substitute atoms and ethereal media, not because we abandon the position that ex¬ ternal reality resembles our ideas, but because wider experience is found to be best reduced to unity by the latter, not by the former ideas. The atoms and the media are themselves only provisional notions, since more experience may be better reduced to unity, for all we yet know, by some other ideas. But throughout remains the postulate: external reality is somewhat like our ideas of its nature.
We have been betrayed by the doctrine that we have combated into forms of speech that do not ade¬ quately express the Critical notion of reality. We hasten to complete our conception by adding the omitted elements. External reality is like our con¬ ceptions of it; so much, we have seen, is universally postulated (postulated, be it noticed, not directly ex¬ perienced, not forced upon us from without). But the kind of likeness still remains to be defined. Can the external reality be conceived as being, although in nature like our conscious states, yet in no neces¬ sary relation to consciousness, as being neither a con¬ sciousness nor for a consciousness? The answer is the whole struggle of idealistic thought, the whole progress of philosophical analysis in modern times.
One cannot go over the field again and again for¬ ever. The state of the controversy can be roughly stated thus: When the notion of external reality is based solely upon the application of the notion of causality, all degrees of likeness or unlikeness be¬ tween thought and things are assumed, according to the tastes of individual thinkers. External reality is once for all absolved from the condition of being intelligible, and becomes capable of being anything you please, a dead atom, an electric ' fluid, a ghost, a devil, an Unknowable. But if the subordinate character of this postulate of causality is once under¬ stood, the conception of reality is altered. What is real must be not only vaguely correspondent to an ill-defined postulate, but in a definite relation of like¬ ness to my present consciousness. That this is the actual postulate of human thought is shown by those systems themselves that ignore the postulate of like¬ ness, and has been illustrated in the foregoing. But what forms does this postulated likeness take? For the first, the postulated likeness between my idea and the external reality may be a likeness between my present conscious state and a past or future state of my own, or between this present state and the conscious state of another being. The whole social consciousness implies the postulate of a likeness be¬ tween my ideas and an actual consciousness external to mine, fashioned in my own image. But the sec¬ ond generally recognized form in which the postu¬ late of the likeness of internal and external appears is the form according to which I postulate that a present idea of my own is not like one of my own past or future states, not like any actual past or future state in another being of my own kind, but like a possible experience. That our ideas can ade¬ quately express possibilities of sensation that are actually never realized, either in ourselves or in any other known creature, this is a familiar postulate of natural science. The laws of nature are generally, as is admitted by all, what Lewes called “ ideal con¬ structions,” expressing experiences for us never real¬ ized, but permanently possible. And so extended is the use of the concept of possible experience, that, as we know, Mill in one of his most interesting chap¬ ters gave “ permanent possibility of sensation ’ as an adequate definition of matter.
Now the position of modern phenomenism is, that by these two postulates, or forms of the one postu¬ late of Likeness, the whole notion of external reality is exhausted.
The external world means, according to this posi¬ tion, the possible and actual present, past, and fut¬ ure content of consciousness for all beings. And this result of modern phenomenism we regard, thus far, as the most acceptable postulate about the world. Either as postulate or as demonstrable theory the position is maintained by all the modern idealists. You can find it, for example, stated in Fichte’s “ Bestimmung des Menschen ” and other shorter philo¬ sophic essays (less successfully, we think, though much more at length, in the two larger expositions of the “ Wissenschaftslehre), in the Hegelian “Phanomenologie,” in Schopenhauer’s “ Welt als Wille und Vorstellung,” in Ferrier’s “ Institutes of Meta¬ physic,” in J. S. Mill’s “ Examination of Hamilton,” in Mr. Shadworth Hodgson’s “ Time and Space ” and “ Philosophy of Reflection,” in M. Renouvier’s “ Logique G6n£rale,” in lesser books innumerable, for example, in Professor Baumann’s “ Philosophie als Orientirung fiber die Welt” (in the first chapter), in Professor Schuppe’s “ Erkenntnisstheoretische Logik,” in Professor Bergmann’s “ Reine Logik.” Not of course that all this multitude of thinkers, dif¬ ferent in method, in ability, in aim, in everything but in the fact that they are post-Kantian idealists.
would accept the foregoing statement as a fairly complete account of their doctrines. Some of them would laugh at the simplicity of our terms. But, we choose to mention so confused a list to show how, in the midst of the greatest variations, they all agree about one fundamental truth, namely, that thought, when it inquires into its own meaning, can never rest satisfied with any idea of external reality that makes such reality other than a datum of conscious¬ ness, and so material for thought. Sensualism and the most transcendent a 'priori speculation agree in coming at last to flee in ceaseless unrest from every support for au external reality that may seem to offer itself beyond the bounds of consciousness. This phenomenism of post-Kantian speculation we accept, as at all events the simplest and least contradictory postulate.
So much, then, for one motive of our hypothesis about the world-consciousness. Reality appears as the object either of an actual or of a possible con¬ sciousness. But there remains in this definition of the postulate still one obscure point. What is meant by possible consciousness? WRat can there be for consciousness' beyond the grand total of all actual past and future states of consciousness in all beings? For what purpose and by what right shall we build a world of possibility above or beside the world of actual experience? This question seems too little appreciated and too much evaded by most thinkers. When Miff called matter a “permanent possibility of sensation,” he left room open for the puzzling question: But what is this creature called a possibility? Is it an actual fact? Then what actual fact? If not actual, then in being a mere possibility matter is non-existent.
This scholastic character of the abstract noun “ possibility ” was remarked and criticised by Pro¬ fessor Max Miiller in an article in “Mind,” III.1 We shall not find in most writers on this subject less scholastic or better defined terms for naming the same aspect of the postulate of external reality. In fact, if we suppose that one surveys the whole range of actual consciousness, past, present, and future, and postulates no facts that are not for and in conscious¬ ness, it is difficult to see what will be the meaning of any added “ possible reality.” Possible, for the first, is anything that one conceives, in so far as one conceives it at all. I could possibly have wings and a long tail, an hundred eyes, and a mountain of gold. All that is possible, but in what sense? In this sense, that I do actually imagine myself as possess¬ ing these things. “ Empty possibilities,” or “ imag¬ inations as one would,” are facts of consciousness in so far forth as they are imagined; and they have no other existence. The world of truth is not enriched by these possibilities, whose whole existence is in the actual conscious idea of them. But not in this 1 P.347. “If therefore Mill and his followers imagine that by defining Matter as the permanent possibility of sensation, and Mind as the permanent possibility of feeling, they have removed the dif¬ ficulty of Kant’s Ding an sich, they are mistaken. Their possibil¬ ity of sensation, if properly analyzed, means things or substances which can become objects of sensation.” Professor Muller’s result is not one that we can wholly accept; his criticism of the word possibility is important.
sense is matter to be a “permanent possibility of sensation.” The icebergs in the polar seas are to be real, not in so far as I now imagine them, but in so far as there exists or holds good the law, that were I present I should see them, were I to touch them I should feel them, and that both seeing and feeling would be determined in certain ways beyond the control of my will. The pages of that closed book, the bones inside the body of that cat, my own brain * the molecules of the oxygen that I am breathing, all these, in so far as they are not now actually in my consciousness, are to be still real as “ possible expe¬ riences.” But what kind of unreal reality is this potential actuality?
If we inquire into the motive that leads us to postulate these possible experiences, we shall find it to be the familiar and universal wish to apply the postulate of uniformity to our confused actual ex¬ perience. Our actual experience is not always gov¬ erned by obvious laws of regular sequence. But in postulating consciousness beyond our own immediate data, we are led, by our known prejudice in favor of unity and simplicity, to postulate that the real suc¬ cessions of facts are uniform, whatever may be the case with the fragments of reality that fall within our individual experience. I see an apple fall, and no more than that. But I postulate that if I could have had experience of all the facts, I should have observed a series of material changes in the twig on which the apple hung, that would have sufficed to restore the broken uniformity and continuity of my experiences. In this way it is that, as remarked above, the conception of causal sequence does not create, but organizes and perfects, our notion of ex¬ ternal reality. There is something beyond our expe¬ rience, namely, another experience; that is the first postulate. Experiences form an uniform and regular whole of laws of sequence. That is the other postu¬ late, subordinate to the first. This postulate helps to form for us our idea of the material world beyond individual consciousness; an idea that science ac¬ cepts for its uniformity, without inquiring further into its nature, while a more critical reflection de¬ clares that the facts assumed as existent beyond the range of individual conscious beings are “ possible experiences.”
This assumption of “ possible experiences,” an as¬ sumption made to satisfy the postulate of uniform¬ ity, was expressed, m our hypothesis of a world¬ consciousness, by the supposition of an universal actual experience. Why? W e answer, because the assumed “possible experiences” themselves, by ideally filling up the gaps of actual experience, are intended to lead us to the conception of one uniform absolute experience. This absolute experience, to which all facts would exhibit themselves in their connection as uniformly subject to fixed law, is conceived as “ possible.” But once again, what does that mean? Is the meaning only the empty tautol¬ ogy that if all the gaps and irregularities of indi¬ vidual experience were got rid of by means of con¬ necting links and additional experiences, these gaps and irregularities would disappear? Is the mean¬ ing only this, that if there were an absolute experience of an absolutely regular series of facts, this experience would be absolute and uniform? Or again, is it enough to say that any possible experi¬ ence, an iceberg in the polar sea, my brain, the in¬ side of yonder book, exists for me only as “ my rep¬ resentation ”? Of course, 1 know of it only what I conceive of it, yet I postulate that it has some real¬ ity beyond my representation. This postulate is for us in this preliminary discussion a fact, of which we want to know, not the justification (for we still seek none higher than the fact itself of the postulate), but the meaning. I know of my fellow only what I conceive of him. Yet I postulate that my con¬ ception of him is like him, whereas I do not postu¬ late that my conception of a dragon is like any real animal. Just so I postulate that my conception of the “ possible experience ” called an atom, or the North Pole, is valid beyond my experience, and be¬ yond the actual experience of any known animal.
But I do not postulate that my conception of the possibility that future men might have wings and tails is like any future reality whatever, or in any way valid beyond my conception.
Here, then, is our dilemma. Matter as a mere possibility of experience is more than any animal’s known actual experience. And yet this matter is to be real for consciousness. Nor is it to be real for consciousness simply in so far as the possible expe¬ rience is represented or conceived. The reality con¬ sists not merely in the representation in present con¬ sciousness of a possibly experience, but in the added postulate that this conception is valid beyond the present consciousness. How is this postulate to be satisfied unless by assuming an actual world-con¬ sciousness?
Let us sum up the conditions to which we have here subjected our theory of reality. External real¬ ity was to be postulated, not given; existent for us because we willed it to be. To a portion of our con¬ scious states we ascribed a validity beyond the pres¬ ent. This ascription of validity was to constitute our whole knowledge of the external world; for ex¬ ample, our belief in our own past and future states, in our neighbor’s existence, and in the existence of space, of matter, and of motion. Such an external reality was always conceived as more or less com¬ pletely the counterpart of our idea of it, and hence, as in nature, like the facts of our consciousness. The idea that we at any moment form of the real¬ ity beyond ourselves was the expression of the effort to reduce to unity the present sense-data and the present conception of our own past experience. This reduction to unity took place in certain forms. Thus we conceived the external reality as in space and in time, and, in the second place, as in causal relation to ourselves. The conception of causal relations thus projected into the external reality becomes, when completed, the conception of a completely united and uniform whole of facts. We conceived the external reality as subject to fixed laws of se¬ quence, certainly existent, even though, in our lim¬ ited experience, they be undisco verable. As subject to such laws the external reality was a whole* pos¬ sessing organic unity. But the external reality was also conceived as being real for consciousness and real only for consciousness. The external reality, being an organic whole, must therefore be conceived as the object of an absolute experience, to which all facts are known, and for which all facts are subject to universal law. But there thus has arisen an ob¬ scurity in our theory of reality. The real is to be only for consciousness. Consciousness, however, is popularly thought as existent in our fellow-beings. And yet the postulated reality is to be an organic whole, containing series of facts that to these beings are known only as possible, not as actual, experiences.
We are then in this position. To complete our theory, we “ want a hero.” Not, to be sure, a Don Juan, but a hypothetical subject of the “ possible experiences.” This hypothetical subject we have pos¬ tulated only as a hypothesis. That is, its existence is not yet seen to be a necessary result even of the postulate that there is an external reality. One can form other hypotheses. But this hypothesis has the advantage of being simple and adequate. Moreover, to assume a consciousness for which the “ possible experiences ” are present facts, is to do no more than our theory seems to need; whereas any other hypoth¬ esis (Berkeley’s theological hypothesis, for example, in its original form) seems to assume more than is so far demanded by our theoretical conception of reality. For the sake then of expressing one as¬ pect of our fundamental postulate, we suggest what of course we have not yet proven, that all the con¬ ceived “ possible experiences ” are actual in a Con¬ sciousness of which we so far suppose nothing but that it knows these experiences, or knows facts corre¬ sponding in number and in other relations to these experiences. Thus our idealistic doctrine in this its first form is explained and defended.
IV.
But all this hypothesis needs the deeper confirma¬ tion that we are here seeking for our philosophic doctrines. How is any such idealism to be estab¬ lished? And then, if established, how is this notion of a passionless eternal thought to be transformed into anything that can have a religious value? What we have advanced as hypothesis, expressing the pos¬ tulates of popular thought, is to receive such ad¬ ditions and such foundation as shall fit it to rank as a reasonable philosophic theory of reality. So far it has been a wish of ours, and we have not even shown that it is a pious wish. Can we make of this All-Knower a religiously interesting Spirit? And what shall we do with his still vague relation to the single conscious lives that are to get truth by agree¬ ing with him? If he is not in deepest truth a power that makes them, then so far there is a strange, dark, inexplicable necessity, determining somehow their harmony with him. Plainly, though we find it best to approach our doctrine by this road, we have not yet reached the heart of the mystery.
There is one haunting thought that now must be permitted to come for a time out of its hidingplace and to confront us. It says: “ All this postu¬ lating how vain and worthless, this hope for a proof of your doctrine how absurd, when your very hy¬ pothesis shuts up your human thought as it were in a cage. As you state the relation of the Universal Consciousness in which exists the physical world, and the individual consciousness of the particular thinker, you make indeed the truth of this individ¬ ual thought dependent on its agreement with that all-seeing thought, but as you so far utterly separate the individual thought from the all-seeing thought, you make impossible any sort of transition from one to the other. This individual can never go out of himself, to meet that Infinite thought, and to see if he agrees with it. You put the model all-embracing thought M in a relation to the poor human thought h, in which no transfer of thought really takes place, but still you give to h the command that it shall copy M. Then you postulate that which is by your hypothesis unknowable, namely, that this correspond¬ ence has been attained, and this empty postulate you call a philosophy. After all, say what you will of the beauty and nobility and courage of postulates, all this seems a rather wearisome business. For the postulates appear the vainest of all things when viewed in the light of the very theory that they are to establish.”
This objection is a common-sense one, and formid¬ able. But, like all philosophic skepticism, rightly understood it will be our best friend. Possibly, in¬ deed, we shall have to complete somehow our notion of the relation of the individual minds to the all-em¬ bracing mind; but meanwhile let us take the objec¬ tion in its worst form. What does it lead to when carried to its fullest extent? It leads to absolute skepticism. It says: “ Perhaps then, after all, the relations of our individual thought are such that there is possible for us no foundation whatever for our postulates. They are all in the air. Everything is doubtful. We may be in error everywhere. Cer¬ tainty about the real world beyond is unattainable.” At this point then we are face to face with the utter¬ most theoretical skepticism. What shall we do with it? Why, just what we did with ethical skepticism in an earlier chapter. We must receive it in a friendly spirit, and must find out what it means and assumes. It will, in fact, transform this far-off ex¬ ternal world of the postulates into a true world of Spiritual Life.
One thing this skepticism implies, — one thing so simple as generally to escape notice among the as¬ sumptions of our thought. It implies that we can he in error about an external world. Therefore even this extreme skepticism assumes that there is a differ¬ ence between true and false statements about nature. But now what is involved in saying that a statement is either true or false? To affirm, to deny, to doubt, all imply a real distinction between truth and error; all three then involve in common the assumption that there is such a distinction. That which is in¬ volved alike both in the truth and in the falsity of a statement must itself be certainly true, and cannot be doubted. But what is this assumption implied in the very assertion that a statement about an external world is or may be false? This inquiry we must make if we are to understand our own skepticism.
If we begin this inquiry, we are met at once by a very vexatious paradox. There seems to be an as¬ pect in which all sincere judgments are true. Let us remember the fable of the knights and the shield. Each accused the other of lying. To each the oth¬ er’s account seemed deliberate falsehood. Yet each spoke the truth. Only neither expressed himself fully. Each should have said, “ The shield as it ap¬ pears from my side is golden ” or “ is silver.” But each left out the qualification. Each said the shield, simply. And hence the battle.
But this commonplace about the knights and the shield begins to worry us, when we reflect upon it, by becoming altogether too general in scope. Do we, in fact, ever make sincere assertions about things save as they appear to us? If I say, “ Sugar is pleas¬ ant to the taste,” and my neighbor says, “ Sugar is hateful to the taste,” is this a conflict of veracity? May we not both of us be sincere and truthful in what we say? And are color-blind men lying when they say that there is no difference in color between strawberries and the leaves of the strawberry plant when seen in certain lights? But why is it not just so with all the rest of the things that people say? If you are sincere in what you say, are you not al¬ ways in your assertions simply relating how your ideas appear to you and are grouped? If you say that nothing happens without a cause, do you not mean that what you conceive by the word cause is conceived by you as in connection with every event that you now have in mind? If you say that a straight line is the shortest distance between two I points, do you not mean that what you now conceive under the name straight line agrees with what you now mean by shortest distance? Very well then, how can there be any direct opposition between two sincere statements? Your neighbor says that Dar¬ winism is absurd. You say that Darwinism is true. Where now is in fact the controversy? He says that he has two ideas in mind; namely, an idea of what he chooses to call Darwinism, and an idea of what he chooses to call absurdity. He says that these two ideas agree, just as the knight said that his shield (i. e. the shield as seen by him) was silver.
You say that your idea of Darwinism agrees with your idea of truth, as the other knight said that the shield as seen by him was golden. Why fight about it? Thus all statements appear to be narratives of what goes on in our own minds. If they are sincere, if we mean them, who shall doubt that they are all true? Can any of us make assertions that are more than clear accounts of how we put our own ideas together? Why may not the thief before the judge sincerely say: “ O judge, my idea of what I call chicken-stealing agrees with my idea of what I call virtue ” And the judge may truthfully reply: “ O rascal, my idea of what I call your chicken-stealing agrees with my idea of what I call detestable petty larceny.” Are these two opinions really opposed, so that one is true, the other erroneous? Are these not rather different aspects of the universe? What is truth, moral or physical? Is not. every investiga¬ tion, every argument, every story, every anticipation, every axiom, every delusion, every creed, every denial, just a mere expression of a present union of ideas in somebody? Where do two assertions meet on common ground, so that one can be really true, the other really false? Have different judgments, in different minds or made at different times, any real common object at all? If they have not, how can there be any truth or falsity at all?
This paradox is wild enough if you look at it fairly. And yet many thinkers actually have main¬ tained it under various disguises as the doctrine of what is called the Total Relativity of Truth. Hav¬ ing himself passed through and long tried to hold and to rationalize this doctrine of Relativity, the author has some right to say something in opposition to it. What he has to say can be very briefly put. In its paradoxical form as above stated, the doctrine may be made plausible, and is a suggestive paradox, but it is certainly meaningless. If there is no real distinction between truth and error, then the state¬ ment that there is such a difference is not really false, but only seemingly false. And then in truth there is the distinction once more. Try as you will, you come not beyond the fatal circle. If it is wrong to say that there is Absolute Truth, then the statement that there is absolute truth is itself false. Is it how¬ ever false only relatively, or is it false absolutely? If it is false only relatively, then it is not false abso¬ lutely. Hence the statement that it is false abso¬ lutely is itself false. But false absolutely, or false relatively? And thus you must at last come to some statement that is absolutely false or absolutely true, or else the infinite regress into which you are driven makes the very distinction between absolute and rel¬ ative truth lose all its meaning, and your doctrine of total Relativity will also lose meaning. “ No abso¬ lute truth exists,” — can you say this if you want to? At least you must add, “No absolute truth exists save this truth itself, that no absolute truth exists.” Otherwise your statement has no sense. But if you admit this truth, then there is in fact an absolute distinction between truth and error.
And when we here talk of an “ absolute ” distinc¬ tion between truth and error, we mean merely a “ real ” distinction between truth and error. And this real distinction the fiercest partisan of relativ¬ ity admits; for does he not after all argue for rela¬ tivity against “ absolutists,” holding that he is really right, and they really wrong.
Yet, sure though we feel of the distinction, the paradox and its plausibility remain. How have different judgments, made at different times, any real common object at all? If they have none, then where is the postulated distinction of truth and error? What shall we do with our paradox? In what sense can a private opinion of one man be a genuine error? There must be such a thing as real genuine error, or else even our very skepticism fails to have the least sense, and we fall back into the utterly irrational chaos of not being able with truth to say whether we doubt that we are doubting. But yet how shall we explain the possibility of error? For here is an unique and fundamental postulate.
The next chapter shall be devoted to a more special and detailed study of this problem. But already we shall venture to suggest our solution. It is one that needs possibly some little consideration, and the reader will pardon us if we already state it, although we shall repeat it in another form hereafter. In fact, it is a critical matter for our whole discussion. Here, in fact, will be the point where we shall pass from idealism as a bare hypothesis, expressing pos¬ tulates, to idealism as a philosophic doctrine, rest¬ ing upon the deepest possible foundation, namely, on the very difference between truth and error itself. Our logical problem will become for us a treasurehouse of ideal truth. But just now we make only a suggestion, to which as yet we can compel no agree¬ ment.