Creation or Evolution? A Philosophical Inquiry

by George Ticknor Curtis

The word noumenon has not become naturalized in our language, and did not exist in Greek.[96] It can convey no intelligible meaning to common readers without tracing its derivation, and when it is analyzed we can attribute to it no meaning but a purely arbitrary one, even if we can arrive at that arbitrary signification. In fact, it is a word made by and for the school of Kant. Its first syllable is the Greek noun νοῦς or νόος, which corresponds to our English word thought or intelligence. The Greek verb νοέω, to think, was primarily used as I perceive; the act of the mind in seeing. This idea was distinct from εἴδω, which conveyed the plain meaning of I see. But so subtile were the Greeks in their use of words, that εἴδω was sometimes used specifically to mean to see with the mind's eye, or, as we sometimes say, to realize, or to have a mental perception of. In the Greek use of the two words νοεω and εἴδω, no distinction was made between phenomenon and noumenon. To a cultivated Greek, phenomenon would mean something perceived, and noumenon, if he had possessed the word, would have had the same meaning. He would have used the two words interchangeably, to express either sight by the visual organs or mental perception. Mr. Spencer uses them as if they meant different things, as if phenomenon were something different from noumenon. But noumenon, according to its derivation (for it is coined as the participle of nοεων), means a thing, subject, or object, perceived by the mind. The root idea is mind-action, the verb νοεω meaning to do what the mind does in apprehending a subject or object. So that the derivation of noumenon does not help us to understand the Kantian or Spencerian use of the word.

As this use of the word is, then, purely arbitrary, we must try to understand, as well as we can, what this arbitrary meaning is. As well as I can fathom it, in contrast with phenomenon, the meaning is that phenomenon is something that we see, and noumenon is the ghost or double of what we see. We see a thing with our eyes; but our mind does not see it—it perceives its ghostly double. This is noumenon.

Penetrating, or trying to penetrate, a little further into Mr. Spencer's meaning, it would seem that when he says that phenomenon without noumenon is unthinkable, he means that, although we can see a thing with our corporeal eye, we can not think of it without the mental act of seeing its image with the mind's eye; and then he adds that noumenon can not be thought of in the true sense of thinking, because noumenon is an abstraction or a mere ghost of a subject or an object.

What is all this but a kind of play upon words? We are so constituted that the impressions which a thing external to us produces upon our nerves of perception are instantly transmitted to the brain, and the mind has an instantaneous perception of that object. The phenomenon which we see with our eyes, or become sensible of by touch, thus becomes a thing perceived by the mind, and when we think of it we do not think of its ghost, but we think of the thing itself. Did Laura Bridgman, who had neither eye-sight nor hearing nor speech, but who acquired all her ideas of external objects by the sense of touch, conceive of a round or a square, a rough or a smooth surface, by contemplating the ghost or double of what she touched? And had she no thinking in the true sense of thinking, because the double, or imago of the thing which she touched—the so-called noumenon—was at once necessary to her mental perception, and yet could not be thought of without seeing the object by the corporeal eye? She had no corporeal eye in which there was any vision. All her mental perceptions of external objects were acquired by the sense of touch alone; and we may well believe that she did not need the supposed noumenon to give her an idea of phenomenon. She perceived many phenomena by the simple transmission to her brain, along her nerves of touch, of the impressions produced upon them by external objects; and there is every reason to believe that many of her perceptions were as accurate and true as those which we derive from all our senses. We may now dismiss Mr. Spencer's distinction between phenomenon and noumenon as a distinction quite needless for the elucidation of what takes place in thinking of that which is behind appearance, and may proceed with the discussion of what remains of the passage above quoted.

At the risk of wearying by repetition, I will again resort to the illustration before employed, and will again describe how we reach the conception, for example, of endless space. According to Mr. Spencer, space, or extension, as a thinkable idea, or a subject of thought, is confined to a measurable extent of space. This is the phenomenon, or appearance. All our forms of thought are, it is said, molded on our experience of phenomena that are measurable, or capable of being definitely described; and the connotations of our words which express the relations of phenomena relate to phenomena that we measure, or see, and can definitely describe. Therefore, we can not think of a reality that is behind appearance; can not bring the consciousness of such a reality into any shape, nor bring into any shape its connection with appearance.

If mankind are never to think of that which is behind appearance—can never think of a reality that is behind what they see—because their forms of thought are molded on experiences of phenomena that they see, and because the connotations of their words express the relations of those phenomena and no others, a vast domain of thinking is necessarily closed to them. This is not the experience of our minds. Every day of our lives we go on in search of that which is beyond appearance, and we find it. Take again, for example, the phenomena of a measurable portion of space or time. What appears to us gives an idea of space and time. We measure as great a portion of either as our forms of expression admit of our describing by definite terms, but we are immediately conscious of another reality, an endless extension or duration, because we are conscious that we have not exhausted and can not exhaust, by our measurements and descriptions, the whole possible existence of space or time. This new reality behind appearance is just as truly thinkable, just as true a consciousness, as is the measurable portion of time or space; for it is time or space of which we are constantly thinking, whether it is an extent or duration which we can describe in words, or whether we can only say that it is extent or duration without beginning and without end. Our minds are so constituted that the existence which is manifested to us by observable phenomena leads us to go behind the appearance in search of another reality beyond that which is manifested by the phenomena that we see. All that is inscrutable about this other reality that lies behind appearance is that we can not understand how it came to be, any more than we can understand how the phenomenon which we see and can measure and describe in a definite form came to exist. We do not bring, and do not need to bring, this other reality into connection with appearance. We first have an idea of space and time from observable and measurable phenomena. The reality of extension without limit, and duration without end, follows of necessity, by a process of thought which we can not escape.

But now it becomes needful to answer a further objection. I have said that we are all the while thinking of space, whether it is a measurable and limited or an immeasurable and illimitable space. Mr. Spencer, anticipating this obvious statement, admits that the form of relation between the two ideas, although "almost blank," preserves a certain qualitative character; that is, it is of the quality of space of which we think, whether it is measurable or immeasurable, and therefore it remains "a vaguely identifiable relation." But when, in place of one of the terms of the relation qualitatively the same as the other, we substitute an existence that can not be defined, and is therefore both quantitatively and qualitatively unrepresentable, the relation, he asserts, lapses entirely; one of the terms becomes wholly "unknowable."

I will not again repeat that extension or magnitude having no known limits is a thinkable term, because the subject of thought is the quality of extension or magnitude; quantity not being essential to the idea of extension or magnitude. But I will pass to the idea of an existence which can not be defined. I suppose that by an existence is meant a being. If we undertake to think of a being whose quality we do not know to be the same as the quality of another being whom we do know, and the quantity of whose powers and faculties we can not measure, we propose, says Mr. Spencer, a term of impossible thought, because the law of thought can not be conformed to; the term can not be present to the mind, and no thinkable relation can be framed. Let this supposed difficulty be tested by a plain inquiry into that which we undertake to make the subject of thought when we think of a being who is said to be "unknowable."

"Agnosticism" is a doctrine which eludes a definite grasp. I have seen it defined by one of its most distinguished professors in this way: "Agnosticism is of the essence of science, whether ancient or modern. It simply means that a man shall not say he knows or believes that which he has no scientific grounds for professing to know or believe.... Agnosticism simply says that we know nothing of what may be beyond phenomena."[97] Mankind are apt to be rather practical in their habits of thinking: experience teaches them that there is a well-founded distinction between knowledge and belief, when it comes to be a question of asserting the one or the other.[98] They find, too, by experience that, in regard to what they speak of when they say that they know a thing, there is a distinction to be observed in respect to the means of knowledge. No one hesitates to say that he knows there was such a man as Napoleon Bonaparte, although he never saw him, and although our knowledge of him is now derived from hearsay. But when we speak of knowing that a certain living person was at a certain spot on a certain day, we become immediately aware that in order to justify the assertion we or some one ought to have seen the person at the time and place, especially if anything important depends upon the assertion. There are a great many things that we say we know without scientific or other rigorous proof, and there are a great many other things which we do not say that we know without the kind of proof which is required. All our actions in life proceed upon this distinction, and we could not live in this world with any comfort if we did not act upon the assumption that we know things of which we have no scientific proof.

A very clever jeu d'esprit went the rounds of the periodical press some time ago, in which a well-born and highly educated young agnostic was represented as losing his birthright, his fiancée, and all his prospects in life, because he demanded rigorous proof of everything that affected him. As he would not admit that he was the son of his own parents, without having better proof of it than their assertion, he was turned out-of-doors and disinherited. He would not accept the bloom on the cheek of his mistress as natural unless she gave him her word that she did not paint; and he would not admit that they loved each other without some better proof than their mutual feelings, about which they might be mistaken. The young lady indignantly dismissed him, but he consoled himself as a martyr to the truth of agnosticism. He became tutor to the son of a nobleman, whose belief in the boy's extraordinary talents, although justified by his progress in his studies, the tutor would not admit had the requisite proof. He propounded his denial of what the father had no proper grounds for maintaining, in an offensive way, and of course he lost his place. He retired to a sort of agnostic brotherhood, glorying in his adhesion to truth. Some of his companions remained long enough in the brotherhood to find out that they were making fools of themselves, and at the first opportunity for acting on the ordinary grounds of knowing a fact without rigorous demonstration of it they left him in solitude, went into the world, and achieved success.