Ontology, or the Theory of Being

by P. Coffey

What we conceive as dependent we conceive as relative; what we conceive, by negation, as independent, we conceive as absolute. Then by further observation and reflection we gradually realize that what we apprehended as independent of certain things is dependent on certain other things; that the same thing may be independent in some respects and dependent in other respects. The rain does not depend on the seed which it causes to germinate, but it does depend on the clouds. The water which turns the turbine does not depend on the turbine, but it does depend on the rain; and the rain depends on the evaporation of the waters of the ocean; and the evaporation on the solar heat; and this again on chemical and physical processes in the sun; and so on, as far as sense experience will carry us: until we realize that everything which falls directly within this sense experience is dependent and therefore relative. Similarly, the accident of quantity, in virtue of which we pronounce one of two bodies to be larger than the other, is something absolute as compared with this relation itself; but as compared with the substance in which it inheres, it is dependent on the latter, or relative to the latter, while the substance is absolute, or free from dependence on it. But if substance is absolute as compared [pg 334] with accident, in the sense that substance is not dependent on a subject in which to inhere, but exists in itself, it is not absolute in the sense understood by Spinoza, in the sense of existing of itself, independently of any efficient cause to account for its origin ([64]). All the substances in the universe of our direct sense experience are contingent, dependent ab alio, and therefore in this sense relative, not absolute.

This is the true sense in which relativity is an essential note of the reality of all the data of the world of our sense experience. They are all contingent, or relative, or conditioned existences. And, as Kant rightly taught, this experience forces us inevitably to think of a Necessary, Absolute, Unconditioned Being, on whom these all depend. But, as can be proved in Natural Theology against Kant, this concept is not a mere regulative idea of the reason, a form of thought whereby we systematize our experience: it is a concept the object of which is not merely a necessity of thought but also an objectively existing reality.[391]

But in the thought of most modern philosophers relativism, or the doctrine that “we can know only the relative,” is something very different from all this. For positivists, disciples of Auguste Comte (1798-1857), it means that we can know only the phenomena which fall under the notice of our senses, and the laws of resemblance, succession, etc., according to which they occur. All “theological” quests for supra-mundane causes and reasons of these events, and all “metaphysical” quests for suprasensible forces, powers, influences, in the events themselves, as explaining or accounting for these latter, are according to this theory necessarily futile: the mind must rest content with a knowledge of the positive facts of sense, and their relations. Relativism is thus another name for Positivism.

For the psychological sensism of English philosophers from Hobbes [1588-1679] and Locke [1632-1704] down to Mill [1806-73] and Bain [1818-1903] relativism means that all conscious cognition—which they tend to reduce to modes and complexes of sensation—must be, and can only be, a cognition of the changing, the transitional, the relative.[392] According to an extreme form of this theory the mind can apprehend only relations, but not the terms of any of these relations: it can apprehend nothing as absolute. Moreover the relations which it apprehends it creates itself. Thus all reality is reduced to a system of relations. For Mill the supreme category of real being was Sensation: but sensation can be only a feeling of a relation: thus the supreme category of real being would be Relation.[393]

But the main current of relativism is that which has issued from Kant's philosophy and worked itself out in various currents such as Spencer's Agnosticism, Hegel's Monism, and Renouvier's Neo-criticism.[394] The mind can know only what is related to it, what is present to it, what is in it; not what is apart from it, distinct from it. The mind cannot know the real nature of the extramental, nor even if there be an extramental real. Subject and object in knowledge are really one: individual minds are only self-conscious phases in the ever-evolving reality of the One Sole Actual Being.

These are but a few of the erroneous currents of modern relativism. A detailed analysis of them belongs to the Theory of Knowledge. But it may be pointed out here that they are erroneous because they have distorted and exaggerated certain profound truths concerning the scope and limits of human knowledge.

It is true that we have no positive, proper, intuitive knowledge of the Absolute Being who is the First Cause and Last End of the universe; that all our knowledge of the nature and attributes of the Infinite Being is negative, analogical, abstractive. In a certain sense, therefore, He is above the scope of our faculties; He is Incomprehensible. But it is false to say that He is Unknowable; that our knowledge of Him, inadequate and imperfect as it is, is not genuine, real, and instructive, as far as it goes.

Again, a distinct knowledge of any object implies defining, limiting, distinguishing, comparing, relating, judging; analysing and synthesizing. It implies therefore that we apprehend things in relations with other things. But this supposes an antecedent, if indistinct, apprehension of the “things” themselves. Indeed we cannot help pronouncing as simply unintelligible the contention that all knowledge is of relations, and that we can have no knowledge of things as absolute. How could we become aware of relations without being aware of the terms related? Spencer himself admits that the very reasoning whereby we establish the “relativity of knowledge” leads us inevitably to assert as necessary the existence of the non-relative, the Absolute:[395] a necessity which Kant also recognizes.

Finally, the fact that reality, in order to be known, must be present to the knowing mind—or, in other words, that knowledge itself is a relation between object and subject—in no way justifies the conclusion that we cannot know the real nature of things as they are in themselves, absolutely, but only our own subjective, mental impressions or representations of the absolute reality, in itself unknowable.[396] The obvious fact that any reality in order to be known must be related to the knowing mind, seems to be regarded by some philosophers as if it were a momentous discovery. Then, conceiving the “thing-in-itself,” the absolute, as a something standing out of all relation to mind, they declare solemnly that we cannot know the absolute: a declaration which may be interpreted either as a mere truism—that we cannot know a thing without knowing it!—or as a purely gratuitous assertion, that besides the world of realities which reveal themselves to our minds there is another world of unattained and unattainable “things-in-themselves” [pg 336] which are as it were the real realities! These philosophers have yet to show that there is anything absurd or impossible in the view that there is simply one world of realities—realities which exist absolutely in themselves apart from our apprehension of them and which in the process of cognition come into relation with our minds.[397] Moreover, if besides this world of known and knowable realities there were such a world of “transcendental” things-in-themselves as these philosophers discourse of, such a world would have very little concern for us,[398] since by definition and ex hypothesi it would be for us necessarily as if it were not: indeed the hypothesis of such a transcendental world is self-contradictory, for even did it exist we could not think of it.

The process of cognition has indeed its difficulties and mysteries. To examine these, to account for the possibility of truth and error, to analyse the grounds and define the scope and limits of human certitude, are problems for the Theory of Knowledge, on the domain of which we are trenching perhaps too far already in the present context. But at all events to conceive reality as absolute in the sense of being totally unrelated to mind, and then to ask: Is reality so transformed in the very process of cognition that the mind cannot possibly apprehend it or represent it as it really is?—this certainly is to misconceive and mis-state in a hopeless fashion the main problem of Epistemology.