A. E. Taylor

“ Why, then, should the metaphysician assume that the universe is more specially bound to satisfy the demands of the logical intellect than those of the “practical reason” of morality and religion or the “creative reason” of art? Must we not say that the demand of the logician that the world shall be intelligible stands precisely on the same footing as the moralist’s demand that it shall be righteous, or the artist’s that it shall be beautiful, and that all three are no more than “postulates” which we make, in the last resort, simply because it satisfies our deepest feelings to make them? ”

“ It follows from all this that, just because the absolute whole is neither mere thought nor mere will, nor an artificial synthesis of the two, mere truth for the intellect can never be quite the same thing as ultimate Reality. For in mere truth we get Reality only in its intellectual aspect as that which affords the highest satisfaction to thought’s demand for consistency and systematic unity in its object. And, as we have seen, this demand can never be quite satisfied by thought itself. For thought, to remain thought, must always be something less than the whole reality which it knows. ”

“ Must we not, in fact, say alike to the followers of Logic, of Ethics, of Religion, and of Art, “Your claims on the world are ultimately all of the same kind; they are made with equal right, and so long as any one of you is content to advance his postulate as a postulate, and at his own personal risk, no one of you has any pretension to criticise or reject the postulates of the others”? ”

“ But the moral progress of society will be genuine if, on the whole, our gain is—from the moralist’s special standpoint—more than our loss. We have no reason to despair of our kind if the impartial historian, comparing the facts—not the self-complacent fictions of popular optimism—about our current social life with the facts—not the fancies of Apologetics—about social life, say, in the first century of the Roman Empire, can pronounce that there has been advance on the whole. ”

“ We have to recognise that things are not always what they seem to be; what appears to us is, sometimes at any rate, not real, and what really is does not always appear. Of our two conflicting perceptions, only one at best can be a correct representation of the real course of things; one of them at least, and possibly both, must be mere seeming or appearance, and we are thus cast upon the problem which every science tries, in its own sphere and its own way, to solve: what part of our conceptions about the world gives us reality and what part only appearance? ”

“ Whether we could properly speak of the absolute whole as a society of minds is a further and a more difficult question. A society is much more than a mere collection: it has a purposive unity of structure which exists not merely for the sociological observer from without, but for its own members as active in assigning to each of them his own special place in relation to all the rest. How far society can be said to have such a unity for itself is a question which we cannot answer until we have dealt more fully with the problem of the relation between selfhood and individuality. ”

“ It was Hegel’s conviction that the whole series of concepts or categories by which the mind attempts to grasp the nature of experienced Reality as a whole, from the most rudimentary to the most adequate, can be exhibited in a fixed order which arises from the very nature of thought itself. We begin, he held, by the affirmation of some rude and one-sided conception of the character of what is; the very imperfection of our concept then forces us on to affirm its opposite as equally true. ”

“ Now, in real life we never find this complete and absolute harmony of the contents of experience; there are always, if we look for them, elements in our actual experience which are discordant, and conflict with the system of interests which, on the whole, dominates it. Hence self, in the last resort, is seen to be an ideal which actual experience only imperfectly realises,—the ideal of a system of purposes and interests absolutely in harmony with itself. And there must be, at least, grave doubt as to the logical self-consistency of this ideal, doubts which we must shortly face. ”

“ It is just because the principles of reasoning and the rules of evidence are, in the last resort, the same for all the sciences, that they have to be made themselves the subject of a separate investigation. Logic, like Metaphysics, deals with everything, not in the sense of being another name for the whole of our knowledge, but in the sense that it, unlike the special sciences, attacks a problem which confronts us in every exercise of our thought. ”

“ Of course, a physical vacuum is not the same thing as empty space. For the purposes of any special science a vacuum means a space not occupied by contents of the special kind in which that special science is interested. Thus, in the ordinary parlance of Physics, a vacuum means simply a space in which there is no mass. Whether it is desirable, for the purposes of physical science, to assume the existence of vacuum, is altogether a question for Physics itself, and to decide it in the affirmative is not to maintain the existence of that unmeaning abstraction, absolutely empty space. ”

“ It is sometimes maintained that Metaphysics is an impossibility because the metaphysician’s problems, in their own nature, admit of no solution. To a meaningless question, of course, there can be no intelligible answer, and it is occasionally asserted, and often insinuated, that the questions of Metaphysics are of this kind. But to call the metaphysician’s question a senseless one is as much as to say that there is no meaning in the distinction, which we are all constantly making, between the real and the apparent. ”

“ The problem of Philosophy in dealing with these rival aspects of the world of experience then becomes that of deciding whether either of them can be adopted as the truth in isolation from the other. Or if neither is the whole truth, we must ask ourselves in what way the world can be at once One and Many, how the characters of systematic unity and of indefinite variety can be consistently thought of as belonging to the same Reality. Is Reality, we have to ask, One or is it Many, and if it is both, how are the unity and multiplicity connected? ”

“ If we cannot, then, properly say that the Absolute, or the Universe,—or whatever may be our chosen name for the infinite individual which is the whole of existence,—is a self or person, can we say that the finite individuals which compose it are one and all selves, and that the Absolute is therefore a society of selves? ”

“ We still tend too much to treat the selves which compose a society, at least in our Metaphysics, as if they were given to us in direct experience as merely exclusive of one another, rather than as complementary to one another. In other words, of the two typical forms of experience from which the concept of self appears to be derived, the experience of conflict between our subjective interests and our environment, and that of the removal of the discord, we too often pay attention in our Metaphysics to the former to the neglect of the latter. ”

“ Change by itself, apart from a background of identity, is impossible for the reason that where there is no underlying identity there is nothing to change. All change must be change of and in some thing. A mere succession of entirely disconnected contents held together by no common permanent nature persisting in spite of the transition, would not be change at all. If I simply have before me first A and then B, A and B being absolutely devoid of any point of community, there is no sense in saying that I have apprehended a process of change. ”

“ The whole fact which we call an effect is never complete until we have taken into account its entire connection with everything else in the universe. And similarly, the whole assemblage of conditions includes everything which goes to make up the universe. But when we have thus widened our conception of the cause and the effect, both cause and effect have become identical with one another and with the whole contents of the universe. And thus Causation itself has disappeared as a form of interconnection between the elements of Reality in our attempt to work out its logical implications. ”

“ There is a sense in which an aspect of failure is an inevitable feature in the life of every subordinate and therefore imperfect individual. Human life, even in the millennium, as we rightly feel, would not be human life if the note of sadness were altogether absent from it. Only in the single experience of the absolute whole can the discordant notes be finally resolved into a faultless harmony. ”

“ But again, it is even more manifest that we cannot reduce all reality to qualities, and dismiss the relations between them as simply our subjective mode of apprehension. This line of thought is capable of being worked out in two slightly different ways. We might hold that what really exists is disconnected simple qualities, each distinct from all others as red is from sweet, or loud from hot, and that the whole network of relations by which everyday and scientific thought bring these “reals” into connection is a mere intellectual scaffolding to which nothing in the real world corresponds. ”

“ In other words, only the infinite is in the full sense of the words a completely self-determined whole. The finite is the imperfect, not primarily because there is something outside it, but because its contents are not solely prescribed by the principle of structure which they embody. I, for instance, am a finite being, not principally or merely because there are other men in the world, but because my ideas and purposes are not a fully coherent systematic whole in themselves. ”

“ Show me, we might say, anything which you regard as real,—no matter what it is, a stone wall, an æsthetic effect, a moral virtue,—and I will ask you to think of an unreal and imaginary counterpart of that same thing, and will undertake to prove to you that what makes the difference between the reality and the imagination is always that the real thing is indissolubly connected with the psychical life of a sentient subject, and, as so connected, is psychical matter of fact. ”

“ Thus, unless there are really ends in the physical order which determine the processes of change that culminate in their actual establishment, evolution cannot be real. If the ends, by the establishment of which we estimate progress in development, are merely arbitrary standards of our own to which nothing in external reality corresponds, then the physical order must really be a mere succession of changes which are in no true sense developments, and the whole concept of nature as marked by development will be a mere human delusion. ”

“ That what we believe and desire does make all the difference in the world to the way in which we behave, is one of those elementary verities out of which no scientific hypothesis can claim to reason us. Hence, when the defenders of the theory attempt to draw practical moral and juristic consequences from their doctrines, we are within our rights in simply declining to concern ourselves with so absurd a travesty of the simplest facts of experience. ”

“ And it is clear that, if only on this ground, we should have to say that we are nearer the truth in thinking of the individual whole of complete Reality as an organism than in thinking of it as an aggregate, and nearer the truth still in thinking of it as a mind. Similarly in our judgments upon our own lives and character. So far as one life possesses more breadth and again more conscious unity of aim than another, so far it is more truly individual, and therefore a more adequate type of complete reality. Just so far as I am individual, I am truly real. ”

“ A thing, that is, no matter of what kind, is really what it appears to be, just in so far as the thing, as it appears for our knowledge, is itself a self-contained and therefore unique systematic whole. Or, in other words, just in so far as what we recognise as one thing shows itself, in the face of philosophical criticism and analysis, to be a self-contained systematic whole, so far are we truly apprehending that thing as a manifestation of the fundamental character of Reality, of seeing it as it really is, and so far does our knowledge give us genuine Reality. ”

“ Even when, as an introspective psychologist, I sit down to study the formation of resolutions or the peculiarities of emotional moods by reflection on my own experience, the state in which I study the formation of a resolution or the nature of a mood is not itself the state of resolving or of experiencing the mood in question. We cannot too strongly insist that, if by “self-consciousness” is meant a cognitive state which is its own object, there is no such thing, and it is a psychological impossibility that there should be any such thing, as self-consciousness. ”

“ But in actual life it is oftener the latter that is prominent in our relations with our fellow-men. We—the category of co-operation—is at least as fundamental in all human thought and language as I and thou, the categories of mutual exclusion. That you and I are mutually complementary factors in a wider whole of common interests, is at least as early a discovery of mankind as that our private interests and standpoints collide. ”

“ Hence it might fairly be contended that fully to know your own meaning,meaning, fully to understand what you want, would imply complete insight into the structure of the whole world of reality,—in fact, that self-knowledge and knowledge of the universe must ultimately be the same thing. The systematic unity of the whole world of experience may be so complete that there is nothing in it anywhere which does not correspond to some element in the experience of every one of its members. ”

“ Thus we may say of a thing, in the sense in which we are using the term, that it is what has existence as a whole here and now in the series of experiences, though in saying so we must be careful to bear in mind that the here and now of the thing’s existence are not indivisible points of space or time, but continuous stretches of extension and duration. Now, when we ask in what sense such a thing is one, and why we mark off the limits which separate the one thing from the other things just where we do, it at once becomes apparent that the oneness is a matter of degree. ”

“ Not every member is of vital significance for the life of the whole. But in a complete systematic unity, as we saw, the unity and the multiplicity of the system must be equally real and equally interdependent. This can only be the case if the whole is for its members as well as the members for the whole. And that this may be so, just as the all-embracing whole of reality must, as we have learned, be an experience, so each of its members must be itself an experience. ”

“ There is no opposition more thoroughly enshrined in the language and literature of civilised races than the contrast of seeming with reality, of substance with show. We come upon it alike in our study of the processes of nature and our experience of human character and purpose. Thus we contrast the seeming stability of the earth with its real motion, the seeming continuity and sameness of a lump of solid matter with the real discontinuity and variety of its chemical constituents, the seeming friendliness of the hypocritical self-seeker with his real indifference to our welfare. ”

“ In morality, let it be remembered, we have, as in all the experience of finite beings, a process which is throughout directed upon a result that, once attained, would transcend the process itself. Morality would not be content with anything less than the total abolition of the evil in the world; and with the disappearance of evil, the struggle against it would itself disappear in some higher form of experience. Similarly, knowledge is constantly striving to exhaust the object of knowledge. ”

“ It still remains for him to re-examine the realm of appearance itself in the light of his theory of reality, to ascertain the relative truth which partial and imperfect conceptions of the world’s nature contain, and to arrange the various appearances in the order of their varying approximation to truth. He must show not only what are the marks of reality, and why certain things which are popularly accepted as real must, for Philosophy be degraded to the rank of appearance, but also how far each appearance succeeds in revealing the character of the reality which is its ground. ”

“ It is always thought about a reality which falls, in part, outside the thought itself, is only imperfectly represented by the thought’s content, and for that very reason is a not-self to the thought for which it is an object. And the whole process of thinking may be described as a series of attempts on the part of thought to transcend this limitation. So long as the content of the thought is not adequate to the reality which it thinks, so long, that is, as there is anything left to know about the reality, thought restlessly presses forward towards an unreached consummation. ”