Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller

“ Thus it is only an infirmity of our reason, causing us to hypostasize abstractions, which leads us to speak of 'universal laws of nature,' as if they were more than shorthand expressions for the habitual interactions of realities. But as the subtlety of our insight draws nearer to the subtlety of nature, the crudeness of our 'universal laws' begins to appear. We grow better able to appreciate the real individuality of things, and so substitute specific 'laws' for general. ”

“ It simply postulates that we must learn to think of the individuality of the real as we have learned to think of its reality, not as a completed being, but as a becoming, i.e. as being a process. That which we designate by the term individuality is a varying and growing quantity, never wholly absent, but not always fully developed. At the one end of the process are the atoms — of which we can hardly discern the individuality. At the other end are — let us say the angels — individuals so perfectly individualized that, as mediæval doctors taught, each would form a species by himself. ”

“ If, then, epistemological idealism is solipsism and "twin brother to scepticism," it must be surmounted before the nature of reality can be discussed. If it is not surmounted—cadit quaestio—it becomes futile to discuss whether the real is one or many, whether its criterion is consistency or what, if there is no objectivity at all. Mr. Ritchie has, of course, a perfect right to call a halt here, and to refuse to discuss anything further until his opponents have successfully emerged from the clutches of subjective realism. ”

“ Similarly the goals to which the methods of our thought tend — its intrinsic ideals — acquire a hypothetical reality of a lofty order. For it is evident that if the real nature of phenomena is to be discovered by the way of thought, the supreme ideals of that thought must be, or be realized by, the ultimate reality. But it would not follow that those ideals would render reality mere thought. For they might point either at a reality which should transcend thought, or at one of which thought should be but a single activity — even as it is now the activity of real beings. ”

“ Ritchie wilfully strips himself of one of his chief means of understanding the world when he abstracts from his own reality, and is then puzzled to find that he must be either nothing or an unknowable thing-in-itself, if he be not a bundle of universal thought-relations. ”

“ The individual is more than a meeting-point of universals, because universals are not individuals, nor able to form one, however many of them meet together. But they never do meet in numbers sufficient for a quorum: the attempt to reduce the individuals to universals generates an infinite process, which is never equivalent to the finite individual.
It is not, then, any logical difficulty which compels us to modify the original sense of the assertion that individuality is an ultimate and definitely determined characteristic of reality, but the general flux of reality itself. ”

“ Even at its best, even if it could be shown that reality could be known only as a coherent system of thought-relations, it would not necessarily follow that reality was nothing more, and he would not necessarily have proved anything but the impotence of his thought to grasp reality, by reducing his symbolical expressions for reality to absurdity and contradiction. ”

“ In the case of the lower orders of individuality such appreciation of the peculiar nature of each thing may still be an impracticable and indefinitely distant ideal, but with regard to higher orders the principle is well established. We could hardly say with the poet that "the proper study for mankind is man," if there were not, even in the meanest, an inexhaustible store of idiosyncratic reactions, — an individuality, in short, which becomes more and more conspicuous as we pass from the lower to the higher, and looks less and less like a combination of abstract universals! ”

“ Nor need we blush to own that a view like ours would not prove the popular Vorstellung of "persons" wholly false (even though it would tend to regard 'things' as being only 'persons' of a lower development of individuality) , and so might prove more attractive to the "plain man." For it is possible to be "critical," without disregarding either humanity or reality. ”

“ Ritchie will prefer science to democracy, and the authoritative judgment of Athanasius and the cat against the rest of the world! If he does not, he might work out an amusing theory making the Referendum the ultimate test of reality. That, at least, would be a definite method of utilizing the experience of others, such as is at present lacking. We act quite inconsistently in sometimes submitting to the superior delicacy of the expert's senses, and sometimes rejecting it. ”

“ Individuality thereby becomes a hypothesis and an ideal, as well as a characteristic of reality. The atom of physics is such a hypothetical prolongation of the individual in one direction. Monads and the like, are prolongations in another, and, in the writer's opinion, a far more promising, direction. So we can come to say that an individual is lacking in individuality, i.e. shows this universal characteristic of reality too indistinctly, seems to lend himself too easily to 'explanation' by universals, seems to borrow too much from others, and the like. ”

“ The history of the practical struggle which has evolved us and our minds seems to offer but slender guarantees that our faculties should have been fitted for, and our energies directed towards, those aspects of reality which are of the greatest theoretic importance, [2] and hence arguments from practical or moral necessity, universal desires, and the like, do not perhaps yield the safest approach to the ultimate reality of things. ”

“ Ritchie's sense, reality is thought, but whether that assertion is a valid defence against the objection that Mr. Ritchie has given away his case when he has admitted that reality is not thought to human minds. Until, then, Mr. Ritchie can bring rather more convincing proof of his approaching apotheosis and omniscience, it must be contended that he has neither made out his assertion that rationality is the test of reality, nor its connection with the metaphysical dogma that the real is ultimately the thought of a "divine mind." ”

“ Ritchie's.
Those objections arise in the first place out of his failure to appreciate the development in our conceptions of individuality and reality which has corresponded to the evolution of the objects which they symbolize, and in the second, out of his misunderstanding the respective positions which his opponents' logic assigns to thought- symbols and that which they symbolize. To say that the individual is the real and that the real is individual, is to make a proposition concerning a reality beyond it. It draws our attention to a fact which its terms cannot fully express. ”

“ In addition to generalizing hypothetical objects to explain phenomena, this process of the interpretation of reality by our thought also bestows a derivative reality on the abstractions themselves with which thought works. If they are the instruments wherewith thought accomplishes such effects upon reality, they must surely be themselves real. Hence philosophers have long asserted the reality of Ideas, and we commonly hold the triangle and the space of mathematical abstraction to be the real triangle and the real space. (Mr. Ritchie's fourth sense.) ”

“ For example, the individual is not 'everything which is called one'—things are called one because we attribute to them this extra-logical character of individuality. Nor is the individual what can be expressed by a single term—because the latter is only the nearest logic can get to expressing individuality. The individual is not a spiritual or thinking substance—because the whole category of substance rests upon and is abstracted from the individual, is an attempt thought makes to symbolize a substantivity, which its own adjectivity never properly expresses. ”

“ For it is the primary fact which all the rest are more or less complete theories to explain, and to which they must be referred in order to test their validity. If they prove capable of explaining what they set out to explain, we may reach a loftier view of reality, which will transfigure our primary datum for us, but which even so cannot be considered in abstraction from its basis; if they do not, the other 'senses of reality' are worthless. ”

“ The reduction of the brilliancy and variety of tones and colors to the mechanical processes of atoms is surprising. But after agreeing to it, it is no less surprising to discover the specific physiological functions of the sensory nerves, and to find that this does not invalidate the physicist's calculations. Lastly, it remains a mystery how consciousness obtains a knowledge of any existence external to itself. ”

“ In the order of knowledge, moreover, tones and colors are prior to atomic and ethereal vibrations. Lastly, it is on evolutionist grounds improbable, that if vibrations devoid of color, light, and temperature had been the original fact, they would have been so variously transformed by the senses.
Hence, as a matter of metaphysics, the physicist has either to become an idealist and admit the subjectivity of the data of touch also, or to assert the objectivity also of sounds and colors. ”

“ The individual also is in process, and so individuality becomes a characteristic of which reality may be seen to have less or more. The individuality of a drop of water is very evanescent; the individuality of a schoolboy, or even of a mule, is often found to be a very stubborn fact. Once we have degrees, we can form a standard of individuality ”

“ But it is needless to discuss what would happen to thought if reality had been rendered harmonious, in view of the fact that no philosophy has succeeded in doing this. The whole attempt is dependent for its validity on its success, and its success is, to put it mildly, imperfect. The scientific view of atoms goes behind the popular view of "things," because it holds that the latter do not construct a tenable view of phenomena. Mr. Ritchie would treat the atoms similarly. ”

“ This free and easy appeal to the Deity, in the midst of a discussion of human knowledge, in order to silence an opponent and to fill up any gap in the argument, ought surely to be as severely reprobated as the medieval practice of ascribing any ill-understood fact or bit of knowledge to the agency of the Devil. ”

“ And with all deference to the magni nominis umbra, wherewith the Absolute has overshadowed the minds of philosophers, it seems to me that it is to some such conclusion as this that the course of science tends, rather than to a single merely rational 'universal law,' from which all existences might be necessarily deduced by purely logical processes. ”

“ Ritchie has a transcendent knowledge of another life, whereby he judges our waking life to be real, because of its coherence and intelligibleness from the standpoint of the former, his comparison fails. ”

“ It would hardly be necessary even to ask what is meant by "independent of, or external to" consciousness. The truth seems rather to be, that the effort to understand the universe starts much further back than Dr. Schwarz's pseudo-natural realism, in a chaos where fact, illusion, and fancy are not yet distinguished, and where there is as yet no pretence at coherence. ”

“ Ritchie that other views than his own of ultimate reality are tenable, that they answer the epistemological and metaphysical difficulties at least as well as his, and are at least as deserving of the name of idealism (if Berkeley retains any claim to the doctrine he discovered!) , and that they are far concreter and in closer interaction with the sciences than a metempiric misconception like the Absolute. ”

“ This amorphous mass of primitive perplexity is overlaid with successive strata of metaphysical interpretation, and these deposits will go on with growing precision and refinement until a completely congruous account of all the facts is reached. But though it is well to be reminded of the foundations on which we must build, and of the primary data our solutions must satisfy, the truth surely lies ahead of us and not behind us. ”

“ As we know him better, we do not account for a friend's conduct 'because he is a man,' but by a 'because he is this man.' In all our explanations we seek to get down to the particular, to do justice to the individual peculiarity of things, to enlarge the part assigned to personal idiosyncrasy. ”

“ He suggests (p. 267) a triple test of rationality, a triple basis for the metaphysical assertion that reality is thought, (1) "The agreement between the inferences drawn from the experience of our different senses; (2) the agreement between the judgments of different persons; (3) the harmony of present experience with the results of their and our previous experience, constitute between them the test of reality." It is to be feared that "between them" they fall very far short of giving a reliable test of reality. ”

“ He naturally begins by ascribing to the phenomena which are followed by pains or other practically important consequences a reality not shared by the rest. This first interpretation of the chaos of presentations is probably the first for which we can have direct testimony, and represents the view of reality taken by savages and small children. It is merely an extension of this view when the "plain man," in the condition of "natural realism" distinguishes hallucinations, fancies, and dreams from true reality. ”