Bernard Bosanquet

“ Either you throw the work of mind on the shoulders of a physical reality, and thereby transform the latter fundamentally, or you connect it with the nature of mind as living in the contents, and then you have abandoned the doctrine of petrified or extra-mental universals. To recognise the universal as real, while killing and stuffing it, is to admit a claim which you refuse to satisfy. The reality of the universal is a sufficient proof that the objects of mind may be alive with its vitality. ”

“ What I am speaking of is twentieth century Realism; and the point of novelty about it,—on the whole, though not in every case, and throughout—is its contrast of principle with Materialism. Or, speaking in terms of our subject, the novelty is this; that the realism in question, though it gives much less to Mind than Idealism, gives much more to Reality than Materialism. Whether the position will prove untenable is a question to be discussed. But that the position, if tenable, would go far to rearrange the whole battlefield of, say, Idealism and Materialism, is, I think, indisputable. ”

“ It is a feather in the cap of recent realism to have given the secondary qualities their due. But here its achievement must end. It is impossible on the same principle to do justice to the tertiary qualities, say, beauty or delightfulness. If you reserve anything for a mind stripped of objective contents, you must, as realism admits, reserve pleasure and pain. ”

“ It is not the failure to distinguish between an act and an object of mind. It is not any simple prejudice that mind can apprehend only what is a part of itself. But it is the insight—an insight substantially just—that a universe severed from the life of mind can never fulfil the conditions of self-existence. We saw that to overlook the character of mind which bears on this point, when stating the simplest facts of perception, is to be misled ab initio. Mind is always a world; its objects are always fragments. ”

“ Although a realism, and even a physical realism, they contrast sharply with what is meant by Materialism. If they are meant to be called materialist, which I do not know that they are, it is the conception of matter that has widened, and not the nature of reality that has been cut down to fit an abstract matter. The theory aims at totality, at a fair and complete recognition of the world as we know and love it. It does justice to the sensations of sense, and to the secondary qualities. ”

“ You can consider a portion of the behaviour of a system on its own merits, with reference to its special function, without committing yourself to the belief that it could be real apart from the whole system, or that it adequately displays, within itself, the quality of the system. Objects of finite mind, in short, and finite minds themselves, are bound, after our discussion of physical realism, to strike us as details of reality essentially continuous with each other and reciprocally indispensable. ”

“ The interest of the theory we have been contemplating has lain for me in noting what I take to be the inevitable results of reducing the place of the mind in the actual world to its narrowest conceivable limits. This result is, as I view it, that on the one hand the great body, or the corpse as I should call it, of so-called physical reality, has been cut off and set over against the living nature of mind—which is reduced, as we saw, to a scheme of directions of effort addressed to objects outside them. ”

“ Continuity of the real world with mind seems to me the inevitable goal and climax of twentieth century physical realism, as opposed to eclectic materialism. If the object is to be real in its fulness, as it is the merit of that doctrine to affirm, it must be maintained in connection with its complete conditions. To try and hypostasise it apart from organisms with their minds is in my judgment an evasion of the task laid upon us by the arduousness of reality. Reality, I urge, is always on ahead, where the fuller conditions are focussed. Abstraction is abandonment of the quest. ”

“ Knowledge, then, and thought, so far as it is what we think of, are non-mental, or physical. They are simply the existent things, or parts of them, so far as we apprehend them; never, of course, completely apprehended, but so far as our powers go, apprehended as they really are. Colour, sound, taste are not mental facts. They are physical realities to each of which there is a corresponding mental act, to see, to hear, and so forth. But act and object, even act and the nearer object which some would call content, are not to be identified. Your mind does not in any way make nature. ”

“ The whole meaning I take to be that the Idealist or Criticist is a subjectivist, and starts from "Knowledge" (how it should be knowledge I cannot conceive) as a jumping-off place to get across a gap to reality. ”

“ We have most of us actual experience of some such stages as we pass under the influence of an anæsthetic, when continuity in space and time, concrete system, retentiveness, are gradually wiped out, and we feel ourselves stage by stage reduced from mind to its vanishing point in body. The nature of the self-existent whole is then being by degrees extinguished in us. Suppose, per impossibile, that the universe could be anæsthetised; then, in the same way, the conditions of its concrete reality and self-existence would be gone. ”

“ Mind, then, it follows, is cut down to the narrowest limit. It is nothing but a system of efforts in various directions, efforts which carry with them feelings of relative success and ill-success which amount to pleasure and pain. Consciousness is nothing but effort with its felt direction to our object, and the affections which attend such effort and direction. The object is always non-mental. ”

“ Now I do not say that this theory need necessarily give us a narrow view of the world; but it very naturally did so, and I believe always will do so. The reason is, that it makes us think all the things we live with and care about most, faces, voices, music, light, taste, smell—all these things are, if not illusions, yet in a sort of way on a lower level of truth and reality than things like atoms and gravitation. ”

“ The humanising effect of this belief, and the reality it enables you to assign to beauty, for instance, is an unspeakable gain for life and for philosophy. And, I believe, although the fallacy above-mentioned is operative—yet I believe there is a sound underlying motive in subjective idealism, a recognition of the necessity that the most interesting things should have at least as much reality as anything else, and that mind should not be cut off from its objects, which constitute nature and the world. ”

“ We have briefly referred to a conception in which, so to speak, the universe is mental—is mind or states of mind—through and through, and we now turn to this realism because it is prima facie the completest conceivable counter stroke to any such affirmation, and because, through its very completeness, it suggests a meeting of extremes which the commoner doctrines, resting on a more half-hearted demarcation of the psychical and physical provinces, inevitably exclude. ”

“ On the other side, in showing the Logical Priority of Consequent and Conclusion over Antecedent and Premisses, the appeal was to the ordinary rule of Formal Logic, that truth of Premisses or Antecedent implies that of Conclusion or Consequent, i.e., that if Conclusion or Consequent is false Premisses or Antecedent cannot be true.
Here the traditional rule embodies only what seems the minimum essential to the existence of inference. If any nexus or inferential relation is to survive at all, implication must be admitted to hold from Premisses to Conclusion in an explicit deduction. ”

“ Just as Geometry has no need of further empirical fact, completely rationalised Physics and Chemistry, as ideal schemes, would contain within themselves every element which could be supplied by physical observation ”

“ A mind is a whole, that is in its nature and intent; an object is a fragment. This fact forebodes a difficulty in assessing the reality of objects apart from mind, and so in drawing a line between them. For what is real must surely be a whole, whatever else may be its character. ”

“ But to say that the imperceptibles of science are real, because they represent a behaviour within the universe, and are capable of being inferred by thought and of being an object of mind, is one thing; to say that they partake of a mental nature and have a claim to substantive self-existence per se would be quite another thing. ”

“ This nature, the nature of being a world or whole, is what I take to be the condition of self-existence. It is an old argument for monadism or panpsychism that nothing can strictly be treated as being at all, which does not possess a self. Our doctrine extracts the logical principle of this argument, as distinct from a certain sentimental bias in favour of a spiritual society. Consider, for instance, Plato's Ideas, which our realist has taken as typical of the most real and most important of all physical facts. ”

“ To put a point upon our conclusion as regards the line between mind and its objects, I might suppose myself challenged in terms of the doctrine of knowledge advocated by the realist. What are we to say of knowledge? ”

“ However, on the whole the tendency of realism to-day is away from eclecticism and towards a complete acceptance of external things, in all their concrete richness of existence, as reality independent of mind. And so far we are dealing with a new attitude, with a physical realism which has in the main stripped off the character of materialism.
And secondly—and here I think all twentieth century realism goes together—universals are admitted to be real, though by no means mental. Our particular realist even calls them physical facts. ”

“ The distinction between act and object, or, as some take it, between act, content, and object, is here the governing consideration. It has been held to remove the principal reason for thinking that sense-presentations are something mental. I believe the word mental to be misleading, as I shall explain later on. But I desire to suggest that though it may be well to distinguish clearly between seeing and the object seen, yet it is not a mere failure to make this distinction which causes some of us to believe that the object seen has a character continuous with our mental life. ”

“ No mind can make a world synthetic if that world is not synthetic in itself. But again; no world can be synthetic in itself, that is, can possess universals as a part of its own nature, if its elements have not, pervading them, the living nexus and endeavour towards a whole which indicates participation in the nature of minds. ”

“ Here we see the relative justification of the puzzling doctrine which our authors appeared to maintain—that Antecedent and Premisses on the one hand, and Consequent and Conclusion on the other, are logically prior to each other, each to each. For each has in fact, with reference to the other, one of the two alleged features of logical priority, viz., that it is implied by the other, and is consequently a necessary condition of the other's truth. ”

“ The question as stated in terms of Mentalism seems to be wholly beside the point of mind's relation to its objects. The objects of finite mind—mind other than finite could hardly have an object—are, according to the view to which our argument has led us, neither minds nor products of mind, nor states of mind, nor in any sense except as parts in contrast with wholes, are they secondary and less actual adjuncts or adjectives of minds. They are necessary to minds, as minds are to them, and are discriminated by a concurrent process within the same totality. ”

“ But if so, all qualities involving pleasure and pain are mind-dependent, and no physical realism can recognise them as real. And yet, in truth, they are the most actual, most profoundly inherent, most objectively characteristic qualities of all. And whether pain and pleasure are sense-contents or not, I think it has been proved impossible to separate them in treatment from sense-contents either as elements of feeling or as objects of emotion. You must either assign sense-contents to the mind, or æsthetic contents to physical reality. ”

“ Without a formal break in the deduction, without an assignable falsity in any premiss, we may have got from a region of self-evidence—say of arithmetical truth—to one of questionable results in any concrete science. ”

“ Whether a certain object is continuous with the nature of mind is no question of mere origin or concomitant variation; it is a question of what sort of thing the object is, and what sort of thing mind is, and whether or no the one is connected with the other by inherent character. ”

“ But among these existents which are so together, there are some which are minds, that is, bodies which have acquired the capacity of consciousness. When these are together with other existent things, within the range of reaction through the senses, the conscious thing is aware of being together with the other thing, in the various degrees of sensation, perception, and thought or knowledge. This is nothing more than the amplification or development through consciousness of the fundamental fact which consists in two existents being together in space. My mind is here, in my body ”