Elements of metaphysics

by A. E. Taylor

CHAPTER VI
CONCLUSION

[§ 1.] Can our Absolute Experience be properly called the “union of Thought and Will”? The Absolute is certainly the final realisation of our intellectual and our practical ideals. But (1) it includes aspects, such as, e.g. æsthetic feeling, pleasure, and pain, which are neither Thought nor Will. (2) And it cannot possess either Thought or Will as such. Both Thought and Will, in their own nature, presuppose a Reality which transcends mere Thought and mere Will. [§ 2.] Our conclusion may in a sense be said to involve an element of Agnosticism, and again of Mysticism. But it is only agnostic in holding that we do not know the precise nature of the Absolute Experience. It implies no distrust of the validity of knowledge, so far as it goes, and bases its apparently agnostic result on the witness of knowledge itself. Similarly, it is mystical in transcending, not in refusing to recognise, the constructions of understanding and will. [§ 3.] Metaphysics adds nothing to our information, and yields no fresh springs of action. It is finally only justified by the persistency of the impulse to speculate on the nature of things as a whole.

§ 1. It seems advisable, in bringing this work to a conclusion, to bring together by way of recapitulation a few important consequences of our general principle which could not receive all the notice they deserve in the course of our previous exposition. Our main contention, which it may be hoped our discussion of special problems has now confirmed, was that the whole of Reality ultimately forms a single infinite individual system, of which the material is psychical matter of fact, and that the individuality of this system lies ultimately in a teleological unity of subjective interest. Further, we saw that all subordinate reality is again in its degree individual, and that the contents of the Absolute thus form a hierarchy of ascending orders of reality and individuality, and that in this way, while all finite individual existence is, as finite, appearance and not ultimate Reality, appearances, themselves are of varied degrees of worth, and that, apart from the appearances, there is no reality at all. And finally, we learned that all the aspirations of finite individuals must be somehow met and made good in the ultimate Reality, though not necessarily in the form in which they are consciously entertained by the finite aspirant.

This last conclusion naturally suggests the question, whether it would be a correct description of the ultimate Reality to call it the “union of Thought and Will.” I will briefly indicate the reasons why such a description appears to be misleading. (1) The Absolute may no doubt be called the “union of Thought and Will,” in the sense that its complete individual structure corresponds at once to our logical ideal of systematic interconnection, and our ethico-religious ideal of realised individual purpose. But it must be added that the Absolute appears to possess aspects which cannot fairly be brought under either of these heads. Æsthetic feeling, for instance, and the æsthetic judgments based upon it, must somehow be included as an integral aspect in the absolute whole of experience; yet æsthetic feeling cannot properly be regarded either as thought or as will. And the same objection might be raised in the case of pleasure. However closely pleasure may be connected with conative efforts towards the retention or renewal of the pleasant experience, it seems quite clear that the “pure” pleasures[^[235]] are not forms of conscious “conation,” and that even in those “mixed” pleasures, which depend in part for their pleasantness upon relief from the tension of precedent craving or desire, analysis enables us to distinguish two elements, that of direct pleasure in the new experience, and that of the feeling of relief from the craving. Hence, if it be admitted that the Absolute contains pleasure, it must also be admitted that it contains something which is neither thought nor will. The same argument would hold good, I think, even if we held with the pessimists, that the Absolute contains a balance of pain over pleasure. For, intimate as the connection is between pain and thwarted conation, it seems a psychological monstrosity to maintain that felt pain is always and everywhere an experience of the frustration of actual conscious effort; and unless this monstrosity can be maintained, we must recognise in pain too a fundamental experience-quality irreducible to thought or will. Thus, at best, the description of the Absolute, as the union of thought and will, would be incomplete.

(2) But, further, the description, if taken to mean that the Absolute itself has thought and will, as such, would be not only incomplete but false. For actual thought and actual will can easily be shown to be essentially finite functions, neither of which could ever reach its goal and become finally self-consistent, without ceasing to be mere thought or mere will. Thus actual thought always involves an aspect of discrepancy between its content and reference. It is always thought about a reality which falls, in part, outside the thought itself, is only imperfectly represented by the thought’s content, and for that very reason is a not-self to the thought for which it is an object. And the whole process of thinking may be described as a series of attempts on the part of thought to transcend this limitation. So long as the content of the thought is not adequate to the reality which it thinks, so long, that is, as there is anything left to know about the reality, thought restlessly presses forward towards an unreached consummation. But if the correspondence ideae cum ideato ever became perfect, thought’s object would cease to contain anything which went beyond thought’s own content. It would no longer be an “other” or “not-self” to the thought which knew it, and thus thought and its object would have become a single thing.[thing.] But in this consummation thought would have lost its special character as an actual process, just as the object would have lost its character of a something, partly at least, “given” from without. Both mere thought and mere existence, in becoming one, would cease to have the character which belongs to them in finite experience precisely in virtue of our failure completely to transcend the chasm between them.

The same is the case with will. If, indeed, by will we mean a genuine actual process of volition, this result is already included in our criticism of the claim of thought as such to persist unchanged in the Absolute. For all genuine will implies possession of and actuation by an idea which is entertained explicitly as an unrealised idea, and is thus inseparable from thought. (This, I may incidentally observe once more, is why we carefully avoided speaking of the “subjective interest” we found in all experience-processes as “will.”) But even if we improperly widen the interpretation of the term “will” to include all conative process, the general conclusion will remain the same. For all such processes imply the contrast between existence as it comes to us in the here and now of actual feeling, and existence as it should be, and as we seek to make it, for the satisfaction of our various impulses, cravings, and desires. It is the felt, even when not explicitly understood, discrepancy between these two aspects of a reality, which is ultimately one and harmonious under the discrepancy, that supplies all actual conative process with its motive force. And hence we seem driven to hold that conation as such, i.e. as actual striving or effort, can find no place in an experience in which the aspects of ideality and real existence are once for all finally united.

If we cannot avoid speaking of such an experience in terms of our own intellectual, and again of our own volitional processes, we must at least remember that while such language is true in the sense that the all-embracing harmonious experience of the Absolute is the unattainable goal towards which finite intellect and finite volition are alike striving, yet each in attaining its consummation, if it ever could attain it, would cease to be itself as we know it, and pass into a higher and directer form of apprehension, in which it could no longer be distinguished from the other. In the old mediæval terminology, the Absolute must be said to contain actual intellect and actual volition, not formaliter but eminenter.[^[236]]

§ 2. It follows from all this that, just because the absolute whole is neither mere thought nor mere will, nor an artificial synthesis of the two, mere truth for the intellect can never be quite the same thing as ultimate Reality. For in mere truth we get Reality only in its intellectual aspect as that which affords the highest satisfaction to thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object. And, as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by thought itself. For thought, to remain thought, must always be something less than the whole reality which it knows. The reality must always contain a further aspect which is not itself thought, and is not capable of being apprehended in the form of a thought-content. Or, what is the same thing, while all reality is individual, all the thought-constructions through which we know its character must remain general. We are always trying in our thought to grasp the individual as such, and always failing. As individual, the reality never becomes the actual content of our thought, but remains a “transcendent” object to which thought refers, or which it means. And hence our truest thought can at best give us but an imperfect satisfaction for its own demand of congruence, between thought’s content and its object. The reality can never be ultimately merely what it is for our thought. And this conclusion obviously lends a certain justification both to the agnostic and to the mystic. It is important to understand how far that justification extends.

First, then, a word as to the limits of justifiable Agnosticism. Our conclusion warranted us in asserting that Reality must contain aspects which are not thought, and again must combine thought with these other aspects in a unity which is not itself merely intellectual. In other words, we had to confess that we cannot understand the concrete character of the Infinite Experience, or, to put it in a more homely way, we do not know how it would feel to be “God.” And if this is Agnosticism, we clearly shall have to own that we too are agnostics. But our result gave us no ground for doubting our own general conviction as to the place which intellect and truth hold in the Absolute. On the other hand, it left us with every reason for trusting that conviction. For our conclusion that mere truth cannot be the same thing as ultimate Reality was itself based upon the principle that only harmonious individuality is finally real, and this is the very principle employed by the intellect itself whenever it judges one thought-construction relatively higher and truer than another.

Thus our Agnosticism, if it is to be called so, neither discredits our human estimate of the relative truth of different theories about the real, nor lends any support to the notion that “Knowledge is relative” in the sense that there may conceivably be no correspondence between Reality and the scheme of human knowledge as a whole. It is based not on the distrust of human reason, but upon the determination to trust that reason implicitly, and it claims, in declaring mere truth to fall short of Reality, to be expressing reason’s own verdict upon itself. Hence it does not, like vulgar Agnosticism, leave us in the end in pure uncertainty as to the ultimate structure and upshot, so to say, of the world, but definitely holds that we have genuine and trustworthy knowledge of the type of that structure and the nature of its materials. And it is upon this positive knowledge, and not upon an uncritical appeal to unknown possibilities, that it rests its denial of the simple identity of Reality with thought itself. For all we know, says the common Agnosticism, our thought is sheer illusion, and therefore we must confess that we have in the end no notion what the reality of the world may be. Thought is not illusory, says our systematic Idealism, and therefore its own witness that Reality is an individual whole of experience which is more than thought is a positive contribution to our knowledge. Between these two positions there may be a superficial resemblance, but there is an essential difference in principle.