Elements of metaphysics

by A. E. Taylor

The work of the Philosophy of Nature and of Mind only begins where that of the experimental sciences leaves off. Its data are not particular facts, as directly amassed by experiment and observation, but the hypotheses used by experimental science for the co-ordination and description of those facts. And it examines these hypotheses, not with the object of modifying their structure so as to include new facts, or to include the old facts in a simpler form, but purely for the purpose of estimating their value as an account of ultimately real existence. Whether the hypotheses are adequate as implements for the calculation of natural processes is a question which Philosophy, when it understands its place, leaves entirely to the special sciences; whether they can claim to be more than useful formulæ for calculation, i.e. whether they give us knowledge of ultimate Reality, is a problem which can only be dealt with by the science which systematically analyses the meaning of reality, i.e. by Metaphysics. We may perhaps follow the usage of some recent writers in marking this difference of object by a difference in terminology, and say that the goal of experimental science is the Description of facts, the goal of Metaphysics their Interpretation. The difference of aim is, however, not ultimate. Description of facts, when once we cease to be content with such description as will subserve the purpose of calculation and call for description of the fact as it really is, of itself becomes metaphysical interpretation.

The chief danger against which we must guard in this part of our metaphysical studies is that of expecting too much from our science. We could never, of course, hope for such a complete interpretation of facts as might be possible to omniscience. At most we can only expect to see in a general way how the physical and again how the psychical order must be thought of if our view as to the ultimate structure of Reality is sound. For an exact understanding of the way in which the details of physical and psychical existence are woven into the all-embracing pattern of the real, we must not look. And the value of even a general interpretation will of course depend largely upon our familiarity with the actual use the various sciences make of their hypotheses. With the best goodwill in the world we cannot hope to avoid all misapprehensions in dealing with the concepts of sciences with which we have no practical familiarity.

Though this general caution is at least equally applicable to the amateur excursions of the student whose mental training has been confined to some special group of experimental sciences into the field of metaphysical criticism, it would be a good rule for practice if every student of Metaphysics would consider it part of his duty to make himself something more than an amateur in at least one branch of empirical science; probably Psychology, from its historical connection with philosophical studies, presents unique advantages for this purpose. And conversely, no specialist in experimental science should venture on ultimate metaphysical construction without at least a respectable acquaintance with the principles of Logic, an acquaintance hardly to be gained by the perusal of Jevons’s Elementary Lessons with a supplement of Mill.

§ 2. Cosmology, then, means the critical examination of the assumptions involved in the recognition of the physical as a distinct order of existence, and of the most general hypotheses employed by popular thought and scientific reflection respectively for the description of specially physical existence. It is clear that this very recognition of a distinction between the physical and other conceivable forms of existence implies a degree of reflective analysis more advanced than that embodied in the naïve pre-scientific view with which we started in our last two chapters. In the simple conception of the world of existence as consisting of the changing states of a plurality of interacting things, there was not as yet any ground for a distinction between the psychical and the purely physical. That there really exists a widespread type of thought for which this distinction has never arisen, is put beyond doubt by the study of the psychology of the child and the savage. Both, as we know, draw no hard-and-fast line between the animated and the inanimate, and the savage, in his attempts to account for the phenomena of life, does so habitually by supposing the physical organism to be tenanted by one or more lesser organisms of the same order of existence. The “soul” he ascribes to things is simply a smaller and consequently less readily perceptible body within the body.

For civilised men this conception of all existence as being of the same order, an order which we might describe from our own more developed standpoint as at once animated and physical, has become so remote and inadequate, that we find it hard to realise how it can ever have been universally accepted as self-evident truth. Physical science, and under its guidance the current thought of civilised men, has come to draw a marked distinction between the great majority of sensible things, which it regards as purely physical, and a minority which exhibit the presence of “consciousness.” Thus has arisen a theory of the division of existence into two great orders, the physical and the psychical, which so dominates our ordinary thought about the world, that all the efforts of philosophers, both spiritualist and materialist, to reduce the two orders once more to one seem powerless to make any impression on the great majority of minds.

When we ask what are the distinguishing marks of the physical order as currently conceived, the precise answer we obtain will depend on the degree of scientific attainments possessed by the person to whom our question is addressed. But in the main both current science and everyday thought, so far as it has reflected on the problem, would probably agree as to the following points. (a) Physical existence is purely material or non-mental, or again is unconscious. The exact significance of these predicates is probably rarely clear even to those who make the freest use of them. On the face of it, such epithets convey only the information that existence of the physical kind differs in some important respect from existence of a mental kind; the nature of the difference they leave obscure. Reflection, however, may throw some light on the matter.

The distinction between persons and animals on the one side and mere things on the other seems to rest in the last resort on an important practical consideration. Among the things which, according to the naïve Realism of the pre-scientific theory, form my environment, there are some which regularly behave in much the same general way in response to very different types of behaviour on my own part. There are others again which behave differently towards me according to the differences in my behaviour towards them. In other words, some things exhibit special individual purposes, dependent in various ways on the nature of my own individual purposes, others do not. Hence for practice it becomes very important to know what things can be counted on always to exhibit the same general type of behaviour, and what cannot, but require individual study before I can tell how they will respond to different purposive behaviour of my own. It is on this practical difference that the distinction of mental and conscious from purely physical and unconscious existence seems to be based. We shall probably not be far wrong in interpreting the unconsciousness of purely material existence to mean that it exhibits no traces of purposive individuality, or at least none that we can recognise as such. More briefly, the physical order consists of the things which do not manifest recognisable individuality.

(b) Closely connected with this peculiarity is a second. The physical order is made up of events which conform rigidly to certain universal Laws. This is an obvious consequence of its lack of purposive individuality. The elements of which it is composed, being devoid of all purposive character of their own, always behave in the same surroundings in the same regular uniform way. Hence we can formulate precise general Laws of their behaviour. Originally, no doubt, this uniformity of the physical order is thought of as a point of contrast with the irregular behaviour of purposive beings, who respond differently to the same external surroundings according as their own internal purposes vary. With the growth of Psychology as an experimental science of mental processes there inevitably arises the tendency to extend this concept of uniform conformity with general Law to the processes of the psychical order, and we are then confronted by the famous problem how to reconcile scientific law with human “freedom.” The same antithesis between the apparently regular and purposeless behaviour of the elements of the physical order and the apparently irregular and purposive behaviour of the members of the psychical order is also expressed by saying that the sequence of events in the physical order is mechanically determined by the principle of Causality, whereas that of the psychical order is teleological, i.e. determined by reference to end or purpose.

(c) Every element of the physical order fills a position in space and in time. Hence any metaphysical problems about the nature of space and time are bound to affect our view of the nature of the physical order. Here, again, there is a point of at least possible contrast between the physical and the psychical. As the accumulation of experience makes it increasingly clearer that the bodies of my fellow-men and my own body, in so far as it is an object perceived like others by the organs of the special senses, exhibit in many respects the same conformity to certain general laws, and are composed of the same constituent parts as the rest of the sensible world, such animated bodies of purposive agents have to be included along with the rest of sensible existence in the physical order. The individual’s purposive individuality has now to be thought of as residing in a distinct factor in his composition of a kind foreign to the physical order, and therefore imperceptible by the senses, i.e. as a mind or soul or stream of consciousness in the current psychological sense. Such a mind or soul or stream of consciousness is then usually regarded as not filling a series of positions in space, and sometimes as not filling a series of positions in time.

(d) The physical order, as thus finally constituted by the introduction of the concept of an imperceptible soul or mind, now comprises all sensible existence[^[117]] as an aggregate of events in time and space, linked together by the principle of Causality, and exhibiting conformity with general law. To this conception recent science has made an important addition in the notion of a continuous evolution or development as manifesting itself throughout the series. So that we may ultimately define the physical order as a body of events occupying position in time and space, conforming to general laws with rigid and undeviating uniformity, and exhibiting continuous evolution.[^[118]]