Why then have these systems flourished? Why are these vain undertakings still renewed? The reason is that we cannot understand the joint action of the two functions, and the very point where enlightenment is needed is for us to recognize that no fundamental truths can be understood by us, that we can only look at them, contemplate and accept them. The point, I say, where enlightenment is needed is that the habit of trying to understand is due to a prejudice, to what may be called the superstition of causality.
I shall have to explain this hardy assertion with some care to prevent misconception. Causality, it will be objected, is the one thread that leads us through the labyrinth of nature. The search for causes enables us to become at home in our world by foreseeing events. In what sense then can it be permissible to speak of the prejudice of causality, nay, of the superstition of it? With what warrant prescribe a limit to the aspirations of the human intellect to push its inquiries to the farthest limit, even so far as to understand the functional finalities themselves, if such there be?
The answer, succinctly put, is this: explaining or understanding things means tracing effects to their causes, and this is only one mode, a somewhat disguised mode, of the joint functional activity of which I have spoken. The manifold in this case is that of the temporal sequence of phenomena, of differences due to change of position in time; and the unity established between them (as for instance energy, of which the sequent phenomena represent the transformations) is an ideal, fictive unity, mentally superimposed (real despite its ideal or imaginary character, because of the necessity we are under to view the sequent phenomena sub specie unitatis). That there is nothing in the antecedent to compel the sequent to follow has been since the days of Hume a commonplace in philosophy. That nevertheless there is such a thing as the prediction of eclipses was made by Kant the basis of his doctrine of synthesis a priori. Be the terms used what they may, what counts is the fact that the joint action of two functions, which itself is inexplicable, not to be understood, that is, not to be referred back to a preceding cause (as if there could be such a thing as a cause why we think in terms of causality) is the foundation of all so-called understanding.
Moreover causality is an incomplete example of the fundamental functional process. We never do thoroughly understand; we gain a certain relief, a certain increased ease of mind by pushing the problem back a step. And what I have called the prejudice of causality, is the unwillingness on our part to acknowledge the fact that we are face to face, in the case of causality, with the inexplicable; that that which helps us partially to understand (and serves for practical purposes well enough) is in its nature not to be understood, one of the modes in which the joint action of the functional finalities manifests itself.
An ultimate principle has been defined as one which is presupposed in every attempt to account for it. The functional finalities of which I speak bear the test of this definition. The upshot of it all is that the constitutive principles of the human mind cannot be explained or understood, but can nevertheless be verified. And verification, in the last analysis, means exemplification. If we look at these ultimate truths, whether in geometry, in physics, or, as we shall later see, in ethics and æsthetics, as enunciated abstractly, baldly, we confront them blankly, we are as it were dumbfounded in their presence. They seem arbitrarily imposed upon us. And why? Because we are endeavoring to understand them. We have acquired the habit of trying to get hold of truth by referring back to some antecedent. And therefore we are uneasy and disconcerted. But the moment we see them exemplified, as in the constructions of the geometer, in the laws or uniformities established by the physicist, etc., we are convinced. The subject-matter of ethics is different. The kind of exemplification is likewise different. But verification is exemplification in ethics as elsewhere; and this will be found to mean that the life, the ethical experience, must lead to the certainty.
And now we have reached the point where a brief discussion of the ethical manifold and its mode of unification comes up in proper order.
CHAPTER V
THE IDEAL OF THE WHOLE AND THE ETHICAL MANIFOLD
The ethical manifold, conceived of as unified, furnishes, or rather is, the ideal of the whole. The ethical manifold is the true universe, not “Universe” in the sense in which the word is too laxly used at present to designate those fragmentary and in many respects unconnected lines of experience which might better by way of discrimination be called World.
The ideal of the whole, as the terms imply, must fulfill two conditions: it must be a whole, that is, include all manifoldness whatsoever; and it must be ideal, or perfectly unified. In such an ideal whole the two reality-producing functions of the human mind would find their complete fruition.