Headmaster High School, Salem, Ma.s.s., 1862-64; a.s.sistant Professor of Mathematics, Washington University, St. Louis, 1864-66; Tileston Professor of Political Economy, _ibid._ 1866-69; Professor of Logic and the Philosophy of Science, Ma.s.sachusetts Inst.i.tute of Technology, 1871-79; Lecturer on Ethics, Harvard University, 1879-80; Lecturer on Logic and Speculative Philosophy, University of Michigan, 1883-84.

Member and vice-president St. Louis Philosophical Society; member California Historical Society; American Historical a.s.sociation; American a.s.sociation for the Advancement of Science; National Geographic Society, etc. Author of _Treatise on a.n.a.lytic Geometry_, 1869; _The Limits of Evolution_, 1901, 2d edition, 1904; joint author and editor of _The Conception of G.o.d_, 1897, etc. Editor Philosophical Publications of University of California; American Editorial Representative _Hibbert Journal_, London.]

The duty has been a.s.signed me, honored colleagues, of addressing you on the Fundamental Conceptions and the Methods of our common pursuit--philosophy. In endeavoring to deal with the subject in a way not unworthy of its depth and its extent, I have found it impossible to bring the essential material within less compa.s.s than would occupy, in reading, at least four times the period granted by our programme. I have therefore complied with the rule of the Congress which directs that, if a more extended writing be left with the authorities for publication, the reading must be restricted to such a portion of it as will not exceed the allotted time. I will accordingly read to you, first, a brief summary of my entire discussion, by way of introduction, and then an excerpt from the larger doc.u.ment, which may serve for a _specimen_, as our scholastic predecessors used to say, of the whole inquiry I have carried out. The impression will, of course, be fragmentary, and I must ask beforehand for your most benevolent allowances, to prevent a judgment too unfavorable.

The discussion naturally falls into two main parts: the first dealing with the Fundamental Conceptions; and the second, with the Methods.

In the former, after presenting the conception of philosophy itself, as _the consideration of things in the light of the whole_, I take up the involved Fundamental Concepts in the following order:--

I. Whole and Part;

II. Subject and Object (Knowing and Being, Mind and Matter; Dualism, Materialism, Idealism);

III. Reality and Appearance (Noumenon and Phenomenon);

IV. Cause and Effect (Ground and Consequence; Causal System);

V. One and Many (Number System; Monism and Pluralism);

VI. Time and s.p.a.ce (their relation to Number; their Origin and Real Meaning);

VII. Unconditioned and Conditioned (Soul, World, G.o.d; their Reinterpretation in terms of Pluralism);

VIII. The True, the Beautiful, the Good (their relation to the question between Monism and Pluralism).

These are successively dealt with as they rise one out of the other in the process of interpreting them and applying them in the actual creation of philosophy, as this goes on in the historic schools. The theoretic progress of philosophy is in this way explained by them, in its movement from natural dualism, or realism, through the successive forms of monism, materialistic, agnostic, and idealistic, until it reaches the issue, now coming so strongly forward within the school of idealism, between the adherents of monism and those of pluralism.

The importance of the Fundamental Concepts is shown to increase as we pa.s.s along the list, till on reaching Cause and Effect, and entering upon its full interpretation into the complete System of Causes, we arrive at the very significant conception of the RECIPROCITY OF FIRST CAUSES, and through it come to the PRIMACY OF FINAL CAUSE, and the derivative position of the other forms of cause, Material, Formal, Efficient. The philosophic strength of idealism, but especially of idealistic pluralism, comes into clear light as the result of this stage of the inquiry. But it appears yet more decidedly when One and Many, Time and s.p.a.ce, and their interrelations, are subjected to a.n.a.lysis. So the discussion next pa.s.ses to the higher conceptions, Soul, World, G.o.d, by the pathway of the correlation Unconditioned and Conditioned, and its kindred contrasts Absolute and Relative, Necessary and Contingent, Infinite and Finite, corroborating and reinforcing the import of idealism, and, still more decidedly, that of its plural form. Finally, the strong and favorable bearing of this last on the dissolution of agnosticism and the habilitation of the ideals, the True, the Beautiful, and the Good, in a heightened meaning, is brought out.

This carries the inquiry to the second part of it, that of the Philosophical Methods. Here I recount these in a series of six: the Dogmatic, the Skeptical, the Critical, the Pragmatic, the Genetic, the Dialectic. These, I show, in spite of the tendency of the earlier members in the series to over-emphasis, all have their place and function in the development of a complete philosophy, and in fact form an ascending series in methodic effectiveness, all that precede the last being taken up into the comprehensive Critical Rationalism of the last.

Methodology thus pa.s.ses upward, over the ascending and widening roadways of (1) Intuition and Deduction; (2) Experience and Induction; (3) Intuition and Experience adjusted by Critical Limits; (4) Skepticism reinforced and made _quasi_-affirmative by Desire and Will; (5) Empiricism enlarged by subst.i.tution of cosmic and psychic history for subjective consciousness; (6) Enlightened return to a Rationalism critically established by the inclusion of the preceding elements, and by the sifting and the grading of the Fundamental Concepts through their behavior when tested by the effort to make them universal. In this way, the methods fall into a System, the organic principle of which is this principle of Dialectic, which proves itself alone able to establish _necessary_ truths; that is, _truths indeed_,--judgments that are seen to exclude their opposites, because, in the attempt to subst.i.tute the opposite, the place of it is still filled by the judgment which it aims to dislodge.

And now, with your favoring leave, I will read the excerpt from my larger text.

The task to which, in an especial sense, the cultivators of philosophy are summoned by the plans of the present Congress of Arts and Science, is certainly such as to stir an ambition to achieve it. At the same time, it tempers eagerness by its vast difficulty, and the apprehension lest this may prove insuperable. The task, the officers of the Congress tell us, is no less than to promote the unification of all human knowledge. It requires, then, the reduction of the enormous detail in our present miscellany of sciences and arts, which to a general glance, or even to a more intimate view, presents a confusion of differences that seems overwhelming, to a system nevertheless clearly harmonious,--founded, that is to say, upon universal principles which control all differences by explaining them, and which therefore, in the last resort, themselves flow lucidly from a single supreme principle.

Simply to state this meaning of the task set us, is enough to awaken the doubt of its practicability.

This doubt, we are bound to confess, has more and more impressed itself upon the general mind, the farther this has advanced in the experience of scientific discovery. The very increase in the multiplicity and complexity of facts and their causal groupings increases the feeling that at the root of things there is "a final inexplicability"--total reality seems, more and more, too vast, too profound, for us to grasp or to fathom. And yet, strangely enough, this increasing sense of mysterious vastness has not in the least prevented the modern mind from more and more a.s.serting, with a steadily increasing insistence, the essential and unchangeable unity of that whole of things which to our ordinary experience, and even to all our sciences, appears such an endless and impenetrable complex of differences,--yes, of contradictions. In fact, this a.s.sertion of the unity of all things, under the favorite name of the Unity of Nature, is the pet dogma of modern science; or, rather, to speak with right accuracy, it is the stock-in-trade of a _philosophy_ of science, current among many of the leaders of modern science; for every such a.s.sertion, covering, as it tacitly and unavoidably does, a view about the absolute whole, is an a.s.sertion belonging to the province of philosophy, before whose tribunal it must come for the a.s.sessment of its value. The presuppositions of all the special sciences, and, above all, this presupposition of the Unity and Uniformity of Nature, common to all of them, must thus come back for justification and requisite definition to philosophy--that uppermost and all-inclusive form of cognition which addresses itself to the whole as whole. In their common a.s.sertion of the Unity of Nature, the exponents of modern science come unawares out of their own province into quite another and a higher; and in doing so they show how unawares they come, by presenting in most instances the curious spectacle of proclaiming at once their increasing belief in the unity of things, and their increasing disbelief in its penetrability by our intelligence:--

_In"s Innere der Natur, Dringt kein erschaffner Geist,_

is their chosen poet"s expression of their philosophic mood. Curious we have the right to call this state of the scientific mind, because it is to critical reflection so certainly self-contradictory. How can there be a real unity belonging to what is inscrutable?--what evidence of unity can there be, except in intelligible and explanatory continuity?

But, at all events, this very mood of agnostic self-contradiction, into which the development of the sciences casts such a mult.i.tude of minds, brings them,--brings all of us,--as already indicated, into that court of philosophy where alone such issues lawfully belong, and where alone they can be adjudicated. If the unification of the sciences can be made out to be real by making out its sole sufficient condition, namely, that there is a genuine, and not a merely nominal, unity in the whole of reality itself,--a unity that explains because it is itself, not simply intelligible, but the only completely intelligible of things,--this desirable result must be the work of philosophy. However difficult the task may be, it is rightly put upon us who belong to the Department listed first among the twenty-four in the programme of this representative Congress.

I cannot but express my own satisfaction, as a member of this Department, nor fail to extend my congratulations to you who are my colleagues in it, that the Congress, in its programme, takes openly the affirmative on this question of the possible unification of knowledge.

The Congress has thus declared beforehand for the practicability of the task it sets. It has even declared for its not distant accomplishment; indeed, not impossibly, its accomplishment through the transactions of the Congress itself; and it indicates, by no uncertain signs, the leading, the determining part that philosophy must have in the achievement. In fact, the authorities of the Congress themselves suggest a solution of their own for their problem. In their programme we see a renewed Hierarchy of the Sciences, and at the summit of this appears now again, after so long a period of humiliating obscuration, the figure of Philosophy, raised anew to that supremacy, as Queen of the Sciences, which had been hers from the days of Plato to those of Copernicus, but which she began to lose when modern physical and historical research entered upon its course of sudden development, and which, until recently, she has continued more and more to lose as the sciences have advanced in their career of discoveries,--ever more unexpected, more astonishing, yet more convincing and more helpful to the welfare of mankind. May this sign of her recovered empire not fail! If we rejoice at the token, the Congress has made it our part to see that the t.i.tle is vindicated. It is ours to show this normative function of philosophy, this power to reign as the unifying discipline in the entire realm of our possible knowledge; to show it by showing that the very nature of philosophy--its elemental concepts and its directing ideals, its methods taken in their systematic succession--is such as must result in a view of universal reality that will supply the principle at once giving rise to all the sciences and connecting them all into one harmonious whole.

Such, and so grave, my honored colleagues, is the duty a.s.signed to this hour. Sincerely can I say, Would it had fallen to stronger hands than mine! But since to mine it has been committed, I will undertake it in no disheartened spirit; rather, in that temper of animated hope in which the whole Congress has been conceived and planned. And I draw encouragement from the place, and its a.s.sociations, where we are a.s.sembled--from its historic connections not only with the external expansion of our country, but with its growth in culture, and especially with its growth in the cultivation of philosophy. For your speaker, at least, can never forget that here in St. Louis, the metropolis of the region by which our national domain was in the Louisiana Purchase so enlarged,--here was the centre of a movement in philosophic study that has proved to be of national import. It is fitting that we all, here to-day, near to the scene itself, commemorate the public service done by our present National Commissioner of Education and his group of enthusiastic a.s.sociates, in beginning here, in the middle years of the preceding century, those studies of Kant and his great idealistic successors that unexpectedly became the nucleus of a wider and more penetrating study of philosophy in all parts of our country. It is with quickened memories belonging to the spot where, more than five-and-thirty years ago, it was my happy fortune to take some part with Dr. Harris and his companions, that I begin the task a.s.signed me.

The undertaking seems less hopeless when I can here recall the names and the congenial labors of Harris, of Davidson, of Brockmeyer, of Snider, of Watters, of Jones,--half of them now gone from life. They "builded better than they knew;" and, humbly as they may themselves have estimated their ingenuous efforts to gain acquaintance with the greatest thoughts, history will not fail to take note of what they did, as marking one of the turning-points in the culture of our nation. The publication of the _Journal of Speculative Philosophy_, granting all the subtractions claimed by its critics on the score of defects (of which its conductors were perhaps only too sensible), was an influence that told in all our circles of philosophical study, and thence in the whole of our social as well as our academic life.

[Here I enter upon the discussion of the subject proper, beginning, as above indicated, with the Fundamental Conceptions. Having followed these through the contrasts Whole and Part, Subject and Object, Reality and Appearance (or Noumenon and Phenomenon), and developed the bearing of these on the procedure of thought from the dualism of natural realism to materialism and thence to idealism, with the issue now coming on, in this last, between monism and pluralism, I strike into the contrast Cause and Effect, and, noting its unfolding into the more comprehensive form of Ground and Consequence, go on thence as follows:]

It is plain that the contrast Ground and Consequence will enable us to state the new issue with closer precision and pertinence than Reality and Appearance, Noumenon and Phenomenon, can supply; while, at the same time, Ground and Consequence exhibits Cause and Effect as presenting a contrast that only fulfills what Noumenon and Phenomenon foretold and strove towards; in fact, what was more remotely, but not less surely, also indicated by Whole and Part, Knowing and Being, Subject and Object.

For in penetrating to the coherent meaning of these conceptions, the philosophic movement, as we saw, advanced steadily to the fuller and fuller translating of each of them into the reality that unifies _by explanation_, instead of pretending to explain by merely unifying; and this, of course, will now be put forward explicitly, in the clarified category of Cause and Effect, transfigured from a physical into a purely logical relation. What idealism now says, in terms of this, is that the Cause (or, as we now read it, the Ground) of all that exists is the Subject; is Mind, the intelligently Self-conscious; and that all things else, the mere objects, material things, are its Consequence, its Outcome,--in that sense its Effect. And what the new pluralistic idealism says, is that the _a.s.semblage of individual minds_--intelligence being essentially personal and individual, and never merely universal and collective--is the true total Cause of all, and that every mind thus belongs to the order of First Causes; nevertheless, that part, and the most significant part, of the nature of every mind, essential to its personality and its reason, is _its recognition of other minds in the very act of its own self-definition_. That is to say, a mind by its spontaneous nature as intelligence, by its intrinsic rational or logical genius, puts itself as member of a _system_ of minds; all minds are put by each other as Ends--completely standard and sacred Objects, as much parts of the system of true Causes as each is, in its capacity of Subject; and we have a noumenal Reality that is properly to be described as the eternal Federal Republic of Spirits.

Consequently, the relation of Cause and Effect now expands and heightens into a system of the RECIPROCITY OF FIRST CAUSES; causes, that is, which, while all coefficients in the existence and explanation of that natural world of experience which forms their pa.s.sive effect, their objects of mere perception, are themselves related only in the higher way of Final Causes--that is, Defining-Bases and Ends--of each other, making them the logical Complements, and the Objects of conduct, all for each, and each for all. Hence, the system of causation undergoes a signal transformation, and proves to be organized by Final Cause as its basis and root, instead of by Efficient Cause, or Originating Ground, as the earlier stages of thinking had always a.s.sumed.

The causal relation between the absolute or primary realities being purely Final, or Defining and Purposive; that is to say, the uncoercive influence of recognition and ideality; all the other forms of cause, as grouped by Aristotle,--Material, Formal, and Efficient,--are seen to be the derivatives of Final Cause, as being supplied by the action of the minds that, as absolute or underived realities, exist only in the relation of mutual Complements and Ends. Accordingly, Efficient Cause operates only from minds, as noumena, to matter, as their phenomenon, their presented contents of experience; or, in a secondary and derivative sense, from one phenomenon to another, or from one group of phenomena to another group, these playing the part of transmitters, or (as some logicians would say) Instrumental Causes, or Means. Cause, as Material, is hence defined as the elementary phenomenon, and the combinations of this; and therefore, strictly taken, is merely Effect (or Outcome) of the self-active consciousness, whose spontaneous forms of conception and perception become the Formal Cause that organizes the sum of phenomena into cosmic harmony or unity.

Here, accordingly, comes into view the further and in some respects deeper conceptual pair, Many and One. The history of philosophic thought proves that this ant.i.thesis is darkly obscure and deeply ambiguous; for about it have centred a large part of the conflicts of doctrine. This pair has already been used, implicitly, in exhibiting the development of the preceding group, Cause and Effect; and in so using it we have supplied ourselves with a partial clarification of it, and with one possible solution of its ambiguity. We have seen, namely, how our strong natural persuasion that philosophy guided by the fundamental concept Cause must become the search for the One amid the wilderness of the Many, and that this search cannot be satisfied and ended except in an all-inclusive Unit, in which the Many is embraced as the integral and originated parts, completely determined, subjected, and controlled, may give way to another and less oppressive conception of unity; a conception of it as the harmony among many free and independent primary realities, a harmony founded on their intelligent and reasonable mutual recognition. This conception casts at least _some_ clearing light upon the long and dreary disputes over the Many and the One; for it exposes, plainly, the main source of them. They have arisen out of two chief ambiguities,--the ambiguity of the concept One, and the ambiguity of the concept Cause in its supreme meaning. The normal contrast between the One and the Many is a clear and simple contrast: the One is the single unit, and the Many is the repet.i.tion of the unit, or is the collection of the several units. But if we go on to suppose that there is a collection or sum of all possible units, and call this the Whole, then, since there can be no second such, we call it also "one" (or the One, by way of preeminence), overlooking the fact that it differs from the simple one, or unit, _in genere_; that it is in fact not a unit at all, not an elementary member of a series, but the annulment of all series; that our name "one" has profoundly changed its meaning, and now stands for the Sole, the Only. Thus, by our forgetfulness of differences, we fall into deep water, and, with the confused illusions of the drowning, dream of the One and All as the single _punctum originationis_ of all things, the Source and Begetter of the very units of which it is in reality only the resultant and the derivative. Or, from another point of view, and in another mood, we rightly enough take the One to mean the coherent, the intelligible, the consistent, the harmonious; and putting the Many, on the misleading hint of its contrast to the unit, in ant.i.thesis to this One of harmony, we fall into the belief that the Many cannot be harmonious, is intrinsically a cl.u.s.ter of repulsions or of collisions, incapable of giving rise to accord; indeed, essentially hostile to it. So, as accord is the aim and the essence of our reason, we are caught in the snare of monism, pluralism having apparently become the equivalent of chaos, and thus the _bete noir_ of rational metaphysics. Nay, in the opposed camp itself, some of the most ardent adherents of pluralism, the liveliest of wit, the most exuberant in literary resources, are the abjectest believers in the hopeless disjunction and capriciousness of the plural, and hold there is a rift in the texture of reality that no intelligence, "even though you dub it "the Absolute,"" can mend or reach across. Yet surely there is nothing in the Many, as a sum of units, the least at war with the One as a system of harmony. On the contrary, even in the pure form of the Number Series, the Many is impossible except on the principle of harmony,--the units can be collected and summed (that is, const.i.tute the Many), only if they cohere in a community of intrinsic kindred. Consequently the whole question of the chaotic or the harmonic nature of a plural world turns on the nature of the genus which we find characteristic of the absolutely (_i. e._, the unreservedly) real, and which is to be taken as the common denomination enabling us to count them and to sum them. When minds are seen to be necessarily the primary realities, but _also necessarily federal_ as well as individual, the illusion about the essential disjunction and non-coherence of the plurally real dissolves away, and a primordial world of manifold persons is seen to involve no fundamental or hopeless anarchy of individualism, irreducible in caprice, but an indwelling principle of harmony, rather, that from the springs of individual being intends the control and composure of all the disorders that mark the world of experiential appearance, and so must tend perpetually to effect this.

The other main source of our confusions over the Many and the One is the variety of meaning hidden in the concept Cause, and our propensity to take its most obvious but least significant sense for its supreme intent. Closest at hand, in experience, is our productive causation of changes in our sense-world, and hence most obvious is that reading of Cause which takes it as the producer of changes and, with a deeper comprehension of it, of the inalterable linkage between changes, whereby one follows regularly and surely upon another. Thus what we have in philosophy agreed to call Efficient Cause comes to be mistaken for the profoundest and the supreme form of cause, and all the other modes of cause, the Material (or Stuff), the Form (or Conception), and the End (or Purpose), its consequent and derivative auxiliaries. Under the influence of this strong impression, we either a.s.sume total reality to be One Whole, all-embracing and all-producing of its manifold modes, or else view it as a duality, consisting of One Creator and his manifold creatures. So it has come about that metaphysics has. .h.i.therto been chiefly a contention between pantheism and monotheism, or, as the latter should for greater accuracy be called, monarchotheism; and, it must be acknowledged, this struggle has been attended by a continued (though not continual) decline of this later dualistic theory before the steadfast front and unyielding advance of the older monism. Thus persistent has been the a.s.sumption that harmony can only be a.s.sured by the unity given in some single productive causation: the only serious uncertainty has been about the most rational way of conceiving the operation of this Sole Cause; and this doubt has thus far, on the whole, declined in favor of the Elder Oriental or monistic conception, as against the Hebraic conception of extraneous creation by fiat. The frankly confessed mystery of the latter, its open appeal to miracle, places it at a fatal disadvantage with the Elder Orientalism, when the appeal is to reason and intelligibility. It is therefore no occasion for wonder that, especially since the rise of the scientific doctrine of Evolution, with its postulate of a universal unity, self-varying yet self-fulfilling, even the leaders of theology are more and more falling into the monistic line and swelling the ever-growing ranks of pantheism. If it be asked here, _And why not?_--_where is the harm of it?_--_is not the whole question simply of what is true_? the answer is, _The mortal harm of the destruction of personality, which lives or dies with the preservation or destruction of individual responsibility; while the completer truth is, that there are other and profounder (or, if you please, higher) truths than this of explanation by Efficient Cause_. In fact, there is a higher conception of Cause itself than this of production, or efficiency; for, of course, as we well might say, that alone can be the supreme conception of Cause which can subsist between absolute or unreserved realities, and such must exclude their production or their necessitating control by others. So that we ought long since to have realized that Final Cause, the recognized presence to each other as unconditioned realities, or Defining Auxiliaries and Ends, is the sole causal relation that can hold among primary realities; though among such it _can_ hold, and in fact must.

For the absolute reality of personal intelligences, at once individual and universally recognizant of others, is called for by other conceptions fundamental to philosophy. These other fundamental concepts can no more be counted out or ignored than those we have hitherto considered; and when we take them up, we shall see how vastly more significant they are. They alone will prove supreme, truly organizing, normative; they alone can introduce gradation in truths, for they alone introduce the judgment of worth, of valuation; they alone can give us counsels of perfection, for they alone rise from those elements in our being which deal with ideals and with veritable Ideas. So let us proceed to them.

Our path into their presence, however, is through another pair, not so plainly ant.i.thetic as those we have thus far considered. This pair that I now mean is Time and s.p.a.ce, which, though not obviously antinomic, yet owes its existence, as can now be shown, to that profoundest of concept-contrasts which we earlier considered under the head of Subject and Object, when the Object takes on its only adequate form of Other Subject. But in pa.s.sing from the contrast One and Many towards its rational transformation into the moral society of Mind and Companion Minds, we break into this pair of Time and s.p.a.ce, and must make our way through it by taking in its full meaning.

Time and s.p.a.ce play an enormous part in all our empirical thinking, our actual use of thought in our sense-perceptive life. And no wonder; for, in cooperation, 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 p.r.o.ne 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 s.p.a.ce: 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce; 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 quant.i.ty, or of relations quite other than place and date,--it is not till we realize this _peculiar_ character of the Time-contrast and the s.p.a.ce-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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 a.n.a.lysis, 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 s.p.a.ce; 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce; 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 ident.i.ty as an abiding and immutable reality, enthroned over the mutations of things in Time and s.p.a.ce; 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 ident.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ce is trustworthy and exact. What place and function in philosophy must s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce and Time, or, at any rate, in Time? Or, to put the question more exactly, as well as more gravely and more pertinently, Are s.p.a.ce and Time the true _principia individui_, and is Time preeminently the ultimate _principium individuationis_? Is there accordingly no individuality, and no society, no a.s.sociative a.s.semblage, 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 ill.u.s.tration 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 ident.i.ty 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.s the bounds of the merely phenomenal, by pa.s.sing 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 n.o.body 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 Ident.i.ty and Difference, pa.s.s 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, Quant.i.ty, 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 G.o.d. 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 ident.i.ty, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, which are the organs, or _media_, not of the whole being of the mind, but only of that region of it const.i.tuted 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 s.p.a.ce _a priori_ must count them as two, since they discriminate them with complete clearness, so that it is impossible to work up s.p.a.ce out of Time (as Berkeley and Stuart Mill so adroitly, but so vainly, attempted to do), or Time out of s.p.a.ce (as Hegel, with so little adroitness and such patent failure, attempted to do). No; there Time and s.p.a.ce stand, fixed and inconfusable, incapable of mutual trans.m.u.tation, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce, 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 s.p.a.ce, to mention no others, should afford a strong corroborative evidence in its behalf. And, as already said, this view enables us to pa.s.s the limit which Time and s.p.a.ce 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 pa.s.s.

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 G.o.d.

a.s.sociated 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, aesthetics, and Ethics, and Metaphysics, again, into Psychology Cosmology, and Ontology,--or Theology in the cla.s.sic 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 compet.i.tors.

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.

And what, now, are the accurate, the adequate meanings of the three Ideas?--what _does_ our profoundest thought intend by the Soul, by the World, by G.o.d? We know how Kant construed them, in consequence of the course by which he came critically (as he supposed) upon them,--as respectively the paramount Subject of experiences; the paramount Object of experiences, or the Causal Unity of the possible series of sensible objects; and the complete Totality of Conditions for experience and its objects, itself therefore the Unconditioned. It is worth our notice, that especially by his construing the idea of G.o.d in this way, thus rehabilitating the cla.s.sical and scholastic conception of G.o.d as the Sum of all Realities, he laid the foundation for that very transfiguration of mysticism, that idealistic monism, which he himself repudiated, but which his three noted successors in their several ways so ardently accepted, and which has since so pervaded the philosophic world. But suppose Kant"s alleged critical a.n.a.lysis of the three Ideas and their logical basis is in fact far from critical, far from "exactly discriminative,"--and I believe there is the clearest warrant for declaring that it is,--then the a.s.sumed "undeniable critical basis" for idealistic monism will be dislodged, and it will be open to us to interpret the Ideas with accuracy and consistency--an interpretation which may prove to establish, not at all any monism, but a rational pluralism. And this will also reveal to us, I think, that our prevalent construing of the Unconditioned and the Conditioned, the Necessary and the Contingent, the Infinite and the Finite, the Absolute and the Relative, suffers from an equal inaccuracy of a.n.a.lysis, and precisely for this reason gives a plausible but in fact untrustworthy support to the monistic interpretation of G.o.d, and Soul, and World; or, as Hegel and his chief adherents prefer to name them, G.o.d, Mind, and Nature. If the Kantian a.n.a.lysis stands, then it seems to follow, clearly enough, that G.o.d is the Inclusive Unit which at once embraces Mind and Nature, Soul and World, expresses itself in them, and imparts to them their meaning; and the plain dictate then is, that Kant"s personal prejudice, and the personal prejudices of others like him, in favor of a transcendent G.o.d, must give way to that conception of the Divine, as immanent and inclusive, which is alone consistent with its being indeed the Totality of Conditions,--the Necessary Postulate, and the Sufficient Reason, for both Subject and Object.