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

by Unknown

Time and Space play an enormous part in all our empirical thinking, our actual use of thought in our sense-perceptive life. And no wonder; for, in coöperation, they form the postulate and condition of all our possible sensuous consciousness. Only on them as backgrounds can thought take on the peculiar clearness of an image or a picture; only on the screens which they supply can we literally depict an object. And this clarity of outline and boundary is so dear to our ordinary consciousness, that we are prone to say there is no sufficient, no real clearness, unless we can clarify by the bounds either of place or of date, or of both. In this mood, we are led to deny the reality and validity of thought altogether, when it cannot be defined in the metes and bounds afforded by Time or by Space: that which has no date nor place, we say,—no extent and no duration,—cannot be real; it is but a pseudo-thought, a pretense and a delusion. Here is the extremely plausible foundation of the philosophy known as sensationism, the refined or second-thought form of materialism, in which it begins its euthanasia into idealism.

Without delaying here to criticise this, let us notice the part that Time and Space play in reference to the conceptual pair we last considered, the One and the Many; for not otherwise shall we find our way beyond them to the still more fundamental conceptions which we are now aiming to reach. Indeed, it is through our surface-apprehension of the pair One and Many, as this illumines experience, that we most naturally come at the pair Time and Space; so that these are at first taken for mere generalizations and abstractions, the purely nominal representatives of the actual distinctions between the members of the Many by our sense perception of this from that, of here from there, of now from then. It is not till our reflective attention is fixed on the fact that there and here, now and then, are peculiar distinctions, wholly different from other contrasts of this with that,—which may be made in all sorts of ways, by difference of quality, or of quantity, or of relations quite other than place and date,—it is not till we realize this peculiar character of the Time-contrast and the Space-contrast, that we see these singular differential qualia cannot be derived from others, not even from the contrast One and Many, but are independent, are themselves underived and spontaneous utterances of our intelligent, our percipient nature. But when Kant first helped mankind to the realization of this spontaneous (or a priori) character of this pair of perceptive conditions, or Sense-Forms, he fell into the persuasion, and led the philosophic world into it, that though Time and Space are not derivatives of the One and the Many read as the numerical aspect of our perceptive experiences, yet there is between the two pairs a connection of dependence as intimate as that first supposed, but in exactly the opposite sense; namely, that the One and the Many are conditioned by Time and Space, or, when it comes to the last resort, are at any rate completely dependent upon Time. By a series of units, this view means, we really understand a set of items discriminated and related either as points or as instants: in the last analysis, as instants: that is, it is impossible to apprehend a unit, or to count and sum units, unless the unit is taken as an instant, and the units as so many instants. Numbers, Kant holds, are no doubt pure (or quite unsensuous) percepts,—discerned particulars,—therefore spontaneous products of the mind a priori, but made possible only by the primary pure percept Time, or, again, through the mediation of this, by the conjoined pure percept Space; so that the numbers, in their own pure character, are simply the instants in their series. As the instants, and therefore the numbers, are pure percepts,—particulars discerned without the help of sense,—so pure percepts, in a primal and comprehensive sense, argues Kant, must their conditioning postulates Time and Space be, to supply the "element," or "medium," that will render such pure percepts possible.

This doctrine of Kant's is certainly plausible; indeed, it is impressively so; and it has taken a vast hold in the world of science, and has reinforced the popular belief in the unreality of thought apart from Time and Space; an unreality which it is an essential part of Kant's system to establish critically. But as a graver result, it has certainly tended to discredit the belief in personal identity as an abiding and immutable reality, enthroned over the mutations of things in Time and Space; since all that is in these is numbered and is mutable, and is rather many than one, yet nothing is believed real except as it falls under them, at any rate under Time. And with this decline of the belief in a changeless self, has declined, almost as rapidly and extensively, the belief in immortality. Or, rather, the permanence and the identity of the person has faded into a question regarded as unanswerable; though none the less does this agnostic state of belief tend to take personality, in any responsible sense of the word, out of the region of practical concern. With what is unknowable, even if existing, we can have no active traffic; 't is for our conduct as if it were not.

So it behooves us to search if this prevalent view about the relation of One and Many to Time and Space is trustworthy and exact. What place and function in philosophy must Space and Time be given?—for they certainly have a place and function; they certainly are among the inexpugnable conceptions with which thought has to concern itself when it undertakes to gain a view of the whole. But it may be easy to give them a larger place and function than belong to them by right. Is it true, then, that the One and the Many—that the system of Numbers, in short—are unthinkable except as in Space and Time, or, at any rate, in Time? Or, to put the question more exactly, as well as more gravely and more pertinently, Are Space and Time the true principia individui, and is Time preëminently the ultimate principium individuationis? Is there accordingly no individuality, and no society, no associative assemblage, except in the fleeting world of phenomena, dated and placed? Simply to ask the question, and thus bring out the full drift of this Kantian doctrine, is almost to expose the absurdity of it. Such a doctrine, though it may be wisely refusing to confound personality, true individuality, with the mere logical singular; nay, worse, with a limited and special illustration of the singular, the one here or the one there, the one now or the one then; nevertheless, by confining numerability to things material and sensible, makes personal identity something unmeaning or impossible, and destroys part of the foundation for the relations of moral responsibility. Though the vital trait of the person, his genuine individuality, doubtless lies, not in his being exactly numerable, but in his being aboriginal and originative; in a word, in his self-activity, in his being a centre of autonomous social recognition; yet exactly numerable he indeed is, and must be, not confusable with any other, else his professed autonomy, his claim of rights and his sense of duty, can have no significance, must vanish in the universal confusion belonging to the indefinite. Nor, on the other hand, is it at all true that a number has to be a point or an instant, nor that things when numbered and counted are implicitly pinned upon points or, at all events, upon instants. It may well enough be the fact that in our empirical use of number we have to employ Time, or even Space, but it is a gaping non sequitur to conclude that we therefore can count nothing but the placed and the dated. Certainly we count whenever we distinguish,—by whatever means, on whatever ground. To think is, in general, at least to "distinguish the things that differ;" but this will not avail except we keep account of the differences; hence the One and the Many lie in the very bosom of intelligence, and this fundamental and spontaneous contrast can not only rive Time and Space into expressions of it, in instants and in points, but travels with thought from its start to its goal, and as organic factor in mathematical science does indeed, as Plato in the Republic said, deal with absolute being, if yet dreamwise; so that One and Many, and Many as the sum of the ones, makes part of the measure of that primally real world which the world of minds alone can be. If the contrast One and Many can pass the bounds of the merely phenomenal, by passing the temporal and the spatial; if it applies to universal being, to the noumenal as well as to the phenomenal; then the absolutely real world, so far as concerns this essential condition, can be a world of genuine individuals, identifiable, free, abiding, responsible, and there can be a real moral order; if not, then there can be no such moral world, and the deeper thought-conceptions to which we now approach must be regarded, at the best, as fair illusions, bare ideals, which the serious devotee of truth must shun, except in such moments of vacancy and leisure as he may venture to surrender, at intervals, to purely hedonic uses. But if the One and the Many are not dependent on Time and Space, their universal validity is possible; and it has already been shown that they are not so dependent, are not thus restricted.

And now it remains to show their actual universality, by exhibiting their place in the structure of the absolutely real; since nobody calls in question their pertinence to the world of phenomena. But their noumenal applicability follows from their essential implication with all and every difference: no difference, no distinction, that does not carry counting; and this is quite as true as that there can be no counting without difference. The One and the Many thus root in Identity and Difference, pass up into fuller expression in Universal and Particular, hold forward into Cause and Effect, attain their commanding presentation in the Reciprocity of First Causes, and so keep record of the contrast between Necessity and Contingency. In short, they are founded in, and in their turn help (indispensably) to express, all the categories,—Quality, Quantity, Relation, Modality. Nor do they suffer arrest there; they hold in the ideals, the True, the Beautiful, the Good, and in the primary Ideas, the Self, the World, and God. For all of these differ, however close their logical linkage may be; and in so far as they differ, each of them is a counted unit, and so they are many. And, most profoundly of all, One and Many take footing in absolute reality so soon as we realize that nothing short of intelligent being can be primordially real, underived, and truly causal, and that intelligence is, by its idea, at once an I-thinking and a universal recognizant outlook upon others that think I.

Hence Number, so far from being the derivative of Time and Space, founds, at the bottom, in the self-definition and social recognition of intelligent beings, and so finds a priori a valid expression in Time and in Space, as well as in every other primitive and spontaneous form in which intelligence utters itself. The Pythagorean doctrine of the rank of Number in the scale of realities is only one remove from the truth: though the numbers are indeed not the Prime Beings, they do enter into the essential nature of the Prime Beings; are, so to speak, the organ of their definite reality and identity, and for that reason go forward into the entire defining procedure by which these intelligences organize their world of experiences. And the popular impression that Time and Space are derivatives from Number, is in one aspect the truth, rather than the doctrine of Kant is; for though they are not mere generalizations and abstractions from numbered dates and durations, places and extents, they do exist as relating-principles which minds simply put, as the conditions of perceptive experiences; which by the nature of intelligence they must number in order to have and to master; while Number itself, the contrast of One and Many, enters into the very being of minds, and therefore still holds in Time and in Space, which are the organs, or media, not of the whole being of the mind, but only of that region of it constituted by sensation,—the material, the disjunct, the empirical. Besides, the logical priority of Number is implied in the fact that minds in putting Time and Space a priori must count them as two, since they discriminate them with complete clearness, so that it is impossible to work up Space out of Time (as Berkeley and Stuart Mill so adroitly, but so vainly, attempted to do), or Time out of Space (as Hegel, with so little adroitness and such patent failure, attempted to do). No; there Time and Space stand, fixed and inconfusable, incapable of mutual transmutation, and thus the ground of an abiding difference between the inner or psychic sense-world and the outer or physical, between the subjective and the (sensibly) objective. By means of them, the world of minds discerns and bounds securely between the privacy of each and the publicity, the life "out of doors," which is common to all; between the cohering isolation of the individual and the communicating action of the society. Indeed, as from this attained point of view we can now clearly see, the real ground of the difference between Time and Space, and hence between subjective perception and the objective existence of physical things, is in the fact that a mind, in being such,—in its very act of self-definition,—correlates itself with a society of minds, and so, to fulfill its nature, in so far as this includes a world of experiences, must form its experience socially as well as privately, and hence will put forth a condition of sensuous communication, as well as a condition of inner sensation. Thus the dualization of the sense-world into inner and outer, psychic and physical, subjective and objective, rests at last on the intrinsically social nature of conscious being; rests on the twofold structure, logically dichotomous, of the self-defining act; and we get the explanation, from the nature of intelligence as such, why the Sense-Forms are necessarily two, and only two. It is no accident that we experience all things sensible in Time or in Space, or in both together; it is the natural expression of our primally intelligent being, concerned as that is, directly and only, with our self and its logically necessary complement, the other selves; and so the natural order, in its two discriminated but complemental portions, the inner and the outer, is founded in that moral order which is given in the fundamental act of our intelligence. It is this resting of Space upon our veritable Objects, the Other Subjects, that imparts to it its externalizing quality, so that things in it are referred to the testing of all minds, not to ours only, and are reckoned external because measured by that which is alone indeed other than we.

In this way we may burst the restricting limit which so much of philosophy, and so much more of ordinary opinion, has drawn about our mental powers in view of this contrast Time and Space, especially with reference to the One and the Many, and to the persuasion that plural distinctions, at any rate, cannot belong in the region of absolute reality. Ordinary opinion either inclines to support a philosophy that is skeptical of either Unity or Plurality being pertinent beyond Time and Space, and thus to hold by agnosticism, or, if it affects affirmative metaphysics, tends to prefer monism to pluralism, when the number-category is carried up into immutable regions: to represent the absolutely real as One, somehow seems less contradictory of the "fitness of things" than to represent it as Many; moreover, carrying the Many into that supreme region, by implying the belonging there of mortals such as we, seems shocking to customary piety, and full of extravagant presumption. Still, nothing short of this can really satisfy our deep demand for a moral order, a personal responsibility, nay, an adequate logical fulfillment of our conception of a self as an intelligence; while the clarification which a rational pluralism supplies for such ingrained puzzles in the theory of knowledge as that of the source and finality of the contrast Time and Space, to mention no others, should afford a strong corroborative evidence in its behalf. And, as already said, this view enables us to pass the limit which Time and Space are so often supposed to put, hopelessly, upon our concepts of the ideal grade, the springs of all our aspiration. To these, then, we may now pass.

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We reach them through the doorways of the Necessary vs. the Contingent, the Unconditioned vs. the Conditioned, the Infinite vs. the Finite, the Absolute vs. the Relative; and we recognize them as our profoundest foundation-concepts, alone deserving, as Kant so pertinently said, the name of Ideas,—the Soul, the World, and God. Associated with them are what we may call our three Forms of the Ideal,—the True, the Beautiful, the Good. These Ideas and their affiliated ideals have the highest directive and settling function in the organization of philosophy; they determine its schools and its history, by forming the centre of all its controlling problems; they prescribe its great subdivisions, breaking it up into Metaphysics, Æsthetics, and Ethics, and Metaphysics, again, into Psychology Cosmology, and Ontology,—or Theology in the classic sense, which, in the modern sense, becomes the Philosophy of Religion; they call into existence, as essential preparatory and auxiliary disciplines, Logic and the Theory of Knowledge, or Epistemology. They thus provide the true distinctions between philosophy and the sciences of experience, and present these sciences as the carrying out, upon experiential details, of the methodological principles which philosophy alone can supply; hence they lead us to view all the sciences as in fact the applied branches, the completing organs of philosophy, instead of its hostile competitors.

As for the controlling questions which they start, these are such as follow: Are the ideals but bare ideals, serving only to cast "a light that never was, on land or sea?"—are the Ideas only bare ideas, without any objective being of their own, without any footing in the real, serving only to enhance the dull facts of experience with auroral illusions? The philosophic thinker answers affirmatively, or with complete skeptical dubiety, or with a convinced and uplifting negative, according to his less or greater penetration into the real meaning of these deepest concepts, and depending on his view into the nature and thought-effect of the Necessary and the Contingent, the Unconditioned and the Conditioned, the Infinite and the Finite, the Absolute and the Relative.