Ernest Northcroft Merrington

“ It is no idle coincidence then that the historical representatives of Scepticism and Agnosticism, Hume and Kant, have been just those who tried to disprove the reality of the Self. Their arguments Schiller refutes, and then fearlessly proceeds to examine the cheap phrases and empty charges of anthropomorphism flung at religion and any philosophy that recognizes the uniqueness of personality in our own interpretation of experience. Science is itself infected with the dreaded taint of anthropomorphism. So is philosophy. ”

“ In a sense, therefore, Pluralism seems to be based on Monism, but the One is without reality, being merely an ideal factor in a real plurality. Pluralism seeks a better unity, the actual result to be arrived at by the process of interaction, the perfection and harmony of a real universe, evolved in the course of Time. In this conception Pantheism and Individualism are transcended. The Many and the One are recognized, but the primacy and reality of the Many are more valid than the abstractions of the One. ”

“ May not God be more than a strenuous Pilot wrestling with a refractory fleet in an unfortunate storm, and seeking to make a possible port? May He not be what unbounded worship wills, what faith believes, goodness implies, reason justifies, and love demands, when it uses the controversial terms ‘Infinite’ and ‘Unity’? ”

“ There is needed something in consciousness to connect the moments of experience. The Transcendental Ego serves to do this, as a permanent being, and as the form, which contains the whole of our psychic life as its content. The error of Kant in separating the form from the matter is avoided by maintaining that the two selves are in some way one, an empirical truth corresponding to our conviction that the Self changes and yet is the same. The Transcendental Ego is defined as the ‘I’ with all its powers and latent capacities of development, the ultimate reality which we have not yet reached. ”

“ Humanism is the watchword of the movement which sets up the whole personality in philosophy to the place which it actually occupies in life, namely the supreme place; and from this vantage-ground alone can the problems of thought be properly surveyed and correlated with the essential conditions of will and emotion. ”

“ Briefly then, Schiller’s view of the Self as real and the centre of experience and philosophy accords entirely with that adopted in the present work. Humanism insists on Personality throughout. With the intention of Schiller in giving a place to the Transcendental Ego as opposed to the Self as existing at any one moment, I am in sympathy, but I cannot endorse his use of the term so redolent with historical associations, nor can I approve of his method of seeking the Ego as distinct from the Self, in the future, as an Ideal. ”

“ The universal end of the world-process is being subserved by the lesser ends. If teleology be kept from conflict with scientific mechanism, both philosophy and science will gain. It is only by a knowledge of what has been, that we can venture a prediction of what is to be, and that an adequate explanation can be given of the natural Process as a whole; while, on the other hand, the teleological formula of metaphysics should eventually be of benefit to the sciences of ethics, sociology, biology, and, lastly,—the order being one of time as well as of logic—physics and mechanics. ”

“ Evil enters through non-adaptation of the Ego to the interaction with God. Hence Evil tends to become less as Evolution goes on. Error is in the same case as Evil. The material world is due to the Divine side of the ‘stress,’ while on its own side the Ego produces the phenomenal Self. The process of Evolution means the perfecting of the interaction, so that the development of the world will reveal more and more the nature of God, until at the completion, the perfected spirits would behold the countenance of God. ”

“ The difficulties of the Kantian dualism concerning the Ego can hardly be avoided by clipping off the epistemological function of the Transcendental Ego, or by saying—with surely a Bradleian reminiscence—that the two are somehow one. Nor can the difficulty of knitting up the moments of our experience with an identical Ego, which we know as ourself, be overcome by making an Ideal Ego do it. Of course, there is this Interaction Theory to support, and both the Ego and the Self are needed for the ‘stress’ of the Divine and the human sides. ”

“ The whole process is one of approximation toward unity, never before realized in thought or existence; the Becoming is essential to the true conception of things, and it is in Time.
The idea of God as being but a part of the universe does not satisfy ‘the craving for unity’ which, abuse it as one will, has at least a pragmatic bearing. It seems to me that we require a Personal Ground of all things, the Supreme Unity. ”

“ The philosopher must be told that he has false grounds for the assumption of infinite existence, and the theologian that the doctrine is not only illogical but irreligious, and detrimental to piety, to faith, and to good works. Infinity in God would make Him the Author of Evil would neutralize His Personality, and would deprive the worshipper of his true heritage of religious emotion. Personality and Infinity are incompatible, for Personality rests on the distinction of Self from Not-Self. ”

“ It is the outcome of the Humanistic view of things to see that the significant thing in thought, as in all else, is to be aware of the active personality which reclaims an unknown void, and is rewarded by reality and enrichment of experience. And so the highest explanation of the Universe must be in the highest terms, along the lines of purpose, meaning, and development towards an Ideal, as we know it in ourselves.
A discussion of Schiller’s views of the Deity would strictly involve an estimate of his Interaction Theory. ”

“ To discover the significance of things is the task of metaphysics, and therefore it is necessary that we explain the lower by the higher, and not the reverse, as the extreme physicists and biologists urge. The final cause will be found to be the true ground of existence, and this is possible only through the Deity transcendent above the evolutionary process. Evolution, ‘which was to have abolished teleology, turns out itself to require the most boldly teleological treatment.’ But to be free from objection, the teleological explanation must not be narrowly anthropocentric. ”

“ Schiller interprets the Self as not yet completely known, but as revealed in its true reality with the process of experience. The World, too, is only imperfectly known as yet. This leads him into an exposition of his Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge. Briefly put, it is that our knowledge is gradually evolved by a series of experimental guesses or ‘postulates.’ There is a large element of indeterminateness manifested in the World. The same characteristics of plasticity and growth are present in the intellectual cosmos. Logic is essentially dependent upon psychological needs. ”

“ The first is to be solved by the doctrine of the Plurality of ultimate reals; the second requires God, non-phenomenal and personal, but also finite; and the third is met by a theory of Immortality, qualified by the degree of consciousness reached by the soul in its past. Prominent in Schiller’s system is the process of Becoming, a real process with a beginning and an end in time. Time comes into being with the World-Process, through a determination of the Divine Spirit to form the ultimate spiritual entities into a harmonious cosmos. Between the individual selves and God there is interaction. ”

“ It signifies an attempt to put forward a philosophic theory of a ‘re-anthropomorphized’ or, as Schiller prefers, a ‘re-humanized’ universe. He is ready to stand by Protagoras, and maintain that Man is the measure of all things. Instead of illusory hopes of a philosophy without assumptions, Humanism candidly confesses that its starting-point is our immediate experience and experienced self, from which it can proceed in any direction. ”

“ The Unity of the Absolute could have no religious value. Lotze’s admission of free-will affords a ground for the conception of a Divine guidance and Providence, but it creates an inherent instability in the Absolute. The mysterious problem of Evil thwarts the Unity of things, and destroys the argument. Lotze’s identification of God with the Absolute leads him, according to Schiller, into a kind of Pantheism. The a priori proofs share, in common with Lotze’s proof from interaction, the weakness of being too abstract. ”

“ Since purpose belongs only to intelligent beings, and Evolution is meaningless if not teleological, therefore we acknowledge the divine Personality, rather than contradict our principle of not multiplying entities needlessly to invent gratuitous fictions like an unconscious or an impersonal intelligence. ”

“ Pluralism escapes the difficult problem of origins. But it is prone to fall into another danger quite as great as that which seems fatal to Monism. A relation between the Reals seems required, and this relation seems to imply a Unity. In such a manner, then, does Pluralism imply the Unity of the world. ”

“ Matter is the raw material and is conceived after the Aristotelian view of potentiality. Bearing this in mind, Schiller criticizes ordinary Empiricism, in which the activity of the Self is ignored in the presence of ‘impressions and ideas’; and Apriorism, which in its intellectualistic bias has maintained certain ‘necessities of thought.’ This ‘necessity,’ this ‘universality’ claimed for a priori truths, the Postulates of Pragmatism are quite capable of yielding. ”

“ Truth is not individual either; it must win recognition from society. Pragmatism can show how this is possible, viz. by efficiency and usefulness being taken as the criteria of truth in our intellectual activity. The usefulness is relative to any human end, but ultimately to the perfection of our whole life.
In the Essay on Lotze’s Monism, that philosopher’s ‘proof’ of the underlying unity is subjected to attack. Schiller enlarges upon his previous view that Pluralism may ‘beg’ interaction. ”

“ Here there is the same emphasis, even in the opening words, upon the Self as real and valid, upon the part played by the ‘whole personality’ in the formation of a metaphysic as in every other human enterprise. Schiller sets forward a twofold ground of agreement among philosophers. The first is that the world is experience, and the second is that for the organization of this experience into a reality for philosophy certain connecting principles are needed. ”

“ From his previous account [16] of the universe the same result follows. Regarding infinity as negative and conceptual, he had denied that Space and Time possess it; and he had refused to acknowledge an infinite process of Becoming, or the conception of ‘the world as a whole’ as infinite. ‘An infinite whole is a contradiction in terms.’ [17] The belief in infinity contradicts the important conception of causation, to which Schiller holds under the form of a First Cause, as against the unprofitable notion of an endless regress. ”

“ The bias of Natural Science against these postulates, and the crude treatment of them in the past by their advocates account for the fact that Teleology is still a postulate and not an axiom.
The Personality of God is again briefly vindicated, [25] as also is His Goodness, as a methodological postulate. Infinity is again denied. [26] And Schiller concludes his powerful Essay with a polemic against intellectualism, and a plea for the Pragmatic Theory of Knowledge. The Will-to-believe must be regarded, and philosophy must be reconstructed on a voluntaristic basis. ”

“ In the first Essay on the Ethical Basis of Metaphysics, the development of his theory of knowledge is made clear. Schiller distinguishes between Irrationalism as a doctrine and the view that our cognitive activities are pervaded by the purposive character of mental life generally. The question of value must be raised; purpose and end are, in fact, fundamental to the right understanding of experience. ”

“ The existence of other selves and of their worlds of objectivity is explained after the analogy of hypnotism. As ‘several subjects may be made to share in the same hallucinations,’ so may ‘an operator of vastly greater knowledge and power’ create subjective worlds valid for several persons. ”

“ In the progress of development the approximation of the two goes on, until at last coincidence and perfection shall be reached. This is supported by the testimony of Psychology to the phenomena of multiplex personality and ‘secondary’ selves. Our whole Selves are deeper and more real than our ordinary selves. ”

“ This is further expounded in the ‘Discourse Concerning Pragmatism,’ entitled Useless Knowledge, in which the position is maintained that action is primary, and knowledge only secondary—that the Good is the Source of the True. ”