The Making of a Man

by James W. Lee

V.

The human mind has never been able to resist the conviction that there is such a thing as truth. Though baffled and defeated a thousand times, in every age, in its attempt to formulate truth, it has never been able to consent to give up the search for it. Interest in truth has kept alive and fostered the belief that the mind has power to understand it. The mind’s passion for truth has deepened its confidence in the faculties with which it is ever trying to discover it. The everlasting longing to know truth has been taken as implicit capacity to find it. Philosophic systems have been only so many devices and creations of the mind with which to take hold of truth. The methods proposed, in the first stages of philosophic thinking, for getting at the truth were crude, as the first instruments devised for cultivating the soil and getting out of it what there was in it for food, were crude. Thales, Pythagoras, and Anaximander first attempted to penetrate objective reality, to know its cause, to bring its multiplicity to unity, and to reduce its variety to law. The ever-changing phenomena by which they were surrounded necessarily eluded the meager theories with which they attempted to reduce them to order. They prepared the way, however, for systems which accommodated a greater number of facts. They made possible Plato and Aristotle, who, with hypotheses more complicated and more consonant with the reality they sought to grasp, found truth enough to keep the human race thinking for two thousand years. The blocks of truth they quarried from the mines of objective reality were used to carry up the theological and speculative temples of the Middle Ages.

After the failure of scholasticism, which denotes a period in human thought rather than a particular system of philosophy, Lord Bacon proposed the method of material induction to bring the mind into relations of knowledge with truth. He emphasized the study of the outward facts, their classification and organization. In his esteem, truth was to be reached by the consideration of actual, tangible things. Man was the interpreter of nature, and not necessarily its interpretation.

Truth in the mind was the image of objective truth. It differed from truth out of the mind, as the direct from the reflected ray. He failed from lack of adequate recognition of one of the important factors in the problem of truth. Descartes’ method was more successful, because larger and completer recognition was taken of man.

He began by doubting everything that could be doubted. Heir to the beliefs of all the ages, he determined to summon these, one by one, before the bar of reason, and force them to show cause for their existence. Everyone was to be called into court and put out that could be doubted. The existence of a God was called up and doubted, condemned, and put out. The existence of an external world was called up, doubted, condemned, and put out. In the same summary and shorthand way, man and mind were doubted and put out. All positive beliefs were doubted. After his process of elimination, he found himself without God, without man, without mind, without a permanent external world. All that remained after emptying himself of all mental furnishments and beliefs was the fact that he doubted. But he could not doubt without thinking. In the very act of doubting, he thought. If one thinks, he must think something. The nearest something to the thinking subject is his own personal being. So he thought himself and concluded, “I think, therefore, I am.” But he was not always; he began to be. So he must think of a being that caused him. The being that caused him must himself be uncaused. Moreover, there could not be an uncaused cause, without an effect. Creation, then, with which he stood face to face, was the effect of the great first cause. Thus Descartes’ method, based upon the thought underlying doubt, led him, necessarily, to himself, the object of his thought; and to God, the cause of himself; and to creation, the effect of the great first cause or God. Through his process of coming at the problem, he was able, rationally, to believe in the existence of himself, the outer world, and God, the cause of both. Descartes, as a thinker, was affirmative, positive, constructive. He only doubted down to the point where he could doubt no longer, that he might have a sure foundation upon which to build. His contribution gave fresh courage and inspiration to the human mind. He failed to determine the boundary line between the self and the not-self, between mind and matter, between the thinker and the creation with which he stood face to face. This was the work Spinoza proposed for himself, and in the celebrated Ethics, published to the world at the peril of his life and soul, imagined the task mathematically performed. The two poles of Descartes’ philosophy, the self and the not-self, he united in Descartes’ cause, and named the whole sum substance. The self and the not-self reappeared as attributes of substance, which Spinoza named thought and extension. All the phenomena in the universe, mental or material, were but modes of the infinite substance. The result of his thinking was pure pantheism. He reached a sort of mechanical unity, but he left no place for the affirmation of distinctions. His Ethics was large enough to accommodate everything, but in such a way as to preserve the individuality of nothing. A thought is valuable in proportion to its capacity to take hold of things as they are. The old opinion that heat was caloric, served as a working hypothesis for the mind a long time. In the view of those who held it, it was satisfactory and adequate. But it never really got hold of heat, because it contradicted the nature of heat. The astronomers thought, for a long time, that they had come into relations of knowledge with the stars through the Ptolemaic conception of the heavenly bodies. They were mistaken, however. Their theory did not fit the real celestial order at all. As a work of genius, Spinoza’s Ethics is one of the most remarkable productions ever formulated by the human intellect, but it conducted the mind away from truth, rather than into relations with it. Locke began his work as a philosopher, as Descartes began his, by looking into his own mind. Descartes began by casting out everything that could be doubted. Locke began by making an inventory of what his mind contained. Descartes wanted to find out how much he could know, as measured by what remained after throwing out everything that could be doubted. Locke sought to see how little he could know, by putting the sensations and impressions he found in his mind on the witness stand, and getting them to tell how they came to be there, and where they came from. Descartes began by a study of the intelligence, the instrument of knowledge. Locke began by a study of the facts which, by some means or other, had found their way into his intelligence. Descartes got rid of every belief that could be doubted. Locke ran every idea out of his mind that had been imported from the outside world, in order that he might see if the mind had any constitutional power to produce any. Descartes, having dislodged all inherited beliefs, such as took for granted the existence of God, man, mind, and outer world, found some mental laws, capabilities, and tendencies left, which compelled a man, if he thought at all, to think in a given way; and if he thought on given lines, to think to a given conclusion. Not being able to get these laws out of the mind, he called them innate ideas. They were in the mind by structure and constitution.

After Locke had carefully examined the contents of his mind, he declared they were all imported from an outside realm. Nothing he found in the mind was indigenous to the soil. When all foreign importations were removed, nothing remained but an empty vessel. The mind was nothing but a receptacle, into which the senses dumped such objects as they happened to find lying round loose in the outside world. It had no more power to understand or turn into thought what was brought in than a piece of white paper had to read and interpret what was written upon it; or than a kettle to recognize the liquid making up its contents as water. It is like a table of wax; any sort of letters may be graven upon it, but the table cannot read them.

Locke proposed to find out what the mind could know by counting and tabulating the things he found in his own intelligence. This is very much like trying to understand the nature of light, by considering the blue things and green things and red things the light discloses. All bodies, it is said, which the light enables us to see, attract each other in proportion to their mass, and inversely as the squares of their distance. The law of gravity, which regulates the bodies light reveals to us, is not the law of light. We can never understand the nature of light, or the laws of light, by the study of things which light enables us to see. If all knowledge is but the sum of the impressions which the external world has made on the mind, then the cause of knowledge is matter, and knowledge is but the image or reflection of material things. Knowledge, then, would sustain the same relation to the outside world, that the shadow of a tree does to the tree. One would come as near lifting up the tree by its own shadow as lifting up the truth by Locke’s system of sensational philosophy.

Impressions are simple, atomic. They come into the mind, one after another. They cohere in no unity. They are held together by no necessary relation. They are separate, one from the other. If there is no primary, innate faculty; no abiding and indwelling mental activity, that lies behind, and determines and co-ordinates the objects which nature supplies through the senses, converting them into rational, orderly knowledge, then we can never get hold of truth. We are shut up to hopeless ignorance.