[3] 'A Principle,' says Herbart (Psychologie als Wissenschaft, Einl.) 'should have the double property of having originally a certainty of its own, and of generating other certainty. The way and manner in which the second comes about is the Method.'
[CHAPTER XXX.]
THE LOGIC OF DESCRIPTION: NATURAL REALISM: BEING.
The antithesis between thought and being, between idea and actuality, between notion and object, is almost a commonplace of criticism. Between the ideas of the subject and objectivity a great gulf seems to yawn fixed and impassable. Thinkers, like Anselm and Descartes, have (it is asserted) attempted by a trick which cheated themselves to get from the notion to the object. But—as Kant is supposed to have for ever shown—these decepti deceptores are now universally discredited.[1] Yet the same Kant had shown that the 'things' of ordinary experience are only ideas or appearances in consciousness. These latter ideas, however, were verified by the necessity of interdependence in which they stood, as given by sense. From the notions which Anselm and Descartes proposed to invest with objectivity, there was absent the feature of sense-perception. They were not limited and real ideas, but synthetic laws, general and abstract aspects of reality, modes of conception. They were not definite and individualised things, but terms or conditions for all concepts and realities. They were forms,—forms essential to the explication of reality—and never mere parts of reality.
With such 'forms' or 'thought-terms,' such abstractions, Logic (à la mode de Hegel) has to deal. And in dealing with them it has to counteract this popular distinction (which Kant inclines toward) which sets up an insuperable division between thought and being, between reality and syllogism, between is and is known. Certain of these denominators which thinking employs to describe reality the popular mind wholly identifies with reality. That being is a thought, that force and thing are only modes of conception, sounds to the untrained intellect only a verbal quibble. Things, beings, are there—out there, it says: force is 'ultimate reality.' It is perhaps ready to allow that substances are only mental figments: but it is more doubtful about causes, and inclines to assume them to be in outside nature, and to generate a real necessity in things. On the other hand, it has little doubt that concepts and syllogism are only our ways of looking at reality,—the reality of substances and phenomena, with quality and quantity: that 'final cause' is a mere subjective principle of explanation: and that ideas and knowledge are altogether additions superinduced on a real world.
Now what the Logic shows is that, on one hand, all these terms are ideal and regulative; and on the other that they are real, because constitutive of reality. Showing—or shall we say, reminding us—that being is after all a form of thought, it shows us that knowledge, at the other end, contains or implies reality. It is the business of logic as a fundamental philosophy to dispel the illusion that sensations are fixed reality: that causes and effects are an absolutely real order; whereas concepts and sciences and still more aesthetic and moral principles are not. Its doctrine is that all Our thought-terms, the most vulgar and the most delicate, are, as we may put it, symbolical of reality: explications and manifestations of it. Absolutely real—if that means utterly unideal—none of them are. On the other hand, absolutely ideal,—if that means utterly unreal—none of them are either. If you call them real, their reality is that of thought. If you call them ideal, it is an ideality of a real. Being is not a fixed and solid substratum, a hard rock of reality, on which we may build our relations and further determinations. It also is a thought: it also lives in relation, and becomes more real by further determination.[2] But the habit comes natural to the majority to attribute essential and independent reality (total reality) to the thought-modes it is familiar with in practice: whereas the modes familiar to more advanced intelligence are put aside as merely ideal.
Thus in proportion as Logic insists on the reality of idea, it insists also on the ideality of being. Being is after all a thought: when separate from the relations of experience, a very poor thought. A 'supreme being' even is a thought. And the question of questions for Logic is what degree of reality, what amount of truth does each result of unification express. Is it self-consistent and complete, or does it imply further elements, and if so, in what direction does it suggest and receive completion? But at the best the reality of a logical term is an abstract or formal reality, and consists in its power to interpret, to expound, to define the Absolute. Its more concrete and material reality it has in Nature and in Mind. There however Philosophy has in a further measure to repeat its earlier lesson and show that Nature is not without its ideal aspect, and that Mind is founded on physical reality.