Physics, especially mathematical physics, Vaihinger explains in detail, has been based, and fruitfully based, on fictions. The infinite, infinitely little or infinitely great, while helpful in lightening our mental operations, is a fiction. The Greeks disliked and avoided it, and “the gradual formation of this conception is one of the most charming and instructive themes in the history of science,” indeed, one of the most noteworthy spectacles in the history of the human spirit; we see the working of a logical impulse first feeling in the dark, gradually constructing ideas fitted to yield precious service, yet full of hopeless contradictions, without any relation to the real world. That absolute space is a fiction, Vaihinger points out, is no new idea. Hobbes had declared it was only a phantasma; Leibnitz, who agreed, added that it was merely “the idolum of a few modern Englishmen,” and called time, extension, and movement “choses idéales.” Berkeley, in attacking the defective conceptions of the mathematicians, failed to see that it was by means of, and not in spite of, these logically defective conceptions that they attained logically valuable results. All the marks of fiction were set up on the mathematician’s pure space; it was impossible and unthinkable: yet it proved useful and fruitful.
The tautological fiction of “Force”—an empty reduplication of the fact of a succession of relationships—is one that we constantly fall back on with immense satisfaction and with the feeling of having achieved something; it has been a highly convenient fiction which has aided representation and experience. It is one of the most famous, and also, it must be added, one of the most fatal of fantasies. For when we talk of, for instance, a “life-force” and its élan, or whatever other dainty term we like to apply to it, we are not only summarily mingling together many separate phenomena, but we are running the risk that our conception may be taken for something that really exists. There is always temptation, when two processes tend to follow each other, to call the property of the first to be followed by the other its “force,” and to measure that force by the magnitude of the result. In reality we only have succession and coexistence, and the “force” is something that we imagine.
We must not, therefore, treat our imagination with contempt as was formerly the fashion, but rather the reverse. The two great periods of English Philosophy, Vaihinger remarks, ended with Ockham and with Hume, who each took up, in effect, the fictional point of view, but both too much on the merely negative side, without realising the positive and constructive value of fictions. English law has above all realised it, even, he adds, to the point of absurdity. Nothing is so precious as fiction, provided only one chooses the right fiction. “Matter” is such a fiction. There are still people who speak with lofty contempt of “Materialism”; they mean well, but they are unhappy in their terms of abuse. When Berkeley demonstrated the impossibility of “matter,” he thought he could afford to throw away the conception as useless. He was quite wrong; it is logically contradictory ideas that are the most valuable. Matter is a fiction, just as the fundamental ideas with which the sciences generally operate are mostly fictions, and the scientific materialisation of the world has proved a necessary and useful fiction, only harmful when we regard it as hypothesis and therefore possibly true. The representative world is a system of fictions. It is a symbol by the help of which we orient ourselves. The business of science is to make the symbol ever more adequate, but it remains a symbol, a means of action, for action is the last end of thinking.
The “atom,” to which matter is ultimately reduced, is regarded by Vaihinger as equally a fiction, though it was at first viewed as an hypothesis, and it may be added that since he wrote it seems to have returned to the stage of hypothesis.[[41]] But when with Boscovich the “atom” was regarded as simply the bearer of energy, it became “literally a hypostatised nothing.” We have to realise at the same time that every “thing” is a “summatory fiction,” for to say, as is often said, that a “thing” has properties and yet has a real existence apart from its properties is obviously only a convenient manner of speech, a “verbal fiction.” The “force of attraction,” as Newton himself pointed out, belongs to the same class of summatory fictions.
Vaihinger is throughout careful to distinguish fiction alike from hypothesis and dogma. He regards the distinction as, methodologically, highly important, though not always easy to make. The “dogma” is put forward as an absolute and unquestionable truth; the “hypothesis” is a possible or probable truth, such as Darwin’s doctrine of descent; the “fiction” is impossible, but it enables us to reach what for us is relatively truth, and, above all, while hypothesis simply contributes to knowledge, fiction thus used becomes a guide to practical action and indispensable to what we feel to be progress. Thus the mighty and civilising structure of Roman law was built up by the aid of what the Romans themselves recognised as fictions, while in the different and more flexible system of English laws a constant inspiration to action has been furnished by the supposed privileges gained by Magna Carta, though we now recognise them as fictitious. Many of our ideas tend to go through the three stages of Dogma, Hypothesis, and Fiction, sometimes in that order and sometimes in the reverse order. Hypothesis especially presents a state of labile stability which is unpleasant to the mind, so it tends to become either dogma or fiction. The ideas of Christianity, beginning as dogmas, have passed through all three stages in the minds of thinkers during recent centuries: the myths of Plato, beginning as fiction, not only passed through the three stages, but then passed back again, being now again regarded as fiction. The scientifically valuable fiction is a child of modern times, but we have already emerged from the period when the use of fiction was confined to the exact sciences.
Thus we find fiction fruitfully flourishing in the biological and social sciences and even in the highest spheres of human spiritual activity. The Linnæan and similar classificatory systems are fictions, even though put forward as hypotheses, having their value simply as pictures, as forms of representation, but leading to contradictions and liable to be replaced by other systems which present more helpful pictures. There are still people who disdain Adam Smith’s “economic man,” as though proceeding from a purely selfish view of life, although Buckle, forestalling Vaihinger, long ago explained that Smith was deliberately making use of a “valid artifice,” separating facts that he knew to be in nature inseparable—he based his moral theory on a totally different kind of man—because so he could reach results approximately true to the observed phenomena. Bentham also adopted a fiction for his own system, though believing it to be an hypothesis, and Mill criticised it as being “geometrical”; the criticism is correct, comments Vaihinger, but the method was not thereby invalidated, for in complicated fields no other method can be fruitfully used.
The same law holds when we approach our highest and most sacred conceptions. It was recognised by enlightened philosophers and theologians before Vaihinger that the difference between body and soul is not different from that between matter and force,—a provisional and useful distinction,—that light and darkness, life and death, are abstractions, necessary, indeed, but in their application to reality always to be used with precaution. On the threshold of the moral world we meet the idea of Freedom, “one of the weightiest conceptions man has ever formed,” once a dogma, in course of time an hypothesis, now in the eyes of many a fiction; yet we cannot do without it, even although we may be firmly convinced that our acts are determined by laws that cannot be broken. Many other great conceptions have tended to follow the same course. God, the Soul, Immortality, the Moral World-Order. The critical hearers understand what is meant when these great words are used, and if the uncritical misunderstand, that, adds Vaihinger, may sometimes be also useful. For these things are Ideals, and all Ideals are, logically speaking, fictions. As Science leads to the Imaginary, so Life leads to the Impossible; without them we cannot reach the heights we are born to scale. “Taken literally, however, our most valuable conceptions are worthless.”
When we review the vast field which Vaihinger summarises, we find that thinking and existing must ever be on two different planes. The attempt of Hegel and his followers to transform subjective processes into objective world-processes, Vaihinger maintains, will not work out. The Thing-in-Itself, the Absolute, remains a fiction, though the ultimate and most necessary fiction, for without it representation would be unintelligible. We can only regard reality as a Heraclitean flux of happening—though Vaihinger fails to point out that this “reality” also can only be an image or symbol—and our thinking would itself be fluid if it were not that by fiction we obtain imaginary standpoints and boundaries by which to gain control of the flow of reality. It is the special art and object of thinking to attain existence by quite other methods than that of existence itself. But the wish by so doing to understand the world is both unrealisable and foolish, for we are only trying to comprehend our own fictions. We can never solve the so-called world-riddle because what seem riddles to us are merely the contradictions we have ourselves created. Yet, though the way of thinking cannot be the way of being, since they stand on such different foundations, thinking always has a kind of parallelism with being, and though we make our reckoning with a reality that we falsify, yet the practical result tends to come out right. Just because thinking is different from reality, its forms must also be different in order to correspond with reality. Our conceptions, our conventional signs, have a fictive function to perform; thinking in its lower grades is comparable to paper money, and in its higher forms it is a kind of poetry.
Imagination is thus a constitutive part of all thinking. We may make distinctions between practical scientific thinking and disinterested æsthetic thinking. Yet all thinking is finally a comparison. Scientific fictions are parallel with æsthetic fictions. The poet is the type of all thinkers: there is no sharp boundary between the region of poetry and the region of science. Both alike are not ends in themselves, but means to higher ends.
Vaihinger’s doctrine of the “as if” is not immune from criticism on more than one side, and it is fairly obvious that, however sound the general principle, particular “fictions” may alter their status, and have even done so since the book was written. Moreover, the doctrine is not always quite congruous with itself. Nor can it be said that Vaihinger ever really answered the question with which he set out. In philosophy, however, it is not the attainment of the goal that matters, it is the things that are met with by the way. And Vaihinger’s philosophy is not only of interest because it presents so clearly and vigorously a prevailing tendency in modern thought. Rightly understood, it supplies a fortifying influence to those who may have seen their cherished spiritual edifice, whatever it may be, fall around them and are tempted to a mood of disillusionment. We make our own world; when we have made it awry, we can remake it, approximately truer, though it cannot be absolutely true, to the facts. It will never be finally made; we are always stretching forth to larger and better fictions which answer more truly to our growing knowledge and experience. Even when we walk, it is only by a series of regulated errors, Vaihinger well points out, a perpetual succession of falls to one side and the other side. Our whole progress through life is of the same nature; all thinking is a regulated error. For we cannot, as Vaihinger insists, choose our errors at random or in accordance with what happens to please us; such fictions are only too likely to turn into deadening dogmas: the old vis dormitiva is the type of them, mere husks that are of no vital use and help us not at all. There are good fictions and bad fictions just as there are good poets and bad poets. It is in the choice and regulation of our errors, in our readiness to accept ever-closer approximations to the unattainable reality, that we think rightly and live rightly. We triumph in so far as we succeed in that regulation. “A lost battle,” Foch, quoting De Maistre, lays down in his “Principes de Guerre,” “is a battle one thinks one has lost”; the battle is won by the fiction that it is won. It is so also in the battle of life, in the whole art of living. Freud regards dreaming as fiction that helps us to sleep; thinking we may regard as fiction that helps us to live. Man lives by imagination.