II
Hans Vaihinger is still little known in England;[[39]] and that is the more remarkable as he has always been strongly attached to English thought, of which his famous book reveals an intimate knowledge. In early life he had mixed much with English people, for whom he has a deep regard, and learnt to revere, not only Darwin, but Hume and J. S. Mill, who exerted a decisive influence on his own philosophic development. At the beginning of his career he projected a history of English philosophy, but interest in that subject was then so small in Germany that he had regretfully to abandon his scheme, and was drawn instead, through no active effort on his part, to make the study of Kant the by-product of his own more distinctive work, yet it was a fitting study, for in Kant he saw the germs of the doctrine of the “as if,” that is to say, the practical significance of fiction in human life, though that is not the idea traditionally associated with Kant, who, indeed, was not himself clear about it, while his insight was further darkened by his reactionary tendencies; yet Vaihinger found that it really played a large part in Kant’s work and might even be regarded as his special and personal way of regarding things; he was not so much a metaphysician, Vaihinger remarks, as a metaphorician. Yet even in his Kantian studies the English influence was felt, for Vaihinger’s work has here been to take up the Neo-Kantism of F. A. Lange and to develop it in an empirical and positivistic direction.
There was evidently something in Vaihinger’s spirit that allied him to the English spirit. We may see that in his portrait; it is not the face of the philosophic dreamer, the scholarly man of the study, but the eager, forceful head of the practical man of action, the daring adventurer, the man who seems made to struggle with the concrete things of the world, the kind of man, that is to say, whom we consider peculiarly English. That, indeed, is the kind of man he would have been; that is the kind of life, a social life full of activity and of sport, that he desired to lead. But it was impossible. An extreme and lifelong short-sightedness proved a handicap of which he has never ceased to be conscious. So it came about that his practical energy was, as it were, sublimated into a philosophy which yet retained the same forceful dynamic quality.
For the rest, his origin, training, and vocation seem all to have been sufficiently German. He came, like many other eminent men, out of a Swabian parsonage, and was himself intended for theology, only branching off into philosophy after his university career was well advanced. At the age of sixteen he was deeply influenced, as so many others have been, by Herder’s “Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit”; that not only harmonised with his own tendency at the time towards a mixed theism and pantheism, but it first planted within him the conception of evolution in human history, proceeding from an animal origin, which became a fundamental element of his mental constitution. When a year later he came across Darwin’s doctrines he felt that he knew them beforehand. These influences were balanced by that of Plato, through whose “Ideas” he caught his first glimpse of an “As-If world.” A little later the strenuous training of one of his teachers in the logical analysis of Latin syntax, especially in the use of the conjunctions, furnished the source from which subsequently he drew that now well-known phrase. It was in these years that he reached the view, which he has since definitely advocated, that philosophy should not be made a separate study, but should become a natural part and corollary of every study, since philosophy cannot be fruitfully regarded as a discipline by itself. Without psychology, especially, he finds that philosophy is merely “a methodic abstraction.” A weighty influence of these days was constituted by the poems and essays of Schiller, a Swabian like himself, and, indeed, associated with the history of his own family. Schiller was not only an inspiring influence, but it was in Schiller’s saying, “Error alone is life, and knowledge is death,” that he found (however unjustifiably) the first expression of his own “fictionalism,” while Schiller’s doctrine of the play impulse as the basis of artistic creation and enjoyment seemed the prophecy of his own later doctrine, for in play he saw later the “as if” as the kernel of æsthetic practice and contemplation.
At the age of eighteen Vaihinger proceeded to the Swabian University of Tübingen and here was free to let his wide-ranging, eager mind follow its own impulses. He revealed a taste for the natural sciences and with this the old Greek nature philosophers, especially Anaximander, for the sake of their anticipations of modern evolutionary doctrines. Aristotle also occupied him, later Spinoza, and, above all, Kant, though it was chiefly the metaphysical antinomies and the practical reason which fascinated him. As ever, it was what made for practice that seemed mostly to concern him. Schelling, Hegel, and Schleiermacher, the official German idealists, said nothing to him. He turned from them to Schopenhauer, and thence he drew the pessimisms, the irrationalism, and the voluntarism which became permanent features of his system of thought. The irrationalism, as he himself points out, was completely opposed to all early influences on him, but it lay in his own personal circumstances. The contrast between his temperamental impulse to energetic practical action in every direction, and the reserve, passivity, and isolation which myopia enforced, seemed to him absolutely irrational and sharpened his vision for all the irrationality of existence. So that a philosophy which, like Schopenhauer’s, truthfully recognised and allowed for the irrational element in existence came like a revelation. As to Vaihinger’s pessimism, that, as we might expect, is hardly of what would be generally considered a pessimistic character. It is merely a recognition of the fact that most people are over-sanguine and thereby come to grief, whereas a little touch of pessimism would have preserved them from much misery. Long before the Great War, Vaihinger felt that many Germans were over-sanguine regarding the military power of their Empire, and of Germany’s place in the world, and that such optimism might easily conduce to war and disaster. In 1911 he even planned to publish anonymously in Switzerland a pamphlet entitled “Finis Germaniæ,” with the motto “Quos Deus vult perdere, prius dementat,” and was only prevented by a sudden development of the eye-trouble. Vaihinger points out that an unjustified optimism had for a long time past led in the politics of Germany—and also, he might have said, of the countries later opposed to her—to lack of foresight, over-haste, and arrogance; he might have added that a very slight touch of pessimism would also have enabled these countries, on both sides, to discover the not very remote truth that even the victors in such a contest would suffer scarcely less than the conquered. In early life Vaihinger had playfully defined Man as a “species of ape afflicted by megalomania”; he admits that, whatever truth lies behind the definition, the statement is somewhat exaggerated. Yet it is certainly strange to observe, one may comment, how many people seem to feel vain of their own ungratified optimism when the place where optimism most flourishes is the lunatic asylum. They never seem to pause to reflect on the goal that lies ahead of them, though there must be few who on looking back cannot perceive what terrible accidents they might have foreseen and avoided by the aid of a little pessimism. When the gods, to ruin a man, first make him mad, they do it, almost invariably, by making him an optimist. One might hazard the assertion that the chief philosophic distinction between classic antiquity and modern civilisation is the prevalence in the latter of a facile optimism; and the fact that of all ancient writers the most popular in modern times has been the complacently optimistic (or really hedonistic) Horace is hardly due to his technical virtuosity. He who would walk sanely amid the opposing perils in the path of life always needs a little optimism; he also needs a little pessimism.
Reference has been made to Vaihinger’s devouring appetite for knowledge. This, indeed, was extraordinary, and of almost universal range. There seem to have been few fields with which he failed to come in touch, either through books or by personal intercourse with experts. He found his way into all the natural sciences, he was drawn to Greek archæology and German philosophy; he began the study of Sanscrit with Roth. Then, realising that he had completely neglected mathematics, he devoted himself with ardour to analytic geometry and infinitesimals, a study which later he found philosophically fruitful. Finally, in 1874, he may be said to have rounded the circle of his self-development by reading the just published enlarged and much improved edition of F. A. Lange’s “History of Materialism.” Here he realised the presence of a spirit of the noblest order, equipped with the widest culture and the finest lucidity of vision, the keenest religious radicalism combined with large-hearted tolerance and lofty moral equilibrium, all manifested in a completed master-work. Moreover, the standpoint of F. A. Lange was precisely that which Vaihinger had been independently struggling towards, for it brought into view that doctrine of the place of fiction in life which he had already seen ahead. It is not surprising that he should generously and enthusiastically acclaim Lange as master and leader, though his subsequent work is his own, and has carried ideas of which Lange held only the seeds to new and fruitful development.[[40]]
It was in 1876-77 that Vaihinger wrote his book, a marvellous achievement for so youthful a thinker, for he was then only about twenty-five years of age. A final revision it never underwent, and there remain various peculiarities about the form into which it is cast. The serious failure in eyesight seems to have been the main reason for delaying the publication of a work which the author felt to be too revolutionary to put forth in an imperfect form. He preferred to leave it for posthumous publication.
But the world was not standing still, and during the next thirty years many things happened. Vaihinger found the new sect of Pragmatists coming into fashion with ideas resembling his own, though in a cruder shape, which seemed to render philosophy the “meretrix theologorum.” Many distinguished thinkers were working towards an attitude more or less like his own, especially Nietzsche, whom (like many others even to-day) he had long regarded with prejudice and avoided, but now discovered to be “a great liberator” with congenial veins of thought. Vaihinger realised that his conception was being independently put forward from various sides, often in forms that to him seemed imperfect or vicious. It was no longer advisable to hold back his book. In 1911, therefore, “Die Philosophie des Als Ob” appeared.
The problem which Vaihinger set out to solve was this: How comes it about that with consciously false ideas we yet reach conclusions that are in harmony with Nature and appeal to us as Truth? That we do so is obvious, especially in the “exact” branches of science. In mathematics it is notorious that we start from absurdities to reach a realm of law, and our whole conception of the nature of the world is based on a foundation which we believe to have no existence. For even the most sober scientific investigator in science, the most thoroughgoing Positivist, cannot dispense with fiction; he must at least make use of categories, and they are already fictions, analogical fictions, or labels, which give us the same pleasure as children receive when they are told the “name” of a thing. Fiction is, indeed, an indispensable supplement to logic, or even a part of it; whether we are working inductively or deductively, both ways hang closely together with fiction; and axioms, though they seek to be primary verities, are more akin to fiction. If we had realised the nature of axioms, the doctrine of Einstein, which sweeps away axioms so familiar to us that they seem obvious truths, and substitutes others which seem absurd because they are unfamiliar, might not have been so bewildering.
Physics, especially mathematical physics, Vaihinger explains in detail, has been based, and fruitfully based, on fictions. The infinite, infinitely little or infinitely great, while helpful in lightening our mental operations, is a fiction. The Greeks disliked and avoided it, and “the gradual formation of this conception is one of the most charming and instructive themes in the history of science,” indeed, one of the most noteworthy spectacles in the history of the human spirit; we see the working of a logical impulse first feeling in the dark, gradually constructing ideas fitted to yield precious service, yet full of hopeless contradictions, without any relation to the real world. That absolute space is a fiction, Vaihinger points out, is no new idea. Hobbes had declared it was only a phantasma; Leibnitz, who agreed, added that it was merely “the idolum of a few modern Englishmen,” and called time, extension, and movement “choses idéales.” Berkeley, in attacking the defective conceptions of the mathematicians, failed to see that it was by means of, and not in spite of, these logically defective conceptions that they attained logically valuable results. All the marks of fiction were set up on the mathematician’s pure space; it was impossible and unthinkable: yet it proved useful and fruitful.
The tautological fiction of “Force”—an empty reduplication of the fact of a succession of relationships—is one that we constantly fall back on with immense satisfaction and with the feeling of having achieved something; it has been a highly convenient fiction which has aided representation and experience. It is one of the most famous, and also, it must be added, one of the most fatal of fantasies. For when we talk of, for instance, a “life-force” and its élan, or whatever other dainty term we like to apply to it, we are not only summarily mingling together many separate phenomena, but we are running the risk that our conception may be taken for something that really exists. There is always temptation, when two processes tend to follow each other, to call the property of the first to be followed by the other its “force,” and to measure that force by the magnitude of the result. In reality we only have succession and coexistence, and the “force” is something that we imagine.
We must not, therefore, treat our imagination with contempt as was formerly the fashion, but rather the reverse. The two great periods of English Philosophy, Vaihinger remarks, ended with Ockham and with Hume, who each took up, in effect, the fictional point of view, but both too much on the merely negative side, without realising the positive and constructive value of fictions. English law has above all realised it, even, he adds, to the point of absurdity. Nothing is so precious as fiction, provided only one chooses the right fiction. “Matter” is such a fiction. There are still people who speak with lofty contempt of “Materialism”; they mean well, but they are unhappy in their terms of abuse. When Berkeley demonstrated the impossibility of “matter,” he thought he could afford to throw away the conception as useless. He was quite wrong; it is logically contradictory ideas that are the most valuable. Matter is a fiction, just as the fundamental ideas with which the sciences generally operate are mostly fictions, and the scientific materialisation of the world has proved a necessary and useful fiction, only harmful when we regard it as hypothesis and therefore possibly true. The representative world is a system of fictions. It is a symbol by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of action, for action is the last end of thinking.
The “atom,” to which matter is ultimately reduced, is regarded by Vaihinger as equally a fiction, though it was at first viewed as an hypothesis, and it may be added that since he wrote it seems to have returned to the stage of hypothesis.[[41]] But when with Boscovich the “atom” was regarded as simply the bearer of energy, it became “literally a hypostatised nothing.” We have to realise at the same time that every “thing” is a “summatory fiction,” for to say, as is often said, that a “thing” has properties and yet has a real existence apart from its properties is obviously only a convenient manner of speech, a “verbal fiction.” The “force of attraction,” as Newton himself pointed out, belongs to the same class of summatory fictions.
Vaihinger is throughout careful to distinguish fiction alike from hypothesis and dogma. He regards the distinction as, methodologically, highly important, though not always easy to make. The “dogma” is put forward as an absolute and unquestionable truth; the “hypothesis” is a possible or probable truth, such as Darwin’s doctrine of descent; the “fiction” is impossible, but it enables us to reach what for us is relatively truth, and, above all, while hypothesis simply contributes to knowledge, fiction thus used becomes a guide to practical action and indispensable to what we feel to be progress. Thus the mighty and civilising structure of Roman law was built up by the aid of what the Romans themselves recognised as fictions, while in the different and more flexible system of English laws a constant inspiration to action has been furnished by the supposed privileges gained by Magna Carta, though we now recognise them as fictitious. Many of our ideas tend to go through the three stages of Dogma, Hypothesis, and Fiction, sometimes in that order and sometimes in the reverse order. Hypothesis especially presents a state of labile stability which is unpleasant to the mind, so it tends to become either dogma or fiction. The ideas of Christianity, beginning as dogmas, have passed through all three stages in the minds of thinkers during recent centuries: the myths of Plato, beginning as fiction, not only passed through the three stages, but then passed back again, being now again regarded as fiction. The scientifically valuable fiction is a child of modern times, but we have already emerged from the period when the use of fiction was confined to the exact sciences.
Thus we find fiction fruitfully flourishing in the biological and social sciences and even in the highest spheres of human spiritual activity. The Linnæan and similar classificatory systems are fictions, even though put forward as hypotheses, having their value simply as pictures, as forms of representation, but leading to contradictions and liable to be replaced by other systems which present more helpful pictures. There are still people who disdain Adam Smith’s “economic man,” as though proceeding from a purely selfish view of life, although Buckle, forestalling Vaihinger, long ago explained that Smith was deliberately making use of a “valid artifice,” separating facts that he knew to be in nature inseparable—he based his moral theory on a totally different kind of man—because so he could reach results approximately true to the observed phenomena. Bentham also adopted a fiction for his own system, though believing it to be an hypothesis, and Mill criticised it as being “geometrical”; the criticism is correct, comments Vaihinger, but the method was not thereby invalidated, for in complicated fields no other method can be fruitfully used.
The same law holds when we approach our highest and most sacred conceptions. It was recognised by enlightened philosophers and theologians before Vaihinger that the difference between body and soul is not different from that between matter and force,—a provisional and useful distinction,—that light and darkness, life and death, are abstractions, necessary, indeed, but in their application to reality always to be used with precaution. On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, “one of the weightiest conceptions man has ever formed,” once a dogma, in course of time an hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction; yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken. Many other great conceptions have tended to follow the same course. God, the Soul, Immortality, the Moral World-Order. The critical hearers understand what is meant when these great words are used, and if the uncritical misunderstand, that, adds Vaihinger, may sometimes be also useful. For these things are Ideals, and all Ideals are, logically speaking, fictions. As Science leads to the Imaginary, so Life leads to the Impossible; without them we cannot reach the heights we are born to scale. “Taken literally, however, our most valuable conceptions are worthless.”
When we review the vast field which Vaihinger summarises, we find that thinking and existing must ever be on two different planes. The attempt of Hegel and his followers to transform subjective processes into objective world-processes, Vaihinger maintains, will not work out. The Thing-in-Itself, the Absolute, remains a fiction, though the ultimate and most necessary fiction, for without it representation would be unintelligible. We can only regard reality as a Heraclitean flux of happening—though Vaihinger fails to point out that this “reality” also can only be an image or symbol—and our thinking would itself be fluid if it were not that by fiction we obtain imaginary standpoints and boundaries by which to gain control of the flow of reality. It is the special art and object of thinking to attain existence by quite other methods than that of existence itself. But the wish by so doing to understand the world is both unrealisable and foolish, for we are only trying to comprehend our own fictions. We can never solve the so-called world-riddle because what seem riddles to us are merely the contradictions we have ourselves created. Yet, though the way of thinking cannot be the way of being, since they stand on such different foundations, thinking always has a kind of parallelism with being, and though we make our reckoning with a reality that we falsify, yet the practical result tends to come out right. Just because thinking is different from reality, its forms must also be different in order to correspond with reality. Our conceptions, our conventional signs, have a fictive function to perform; thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Imagination is thus a constitutive part of all thinking. We may make distinctions between practical scientific thinking and disinterested æsthetic thinking. Yet all thinking is finally a comparison. Scientific fictions are parallel with æsthetic fictions. The poet is the type of all thinkers: there is no sharp boundary between the region of poetry and the region of science. Both alike are not ends in themselves, but means to higher ends.
Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if” is not immune from criticism on more than one side, and it is fairly obvious that, however sound the general principle, particular “fictions” may alter their status, and have even done so since the book was written. Moreover, the doctrine is not always quite congruous with itself. Nor can it be said that Vaihinger ever really answered the question with which he set out. In philosophy, however, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way. And Vaihinger’s philosophy is not only of interest because it presents so clearly and vigorously a prevailing tendency in modern thought. Rightly understood, it supplies a fortifying influence to those who may have seen their cherished spiritual edifice, whatever it may be, fall around them and are tempted to a mood of disillusionment. We make our own world; when we have made it awry, we can remake it, approximately truer, though it cannot be absolutely true, to the facts. It will never be finally made; we are always stretching forth to larger and better fictions which answer more truly to our growing knowledge and experience. Even when we walk, it is only by a series of regulated errors, Vaihinger well points out, a perpetual succession of falls to one side and the other side. Our whole progress through life is of the same nature; all thinking is a regulated error. For we cannot, as Vaihinger insists, choose our errors at random or in accordance with what happens to please us; such fictions are only too likely to turn into deadening dogmas: the old vis dormitiva is the type of them, mere husks that are of no vital use and help us not at all. There are good fictions and bad fictions just as there are good poets and bad poets. It is in the choice and regulation of our errors, in our readiness to accept ever-closer approximations to the unattainable reality, that we think rightly and live rightly. We triumph in so far as we succeed in that regulation. “A lost battle,” Foch, quoting De Maistre, lays down in his “Principes de Guerre,” “is a battle one thinks one has lost”; the battle is won by the fiction that it is won. It is so also in the battle of life, in the whole art of living. Freud regards dreaming as fiction that helps us to sleep; thinking we may regard as fiction that helps us to live. Man lives by imagination.