International Congress of Arts and Science, Volume 1 / Philosophy and Metaphysics

by Unknown

It is clear that this division holds for all cases of forming hypotheses. A general hypothesis serves every special hypothesis as a heuristic principle. In the former we comprehend the causal explanation indicated immediately by the facts revealed to our perception in the special case. It contains, as we might also express it, the genus to the specific limitations of the more exact investigation. But each of these general hypotheses is a modification of the most general form of building hypotheses, which we have already come to know as the condition of the validity of all inductive inferences, that is, as the condition for the necessity of their deduction, and, consequently, as the condition for the thought that like causes will be given in the reality not yet observed as in that already observed. We have further noticed that in this most general form of building hypotheses there lie two distinct and different valid assumptions: beside the empirical statement that like causes will be given, which gives the inductive conclusion the hypothetical form, there stands the judgment that like causes bring forth like effects, a corollary of the causal law. The real dependence of the effect upon the cause, presupposed by this second proposition and the underlying causal law, is not, as was the other assumption, an hypothesis, but a necessary requirement or postulate of our thought. Its necessity arises out of our thought, because our experience reveals uniformity in the sequence of events. From this point of view, therefore, the causal law appears as a postulate of our thought, grounded upon the uniformity in the sequence of events. It underlies every special case of constructing hypotheses as well as the expectation that like causes will be given in the reality not yet observed.

Mill's logic of induction contains the same fault as that already present in Hume's psychological theory of cause. Hume makes merely the causal law itself responsible for our inductive inferences, and accordingly (as Mill likewise wrongly assumes) for our inferences in general. But we recognize how rightly Mill came to assert, in contradiction to his empiristic presuppositions, that the causal law offers "an undoubted assurance of an invariable, universal, and unconditional," that is, necessary, sequence of events, from which no seeming irregularity of occurrence and no gap in our experience can lead us astray, as long as experience offers uniformities of sequence.

Rationalism is thus in the right, when it regards the necessary connection as an essential characteristic of the relation between cause and effect, that is, recognizes in it a relation of real dependence. At this point Kant and Schopenhauer have had a profounder insight than Hume and Stuart Mill. Especially am I glad to be in agreement with Lotze on a point which he reached by a different route and from essentially different presuppositions. Lotze distinguishes in pure logic between postulates, hypotheses, and fictions. He does not refer the term "postulate" exclusively to the causal law which governs our entire empirical thought in its formation of hypotheses, but gives the term a wider meaning. "Postulates" are only corollaries from the inductive fundamental form of all hypothesis construction, and correspond essentially to what we have called general or heuristic hypotheses. His determination of the validity of these postulates, however, implies the position to be assigned to the causal law and therefore not to those heuristic hypotheses. "The postulate is not an assumption that we can make or refrain from making, or, again, in whose place we can substitute another. It is rather an (absolutely) necessary assumption without which the content of the view at issue would contradict the laws of our thought."[^[23]]

Still the decision that we have reached is not on this account in favor of rationalism, as this is represented for instance by Kant and his successors down to our own time, and professed by Lotze in the passage quoted, when he speaks of an absolute necessity for thought. We found that the causal law requires a necessary connection between events given us in constant sequence. It is not, however, on that account a law of our thought or of a "pure understanding" which would be absolutely independent of all experience. When we take into consideration the evolution of the organic world of which we are members, then we must say that our intellect, that is, our ideation and with it our sense perception, has evolved in us in accordance with the influences to which we have been subjected. The common elements in the different contents of perception which have arisen out of other psychical elements, seemingly first in the brute world, are not only an occasion, but also an efficient cause, for the evolution of our processes of reproduction, in which our memory and imagination as well as our knowledge and thought, psychologically considered, come to pass. The causal law, which the critical analysis of the materialscientific methods shows to be a fundamental condition of empirical thought, in its requirement that the events stand as causes and effects in necessary connection, or real dependence, comprehends these uniform contents of perception only in the way peculiar to our thought.

Doubtless our thought gives a connection to experience through this its requirement which experience of itself could not offer. The necessary connection of effect with cause, or the real dependence of the former upon the latter, is not a component of possible perception. This requirement of our thought does not, however, become thereby independent of the perceptive elements in the presuppositions involved in the uniformity of sequence. The a priori in the sense of "innate ideas," denoting either these themselves or an absolutely a priori conformity to law that underlies them, for instance, our "spontaneity," presupposes in principle that our "soul" is an independently existing substance in the traditional metaphysical sense down to the time of Locke. Kant's rationalistic successors, for the most part, lost sight of the fact that Kant had retained these old metaphysical assumptions in his interpretation of the transcendental conditions of empirical interaction and in his cosmological doctrine of freedom. The common root of the sensibility and of the understanding as the higher faculty of knowledge remains for Kant the substantial force of the soul, which expresses itself (just as in Leibnitz) as vis passiva and vis activa. The modern doctrine of evolution has entirely removed the foundation from this rationalism which had been undermined ever since Locke's criticism of the traditional concept of substance.

To refer again briefly to a second point in which the foregoing results differ from the Kantian rationalism as well as from empiricism since Hume: The postulate of a necessary connection between cause and effect, as we have seen, in no way implies the consequence that the several inductions lose the character of hypotheses. This does not follow merely from the fact that all inductions besides the causal law include the hypothetical thought that the same causes will be given in the reality not yet observed as appear in that already observed. The hypothetical character of all inductive inferences is rather revealed through the circumstance that in the causal postulate absolutely nothing is contained regarding what the efficacy in the causes is, and how this efficacy arises.

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Only such consequences of the foregoing interpretation of the causal law and of its position as one of the bases of all scientific construction of hypotheses may be pointed out, in conclusion, as will help to make easier the understanding of the interpretation itself.

The requirement of a necessary connection, or dependence, is added by our thought to the reproductive and recognitive presuppositions that are contained in the uniformity of the sequence of events. If this necessary connection be taken objectively, then it reveals as its correlate the requirement of a real dependence of effect upon cause. We come not only upon often and variously used rationalistic thoughts, but also upon old and unchangeable components of all empirical scientific thought, when we give the name "force" to the efficacy that underlies causes. The old postulate of a dynamic intermediary between the events that follow one another constantly retains for us, therefore, its proper meaning. We admit without hesitation that the word "force" suggests fetishism more than do the words "cause" and "effect;" but we do not see how this can to any degree be used as a counter-argument. All words that were coined in the olden time to express thoughts of the practical Weltanschauung have an archaic tang. Likewise all of our science and the greater part of our nomenclature have arisen out of the sphere of thought contained in the practical Weltanschauung, which centred early in fetishism and related thoughts. If, then, we try to free our scientific terminology from such words, we must seek refuge in the Utopia of a lingua universalis, in short, we must endeavor to speak a language which would make science a secret of the few. Or will any one seriously maintain that a thought which belongs to an ancient sphere of mental life must be false for the very reason that it is ancient?

In any case, it is fitting that we define more closely the sense in which we are to regard forces as the dynamic intermediaries of uniform occurrence. Force cannot be given as a content of perception either through our senses or through our consciousness of self; in the case of the former, not in our kinesthetic sensations, in the case of the latter, not in our consciousness of volition. Volition would not include a consciousness of force, even though we were justified in regarding it as a simple primitive psychosis, and were not compelled rather to regard it as an intricate collection of feelings and sensations as far as these elementary forms of consciousness are connected in thought with the phenomena of reaction. Again, forces cannot be taken as objects that are derived as possible perceptions or after the analogy of possible perceptions. The postulate of our thought through which these forces are derived from the facts of the uniform sequence of events, reveals them as limiting notions (Grenzbegriffe), as specializations of the necessary connection between cause and effect, or of the real dependence of the former upon the latter; for the manner of their causal intermediation is in no way given, rather they can be thought of only as underlying our perceptions. They are then in fact qualitates occultae; but they are such only because the concept of quality is taken from the contents of our sense and self perception, which of course do not contain the necessary connection required by our thought. Whoever, therefore, requires from the introduction of forces new contents of perception, for instance, new and fuller mechanical pictures, expects the impossible.