“ Moreover, when the belief or inference is uncertain, need even in the shape of desire is not in itself a foundation of belief in the thing desired: to need a dinner is not to believe in getting it; and, as Aristotle said, “there is a wish for impossibilities.” It is fair, however, to add that Balfour has a further foundation for the belief in Nature, the survival of the fittest, by which those only would survive who possessed and could transmit the belief. ”

“ The things best known to man are the things which he now knows as a man. About these known things there is some agreement: about the beginnings of knowledge there is nothing but controversy. We do not know enough about the origin of knowledge to determine its limits. Hence, to proceed from psychology to metaphysics is to proceed from the less to the more known; and the paradoxes of psychological have caused those of metaphysical idealism. ”

“ At the same time, while the independence of metaphysics leads us to metaphysical realism, this is not to deny the value of psychology, still less of logic. Besides the duty of determining what we know, there is the duty of determining how we know it. But in order to discharge it, a reform of psychology as well as of metaphysics is required. Two psychological errors, among many others, constantly meet us in the history of idealism—the arbitrary hypothesis of a sense of sensations, or of ideas, and the intolerable neglect of logical inference. ”

“ The chief results we have found against materialism are that bodies evolving account neither for the origin of themselves, their nature, and their fundamental order of resemblance and difference, nor for the nature and origin of consciousness, nor even as yet for their becoming good for conscious beings. Hence we come to the realistic conclusions that among known substances some are bodies, others are souls; that man is body and soul ”

“ Again, the method of true realism is that of Aristotle, and consists in recognizing the independence of metaphysics. The contrary method is psychological metaphysics, which makes metaphysics dependent on psychology, on the ground that the origin of knowledge determines its limits. This is the method which, as we have seen, has led from psychological to metaphysical idealism, by the argument that what we begin by perceiving is mental, and, therefore, what we end by knowing is mental. Now, there is no principle of method superior to that of Aristotle—we must begin with what is known to us. ”

“ He avers that this “metaphysic of experience” is not idealism, or the tenet that consciousness is the only reality. It is realism—but inconsequent and inadequate realism, something like that of Spencer; according, indeed, more knowledge of the distinction between Nature as condition of sensations and God as condition of Nature; but very like in holding that all we know of natural forces is our perceptions. We know more, however, about a body, such as a bell, than either Spencer or Hodgson allows. ”

“ The common tenet of the whole school is that without inference we immediately perceive the external world, at all events as a resisting something external to our organism. But is it true? There are three reasons against it, and for the view that we perceive a sensible object within, and infer an external object without, the organism. In the first place, there are great differences between the sensible and the external object; they differ in secondary qualities in the case of all the senses; and even in the case of touch, heat felt within is different from the vibrating heat outside. ”

“ On this theory, then, founded on the conscious facts of double and single pressure in touch, and on the logic of inference, we have at once a reason for our knowledge of external bodies, and an explanation of the early appearance of that knowledge. The child has only to have its mother’s nipple in its mouth in order to infer something very like the mutually pressing parts of its own mouth. Having thus begun by touch and tactile inference, we confirm and extend our inferences of bodies in Nature by using the rest of the senses. ”

“ He must ask what are known things, and especially what has been discovered in the sciences; in mechanics, in order to find the essence of bodies which is neglected by idealism; in mental science, in order to understand consciousness which is neglected by materialism. With the conviction that the only fair way of describing metaphysics has been to avoid putting forward one system, and even to pay most attention to the dominant idealism, we have nevertheless been driven occasionally to test opinions by this independent metaphysical method. ”

“ The Scottish School never realized that every sensation of the five senses is a perception of a sensible object in the bodily organism; and that touch is a perception, not only of single sensible pressure, but also of double sensible pressure, a perception of our bodily members sensibly pressing and pressed by one another, from which, on the recurrence of a single sensible pressure, we infer the pressure of an external thing for the first time. Intuitive Realism is to be replaced by Physical Realism. ”

“ Nevertheless he gives absolutely no proof of the assumption that there is no sense of causality. There is none in the subsidiary senses, because none of them perceives the pressures exerted on them. But the primary sense of touch perceives one bodily member causing pressure on another, reciprocally, within the organism, from which we infer similar particular pressures caused between the organism and the external world; but without needing the supposed stupendous belief and assumption of the uniformity of Nature, which is altogether ignored in the inferences of the ordinary man. ”

“ Balfour says, given that men believe in Nature, they will survive; but he fails to show how they come to believe in it. Inference from sense is the one condition of all belief in anything beyond oneself, whether it be Nature, or Authority, or God; and it is the one condition of all needs, which are not mere feelings, but desires of things. The result of undermining this sure foundation emerges in Balfour’s attitude to the beliefs themselves. He holds that space, time, matter, motion, force, are all full of the insoluble contradictions supposed by Spencer ”

“ Vision does not perceive a sensation of colour; it perceives a visible picture, e.g. green, which is in the organism, but has never been proved to be a mental fact, or not to be a material fact. So touch perceives not a sensation of pressure, but a pressure which is a material fact in the organism. From a material pressure within we logically infer a material pressure outside. He thirdly assumes an appendix to the second assumption: he assumes that sense perceives mental sensations with succession but without causality, because no kind of cause is open to observation. ”

“ This is not to forget that the five senses are not our whole stock or to confine inference to body. We have also the inner sense of consciousness which is inexplicable by body alone. By combining, moreover, our knowledge of Nature with our consciousness of our own works, we can infer that Nature is a work of God. ”

“ The result of this confusion is that the moderns have no name at all for a distinct thing, and, being mere slaves of abstract terms, constantly speak of mere attributes, such as activity, life, will, actuality, unity of mental operations, as if they were distinct things. But an attribute, though real, is not a distinct reality, but only a determinant of a substance, and has no being of its own apart from the substance so determined; whereas a substance, determined by all its attributes, is different from everything else in the world. ”

“ Logical inference from sense is a process from sensible to insensible existence. The former error needs something deeper than a Kantian critique of reason, or an Avenarian criticism of experience; it needs a criticism of the senses. We want an answer to this question—What must we know by the senses in order to enable us to know what we infer by reason in the sciences? Without here aiming at exhaustiveness, we may bring forward against the dominant idealism a psychological theory of sense and reason. By touch I perceive one bodily member reciprocally pressing another in myself, e.g. ”

“ While these realisms come dangerously near to materialism, that of the Roman Catholic A. Günther (1783–1863) , “Cartesius correctus,” erected too mystical an edifice on the psychological basis of Descartes to sustain a satisfactory realism. Yet Güntherism has produced a school, of which the most distinguished representative is the Old Catholic bishop in Bonn, Th. Weber, whose Metaphysik, completed in 1891, starting from the ego and the analysis of consciousness, aims at arriving at the distinction between spirit and nature, and at rising to the spirit of God the Creator. ”

“ Finally, as touch perceives reciprocal pressure within, and tactile inference infers it without, touch is the primary evidence of the senses which is the foundation and logical ground of our belief in Nature as a system of pressing bodies. Balfour, however, having from unproved assumptions denied the evidence of the senses, and the rational power of using them to infer things beyond oneself, has to look out for other, and non-rational, foundations of belief. He finds them in the needs of man. ”

“ Matter thus, which had at first been defined as a complex of perceptions objectified, now turns out to be a condition without which perceptions would not exist, but whose nature is known only as a complex of perceptions. Finally, according to him, having inferred matter as the condition of our perceptions, we are entitled to infer that the condition of the existence of matter is God, whose nature, however, can be inferred only by practical reason from conscience. ”

“ According to him, we believe in Nature because it satisfies our material needs, and in God because he satisfies our spiritual needs. But bare need, e.g. a pang of hunger, is no cause of belief beyond itself; and desire, or need of something prospective, e.g. a desire of food, is effect, not cause, of a previous belief that there is such a thing, and of a present inference that it may again be realized. ”

“ On this assumption of a sense of sensations, but not of causality, he deduces that we could not from such data infer any particular kind of cause, or a bodily cause, e.g. a tree, or indeed any cause at all, or any event beyond perception, without assuming the principle of causation that Nature is uniform in cause and effect over great intervals of time and space. ”

“ Now, when the thing with which touch is in a state of reciprocal pressure is external, e.g. a table, we feel our organism pressed and pressing; we do not feel the table pressing and pressed, but infer it. ”

“ The cause of this anachronism has been the failure of intuitive realism and the domination of idealism, which makes short-sighted men suppose that at all events they must begin with the psychology and the psychological idealism of the day, in the false hope that on the sands of psychological idealism they may build a house of metaphysical realism. ”

“ But when we examine his theory of the non-ego, and find that it resolves matter into active force and this into animated activity, identifies law with reason, and calls God absolute substance, we see at once that this spiritual realism is not very far from idealism. ”

“ And, Reid. though I have been taught by philosophers that what I immediately touch is an idea, and not matter, yet I have never been able to discover this by the most accurate attention to my own perceptions.” No opposition to idealism could be more distinct. Reid, however, did not always express himself so distinctly. Moreover, he and his successors mixed up so many accidents with the essence of their realism that the whole system broke down under its own weight. Their psychology contained valuable points. ”

“ It will be objected that they are merely possible perceptions. But as they really produce our real perceptions, they are themselves not merely possible, but real or actual. A possible cause could not actually produce an actual effect.
James Martineau (q.v.) in A Study of Religion (1888) , like Shadworth Hodgson, started from Kant, and tried to found on transcendental idealism “a return to dualism.” If there is one thing certain in the Kantian philosophy, it is its author’s perception that what is contributed by mind must not be extended to things beyond mind. ”

“ The Thomist reaction has had a good effect in the way of encouraging the study of Aristotelian philosophy in itself, and as modified by Aquinas. Nevertheless, the world cannot afford to surrender itself to Aristotle, or to Aquinas. Aristotle could not know enough, physically, about Nature to understand its matter, or its motions, or its forces ”

“ Hegel only extended Martineau. a priori forms to things by resolving things into thoughts. Mill also protested “against adducing, as evidence of the truth of a fact in external nature, the disposition, however strong or however general, of the human mind to believe it.” Yet Martineau adopted, as his view of the limits of human intelligence, that Kant was right in making space and time a priori forms of sense, but wrong in limiting them to sensations. ”

“ He thought that in the soul there is a productive intellect and a passive intellect, and that, when we rise from sense by induction, the productive causes the passive intellect to receive the universal form or essence, e.g. ”

“ His point is, that the world only appears to be phenomena governed by necessary laws, and is really a spontaneity which makes new beginnings, such as life and consciousness, tending to good. These examples are enough to show that the psychological metaphysics of spiritual realism has not been able to withstand the rise and progress of spiritual idealism in France. ”