Elements of metaphysics

by A. E. Taylor

In practical life, too, one of our most ineradicable convictions is that there are degrees of worth which coincide with degrees of the adequacy with which partial systems exhibit the nature of the larger wholes to which they belong. For instance, among the different mental systems which may be called my partial “selves,” there are some which I call “truer” than others, on the ground that they more fully reveal my whole character as an individual human being. My whole character undoubtedly appears in and determines all the subordinate systems which make up my mental life. Each of them is the whole character in a special aspect, or as reacting upon a special system of suggestions, but some of them contain the whole in a more developed and explicit form than others. I am in one sense myself wherever I may be and whatever I may be doing, and yet I am “more myself” in health than in sickness, in the free pursuit of self-chosen studies than in the forced discharge of uncongenial tasks imposed on me by the necessity of earning an income.

We ought, then, to be prepared to find the same state of things universally in the relation of Reality to its Appearances. In a world where “higher” and “lower,” “more” and “less” true have a meaning, some of the lesser systems in which the nature of the whole is expressed must be fuller and more adequate representations of that nature than others. This is as much as to say that it would require comparatively little transformation of some of the partial systems recognised by our knowledge to show how the common nature of the whole system of Reality is expressed in them; in other cases the amount of transformation required to show how the whole repeats itself in the part would be much more extensive. To take a single instance, if our preceding analysis of the general nature of Reality is sound, we can see much more clearly how that nature reappears in the structure of a human mind than how it is exhibited in what we call a physical thing, and we may therefore say the human mind expresses the fundamental character of the whole system much more fully and adequately than physical nature, as it exists for our apprehension. More briefly, the same thought may be expressed by saying that Reality has degrees, and that the forms of Appearance in which its common nature is most fully and clearly manifested have the highest degrees of reality.

§ 3. This conception of Reality as capable of degrees may at first seem paradoxical. How can anything, it will be asked, be more or less “real” than anything else? Must not anything either be entirely real or not real at all? But the same difficulty might be raised about the recognition of degree in other cases where its validity is now universally admitted.[admitted.] Thus to some minds it has appeared that there can be no degrees of the infinite or the infinitesimal; all infinites, and again all zeros, have been declared to be manifestly equal. Yet it hardly seems possible to escape the conclusion that the concept of successive orders of infinitely great, and again of infinitely small, magnitudes is not only intelligible but absolutely necessary if our thought on quantitative subjects is to be consistent (When the sides of a rectangle, for instance, become infinitely great or infinitely small relatively to whatever is our standard of comparison, it still remains a rectangle, and its area therefore is still determined by the product of its sides, and is therefore infinitely great or small, as the case may be, in relation not only to our original standard but to the sides themselves.[^[68]]) What is in one sense not a matter of degree, may yet in another not only admit but positively require the distinction of degrees of more and less. And this is precisely the case with Reality as it manifests itself in its various appearances. In the sense that it is the same single experience-system which appears as a whole and in its whole nature in every one of the subordinate experience-systems, they are all alike real, and each is as indispensable as every other to the existence of the whole. In the sense that the whole is more explicitly present in one than in another, there is an infinity of possible degrees of reality and unreality. We should be justified in borrowing a term from mathematical science to mark this double relation of the appearances to their Reality, and speaking of them as successive orders of Reality. And we might then say that it is one of the principal problems of a complete Philosophy to ascertain and arrange in their proper sequence, as far as the limitations of our knowledge permit, the orders of Reality.

§ 4. Such a task as this could only be carried out by an intelligence equally at home in metaphysical analysis and in the results of the special sciences, and would form the proper work of applied Metaphysics. In a discussion of general metaphysical principles it is sufficient to indicate the general nature of the criteria by which the degree of reality exhibited by any special partial system must be determined. Now, this general nature has been already made fairly clear by the foregoing inquiry into the unity of Reality. Reality, we have seen, is one in the sense of being an individual self-contained whole of experience. And its individuality means that it is the systematic embodiment of a single coherent structure in a plurality of elements or parts, which depend for their whole character upon the fact that they are the embodiment of precisely this structure. If this is so, we may say that degrees of reality mean the same thing as degrees of individuality, and that a thing is real precisely to the same extent to which it is truly individual.

A thing, that is, no matter of what kind, is really what it appears to be, just in so far as the thing, as it appears for our knowledge, is itself a self-contained and therefore unique systematic whole. Or, in other words, just in so far as what we recognise as one thing shows itself, in the face of philosophical criticism and analysis, to be a self-contained systematic whole, so far are we truly apprehending that thing as a manifestation of the fundamental character of Reality, of seeing it as it really is, and so far does our knowledge give us genuine Reality. On the other hand, just so far as what at first seemed a self-contained whole is discovered by subsequent analysis not to be so, so far have we failed to see the facts in their true place in the single whole of Reality, and so far is our knowledge affected with error and unreality. Or, again, the more truly anything is a self-contained individual whole, the higher its place in the scale of Reality.

When we ask what are the marks by which one thing may be shown to be more of a true individual whole than another, we shall find that they may be reduced to two, both of which we can easily see to be in principle the same, though, owing to the limitations of our insight, they do not always appear to coincide in a given case. One thing is ceteris paribus more truly an individual whole than another: (1) when the wealth of detailed content it embraces is greater; (2) when the completeness of the unity with which it embraces that detail is greater. Or, the degree of individuality possessed by any system depends: (1) on its comprehensiveness; (2) on its internal systematisation. The more a thing includes of existence and the more harmoniously it includes it, the more individual it is.

It is manifest, of course, that these two characteristics of a systematic whole are mutually interdependent. For, precisely because all Reality is ultimately a single coherent system, the more there is outside any partial system the greater must be the dependence of its constituents for their character upon their connection with reality outside, and the less capable must the system be of complete explanation from within itself. The more the partial system embraces, the less will its constituents be determined by relation to anything outside itself, and the more completely will its organisation be explicable by reference to its own internal principle of structure. That is, the greater the comprehensiveness of the system, the completer in general will be its internal coherence. And, conversely, the more completely the working of the whole system in its details is explicable from within as the expression of a single principle of internal structure, the less must be the dependence of its contents on any external reality; and therefore, seeing that all reality is ultimately interconnected, the less must be the extent of what lies outside the system in question. That is, the greater the internal unity, the greater in general the comprehensiveness of the system. Thus ultimately the two criteria of individuality coincide.

§ 5. In practice, however, it constantly happens, as a consequence of the fragmentary way in which our experiences come to us, that comprehensiveness and thorough-going systematic unity seem to be opposed to one another. Thus we can see, as a general principle, that the systematic organisation of knowledge depends upon its extent. The wider our knowledge, the greater on the whole the degree to which it exhibits organic structure; the systematisation of science and its extension ultimately go together. Yet at any one moment in the development of knowledge the recognition of fresh truths may necessitate a temporary introduction of disorganisation and discrepancy among the accepted principles of science. Thus in the history of geometry the recognised principles of the science were temporarily disorganised by the admission of incommensurable magnitudes which was forced upon the early Greek mathematicians by the discovery that the side and diagonal of a square have no common measure, and the discrepancy was only removed when it became possible to revise the principles of the theory of numbers itself. So again at the present day there is a real danger that premature anxiety to give the study of Psychology precise systematic character by an exact definition of its subject and its relation to the various physical and mental sciences, may stand in the way of the extension of our knowledge of the facts of psychical life. We have often to purchase an important extension of knowledge at the cost of temporary confusion of principles, and to be content to wait for the future readjustment of facts to principles in the course of subsequent progress.

So in our moral life we judge one man’s character more individual than another’s, either on the ground of the superior breadth of his interests, or of the superior consistency with which his interests are wrought into a self-consistent whole. The man of many interests has so far a truer individuality than the man of few, and again the man of steady purpose than the man whose energies are dissipated in seemingly conflicting pursuits. But the two criteria do not always, for our insight, coincide. An increase in variety and breadth of interests may be accompanied by a diminution in coherency of aim, and a gain in coherency of aim appears often to be bought by concentration upon a few special objects. And we should find it hard or impossible to decide, where the two aspects of individuality appear to fall thus apart, whether the man of many interests and relatively dissipated energies, or the man of few interests and intense concentration upon them, exhibits the higher individuality. For what looked like self-dissipation in the pursuit of disconnected objects might really be the systematic pursuit of a consistent purpose too wide to be clearly apprehended in its unity either by contemporary observers or by the actor himself, yet apparent enough to the reflective historian reading the significance of a life by its whole effect upon society, and what seemed at the time the single object of the man of one idea might similarly be found in the light of the sequel to be the hasty combination of radically inconsistent aims.[^[69]]

Such reflections, however, only show that our limited insight is insufficient to assign to every appearance with certainty its own place in the ordered system of appearances through which the single Reality expresses itself. They do not touch our general position, that where comprehensiveness and harmony can be seen to go together, we are justified in using them as the measure of the individuality and therefore of the reality of the partial system in which we discover them. It is on such grounds, for instance, that we may safely pronounce that an organism, which is the living unity of its members, is more individual and therefore a higher reality that a mere aggregate of pre-existing units, in which the nature of the parts is wholly or mainly independent of the structure of the whole; and again, that a mind consciously and systematically pursuing a coherent self-chosen system of ends is more individual, and therefore again a higher reality, than an organism reacting according to the temporary character of its environment or its momentary internal condition in ways which form no systematic execution of a connected scheme of ends. And it is clear that, if only on this ground, we should have to say that we are nearer the truth in thinking of the individual whole of complete Reality as an organism than in thinking of it as an aggregate, and nearer the truth still in thinking of it as a mind. Similarly in our judgments upon our own lives and character. So far as one life possesses more breadth and again more conscious unity of aim than another, so far it is more truly individual, and therefore a more adequate type of complete reality. Just so far as I am individual, I am truly real. And just so far as I fall short of systematic individuality, whether from the poverty of my interests or their mutual incompatibility, the appearance of unity in my life is illusory, and I must be pronounced an unreal appearance.