ON POSITIVISM.
[168] "Does any one fancy that he sees a solid cube? It is easy to show that the solidity of the figure, the relative position of its faces and edges to each other, are inferences of the spectator—no more conveyed to his conviction by the eye alone than they would be if he were looking at a painted representation of a cube. The scene of nature is a picture without depth of substance, no less than the scene of art; and in the one case, as in the other, it is the mind which, by an act of its own, discovers that colour and shape denote distance and solidity. Most men are unconscious of this perpetual habit of reading the language of the external world, and translating as they read. The draughtsman, indeed, is compelled, for his purposes, to return back in thought from the solid bodies which he has inferred, to the shapes of surface which he really sees. He knows that there is a mask of theory over the whole face of nature, if it be theory to infer more than we see. But other men, unaware of this masquerade, hold it to be a fact that they see cubes and spheres, spacious apartments, and winding avenues. And these things are facts to them, because they are unconscious of the mental operation by which they have penetrated nature's disguise....
"Our sensations require ideas to bind them together; namely, ideas of space, time, number, and the like. If not so bound together, sensations do not give us any apprehension of things or objects. All things, all objects, must exist in space and in time—must be one or many. Now space, time, number, are not sensations or things. They are something different from, and opposed to, sensations and things. We have termed them ideas. It may be said they are relations of things, or of sensations. But granting this form of expression, still a relation is not a thing or a sensation; and therefore we must still have another and opposite element, along with our sensations....
"We are often told that such a thing is a fact—a fact, and not a theory,—with all the emphasis which, in speaking or writing, tone or italics or capitals can give. We see from what has been said, that when this is urged, before we can estimate the truth, or the value of the assertion, we must ask to whom is it a fact? what habits of thought, what previous information, what ideas does it imply, to conceive the fact as a fact? Does not the apprehension of the fact imply assumptions which may with equal justice be called theory, and which are perhaps false theory? in which case the fact is no fact. Did not the ancients assert it as a fact, that the earth stood still, and the stars moved? and can any fact have stronger apparent evidence to justify persons in asserting it emphatically than this had?"—Whewell's Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences, 2nd ed., vol. i., p. 42, seq.
That the solidity of figures is in truth given by mental judgment, has been often proved experimentally; see for examples, Huxley's Elementary Physiology, Lesson x., 13–16. The experiment with a coin, lens and pin, p. 259, is easy as well as conclusive, but Wheatstone's Pseudoscope more surprising to most observers. Compare on this curious subject Brewster's Natural Magic, Letter v.
[169] It is important to bear in mind that, from an admitted incompetency of our faculties to know the absolute, we cannot infer an impossibility of knowing its existence. To know that a thing is, and to know what it is, are two totally distinct degrees and sorts of knowledge. The moment this distinction is stated, every one sees its truth; but many persons omit stating it to themselves when they reason upon these difficult subjects.
Ravaisson, after giving a brief account of Herbert Spencer's opinion, goes on to say: "Comment il y a, au fond de toute connaissance, un absolu, auquel correspond, comme son opposé, le relatif, c'est ce qu'établissait, il y a plus de vingt siècles, contre une doctrine déjà régnante alors de relativité et de mobilité universelles, la dialectique platonicienne, qui fraya le chemin à la metaphysique. Elle faisait plus: elle montrait que par cet absolu seul les relations sont intelligibles, parce qu'il est la mesure par laquelle seule nous les estimons. La métaphysique, entre les mains de son immortel fondateur, fit davantage encore: elle montra que cet absolu, par lequel l'intelligence mesure le relatif, est l'intelligence même. C'est ce que redisait Leibniz, lorsque, à cette assertion, renouvelée de la scolastique par Locke, qu'il n'était rien dans l'intelligence qui d'abord n'eût été dans le sens, il répondait: "sauf l'intelligence," et que, avec Aristote, il montrait dans l'intelligence la mesure supérieure du sens."—Rapport, p. 66.
Ravaisson then gives interesting extracts from Sophie St. Germain, and proceeds to show how Comte, without admitting any self-contemplating intelligence, and thus inferring the possibility of an Absolute, did in fact pursue the idea of Unity, and extended this idea to the universe,—a principle which, if fully grasped, must be fatal to Positive views. "D'accord maintenant avec Platon, Aristote, Leibniz, il déclarait que l'ensemble étant le resultat et l'expression d'une certaine unité, à laquelle tout concourt et se co-ordonne et qui est le but où tout marche, c'est dans cette unité, c'est dans le but, c'est dans la fin ou cause finale qu'est le secret de l'organisme."—Rapport, p. 76.
A special interest attaches to the work of Ravaisson as an authoritative French rating of the philosophic exchange between England and France. It is almost unnecessary to refer for a less abstract account of these relations to the widely known writings of M. Taine.
[170] It should have been stated in the text, as it was in the delivered lecture, that these questions were not forgotten by the eminent Professor. The passages referred to will be found in his eloquent address on the "Scientific use of the Imagination," p. 47, seq., or in his volume of collected Essays, p. 163, seq. The reader may observe that, both in Professor Tyndall's pages and two sentences back in this lecture, Development is spoken of as a process or law in operation. The various kinds of philosophy which may be engrafted on such a law are severally determined by whatever reply is given to the questions above suggested. It would seem inappropriate here to state the possible relations between a law of development and such consequent (or inconsequent) philosophies. Those who wish to consider them the writer may refer to his little volume entitled "Right and Wrong," for a brief discussion of this subject, and more particularly for the results to natural theology.
The following German sketch of an evolution-philosophy may not be without interest:—"Vermöge einer ewigen Kreisbewegung entstehen als Verdichtungen der Luft unzählige Welten, himmlische Gottheiten, in deren Mittelpunkt die cylinderförmige Erde ruht, unbewegt wegen des gleichen Abstandes von allen Punkten der Himmelskugel. Die Erde hat sich aus einem unsprünglich flüssigen Zustande gebildet. Aus dem Feuchten sind unter dem Einfluss der Wärme in stufenweise Entwickelung die lebenden Wesen hervorgegangen. Auch die Landthiere waren anfangs fischartig und haben erst mit der Abtrocknung der Erdoberfläche ihre jetzige Gestalt gewonnen. Die Seele soll Anaximander als luftartig bezeichnet haben."
Anaximander of Miletus was born about B.C. 610. Consequently he ranks early among European theorizers on development. The extract is from Ueberweg's Grundriss, t. 1, p. 40. Cf. Plutarch de Placit. v. 19, and Sympos viii. qu. 8, with Euseb. Præp. Evang. i. 8.
[171] The sight of a dualism apparently insoluble never fails to suggest some such questions as these: Was it always so? will it be so always? and were I at the centre of the universe, should I see it so now?
There are three possible ways of conceiving otherwise: 1, by reducing mind to matter; 2, by reducing matter to mind; 3, by comprehending both under a higher unity.
We need only write down these issues for common sense to perceive that Nos. 1 and 2 arise from, and end in one-sided speculation. A man who lives shut up amongst machinery is apt to think of his own mind as a machine. Great chemists have ere now taken the human stomach for a laboratory, and were slow in awakening to those physiological facts which put the vital processes of assimilation in a nobler and truer light. Comte began by reducing all sciences to mathematical elements. Afterwards he discovered that to explain a higher order of things by a lower is the essence of materialism.
To a meditative spirit, the inner world is nearer than the outer; and therefore the evidence of its reality is stronger by wanting the weakness of a second link. But active life brings home to us the existence of both; we suffer by defying or neglecting the laws of either; and pain and sorrow are often the advanced guard of much stern unyielding truth. In a world where we all endure the friction of things external, it is hard not to believe in objective as well subjective realities.
The truth is, that the primary question belongs to the practical reason, and can be settled by no other criterion. There is a philosophical maxim that we can never speak of the Divine univocally, but only by analogy, figure, or similitude; the cause being that all attributes belonging to the Infinite require words which, if taken literally, must land us in self-contradiction. How vivid an idea do we gain of Omniscience or Omnipotence by saying that it is "a circle of which the centre is everywhere, the circumference nowhere." And what signifies the obvious inconsistency? Deny the Infinite, try to find a place for its centre or circumference, and the inconsistency remains, together with a host of absurd consequences. When of two hypotheses both cannot, but one must be true, and either position lands us in logical inconsistency, it is easy to see that our theoretical understanding will never clear up the inexplicable issue. A rule by which we live and act becomes the surest touchstone of truth or falsehood.
Let us see whether the two worlds in which we live can be practically treated as one. Suppose a bivouac into which a shell descends, certain in another moment, by physical law, to explode. Is the moral law—the effort of this man or that man to escape—equally certain? Arguing abstractedly, most people would hold it so, yet we know that the fact lies otherwise. There is a fatalism among soldiers—"every bullet has its billet"—as there is among nurses who believe that every epidemic must kill its destined prey. One may have trained himself to wish for death, another is indifferent, a third so undecided that he leaves the event to a doctrine of chances, a fourth is simply capricious. Each by a course of life and action has made or modified his present moment for choice, and any one may or may not draw back from the coming peril. Had the falling shell been a splash from a carriage wheel, every man would have shrunk from it. The latter risk is too simple for human ponderings or human self-direction, and in such cases people act by a proximate straightforward instinct.
But on what principles must he who shrinks from either risk really proceed? He is sure that his own movements are in his own power and contingent. He is equally sure that the movements of shell or mud are absolutely determined in calculable curves, and not at all contingent. Acting on these two conjoint data, he succeeds in avoiding death or dirt; and, whatever theorists may write, he would have perilled his success by acting otherwise. Nay, what is much to our purpose, all theoretical men would themselves act upon the like assumption in all cases of practical consequence and emergency.
Suppose dualism banished from the world in fact as well as in theory, the problems of education ought to be as demonstrable as those of geometry or chemical experiment. The paths of men and of comets being equally calculable, because equally subject to uniform law, how comes it that biography and history abound in the records of grossly falsified predictions? Let the courses of nations be tabulated, and statesmanship is made easy. We must owe it to some egregious oversight that criminal punishments are not invariably deterrent. Perhaps the law of the strongest motive has been neglected; if so, re-enact the code of Draco, and virtue will become universal. Till then the supposition must continue only an unverified hypothesis.
If we go back to our starting-point, and ask, can the practical dualism be reduced to a higher unity? our answer must confess a present condition of ignorance. We are so far from knowing what constitutes the thing we call matter, or what the entity we feel within us—our soul or mind—really is, that we cannot tell how they act and react on each other. We fail in tracing our own sensations from their outward antecedents to their impression on our consciousness; and, vice versâ, we cannot follow our energies from the springs of our volitions outward. While thus baffled, the longed-for unity floats before our inward eye like a dim vision of that intuitive faculty which pronounces subject and object to be ultimately identical, or as a revelation of that religious faith which accepts the incomprehensible, and reposes in the bosom of God.
[172] Since Comte's time it has been shown that mental development is no very difficult process, provided we assume that several principles which consciousness distinguishes and sometimes places in antagonism, may be treated as equivalents, and be resolved into each other interchangeably. For example, we have been apt to reverence those who suffered the loss of all things rather than accept the Expedient as the Right, and who died resolute in disallowing the rule of policy to be pleaded in foro conscientiæ. We have also in common parlance asserted a distinction between these two principles, while holding that the one claims the other for its assured attendant. Honesty, we said, is the best policy; and we never meant thereby that thorough policy is the best policy. What we did mean was that a regard to expediency fails of the success which a straightforward observance of right deserves, and will at last obtain. But to make mental development easy, antitheses must appear fluent, the noble be convertible with the useful, the human with the merely animal. Thus, when Comte adored Clotilde, and Dante immortalized Beatrice, they rehearsed for a millionth time the loves of preadamite plants. Coleridge used to maintain that the test of a philosophy was its ultimate coincidence with common sense. In the theories under consideration, right is philosophically resolved into the greater happiness of the greater number, and this equivalent exactly coincides with the common sense of starving thinkers who are possessed by a fixed idea that the happiness of the impoverished many is promoted by an opportune pillage of the wealthy few.
It is less easy to verify mental development than to theorize upon it, yet verification may not be impossible! If disbelief in a future life, denial of responsibility, duty, and morality, as opposed to expediency, make sufficient way in the world, and if practice harmonize with speculation, progress may become more evidently regress, and Man be proved a brute animal at last. The promising events in France are patent to every one; a less known, but still more encouraging fact, which we learn on scientific authority, is that certain Basuto tribes have lately adopted the (to them) novel custom of cannibalism.
Pending the hoped-for verification, if an identity of human with animal nature be accepted as provisionally true, it may be as well to anticipate a few of its logical consequences. Eating the flesh of our instinctive congeners ought positively to be discountenanced; or, as men and women are simply animal, all carnivorous human beings should on compulsion become cannibals. Despotism being the form of government adopted by us with general applause, as regards the animal kingdom, it cannot be too soon transferred to our own mismanaged nationalities. In a word, our practices in reference to men, women, beasts, fishes, birds, and reptiles, ought to be made uniform. Above all, the new school-boards should be charged with the education of our poor relations, and the linguistic professors of Oxford and Cambridge be instructed to use every effort for the promotion of a universal language. Charity may be thought by some to begin at home, therefore a commencement may be made with the domesticated irrationals, finches spaniels, cats, hackneys, sheep, mules, all asses, all pigs, and all monkey favourites. It is just possible that volatile creatures unaccustomed to habits of reflection (some tribes of light-minded birds, for example) may find abstract ideas and declarative sentences a little difficult. Yet, after all, it need not be such a long step in the case of contemplative owls; and we may then apply the old proverb, "Il n'y a que le premier pas qui coûte." At all events, the "Simious process," so successful in our world of fashion, will be likely to suffice with every well-disposed chimpanzee; the circle of knowledge will continually widen until the world of animals becomes identified with the world of man. Then, but not till then, the astonished psychologist may cease his useless labours, and record the inauguration of a new era by acknowledging
"Omnia jam fient fieri quæ posse negabam;"
or, still more conclusively,
"Thinking is but an idle waste of thought,
And nought is everything, and everything is nought."