[9]. For further discussion the reader may be referred to Royce, The World and the Individual, First Series, Lects. 2 and 4. See also infra, Bk. IV. chap. 6, § 2.
CHAPTER II
THE METAPHYSICAL CRITERION AND THE
METAPHYSICAL METHOD
[§ 1.] In the principle that “Reality is not self-contradictory” we have a universal and certain criterion of reality which is not merely negative, but implies the positive assertion that reality is a consistent system. [§ 2.] The validity of this criterion is not affected by the suggestion that it may be merely a Logical Law. [§ 3.] Nor by the raising of doubt whether all our knowledge is not merely “relative,” a doubt which is itself meaningless. [§ 4.] As to the material of the system, it is experience or immediate psychical fact. [§ 5.] It must be actual experience, not mere “possibilities” of experience; but actual experience must not be identified with “sensation.” [§ 6.] Nor must we assume that experience consists of subjects and their states; nor, again, that it is a mere succession of “states of consciousness.” [§ 7.] The differentia of matter of experience is its immediacy, i.e, its combination in a single whole of the two aspects of existence and content. [§ 8.] This union of existence and content is broken up in reflective knowledge or thought, but may be restored at a higher level. [§ 9.] Experience further always appears to be implicitly complex in respect of its content. [§10.] An adequate apprehension of reality would only be possible in the form of a complete or “pure” experience, at once all-inclusive, systematic, and direct. The problem of Metaphysics is to ascertain what would be the general or formal character of such an experience, and how far the various provinces of our human experience and knowledge approximate to it. The knowledge Metaphysics can give us of the ultimate nature of reality as it would be present in a complete experience, though imperfect, is final as far as it goes. [§11.] As to the method of Metaphysics, it must be analytical, critical, non-empirical, and non-inductive. It may also be called a priori if we carefully avoid confusing the a priori with the psychologically primitive. Why our method cannot be the Hegelian Dialectic.
§ 1. If we are, in the end, to attach any definite intelligible meaning to the distinction between things as they really are and things as they merely appear to be, we must clearly have some universal criterion or test by which the distinction may be made. This criterion must be, in the first place, infallible; that is, must be such that we cannot doubt its validity without falling into a contradiction in our thought; and, in the next, it must be a characteristic belonging to all reality, as such, and to nothing else. Thus our criterion must, in the technical language of Logic, be the predicate of an exclusive proposition of which reality is the subject; we must be able to say, “Only the real possesses the quality or mark X.” The argument of our last chapter should already have suggested that we have such a criterion in the principle that “what is real is not self-contradictory, and what is self-contradictory is not real.” Freedom from contradiction is a characteristic which belongs to everything that is real and ultimately to nothing else, and we may therefore use it as our test or criterion of reality. For, as we have seen in the last chapter, it is precisely our inability, without doing violence to the fundamental structure of our intellect, to accept the self-contradictory as real which first leads to the drawing of a distinction between the real and the merely apparent; on the other hand, where we find no contradiction in thought or experience, we have no valid ground for doubting that the contents of our experience and thinking are truly real. In every application, even the most simple and rudimentary, of the distinction between what really is and what only seems, we are proceeding upon the assumption that, if things as we find them are self-contradictory, we are not yet in possession of the truth about them; while, on the other hand, we may legitimately treat the results of our thinking and experience as fully true until they are shown to involve contradiction. Thus, in setting up the proposition “What is real is never self-contradictory” as a universal criterion, we are only putting into explicit form, and proposing to apply universally, a principle involved in all rational reflection on the course of things. Audacious as the attempt to make such a general statement about the whole universe of being appears, it is an audacity to which we are fully committed from the first moment of our refusing to accept both sides of a contradiction as true.
The principle that “Reality is not self-contradictory” at first sight might appear to be merely negative; we might object that it only tells us what reality is not, and still leaves us quite in the dark as to what it is. This would, however, be a serious misconception. As we learn from modern scientific Logic, no true and significant negative judgment is merely negative; all significant negation is really exclusion resting upon a positive basis. I can never, that is, truly declare that A is not B, except on the strength of some piece of positive knowledge which is inconsistent with, or excludes, the possibility of A being B.[[10]] My own ignorance or failure to find sufficient ground for the assertion A is B is never of itself logical warrant for the judgment A is not B; that A is not B I can never truly assert, except on the ground of some other truth which would be contradicted if A were affirmed to be B. Hence to say “Reality is not self-contradictory” is as much as to say that we have true and certain knowledge that reality is positively self-consistent or coherent; that is to say that, whatever else it may be, it is at least a systematic whole of some kind or other. How much further our knowledge about reality goes, what kind of a whole we can certainly know it to be, it will be the business of succeeding portions of this work to discuss; but even at the present stage of the inquiry we can confidently say that unless the distinction between the real and the apparent is purely meaningless, it is positively certain that Reality,[[11]] or the universe, is a self-consistent systematic whole.
§ 2. Our declaration that the principle of the self-consistency of the real affords a certain and infallible criterion of reality, may probably provoke a sceptical doubt which is of such importance that we must give it full consideration before making any further advance. I state the difficulty in what appears to me its most reasonable and telling form. “Your alleged criterion,” it will be said, “is simply the logical Law of Contradiction expressed in a novel and misleading way. Now, the Law of Contradiction, like all purely logical laws, is concerned not with real things, but exclusively with the concepts by which we think of them. When the logician lays it down as a fundamental truth of his science that A cannot be both B and not B, his A and B stand not for things “in the real world to which our thoughts have reference,” but for concepts which we frame about the things. His law is thus purely what he calls it, a Law of Thought; he says, and says truly, “you cannot, at the same time, and in the same sense, think both that A is B, and that it is not B”; as to whether such a state of things, though unthinkable to us, may be real “as a fact,” he makes no assertion. You take this law of our thinking, silently assume that it is also a law of the things about which we think, and go on to set it up as an infallible criterion of their reality. Your procedure is thus illegitimate, and your pretended criterion a thing of nought.”[[12]]
Our reply to this common sceptical objection will incidentally throw an interesting light on what was said in the last chapter of the close connection between the problems of Logic and those of Metaphysics. In the first place, we may at least meet the sceptic with an effective tu quoque. It is you yourself, we may say, who are most open to the charge of illegitimate assumption. Your whole contention rests upon the assumption, for which you offer no justification, that because the Law of Contradiction is admittedly a law of thought, it is therefore only a law of thought; if you wish us to accept such a momentous conclusion, you ought at least to offer us something in the nature of a reason for it. Nor shall we stop here; we shall go on to argue that the sceptic’s interpretation of the Law of Contradiction rests on a positive confusion. By a Law of Thought may be meant either (a) a psychological law, a true general statement as to the way in which we actually do think, or (b) a logical law, a true general statement as to the conditions under which our thinking is valid; the plausibility of the sceptical argument arises from an unconscious confusion between these two very different senses of the term. Now, in the first place, it seems doubtful whether the principle of contradiction is even true, if it is put forward as a psychological law. It would be, at least, very hard to say whether a human being is capable or not of holding at once and with equal conviction the truth of two contradictory propositions. Certainly it is not uncommon to meet persons who do fervently profess equal belief in propositions which we can see to be inconsistent; on the other hand, they are usually themselves unaware of the inconsistency. Whether, in all cases, they would, if made aware of the inconsistency, revise their belief, is a question which it is easier to ask than to answer. But it is at any rate certain that the logician does not intend his Law of Contradiction to be taken as a psychological proposition as to what I can or cannot succeed in believing. He means it to be understood in a purely logical sense, as a statement about the conditions under which any thought is valid. What he says is not that I cannot at once think that A is B and that it is not B, but that, if I think so, my thinking cannot be true. Now, to think truly about things is to think in accord with their real nature, to think of them as they really are, not as they merely appear to an imperfect apprehension to be; hence to say that non-contradiction is a fundamental condition of true thinking is as much as to say that it is a fundamental characteristic of real existence. Just because the Law of Contradiction is a logical law, it cannot be only a logical law, but must be a metaphysical law as well. If the sceptic is to retain his sceptical position, he must include Logic along with Metaphysics in the compass of his doubts, as the thorough-going sceptics of antiquity had the courage to do.
§ 3. But now suppose the sceptic takes this line. All our truth, he may say, is only relatively truth, and even the fundamental conditions of true thought are only valid relatively and for us. What right have you to assume their absolute validity, and to argue from it to the real constitution of things? Now, what does such a doubt mean, and is it rational? The answer to this question follows easily from what we have already learnt about the logical character of denial. Doubt, which is tentative denial, like negation, which is completed denial, logically presupposes positive knowledge of some kind or other. It is never rational to doubt the truth of a specific proposition except on the strength of your possession of positive truth with which the suggested judgment appears to be in conflict. This is, of course, obvious in cases where we hesitate to accept a statement as true on the ground that we do not see how to reconcile it with another specific statement already known, or believed, to be true. It is less obvious, but equally clear on reflection, in the cases where we suspend our judgment on the plea of insufficient evidence. Apart from positive knowledge, however defective, as to the kind and amount of evidence which would, if forthcoming, be sufficient to prove the proposition, expressions of doubt and of belief are equally impertinent; unless I know, to some extent at least, what evidence is wanted, how indeed am I to judge whether the evidence produced is sufficient or not?[[13]] Thus we see that the paradox of Mr. Bradley, that rational doubt itself logically implies infallibility in respect of some part of our knowledge, is no more than the simple truth. We see also that the doubt whether the ultimate presuppositions of valid thinking may not be merely “relatively” valid, has no meaning. If the sceptic’s doubt whether Reality is ultimately the self-consistent system that it must be if any of our thinking can be true is to lay any claim to rationality, it must take the form of the assertion, “I positively know something about the nature of Reality which makes it reasonable to think that Reality is incoherent,” or “Self-consistency is inconsistent with what I positively know of the nature of Reality.” Thus the sceptic is forced, not merely to lay claim to absolute and certain knowledge, but to use the test of consistency itself for the purpose of disproving or questioning its own validity. Our criterion of Reality, then, has been proved infallible by the surest of methods; we have shown that its truth has to be assumed in the very process of calling it in question.
§ 4. Reality, then, in spite of the sceptic’s objections, is truly known to be a connected and self-consistent, or internally coherent, system; can we with equal confidence say anything of the data of which the system is composed? Reflection should convince us that we can at least say as much as this: all the materials or data of reality consist of experience, experience being provisionally taken to mean psychical matter of fact, what is given in immediate feeling. In other words, whatever forms part of presentation, will, or emotion, must in some sense and to some degree possess reality and be a part of the material of which reality, as a systematic whole, is composed; whatever does not include, as part of its nature, this indissoluble relation to immediate feeling, and therefore does not enter into the presentation, will, and emotion of which psychical life is composed, is not real. The real is experience, and nothing but experience, and experience consists of “psychical matter of fact.”[[14]]