Harvard Psychological Studies, Volume 2

by Unknown

And emptier still is the naïve belief that man is free. Do we not profit from decades of psychological labor, whereby the finest structure of the brain has been discovered, wherein the psychological laws have been studied with the exactitude of a natural science, wherein we have studied the mental life of animals and children, and have observed the illusions of freedom in the hypnotized man and in the insane? Yes, we know to-day that every mental act, that every psychological process is the absolutely necessary outcome of the given circumstances; that the functions of the cells in the cortex of the brain determine every decision and volition, and that man's deed is as necessary as the falling of the stone when its support is taken away. Yes, modern psychology does not even allow the will as an experience of its own kind; it has shown with all the means of its subtle analysis that all which we feel as our will is only a special combination of sensations which accompany certain movement-impulses in our body. Can we still take it seriously, when the philosopher steps in and pushes sovereignly aside all the exact knowledge of mankind, and declares simply "Man's will is free!"

Finally, the claim for the over-personal, absolute consciousness in man. It is a triumph of modern science to understand how the duties and ideals have grown up in the history of civilization. What one nation calls moral is perhaps indifferent or immoral for another people or for another time; what the one calls beautiful is ugly for the other; what one period admires as truth is absurdity for another; there is no absolute truth, no absolute beauty, no absolute religion, no absolute morality; and sociology shows how it was necessary that just these ideals and just these obligations should have grown up under a given climate and soil, a given temperament of the race, a given set of economical conditions, a given accumulation of technical achievements. Man has made his Absolute, not the Absolute made man, and whatever hopes and fears make men believe, the scholarly mind cannot doubt that these beliefs and idealizations are merely the products of the feelings and emotions of individuals bound together by equal conditions of life. Leave it to the raptures of the mystic to ignore all scientific truth, to get over-soul connection beyond all experience. In short, to accept Emerson's philosophy, the scientist would say, means to be a poet where Nature is concerned, means to be ignorant where man is concerned, and means to be a mystic where moral and religious, aesthetic and logical ideals are concerned. Can such be the herald of modern philosophy?

But those who are so proud and so quick are not aware that the times have changed and that their speech is the wisdom of yesterday. In the history of human knowledge the periods alternate. Great waves follow each other, and while one tendency of scientific thought is ebbing, another is rising; and there is no greater alternation than that between positivism and idealism. The positivistic period of natural science has ebbed for ten or fifteen years; an idealistic one is rising. Emerson once said here in Harvard that the Church has periods when it has wooden chalices and golden priests, and others when it has golden chalices and wooden priests. That is true for the churches of human knowledge too, and for knowledge of all denominations. Forty, fifty years ago, in the great period when Helmholtz discovered the conservation of energy and Darwin the origin of species, one naturalistic triumph followed the other, golden high priests of natural science were working with wooden chalices in narrow, awkward laboratories; to-day natural science has golden chalices provided in luxurious institutions, but there are too many wooden priests. The fullest energies of our time are pressing on to an idealistic revival, are bringing about a new idealistic view of the world, and turning in sympathy to that last foregoing period of idealism of which Ralph Waldo Emerson was perhaps the last original exponent. But also with his period idealism was not new. When he came to speak on the Transcendentalist, he began, "The first thing we have to say respecting the new views here in New England is that they are not new." Yes, indeed; since the beginnings of Greek philosophy, more than two thousand years ago, the two great tendencies have constantly followed each other. Each one must have its time of development, must reach its climax, must go over into undue exaggeration, and thus destroy itself to make room for the other, which then begins in its turn to grow, to win, to overdo, and to be defeated.

Glorious had been the triumph of Positivism in the middle of the eighteenth century when the French encyclopædists were at work, those men who wrote the decrees for the French Revolution. But before the last consequences of the Positivism of the eighteenth century were drawn, the idealistic counter-movement had started. Immanuel Kant gave the signal, he fired the shot heard round the world; and Fichte followed, whose ethical Idealism changed the map of Europe, and his spirit went over the Channel to Carlyle, and finally over the ocean to these shores of New England and spoke with the lips of Emerson. It is unimportant whether Emerson studied the great transcendental systems in the original; he knew Kant and Schelling probably at first through Coleridge, and Fichte through Carlyle. But in the mean time Idealism too had exaggerated its claims, it had gone forward to Hegel, and while Hegelian thought, about 1830, held in an iron grasp the deepest knowledge of his time, his neglect of positive experience demanded reaction, a counter-movement became necessary, and in the midst of the nineteenth century the great idealistic movement with all its philosophical and historical energies went down, and a new Positivism, full of enthusiasm for natural science and technique and full of contempt for philosophy, gained the day. With logical consistency, the spirit of empiricism went from realm to realm. It began with the inorganic world, passed into physics, then forward to chemistry, became more ambitious and conquered the world of organisms, and when biology had said its positivistic say, turned from the outer nature of being to the inner nature. The mind of man was scrutinized with positivistic methods; we came to experimental psychology, and finally, as the highest possible aim of naturalism, to the positivistic treatment of society as a whole, to sociology. But naturalism again has overdone its mission, the world has begun to feel that all the technique and all the naturalistic knowledge makes life not more worth living, that comfort and bigness do not really mean progress, that naturalism cannot give us an ultimate view of the world. And above all, the reaction has come from the midst of the sciences themselves. Twenty years ago scientific work received its fullest applause for the neglect of philosophical demands. Ten years ago the feeling came up that there are after all problems which need philosophy, and to-day philosophers, with good or bad philosophy, are at work everywhere. The physicists, the chemists and the biologists, the astronomers and the mathematicians, the psychologists and the sociologists, the historians and the economists, the linguists and the jurists, all are to-day busily engaged in philosophical enquiries, in enquiries into the conditions of their knowledge, into the presuppositions and methods of their sciences, into their ultimate principles and conceptions; in short, without a word of sudden command, the front has changed its direction. We are moving again towards philosophy, towards Idealism, towards Emerson.

Does all this mean that we are to forget the achievements of natural science, and ignore the results of empirical labor, of labor which has given us an invincible mastery of stubborn nature and an undreamed-of power to calculate all processes of the physical and of the psychical world? No sane man can entertain such a notion. Yes, such ideas would contradict the laws which have controlled the alternation of Idealism and Positivism through the ages of the past. Whenever Positivism returned, it always showed a new face, and the teaching of the intervening period of Idealism was never lost. The naturalism of the middle of the nineteenth century was not at all identical with the naturalism of the middle of the eighteenth; and so Idealism too, as often as it returned to mankind after periods of neglect and contempt, had every time gained in meaning, had every time found increased responsibilities, had every time to do justice to the new problems which the preceding period of Positivism had raised. If Idealism to-day wants to gain new strength, nothing must be lost of all that the last fifty years have brought us, no step must be taken backward, the careful scientific work of the specialists must be encouraged and strengthened, and yet the totality of this work must be brought under new aspects which allow a higher synthesis; yes, a higher synthesis is the problem of the philosopher of to-day. He does not want to be ignorant of natural science and simply to substitute idealistic demands in the place of solid, substantial facts; and he should feel ashamed of the foul compromise with which half-thinkers are easily satisfied, a compromise which allows science its own way till it comes over the boundaries of human emotions, a compromise which accepts rigid causality but pierces little holes in the causal world, making little exceptions here and there that human freedom may be saved in the midst of a world-machinery; a compromise which accepts the social origin of ideals, but claims a mystic knowledge that just our own private pattern will remain in fashion for eternity. No philosophy can live by compromises. If natural science is to be accepted and Idealism is to hold its own, they must be combined, they must form a synthesis in which the one no longer contradicts the other. Just such synthetic harmonization, and not at all a stubborn ignorance of the other side or a compromise with cheap concessions, was the aim of the period from Kant to Emerson. It is merely the naturalistic period which ignores its idealistic counterpart, which delights in its one-sidedness, which is afraid of harmony because it is suspicious of demands for concessions. It is naturalism only which thinks that mankind can walk on one leg.

If we ask where such harmonization can be found, where the great Idealists of the beginning of the last century have sought it, and where our modern philosophy is seeking it again, well aware that by the progress of science in the mean time the difficulties have been multiplied, the logical responsibilities have become gigantic, we cannot do more here than to point out the direction; we cannot go the way. And it is clear, of course, too, that such an answer has its individual shape, and that no one can promise to give a bird's-eye view of the marching movement while he is himself marching among his comrades. But the individual differences are non-essential. The one great tendency, the Emersonian spirit, if it is rightly understood, is common to them all. What has modern philosophy all over the world to say about that threefold claim concerning Nature, Freedom, and Oversoul? What has it to say when natural science has fully said its say and had its fair hearing, and has been approved as sound and welcome?

A philosopher might answer, perhaps, as follows: You Positivists have done wonderfully with your microscopes and your telescopes, with your chronoscopes and spectroscopes; you have measured and weighed and analyzed and described, and finally explained the whole world which you perceive, and there is nothing in space and time and causality which can escape your search. But did not all that work of yours involve certain presuppositions which you had accepted and which it was not your business to look on critically, but which, nevertheless, may be open to enquiry? Your first claims granted, all may follow; but how is it with the first claims? You examine all that is in space and time, but what are space and time? You examine the material substances and the contents of consciousness, but what is consciousness, and what is matter? You seek the special applications of causality, but what is causality? Well, you reply, you give the facts just as you find them; but do you do that really? And what do you mean by saying that you find the facts? Let us look, at least for a moment, at the very simplest facts with which your work begins. You say there are physical objects made up of atoms, and you describe them as a physicist; and there are mental ideas in consciousness made up of sensations, and you describe them as a psychologist; and both, you say, you are finding. But what does it mean, that you find the physical object outside there and the mental idea of the object inside in you; is that really a statement of your immediate experience? The physicist speaks of this table here before me, outside of me; and the psychologist speaks of my idea of this table, enclosed in my consciousness. Both may do well to speak so; but will you make me believe that I find that doubleness in my experience? If I see this table and want to use it, I am not aware of one table of wooden stuff and another in me of mental stuff. I am not aware of a two-ness at all, and if the physicist says that this wooden table is made up of molecules and has in itself no color and no continuity, and that the mental idea in me furnishes all those qualities of color and smoothness, but has no solidity, then they speak of two interesting worlds about which I am anxious to know, but certainly neither of them is the world I live in. If I lean on this table I am not aware of a table in my mind at all. I know the one table only, and this one table has its color and its smoothness.

I know what you will answer. You will say, in your immediate experience there are indeed not two worlds of objects, a physical and a psychical; the real thing to which our interests in life refer is not differentiated into a molecular object outside of us and a sensational object in us, but it is clear that every real thing allows a kind of double aspect; we can consider this table in so far as it is common to all of us, in so far as it is a possible object for every one of us, and in so far as it becomes an object for the individual, and we can then call the objects, in so far as they are common property, physical; and in so far as we take the aspect of individual relations, psychical; and as it must be of the highest importance for our practical purposes to discriminate between those two aspects, we have clearly the right to consider the world from the point of view of both the physicist and the psychologist. It is, of course, an abstraction if we leave out in the one case the one side, in the other case the other side of our objective experience; but we gain by that the possibility of constructing two closed causal systems of which each one must have its special conditions of existence, inasmuch as the one is conceived as related to individuals and the other as independent of individuals.

Very true, we should answer. Something like that saves you completely, justifies fully your claim to separate the physical and the psychical worlds of objects, the world of matter and the world of ideas; but can you deny that you have lost your case, are you not now yourself in the midst of philosophical, methodological discussions, which your physics and psychology themselves cannot settle, yet which must be settled before they can enter into their rights; and above all, do you not yourself see now that your whole physics, for instance, is not at all an account of reality, but merely a certain logical transformation of reality; that you do not find the world of physics at all, just as little as you find the psychical ideas, but that you can merely work over and reshape the reality which you find till you construct out of it your world of matter and your world of consciousness? What you believed you would find you have never found, while your construction of physical things may have been most necessary for your purposes; but do not deny that you have left reality far behind you.