The Approach to Philosophy

by Ralph Barton Perry

According to panpsychism, then, physical nature is the manifestation of an appetency or bare consciousness generalized from the thinker's awareness of his most intimate self. Such appetency or bare consciousness is the essential or substantial state of that which appears as physical nature.

The Inherent Difficulty in Spiritualism. No Provision for Objective Knowledge.

§ [137]. We must now turn to the efforts which this doctrine has made to maintain itself against the sceptical trend of its own epistemology. For precisely as in the case of phenomenalism its dialectical principle threatens to be self-destructive. Immediate presence is still the test of knowledge. But does not immediate presence connote relativity and inadequacy, at best; an initial phase of knowledge that must be supplemented and corrected before objective reality and valid truth are apprehended? Does not the individuality of the individual thinker connote the very maximum of error? Indeed, spiritualism would seem to have exceeded even Protagoreanism itself, and to have passed from scepticism to deliberate nihilism. The object of knowledge is no longer even, as with the phenomenalist, the thinker's thought, but only his thinking. And if the thinker's thought is relative to him, then the thinker's act of thinking is the very vanishing-point of relativity, the negative term of a negating relation. How is a real, a self-subsistent world to be composed of such? Impelled by a half-conscious realization of the hopelessness of this situation, the exponent of spiritualism has sought to universalize his conception; to define an absolute or ultimate spirit other than the individual thinker, though known in and through him. But it is clear that this development of spiritualism, like all of the speculative procedure of subjectivism, threatens to exceed the scope of the original principle of knowledge. There is a strong presumption against the possibility of introducing a knowledge of God by the way of the particular presentations of an individual consciousness.

Schopenhauer's Attempt to Universalize Subjectivism. Mysticism.

§ [138]. Schopenhauer must be credited with a genuine effort to accept the metaphysical consequences of his epistemology. His epistemology, as we have seen, defined knowledge as centripetal. The object of real knowledge is identical with the subject of knowledge. If I am to know the universal will, therefore, I must in knowing become that will. And this Schopenhauer maintains. The innermost heart of the individual into which he may retreat, even from his private will, is—the universal. But there is another way of arriving at the same knowledge. In contemplation I may become absorbed in principles and laws, rather than be diverted by the particular spacial and temporal objects, until (and this is peculiarly true of the æsthetic experience) my interest no longer distinguishes itself, but coincides with truth. In other words, abstract thinking and pure willing are not opposite extremes, but adjacent points on the deeper or transcendent circle of experience. One may reach this part of the circle by moving in either of two directions that at the start are directly opposite: by turning in upon the subject or by utterly giving one's self up to the object. Reality obtains no definition by this means. Philosophy, for Schopenhauer, is rather a programme for realizing the state in which I will the universal and know the universal will. The final theory of knowledge, then, is mysticism, reality directly apprehended in a supreme and incommunicable experience, direct and vivid, like perception, and at the same time universal, like thought. But the empiricism with which Schopenhauer began, the appeal to a familiar experience of self as will, has meanwhile been forgotten. The idea as object of my perception, and the will as its subject were in the beginning regarded as common and verifiable items of experience. But who, save the occasional philosopher, knows a universal will? Nor have attempts to avoid mysticism, while retaining Schopenhauer's first principle, been successful. Certain voluntarists and panpsychists have attempted to do without the universal will, and define the world solely in terms of the many individual wills. But, as Schopenhauer himself pointed out, individual wills cannot be distinguished except in terms of something other than will, such as space and time. The same is true if for will there be substituted inner feeling or consciousness. Within this category individuals can be distinguished only as points of view, which to be comparable at all must contain common objects, or be defined in terms of a system of relations like that of the physical world or that of an ethical community. The conception of pure will or pure feeling inevitably attaches to itself that of an undivided unity, if for no other reason because there is no ground for distinction. And such a unity, a will or consciousness that is no particular act or idea, can be known only in the unique experience which mysticism provides.

Objective Spiritualism.

§ [139]. The way of Schopenhauer is the way of one who adheres to the belief that what the thinker knows must always be a part of himself, his state or his activity. From this point of view the important element of being, its very essence or substance, is not any definable nature but an immediate relation to the knower. The consequence is that the universe in the last analysis can only be defined as a supreme state or activity into which the individual's consciousness may develop. Spiritualism has, however, other interests, interests which may be quite independent of epistemology. It is speculatively interested in a kind of being which it defines as spiritual, and in terms of which it proposes to define the universe. Such procedure is radically different from the epistemological criticism which led Berkeley to maintain that the esse of objects is in their percipi, or Schopenhauer to maintain that "the world is my idea," or that led both of these philosophers to find a deeper reality in immediately intuited self-activity. For now it is proposed to understand spirit, discover its properties, and to acknowledge it only where these properties appear. I may now know spirit as an object; which in its properties, to be sure, is quite different from matter, but which like matter is capable of subsisting quite independently of my knowledge. This is a metaphysical spiritualism quite distinct from epistemological spiritualism, and by no means easily made consistent therewith. Indeed, it exhibits an almost irrepressible tendency to overstep the bounds both of empiricism and subjectivism, an historical connection with which alone justifies its introduction in the present chapter.

Berkeley's Conception of God as Cause, Goodness and Order.

§ [140]. To return again to the instructive example of Bishop Berkeley, we find him proving God from the evidence of him in experience, or the need of him to support the claims of experience.