The Approach to Philosophy

by Ralph Barton Perry

his thought has transcended the epistemology with which he overthrew the conception of material substance, in two directions. For neither mind of the finite type nor mind of the divine type is perceived. But the first of these may yet be regarded as a direct empirical datum, even though sharply distinguished from an object of perception. In the third dialogue, Philonous thus expounds this new kind of knowledge:

"I own I have properly no idea, either of God or any other spirit; for these being active, cannot be represented by things perfectly inert, as our ideas are. I do nevertheless know that I, who am a spirit or thinking substance, exist as certainly as I know my ideas exist. Farther, I know what I mean by the terms I and myself; and I know this immediately or intuitively, though I do not perceive it as I perceive a triangle, a color, or a sound."[284:15]

The knowledge here provided for may be regarded as empirical because the reality in question is an individual present in the moment of the knowledge. Particular acts of perception are said directly to reveal not only perceptual objects, but perceiving subjects. And the conception of spiritual substance, once accredited, may then be extended to account for social relations and to fill in the nature of God. The latter extension, in so far as it attributes such further predicates as universality and infinity, implies still a third epistemology, and threatens to pass over into rationalism. But the knowledge of one's fellow-men may, it is claimed, be regarded as immediate, like the knowledge of one's self. Perceptual and volitional activity has a sense for itself and also a sense for other like activity. The self is both self-conscious and socially conscious in an immediate experience of the same type.

Schopenhauer's Spiritualism, or Voluntarism. Immediate Knowledge of the Will.

§ [135]. But this general spiritualistic conception is developed with less singleness of purpose in Berkeley than among the voluntarists and panpsychists who spring from Schopenhauer, the orientalist, pessimist, and mystic among the German Kantians of the early nineteenth century. His great book, "Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung," opens with the phenomenalistic contention that "the world is my idea." It soon appears, however, that the "my" is more profoundly significant than the "idea." Nature is my creation, due to the working within me of certain fixed principles of thought, such as space, time, and causality. But nature, just because it is my creation, is less than me: is but a manifestation of the true being for which I must look within myself. But this inner self cannot be made an object of thought, for that would be only to create another term of nature. The will itself, from which such creation springs, is "that which is most immediate" in one's consciousness, and "makes itself known in a direct manner in its particular acts." The term will is used by Schopenhauer as a general term covering the whole dynamics of life, instinct and desire, as well as volition. It is that sense of life-preserving and life-enhancing appetency which is the conscious accompaniment of struggle. With its aid the inwardness of the whole world may now be apprehended.

"Whoever has now gained from all these expositions a knowledge in abstracto, and therefore clear and certain, of what everyone knows directly in concreto, i. e., as feeling, a knowledge that his will is the real inner nature of his phenomenal being, . . . and that his will is that which is most immediate in his consciousness, . . . will find that of itself it affords him the key to the knowledge of the inmost being of the whole of nature; for he now transfers it to all those phenomena which are not given to him, like his own phenomenal existence, both in direct and indirect knowledge, but only in the latter, thus merely one-sidedly as idea alone."[287:16]

The heart of reality is thus known by an "intuitive interpretation," which begins at home in the individual's own heart.

Panpsychism.

§ [136]. The panpsychist follows the same course of reflection. There is an outwardness and an inwardness of nature, corresponding to the knower's body on the one hand, and his feeling or will on the other. With this principle in hand one may pass down the whole scale of being and discover no breach of continuity. Such an interpretation of nature has been well set forth by a contemporary writer, who quotes the following from the botanist, C. v. Naegeli:

"Sensation is clearly connected with the reflex actions of higher animals. We are obliged to concede it to the other animals also, and we have no grounds for denying it to plants and inorganic bodies. The sensation arouses in us a condition of comfort and discomfort. In general, the feeling of pleasure arises when the natural impulses are satisfied, the feeling of pain when they are not satisfied. Since all material processes are composed of movements of molecules and elementary atoms, pleasure and pain must have their seat in these particles. . . . Thus the same mental thread runs through all material phenomena. The human mind is nothing but the highest development on our earth of the mental processes which universally animate and move nature."[288:17]