the reality that we accept is for us at any time the simplest description of the phenomena as known to us. To put this view in our own way, we might say that the world is scientifically viewed as a per¬ fectly united whole, which would, if fully known, fully satisfy our highest mental desire for continuity and perfect regularity of conception. Therefore it is that the “ universal formula ” of the last chapter is a conception that expresses the scientific ideal. With less perfection, harmony, and unity of thought about the world, science will never rest content so long as she continues to be science. But for this very reason science postulates that this perfect order must be already realized in the world. It is not merely that this order is the practically unattainable but still necessary ideal for our reason; but we must postulate that this order is already present in things, far off as our thought is from it. This pos¬ tulate gives life to our scientific thought. Without it our search for an order that need not exist is meaningless play.
This postulated order, however, if found, would mean for us relative simplicity and economy of con¬ ception. The infinite mass of phenomena would be conceived as one whole. The maximum of wealth of facts would be grasped with the minimum of men¬ tal effort. We postulate after this fashion that the world loves parsimony, even as we do.
To illustrate by the case of one science. A great master of mechanical science has called it the science which gives the simplest possible description of the motions in the world. If we accept this account of mechanics, we are at once puzzled by the fact that most mechanical theories make assumptions about the forces at work in the world, and that all of them predict coming facts. But forces form no part of the experience or of the mere description of motion. And the future is not yet given to be described.
How then does all this agree with the definition in question? Very well indeed. For those who as¬ sume, forces to explain given motions, always assume just those forces that will directly explain, not any description at random of the motions given in expe¬ rience, but the simplest possible description. Any motion being relative, never for our experience abso¬ lute, we can assume at pleasure any point in the world as the origin or point of reference that shall be regarded as at rest, and so we can get an infinite number of descriptions of any given motions. Wb can make any object in the world move at any de¬ sired speed or in any desired direction, simply by altering the origin to which we shall choose to refer its motion in our description thereof. But all these possible descriptions are not equally useful for the purposes of the science. Some one of them is the simplest for all the motions of the system in ques¬ tion; and this we regard as best expressing the ac¬ tual natural truth in the matter. The assumption of just such forces as would explain this simplest system of motions as described, satisfies us. We say, these forces are the real ones at work. But still we know that the forces assumed only express in another form the fact that the description in ques¬ tion is the simplest. Is this, however, really all that the science does with the given motions? No, one thing more the science assumes, namely, that if the system of motions in question is not subject to any external influence, it will remain fundamentally and in deepest truth the same in future, that is: The simplest description of the given motions in a sys¬ tem of bodies that is wholly independent of the ac¬ tion of bodies without the system, this description is permanent for all states of the system. This assumption is needed before mechanical science can venture on any prediction, or beyond mere descrip¬ tion of past and present motions. This is the pos¬ tulate of the uniformity of nature in its mechanical shape.1 The complete present description of the world would reveal the whole future of the world.
"WTiat, however, does this postulate of uniformity express for our thought? What is the philosoph¬ ical outcome of it? It expresses for our thought the demand that nature shall answer our highest intel¬ lectual needs, namely, the need for simplicity and absolute unity of conception. Mechanical science can no more do without this assumption than can any other science.
The ground that we have here very briefly passed over is known to all readers of modern controversy. We can only add our conviction that, as far as it goes, the foregoing view is a perfectly fair one. Whether or no there be any deeper basis for this Professor Clifford, in his essay on Theories of the Physical Forces, in his Lectures and Essays, vol. i., p. 109 sqq., has under¬ taken to reduce this postulate to the general one of Continuity. The philosophical outcome would be the same.
postulate, it is sure that science makes the postulate, and does not give any deeper basis for it. For nat¬ ural science it is a faith.
Now this faith, not blind faith but postulate, not basely submitted to merely because we must submit to it, but boldly assumed because we think it worth the risk, wherein does it differ from what our funda¬ mental religious faith would be if we made of that also no mere dogmatic creed, but a general assump¬ tion, no mere passive trust, but an active postulate? Beneath all the beliefs that we could not demon¬ strate in our last chapter, lay the determination not so much to prove one cast-iron system of dogmas, as to find some element of reality that should have an infinite worth. The world should be at least as high as our highest conception of goodness. And to this end the partial evil should be in deepest reality universal good, even though our imperfect eyes could never show to us how this could be, — could never see through the illusion to the “ image¬ less truth ” beneath. Therefore, although we vainly sought among the Powers of the world for proof of all this, may we not still hope to approach the Eternal Reality with these postulates, and to say: “Though thou revealest to us nothing, yet we be¬ lieve thee good. And we do so because this faith of ours is a worthy one.” Possibly then our Religion will be just the highest form of our conduct itself, our determination to make the world good for our¬ selves, whatever baseness experience shows us in it.
Then we can say: Just as science is undaunted by the vision of the world of confusion, so shall our religious faith be undaunted by the vision of the evil of the world. We shall war against this evil in the trust that the highest reality is not against us, but with us, just as we try to comprehend the world with the faith that the highest reality is in conformity with our private reason. In both cases we take the risk, but we take the risk because it is worth taking, because to take it is the highest form of activity. As the faith of science helps to make life rational, so the religious faith helps to make life in the high¬ est sense moral, by insisting that the ideal labors of our moral life are undertaken not alone, but in har¬ mony with the world as known to the Infinite.
To make the parallel a little clearer, we may say that science postulates the truth of the description of the world that, among all the possible descrip¬ tions, at once includes the given phenomena and at¬ tains the greatest simplicity; while religion assumes the truth of the description of the world that, with¬ out falsifying the given facts, arouses the highest moral interest and satisfies the highest moral needs.
All this has often been said, but it has not always been clearly enough joined with the practical sug¬ gestion that if one gives up one of these two faiths, he ought consistently to give up the other. If one is weary of the religious postulates, let him by all means throw them aside. But if he does this, why does he not throw aside the scientific postulates, and give up insisting upon it that the world is and must be rational? Yea, let him be thorough-going, and, since the very perception of the walls of his room contains postulates, let him throw away all these postulates too, and dwell in the chaos of sensations unfriended. There is no reason why he should not do this unless he sees a deeper foundation for his postulates. We have no mere dogmas to urge here. Let one abandon all mere postulates if he has not the courage to make them, but then let one consist¬ ently give them all up. The religious postulates are not indeed particular creeds. One may abandon creeds of many sorts, and yet keep the fundamental postulate. But if he abandons the fundamental pos¬ tulate of religion, namely, that universal goodness is somehow at the heart of things, then he ought consistently to cease from the fundamental postu¬ late of science, namely, that universal, order-loving reason is somehow the truth of things. And to do both is to lack the courage of rational and of moral life.
Such is the way of the postulates. And yet we desire to find, if we can, a more excellent way. These postulates must be confirmed if possible, and then subordinated to higher results. It was the skeptical work of the last chapter to turn attention away from false or inconclusive methods of estab¬ lishing religious faith. There we saw how much must seem, according to all the ordinary apologetic methods, theoretically doubtful. In this chapter we have seen how postulates, theoretically uncertain, but practically worth the risk, are at the foundation of our whole lives. Hereafter we shall seek to dig beneath these foundations to that other sort of theo¬ retical certainty whereof we have made mention. If we get it, then all our work will have been worth while. Our skepticism will have saved us from an¬ tiquated methods, and from worn-out dogmas. Our faith will have been purified by being reduced to certain simple postulates that are not identical with the traditional creeds, although those creeds tried to express them. And both our skepticism and our faith will then finally become elements of a broader Religious Insight.
The dead external reality, into whose darkness we had to peer in vain for light, has indeed transformed itself. It is no more merely dead, or merely exter¬ nal. It is ours and for us. It was a world of doubt in the last chapter, just because we made it dead and external. Now that we have seen how it was the expression of postulates, it seems to have become plastic and ideal. Yet what it has gained in plas¬ ticity, it has lost in authority. After all, is not this business of postulating into the void a dangerous one? Is it not a hollow and empty activity this, if we really reflect upon it? Courage indeed we must have; but is religion no more than courage? Nay; we must have if possible some eternal Truth, that is not our postulate, to rest upon. Can we not get some such comfort? And may there not be some higher relation of our lives to that truth, — such a relation that the truth shall be neither the arbitrary product of our subjective postulates, nor a dead ex¬ ternal reality such as was the world of doubt? We are bound still to search.
CHAPTER X.
Et$ rbv oAov ovpavov a7ro/?A.e^a? to $v elvai <pTj<ri tov Oeov • Aristotle, concerning the doctrine of Xenophanes.
Still we are seeking the Eternal. Postulates about it we must indeed make, or else we shall do nothing. But can we not go beyond the mere postu¬ lates? Is there no other road open to the heart of things? In fact many other ways have been sug¬ gested. The religiously interesting efforts towards a suggestion of such ways have been the special work of philosophical Idealism in the past. Let us then see to what results philosophical Idealism offers to lead us.
I.
“The world of dead facts is an illusion. The truth of it is a spiritual life.” That is what philo¬ sophical idealism says. This spiritual life may be defined in many ways. But the multitude of the ways of defining it do not altogether obscure the sense of the doctrine. Plato and St. Augustine and Berkeley and Fichte and Hegel give us very various accounts of the spiritual life that is to be at the heart of things, but they agree about the general thought. As to the proof of the doctrine, very many writers have presented this idealism as a sort of prod¬ uct of poetical fantasy, and have thereby helped to bring it into disrepute. We profess no such enthu¬ siasm. If we are to give any foundation for our postulates by means of an idealistic doctrine, then this foundation must be no mere poetic fancy, but a well-framed philosophic doctrine, able to stand crit¬ icism, and to satisfy very unemotional aims, as well as the higher moral aims themselves. But if ideal¬ ism is to receive rigid theoretical tests, we may still, in view of our present discussion and its needs, be helped on our way more directly if we first consider very generally and briefly what idealism could do for us if it were established, thereafter going on to the theoretical consideration of its claims.
That the Eternal is a world of spiritual life is what the idealists of the past have maintained, and the religious force of their doctrine lay not so much in the insight that was thus offered concerning the nature of the powers that are in the world, as in an¬ other insight. Just here idealistic doctrine and its outcome has been seldom comprehended, even by the idealists themselves. The world, merely viewed as a heap of warring Powers, cannot be a world of spiritual life. If the real world is nevertheless a world of such spiritual life, it must be so because, beyond and above the Powers, there is this higher spiritual Life that includes them and watches over them as the spectator watches the tragedy, — a Life in which they live and move and have their being.
The characters in a tragedy do not constitute as war¬ ring powers, in their separate existence, the si^nificance of the tragedy. The spectator, the overseeing thought, for which and in which these fancied pow¬ ers contend, this it is that gives them unity and sig¬ nificance. Even so the highest spiritual life that the idealist finds in the world is not to be a power among other powers, but a thought for which exists all that is. Hence the deepest assertion of idealism is not that above all the evil powers in the world there is at work some good power mightier than they, but rather that through all the powers, good and evil, and in them all, dwells the higher spirit that does not so much create as constitute them what they are, and so include them all.
How all this is to be more fully explained, and how it is to be justified, if at all, by idealism, we shall see further on. But for the present we may suggest that such idealism as this has a peculiar ad¬ vantage in dealing with the problems that we found insoluble in the discussion of the world of the Powers. There we found a world of contending elementary forces, A, B, C, etc. As contending powers they must needs appear finite. If one was good, another was or might be evil. And as we had to deal only with the warring elements, the thought that partial evil may, after all, be universal good seemed not very plausible, and quite indemonstrable. The world being the collection of the powers that are in it, the good and evil of the whole seemed to be the sum of the separate good and evil elements. But now we have a thought that may make possible the existence of universal goodness. If the tragedy as a whole is good, although its elements are evil, so like the tragedy may the world be universally good if the single evils of reality, like the single parts of the tragedy, are elements in a whole that exists for an all-see¬ ing, all-inclusive Spirit, in whom are all things, and whose nature as a whole is good. Thus, then, if we cannot yet see just how the partial evil is universal good in the all-inclusive mind, we can already, from the outset at least, fancy that it may so be. The All-Enfolding may be good even although of necessity there are elements in his world of infinite experience that, separately considered, may be evil. So ideal¬ ism offers as its theodicy not that the world contains a surplus of good powers, or that the creative power, when it made the devilish powers, still meant well; but the theodicy of idealism suggests a way in which evil may be, after all, a partial view of an all-em¬ bracing goodness.
Hence the importance, for our present discussion, of an effort to treat calmly and critically the main doctrine of philosophic idealism. Here at least is some suggestion of a chance that we may, in time, come to rise above mere postulates, and may found a positive religious theory. For the postulates are indeed, in themselves, not enough. We want, if possible, to get beyond them, though we are ready to accept them as final if we can do no better. Yet we are still forced to begin our account of idealistic doctrine with nothing better than postulates.
II.
The imperfection of the author’s private under¬ standing of deeper tr ith has forced him to come to idealism in the first instance by a very straight and easy path, that most deeper idealists would deride. After he had by that road reached the definite con¬ ception of one form of idealism, he found a further thought by which this idealism seemed to be trans¬ formed into a doctrine of greater philosophical and religious significance. At the same time, the proof of the doctrine first seemed to him to become clear and all-embracing. Now a reader cares little for the contents of an author’s note-book, or for a his¬ tory of his opinions; but sometimes the exposition of a view is a little helped by presenting it in suc¬ cessive parts that follow in their order somewhat the line of the author’s own development. Hence the present chapter shall suggest philosophic ideal¬ ism as a mere hypothesis, that still only tries to ex¬ press our fundamental postulates. Then we shall go on to see what deeper foundation for it we can find. And furthermore, our first suggestion of ideal¬ ism shall be a purely theoretical conception, not assumed to satisfy directly an ethical postulate, but merely to express theoretical postulates about the world. Then we shall be able to see what religious doctrine can be built upon this foundation. This way commends itself as avoiding the greatest dan¬ ger of idealism, namely, fantastic speculation with noble purposes, but with merely poetical methods.
Our present method shall be coldly theoretical, however deeply our religious philosophy is concerned in the outcome.
For the first then we shall suppose our whole task to be the suggestion of a plausible, i. e. of a simple, adequate, and consistent hypothesis about the nature of external reality. Hereafter we shall consider more critically the foundation of such hypotheses. Provisionally, then, we shall suppose that, by a per¬ fect theory of knowledge, the following result has been reached: Human beings are able to form ideas that correspond in some way with a real world, out¬ side of themselves. That is, the sequence of human ideas corresponds to sequences of external events, or to relations of coexistence among external things. The necessary or uniform connections of human ideas correspond to regular or to universal connec¬ tions among external things. Or, in the brief form of Mr. Herbert Spencer’s phraseology, to each nec¬ essary relation a: b in human consciousness there corresponds a relation A: B in the external world.
Suppose, then, that all this has been established. No one will admit more readily than the writer that this supposition is at this point merely tentative. Our theory of knowledge is yet to be completed, and be¬ tween its conception and its realization there are still wide oceans of doubt. We shall, in fact, deal with the problems of this theory in the next chapter. But for the moment suppose admitted what scientific thought generally takes for granted, namely, the cor¬ respondence of inner and outer relations in such wise that the former are naturally copies of the lat¬ ter. And, on this foundation, suppose that we intend to consider what hypothesis as to the nature of the related terms A and B in the external world is, on the whole, the most plausible.
For the sake of avoiding controversy we may for the moment leave out of account two old questions. We cannot really escape either, and both will sternly confront us before we get in at the door of the tem¬ ple of certainty. But here at the outset we are playing with hypotheses, and may be absolved from the responsibility of securing ourselves beforehand from all possible attacks. The first is the question of the idealists: How can any reality be conceived unless as implying or including states of conscious¬ ness? For the moment we will waive this part of the Berkeleyan contention altogether; for we are not yet concerned to prove by metaphysical analysis the universal coincidence of consciousness and reality. We wish merely a plausible hypothesis to be ad¬ vanced as to the nature of what more popular thought means by reality. The second question that at the outset we avoid is the one concerning the ground of the assumed agreement between the external and the internal orders of facts. Whether this ground lies in a causal determination of our consciousness by the external world, or in a preestablished harmony of both, matters not. W e first take our stand, then, upon the facts admitted by popular belief. Here are feelings, sequences of feelings, thoughts, trains of thought, systems of scientific belief: all internal facts. Beyond the consciousness of these internal facts stretches (so we now assume, and only assume) another world of facts, in which something corresponds to each one of these feelings, some order of facts to each sequence of feeling, some system of facts and of laws to each properly constituted system of beliefs. The external order of the world beyond corresponds to the order of this internal world of our consciousness, but is not this order. A plausi¬ ble hypothesis is required as to the nature of this corresponding external order.
Let us examine Berkeley’s familiar hypothesis, which, as a mere hypothesis, we can examine apart from any study of Berkeley’s philosophical argu¬ ments for his idealism. According to Berkeley there exist conscious beings, more or less like ourselves, of whom the head and father is God. Now external to all beings besides God there is a real world. This real world is made up of the eternal system of God’s thoughts.
“ When I deny sensible things an existence out of the mind, I do not mean my mind in particular, but all minds. Now it is plain they have an existence exterior to my mind, since I find them by experience to be independent of it. There is some other mind wherein they exist, dur¬ ing the intervals between the times of my perceiving them; as likewise they did before my birth, and would do after my supposed annihilation. And as the same is true with regard to all other finite created spirits, it nec¬ essarily follows, there is an Omnipresent Eternal Mind, which knows and comprehends all things, and exhibits them to our view in such a manner, and according to such rules as he himself hath ordained, and are by us termed the laws of nature.” 1 1 Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous, III.
This so familiar hypothesis of Berkeley is in part founded upon a thought that for the present we have agreed to neglect, i. e. upon the notion of the exter¬ nal world as the cause of our internal impressions. Not being caused by myself, my ideas, reasons Berke¬ ley, must have an external cause. And the only intelligible cause is an active spirit. Yet for our present purpose this thought is not important. We are not asking about the cause of our conscious states, but about the way in which we can most plau¬ sibly conceive of an external world corresponding to these states. The correspondence is assumed. Into its ground, be it preestablished harmony or physical influence, we do not just now inquire. Our only criteria of plausibility, if causal explanation is dropped, are therefore adequacy, simplicity, and con¬ sistency. Is Berkeley’s hypothesis consistent with itself, and is it the simplest hypothesis possible?
Stripped of non-essential features, the hypothesis is that there corresponds to our consciousness another higher and farther-reaching consciousness, containing all that is abiding in our consciousness, and much more besides. This consciousness is in form and matter a rational spirit, having definite purposes in the creation and education of the various finite spir¬ its. These purposes require for their accomplishment that our conscious states should within certain limits agree with this higher consciousness, — should corre¬ spond to it in form and to a certain extent. This corre¬ spondence constitutes what we mean by truth. There is no external world but this other consciousness.
To Berkeley, as we know, the essential part of this doctrine was the teleological part. That God’s thoughts and our correspondence thereto result from and express God’s purposes in creating the world, this was for Berkeley the main point to be proven. But if the teleological element of the doctrine be for this first left out of account, there is another part that we just now wish to hold fast. Our thought is true by reason of its correspondence to the fads of an actual consciousness, external to our own: this hypothesis has an interest apart from its origin and from its original use. Why in philosophy should we be afraid of doctrines because they have an as¬ sociation with some dreaded theological dogma, or with some enthusiastic and over-confident system of the past? About the nature of the external world we have at the outset nothing but hypotheses. Be¬ fore we test them in any very exact way, we may with safety try to understand them. Perhaps what seemed the wildest of them all may turn out to be the very best. Because a certain hypothesis was put forward rather as a demonstrable and eternal truth than as a hypothesis, shall we reject it without further examination? Perhaps it may in fact turn out to be part of the eternal truth.