F. C. S. Schiller

“ For by a philosophy that seriously strives to comprehend the whole of experience, the unity of the agent is never forgotten in the multiplicity of his pursuits, but is emphatically affirmed in the principle of postulation, which pervades all theoretic activity, generates all axioms, initiates all experiment, and sustains all effort. For ever before the eyes of him whose wisdom dares to postulate will float, in clearer or obscurer outline, the beatific vision of that perfect harmony of all experience which he in all his strenuous struggles is striving to attain. ”

“ It is precisely in so far, therefore, as experience is unsatisfactory that we have need of a principle of Sufficient Reason. It has to be left, with so much of the panoply of practical life, at the gates of Heaven.
Comprehended as a postulate, therefore, the principle of Sufficient Reason no longer exercises an unsympathising tyranny of pure reason over reluctant desires; it does not drive us to seek for reasons that can never satisfy without end; it only enables us to assign a reason whenever we will, and the situation seems to us to need one. ”

“ For though it would be fascinating to trace the course of postulation to which religious conceptions owe their birth, we must follow the dry and dusty road of logical postulation by whose side the hardiest flowers of the boldest rhetoric can scarce contrive to blossom. A constant and unchanging self is needed not merely to satisfy what subsequently develops into the religious instinct, but also in order to yield a trustworthy standard of comparison for the purposes of everyday life. If Edwin likes his mammoth steak well done to-day and underdone to-morrow, no woman can live with him. ”

“ Why should we be tied down to Kant’s factors? Has not Mr. Shadworth Hodgson recently shown that it is possible to construct a logical analysis of knowledge as elaborate and careful as Kant’s (though perhaps just as unsound ultimately) without having recourse to a use of a priori principles? Or better still, should we not do well to go back to Aristotle and find in his antithesis of mediate and immediate, discursive and intuitive, the basis of an analysis quite as legitimate in theory and far more fertile in practice? ”

“ If we take it as it appears in our experience as now organised, we are, similarly, met with the difficulty that what it now is is nothing definitive, but merely a term in a long development the end of which is not yet in sight. And if, led by such considerations, we look forward and declare that the objective world most truly is whatever it develops into, who will take it upon himself to prophesy concerning its future developments, and guarantee that it will always remain objective in the way it is at present, that it will continue to resist and constrain? ”

“ We stand to lose nothing and to gain everything by making a postulate which is both a practical necessity and an obvious methodological assumption, pointing out a way of investigating a subject with which we must grapple, if we will to carry on the struggle which is life.
Quid plura? Experience has shown that Nature condones our audacity, and step by step our assumption has been confirmed. The ‘reign of law’ has turned out to be as absolute as ever we chose to make it, and our assumption has worked wherever we have chosen to apply it. ”

“ There is hope from the young, even though the old generation should obstinately cling to its inveterate errors. Errors as a rule are not renounced; they die out. In this particular case the prospect is perhaps a little brighter than usual, because not all who now believe in their speculative impotence really enjoy their position. And the young are in a different case: their natural sympathies are rather with a philosophy that makes the blood run warm than with one that congeals the natural flow of thought by the chilling vacuity of its abstractions. ”

“ If nature is regular, it can be trusted; the future will resemble the past—at least enough to calculate it—and so our past experience will serve as guide to future conduct. There is, moreover, a glorious simplicity about calculating the future by the assumption that out of the hurly-burly of events in time and space may be extracted changeless formulas whose chaste abstraction soars above all reference to any ‘where’ or ‘when,’ and thereby renders them blank cheques to be filled up at our pleasure with any figures of the sort. ”

“ Can it really be that they cannot see that every triumph of the most rabidly ‘anti-teleological’ mechanical method is, from the ‘synoptic’ standpoint of philosophy, so much more welcome testimony to the power of the human mind and will to grapple with its experience, and confirms the validity of its teleological assumptions? At all events such blindness, whether it be involuntary or voluntary, is not possible to one who has grasped the truth that theoretic truths are the children of postulation. ”

“ To the vision of the rudimentary eye the world is not coloured; it becomes so only to the eye which has developed colour ‘sensitiveness’: just so the ‘fact’ of each phase of experience is relative to our knowledge, and that knowledge depends on our efforts and desires to know. Or, if we cling to the notion of an absolutely objective fact of which the imperfect stages of knowledge only catch distorted glimpses, we must at least admit that only a final and perfect rounding-off of knowledge would be adequate to the cognition of such fact. ”

“ It is a false abstraction of intellectualism to divorce thinking from doing, and to imagine that we can think the world truly without acting in it rightly. But in reality this is quite impossible. ‘Pure’ thought which is not tested by action and correlated with experience, means nothing, and in the end turns out mere pseudo-thought. Genuine thinking must issue from and guide action, must remain immanent in the life in which it moves and has its being. Action, conversely, must not be opposed to thought, nor supposed to be effective without thought ”

“ Let us, therefore, insist that before the reason is condemned untried, and philosophy is finally reduced to a trivial game which may amuse but can never really satisfy, it is necessary to inquire whether the ‘antinomies’ do not arise rather from volitional discord than from intellectual defect, whether the contradictions of the reason are not forced upon it by an indecision which knows not what it wills, a division of the will which insists on willing incompatibles, or a lack of courage and endurance which fails to follow out what it wills. ”

“ For apart from the fact that it would be gratuitous to suppose a revolution in our experience sufficient to upset them, they are protected by our laziness. To think always costs an effort, and the effort of thought required to undo the structure of mind which has grown up with the ages would be so gigantic that we should shrink with a shudder from the very thought thereof. And all for the sake of what? Merely to show that the mental order was constructed bit by bit by postulation and might be constructed otherwise! ”

“ I have no quarrel with the psychologists who argue against an antiquated view of futile and unknowable soul-substance, and insist that the only self they can recognise is just the implicit ‘owning’ of all conscious processes. If the coherence and continuity of conscious processes can under the proper conditions develop into explicit self-consciousness, that is enough; and so long as the psychologists are able and eager to tell us all about the psychogenesis of the self, I see no reason why their accounts should not be referred to with gratitude and respect. ”

“ The intellectual cosmos also neither has nor needs fixed foundations whose fixity is an illusion. Like the physical universe it is sustained by the correspondence and interplay of its parts; or, if we prefer it, floats freely in a sea of the unknown, which now and again buffets it with its waves, but across which the sciences have established well-travelled routes of intellectual intercourse.
The cosmos grows, as we have said, by experiment. ”

“ Hence the antithesis of subjective and objective is a false one: in the process of experience ‘subject’ and ‘object’ are only the poles, and the ‘subject’ is the ‘positive’ pole from which proceeds the impetus to the growth of knowledge. For the modifications in the world, which we desire, can only be brought about by our assuming them to be possible, and therefore trying to effect them. There is no revelation either of nature or of God, except to those who have opened their eyes; and we at best are still self-blinded puppies. ”

“ In the Kantian analysis knowledge is said to arise out of the union of heterogeneous elements, Sensation and Thought, the former supplying the Matter, the latter the Form. But what authenticates Kant’s fundamental antithesis of Matter and Form, Sensation and Thought, so that it should be imperative on every one to set out from it in his analysis of the nature of knowledge? Why are we not to be at liberty to conduct our analysis in whatever way and by whatever principles appear to us most suitable? ”

“ We make it infinite and infinitely divisible by carrying actual motions and divisions on in thought, because it is sweet to imagine that no limit exists beyond which we cannot penetrate. We make it continuous by idealising an (apparent) feature of perception, in order to confer upon it a mystic invulnerability. And lastly we make it homogeneous—structureless, and therefore able to receive any and every structure—in order to relieve our minds and practical forecasts of the utter and incalculable heterogeneity which renders the physical qualities of real space different at every point. ”

“ But when, for the sake of bolstering up an inhuman and incompetent, and impracticable intellectualism, an attempt is made to cut down the scope of philosophy to an attenuated shred which intellectualism can contemplate without dismay, when we are required to believe that philosophy need aim only at understanding, [50] and at understanding in general, without either condescending to the particular, or considering that which ‘passeth all understanding,’ it is high time to protest. ”

“ It is only by asking that we discover whether or not an answer is attainable, and if they cannot alter the ‘facts,’ our demands can at least make them appear in so different a light, that they are no longer practically the same.
For in truth these independent ‘facts,’ which we have merely to acknowledge, are a mere figure of speech. The growth of experience is continually transfiguring our ‘facts’ for us, and it is only by an ex post facto fiction that we declare them to have been ‘all along’ what they have come to mean for us. ”

“ Its universality follows from its very nature as a postulate. If we make a demand that a certain principle shall hold, we naturally extend our demand to all cases without distinction of time, past, present, and to come. The shrinking modesty which clings to the support of precedent is out of place in a postulate. A truth which we assume because we want it may as well be assumed as often as we want it and for all cases in which it may be needed. We can make it therefore as universal as we please, and usually we have no motive for not making it absolutely universal. ”

“ As a first attempt to explain how our struggle to mould our experience into conformity with our desires is compatible with the ‘objectivity’ of that experience, the above may perhaps suffice, though I do not flatter myself that it will at once implant conviction. Indeed I expect rather to be asked indignantly—‘Is there not an objective nature which our experiments do not make, but only discover? Is it not absurd to talk as if our attempts could alter the facts? ”

“ And yet when the philosopher has laboriously disentangled the varied threads that are woven into the texture of practical life, and questions us, we can realise the character of our constructions. We can see full well that all these attributes which conceptual space postulates are impossible in perceptual space; that is just the reason why we demand them. They are pure abstractions which idealise the actual and serve the purpose of enabling us to simplify and to calculate its behaviour. ”

“ The first of these is that the whole world in which we live is experience and built up out of nothing else than experience. The second is that experience, nevertheless, does not, alone and by itself, constitute reality, but, to construct a world, needs certain assumptions, connecting principles, or fundamental truths, in order that it may organise its crude material and transmute itself into palatable, manageable, and liveable forms. ”

“ It is not enough merely to contend that these truths cannot come from experience, because experience can only give fact and not necessity (or at least not an objective necessity) , and because it can never guarantee an absolute universality which applies to the future as well as to the present and past. For a postulate possesses both these valuable characteristics by as good a right as an a priori truth, and is not afflicted with the impotence that besets a mere record of past experience. ”

“ Our epistemology would be beautiful, because great and symmetrical, but would it be indisputably true? Could we not conceive some other philosopher gifted with an equally synoptic imagination setting himself to compete with our lovely construction, and succeeding, perhaps, in throwing it into the shade of oblivion by a rival structure based on different assumptions, built up by different connections and excelling its predecessors in completeness, simplicity, and æsthetic harmony? ”

“ But of course I have no intention of denying the existence of this factor in our experience and, consequently, in our world. We never experiment in vacuo; we always start from, and are limited by, conditions of some sort. Just as our experiment must have some psychological motive to prompt it and to propel us, so it must be conditioned by a resisting something, in overcoming which, by skilfully adapting the means at our disposal, intelligence displays itself. Let it be observed, therefore, that our activity always meets with resistance, and that in consequence we often fail in our experiments. ”

“ It is impossible to acquiesce in Kant’s compromise and to believe by the might of the Practical Reason in what the Theoretic Reason declares to be unknowable. For if the suprasensible and noumenal does not really exist, it is both futile and immoral to tell us to believe in it on moral grounds; the belief in it is an illusion, and will fail us in the hour of our direst need. If the belief in the postulates is to have any moral or other value, it must first of all be used to establish the reality of the objects in which we are bidden to believe. ”