Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge

by Alexander Philip

I distinguish in my active experience a clear difference between wishing and willing, and further between willing and effective action. My Power—the Energy related to my Will—the exertion of which is necessary to translate Volition into an overt result—is a limited and quantifiable thing, but that such a hidden energetic medium or substratum underlies all phenomena is evident from the fact that I do not will directly the appearance of any given phenomenon. I may wish that. But when the Volition is reached and the wish transformed into overt exertion I find myself involved in the multifarious processes of an energetic system which I may so far influence, but which is nevertheless in many ways constantly going on irrespective of my Volition. I may wish to avoid pain and may will certain exertions with that view, but the consequences may be the reverse of what I wished. This shows that the Volition operates immediately not on the sensation but on the energetic system.

In all cases between Volition and overt result there seems to be erected and constantly maintained around me a vast energetic system, a part but only a small part of which, namely the Energy of my organism, can be influenced directly by my Will, whilst, even in immediate relation with that part, transmutations beyond the reach of my Will are constantly going on. Indeed, what fundamentally distinguishes Volition from Desire is its relation to the energetic system.

The doctrine of Energy therefore puts in a new and clearer light the whole theory of Causation.

It is common for philosophers to talk of invariable sequence as the criterion of Causality. But, in fact, that is quite fallacious. No one ever regards a phenomenon as the cause of another phenomenon. We ascribe Causality to the energetic transmutation which in some form or other we inevitably believe to accompany the appearance of every phenomenon. We never postulate a causal relation between day and night—the most notable case of invariable sequence. When we say the fire warms the room, or the horse draws the cart, or the sun ripens the corn, it is the Energy which we rightly or wrongly associate with the visual sensation referred to in the words "fire" and "horse" and "sun" of which we are thinking, and by no means of these visual sensations themselves. As has been well said, we never suppose that the leading carriage of the train draws those behind it, although their relation of sequence is quite as close to it as to the engine.

True, it is and must be from and by phenomena only that I infer and measure the transmutations of Energy, but the transmutations measured are operations of the real thing-in-itself postulated by Science. The existence of such Energy is suggested to me primarily in my experience of my own activity in which I recognise my power of doing work—a quantifiable and measurable thing, homogeneous with the Energy in respect of which Science states the relations and conditions of all physical phenomena. My most incessant mental act is that by which, on the analogy of my own active experience, I refer all phenomena to the underlying energetic system. This reference it is which transforms sensation into perception; and the constant affirmation of this reference is the great function of the synthetic mental activity of the understanding, and is at once the origin and explanation of that imperative mental tendency which metaphysicians call the law of Causality.

How, then, does this doctrine affect the theory of the nature of Space?

If it be true that the world as my Presentment consists in the transmutations occurring in that particular part of the energetic system which constitutes the real substratum of the brain, then phenomena as a whole must arise in transmutation, in a process of Becoming rather than in a state of Being, and Space must be the content, the condition, in which that process proceeds. The laws of Space, therefore, are laws, so to speak, of motion, not of position. The most absolutely still and motionless visual presentation is really a series of constant transmutations of Energy and the form of Space is constituted by the laws of transmutation, which are thus at once the necessary conditions of my perception and the universal conditions of all sense-perception. Space, therefore, does not contain the real thing which sustains the phenomenal world any more than it does the reality which underlies my conscious self. It is the universal condition of the transmutations which constitute phenomena; and it therefore "contains" all these phenomena, including my body as phenomenon and only as phenomenon. Its form is discovered by my organic motor activity, and in representing this activity the mind constructs its concepts of Space and Extension.

This view of the nature of Space, by relating its forms and laws with the objective, and a-logical thing-in-itself in virtue of the transmutations of which our sense-experience occurs, relieves an obvious difficulty which must always have been felt in accepting without qualification the purely Kantian view which regarded it as a category imposed by the Intelligence upon the otherwise unknowable world of sense.

The most ardent assertors of the ideality of Space have hitherto apparently had difficulty in avoiding the tendency to conceive it as the persistent all-embracing objective content of the thing-in-itself, not merely of the phenomenon, although the latter only might enter into Knowledge. The doctrine, however, which presents our conception of Space as discovered in our activity amid resistant transmutation-processes not only establishes its ideality but at the same time explains the relation which its form nevertheless bears to the objective material laws of the sensible presentation. It liberates the mind from the oppressive necessity of regarding Space as still somehow objectively extending and containing the real world. It also relieves an obvious difficulty which confronts the Philosophy of Schopenhauer in locating those transcendental forms of the phenomenon which are imposed a priori upon the presentation, and yet are not to be found in the pure Volition.