An Introduction to Philosophy

by George Stuart Fullerton

Various considerations have moved men to become monists in this sense of the word. Some have been influenced by the assumption—one which men felt impelled to make early in the history of speculative thought—that the whole universe must be the expression of some unitary principle. A rather different argument is well illustrated in the writings of Professor Höffding, a learned and acute writer of our own time. It has influenced so many that it is worth while to delay upon it.

Professor Höffding holds that mental phenomena and physical phenomena must be regarded as parallel (see Chapter IX), and that we must not conceive of ideas and material things as interacting. He writes:[1]—

"If it is contrary to the doctrine of the persistence of physical energy to suppose a transition from the one province to the other, and if, nevertheless, the two provinces exist in our experience as distinct, then the two sets of phenomena must be unfolded simultaneously, each according to its laws, so that for every phenomenon in the world of consciousness there is a corresponding phenomenon in the world of matter, and conversely (so far as there is reason to suppose that conscious life is correlated with material phenomena). The parallels already drawn point directly to such a relation; it would be an amazing accident, if, while the characteristic marks repeated themselves in this way, there were not at the foundation an inner connection. Both the parallelism and the proportionality between the activity of consciousness and cerebral activity point to an identity at bottom. The difference which remains in spite of the points of agreement compels us to suppose that one and the same principle has found its expression in a double form. We have no right to take mind and body for two beings or substances in reciprocal interaction. We are, on the contrary, impelled to conceive the material interaction between the elements composing the brain and nervous system as an outer form of the inner ideal unity of consciousness. What we in our inner experience become conscious of as thought, feeling, and resolution, is thus represented in the material world by certain material processes of the brain, which as such are subject to the law of the persistence of energy, although this law cannot be applied to the relation between cerebral and conscious processes. It is as though the same thing were said in two languages."

Some monists are in the habit of speaking of the one Being to which they refer phenomena of all sorts as the "Absolute." The word is a vague one, and means very different things in different philosophies. It has been somewhat broadly defined as "the ultimate principle of explanation of the universe." He who turns to one principle of explanation will conceive the Absolute in one way, and he who turns to another will, naturally, understand something else by the word.

Thus, the idealist may conceive of the Absolute as an all-inclusive Mind, of which finite minds are parts. To Spencer, it is the Unknowable, a something behind the veil of phenomena. Sometimes it means to a writer much the same thing that the word God means to other men; sometimes it has a significance at the farthest remove from this (section 53). Indeed, the word is so vague and ambiguous, and has proved itself the mother of so many confusions, that it would seem a desirable thing to drop it out of philosophy altogether, and to substitute for it some less ambiguous expression.

It seems clear from the preceding pages, that, before one either accepts or rejects monism, one should very carefully determine just what one means by the word, and should scrutinize the considerations which may be urged in favor of the particular doctrine in question. There are all sorts of monism, and men embrace them for all sorts of reasons. Let me beg the reader to bear in mind;—

(1) The monist may be a materialist; he may be an idealist; he may be neither. In the last case, he may, with Spinoza, call the one Substance God; that is, he may be a Pantheist. On the other hand, he may, with Spencer, call it the Unknowable, and be an Agnostic. Other shades of opinion are open to him, if he cares to choose them.

(2) It does not seem wise to assent hastily to such statements as; "The universe is the manifestation of one unitary Being"; or: "Mind and matter are the expression of one and the same principle." We find revealed in our experience mental phenomena and physical phenomena. In what sense they are one, or whether they are one in any sense,—this is something to be determined by an examination of the phenomena and of the relations in which we find them. It may turn out that the universe is one only in the sense that all phenomena belong to the one orderly system. If we find that this is the case, we may still, if we choose, call our doctrine monism, but we should carefully distinguish such a monism from those represented by Höffding and Spencer and many others. There seems little reason to use the word, when the doctrine has been so far modified.

58. DUALISM.—The plain man finds himself in a world of physical things and of minds, and it seems to him that his experience directly testifies to the existence of both. This means that the things of which he has experience appear to belong to two distinct classes.

It does not mean, of course, that he has only two kinds of experiences. The phenomena which are revealed to us are indefinitely varied; all physical phenomena are not just alike, and all mental phenomena are not just alike.