CATEGORIES

XXI—CATEGORIES OF SUBSTANTIALISM,
AND OTHERS

A Category is primarily a class of Judgments. Since arguments are composed of judgments, a category is also a class of arguments; that is to say, the argument follows the classification of the judgment. This is not the practice of syllogists, who have categories for judgments only, the arguments being classified according to verbal expression.

I distinguish six categories—two Natural and four Artificial. The judgments of a natural category concern experience presented in a synthesis whose composition is due to the noumenal mind; the categories corresponding to this definition are—

Inherence—
Association.

An artificial category is so called because the synthesis is formed by the subjective mind.

The first category of this kind is

Perspection—

which is an artificial arrangement of objects according to a figurative interpretation of certain appearances they present.

The second artificial category I will call

Concretion—

as it is an ideal cohesion of experiences never wholly perceived at once. These two categories are those chiefly responsible for the realistic mode of thought.

The third artificial category is that which is called in science causation, but it is only

Sequence,—

that is, a series of phenomena sufficiently coherent to afford a basis for inference, but not necessarily or energically connected. Hume and others have conclusively proved that such phenomena are not causally related.

Finally there is

Causation—

in the proper sense of the word, that is, the relation between energic mind and its effects. This is the category of human affairs generally, and of all the Cosmic that we explain by analogy with the Human. It is the only exhaustive explanation of phenomena, and so is the category which philosophy would substitute for the rest. When we can truly resolve things into effects analogous to human actions, we have reached the highest standpoint from which they can be viewed. Realistic anthropomorphism is the first and rudest explanation of things: idealistic anthropomorphism is the last and most refined.

The artificial categories are all formed on analogies supplied by the natural, since the intellect is incapable of imagining anything absolutely original.

Each category may include judgments of other categories in a subordinate relation. Inherence and concretion enter to some extent as auxiliaries into all the others. A group category may be treated as an individual object for certain purposes, and an individual as a group of properties. In the one case a fictitious unity is created, in the other a real unity is imaginatively dissolved. But in general the categories are sufficiently distinct and may be considered as mutually exclusive. They will be separately analysed and exemplified.

The term category is used in common logic to signify the final classes into which judgments can be arranged. To this minor use only is the category applied. It does not either denote a classification of arguments or a distinct province of ideas whose origin and validity should be a matter of investigation. In Greek and modern logic arguments are distinguished solely by their verbal expression—never by the character of the judgment that enters into them. Treated in this superficial and haphazard way, the categories necessarily play a quite insignificant part in philosophy.

The oldest known set of categories is that quoted by Aristotle in his Metaphysic as being held by a sect of Pythagoreans. It consists of the following series of contraries—

Bound.
Odd.
Unity.
Right.
Male.		Infinity.
Even.
Plurality.
Left.
Female.		Rest.
Straight.
Light.
Good.
Square.		Motion.
Crooked.
Darkness.
Bad.
Oblong.

Aristotle's own categories are the following:—

This list can be reduced to one half the number. Quantity, Quality, Posture, Condition are kinds of Attribute or Property of the Substance. Place and Time are valid. Action and Passion are both referable to causation. Non-causal sequence or consecution (as day following night)—one of the commonest judgments—is not mentioned.

The Stoics reduced Aristotle's ten categories to four—Substratum or Substance, the Essential Quality, Manner of being, and Relation.

Kaṇáda, a Hindu philosopher, has six categories—Substance, Quality, Action, Genus, Individuality, and Concretion or Co-inherence.

Plotinus was acquainted with the Aristotelian and Stoic lists and offers as his own:—(1) Fundamental forms of the Ideal—Being, Rest, Motion, Identity, Difference; (2) Categories of the Sensible—Substance, Relation, Quality, Quantity, Motion.

Descartes recognised but two final categories, the Absolute and the Relative.

Kant has an elaborate scheme of categories, which he considered to be, not merely classes of judgments, but innate power of the mind by which we are moved to form the judgments. They are the following:—

I.Of Quantity.Unity, Plurality, Totality.
II.Of Quality.Reality, Negation, Limitation.
III.Of Relation.Of Inherence and Subsistence
(substantia et accidens).
Of Causality and Dependence
(cause and effect).
Of Community (reciprocity between
the active and the passive).
IV.Of Modality.Possibility, Impossibility, Existence,
Non-existence, Necessity,
Contingency.

Sir William Hamilton's categories were Being, Being by itself, and Being by accident.

Categories have also been proposed by Spinoza, Locke, Wolff, Leibnitz, Herbart, Mill, and others. No two of them are alike. They are not formed on any definite principle, but are individual opinions as to the most convenient way to classify judgments[13].

XXII—INHERENCE

An object being given by perception we develop our knowledge of it, first by narrowing our focus of attention so as to perceive parts and single attributes of the object; next by widening our attention so as to include several objects in one view. The first process is Analysis or Abstraction; it informs us what attributes co-inhere to constitute the object. The second is Synthesis or Grouping, by which we learn the relations of one thing to others. These operations comprise all we know about a thing, for it can have no attributes which are not either internal or external.

Practical analysis means cutting a thing to pieces or dissolving it, and this has a certain value because it multiplies objects. But it does not increase our knowledge of the first thing. On the contrary, by destroying a thing we render a knowledge of it impossible. The analysis which gives knowledge is Metaphysical Abstraction—an attention concentrated on the parts of a thing without destroying their connection with the other inherent parts. The metaphysical elements may be quite different from the mechanically divisible parts. They are generally a species of things which could not exist alone, such as red, blue, straight, curved, square, round, acid, sweet, insipid, fragrant, sharp, hot, heavy, dull, loud, bright, and a multitude of properties of that abstract kind.

For many of these—at least for the description of them—a comparison of two or more things is essential. A sound is heard to be loud by comparison with another which is low or soft; a knife is known to be blunt by experience of another more sharp, or the same knife in a sharper condition. But comparison does not alter the essential character of abstract attention—it serves merely as an incitement to it. Difference between qualities otherwise alike whets our attention to a finer discrimination.

The properties recognised by each sense are easily distinguished in the bulk from those of another sense. Colour is distinct from Figure in a more marked degree than red from blue or square from circular. Fine degrees of Sound may be difficult to discriminate, but not the difference between a sound and a smell or a taste.

Still broader contrasts give rise to an artificial but sometimes useful kind of attribution—the negative. When we do not know much concerning the positive characteristics of a thing, it is something to know that it has not this or that property. What Thought is, positively, few people know, but they are able to say (with a little prompting) that it is un-extended, im-material, im-ponderable, and so forth. This comparison re-acts on the thing better known, and so we call visual objects 'extended' from their dissimilarity to thoughts. But for that there would have been no occasion to notice the abstract extension of visual objects. The term 'visual object' would have tacitly included extension. There must be great and general ignorance of a thing to excuse the negative attribution: it is not allowable to speak of plants as non-metals, or sheep as non-horses, but a large class of animals is called in-vertebrate. In this case the negative property serves to bar a possible inference that all animals are vertebrate, since those we know best are so.

The judgment in this category is a consciousness of the attributes making up a thing, or so much of it as interests us. 'Cleopatra's Needle is an obelisk of granite, about sixty-eight feet high, and is carved with hieroglyphics.' If we go on to say that it stands on the Thames Embankment, we shift into the category of association. The relation of an object to its place is different from that of one inherent attribute of the object to another, or to the whole.

The properties of a general idea are defined in this category. The synthesis is natural or noumenal, the artificiality of the idea consisting merely in the omission of some of the concrete properties. 'Garden rhubarb [in general] has broadly cordate leaves, strongly veined beneath; the footstalks are long, thick, and fleshy, with a channel above; its growth is exceedingly rapid.' These are properties inherent in a unity not of our making. The botanist changes into the category of sequence when he says, 'the stalks are used for tarts and made into jam.'

In a complicated object or general idea some of the judgments we treat as inherent may be inferences in other categories used subordinately. 'The ancient Persians had remarkably thin and weak skulls. They were good horsemen and archers, courageous and spirited in battle. They wore a tunic and trousers of leather.... They were quick and lively, keen-witted, capable of repartee, ingenious, and—for Orientals—far-sighted. They had fancy and imagination, a relish for poetry and art, and they were not without a certain power of political combination.' Some of these properties might have been perceived objectively, but not the possession of fancy and imagination, which could only be known by inference in causation—here used to complete a coherent unity. The historian employs causation as a principal category when he tells us that 'their bards did not touch the chords which rouse what is noblest and highest in our nature.' The thought implied in touching chords—the notion of will directing action—is a different judgment from the perception of an inherent permanent attribute.

The argument in this category consists in ideally completing an imperfect object by comparison with a similar object, or the idea of a similar object. Suppose we have studied thoroughly one or more rhubarb plants, and then see a plant with broadly cordate leaves, footstalks long, thick, and fleshy, and having a channel above. In the time at our disposal we cannot ascertain if its growth is exceedingly rapid, but we are justified in inferring that it is, and that the plant we are examining is in all other respects rhubarb. If the Egyptian obelisks we have seen were sculptured with hieroglyphics throughout their length, and we see an obelisk part of which is underground, it is a rational inference that that part also is sculptured.

We have proved that certain samples of aluminium have a specific gravity of 2·6, and then see a metal—of specific gravity unknown—which has all the other properties of aluminium: we may confidently infer that this metal also would, if tested, show a specific gravity of 2·6.

For purposes of reason it may be necessary to compare things that cannot be brought physically together. When this happens we generally compare them in idea, or the idea of one with the other as object. When great accuracy is required and the idea—which is always rather vague—cannot be relied on, we have recourse to mediate comparison. Standards are employed. These are manageable or portable objects with which principal things are separately compared by way of effecting indirectly a comparison between them. Standards can only mediate comparisons between abstract properties, for if they contained all the concrete properties of the compared objects they would, by supposition, be as unmanageable as the latter. We have standards for length in rules, scales, tapes, chains; the balance is a standard for weight. There are also scales for pitch of sound, varieties of colour, degree of light, heat, atmospheric pressure, and probably some others for special purposes.

Indirect comparison is not in itself inference; or if inference it is subordinate and preparatory to some more important conclusion. A coin is weighed and concluded to be light, but this is only a datum in determining the more important question whether it is a forged coin or not.

XXIII—ASSOCIATION

In this category we widen the attention so as to include several objects in one act of perception.

The first result of this diffusion of attention is to lessen the brilliancy of objects. Our attention is a light which is intensified when narrowed and concentrated—enfeebled when dispersed over several objects. The observation of a group amounts practically to observing the objects in rapid succession. At a given moment we perceive only one thing well, or it may be only a small part of a thing, but we have a dull sense of other things adjacent, which we have just seen and may immediately see again in any order we please. That is all that is meant by perception of a group.

To distinguish this category properly from the next we must consider the group of objects as divested of depth or distance outwards. It is to be regarded as a flat surface standing a few feet from us, the objects in it having absolutely the dimensions they appear to have. This is in fact their real magnitude, for the supposed real magnitude is a matter of theory, and means the perceptual magnitude taken under certain conditions of observation. The real magnitude is constantly changing, so for practical convenience in determining size, etc., we refer all objects to one condition of observation—that in which they can be touched as well as seen.

In metaphysic we are not obliged to recognise this convention. If an object a mile off appears to be an inch high, it is an inch high as really as if it were in a photograph or picture and materially represented of that height. The mystery of the change of size in objects is not explained or reasoned away by any device for overcoming some of its practical inconveniences. It depends on the degree of energy with which minds affect each other.

A group has properties which an object has not; or, if this be not strictly the case, we may say that the properties we look for in a group are not those we distinguish in a single object. The special properties of a group are positions. It is unnecessary to say 'relative' positions, for position cannot be otherwise than relative. Position cannot be defined by reference to anything more simple. What is meant is intuitively known to everybody. But let us take a concrete example—a man with a horse and cart standing on a bridge. Each object in this group has a position towards the other objects. The bridge is over the river and under the cart; the cart is upon the bridge and behind the horse; the man is in the cart; the horse is before and outside of the cart, it is near one end of the bridge, far from the other, and between the two extremities. These are the principal positions in a natural group or association, by which is meant the objects we can see (or are supposed to see) simultaneously, and whose mutual positions we are considering.

The use of observing positions is the same as that which moves us to all rational study, namely, its value in prediction. We can reason from one object to another in a group just as we reason from one property to another in an object.

Suppose our perception of a landscape is interrupted for a moment, and when we next endeavour to perceive it we find we only perceive a portion of it, the rest being 'hidden' by an intervening object. As far as we are concerned the hidden part has been annihilated. We only remember what was there. But this recollection is also a preconception of what we may be able to cause to appear again, either by removing the obstructing object, by waiting till it has been removed, or by walking round and standing between it and the landscape.

If this be too close to mere recollection, we have pure reasoning when from the general appearance of a group we imagine generally some concealed part of it not before seen. A procession of people dressed in mourning is usually accompanied by a hearse: from perceiving the people only on a certain occasion we predict the hearse. The sound of a steam-whistle enables us to imagine a train in a certain locality, though fog or other obstruction may prevent our seeing it. The scent of flowers prepares us for finding them somewhere near us. From smoke we predict the nearness of a chimney. The trail of an animal is a clue to his position.

The judgment in this category is therefore a consciousness of position, such as those mentioned above. The argument is a completion of one association by comparison with another—the expectation of similarity in groups.

Movement. All judgments as to change of position in objects come under this category. It takes at least two things arranged in a group to produce the perception of movement. If there were but one thing in our field of observation we could not say whether it moved or not, for there would be nothing which it would pass, or leave, or approach. It would appear to stand still. There is, however, more in movement than depends on mere perception.

All movement is due to energy either in the observer or in the other mind acting upon his. Energy is not a generalisation of moving things, nor a property, nor a relation, though all these may be signs of energy. The most abstract idea of movement is Motion. It may be defined as a series of positions.

Number. If we treat a group as a large loose object we shall perceive in it certain properties not strictly positional. Number is one of these.

A group of three coins has not the same practical value as a group of six or sixty, and we are thus obliged to notice the difference and distinguish degrees of this property by names—hence Arithmetic.

Flat Space or space of two dimensions is another property of a group. Grouped objects have frequently intervals between them. Such intervals are negations of perception—interruptions or discontinuities of experience. But by abstraction we can reduce the objects bounding an interval to a geometrical line, and so give a sort of positive existence to the interval. Thus we talk of a hole or of darkness as if they were true objects, and measure them by standards of length.

If we abstract the boundary lines from a space we get the idea 'intervalness,' which is the right name for two-dimensioned space. This abstract idea is nearly the same as abstract size. Space is interval without bounds—size is object without contents. Space and size are equally nothing intrinsically or in their own right, but they have been reached by different modes of refining away the positive qualities associated with them, and this difference of origin is slightly suggested by their names. Spaces have a use in perception similar to rests in music—they relieve the attention and give contrast and vigour to the next positive object.

XXIV—PERSPECTION

This is the first of the artificial categories. It is an ideal treatment of an associated group to facilitate a certain kind of reasoning.

Reason—let me repeat—is the imaginary extension of experience by comparison with more complete experience of a similar kind. By reasoning in inherence we complete single objects; by inference in association we complete groups. These two categories demonstrate that a natural group consists of fragments of objects, and fragments of other natural groups which are possible but not yet developed. A hill is partly concealed by a house, the house partly concealed by a tree, the tree by a stone fence, the fence by a growth of ivy. A river disappears at a curve and is lost to view; we know from experience of other rivers that under certain conditions we might perceive the river further on as a feature in several more landscapes. As we gaze at an association of objects these possible completions occur to us—not fully or definitely but sufficiently to convince us that the group might be developed into many other groups, and into a multitude of objects of forms different from those we actually perceive. By our hypothesis the observer has always been stationary, the objects have moved to and fro but not from near to far. Their real dimensions have remained unaltered, and nothing has occurred to suggest that they ever appear of other dimensions. In short we are gazing on a piece of stage-scenery.

But there is another element in perception. We and all other real (mental) beings are part of the cosmic force. We are co-creators of what we perceive—limited gods, not machine-men as the scientific people would have us believe. But for our power of affecting each other and our readiness to receive impressions from other minds, there would be no perception—no material objects. We (that is, all sentient beings) could, by unanimous resolution, annul the material creation—blot out the universe of objective things in a moment. United to and implied in this general power is the particular power of modifying our world without destroying it. We can redistribute the active and passive forces so as to produce other perceptual effects than those present at a given moment. And we habitually do this to some extent. Within a limited scope our world is plastic as dough, and we knead it to any form we please. For example, we exert energy to change our place, and immediately the group before us breaks up and undergoes metamorphosis. Some objects disappear altogether, and entirely new objects present themselves. Some become smaller, others larger; some fractional forms fill out to completion, some integers undergo curtailment, others separate into several distinct objects. In a few minutes the first group has dissolved into a second, which may merge into a third, and so on indefinitely.

In contemplating these phenomena we discern a third form of completeness and incompleteness, distinct from those that enter into inherence and association. Hence a new type of reasoning—another category: the Perspective.

It will be convenient to suppose that the modifications to which it refers are solely due to the observing mind, as the most conspicuous and comprehensive really are, but some of the minor perspective changes are due to the noumenon of the object.

We have first to get a criterion of perspective perfection. What this shall be is to some extent a matter of convention. The standard I shall adopt is, that an object of a nature to be perceptible to all the senses would be most perfect if within reach of touch. If it can be heard it is then heard at its loudest—this is correct enough for our purpose,—if it can be seen it is then seen at its largest and brightest. This is Perspective Completeness at the Tactual Range. It means the closest contact of noumenon and subject, compatible with clear definition in perception.

Now let us exert energy and disarrange a group. Those things that were or might have been tangible in the former position, are no longer so, but they may still be seen, heard, or even smelt. The bright colours have however somewhat faded, the size has shrunk, some of the details are lost. Here is a lapse from perspective completeness. It is indicated, not as in the first two categories by mechanical cutting away of mass and circumstance, but by deterioration all over the object. We seem to be thrown out of focus in relation to it, and the perspective degradation may increase until the object has dwindled to a speck and finally disappears altogether.

The judgment in this category consists in observing the kind and degree of degradation to which things are liable in perspection. In addition to change in size, brightness, detail and loudness, which have been already mentioned, occultation as in the second category can be used as an indirect datum. An object which eclipses another is invariably more perfect perspectively than the object eclipsed. The motion of objects has also to be taken into account. As objects degrade their movements slacken, and recover power as the objects are restored.

By attending to all these indications and checking each by the rest, we have the elements of a fairly accurate inference as to comparative perspective condition. We have constant practice in this sort of thought with frequent opportunities of verifying our conclusions; penalties are annexed to failure and rewards to success. It is no wonder then that in the course of years we become expert in judging of perspective condition, so that when confronted with a natural group we can estimate almost instantly the degree in which each object falls short of perspective integrity.

The result of this practice is that on perceiving a natural group of many objects, we graduate them according to the perspective deterioration which each exhibits, and for greater precision we figure the perspective difference as an interval between the objects—an imaginary interval modelled on the true interval of association. The object on a distant horizon is visually as near as the ground we can touch by stooping, but in this imaginary group the former is placed at the far end of the line and the latter at the near end, and between them are ranged the other objects each at a point corresponding to what we suppose to be its perspective distance. That is how a landscape acquires depth. Space outwards is an ideal imitation of real lateral interval. It is the measure and expression of perspective defacement.

From what has been said it follows that the near objects will be relatively large, clear, and lively in motion, while the far will be small, dull, and slow, but this rule is liable to many exceptions which can only be learnt by experience.

On the analogy of the other forms of inference—which consist in completing imperfect things by reference to others more perfect—the essence of an argument in perspection is the power to imagine an object which is perspectively defective, brought up to the tactual range and displaying all the qualities it would possess in that position. This is done by comparing it with the idea of the same or a similar object experienced at the tactual range; and is done for an ulterior purpose, like all other intellectual operations. A great part of our material happiness consists in the exercise of the short senses (taste, touch and smell), and the chief use of perspective reasoning is to enable us to judge of the energy required to bring a distant object near for close perception. We have therefore to observe our energic fluctuations in conjunction with perspective change, if we would extract the utmost practical benefit from this category. The perspective inferences are none the less useful after we discover that they are not intuitions, and that the completeness we imaginatively assign to distant objects has no existence until we exert the corresponding energy.

A landscape being rendered perspective we can determine the perspective state of any new object that may enter it, by reference to the objects adjoining it, and this though the object be of a species quite unknown to us and which therefore, by itself, would afford no clue to its perspective distance.

The imaginary interval we place between objects of different perspective effacement, can be expressed in terms of exact lateral measurement. This is done by developing and measuring the associative groups represented in the perspective group. Supposing we wish to get an exact definition of the perspective condition of a mountain relative to a certain station, we can, from that station, develop all the natural groups up to the mountain (walk over the ground) and measure the lateral intervals and masses disclosed. The total measurements will be a definition of the mountain's perspective distance in terms of true associative distance. That is what we mean by saying a mountain is ten miles off. It is not really ten miles off—it is not an inch off. But to render it tactually perfect we should have to expend an amount of energy equal to 17,600 times the energy required to move from one associative object to another a yard apart from it laterally. If we practise the mileage scale in conjunction with the perspective indications, we may acquire the art of expressing in miles, though not measured, the distance of objects estimated from purely perspective data, but few can do this with any near approach to exactness[14].

The realistic three-dimensioned space is a combination of the true interval of association and the false interval of perspection. This generates an idea resembling the capacity or vacancy in a room or vessel, and thus it is supposed that objects occupy a sort of universal room without walls, floor, or ceiling. It is however the enclosing objects which make a room, and when they are abstracted there remains nothing. The universal room is therefore nothing—a myth. It is a useful working theory for common purposes, but in philosophy it is superfluous and obstructive.

In the definitions of geometry no difference is made between the depth of a landscape and the 'third dimension' of any small cubic object. They are both called 'third dimension' or 'cubic dimension.' Yet they are inferences of different categories, and neither is real. The former, as we have just seen, is the imagined redintegration of objects perspectively shrunk and defaced. The latter is the imaginary completion of a thing having many surfaces or facets, only one of which can be shown at a time.

Sky Perspection. The effect produced on our mind by the observation of celestial objects, reveals at once the artificiality of cubic space. Clouds in their form and movements are somewhat like earthly things—vapour or mountains,—and so we conceive them partially graduated in distance and floating in a concavity. But whether they are a mile off, or twenty miles off, few of us can tell.

When we contemplate the sun, moon and stars, our realism is completely at fault. These we cannot modify at will, and they move too slowly and present too uniform an aspect to cause the perspective effect. Since we have never seen them at the tactual range we know not to what degree they are perspectively incomplete; hence they appear without relative distance—distance being simply a metaphor of perspective effacement. If 'cubic space' is real, let the realists tell us why we do not see it in the sky—why we do not arrange the stars behind each other according to their calculated distances. This question is unanswerable realistically, but idealistically it presents no difficulty. The sky is not spaced, because the conditions are wanting under which the illusion of terrestrial space is formed in the intellect.

By close instrumental attention to the moon and planets a slight parallax is observable, and on the analogy of terrestrial parallax astronomers are able to calculate what they call the distance of these bodies. Perhaps their calculations are right, but the magnitudes are not conceivable as associative distance, being so much greater than we have any experience of. We take them to mean that the heavenly bodies are extremely degraded, perspectively speaking. Their noumena are in contact with our minds, for this is essential to perception, but if astronomical calculations are correct the contact is infinitely slight, compared with what it would be, supposing—to speak realistically—we could go to the stars or they could be brought to us.

Berkeley's Theory of Vision and Dialogues are occupied with the analysis of perspection. The arguments he uses to show that distance outwards is not real are in the main those given in this section.