title: The new idealism,
text: ^.Z*'- * ^^*<.l^?• IK- «< .' I '" - **' '. ^u ,t£ ^:^/.vl>!?™S'^fc•' 'J r .** ^w'.'i' Class fi ^ ^ 3 Book t SgS GopyrigTitl^® COEHRIGHT DEPOSm THE NEW IDEALISM By MAY SINCLAIR The Belfrt Mary Olivier The Romantic The Three Sisters The Tree of Heaven A Defence of Idealism Mr. Waddington of Wtck The Return op the Prodigal JoiTRNAL of Impressions in Belgium Life and Death of Harriet Frean THE NEW IDEALISM BT MAY SINCLAIR THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 1922 All rights reserved PRINTED IN THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ^fu^ Copyright, 1922, By may SINCLAIR. Set up and printed. Published April, 1922. APR 2G iS22 CIA659779 <r4 This Book IS Dedicated to WILLIAM PEPPEEELL MONTAGUE WHO WILL NOT AGEEE WITH A WOED OP IT INTEODUCTION The aim of this book is twofold: to examine the foundations of realism more critically, and to outline a reconstruction of idealism more closely than was possible ^ve years ago. The latest developments of philosophy demand a revision of the whole problem, from a shifted standpoint. Since 1917 realism has gained in solidity and a certain intricate precision. The Critical Eealists ^ have discovered a flaw in its theory of perception and tried to mend it (not, I think, with conspicuous success) ; Professor Whitehead ^ has laid down its first principles once for all; and Pro- fessor Alexander ^ has built it up into a system among systems. Eealism is ten times more formidable than it was in 1917. And since 1917 the issue has been narrowed down to the field of Space and Time, and it is there that the battle between realism and idealism must be fought. That issue is very clear. For, however realists may differ among themselves, whether they say with Pro- fessor Alexander that Space-Time is the ultimate reality, or with Professor Whitehead that the ultimate entities are events, they are all agreed that mind is not the ultimate entity and must be kept out of the problem. ** Nature,'' Professor Whitehead says, '4s closed to mind. ' ' Mind, on any realist scheme, is only ^Essays m Critical Bealism: 1920. ^Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge: 1919. The Concept of Nature: 1920. ^ Space, Time and Deity: 1920. vii viii INTEODUCTION one more entity, one more change in a sequence of changes; the last thing, not the first, though highest, if you like, in the scale of values. The problem of the realist, then, is how to account for mind as part of a system in which mind was not present from the beginning. I have tried to show that this attempt to get mind out of the mindless lands us in endless difficulties and contradictions, contradic- tions which are only removed from one level of the enquiry to crop up again on the next ; that it is easier to obtain an uncontradictious space-time continuum from ultimate consciousness than to produce conscious- ness from an ultimate space-time. Take this affair of the continuum. Professor White- head tells us that it is secured by the covering which one event gives to another and to its own ** event- particles." You can divide an event into an infinite number of event-particles, but the whole event extends over them in unbroken duration. This is true. It is also true that if once you start splitting up events into event-particles you are saddled with all the inconven- iences of discontinuity. The event as a whole, as a covering continuum, exists only for consciousness which holds together all the moments of its duration. For the idealist, consciousness is the covering event. I have tried to show both that consciousness is ulti- mate and that there is consciousness and conscious- ness, and that the realist attack bears hard, not on primary consciousness which perceives, feels, wills, remembers, conceives and imagines, but on conscious- ness which returns on itself, on that secondary, super- vening consciousness which reflects, judges, infers and reasons. Professor Whitehead is right when he says that it is no explanation of anything to say that ** there is a mind knowing it, " if he means that things are not INTEODUCTION ix made or modified by the play of mind on them. But this play is the act, not of primary but of secondary consciousness. I have not seized on this distinction because it is an easy way out of the difficulty, but because it seems to me to be a simple fact of experience. I should be ashamed of treating so plain a platitude as if it were a discovery were it not that it is continually over- looked. The main assumption of realism — that in knowing we know that things exist in themselves apart from any knowing — rests on the confusion. I have tried to show that this assumption is not justified; that primary consciousness knows nothing about things outside and apart from itself and makes no affirmation of their independent existence ; that this again is the work of secondary consciousness, and that we have only to examine our primary consciousness in its innocence and purity to see that it is so. The affirmations of secondary consciousness (which are what realism goes on) come too late. It does indeed report a distinction between itself and what it knows ; but what it knows is nothing more nor less than that primary block of consciousness in which there is no distinction between knowing and things known. / I am not going to apologise too much for this book; for it is not a defence of my ** Defence of Idealism." On the contrary, it is an attempt, successful or unsuc- cessful, to remedy the many shortcomings of that light- hearted essay. The worst of these were its failure to realise the supreme importance of Space-Time in the problem of consciousness, and the bearing of Values on the moral problem. I am still in the curious position of admiring beyond everything the work of the realists with whose con- X INTEODUCTION elusions I am not able to agree. I have no longer any prejudice against realism, and would even be glad if somebody would convert me to it, so that I might enjoy the advantages of the position ; for example, its freedom from metaphysical care. About all the arguments for idealism there is an air of melancholy compulsion, while for sheer intellectual delight, give me realism. It has turns of surpassing fascination and surprise. Such is Professor Laird's idea that when you remem- ber Mont Blanc you are really and truly back in the past, beholding the mountain. Such Professor White- head's theory of Time, and Professor Alexander's cor- relations of Space-Time and his vision of Deity. These things come on you like the first burst, long ago, of Plato and Spinoza, of Kant and Hegel, on your excited youth. I know no other philosophy that provides a comparable thrill. As it was not possible, while still struggling with my opponents, to convey any sense of my profound in- debtedness, I record it here, lest in the agitation of controversy I should seem to have forgotten what it would ill become me to forget. If I betray ignorance of many contemporary idealists, it is because for years I was satisfied with Kant and Hegel relieved by Schopenhauer and Mr. Bradley, and because, lately, my chief interest has been in seeing what can be said against idealism. It is the realists who have made me look to its defences and who have most helped to show me the possible lines of reconstruc- tion. I could have done nothing without Professor Alexander's work on Space-Time. Much as idealism owes to idealists, its larger debt must be to the first realist who taught them to *'take Space and Time seriously." So, after years of devotion to Mr. Brad- ley's Absolute, I wanted to see what would happen if INTEODUCTION xi I simply followed the trail which, thanks to Professor Alexander, I saw before me. If it happens to have struck across somebody else's trail, so that I seem to have borrowed without acknowledgment, I apologise. The part of the present essay I feel most nervous about is that in the second section of Chapter III, where I have ventured to criticise Professor White- head's work. The idealist who has no expert math- ematical knowledge must always be haunted by a ghastly fear. For all he knows, the mathematician may come out any moment and slay him with a set of equations, and he will not even have the benefit of knowing how dead he is. Again, I am afraid that in my chapter on The Antinomies of Space and Time, I have done less than justice to Professor Boodin who has written three bril- liant philosophic works : Time and Reality; Truth and Reality and A Realistic Universe; besides his essay on Cosmic Evolution.^ He has succeeded in making even Pragmatism fascinating. But it seemed a pity that so fine a thinker should have taken up with such a lament- able view of space and time. The more so, as his pragmatic realist intentions have not blinded him to certain aspects of the case that make for idealism, and he has shown very clearly that he sees where the root of the matter lies. Thus in Time and Reality: ''We can never prove . . . that what appears as continuous is not objectively discrete. Thus the surface of the water and the pictures of the vitoscope appear as continuous, though objectively we know that they are discrete. The continuity here is in the per- ceiving subject, not in the perceived object. . . . The only way then to be sure we have a continuum is intellectually to construct one. If you ask, then, how we know that there is such a continuum, whether it is not merely an ideal construction, we answer that this is irrele- vant to our purpose; but if there is objective continuity at all it must be thus constructed." * Published in The Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society: Vol. XXI. xii INTEODUCTION The nniiistructed student should be warned that realism is more formidable than it can be made to look. Also that when the critics of Professor White- head and Professor Alexander have done their worst, Space, Time cmd Deity, the Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge and The Concept of Nature are likely to stand with the greatest philosophic works of the twentieth century. I do not imagine for one moment that my own idealism is watertight, or that no doubt will ever trou- ble me as to the truth of its assumptions. All meta- physics are highly problematic, and the idealist is not more bound than other people to furnish a watertight system. Enough if his theory does not leak too much ; he cannot prove anything any more than other people. His assumptions need not even be a better description, provided they give a more adequate and consistent ex- planation of the facts. But they must be adequate, they must be consistent, and they must explain. I can hardly hope that mine fulfil these requirements at all points. It must be admitted that idealists before now have spoiled their case by injudicious statements. I have tried to avoid injudicious statements, but it is more than likely that I have not been so successful as I think. The worst, or the best, that can happen to me is to be found out. I shall not care if some idealist comes along and says, **This isn't new idealism. So and So has said it already ten times over;^' for then I shall have So and So 's support. Or if another ideal- ist says, * * This will never do. This isn't the way to re- construct idealism. I can show you a much better one,'' I shall not care, provided he does show me. And I hope I shall not miad very much if a realist comes and smashes the whole thing to smithereens, INTRODUCTION xiii provided lie convinces me of some truth I have not seen. I can only say, ^ * This is the truth about idealism as I see it now. * ' I submit myself to the judgment of those who know how hard it is, in this adventure, to escape disaster. May Sinclair. London, July 29th, 1921. CONTENTS PAGE Introduction vii-xiii BOOK ONE : THE CRITICAL PREPARATIONS CHAPTER I The Old Idealism 1 i The Position 1 ii Epistemology 3 iii Future of Idealism 13 II The New Realism 15 i The Realist Position. 15 ii The Realist Theory of Memory 22 iii The Realist Theory of Relation and Knowledge. 29 ^iv The Strength of Realism 36 V Objections 37 III Some Realist Theories of Perception 39 i Professor Broad and the Real Counterpart ... 39 ii Professor Whitehead and the Concept of Nature. 81 iii The Critical Realists 114 rv Antinomies of Space and Time 139 i The Antinomies 139 ii Some Modern Solutions ........ 142 iii The Compact Series Considered 158 V "Space, Time and Deity" 162 i Space-Time 162 ii The Categories 179 iii Quality 191 iv Consciousness 195 V Deity ^ 209 BOOK TWO : RECONSTRUCTION OF IDEALISM 217 VI Space, Time and Consciousness ...,,.. 219 i The Problem 219 ii Consciousness and Space- Time. e. 224 iii Consciousness and the Categories. ^. 232 iv Relativity 243 XV XVI CONTENTS CHAPTER PAGE Vn Space, Time and Other Consciousnesses. ^. 246 i Forms of Consciousness 246 ii Reversible Time Series 247 iii The Fourth Dimension 249 iv Dream Space-Time ,. 251 V Personal Perspectives 252 Vni Difficulties and Objections 260 i The Challenge 260 ii The Crux 261 iii Being and Being-known 267 IX Primary Consciousness 274 i The Distinction 274 ii The Naif Confusion 283 iii The Unperceived Reality and the Crucial Relation. 284 X Secondary Consciousness 290 i The Work of Mind 290 ii Relation of Primary and Secondary Consciousness 291 _ _ iii Realism and Idealism 293 XI Ultimate Consciousness 295 i Necessity of Ultimate Consciousness 295 ii Problems of God's Knowing 299 iii The Moral Problem 303 iv Free- Will 305 V Relation of Finite and Ultimate Consciousness. 307 XII Summary 311 i The Unsolved Problems 311 ii Primary and Secondary Consciousness .... The idealist is fatuously sanguine if he expects his. own pet system to come up out of the turmoil looking J just the same. Never before has there been such a ruthless exposure of the weak points in his position. At the present moment it seems fairly safe to say that the Old Idealism, I mean the Idealism of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, of Berkeley, of Kant and Hegel, of the new-Kantians and new-Hegelians, all the old logic and epistemology (horrible word) will have to go and give place to an idealism which will take serious account of the world of space and time. The Old Idealism owes its present rather dubious position not only to its more recent excesses, but to the shadiness of its transactions in the past. Consider its origins. It started with the crime of question- 1 2 THE NEW IDEALISM i begging. Descartes 's **I think, therefore I am'' was really a very glaring instance. Since then Idealism has never ceased to mix up the ratio essendi with the ratio cognoscendi and to glory in the confusion. Still one aspect of Idealism should not be lost sight of. Hitherto it has always been a reaction against some foregoing dogmatism. It started critical. Even with Descartes it started critical. It may even be said that the most valuable part of the Cartesian philosophy is its criticism, its scepticism, its method. And modem idealism, properly speaking, starts with Kant, following Hume. Even realists will admit that, as Hume's philosophy, like Berkeley's, was a justifi- able reaction against the dualistic realism of Locke, Kant's philosophy was a justifiable reaction against the dogmatic realism of Wolf. Every great philosophic system is a reaction or a development from its prede- cessor ; in either case it must be critical, since develop- ment also involves selection and rejection. Idealism, then, is primarily a criticism. Whatever construction or reconstruction it may end with, it begins empirically with an examination of experience. In Kant's hands it became a system that any realist can in his heart respect, even when he has danced on Kant's Anti- nomies and his Unity of Apperception, and his Trans- cendental Ego. We know that the Critical Philosophy ended in a formidable scepticism, a drastic doubt of appearances, a thoroughgoing system of relativity. Even the schemata of space and time, even the categories, con- stitutive of experience though they may be, apply only to appearances, not to things-in-themselves. By a beautiful irony of logic, Kantian idealism ends in dual- ism, too. There is a gulf fixed between thought and the Thing-in-Itself. Kant's schemata fall apart from his categories. The august categories, after aU, are not I THE CRITICAL PREPARATIONS 3 constitutive of reality, they are barely constitutive of phenomenal appearance, though they receive its taint. They are ready-made intellectual forms, salvage from an exploded logic, clapped on to the given stuff or con- tent of sensation, frames into which sense-data, like so many window panes, somehow amazingly contrive to fit. Constitutive or not, thought partakes of the phenomenal, the ultimately unreal character of its sen- suous content. Knowledge is cheated of Being, if the Thing-in-Itself remains unknown and unknowable. At the same time this dualism between appearances and reality was simpler than the dualism of Descartes and Spinoza, simpler than any preceding realism. And the next step in simplification was obvious. Hegel took it. He knocked the bottom out of dualism with one immense simplifying phrase: ** Thought is the Thing-in-Itself; why go out of your way to assume any other? The Ding-an-sich does not skulk and dodge unknown behind phenomena ; it is part, the most essen- tial and permanent part, of the entire show. An ulti- mate, unknown, skulking and dodging Ding-cm-sich is an unwarrantable and superfluous duplication of the real ; he called it a dead-head. Wherever you pick him up he is concerned with the process of self -determin- ing, self -realising thought ; with the posing and oppos- ing and reconciling of its di:fferences; with the world of Becoming, of passing away and with the passing away of the passing. And the Thing-in-ItseK emerges again and again in higher and higher forms, as it swings itself upwards, eternal and selfsame through all the intricate movements of the Triple Dialectic. Nothing could be more complicated, yet nothing could be simpler. It seems almost childishly simple when you catch the trick of it. The world is neither more nor less than a system of thought-relations. A trans- parent system. The net in which Hegel snares the un- /■ ) 4 THE NEW IDEALISM i wary world is **a net of diamond.'^ Sense itself, the crux of Hegelianism, what is it but one of two terms in a *^ thought relation''? This cosmos of perceived relations is through and through *^ objective'' for us, for finite and relative consciousness ; but the subject- object relation itself falls into the net of Absolute thought. Its being is to be known. Pure unqualified Being is the thinnest and poorest of the categories, but Absolute Knowledge is Being in its totality. It doesn't greatly matter whether this is or is not a true account of Absolute Idealism. It is the account that passes for it with most of Hegel's followers and all of his opponents. I do not think it distorts Hegel more than he distorted himself in his Logic. Anyhow it is what we mean when we talk about Absolute Ideal- ism ; and it has secured a firm and independent footing under that name. That the grand totality of thought is itself only a moment in the process of Absolute Spirit; that spirit should be regarded as a neutral * * Third, ' ' the underlying, unifying reality of * 'matter ' ' and ** consciousness"; that in Hegel's system, properly understood, the logical aspect is ultimately trans- cended ; all this may be urged with equal passion and reason by the devotees of Hegel; in spite of them, in spite of his own reiterated protests, his Logic stands as the most thoroughpaced system of epistemology (that horrible word again!) ever known. Thought is the Thing-in-Itself ; it is ultimate Eeality; it is the Whole; so comprehensive is it that it renders Spirit or any other metaphysical entity superfluous. We are forced to the preposterous conclusion not only that all Knowing is being, but that all being is knowing, which appears, to say the least of it, improbable. Observe that in each system of Idealism some funda- mental element of reality escapes the net. Thus Berke- ley takes little account of thought, Hegel is not serious I THE CRITICAL PREPARATIONS 5 with sense; Kant fails to correlate them: all three neglect the metaphysical and creative will. u Now if it fails to establish an Absolute Consciousness carrying and covering the totality of things, Idealism Episte- is done for. Its reductio ad ahsurdum is Solipsism. °^ Of the world before consciousness we shall be obliged to say either that it never existed, or that it only exists now, from moment to moment, in consciousness that provides it with a past time and a behaviour deducible (in consciousness) from its behaviour here and now. "We shall have to say of the solar system, of the ple- siosaurus flopping on his mesozoic beach, of the club mosses and tree ferns of the carboniferous age that they have only this problematical existence. They never really were ; they are constructions in conscious- ness of what they would have been had there been any consciousness to perceive them. When I go out of the room, the room and everything in it ceases to exist; I give birth to the hall and stair passages instead as I go along them. I may carry all space and all time about with me, but within them the vast cosmos lives and dies according to whether I am conscious of it or not. When I am unconscious space and time also die. To return to sanity, the vital problem for the episte- mological idealist is the problem of the synthetic judg- ment; the judgment by which we enlarge our experi- ence. At first sight it looks as if such judgments could only be empirical, as if it were truer to speak of experi- ences by which we enlarge our judgment; as if there could be no such thing as synthetic judgments a priori. All judgments concerned with a priori material, all judgments of pure space-time, all judgments of pure mathematics, even the simplest, so long as they ad- vance from a lower to a higher power — from the point 6 THE NEW IDEALISM i to the line, from the line to the plane, from the plane to the solid — are synthetic and are a priori in the sense that they are true independently of actual concrete experience. But mark what follows. According to the Old Ideal- ism the mind is the origin and home of all the a priori stuff there is. You would therefore suppose that in any judgment a priori the mind is not travelling along the field of experience and arriving at fresh know- ledge ; it is merely unloading the thought-stuff which, previous to all experience, it carries about with itself as a matter of course. Consequently no a priori judg- ment can be synthetic in the sense of giving it some- thing that it hasn't got. It is in the field of space and time that the self adds to its knowledge and that syn- thetic judgments become possible. If Kant is right and space and time are forms of sensible experience alone, not only will pure mathe- matical knowledge be independent of space and time, but there will be no such thing as synthetic mathe- matical knowledge a priori. No advance, no discovery in the higher ma,thematics. When Bolyai found that two parallel lines can be drawn through one point, con- trary to Euclid's axiom (contrary, you may say, to all previous experience of parallel lines), you would have thought that if ever there was a synthetic judgment it was that. The whole business is purely synthetic, neither contained in the notion of parallel lines nor provided for by their definition; and it is purely a priori, since no possible concrete experience would give you the behaviour of Bolyai 's parallel lines. And so far from denying all this Kant declares, very emphatically and in leaded type, that all mathematical judgments (even some apparently analytic ones) are synthetic. And yet, if he is right and the mind sup- plies the a priori elements of the cosmos, he has no I THE CEITICAL PEEPARATIONS 7 business to talk about a priori synthesis at all. Bolyai will not bave discovered new properties of parallel lines. The pure mathematician cannot discover new properties of anything; he does nothing but cart old properties about with him in his a priori portmanteau and take them out and look at them as he goes along. The Old Idealism is in a dilemma. If Kant is right and space and time are schemata of sensible perception only, they may provide for the synthesis, but they do away with all the a prioriness. If Hegel is right and they are forms of a priori thinking, where is the syn- thesis ? On either theory it is clear that you can't have both. This affair of the synthetic judgment is crucial for Idealism. The epistemological idealist has got to ac- count for the unearned increment of mathematical knowledge, for the mathematician's advance from the known a priori to the previously unknown, when on his hypothesis the a priori unknown is a contradiction in terms. But an a priori truth becomes an empirical truth as soon as it is known, that is to say, is taken up into the general body of experience. On the other hand no pos- sible manipulation will convert an empirical truth into an a priori one. So that, properly speaking, there are no immediate empirical truths, only empirical facts, from which truths are derived by a process of general- isation. It is a fact that I see a brickbat fall to the ground, but it is not a truth, though my judgment may be true or false according as it agrees or not with the fact. It is a truth that * * action and reaction are equal and opposite," but it is also an empirical fact. It is obvious that though Newton arrived at his third law of motion by a process of thought, it is not a law of thought that he arrived at but a law of motion. So when the idealist (I mean the epistemological 8 THE NEW IDEALISM i idealist) says that the universe is ^^the work of thought/ ^ what does he precisely mean! Presumably he does not mean that it is the work of an ingenious Creator manufacturing a cosmos after a pattern of ideas in his head. He means that thought is more intimately connected, more deeply interfused with the universe than that. He means that thought is the stuff of it, and that so far it is downright con- crete and objective. He does not mean merely that the universe is of such a sort that it may be understood, that by taking thought we can find out all about it. He means nothing more nor less than that thought builds up a sohd barracks of a cosmos with the bricks of sense- data and the mortar of the categories. If he is a post- Kantian idealist he will of course reduce space and time to thought relations and settle them down com- fortably among the categories, too. And he will tell you all about the categories, but of the sense-data he will not be able to give any coherent account at all. Even the nature of the correlation will be left obscure. Enough that somehow or other we can and do apply (changing the metaphor) the neatly cut pattern of our thoughts to the unreasonable and shapeless stuff of sense. And all the time there is no state of consciousness, no real process of thinking, that in the least resembles this process — except that after-thought which recog- nises the presence of the categories in any given sec- tion of experience. True that, cut it where you will, experience will yield to thought at least the categories of space and time, of relativity, of quality or quantity or both. And equally, the data of sense will play, so to speak, into their hands ; they will not on the first casual encounter show themselves hard and recalci- trant to thought. That is a later development. Up I THE CRITICAL PREPARATIONS 9 to a certain point they will submit placably to thougM- relations. So far so good. But the epistemological idealist takes little or no account of cosmic processes which are in no sense processes of thought. He can make nothing of cosmic relations, the terms of which are not terms of thought but such things as matter and motion, energies, inertias, velocities; chemical actions and re- actions ; life, growth and reproduction. The sequences in which he builds up his universe are ludicrously un- like the sequences in which the universe would appear to have built itself up before thought, before conscious- ness came into it. The epistemological idealist declares that the being of the external universe is to be known. And though you may say of any given section of experience that in the perception of its quality you join the category of quality on to its sense-data, that the finding of the cause of any given effect involves the application of the category of causality, and so on through the whole Hst, still, this is not the method by which experience is increased section by section. The external world becomes known by processes of synthesis and analysis : not by such synthesis as the dabbing of categories on to sense-data, nor by such analysis as disentangling them again from the result; but by thought's patient, subservient following of processes the majority of which are inherently irrational, irreducible to any thought. The idealist may be able to face without a qualm the idea of the plesiosaurus disporting himself on his mesozoic beach when there isn't anybody to look at him, the idea of primordial matter in motion, of worlds, indubitably real, whirling away in space millions of years before the appearance of consciousness on this 10 THE NEW IDEALISM i planet. His Absolute ensures Mm against loss. His cosmos is perfectly safe, floating about in the vast con- sciousness of the Absolute. The plesiosaurus is not playing to an empty house, for he has the aU-appre- ciating eye of the Absolute upon him. So far the ideal- ist has nothing to worry about. But what he ought to worry about and doesn't is the idea of a cosmos claimed to be the **work of thought'' and the very process of reason, which yet contains so many things that are not reasonable, so may processes that are not processes of thought at all. When we con- sider what reason is and what it does and what it doesn't do, have we any reason to suppose that in the Absolute consciousness an irrational relation becomes a rational one, or that matter in motion, say, is known as spirit at rest? It may be. The pattern of the cosmos as a whole may be a purely static affair. Within the absolutely resting Whole matter in motion may turn out to be a mode of the manifestation of spirit; but, if it does, it will not be by virtue of its epistemological qualities; and at the present stage of proceedings we have no business to assume its spirituality. For it is the thorough-going irrationality of the uni- verse that is dangerous to our idealist. The bosom of the Absolute is not the comfortable home he thinks it is. It is too comprehensive, too hospitable to those irrational elements. Look at some of them. Who can measure the pro- portion of reason and non-reason in the universe? There is reason in certain complexes, in all adaptations of means to ends ; in all laws derived from laws, in all generalisations from generalisations, in all measures and proportions. There is reason in a physical equa- tion, in a resultant whose factors are known, in all mathematical processes apart from their ultimate I THE CRITICAL PREPARATIONS 11 terms ; in every calculation of causes whose effects are known or of effects whose causes are known ; in every calculation whose terms are known; in every relation whose terms are known ; in every quantity-quality cor- relation when the original connection between quantity and quality is known. But there may be no reason in the original connec- tion ; for example, between vibrations of a certain wave length and the quality red. No reason in the connec- tion between molecular nerve change and stimulus, and between nerve change and the sensum red, or between an act of will and muscular contraction. No reason in chemical action and reaction, in magnetic attraction; in gravitation; in the transformation of heat into energy and energy into heat, or in any other physical permutation, no reason in certain fundamental axioms of mathematics, in any irreducible, indefinable term, in any ultimate entity. We shall presently see that there is no reason in pure space and pure time. No reason, it would seem, in the very elements from which the cosmos is built up. And besides his confusion of being with knowing, and his neglect of those ultimate, irreducible things, the idealist ignores the WUl. Will is chief among ulti- mate, irreducible things. If Will is to be treated merely as a department of human psychology, why not thought? In what respect is a ** category'' (which, after all, has got to be put there by somebody or some- thing) more commendable than an act of will? Epis- temology is always shirking this fundamental problem of the will. What are we to say then? Is the realist right in re- garding all knowledge as, primarily, discovery? The idealist is faced with the glaring fact that there is discovery, not only in the physical sciences, but m his oivn a priori realm. If he stopped to consider se- 12 THE NEW IDEALISM i riously what he means when he talks about ^* experi- ence ' ' he would see that he is juggling with the double meaning of the term. Even when he is honest and calls the thing consciousness all the time, he is landed in queer places. It is not that my private and personal adventure, the process by which I enlarge my know- ledge, is made to figure as an ontology. The idealist distinguishes between the empirical experience of the ego in space and time and the ontological function of the categories. He can insist that knowledge is only discovery for us, for finite consciousnesses progress- ing in space and time. Experiencing is not experience. But this doesn't help him very much. The trouble is that the actual process of the cosmos bears no earthly resemblance to the means by which he affirms it to have arisen in consciousness. It looks as if he would have to surrender to the first realist who comes along and confronts him with the difference. But no. It is at this point that he makes his bolt for the Absolute. Now supposing the idealist is not thinking of con- sciousness as we know it at all; that he has made a successful bolt and found his refuge in the Absolute. It is not possible that thought alone should be this Ab- solute. Whatever else it does, the Absolute must cover, must somehow provide for all those recalcitrant, irrational, unclarified elements that make up half the fabric of the universe. He can only arrive at his Ab- solute by exposing the relativity of the ultimate cate- gories of thought and filtering them away. The Ab- solute is nothing if it is not a higher, more comprehen- sive term than thought, higher and more compre- hensive even than consciousness. After all, being is not knowing, and knowing is not being; so that epis- temological idealism is broken on its own wheel. I THE CEITICAL PEEPARATIONS 13 • • • 111 For this generation, anyhow, epistemological ideal- ism is dead ; and I confess I do not see how there can Future be any resurrection for it. With its one-sidedness, its J^^ blindness to the actual pattern of the universe, its fan- tastic logic, its failure to correlate the forms and pro- cesses of thought with the forms and processes of things, it was bound to provoke a formidable reaction. I think it must be admitted that new realists are right in contending that there are things in the uni- verse which forever escape the snare of thought; that you might as well put salt on its tail as try to catch the universe that way. By no conceivable process can it be reduced to terms of mere knowing. To conscious- ness as we know it the universe presents an obstinately objective front. Now it is against all precedent that any philosophic system should appear again in the precise form in which it originated. If idealism is to survive, if a New Idealism is to spring up by way of reaction from the New Eealism, it will be a system as far removed from logics and epistemologies as the idealisms of Kant and Hegel, of Green and Bosanquet and Bradley are re- moved from the sensational idealism of Berkeley and of Hume. If it is to survive It is unthinkable that Idealism should remain unaf- fected by the profound change that has come into phi- losophy with the appearance of the New Eealism. Clearly it has got to move on or go under. These essays are an attempt — slight, I am aware, and imperfect, as such tentative efforts must be — to estimate the effect of the New Eealism, to map out the first lines of pos- sible movement. One thing is obvious : that no advance is possible without definite revisions and surrenders. Idealism must not underrate the enemy's forces, and 14 THE NEW IDEALISM i it must be prepared to cede certain territory. It must leave behind it certain nobly built redoubts, certain cherisbed positions no longer tenable. It must give up its unnatural logics, scrap its obsolete apparatus of thought-relations. And it must change its methods. It must once more be empirical, critical, reactive. And that is no simple affair of surrenders and concessions. Idealism must effect an entire change of front. It must come out into the open and external universe of things. It must somehow contrive to reconcile the universe of things with the universe of thought, without doing violence to its palpable objectivity. It must cease to make non- sense of the plain principles of physical science, and of the plain man's progress in the world of so-called physical realities; and it must be proof against all attacks based on the behaviour of that world. First of all, then, the New Idealism has to do as Pro- fessor Alexander tells us, **Take space and time seriously.'' a THE NEW EEALISM 1 The New Realism was bound to come. Other phi- losophies anticipated its insurgence against the per- Tie sistent tyranny of the Absolute and the One. I think Position it was William James who first pointed out that the appetite for unity is not a universal one. It seemed to him a perverted appetite, or at best an acquired taste, a psychological eccentricity which, as it has no bearing upon conduct, the pragmatist need not take into account. But Humanism, Pragmatism and Vitalism did little but revolt; they were incapable of accomplishing a revolution. None of the three had anything that could be called a logic or an ontology. Still, by setting up irrelevant standards they succeeded in side-tracking philosophy for quite a number of years; Humanism defending the honest man's claim for possession of a world of real things uncontaminated by subjective processes; Pragmatism turning its back on the quest for ^^ ultimate'' reality and substituting its scale of * 'working" values for the logical criteria of truth; both boosting the ''Many" at the expense of the One ; Vital- ism presenting its elan vital as the ultimate reality, and reconstructing the perceived cosmos with reference to our action and our action only, going from one contra- diction and confusion to another in its attempt to re- concile realism and idealism, physical science and meta- physics. They have nothing in common with the new 15 16 THE NEW IDEALISM ii realism but their respect for ^^ external" reality and their distaste for the Absolute of idealist monism. They need not detain us here.^ Eealism then starts with a criticism of the idealist theory of knowledge and being. Its method is strictly empirical. It takes the cosmos provisionally at its face value and asks: Why assume that this is a universe rather than a pluriverse? Why assume that it is a world of appearances rather than of real things ? Why assume that its being is only to be known ? If you are going by appearances, which is all that on your own showing you have to go on, then the cosmos presents every appearance of plurality, every appearance of in- dependent reality utterly outside consciousness. But this independence and outsideness is more than a mere matter of appearance ; it follows from the nature both of reality and of knowing. If a thing is known, ipso facto it is something more than the act, or state (which- ever it may be) of knowing. Idealism assumes that this act or state is simpler than it really is. Knowing involves at least two terms and a relation, whether you take the subject and object as your terms and con- sciousness as your relation, or consciousness and the object of consciousness, when your relation will be an unknown x. In either case the object will stand on its own feet as a separate and independent entity, which is all that realism wants. 