Essays Towards a Theory of Knowledge

by Alexander Philip

I habitually refer to the visual extended image as the primary basis of my idea of the world, or of any particular part of the world, such as my dining-room. Why? Simply because, for the reasons already noted, the sense of sight is the sense of universal reference. In principle it is the same habitual tendency which makes me associate every element of my world with its appropriate name. It is different in the case of other sensations. When I am absent from Niagara I do not, in thinking of it, primarily conceive of it as a roar of sound. I think of certain motions of mass which, if I were present, would occasion the subjective sensations of sound. But for the habitual tendency arising from the universal reference to the visible I would do the same in the case of the visual image. All I am necessitated to think is a real event—a real, physical, dynamical transmutation—proceeding quite independently of my perception or presence; and if I can only manage to realise that I must, for philosophical purposes, eliminate my reference to visual as well as to audible or other sensations, I will understand that all I am entitled to, and all I can, without hopeless contradiction, postulate as real thing existing independently of my perception, is a transmutation of Energy. This energy is imperceptible, unextended, unfigured, yet it is by no means a mere logical or mental necessity or associative tendency. On the contrary, it is very real. It sustains my every act. By an imperative mental necessity I am obliged, by inference from my experiences as an active and percipient agent, to postulate the energetic system in which I am involved, and with one particular centre in which I am organically related.

But we recall at this point that Science says she must still postulate Matter as the vehicle of Energy. But what does that mean except that the subject of her studies is the sensible presentation which itself consists of energy transmutation in part constantly changing but with relatively permanent and recurrent elements? These more permanent elements constitute what we call bodies. If the sensible presentation consisted exclusively of one continuous, unchanging phenomenon, Reason would never be stimulated, and Personality, Cause, Power would never have been postulated or conceived. But the transmutation is constantly "accelerated"—incessantly fluctuates and varies. Certain of these variations I recognise as related to my own volitional activity, and I am thus furnished with a key which enables me, by a sympathetic analogy, to attribute all the changes in my experience to various agents, each related to the other by the intervention of this system of physical Energy. Some of these I can further trace to the initiative of Volition of myself or other persons; others I can only recognise as integral parts of the vast energetic system of Nature, the stimulus of which I cannot follow further.

The reality of Matter is said to be proved by its indestructibility; but this characteristic can easily be resolved into (1) the indestructibility of Space and Extension which we have seen to be merely another name for the necessity or inevitable universality of the general laws and conditions of Energy transmutation, and (2) the indestructibility of the Energy to the transmutations of which we attribute the forces of Cohesion and Gravitation.

All vital activity is but a producing of changes in the stream of transmutation. We never do, nor in the nature of things do we ever try to, increase or diminish the quantity of the real Energy itself. We instinctively recognise the objective source of our physical power, and this has led some thinkers to suppose that the indestructibility of Matter is an a priori datum of thought. But such a belief is quite unfounded. All it amounts to is a recognition that the destruction of Matter is beyond our power—a necessary consequence of the fact that we merely act upon the transmutation-process. Many a long contest between the supporters of a priori and experiential knowledge can be set at rest by this view of the mediating functions of the energetic organism.

The reflections which we have thus briefly noted and illustrated open a wide field for inquiry. The scientific doctrine of Energy would seem to be pregnant with momentous consequences for Philosophy, and it is worth while for metaphysicians to devote to this subject the deepest and most deliberate thought. The results cannot easily be grasped by a mere cursory perusal of memoranda, in which we have only sketched a few salient aspects of the doctrine. We deprecate unwarrantable assurance, and are fully conscious of the difficulty of adequately expressing thought on such a theme; but we have not written rashly nor without good grounds for asking attention.

Science, it seems to us, postulates in Energy an a-logical, unextended, real thing-in-itself in terms of which the phenomena of Physics can be adequately and quantifiably stated. At the same time it furnishes Philosophy with a theory of the objectively real thing-in-itself which satisfied those necessities of thought by which we are constrained to interpret our sense-experience by a constant reference to a Reality beyond it—a necessity due to our association as Actors with an Energy beyond that which is the seat of our Presentment. Such a view avoids the incurable difficulties and contradictions involved in the theory of the reality of extended material substance, or in any theory, indeed, which asserts the reality—as presented—of the sensible presentation. Physical Reality thus conceived is consistently thinkable as co-existent with the thing-in-itself—be it ultimately Intelligence or Volition—of which our cognitive and conative existence is a manifestation. And such a doctrine, by explaining all phenomena as transmutations proceeding (according to the definite mathematical laws prevailing throughout the whole Universe of Energy) at that point in the system which is organically related to Consciousness, accounts at once for the apparent apriority and necessity of the qualities of Space, and at the same time for their evident universality and objectivity.

In a word, it would rather seem as if Science, unconscious of its pregnant possibilities, has not only formulated a theory which co-ordinates and unifies the entire fabric of physical knowledge, but has also at length furnished Philosophy with the key to that problem the solution of which has, in the words of Schopenhauer, been the main endeavour of philosophers for more than two centuries, namely, to separate by a correctly drawn line of cleavage the Ideal—that which belongs to our knowledge as such—from the Real, that which exists independently of us; and thus to determine the relation of each to the other.

To us it seems not strange that Philosophy should in the end be indebted to Science for this solution—nor should Science, in the hour of her greatest speculative victory, object too hastily to the assistance which the thinker, trained to the study of the process of thought, can render in clarifying and restating in its metaphysical aspects a theory which, if profoundly conceived, and formulated by men of science from Rumford and Davy to Stewart, Tait, and Kelvin, was partially anticipated by the metaphysician who conceived the world as will and idea.

We maintain, therefore, that the presentation of sense, the continuum or manifold, or what you will, consists in the transmutations of a real substance itself unextended and unperceived; that the laws of these transmutations are what constitute the geometric all-containing Space; that at a point in this real energetic system organically related to the intelligent self, the transmutations occurring there constitute the individual's sensible experience; that his mind, by also actively influencing the system at that point, can stimulate the train of transmutations which constitute his world of ideas; that the mind can discover itself as Will influencing transmutations in the organism which are transmitted through a wider, larger portion of the system; and can recognise the transmutations at the related point as influenced sometimes by its own Volition and sometimes by other agents. We seek to bring the added light of scientific theory to reconcile the conflict between the law and the fact, between the objects of reflection and the objects of sense, between the world of thought and the world of phenomena,—the problem which Plato raised and which has since been the central problem of Metaphysics. In doing so we present a doctrine which not only maintains the truth of the Ideal, and the actuality of the phenomenal, and the relative reality of both, but which proves, with all the cogency of Science, how it is that the Sensible is permeated by and made knowable only by the Ideal, by the laws of the transmutations which constitute actuality, and that, on the other hand, the Ideal only enters experience as the regulative principle of the ever-transmuting Reality.