, we must discover these elements which the scientist finds. Mill, as you know, embodied this doctrine in his logic in which he undertook to state the logic of science. It is by no means an adequate account of scientific procedure; but his theory of induction and of the inductive process in science, his method of agreement and difference, are definitely attempts to state the scientist's procedure. They ate really methods of distinguishing rather than of forming hypotheses.
What I am attempting to make clear is that the positivistic doctrine was one which undertook to give the philosophic implications the form of scientific method. But neither Comte nor Mill gave a competent account of the scientist's procedure.
(461) They did assume that science-what we would call "research science" -- was the most efficient method of knowing. They did recognize that this type of science was one which was an advance over metaphysical science, while the metaphysical was a natural successor to theology. We have, then, in the French thought of this period, the reconstruction of science as presenting the form of the philosophic problem.
The step which positivism represents Is that of stating a problem so that it is put in the form of a method rather than of a result. Is the method of science the method of philosophy? Can one make the method of science the method of philosophy? One great, somewhat grandiose effort to solve this problem was made by the Romantic idealists. Hegel, who was most complete in his statement, undertook to show that the method of science and the method of human thought in all its endeavor and the method of the universe were all the same, the method which he represented by his dialectic process. His philosophy was in one sense a philosophy of evolution; but the same process, the same method, the same logic, lay back of physical nature, back of moral effort, back of human history, back of all that science presents. It was, as I said in other connections, a grandiose undertaking which was a failure. Particularly, it was unable to present the scientific procedure within each field. It could not successfully state the method of research science. This is the problem, then, that is presented in positivism. For positivism metaphysics is past; it is gone. Just as metaphysics was supposed to have wiped out theology, so the positivists were presenting a method which could be immediately applied, and through which we could get rid of metaphysics.
X
Comte had as vivid an interest in the relation of his philosophy to society and its values as any others of the period. He looked for the forms of a society of the human race whose values should determine the conduct of the individual. But, as far as the process of knowing social values was concerned, it would be
(462) the same as in the physical and the biological sciences. He assumed that there could be a study of society which could be undertaken in the same way as the study of the physical sciences. That was the most striking character of his doctrine in its immediate impact. The church had a metaphysical doctrine behind it. And this is no less true in this period of what we may call "political science," the theory of law, of ethics, of education. That is, each of them had essential doctrines. The sovereignty of the state, in the attitude of an English community, is to be found in the individuals that form the republic. Sovereignty was a dogma. It was that in the state which exercised absolute power. And the state had to be conceived of in terms of such metaphysical entity as that. Similarly, the family was a certain definite entity, and the school was a certain definite entity. One argued from the nature of the sovereign, of the family, of the school, what the position of the individual under it must be. In each case the attitude was essentially metaphysical. What Comte presented was the demand for the use of positivistic method in the study of society. He presented sociology as a new field. What I want to emphasize is that we do not think of it as another science. We have economics, education, political science; and here comes sociology, another science covering the same field and yet claiming to be different. It has been, in very recent times, a great question as to whether there was any such thing as sociology. And I have seen theses presented in this university for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in the field of sociology upon the problem of whether or not there is any such thing as sociology. What is characteristic of Comte's position is his demand that society and social events should be approached in the same fashion that the study of plants and animals and moving bodies are approached. He was breaking away from the metaphysical attitude and presenting another science, that of society. As he conceived of society, it inevitably includes the whole human race; and he thought there could be one science of it. Sociology, then, was the attempt to apply the method of positivism, the method of science, to the field of society, an at-
(463) -tempt to displace what was, at that time, an essentially metaphysical approach, one which started off with the definition of the state, with a study of the processes of social changes going on in various institutions. Comte undertook to approach human affairs in the way of the scientist who simply analyzes things into their ultimate elements in a positivistic fashion and then from that finds the laws of their behavior. But there lay in the back of Comte's mind pictures of a medieval period, only he would have substituted society for the pope. He was not freed from that. This other side of Comte's doctrine is one that harks back to the medieval period.
I pointed out that early in the century, during the period of De Bonald and De Maistre, reactionary philosophers sought to go back to the church as the source of all authority, as that which must give an interpretation of life. Their statement, however, was different from the medieval statement. They were particularly impressed with the society of Europe in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, the period which is best represented by Dante. It was a period in which the world realized itself as a single community, in which everything could be explained by the doctrine of the church. There was no difficulty in the explanation, because this world was so created that man can be moral; and, if he can be moral, it must also be possible for him to be immoral. It is a world in which sin has a legitimate place; and if man sins, the punishment of sin follows. The world at that period was entirely comprehensible from the point of view of the church theology. It included everyone. Anything that happened that was undesirable could be explained by the fact that God was using it to bring about the great good, including the good of man. The Western world was conceived of as a single society. It took In nearly the whole of the human race. It was organized through the church. The church took over the statement that St. Paul gives, you remember, of the church as the body of which Christ was the head. In his concept of a unified society everyone has his place and everything can be explained from the point of view of the theory of the church.
(464) It was to that conception of a society which was a world society, an organic society, and a society which answered to the immediate impulse of the individual that these philosophers, De Bonald and De Maistre, went back.
Comte was never influenced by this account. His positions freed him from the dogma of the church, but he still looked to such a picture of the whole society of man as representing the idea that should be realized. The curious thing from our standpoint is that he should have copied to such an extent the characters of the church. His idea, too, was that society should be an organic whole. It must then have some organized value. What Comte presents, instead of welfare by the church, is the welfare of the community as a whole. This community as a whole comes to take the place of the glory of God, which, as spoken of by the church, is the end of all existence. For the positivist it is not the glory of God but the good of mankind that is the supreme value. That is the supreme value in terms of which everything should be stated. This point of view is stated in less emotional form in the utilitarianism in England during the same period. Bentham and the Mills are, in a sense, companion figures to Comte. Their idea of the ideal society is one which achieves the greatest good of the greatest number. This welfare of the community transcends the good of any particular individual. This is something all should see, and man's attitude toward it should be a religious attitude. This should be recognized as the supreme value that determines all others. And Comte recognized that an emotional attitude was essential.
John Stuart Mill said that everyone finds himself and his conduct constantly influenced by others. Each can retain his own pleasure by recognizing others in the pursuit of their pleasure. The individual feels continually the presence of the community about him forcing him to recognize the interest of others. It seems a skeptical account which Mill gives of the origin of virtue. Comte would put up the good of the community itself through an emotional expression which should be essentially religious in its character. That is, men should actually worship
(465) the Supreme Being in the form of society. Society as an organized whole, as that which is responsible for the individual, should be worshiped; and on this basis Comte undertook to set up a positivistic religion. Now, this religion of positivism had some vogue among the followers of Comte. There was a devoted group of this sort to be found in England. It never attained any size. A wag, referring to a dissension among them, said of the sessions, "They came to church in one cab and left in two." It never became a widespread religious movement, but the undertaking to set up such a religion which should find the highest value in society and fuse that into a unity which could be worshiped was characteristic of Comte. He thought and looked for a society that could be organized in the same fashion as medieval society had been by the church. And he attempted to work out in some detail how this sort of ordering of society would take place. He did not try to substitute the value of society itself for the Deity, but tried to take over the religious attitude toward the Deity into the religious attitude of members of the community toward society itself.
This phase of Comte's sociology was not a lasting one. What was of importance was his emphasis on the dependence of the individual on society, his sense of the organic character of society as responsible for the nature of the I individual. This is what Comte put into a scientific form. It had already found its theological statement, as 1 have said, in Paul's account of the relation of men in the church to parts of the body and to the church as the whole. That is, he conceived of the individual as determined by society as an organism, just as there are different organs which must be conceived of as dependent on the organism as a whole. You cannot take the eye as a separate reality by itself. It has meaning only in its relationship to the whole organism of which it is a part. So you must understand an individual in a society. Instead of thinking of society made up of different entitles, Comte thought of it in terms of a union of all which was an expression of a certain social nature which determined the character of the individual. There are two characteristics of
(466) Comte: first, his recognition that society as such is a subject for study; and second, his conviction that we must advance from the study of society to the individual rather than from the individual to society.
XI
The next point I want to emphasize is that in France the philosophic mind was dominantly psychological. It was psychological in a different sense from that in which English empirical thought was psychological. It was also different from the psychological position of Reid and the so-called Scottish school. For example, it recognizes activity as a fundamental characteristic of the experience which science was studying, and not simply the content of experience, not simply states of consciousness. It recognizes that the process of knowledge is not simply the passive reception of impressions, but that it is an organized process in knowledge. In sensation one can say that the mind just has impressions. But in perception you have a reaction of the mind upon its own sensations, and perhaps on the objects which were supposed to be responsible for these sensations. Activity, then, forms part of the content with which the French psychologists were occupied. They were also much more interested in the affective side of life, the emotional side. They were not, however, any more interested in the personality, the ego, the self, from the psychological side than were the English empiricists. The Germans, of course, in their philosophy came back to the self as basic. It is central to their whole doctrine. But their interest was metaphysical rather than psychological.
The interest of the French psychologists was in the actual stream of life of the self rather than in the psychology of the other groups. These others regarded psychology as the method of philosophy. This gave to their philosophy that character expressed in the term "spiritualism." That is, it assumed that what is revealed in our study of ourselves is in accord with nature itself. In one sense, Comte agreed with this position; in another sense, he did not. In his adherence to science and
(467) the conception of the individual as a product of social forces he did not. The emphasis of French philosophy was upon the experience of the individual. In this it went back to its psychological method. Royer-Collard, for example, in taking over the Scottish form, comes back to our immediate intuition. He relied upon those experiences with which psychology deals. That is, he, like Reid, did not come back to immediate experiences in the sense that Descartes did. Descartes came back to the immediate experience of his own existence as a self, as a substantial being. Reid came back to that experience in its immediate psychological character. In our immediate experience we are in contact with objects that we know. This is the aspect of experience to which Reid came back. And French philosophy laid particular emphasis on this same aspect of the individual. Its method was that of psychology. Comte turned away from that and tried to reduce psychology to biology. He denied the possibility of a science of psychology.
If we are to relate the French philosophy to that of its neighbors in England and Germany, it is essential to recognize this essentially psychological interest. The whole interest of the English analysts was in carrying the division of experience back to that which was common to everyone back to common sensations, common impressions, common memory images back to that which was psychical in the sense of being private not only in that it lies within the experience of an individual but in the sense of having that particular character which belongs to one's own inner life as distinct from that of anyone else. What the French felt and expressed on the philosophical and the literary side was the need of an active self to which these experiences came back. Among the Germans we have seen thinkers coming back to a logical process which is identical with experience, for both are expressions of the single ego. But in that single ego it is difficult to get to the common character which belongs to the individual life, that in which sensations are identified with the life of the individual. This disappears in so far as it is known to the experience of others and the infinite movement of minds
(468) that are common to it. From the logical standpoint, that which is peculiar to the individual lacks reality. What is universal and necessary is real. John Stuart Mill definitely presented his philosophy in a psychological form. So did his father. But they were interested in the analysis of the object of knowledge. They proceeded on the principle that if they could get back to the elements of knowledge they could determine the character of objects. They find these in what were called "impressions" and "Ideas," which are located by the individual in his own experience. Their method, then, was that of introspection. What the school was interested in, and what it placed emphasis on, was the object of knowledge as such. Thus their problem was essentially the epistemological problem.
The interest of the French philosopher was not in the epistemological problem. It lay, rather, in the attack on certain institutions. They were interested in pulling down the theories of the church and state. This problem was first attacked by the "sensationalists, " as their opponents called them. This was essentially a revolutionary school. It was recognized as having that political bias. When philosophy was being established on more definite philosophical bases, when France was endeavoring to get itself out of the situation which had been left by the Revolution, a turn was made to the philosophy of Reid, taking over his position that one has immediate knowledge of that which lies outside, and particularly emphasizing the test of that knowledge which Reid had insisted on, the test of common sense, a sense which is common to all. This left the experience of the individual as a field which was of deep interest in itself. It was no longer simply the field within which the object of knowledge was found. It was that in which the experience of the individual was found. The object of knowledge is common. It is only in so far as it, is public that it has validity. On the other hand, it lies in the experience of the individual. The emphasis of the empirical school had been on that object as it was supposed to exist in the experience of all; and, while they recognized that it appeared in the experience of the individual, their
(469) interest centered in finding out what was the import of its being common property. If one sets this doctrine up as the theory of knowledge, it implies that the mind itself has direct acquaintance with its object. It has, in some sense, cut the Gordian knot. You cannot ask how you know; the fact is that you do know! That leaves the field of the experience of the individual as a field which may have interest in itself. And it was this interest which the French took up.
As I have said, they were following out what was characteristic of the French mind and its genius-its memoirs, its study of the experience of the individual, as found, for example, in Montaigne. That interest belonged peculiarly to the French. They were interested in the experience of the individual just as an individual, and in the recounting of that experience. As I said, they took the position of Reid; but they took it in a somewhat different form. Their position approached that of Kant. They assumed a general experience which was common in some sense to all, something answering to the transcendental ego. The forms of the mind, which were common to all individuals, are the Kantian reply to the position of the English empirical school and their skepticism; and French philosophy took over this answer. It is this interest that characterized French thought and its psychology. And this interest gives a certain definite turn to French psychology and to the philosophy that depended on it.
To get that angle one must realize the development taking place in Germany. After the development of the Romantic school the Germans also turned to psychological investigation. We have, first of all, the philosophy of Herbart, which may be said to answer to the tendency among the French. Herbart undertook to establish his philosophy on the basis of ideas as they appear in the mind-, of the individual. The principal application of this Herbartian psychology was in the field of education. Herbart was himself a theorist in the field of education. He looked on the mind from the point of view of the increase of knowledge. The organization of ideas in the mind answers to the Lockian idea, a state of consciousness which has a reference
(469) to something else, that out of which the intellectual life, as over against the affective and volitional life, is built up. What Herbart was interested in pointing out was that it was the organization of these elements in the mind that made the mind able to isolate others. Taking over the Kantian term, he called this organization "apperception," and not simply "perception" in the sense of immediate experience-not simply the organization of that experience in terms of association but a perception which is a unified grasp of the sense in experience. Now this Herbart referred to as an "apperceptive mass of ideas." The gist of the doctrine was that grasping anything, taking it over into the mind, is dependent on there being given such a mass. There must be a group of ideas to which one might look for connective factors which give ideas their essential relations. The value of this theory was to be found not only in the application of it to education but also in the beginnings of the science of language. In those two fields the Herbartian psychology remained significant long after its influence had been lost elsewhere.
There is a certain community between the French and Germans in connection with their interest in psychological content. But another distinction must be made. German psychologists, especially Herbart's successors, were laying stress on the organism and its structure. This resulted in a significant physiological psychology. If you study what takes place in experience in terms of the central nervous system and the nervous mechanism in general, you will find that which is common, universal. The technique of your study will be to isolate what your experience has in common with the experience of others. But suppose you get a curious experience like color blindness, where one person fails to distinguish red from green. Even this may be isolated, at least hypothetically, in terms of certain color spot-, which should be present in the eye but are not. In this way you get a more or less universal statement of the unusual experience. Just because this psychology was so interested in the organism as such, it was stated in terms that belong to all organisms. The study of the experience of the individual was put into the same
(471) terms. Such an approach would select out of the experience of the individual that which is common in the experience of all. French psychology lays emphasis on that which is individual and peculiar, on that which introspection reveals. The German school passes over this, perhaps. Its interest is in the problem as it appears in the organic responses and mechanisms of experience in the individual.
XII
The psychological problem that came to have the largest meaning for the French philosophy, that about which other problems were gathered, was that of mechanism and determinism as over against voluntary acts and free will. We have seen that French philosophy had oriented itself with reference to fact. Comte had given expression to this in terms of scientific method, as over against simply scientific results. He brought over a scientific method into philosophy and undertook to approach the problem of common reforms from the standpoint of the method of science. Is there any place for common choice in the world which science discusses? Can the worlds of will and of law be brought together? That is the problem that fixed itself in the mind of the French thinkers.
They accepted a scientific statement that did not open the door to the sort of miracle which you find in the statement of Descartes, which assumes that God in some fashion enables consciousness to react on the organism. They did not take that course. They tried to find a place for consciousness in the world as science presents it. There was no criticism of the scientist's statement in his own terms; but they tried to find a way by which choice could be brought into a mechanistic universe, a world in which causal relations are dominant, in which one can state, from the point of view of the causes, if lie had them all, what the effects must be. It was the sort of a picture suggested by Laplace in his world-equation in which one would have only to introduce the variable of time and solve it in order to find just where every particle must be at any given instant. If that is
(472) your conception of physical science, is there any place, any meaning, for human spontaneity, human freedom? That was the problem which interested the French thinkers because of their concern with their own inner experience. You do not find this sort of problem dominating thought in England or Germany. It was peculiarly a French approach.
In the case of the English, we have the analysis of the object of knowledge in terms of impressions and ideas, or sensations and images, the interest lying in the treatment of the epistemological problem in reference to the content of the object of knowledge as related to the states of consciousness of the individual. On the German side we have, first of all, the approach from the standpoint of the personality, the self, and the metaphysical conception of the Absolute Self, of which the individual self was regarded as a phase. The interest there lay in the metaphysical identification of the personality of the individual with the Absolute Self of the whole universe. The later development from this period of German Romantic idealism was found in the physiological approach, in which the attempt was made to find what answers to the stimulus in what takes place in the organism, especially in the central nervous system. An attempt was made to set up a relationship between the stimulus and the response of the organism to it. It was inevitable that the interest should be guided by that which could be actually isolated in the study of the physiological process. A central nervous system is a complex structure whose elements are so mixed that they can be reached only by microscopic study, and the complexities of the structure are so great that it was with very great difficulty that any entrance at all was made into this field. It was inevitable that investigators should fasten on that which could be got hold of. Beyond that, they were left largely in the field of speculation and were thrown back on what introspection indicated plus the hypothesis of nervous processes and structures that would answer to what introspection revealed. The sense organs themselves were, of course, there for study, analysis, and anatomization. These could be identified as having definite relation-
(473) -ships to stimuli from without. It was possible to approach the theory of color, for example, from this standpoint. The photochemical substances in the eye could be regarded as answering to particular vibrations without.
When it came to following the nerve tracts back into the central nervous system, the field was so intricate that it was difficult to follow out the paths, Simple reflex automatisms or paths could be found or were supposed to exist running through the sense organs back to the muscles and glands, and it was possible then to approach the central nervous system from the point of view of these reflexes. The earlier assumption had regarded these elements in the central nervous system as in some sense answering to certain characteristics of the object. They even pictured the nerve cells as that which would answer to a group of ideas. The study of the central nervous system showed that it consisted of a set of paths among the nerve cells. But you got nothing but a set of paths. There is nothing static in the central nervous system. You could not find anything there that answered to an idea of a static entity. One simply finds connections between the end-organs and the muscles and glands in which the nerve processes finally terminate-a field of fibrils and nerve centers which are intricate but remain in the paths. You had, then, an approach from the point of view not of statics but of dynamics. A physiological psychology inevitably emphasizes what we call the "active side" of psychology, and this leads back to the study of what goes on in the experience of the individual.
Now, there was no place within this process into which one could insert a conscious process; the most that one could do was to define a certain correlation. It was this interrelationship between what was going on in different nervous mechanisms, and what belonged to the experience of the individual that interested the German psychologists particularly.
The interest on the French side was one which belongs to the field of introspection first of all. Physiological psychology was not neglected there. Some very valuable work was done in
(474) France in the study of the phenomena of light. Many of the subjects which were dealt with by the psychology of the period were examined in the laboratory by the French psychologists. But their approach A as from the standpoint of the individual rather than from the standpoint of the physiological system. I have already pointed out the positions of Royer-Collard and Cousin. They came back to the immediate experience of knowledge as that in the experience of the individual which is ultimate. I have indicated the difficulties connected with that, but the position is characteristic of the French school. They held on to the experience of the individual.
When we advance to the philosophical problem involved in such an approach, we find it centers in the problem of the freedom of the will. Science assumes that everything that happens can be explained because it must necessarily follow from previous events as an expression of natural law. The intelligibility of nature is dependent on our assumption that there are uniform laws that can be depended on. If nature were a chaos of events that had no necessary connection with each other, it would be impossible for science to unravel any of its mysteries. Our knowledge would be confined to particular experiences, sensations. Unless we can find connections between these, knowledge is utterly impossible. The intelligibility of nature presupposes natural laws. Science, in its faith in the intelligibility of the world, is committed to the necessity of its happenings. It is natural, therefore, that science should emphasize this necessity and that it should sweep everything within this field of necessity, at least in so far as it knows it. And that, of coarse, took in the human body; everything that happens there must be in accordance with natural law. There are laws for the circulation of blood as for the movement of planets. Each can be known. It seems that what takes place is necessary. In terms of this, the succession of our states of consciousness as they succeed each other seems to be necessary. The behavior of human consciousness is as necessary as the movements of the heavenly bodies.
(475)
XIII
Cousin's reaction against this assumption was a superficial one. He undertook to check the statement of the necessity of physical science against the active nature of the self and thus tried to find a place in which you could insert the freedom of the individual. The approach of Renouvier is somewhat different in character. He emphasized the hypothesis as it appears in science. Science approaches its field with postulates which, we say, are based on a certain phase of experience. One of these assumptions is that the world is knowable; another is that the world is in some sense necessary, that is, that we can predicate events. Now, if we can predicate events, we must know the reason why' things are going to happen. But the hypotheses with which we approach these problems are hypotheses which arise in our own minds. The hypotheses are themselves in nature. We must find that which answers to nature by the form in which it appears in human thought, and what Renouvier insists on is that in the alternatives which we have between hypotheses it is possible for the human mind to enter as a determining factor. There are alternative hypotheses, especially when -we recognize how small a part of the ,s hole field of knowledge is really brought within the range of our scientific study. We know very little -- so little that -we feel like a child on the seashore gathering pebbles while the ocean of truth lies beyond. Renouvier insisted that in the selecting of hypotheses the human will plays its part; the mind plays a part in the structure of knowledge.
This comes out in another form when we get to Boutroux. Still a third answer was suggested by some who came back to parallelism in a somewhat different expression than that of the physiological psychologists. The physical and the mental side of the world are parallel. That implies some common content. The attempt was made to approach something that was both physical and mental; and it laid that which was more fundamental in the mind. It was an attempt to go back from parallelism to something that lies beyond it. This parallels Boutroux's
(476) statement, and indicates that we have here a reflection of the positivism to which I have called your attention in Comte.
You remember Comte undertook to get away from metaphysical presuppositions. That which we know is what appears in experience-it is phenomenal. Our knowledge of that is positive and direct. When we go back to a substance that lies back of this, we are making metaphysical assumptions that cannot be established. Knowledge should confine itself to the recording of experiences and the relationships which we find lying between them. We cannot say that there are certain physical bodies, entities, substances; the most that we can say is that there are certain experiences which we have interpreted in this metaphysical fashion. We cannot say that there is a force which acts with necessity in the world; the most we can say is that there are certain uniformities in motion and change. We can determine this but we cannot get back to any forces. When we speak of a force as operating from an object, when we allow ourselves to use our imaginations and think of the sun as pulling the earth, then we get a sense of a necessity which impels the earth to move toward the sun. If, on the other hand, we observe the movements of the earth and sun with reference to each other and we find that these movements agree with Newton's law that velocities are proportionate to masses and indirectly to the square of the distances, we are noting certain uniformities in certain changes; and these uniformities present a different experience from that which was implied in the idea of a force.
It is Boutroux who undertakes to analyze what is involved in this conception of knowing. You must remember the sort of problem with which we are working: Does the necessity which science implies as found in the world include also the action of the human mind, You set up the mechanical universe and posit the human body as a part of it. If you establish a strict parallelism between an organism and what takes place in the mind, you seem to reduce the mental process to a mechanism. What Boutroux undertakes to do is to analyze what this necessity means. He speaks of a metaphysical necessity in the first
(477) place, a necessity which expresses itself in the formula of identity: A is A, or, in order to put It In a form which we feel to be the most general, A is not-nothing. That is, given any certain reality, in so far as we can identify anything with it we can affirm the same thing of that which is identified with it that we can of the thing itself. If we can say anything about the nature of substance, because of a given effect, then anything that We can identify with substance can have the same thing attributed to it. That is the nature of substance. If you say anything of it in its relationship to an effect, then you can identify anything which occurs with that which makes possible the same affirmation in regard to the relation between cause and effect. In so far as you can get back to A as A, you can get back to cause as a metaphysical necessity. But the necessity that is Indicated here does not go over to the characters of things.
We keep talking about the mechanical universe as a whole. But we have no knowledge of a whole. We have knowledge of various elements and speak of them in a metaphysical sense. We say the table has a certain nature which was there before and will be there after we are gone. It is substance that we identify in certain of our experiences. We can make the same affirmation about the universe that we make of the table. But we never reach the universe as a whole. Our metaphysics necessarily is confined to those situations in which we identify the nature of one thing with the nature of something else. If we could get hold of the whole universe, we could get a statement which would identify everything with the universe and give to it the characters that belong in the universe. But we cannot do that. Necessity from the metaphysical point of view is a necessity that is affected by contingency in regard to the object about which we make our affirmation. For one man a substance, an organism, is certain states of consciousness. For another it is a form of a phenomenal mind and does not apply to the noumenal reality. For a third it is a phase in the logical process of development. It is a fact that there is a certain matter out there in the world that is immediately given to us by knowledge and has a
(478) certain range of contingency; but if we go beyond our field of experience, we find the contingency which the positivists emphasized.
We see that the laws of nature are necessary. They are the record of happenings that have come within the experience of ourselves and of others who have recorded their experiences. They state simply the fact that B follows A in our own lives and in theirs. That is all the necessity that there is: A itself is contingent and B is contingent. When A has occurred and B has then occurred, we form, if you like, a habit of expecting B when we find A. We strike a match and expect a light, but the relationship between the striking of the match, as science distinguishes it, and the light is certainly a contingent relation. Suppose you can follow out in detail the process that goes on in the explosion of the match: the waves of radiation that reach the retina of the eye; the disintegration of the photochemical substances there; the effect in the central nervous organism following that; the movement from the nerve centers to the muscles and back to the eye; and the resultant winking of the eye. There we have a necessary succession of events. What about the light? The light is not a chemical explosion; it is not the waves of radiation; it is not the disintegration of photochemical substances in the eye; nor is it the excitement in the central nervous system. The events that take place in nature are events which, as events, are contingent. They happen. No scientist can sit down and evolve nature, from any ideas, any metaphysical entity. He can experience objective nature and accurately record it and know certain relationships which are there, but that which happens is contingent. The uniformities which we discover are in themselves contingent. That is, the law of nature does not exclude contingency any more than metaphysical laws or laws of logic exclude it. In order that we may observe anything, something must be happening. The whole point of the position in question is that it is the unexpected that happens, and there is much truth in it. If a thing happens at all, it is in some way unexpected. It is not entirely the sort of thing that we could prophesy. There
(479) is always some element in that which takes place which is different from anything that we could anticipate -- a bit of novelty attends the recurrence of even ordinary events. That is true as far as our observation of it is concerned. It has got to be something different from anything we could hold in the mind or we would be unable to identify it. Our discovery of uniformity implies that which is not uniform. What Boutroux was interested in was in reducing an event which is different from another event to a certain identity with it.
To have uniformity you must have it in that which is not uniform; that which the genius of research is able to get out of the world are uniformities in the midst of that which is not uniform. You cannot have the one without the other. We come into a world which is pluralistic, as far as our knowledge is concerned. We are overwhelmed with a multiplicity of things that cannot be identified with each other, and then we set out on a scientific approach and select something which we think may be a clue to identities. In order to select that element, we must ignore other characters. If we are going to consider a given peculiarity, we must not give attention to others; and if we have good fortune when we follow the peculiarity out, we may discover it elsewhere. We might have had some other clue. A later scientist with better luck or greater penetration does find some other clue that is more important and builds up his theory on the basis of that clue. But a still greater genius may displace him. The undertaking is to bring order into something which is, in our immediate experience, wholly disordered. We must get a method for doing this: following out clues which are involved and ignoring what we do not know. It has been pointed out that ignoring is an essential part of knowledge. You can only know a thing in so far as you can ignore something else. We generally think of this in terms of getting rid of that which is not essential to the thing. It was Boutroux who insisted that scientific procedure is directed by the interest which we have in the process of knowledge and is dependent on the choices that we make of the hypotheses that we form out of contingent
(480) interests. I want to leave that in your minds particularly, because it appears in somewhat different form in the later statement of Poincaré in regard to the conventional character in which mathematics is presented. Boutroux also turned particularly to mathematics to show in what sense his statement was correct. A man in mathematics gets the highest degree of abstraction. In that subject you can consider things only in terms of the content of their certain, definite relationships. You must abstract everything else. But the knowledge you get is at the expense of everything else.
Boutroux, and the point of view which he represents in the development of French philosophy, indicates the reaction to the method and psychology of science. As I pointed out, science had given a control over the world which went beyond that which could be obtained by philosophy. The striking result of scientific work, its research, and the establishment of its results by observation and experiment lay, among other things, in its presenting that which is recognized by all who are competent to recognize what the scientist is doing. That is the difference between science and philosophy. One belongs to one philosophical school or another; he is an idealist, a pragmatist, a realist. One does not, on the other hand, belong to one scientific school or another as far as the results of science are concerned, if these results are established by observation. If the hypotheses are consistent and logical, they are accepted even where there is a difference of opinion in regard to the value of any certain one of them. They are taken as working hypotheses; and, in so far as they work, they are accepted. There is, on the whole, unanimity among the scientists in so far as results are concerned. Of course, in regard to the questions of accuracy of observation, of the adequacy of absolute tests, and of the interpretation of these results there are wide differences of opinion. But in so far as one gets a hypothesis that is recognized as consistent in its structure, one that answers to the problem which has given rise to it, and the hypothesis is supported by tests, it is accepted. It must be accepted to get that
(481) sort of unanimity which science presents but which is in contrast with the attitude of philosophers. The temperament of the man himself, his background, may determine the philosophy that he adopts. There is, of course, rational development of it from his mere opinion. It is criticized by himself and by others. One must accept certain types of criticism, but in the end one does take the point of view which answers to the personality, the interest, the background, of the man himself in his philosophic creed. Thus, science has stood out in contrast with philosophy in certain respects. It has an authority which philosophy does not have. During the medieval period philosophy expressed the attitude of the authoritative church, with its affirmation of divine inspiration; and hence it was able to speak for science. But with the appearance of experimental science you have an authority which is different from that of philosophy.
I wish to call that to your attention in order to indicate the attitude which philosophy took. It felt that it had to recognize science; and the relationship of science to philosophic doctrine became, in one way or another, the really important problem of all nineteenth-century thought. The Romantic idealists undertook to bring science within philosophy itself. They did not succeed, but they stated the scientific method in terms of the dialectic. If they had succeeded, then there would have been a philosophy of science which should have been more or less in harmony with both science and philosophy. The point of conflict between science and philosophy in England was the epistemological question. Science tells us what we know. And what the epistemological school did was to criticize knowing as such -- not the result of science, but the process knowing. What does knowing amount to; what does it tell us? The Germans, of course, recognized this problem; but their interest lay in the carrying-out of science, particularly along the lines of physiology and the relationships between the organism and states of consciousness. There was an interest in finding that interrelationship through the development of psychophysics.
Fechner thought that he had found a mathematical relation-
(482) -ship which could be set up between the intensity of the stimuli and that of the responses. He found out that you had to increase a stimulus by a certain percentage of itself in order to produce a difference in the response or in the sensation itself. If you were to take up a weight, for example, you would have to add a certain percentage, a third, of the weight to itself before you would recognize that you had a heavier weight in your hand. Similarly, a light would have to be increased by a tenth of itself. Fechner went on the assumption that these just-perceptible differences were elements in sensation which were equal to each other. The assumption then would be that sensation is made up out of elements which appear in just-perceptible differences. It is a composite. You can break it up so that you have elements which are just perceptibly different. If that is true, you can say that you can set up a mathematical relationship between the stimulus and the sensation. You add a certain percentage of the stimulus to itself in order to get a just-perceptible difference. If you work that out, what you get is a logarithmic equation. This seemed to be an open door for the mathematical analysis of so-called "consciousness." It seems possible, by means of mathematical analysis, to get back to ultimate elements in sensation itself. Fechner designated this as the field of psychophysics.
You can see at once that there are all sorts of assumptions here. For example, in the instances to which I have referred, it is assumed that the sensation can be broken up into just-perceptible differences, and that a difference in one case is equal to that in another. These assumptions are without support. Particularly, the theory runs frankly against the data of experience. One's sensation of weight is a unit; it is not made up of a number. You can lift a series of weights and, after that, can see, we think, that some of them would feel equal. Suppose we have a pound weight. That would be a guess which does not mean that the sensation you have when you lift the pound weight is equal to, can be divided into, twelve or sixteen different parts. The experience, the unitary experience, cannot be divided as the
(483) object itself can be divided. And then, of course, there is the question of just where the equation which is made use of is to be applied. What you get is the response of the individual which indicates that he feels that this weight is heavier than another. Now, what has happened? A stimulus has come in, has traveled around through the central nervous system, and has come out in the process of feeling. That represents a very intricate pathway in the central nervous system. Does the equation represent a relationship between the increase in the stimulus and the response of the nervous system? Have you a relationship there between the stimuli and consciousness, between the stimuli and the response in the central nervous system? This is a question which you see-when you once get over the sense of triumph at having gotten mathematics into the field of consciousness -- involves assumptions that run counter to the actual data of experience. And, on the other hand, you have got the relationship which may apply to the organism in its response instead of the relationship between consciousness and the stimulus. So, the field of psychophysics lost its interest rather shortly. There has been a revival of it at the present time from another standpoint, however. I brought it up as an illustration of the type of interest that was dominant in Germany-the interest in the study of our consciousness and experience through the study of the organism as science deals with it. That is where the interest fastened in Germany.
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Now, in France you have the interest in the relationship of the individual as an individual, as a personality, to science. What is the bearing of the scientific doctrine on the experience of the individual as a personality ? What science gives is a world that is seemingly independent of ourselves-at least as far as science presents it. And, as I have indicated, Boutroux says it has necessity-the necessity which science predicates in its statements, if not one of a metaphysical character. The scientist qua scientist does not state that the changes must take place in the
(484) order in which he thinks they will. He has not got back to a necessary structure of the universe which can be dealt with. I have already said several times that the necessity which science postulates is practically synonymous with the intelligibility of the world. The only way in which you can know the world is in terms of uniformity. It is only in so far as you can get a law that you can get that which is uniform, that you can get that which can be known. Science does not state that it has discovered laws which are themselves fixed and certain. Its statements are always hypothetical. If the relationship between the mass, distances, and velocities of bodies is such as stated in Newton's law, then such and such results must be true. If the law of the pressure of gases is as it has been worked out, then such and such results must follow. That is where the necessity lies. It is a necessity of a hypothetical presupposition. A hypothetical proposition is a solution of certain problems which has met the test of observation. That is why we can go ahead on the basis of it. But science does not maintain that those hypotheses are necessary. It maintains, as I have said, that they are legitimate solutions for the problems which people have met and that they have been tested in the sense that action can continue on the basis of them. We can work out such things as stresses and strains, can determine when motions will occur. We do not hesitate to make these statements with the recognition that there may be some more satisfactory statement. But, as far as the situation is given, we are justified in accepting this hypothesis. Now if we do use a certain hypothesis, it necessarily follows that such and such results will be found. If the hypothesis is correct, the eclipse will take place at such and such a time. That is the scientific necessity.
Boutroux approached the question from the point of view of a metaphysical necessity and asked what the justification for this metaphysical necessity is. He pointed out that there are always contingencies even in the metaphysical state. I think we can see that the contingent to which Boutroux referred is just that which I have pointed out in the hypothetical nature
(485) of the scientist's judgment. After A, B must follow. This is contingent, never dogmatic. On the contrary, the scientist is looking for events which will lead him to another problem. We can regard Newton's statement as an approximation and Einstein's as more accurate. Newton was the last person to maintain that there was absolute assurance in regard to the law of gravitation. He used the unfortunate expression that he had not used hypotheses. What he was referring to were the rather fantastic assumptions which the scientists of the time were making. They went beyond a possibility of testing. But his statement of the law was definitely a hypothesis. His hypothesis appeared in this form: he knew what the velocity of a falling body is near the surface of the earth; he had a rough estimate on the basis of which he could determine the distance of the moon, and he could figure out how much the moon falls toward the earth during a second; if it were not for the attraction of the earth, the moon would go off on a tangent; he could figure out how much the moon was drawn toward the earth during a second; if you take this relation in terms of the inverse square, then the distance the moon falls in a second, its velocity, would have a definite value; the moon should fall only 1/3,6oo as rapidly as a body on the surface of the earth. That was the hypothesis which Newton set up, and he figured out on that basis what the velocity of the moon was and then saw that it was a certain fraction of the velocity of a body falling near the surface of the earth. That is thinking in a circle, and the first calculation was not entirely satisfactory; but he got a more accurate measurement of the attraction of the earth and found that it agreed exactly.
There you get the test of a hypothesis. You can continue to act on the assumption that the body is continually falling toward the earth with a velocity which is determined by this law. There is nothing that we now know that interferes with that assumption. All the facts are in harmony with it. If that is the law, then we can go on and state what must follow. That is the necessity that science can appeal to. If this law holds,
(486) there [sic then?] there must be such and such a result. If this law holds, there is a necessity which carries with it contingency. When Boutroux was criticizing the necessity of the law from the metaphysical standpoint, he was implying that the scientist was making a metaphysical assumption. Science, of course, always works with errors of observation; and science also works with reference to a method of limits. It does not get back to exact agreements, exact positions, exact congruence. What it does do, however, is to get a position which approximates these. The limit is never reached. But we get a series of which one can say: If the limit were reached, then such and such a thing would be true; and if that is true, such and such things must be true if we approximate it. We have, then, a method of approximation which enables us to state what the situation will be when you get there. But there is an "If" there, and the whole scientific method has this postulate behind it. Boutroux's assumption does not negate that. We cannot get back to the noumenal reality of the universe. Our knowledge is all relative knowledge. The space and time which are the basis for geometry and mechanics are relative to our own observations. All our observations have that sort of relativity behind them. What we find is a correlation between that which is given in experience and what we assume there as outside.
The possibility of getting such correlation is found, of course, in a field of thought in which mathematics and logic are dominant. Mathematics is a field of exact thought and analysis which has proved powerful. It has back of it certain definitions, certain presuppositions, certain postulates. Given these, its results are necessary results. Geometry has a postulate of parallel lines-that through a point outside of a line only one line can be drawn that will be parallel to it. Now you can set up another postulate, that through a point an indefinite number of lines can be drawn that are parallel to it, and you can construct a geometry on this basis. And as a piece of logic, the latter is just as sound a system as Euclidean geometry. You can make still other suppositions: that more than one line or a certain
(487) number of lines can be drawn through such a point, or that no lines can be drawn through it. You are at liberty to make any assumption on the basis of which you can build up a consistent geometry. If we say Euclidean geometry fits the experience we have of things, there is a great question as to how far it can be applied. Our measurements indicate that our local world is Euclidean. But we have never made any exact measurements which we tried to carry out to sufficient length to determine whether it is true that space is Euclidean. It is possible that our world is non-Euclidean. The assumption of Einstein is that it is non-Euclidean. We cannot prove that it is or that it is not. If we set up the assumption of its being Euclidean, then necessary results follow. Suppose you have a geometry which is non-Euclidean and one that is Euclidean. Which one is to be adopted? You will adopt the one that is most convenient!
Here you get the position of Poincaré, which is a development of Boutroux's statement, that our scientific theory and our mathematical theory are the most convenient that we can get. In the first place, we must abandon the space of immediate observation, the space in which we move up and down and right and left. What is real space? No one can tell. You can work out a geometry of one sort, or an infinite number of others, which could be applied to our experience, each having various of these different assumptions as to what the structure of the world is. Poincaré says we should adopt that which is most convenient. It is like getting persons of different races together and saying that the proceedings shall be in a certain language. You can find out the number of persons who speak the language that is most generally known, and you take that language as the medium of the gathering. In what language shall we express our observation of tile world, Euclidean of non-Euclidean, or some other? That which is the most convenient! That is Poincaré's position. He said that our scientific theories are, after all, compromises. We never get back to the exact elements that science presupposes. There is always considerable leeway in the hypothesis, but the scientist proceeds anyway. We have never had
(488) knowledge of reality. We have a compromise, a working compromise.
But Boutroux did not go to the point of saying that statements which science makes are simply conventionalisms. That is the statement that Poincaré makes later. The former considered himself a rationalist. He said we can find out about the world so that we can get an agreement between the world as it is and the scientific statement we make. We can make a scientific statement that comes pretty close to the statement of the nature of things. Thus we can feel that we know something about reality. That was the position which Boutroux retained: we should believe that knowledge reveals something of the world. But he refused to recognize what he considered the datum of science in regard to the necessity of a scientific statement. As I have tried to point out, he was implying a necessity in the scientist's statement which the scientist does not claim. He was failing to recognize that all scientific judgments are, from the point of view of the scientist, hypotheses and that the necessity is only the necessity that you get in a hypothetical syllogism. If A is B, then C is D. However, A is B; so C is D. The scientist's laws are always of that form. If the square of the distances gives such and such a result, then a certain movement of the moon will be necessary if its motion conforms to the hypothesis of universal gravitation.
Boutroux represents a movement which comes to be more prominent in French philosophy, a movement toward the irrationality of our experience. He turned it in this direction, gave it an anti-intellectualist current. What he reached was the statement that science in its rational statement seems to get a necessary, ordered result which it does not really get. He criticizes what he considered to be the finding of science from the point of view of its own place. His interest in it was in showing that science is not justified-supposing it makes that claim-in saying that the unity of the individual is determined, that he has no free will, no spontaneity. The freedom of the will is a question. We do not know that the world is such a necessary tex-
(489) -ture of events that everything that takes place is determined by what has occurred before. He is interested in showing that the world is not such a necessary texture of events that everything that takes place is caused by what preceded it. He undertakes to show this by the analysis of the process of science itself, and by his assumption that what science presents is a sort of compromise. Boutroux comes to a definite conclusion that the realistic statement of science, as he interprets it, claims far more than it can establish.
That is a step in the direction of anti-intellectualism, and it is carried on by Bergson. Both Poincaré and Bergson represent a movement which developed along that line. In this, Poincaré was the scientist and Bergson the philosopher.
As I have already said, the principal figure in the movement in the tendency which introduced the element of irrationality in French thought is Boutroux, who criticized the conception of necessity as this appears in scientific doctrine and in scientific method. His theme was the presence of contingency in both the doctrine and the method of science. From the metaphysical standpoint he insisted that each postulate of science left the door open to contingencies. The axioms and postulates of mathematics and the sciences could not be reduced to identity; they could not be developed from the proposition that A is A. The universe could not be presented as necessary. Therefore, the findings of science are contingent.
From the standpoint of method, science proceeds inductively, discovering the laws which in their formulation are presented as necessary. But there formulations never exactly accord with the findings of observation and experiment. The point that Boutroux laid emphasis on was that the form of the law is one which is made by the, mind. But this universal and necessary form does not exactly state what is presented in experience. Furthermore, the mind selects that form which seems to be the most satisfactory for the given situation. From Boutroux's standpoint, a compromise is made between the demand of the mind for necessary laws and the actual data as they come
(490) within the field of observation in science. This term "compromise" was the one that he used. There is an element of contingency here not only from the standpoint of the sort of data that comes within the range of science but also from the point of view of the mind itself in the selection that it makes of the hypothesis it uses. In the end, however, Boutroux conceived the universe as rational. He was not himself anti-intellectualistic; he did not come back to an irrational element. But, on the other hand, he did not believe that science was able to demonstrate a necessary rational order, that room was always open for the expression of spontaneity on the part of the individual. These were the principal points in Boutroux's statement. As you see, this study of science is made from the standpoint of contingency, with a view to leaving the door open to the freedom of the will, to the expression of the individual as an individual. That was the problem that more or less obsessed the French philosophic mind during the period under consideration. It has before it the seeming mechanical order of the universe which mathematical science presented and within which, at least in its formulation, everything that takes place is necessarily determined by that which has gone before. In such a universe there seems to be no room for the spontaneous individual, for the spontaneous mind, for our freedom or ability to determine our own conduct. This seems to be an illusion.
XV
The next figure of importance in this movement is Poincaré, the author of Science and Hypothesis and other significant works, and a cousin, by the way, of the one-time premier of France. He was an eminent mathematician and physicist. He was particularly important in the development of Maxwell's theory of electricity. He also gave a very acute and profound study of the meaning of scientific method. Born in the year of Comte's death, he parallels Russell and Whitehead in England. He belonged not only to the group of men we have considered but to these men who are our contemporaries. He is a connect-
(491) -ing link between them. He took up the mathematical method as such and showed that that method is not one of deduction. So far as one has simply the principle of identity-that A is equal to A-as the principle of reasoning, no advance can be made. Nothing more can be found in the world than is presented in the premises. He sees, however, that advances have appeared in mathematical theory and asks what their source is. So far as arithmetic and algebra are concerned, he brings them back to a principle of mathematics which finds its expression in the number series, namely, the proof that anything true of n will also be true of n - 1, and one goes on back until one reaches the position of unity itself. In such a situation the mind, by immediate intuition, realizes what the law of the number series is. That immediate intuition is not a mere reduction to identity. It does not come back to the principle that A is equal to A. It is a grasping by the mind of a process which, in its recurrence, exhibits certain necessary laws. In the field of geometry we have the fundamental assumptions of Euclidean geometry in the axioms, postulates, definitions. These Poincaré considers from the point of view of non-Euclidean geometry. The former geometry develops on the Euclidean axiom that only one line can be drawn through a point outside a line parallel to that line. What Poincaré points out is that we have here certain more or less arbitrary definitions. He discusses the space of our perception with its dimensions, its structure, and its position in relation to the space of mathematics and geometry; and he finds that the latter space is, in some sense, created by the geometrist.
I pointed out that it is perfectly possible to create other geometries which are non-Euclidean, geometries of what we may call cc curved spaces." For example, we speak of a solid as the form of an infinite number of planes. We start from a line and reach the plane as an infinite number of lines; start with the plane and reach solids by an infinite number of planes. Now, suppose those planes, instead of being level, were bent, were slightly curved. Suppose the universe were made out of space that had a coefficient of curvature. The point can be made perhaps a
(492) little more concrete by the change which came about in navigation when it was recognized that the surface of the earth was curved. It came to be realized that the shortest distance between two points is not a direct line. Now, suppose that is true not only of the surface of the earth but that the whole of space has a slight curvature. Then the axiom of Euclid about the parallel lines would not be true. Such a space as that would require a geometry built on a principle different from that of Euclid. Such a geometry might be developed, and for every proposition in that geometry you could find a proposition in the Euclidean geometry, and vice versa. You could go on the assumption that you had a curved space with a certain coefficient of curvature, and build your geometry on that basis, and still you could utilize the Euclidean position as a particular instance. In other words, it is a matter of convenience whether we adopt one geometry or another. The reason for adopting the Euclidean geometry is that it has been found more convenient. And Poincaré said, suppose we should find that our space had some such curvature, that lines which are parallel tend to meet at a distant point. We would then probably find it more convenient to go on the assumption that there was an error in our calculation than to change our system of geometry. It would likely be that we would retain Euclidean geometry even in a non-Euclidean world because it would be the most convenient. In other words, our mathematical systems are conventional.
It is possible that people should live in a world not of solids but of fluids. Suppose one did live in a world of fluids. Then the form of this desk, as we conceive of it, when it had passed out through the fluid would be distorted. Or, take another illustration that Poincaré used. Let us assume that, as we move from a center in any direction, all dimensions and positions are proportionately decreased. This table, for example, would have a certain definite volume, a certain definite length. Now, if it moves away from this point, its dimensions would be altered proportionately. But not only would the dimensions of the table change, but those of the measuring-rods would
(493) also change. Not only that, but persons would also become smaller while retaining the same symmetry. The retina of the eye would be just so much smaller. just as a body shrinks in the cold, every object would become proportionately less in all its dimensions. You can see that in such a world as that there would be no way of discovering this change, because the individuals and the units of measurement would change proportionately. What we have in science is a satisfactory language for stating the events and structure of things as they take place about us. Now, we could have another language; and if we did, we could express the relationship which exists in this world in one language or another. The system that is used is a conventional one. It comes back to the process of the mind of the individual. The whole mathematical system, then, is a conventional system. It does not give us a picture of the world as it is, but it does pick out certain relationships in it. And it states these relationships in terms of such convenient systems as that to which I have referred. Thus , the mechanical system of the universe, instead of being a structure lying outside of us in which we are helpless elements, is really a creation which serves to enable us to pick out those aspects that seem to be the important or essential features of the world and their relationships.
Here we have, as you see, a development of the conception of a compromise between the mind and the world which Boutroux had brought forward. Poincaré was not skeptical. He did not believe that it was impossible to know. What he was doing was reconstructing what he considered to be the limits, the actual content, of our knowledge. We have this same conception carried further among the neo-realists, like Russell, who assumes that the only knowledge that we have of a world outside of ourselves is of its logical pattern, and lie thinks that there is a relationship between that pattern and the pattern of our thought. You have a certain pattern present in Euclidean geometry. You have another picture arising out of our immediate sense perception. You have still another pattern in the nonEuclidean geometry. Suppose there were creatures that lived in
(494) two dimensions only, and suppose they developed a geometry in that dimension. They have only those dimensions and move in that plane. Now, suppose there is a hump in that plane. These beings will be unable to state it in terms of dimensions of things. What they would find is that, as they approached the hump, in order to move around it in the shortest time they would have to make a curve. They might express that in different ways. They might assume that there was some sort of a force in the back of what we could call the center of this hump which drove them away. You would get the same sort of a picture if you were in a balloon and, looking down, saw people moving with lanterns where you could not see the contour of the earth. It would all be a plane. But you would see forms with lanterns going over the side of a mountain and notice that, when they got to a certain point, they went off in a curve instead of a straight line. You would have two different ways of stating that. If you could get the third dimension, you could state it in terms of this dimension or you could state it in terms of a force. How would you express it if you were sailing over the ocean and did not know that the surface was curved and found that you got to a certain point by taking a longer path? You could conceive of some repulsive power drawing you away when you take one way rather than another. You would have different ways of explaining your course.
So you can have different geometries. One geometry, the Euclidean, has proved to be the simpler way of stating our experience of spatial relations. You could state it in other terms. In the Einsteinian doctrine you get a particular statement which works out in a non-Euclidean geometry. That may be the simpler way of stating it. That may come to be accepted. It is the position in which one sees certain relationships which exist between certain events, something that is happening out there; and you presume the relationship between that and the patterns that you have in your own mind. You cannot get hold of those events out there, but you find a certain structure in them. The most striking illustration of that is found in the relativity doc-
(495) -trine. You can get a statement in terms of which you get what takes place in one space, then in terms of that which takes place in another. Now there is a certain interpenetration between events in your theory which can be given a definite statement, and that statement can be translated into any space. From such a standpoint you can recognize that your mathematical theory is only a link for bringing out relationships where you do not have the things which have these interrelationships. And you can get the correlation between that pattern and the pattern that you have in your mind. From the biological point of view, these patterns were all convenient. That is, they are definitely selected with reference to the uses to which one is to put them. They are selected for the sake of their convenience. That is what we mean by "convenience." But there are certain necessary relations. Thus, Poincaré was not skeptical. He was, as it were, simply loosening the mathematical theory of the world from the world itself, as it was presented by the physical scientist.
The latter had thought that the world was a mechanical structure of masses, of bits of energy, in motion. He thought of it as a great machine that ran in accordance with necessary law. Poincaré and the others were loosening this necessary structure from the world itself and lodging it in the mind. We can get a connection, a correlation, of the relations between the characters out there and those in your mind; but we have no such universe actually present in experience. We have only a way of getting hold of certain characters which are there. Do these characters reveal the actual structure of reality? In the matter of movement Poincaré came back to a certain intuition of the movement in dealing with the recurrence of the number series. Does that intuition reveal the actual relationship of events to each other? He believed it did.
The tendency here is to assimilate the nature of things to the mind. This is a tendency toward a certain type of idealism. But we have a fundamental break between the mind, on the one side, and what we call "matter," on the other. It involves the
(496) distinction between quantity and quality. Our experience tends to pick out that which is qualitative. Our mathematical technique, our scientific technique, picks out that which is quantitative. So, we speak of color in nature as a certain motion, of something with definite vibrations. We measure the world and deal with it as a measurable quantity, but no measurement gives us a control over it. The color, sound, taste, odor-the quantities of the world -- tend to be put in the mind. That bifurcation of the world has been the most convenient to use. As Poincaré pointed out, it is a great convenience to have these statements; but the only thing we get hold of is certain. definite relations in the world, and those relations from Poincaré's standpoint, as stated in terms of geometry, are, in a certain sense, a creation. What is the relationship of those statements to reality itself? Poincaré denied that the logic and metaphysics of identity could reveal to us the world as it existed, but he did speak of an intuition which could see through to certain essential relations. We want a world made up of events-one in which things have definite lengths, can be definitely measured -- one in which objects can be put into geometric relations with each other, have perfectly definite Successions, certain velocities, certain accelerations. That is the sort of world we A ant so that we can control it. In order to get such a world, we must abstract from our experience as it takes place immediately. This table is colored; it has it feel; it is warm; it is smooth. We cannot state its characters in these terms; but we can state them in tems of a geometry, in terms of a dynamics. We can utilize the materials of nature for this or that or the other thing, and by giving a scientific statement we Can get control of reality. But to do that we must put this conventional framework of ours into the world.
XVI
We have in these conceptions, which follow from Comte up to Poincaré, the setting for the philosophy of Bergson. There is one important addition. The thought of Boutroux and Poincaré was occupied with mathematical physics. The problems of biology
(497) were only incidental to their discussions. It was assumed that life-processes could be stated in terms of the inanimate world; life could be dealt with in terms of chemistry and physics. This position could not be proved, but it was a legitimate assumption that the whole world could be included in such a mechanical statement. The justification for that is what Boutroux and Poincaré were discussing.
Bergson starts with the science of biology, particularly the theory of evolution. He is a true French philosopher in that his method is a psychological one. In his book Time and Free Will he starts off with the assumption that the universe and the field of our experience are fields of what he calls "Imagination." They are the impressions that belong to a self, to a mind, an organized mind. You can see this is an idealistic statement; yet, it is not romantic, spiritual idealism, nor yet the subjective idealism of Berkeley. Bergson comes back to experience as he finds it; he recognizes the table as an experience that can be stated in terms either of physics or of psychology. And he chooses the psychological statement of it. He does not lodge objects in the mind. They can be in the mind or out of the mind but are the same in both cases. There is an identity of structure, or nature, as you like. The question whether they are in the mind or not is a question that does not necessarily arise. Suppose one takes the illustration I have given before of the face of a person that one sees and mistakes for an acquaintance. When one approaches the individual, he sees that he has made a mistake. In a certain sense he takes off the face that he sees and considers that it is a different individual. He has put something -the face, form, image, of his friend-on this person; and when he approaches, he sees that it does not fit. Where was that image that he saw? Was it out there, or was it in the mind? What is the meaning of any such question as that? We may say the image could not be there, for, when we come to study it, it is different and what was seen was only a mental image, and a mental image must be in a mind. But, for the purpose of ex-
(498) -perience the image is out there. That is a phase of experience of which French philosophy never lost hold.
Bergson presents himself at this point. His is a different approach from that which we have indicated was being made in Germany. The approach in Germany was to take the physiological organism over into the field of psychology. It states what corresponds to states of consciousness in terms of what goes on in the organism. And this psychology which wants to be scientific simply gets a parallelism between these two. As far as it can, it subordinates the mental to the physical, or rather the psychical to the physiological. If it can only get hold of what goes on in the central nervous system, the self, then it will have data of a scientific sort and will be able to interpret this much more uncertain field of the inner life. It goes from the ground of natural science into the psychical self. Bergson reversed this procedure. His approach was from the psychical side, and he attempted to deal with the physical and physiological from that standpoint. He does not, however, use the distinction as Berkeley did. Berkeley wiped out the distinction between the mental and physical and tried to state the problem in terms of association of ideas. The German, or physiological-psychological, school does not, of course, wipe out the psychical; but it looks at it from the point of view of the physiological. That is, the psychical tends to become phenomenal, merely a psychical shadow which accompanies certain physiological happenings. That which is given, the whole process, is found in the organism. Only a part of this reveals itself in consciousness which flares up here and there. If we want to understand states of consciousness, we must go over into the field of physiological psychology. That is the attitude which the scientific psychologists took, although a philosopher could interpret that attitude in different fashions. But the psychologists as such were demanding an attitude in which they interpreted the psychical in terms of the physical. They did not, however, say that consciousness is a secretion of the brain as the bile is a secretion of
(499) the liver. They had got beyond that form of crude materialism which belonged to the 1840's.
The position of Bergson is that the fundamental reality is given in mental experience, and that the statement of what we call physical and physiological must be interpreted in terms of the psychical, of the mental. He undertakes to treat the physical world, as science deals with it, as a phenomenal statement of what goes on in the psychological world. There is a distinction between knowledge and the real. It is a distinction which is legitimate. It is one which is undertaken in the interest of conduct, for the sake of utility. If one does not undertake to set up the experienced world as the ultimate metaphysical reality, there is no criticism to be made of our statement of it in such terms. But the content of reality is that which is revealed within, in that which is in some sense psychical. We have taken the realities that go on in our inner experience and have fixed them so that we can control them, but we must not assume that the petrification of these experiences is a living, pulsing reality.
The first question, of course, that would be put up to such a philosophy is: How do you know that this is the approach to ultimate reality? Science knows a world in so far as it can measure it, in so far as it can find laws of uniformity that are stated in terms of the relationship of things in space and time-and its statement in terms of time is, after all, spatial. If you ask the length of time that it takes to walk through the park, the answer is so many minutes. What is that? It is the representation of a certain distance on the face of your watch. If you are going to put the time that science deals with in measurable terms, you must put it in spatial terms. How can you get the different inner realities if what your science deals with is stated in terms of an outer physical world? It is in the former that you get to exact measurements, to ultimate realities. But how do you approach that inner world in which you say the outer is a distinct phenomena? What Bergson does is to set up a metaphysical method. He has rejected the scientific formula. He regards it as academic. He calls for an immediate return to inner
(500) experience, a return to that inner experience which does not take place in terms of what he calls "concepts." The field of distinctions and of reality are for Bergson special fields. And he places in the former not only what the measuring-rod deals with but also the whole of scientific technique. The only thing he can measure is something that he can put a measuring-rod on. You have the falling grains of sand in the hourglass, the drops of water in a water clock, the slow melting-away of the candle, the swinging of the pendulum of a clock. All these are spatial events, and the only time that science deals with is a time that can be petrified in such spatial form, that is, where one can apply measurement. Motion, to be measured, must be stopped. You measure a motion, and what you get is a simultaneity at one end of the line and a simultaneity at the other. You get the point on your watch at which the hand of your watch stands when the runner starts; and when he stops, you may reduce that and get back to an infinitesimal bit. If you are measuring in terms of space, your motion must be put in a spatial container. You have to stop your motion in order to measure it. As far as science deals with processes, then, it must petrify them in spatial forms.
Our concepts, says Bergson, have the same characteristic. What they do is to divide things off into discontinuities. Conceptualization breaks up processes and simply relates concept A to concept B. It analyzes the living object into certain quantities, and puts all these together; but it carefully distinguishes one from the other. It is this, that, and the other thing; and they must all be held separately. You take a reality to pieces and can get your conceptual view of what its nature is. It is made up of a set of situations which you describe in terms of movement, but a whole set of separate concepts would be required to define the thing. It is not as simple for Bergson to make his conceptual world spatial as it is for him to make his temporal world spatial. But he undertakes to show that our conceptual analysis inevitably stops the living process. It does not give the reality of something that is going on. If you are to
(501) know all this, know reality in terms of concepts, you must get it by the approach of intuition, by a sudden turning-back to the inner life, grasping it in its reality. Bergson distinguishes sharply between that reality and the spatial, conceptual statement which one finds of it. In that world of change, of process, of spontaneity, Bergson is able to preserve freedom. The other statement is that which science makes in concepts, in measurement. The former is the statement which you get in Bergson's volume translated under the title of Time and Free Will.
The ideal of a scientific statement is that you get in an equation the assurance of a reality of such sort that it makes no difference what happens-there is no accident in it. Everything must happen according to that which has taken place. That is the scientific ideal of accuracy. That is the picture that science undertakes to obtain. But, Bergson says, that does not carry with it the nature of duration, of what is happening. Under such circumstances, happening would cease. You would have absolute monotony, no way of distinguishing one moment from another. The scientist tries to wipe out all such distinctions. Bergson turns to the inner life for the expression of this other type of succession -- a type of succession in which it is always the unexpected that happens, in which it is that which is universal that makes us aware of succession, of duration. You cannot recognize duration, happening, experience, except in that which is changing. There must be change in order that there may be awareness of what is going on. Duration, then, is something that lies in our immediate experience. But duration is not found in the world as science presents it, that is, not as mechanical science has presented it. Here you do not find that which is characteristic of this inner experience. It is the statement of this situation that Bergson faces, and it is more or less original with him. To Bergson there is for the scientist nothing but a succession of separate, instantaneous moments, one of which replaces another. Now that is not duration. What does characterize duration is a passage from the past into the present, and on into the future. Something is always taking place in
(502) which there is some past and some future. This is true of every experience. Whether that is to be called "Interpenetration" may be a question, but that is the way in which Bergson presents it. The past is actually crowding into the future. The only way in which we can get that duration is by a sort of intuition, a sudden turning on one's self, grasping experience as it is going on. But, if you try to state it by means of analysis, especially in terms of the external world, you kill it. In such a statement you have to anatomize it. You can dissect it, but then you no longer have a living process there.
It is this attitude of Bergson which makes him an anti-intellectualist. Of course, Bergson is not an anti-intellectualist in the sense that he denied intelligence of a sort, but he says it has a particular function. From that standpoint Bergson may be called pragmatic. The function of conceptional thinking is action. It presents a world in terms of mechanisms. It is a mechanical thing and gives the mechanism by means of which we can control the content of experience. -'Jan is a tool-making animal. He works by tools; and his concepts are tools, just as his machines are. They are legitimate for their purpose. But the purpose is not that of revealing ultimate reality. If you want to get ultimate reality, turn within, where you have experience itself. Bergson has the same difficulty in terms of philosophy and metaphysics as do the mystics. You get intuitions only in a glimpse that can be recognized now and then, and you cannot determine whether or not you are going to get them. In the very nature of the case there can be no conceptual theory of intuition. That is perhaps the most fundamental obstacle to the development of the Bergsonian philosophy. But the escape from this difficulty which Bergson presents is his identification of life with this reality which we have within us. I pointed out to you that in scientific development there is evolution, and the theory of life which appears in science is revealed in the Bergsonian philosophy. In other words, Bergson finds in life all the characters which he has identified in this inner experience. But what is life? As it is presented to us in the modern physiological
(503) statement, it is an interaction of process going on all over the body. The different elements must be there affecting each other in order that there may be life. You can kill a living form and get all the elements and get them into test tubes, but you can never get life. Life then is, from the point of view of Bergson, another illustration of that which we find in our own inner life, another illustration of reality.
We have seen that the center of Bergson's position is found in what he terms "intuition," the recognition of duration as it appears in the inner experience. This involves interpenetration of characters-intensity, rather than extensity, of qualities. This is a method which is given immediately, obtained through a conceptual analysis and construction. From Bergson's standpoint the reality of the world is that which is revealed in the inner experience. This inner experience belongs to the individual. It is not essential to the nature of reality. It indicates, rather, the path by which the individual gets this intuition. But that of which he gets an intuition is not a state of consciousness; it is of the nature of reality itself.
XVII
In discussing the relationship of mind and body in Bergson's doctrine we have seen that the center of reality is to be found in the psychical experience, as he indicates in the use of the term "image." These images answer in one sense to the impressions and ideas of the empirical school. For Bergson the center of reality is the psychical experience which is revealed in intuition, as distinct from conceptual knowledge and also as distinct from the organism of the spatial world. For Bergson the category of time, as lie conceives time, is closer to reality than that of space. The time to which he refers is duration, durée that which appears in the inner experience, that within which there can be different types of interpenetration. This he puts in sharp contrast with the spatial world, which is external, which is the state of quantity, while the inner experience is the state of quality;
(504) which is a matter of extensive magnitude over against intensive magnitude. He refuses to recognize that this intensive magnitude can be dealt with from the point of view of the extensive magnitude. In Bergson's mind, concepts involve the same sort of externality which he criticized in the attempts to state our inner experience in terms of external stimulation. When we think of things in terms of concepts with the sharp differences of which they are capable, separating one from another, we are doing the same sort of injustice to reality as that to which I just referred in the relation of an extensive stimulation or an extensive physiological response in its relationship to the inner experience. Bergson does not say that a concept is a spatial event, but he says that it has just the same character of externality. Concepts are exclusive of each other, and that exclusiveness is almost externality. What Bergson finds in the world, especially in the biological world, is a creative process which grows out of that which has taken place but which is not itself given in that which has come before. Duration is always the happening of that which is novel. If you get a spatial statement of time, you get that which has no succession in it, at least no duration in it. Duration involves the appearance of something that was not present before.
The account which Bergson gives of this world, as against what he speaks of as a "distortion of reality," is in terms of the characters in which the organism, the mind, puts its experience. He assumes that the nature of the individual fixes the world, and fixes it in terms of the uniformities of an individual's past experience in order that he may utilize it. The mind selects out certain characters of experience on which it can depend, on which its past experience indicates it can depend, and states a world in these fixed forms. It is a pragmatic sort of procedure, a selection of characters which are relatively permanent and a statement of these in the interest of the solution of problems. The externalized world is, therefore, a fixing, a freezing, of reality in terms of certain uniformities that are applied to the world as if they dominated and expressed that reality. The
(504) mind, then, is that which within itself is psychical, and which fixes its own universe and its own organism for the purposes of conduct. The great instrument for this purpose is the central nervous system.
Bergson passes on from this sort of a statement which is in psychical terms over to a statement in biological terms in the notion of a creative evolution. Reality, in so far as it is living, is that which advances, that which changes in its own nature, that whose nature it is to change. In Bergson's sense, motion is something that goes on in the nature of the thing that is moving. It is not a mere change of position. It does not change that which is itself moving. Life is a change in the very nature of that which lives. In so far as we are living beings, we are not at any second what we were the second before. If we undertake to state life in terms of a permanent content, we have taken the whole meaning out of life as life. There is a physical, chemical statement available, but it is applied to inanimate things. It cannot be made into a statement of life, for our conduct is from one reality to another in which that reality is always changing. That, Bergson says, identifies life with this inner nature which our intuition reveals to us. Life is in that sense a sort of mind. It has the same relationship to its environment as mind has to its world and physical organism. It is selecting, it is petrifying its world in spatial terms in the same fashion that mind does. In an account of the process of evolution he gives this statement of an onward move that is creation, that is constantly changing, producing that which was not there before, changing itself but doing it by means of the physical world. This picture we must get from the outside, from what biology presents. But we interpret the form from within, for reality lies in our own experience. In out own experience we ate cutting things up into homogeneous elements. That is, we want to have the same science for tomorrow that we have today. We do not wish to have to remember in detail. Therefore, we fix our world and become familiar with it.
Evolution is a process of constructing a world that is exactly
(506) parallel, in Bergson's sense, to our perception of it. Selection is going on. Processes are continued; and in this selection that which is novel is happening, making duration possible. That takes place in our conduct, too. Now, Bergson brings this over into a grand evolution in the development of life-processes. Life-forms in this fashion do just what we do in sense perception. They mobilize themselves. They maintain themselves by means of skeletons they develop, by sense organs which are produced by their environment, which bound it and analyze it into elements which can be regarded as relatively permanent. The organism does this sort of thing just as our perception builds up its field of perception and its objects. But this very world impresses life in just the way that habit impresses our own action. Man becomes the slave of his habits, of the exoskeletons which cover us. We can only see what we have habituated ourselves to see. We live in the world which is cut out by our past habits. This situation is presented from the Bergsonian standpoint on the side of evolution in its relation to an environment of organisms which have picked out that which they can eat, that which they can reach by their method of procreation, that by means of which they can avoid this danger and that. The organism has fixed itself, and it cannot go ahead. The man who is getting on in years loses the vital spark. Health is gone; he has nothing left but the fixed habits of life; he can see nothing but that which he has selected in his conduct; he has impressed himself, and there is no further advance for him; he can no longer be in a field of creation.
What I want to leave with you is a clue for the comprehension of Bergson's conception of the world-the parallelism of the perceptual process and the living process with this metaphysical assumption of process which he never fully worked out. He does not show us in any detail how the method does actually get stereotyped, nor does he show how life stereotypes its world. He appeals to the process of perception and refers us to that sort of intuition which is so difficult to get, and assumes that the same thing is taking place in the external world that is taking
(507) place from the standpoint of our inner perception. It is that to which he refers, as I have said.
Here, then, we have Bergson's solution of the problem he took over from Boutroux and Renouvier -- the problem of freedom. If one accepts his statement, he has more than solved it. The only reality is this duration In which that which is novel is continually coming into being. Bergson's problem can be presented in this way. It is true that you can never previse what is going to happen. There is always a difference in what takes place and what has existed in the past. You cannot determine what you are going to be later. But the question is now: What is the relationship of means to ends? We are constantly stating the means. Bergson is correct in his position that, if we state an end in the form in which it is going to be realized, or if we state it in such form that we must stick to the account that we give of it, then we distort the thing. There is a story of James and Royce, who were out sight-seeing in a city. Royce had information of where they were going and told James what car they would take so that in the end they would get to such and such a place. They got to a junction where they had to change cars. James got on the wrong car. Royce corrected him, telling him he was on the wrong car, that the car he was on went to another point. "Yes," said James, "that is where I wanted to go." There he puts in acute form the present problem. Can we state the end of our own conduct and the end of creation; can it be stated in exact, definite form if the world is something that is moving on from that which is to that which is not? If that is the nature of reality, can the end toward which movement is to take place be stated in a conceptual form? Certainly we can say that it cannot be stated at any given time.
What Bergson overlooks in his treatment of science is that science does not undertake to make such a statement. It is continually presenting hypotheses of the world as it is, but science is a research affair and goes forward on the basis of the fact not only that the world will be intelligent but that it will always be different from any statement that science can give of it. That
(508) is, we are looking for an opportunity to restate any statement which we can give of the world. That is the implication of our research science. But that does not mean that we cannot think in conceptual terms. It means that we are always restating our restatement of the world. The same is true of our own ends and process in life. If a person could state to himself everything that is going to happen, his life would be unbearable. Life is a happening; things take place; the novel arises; and our intelligence shows itself in solving problems. But the solution of problems is by means of a definite conceptual procedure. The collapse of absolute idealism lies in the fact that everything is all accomplished in the Absolute. All that is to take place has already taken place in the Absolute. But our life is an adventure. And we can be intelligent in stating at every point the form which our conduct should take. We show our intelligence by giving as elaborate a statement of the world as we can. The realization of emergence in philosophy, the large acceptance of pluralism which you see, is involved in the assumption that the novel can appear by saying it is an enlarging of our finite imperfect experience. But there can be nothing novel in an Absolute. You can have a process of an infinite type, but it is one in which all the movements are determined. You can have contradictions, but they are always overcome. You have that which goes on; but it is going on in eternity, in an infinity in which the result is obtained already, but in which it does not appear.
It is this element that Bergson insists is involved in passage. That other statement is of a conception of the reality of the world in which everything is fixed in advance. It is its acceptance which Bergson is fighting. When you state reality in terms of a mechanism, it is an academic statement of nature. When you undertake to state your ends and problems, you fix and stereotype it. You stop advancing. Does that mean you cannot use the intelligence that enables you to get hold of means of stating the ends toward which you are moving? If this is true, Bergson's doctrine is correct, and we must draw away our in-
(509) -tellectual control of life and give ourselves up to our impulses. But if you can state your end in terms of your means, with a definite recognition that that statement is one which you are going to change, that your life is a process of adaptation, you can have the full reign of intellectual life and the control that it gives and still not stereotype your experience.
That brings out the problem which Bergson presented in his philosophy. The problem is that involved in the opposition, if you like, the antimony, between a conceptualized statement of that which is going to take place, of that which we are going to do, and of that which does arise, that which we do do, that which takes place in nature. Is there any real duration? If there is, there is that in which the novel is appearing. We are passing on constantly to that which is new, and our conceptual statement is in terms of the situation in which we find ourselves. How can we state that which is not? That is the Bergsonian problem in its simplest form. I have tried to present it as it appears in perception, as it appears in mechanical science, in evolution, and in terms of social progress. We are moving on, in the very nature of the case, in a process in which the past is moving into the present and into the future. Can we use our intellects to get hold of and direct this movement? Bergson says that we cannot, because in the nature of the case that toward which we are going is not here yet and, if you do not have knowledge of the end to which you are going, you cannot travel toward it intellectually. You must depend on the wind blowing behind you. You cannot reach it by conceptual means. But there is another statement which can be made over against this: that the man who is finding his way toward a goal which he cannot state can make a tentative plan as he goes along, and then he can make that better, more accurate, more complete. But lie has got to be in the attitude of continually reconstructing it and restating it. We do not know what the end of society should be, but we are sure that disease and misery in its various forms should be gotten rid of. How we are going to get rid of disease we do not know. How the values that have rested in it in the
(510) past, the care for the sick, and so on, fit in with the conception of a place where there will be no suffering we do not know. But we are stating in our conceptual way what the end is to be, and then we test our steps and restate it. What Bergson denies is the possibility of advancing by a set of hypotheses which are being continually reconstructed if they do not hold-hypotheses which are confessedly hypothetical. We have only the statement which we can give at the time, hypotheses which are open to unexpected happenings and which are ready for reconstruction, hypotheses that belong to a world in which things are going on, in which there is duration. What Bergson says is that this sort of intelligent control of our conduct and intelligent control over our comprehension of and appreciation of nature in the direction of the movements in society is impossible. He refuses that because any statement that is made at this time would be an absurd statement of what is going to be later. If we had to conduct the world by the hypotheses of the seventeenth century, we would not get along. They undertook to state the world as they gave it in conceptual terms. But that did not interfere with a continued restatement of them. The scientist is always ready to reconstruct, and it is by means of such refined statement that he gets ahead. If, of course, science had undertaken to give infallibility to any statement that it had and refused to reconstruct that statement, it would have been in a prison. But a restatement at every point possible is what science wants. Thus, Bergson's attack upon science represents a misconception of its method and ideal. His flight to irrationalism is unnecessary.
