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

by Unknown

The contempt with which the assumption of forces meets, on the part of those who make this demand, is accordingly easily understood, and still more easily is it understood, if one takes into consideration what confusion of concepts has arisen through the use of the term "force" and what obstacles the assumption of forces has put in the way of the material sciences. It must be frankly admitted that this concept delayed for centuries both in the natural and moral sciences the necessary analysis of the complicated phenomena forming our data. Under the influence of the "concept philosophy" it caused, over and over again, the setting aside of the problems of this analytical empirical thought as soon as their solution had been begun. This misuse cannot but make suspicious from the very start every new form of maintaining that forces underlie causation.

However, misuse proves as little here against a proper use as it does in other cases. Moreover, the scruples that we found arising from the standpoint of empiricism against the assumption of forces are not to the point. In assuming a dynamic intermediary between cause and effect, we are not doubling the problems whose solution is incumbent upon the sciences of facts, and still less is it true that our assumption must lead to a logical circle. That is, a comparison with the ideas of the old concept philosophy, which even in the Aristotelian doctrine contain such a duplication, is not to the point. Those ideas are hypostasized abstractions which are taken from the uniformly coexisting characteristics of objects. Forces, on the other hand, are the imperceivable relations of dependence which we must presuppose between events that follow one another uniformly, if the uniformity of this sequence is to become for us either thinkable or conceivable. The problems of material scientific research are not doubled by this presupposition of a real dynamic dependence, because it introduces an element not contained in the data of perception which give these problems their point of departure. This presupposition does not renew the thought of an analytic rational connection between cause and effect which the concept philosophy involves; on the contrary, it remains true to the principle made practical by Hume and Kant, that the real connection between causes and their effects is determinable only through experience, that is, empirically and synthetically through the actual indication of the events of uniform sequence. How these forces are constituted and work, we cannot know, since our knowledge is confined to the material of perception from which as a basis presentation has developed into thought. The insight that we have won from the limiting notion of force helps us rather to avoid the misuse which has been made of the concept of force. A fatal circle first arises, when we use the unknowable forces and not the knowable events for the purpose of explanation, that is, when we cut off short the empirical analysis which leads ad infinitum. To explain does not mean to deduce the known from the unknown, but the particular from the general. It was therefore no arbitrary judgment, but an impulse conditioned by the very nature of our experience and of our thought, that made man early regard the causal connection as a dynamic one, even though his conception was of course indistinct and mixed with confusing additions.

The concept of force remains indispensable also for natural scientific thought. It is involved with the causal law in every attempt to form an hypothesis, and accordingly it is already present in every description of facts which goes by means of memory or abstraction beyond the immediately given content of present perception. In introducing it we have in mind, moreover, that the foundations of every possible interpretation of nature possess a dynamic character, just because all empirical thought, in this field as well, is subordinate to the causal law. This must be admitted by any one who assumes as indispensable aids of natural science the mechanical figures through which we reduce the events of sense perception to the motion of mass particles, that is, through which we associate these events with the elements of our visual and tactual perception. All formulations of the concept of mass, even when they are made so formal as in the definition given by Heinrich Hertz, indicate dynamic interpretations. Whether the impelling forces are to be thought of in particular as forces acting at a distance or as forces acting through collision depends upon the answer to the question whether we have to assume the dynamic mass particles as filling space discontinuously or continuously. The dynamic basis of our interpretation of nature will be seen at once by any one who is of the opinion that we can make the connection of events intelligible without the aid of mechanical figures, for instance, in terms of energy.

Thus it results that we interpret the events following one another immediately and uniformly as causes and effects, by presupposing as fundamental to them forces that are the necessary means of their uniformity of connection. What we call "laws" are the judgments in which we formulate these causal connections.

A second and a third consequence need only be mentioned here. The hypothesis that interprets the mutual connection of psychical and physical vital phenomena as causal one is as old as it is natural. It is natural, because even simple observations assure us that the mental content of perception follows uniformly the instigating physical stimulus and the muscular movement the instigating mental content which we apprehend as will. We know, however, that the physical events which, in raising the biological problem, we have to set beside the psychical, do not take place in the periphery of our nervous system and in our muscles, but in the central nervous system. But we must assume, in accordance with all the psycho-physiological data which at the present time are at our disposal, that these events in our central nervous system do not follow the corresponding psychical events, but that both series have their course simultaneously. We have here, therefore, instead of the real relation of dependence involved in constant sequence, a real dependence of the simultaneity or correlative series of events. This would not, of course, as should be at once remarked, tell as such against a causal connection between the two separate causal series. But the contested parallelistic interpretation of this dependence is made far more probable through other grounds. These are in part corollaries of the law of the conservation of energy, rightly interpreted, and in part epistemological considerations. Still it is not advisable to burden methodological study, for instance, the theory of induction, with these remote problems; and on that account it is better for our present investigation to subordinate the psychological interdependences, to the causal ones in the narrower sense.

The final consequence, too, that forces itself upon our attention is close at hand in the preceding discussion. The tradition prevailing since Hume, together with its inherent opposition to the interpretation of causal connection given by the concept philosophy, permitted us to make the uniform sequences of events the basis of our discussion. In so doing, however, our attention had to be called repeatedly to one reservation. In fact, only a moment ago, in alluding to the psychological interdependences, we had to emphasize the uniform sequence. Elsewhere the arguments depended upon the uniformity that characterizes this sequence; and rightly, for the reduction of the causal relation to the fundamental relation of the sequence of events is merely a convenient one and not the only possible one. As soon as we regard the causal connection, along with the opposed and equal reaction, as an interconnection, then cause and effect become, is a matter of principle, simultaneous. The separation of interaction from causation is not justifiable.

In other ways also we can so transform every causal relation that cause and effect must be regarded as simultaneous. Every stage, for instance, of the warming of a stone by the heat of the sun, or of the treaty conferences of two states, presents an effect that is simultaneous with the totality of the acting causes. The analysis of a cause that was at first grasped as a whole into the multiplicity of its constituent causes and the comprehension of the constituent causes into a whole, which then presents itself as the effect, is a necessary condition of such a type of investigation. This conception, which is present already in Hobbes, but especially in Herbart's "method of relations," deserves preference always where the purpose in view is not the shortest possible argumentation but the most exact analysis.

If we turn our attention to this way of viewing the problem,—not, however, in the form of Herbart's speculative method,—we shall find that the results which we have gained will in no respect be altered. We do, however, get a view beyond. From it we can find the way to subordinate not only the uniform sequence of events, but also the persistent characteristics and states with their mutual relations, under the extended causal law. In so doing, we do not fall back again into the intellectual world of the concept philosophy. We come only to regard the persisting coexistences—in the physical field, the bodies, in the psychical, the subjects of consciousness—as systems or modes of activity. The thoughts to which such a doctrine leads are accordingly not new or unheard of. The substances have always been regarded as sources of modes of activity. We have here merely new modifications of thoughts that have been variously developed, not only from the side of empiricism, but also from that of rationalism. They carry with them methodologically the implication that it is possible to grasp the totality of reality, as far as it reveals uniformities, as a causally connected whole, as a cosmos. They give the research of the special sciences the conceptual bases for the wider prospects that the sciences of facts have through hard labor won for themselves. The subject of consciousness is unitary as far as the processes of memory extend, but it is not simple. On the contrary, it is most intricately put together out of psychical complexes, themselves intricate and out of their relations; all of which impress upon us, psychologically and, in their mechanical correlates, physiologically, an ever-recurring need for further empirical analysis. Among the mechanical images of physical reality that form the foundation of our interpretation of nature, there can finally be but one that meets all the requirements of a general hypothesis of the continuity of kinetic connections. With this must be universally coördinated the persistent properties or sensible modes of action belonging to bodies. The mechanical constitution of the compound bodies, no matter at what stage of combination and formation, must be derivable from the mechanical constitution of the elements of this combination. Thus our causal thought compels us to trace back the persistent coexistences of the so-called elements to combinations whose analysis, as yet hardly begun, leads us on likewise to indefinitely manifold problems. Epistemologically we come finally to a universal phenomenological dynamism as the fundamental basis of all theoretical interpretation of the world, at least fundamental for our scientific thought, and we are here concerned with no other.

[4] Cf. the author's "Theorie der Typeneinteilungen," Philosophische Monatshefte, vol. xxx, Berlin, 1894.

[5] Kant, Kr. d. r. V., 2d ed., p. 862.