John Watson

“ Why is the effort to find a true individual by summing up space or time necessarily abortive, if not that the mind refuses to be satisfied with that which is no real unity? It is the tacit conception of the world as complete that makes us aware of the inadequacy of all our efforts to determine it as a mere externality of parts or a flux of moments. Had we no higher conception of existence, we should never be conscious of the inadequacy of our conception of it as an extensive quantum. Thus in the consciousness of objects as in space and time we are already beyond that consciousness ”

“ We are therefore entitled to say that no process of knowledge or action can ever bring the human mind to a stage in which reality will present itself as other than that of the unity of subject and object, which is the only reality we are capable of knowing. ”

“ No doubt the teacher who has a firm grasp of the history of philosophy may do much even in that way to stimulate thought in his pupils; but the method of encouraging men to trust to lectures, or histories of philosophy, for their knowledge of the masters of thought, seems to me fatal to all real philosophical insight. What is wanted is that the student should get his knowledge at first hand. Direct contact with the mind of an original thinker like Spinoza has a stimulating influence and a suggestiveness that can never come from merely hearing what another man has to say about him. ”

“ Kant, as we have seen, accepted the view of Leibnitz that the real must be individual and self-complete. Now, there is a sense in which this must be admitted to be true. It is a contradiction in terms to speak of more than one universe: beyond the totality of existence there can be no existence. That reality is one, is a conviction which has tacitly or expressly been the guiding idea of every thinker since Thales, and, as we may even say, of the whole race of man since the dawn of consciousness. ”

“ Thus the consciousness of the limitations of human intelligence suggests the idea of an intelligence that is unlimited — a perceptive intelligence which does not proceed, by a successive process of synthesis, from part to part, but contemplates reality in its fulness and perfection. We are therefore compelled to think of a reality that is not borne along on a changing stream of time, but is beyond time, self-complete and self-determining. This conception prepares the way for a true view of man as an active or moral being. ”

“ The most rigid determinist has evidently no reason so far to complain of any want of "vigor and rigor" in Kant's doctrine. Of that doctrine it is a striking feature that it puts the mental series of events—the perception, desire, and volition—on precisely the same footing as the physical movements by which it is preceded and followed. Events in the external world are in unbroken continuity with the internal stream of ideas. If Kant still persists in maintaining the freedom of man, it is not without a clear apprehension of the apparent strength of the determinist's case. ”

“ On the other hand, it is impossible to find among objects in space and time a true individual. Every object in space is infinitely divisible, and, beyond the remotest object that we may picture to the imagination, we can imagine others still more remote. Similarly, it is impossible to break up time into indivisible units, or to go back in imagination to a moment of time beyond which time was not. The true individual thus eludes us on both sides: it can neither be thought nor presented. It would therefore seem that we are for ever shut out from a vision of reality as it actually is. ”

“ THE CRITICAL PHILOSOPHY AND IDEALISM.
HUMAN thought develops by antagonism. The great masters of speculation are of kin with the great prophets: impelled by a fiery energy and enthusiasm, they build up an edifice of thought, which is imposing by its large and bold outlines, and which for a time is admired as a flawless product. A new contribution has been made to the intellectual treasures of the race, and men are neither able nor disposed to criticise it. ”

“ But there have been as many definitions of the Unity which is presupposed in all forms of existence as there have been philosophies. Now, the Kantian conception of the ultimately real is at bottom that of a reality which is complete in itself, not by the inclusion, but by the exclusion, of all differences or relations. ”

“ As a matter of fact, no one is satisfied simply to know the relative position or magnitude of an object, or the mere place of an event in the flux of time: we begin with such knowledge, but we go on to inquire into its less obvious nature — its causal relations, its development, its meaning for human life. ”

“ Strictly speaking, thought has not a number of conceptions, but different conceptions are but convenient distinctions which we make in the one process of conception by which we become conscious of what reality truly is. And, just as we cannot tell what the acorn is until we have seen it develop into the oak, so it is impossible correctly to characterize Reality until thought has done its perfect work, and reached the ultimate phase of conception. ”

“ To preserve human freedom, Kant therefore denied that in his rational nature man can be viewed as in time, and, as knowledge is only of that which is in time (or space) , he further denied that we have a knowledge of ourselves as free beings. We do not know ourselves as free, though the fact of our possessing an idea of the moral law necessitates the belief in our freedom. ”

“ Eliminate the idea of the self as it is presented by an act of thought, and the natural impulse may still remain, and may even be followed by the instinctive movement of seizing and eating the food within reach, but there will be no act properly so called. Desire involves the interpretive power by which the relation of food to my physical well-being, and indirectly to my moral well-being, is presented to my consciousness. Thus, in having a desire I have already gone beyond the mere consciousness of a certain event. Desire is, however, not yet volition, but only the idea of a possible volition. ”

“ The impossibility, therefore, of resting in the mere knowledge of coexistences and successions arises from the consciousness that we can only know reality in its completeness by abandoning the monotonous repetition of space on space, time on time, quantum on quantum, and seeking for a more fundamental mode of comprehending it. ”

“ Not only is the phrase "far more perfect omnipotence" nonsense, — the translator's nonsense; for Spinoza says nothing of the kind, — but "a — at least in my opinion — far more perfect omnipotence of God" is as pretty a "derangement of epitaphs" as I remember ever to have seen, and "apprehending as creatable an infinity of things" does not overwhelm one by its elegance. The meaning of Spinoza would perhaps have been better understood had the passage been turned somewhat thus: "The omnipotence of God has therefore been in activity from all eternity, and to all eternity will continue in activity. ”

“ The debt of humanity to Kant is incalculable, but a slavish submission to his system, and especially to the letter of his system, can only result in arresting the free activity of the human spirit. We must therefore be grateful to any one who helps us, not merely to see Kant, but to see beyond him. This is the task which Professor Caird, in his exhaustive work on the Critical Philosophy, [1] has set himself to perform, and he has done it in a way that leaves nothing to be desired. ”

“ If we must present objects to ourselves as extensive or intensive quanta, we can never come directly into the presence of individual reality, since no quantum can possibly be a true individual. Thus Kant proceeds to urge the claims of thought in such a way as to bring out the limits of our perceptive experience. He maintains, in the first place, that we cannot possibly have experience of the world of sensible objects either as absolutely limited, or as absolutely unlimited, in time or space. ”

“ Thus man conceives of himself as under a law that is independent of the world of sense. True, he cannot know himself as he is, but in the very possession of the idea of duty he learns that he must in his inner nature be capable of freedom, and that this freedom may be realized in the act of willing the moral law. ”

“ When we have learned that Leibniz passed through a Hobbes-stage, a Cartesian-stage, a Spinoza-stage, and that in a certain year he was occupied mainly with a certain philosopher, we have still to ask what was the value and the relation to one another of the stages through which he passed, and of the ideas so occupying him. The history of the struggles of the individual thinker towards a new conception of things may throw much light upon the application of ideas, if the historian is himself a man of speculative insight, but not otherwise ”

“ Hence we must deny the Kantian doctrine, that the quantitative determination of things is inapplicable to things as they truly are. The true view is that things are related quantitatively, not merely for our intelligence, but for all intelligence; though, at the same time, they have much deeper relations. The various stages of knowledge are not connected in the way of mutual exclusion: the physical sciences do not overthrow, but build upon the foundation of the mathematical: the mental sciences build upon both. ”

“ This is the assumption which leads him to affirm that knowledge is never of the real, but only of the real as distorted by the subjective forms of space and time. It is because no object that is completely isolated from all connection with other objects can be found in the sensible world, that he brands the whole of our knowledge as phenomenal, and falls back upon a faith in a reality that cannot be compressed within the frames of our perception or thought. Here is the point where Idealism joins issue with Kant. ”

“ For, as forms of human perception, space and time are for us unalterable. Since they belong to the very constitution of our minds, we can apprehend no object of sense without giving it the form under which such apprehension is alone possible for us. Leibnitz was therefore mistaken in supposing that space and time are merely confused conceptions of the mutual relations of things ”

“ It is the same with time, which has no beginning and no end. The perception of a particular space or time thus exists for us only in the process by which it is generated and united with other spaces or times. The synthetic activity exercised by the mind in this case takes the form of a successive synthesis of homogeneous units, for every part of space or time is precisely alike. This form of synthesis lies at the basis of all our sensible presentations, for obviously no sensible object can escape from the conditions of our perceptive experience. ”

“ It is here that the distinction of phenomenal and real is made to play an important part. "If our actions," says Kant, "are nothing more than events in time, freedom cannot be saved. On the contrary, we must hold man to be a mere puppet or automaton. ”

“ Kant was therefore unable to admit that we can by thought obtain an actual knowledge of individual realities. When we have emptied objects of their spatial and temporal relations, we have not attained to a knowledge of the real, but on the contrary we have entered into a world of abstractions. ”

“ The truth is, I believe, that the man who starts with the Ethics will find it almost impossible to make any headway. But why should he start with the Ethics? In the De Intellectus Emendatione Spinoza has given us a sort of autobiography of his spiritual development, in which he tries to explain how he raised himself from the limited point of view of ordinary thought to the wider vision of philosophy. ”

“ The peculiar doctrine of Kant in regard to the nature of space and time is thus interwoven with his whole system of thought. In one form or other he is always occupied with the opposition of objects of sensible experience, which can never be ultimate realities because they can never be complete individuals, and the inextinguishable impulse to believe in and to seek for such realities. ”