§ 1. In the preceding book we have seen that the very nature of the metaphysical problem predetermines the general character of the answer we are to give to it. What our intellect can accept as finally real, we saw, must be indissolubly one with actual experience, and it must be an internally coherent system. In the present book we have to discuss more in detail the structure which must belong to any reality possessing these general characteristics. The present chapter, then, will be devoted to an examination of the implications of the experiential character of real Being; in the next, we shall deal with the nature of its unity as a single system.
We may perhaps most conveniently begin our discussion with a re-definition of some of our principal terms. We have hitherto spoken of the object of metaphysical knowledge indifferently as “Being,” “What is,” “What truly exists,” and as “Reality,” “the ultimately real.” So far as it is possible to draw a distinction between these two sets of names for the same thing, we may say that each series lays special stress on a somewhat different aspect of our object. When we say that a thing “is” or “has Being,” we seem primarily to mean that it is an object for the knowing consciousness, that it has its place in the system of objects which coherent thought recognises. When we call the same object “real” or a “reality,” we lay the emphasis rather on the consideration that it is something of which we categorically must take account, whether we like it or not, if some purpose of our own is to get its fulfilment.[[31]] Thus again the “non-existent” primarily means that which finds no place in the scheme of objects contemplated by consistent scientific thought; the “unreal,” that with which we have not, for any human purpose, to reckon.
This is what is often expressed by saying that reality means what is independent of our own will, what exercises resistance, what constrains or compels our recognition, whether we like it or not. Philosophers have pointed out that this way of putting the case is only half the truth. The “stubborn” facts or realities which, as we commonly say, force us to recognise them, only do so in consequence of the presence in us of definite interests and purposes which we cannot effect without adapting ourselves to the situation expressed by our statement of the “facts.” What lies entirely outside my interests and plans gets no kind of recognition from me; it is “unreal” for me precisely because I have no need to take account of it as a factor to be reckoned with in the pursuit of my special ends. Thus, so long as we use the term in a relative sense and with reference to the special ends of this or that particular agent, there may be as many different orders of “reality” as there are special purposes, and what is “real” for the agent inspired by one purpose may be unreal for his fellows whose purposes are different. Thus, for example, to an English Christian living at home in England the rules of “caste” in India are usually for all practical purposes unreal; he has no need to take their existence into account as a condition of the successful prosecution of any of his aims and interests; for him they have no more significance than the rules of legal procedure adopted in Wonderland. But for the historian of Indian society, the native Hindu Christian, and the devout worshipper of Shiva, the rules of caste are a true reality. Not one of the three can execute his special purposes without taking them into account and allowing them to operate in determining his way of proceeding to his goal. Again, the kind of reality which the rules of caste possess for each of our three men is different, in accord with the differences in their characteristic purposes. For the historian, they are real as a system of ideas which have influenced and do influence the conduct of the society of which he is writing the history, in such a way that without understanding them he cannot get a clear insight into the social structure of Hinduism. To the native Christian, they are real as a standing source of difficulty and a standing temptation to be false to his highest ideals of conduct. To the Shivaite, they are real as the divinely appointed means to bodily and spiritual purification from the evil that is in the world.
§ 2. So far, then, it might seem that “reality” is a purely relative term, and that our previous choice of ultimate freedom from contradiction as our standard of reality was an arbitrary one, due to the mere accident that our special purpose in sitting down to study Metaphysics is to think consistently. Of course, it might be said, whatever game you choose to play at, the rules of that particular game must be your supreme reality, so long as you are engaged in it. But it depends on your own choice what game you will play and how long you will keep at it. There is no game at which we all, irrespective of personal choice, have to play, and there is therefore no such thing as an ultimate reality which we must all recognise as such; there are only the special realities which correspond to our special individual purposes. You have no right to set up the particular rules of the game of scientific thought as a reality unconditionally demanding recognition from those who do not choose to play that particular game.[[32]]
Such an argument would, however, be beside the point. It is true that the special nature of the facts which any one of us recognises as real depends on the special nature of his individual purposes. And it is true that, precisely because we are, to some extent, genuine individuals, no two men’s abiding purposes are identically the same. It is therefore true, so far as it goes, that Reality wears a different and an individual aspect for each of us. But it is emphatically not true that there is no identical character at all about the purposes and interests of different individuals. The very recognition of the fact that any one individual purpose or interest can only get expression by accommodating itself to a definite set of conditions, which constitute the reality corresponding to that purpose, carries with it the implication that the world is ultimately a system and not a chaos, or, in other words, that there is ultimately a certain constitution of things which, under one aspect or another, is of moment for all individuals, and must be taken into account by every kind of purpose that is to get fulfilment. If the world is systematic at all,—and unless it is so there is no place in it for definite purpose of any kind,—it must finally have a structure of such a kind that any purpose which ignores it will be defeated. All coherent pursuit of purpose, of whatever type, must therefore in the end rest on the recognition of some characteristics of the world-order which are unconditionally and absolutely to be taken into account by all individual agents, no matter what the special nature of their particular purposes. This is all that is meant when it is said that the reality investigated by Metaphysics is absolute, or when the object of metaphysical study is spoken of as the Absolute.
We may, in fact, conveniently define the Absolute as that structure of the world-system which any and every internally consistent purpose must recognise as the condition of its own fulfilment To deny the existence of an Absolute, thus defined, is in principle to reduce the world and life to a mere chaos. It is important, however, to bear in mind that in Metaphysics, though we are certainly concerned with the ultimate or absolute Reality, we are concerned with it from a special point of view. Our special purpose is to know, or to think coherently, about the conditions which all intelligent purpose has to recognise. Now this attitude of scientific investigation is clearly not the only one which we can take up towards the ultimately real. We may, for instance, seek to gain emotional harmony and peace of mind by yielding up the conduct of our practical life to the unquestioned guidance of what we directly feel to be the deepest and most abiding elements in the structure of the universe. This is the well-known attitude of practical religion. Primâ facie, while it seems to be just as permissible as the purely scientific attitude of the seeker after truth, the perennial “conflict of religion and science” is sufficient to show that the two are not identical. How they are related is a problem which we shall have, in outline, to consider towards the end of our inquiry; at present it is enough for our purpose to recognise them as divergent but primâ facie equally justified attitudes towards what must in the end be thought of as the same ultimate reality. As Mr. Bradley well says, there is no sin which is metaphysically less justifiable than the metaphysician’s own besetting sin of treating his special way of regarding the “Absolute” as the only legitimate one.
§ 3. To return to our detailed investigation of the connection between Reality as now defined for the metaphysician, and Experience. We can now see more completely than before why it is only in immediate experience that reality is to be found. Our reason for identifying reality with immediate experience has nothing to do with the theory according to which “sensations,” being the product of a something “without the mind,” are supposed to carry with them a direct certificate of the independent existence of their “external” cause. For we have seen: (1) that immediacy means simply indissoluble union with a whole of feeling, and that this immediacy belongs to every mental state as actually lived through; (2) that the dependence of sensations in particular on an “external” cause, is in no sense an immediate datum of experience, but a reflective hypothesis which, like all such hypotheses, demands examination and justification before it can be pronounced legitimate; (3) that it is a philosophical blunder to identify the real with the merely “independent” of ourselves. What is merely independent, as we have now seen, would for us be the merely unreal. Presence in immediate experience is a universal character of all that is real, because it is only in so far as anything is thus presented in immediate unity with the concrete life of feeling that it can be given as a condition or fact of which an individual interest must take account, on pain of not reaching accomplishment. Actual life, as we have already learned, is always a concrete unity of feeling in which the two distinguishable aspects of a psychical fact, its existence and its content, the that and the what, though distinguishable, are inseparable. Scientific reflection on the given we found to be always abstract, in the sense that its very essence is the mental separation of the content from the process. By such separation we mediately get to know the character of the separated content better, but our knowledge, with all its fulness, still remains abstract; it is still knowledge referring to and about an object outside itself. It is only when, as a result of the reflective process, we find fresh meaning in the individual process-content on its recurrence that we return once more to the concrete actuality of real existence.
Now, we may express this same result in another and an even more significant way. To say that reality is essentially one with immediate feeling, is only another way of saying that the real is essentially that which is of significance for the attainment of purpose. For feeling is essentially teleological, as we may see even in the case of simple pleasure and pain. Amid all the confusion and complexity of the psychological problems which can be raised about these most simple forms of feeling, one thing seems clear, that pleasure is essentially connected with unimpeded, pain with impeded, discharge of nervous activity. Pleasure seems to be inseparable from successful, pain from thwarted or baffled, tendency.[[33]] And if we consider not so much the abstractions “pleasure in general,” “pain in general,” as a specific pleasure or pain, or again a complex emotional state, the case seems even clearer. Only a being whose behaviour is consciously or unconsciously determined by ends or purposes seems capable of finding existence, according as those purposes are advanced or hindered, pleasant or painful, glad or wretched, good or bad. Hence our original decision that reality is to be found in what is immediately experienced, as opposed to what is severed by subsequent reflective analysis from its union with feeling, and our later statement that that is real of which we are constrained to take account for the fulfilment of our purposes, fully coincide.
This point may perhaps be made clearer by a concrete example. Suppose that some purpose of more or less importance requires my immediate presence in the next town. Then the various routes by which I may reach that town become at once circumstances of which I have to take note and to which I must adapt my conduct, if my important purpose is not to be frustrated. It may be that there are alternative routes, or it may be that there is only one. In any case, and this is fundamental for us, the number of alternatives which my purpose leaves open to me will be strictly limited. I can, as a matter of mere mathematical possibility, go from A to B in an indefinite number of ways. If I have to make the journey in actual fact on a given day, and with existing means of transit, the theoretical infinity of possible ways is speedily reduced to, at the outside, two or three. For simplicity’s sake we will consider the case in which there happens to be only one available way. This one available way is “real” to me, as contrasted with the infinity of mathematically possible routes, precisely because the execution of my purpose restricts me to it and no other. The mathematically possible infinity of routes remain unreal just because they are thought of as all alike mere possibilities; no actual purpose limits me to some one or some definite number out of the infinity, and compels me to adapt myself to their peculiarities or fail of my end. They are “imaginary” or “merely possible” just for want of specific relation to an experience which is the expression of a definite purpose.
This illustration may lead us on to a further point of the utmost importance, for it illustrates the principle that the real as opposed to the merely “possible” or “merely thought of” is always individual. There was an indefinite number of mathematically conceivable ways from A to B; there was only one, or at least a precisely determinate number, by which I could fulfil a concrete individual purpose. (Thus, if I have to make the journey to B in a given time, I must take the route followed by the railway.) So universally it is a current common-place that while thought is general, the reality about which we think and of which we predicate the results of our thought is always individual. Now, what is the source or principle of this individuality of the real as opposed to the generality of the merely conceivable? It is precisely that connection of reality with actual purpose of which we have spoken. The results of thought are general because for the purposes of scientific thinking we isolate the what of experience from its that; we consider the character of what is presented to us apart from the unique purpose expressed in the experience in which it comes to us. In other words, the problems of scientific thought are all of the form, “How must our general purpose to make our thought and action coherent be carried out under such and such typical conditions?” never of the form, “Of what must I take account for the execution of this one definite purpose?” The reason for this difference is at once apparent. In making “this definite purpose” a topic for reflection, I have ipso facto abstracted its what from its that and converted it into a mere instance or example of a certain type. It was only while it remained this purpose as actually immanent in and determining the immediate experience of actual life that it was a completely determinate unique this; as reflected on it becomes a type of an indefinite number of similar possibilities.