George Edward Moore

“ And, in general, that which makes the sensation of blue a mental fact seems to escape us; it seems, if I may use a metaphor, to be transparent—we look through it and see nothing but the blue; we may be convinced that there is something, but what it is no philosopher, I think, has yet clearly recognised. ”

“ If, on the other hand, we clearly recognise the nature of that peculiar relation which I have called ‘awareness of anything’; if we see that this is involved equally in the analysis of every experience—from the merest sensation to the most developed perception or reflexion, and that this is in fact the only essential element in an experience—the only thing that is both common and peculiar to all experiences—the only thing which gives us reason to call any fact mental ”

“ I do not believe it possible to refute a single one of the many important propositions contained in the assertion that it is so. Reality may be spiritual, for all I know; and I devoutly hope it is. But I take ‘Idealism’ to be a wide term and to include not only this interesting conclusion, but a number of arguments which are supposed to be, if not sufficient, at least necessary, to prove it. Indeed I take it that modern Idealists are chiefly distinguished by certain arguments which they have in common. That reality is spiritual has, I believe, been the tenet of many theologians ”

“ If we are told that the assertion ‘Blue exists’ is meaningless unless we mean by it that ‘The sensation of blue exists,’ we are told what is certainly false and self-contradictory. If we are told that the existence of blue is inconceivable apart from the existence of the sensation, the speaker probably means to convey to us, by this ambiguous expression, what is a self-contradictory error. For we can and must conceive the existence of blue as something quite distinct from the existence of the sensation. We can and must conceive that blue might exist and yet the sensation of blue not exist. ”

“ But it does follow that, so far as this argument goes, it is the barest supposition, without the least bit of evidence. I propose to attack a proposition which seems to me to stand in this relation to the conclusion ‘Reality is spiritual’. I do not propose to dispute that ‘Reality is spiritual’; I do not deny that there may be reasons for thinking that it is: but I do propose to show that one reason upon which, to the best of my judgment, all other arguments ever used by Idealists depend is false. ”

“ The element that is common to them all, and which I have called ‘consciousness,’ really is consciousness. A sensation is, in reality, a case of ‘knowing’ or ‘being aware of’ or ‘experiencing’ something. When we know that the sensation of blue exists, the fact we know is that there exists an awareness of blue. ”

“ But I believe that no Idealist ever has maintained it to be so. Although this—that two distinct terms are necessarily related—is the only sense which ‘esse is percipi’ can have if it is to be true and important, it can have another sense, if it is to be an important falsehood. I believe that Idealists all hold this important falsehood. They do not perceive that Esse is percipi must, if true, be merely a self-evident synthetic truth: they either identify with it or give as a reason for it another proposition which must be false because it is self-contradictory. ”

“ And at this point I need not conceal my opinion that no philosopher has ever yet succeeded in avoiding this self-contradictory error: that the most striking results both of Idealism and of Agnosticism are only obtained by identifying blue with the sensation of blue: that esse is held to be percipi, solely because what is experienced is held to be identical with the experience of it. That Berkeley and Mill committed this error will, perhaps, be granted: that modern Idealists make it will, I hope, appear more probable later. ”

“ I am as directly aware of the existence of material things in space as of my own sensations; and what I am aware of with regard to each is exactly the same—namely that in one case the material thing, and in the other case my sensation does really exist. The question requiring to be asked about material things is thus not: What reason have we for supposing that anything exists corresponding to our sensations? but: What reason have we for supposing that material things do not exist, since their existence has precisely the same evidence as that of our sensations? ”

“ The fact is, on his own theory, that himself and that other person are in reality mere contents of an awareness, which is aware of nothing whatever. All that can be said is that there is an awareness in him, with a certain content: it can never be true that there is in him a consciousness of anything. And similarly he is never aware either of the fact that he exists or that reality is spiritual. The real fact, which he describes in those terms, is that his existence and the spirituality of reality are contents of an awareness, which is aware of nothing—certainly not, then, of its own content. ”

“ And there are, I admit, many who not only imply, as we all do, that green is distinct from the sensation of green, but expressly insist upon the distinction as an important part of their system. They would perhaps only assert that the two form an inseparable unity. ”

“ It was, in this way, commonly supposed, before Kant, that many truths could be proved by the law of contradiction alone. This is, therefore, a mistake which it is plainly easy for the best philosophers to make. Even since Kant many have continued to assert it; but I am aware that among those Idealists, who most properly deserve the name, it has become more fashionable to assert that truths are both analytic and synthetic. Now with many of their reasons for asserting this I am not concerned: it is possible that in some connexions the assertion may bear a useful and true sense. ”

“ Or again that, since an object necessarily implies a subject, and since the whole world must be an object, we must conceive it to belong to some subject or subjects, in the same sense in which whatever is the object of our experience belongs to us. ”

“ We have then in every sensation two distinct elements, one which I call consciousness, and another which I call the object of consciousness. This must be so if the sensation of blue and the sensation of green, though different in one respect, are alike in another: blue is one object of sensation and green is another, and consciousness, which both sensations have in common, is different from either. ”

“ For the element ‘consciousness,’ being common to all sensations, may be and certainly is regarded as in some sense their ‘substance,’ and by the ‘content’ of each is only meant that in respect of which one differs from another. In this sense then ‘blue’ might be said to be the content of the sensation; but, in that case, the analysis into ‘content’ and ‘existence’ is, at least, misleading, since under ‘existence’ must be included ‘what exists’ in the sensation other than blue. ”

“ To have in your mind ‘knowledge’ of blue, is not to have in your mind a ‘thing’ or ‘image’ of which blue is the content. To be aware of the sensation of blue is not to be aware of a mental image—of a ‘thing,’ of which ‘blue’ and some other element are constituent parts in the same sense in which blue and glass are constituents of a blue bead. ”

“ The facts present themselves as a kind of antinomy: (1) Experience is something unique and different from anything else; (2) Experience of green is entirely indistinguishable from green; two propositions which cannot both be true. Idealists, holding both, can only take refuge in arguing from the one in some connexions and from the other in others.
But I am well aware that there are many Idealists who would repel it as an utterly unfounded charge that they fail to distinguish between a sensation or idea and what I will call its object. ”

“ For there is a certain doctrine, very prevalent among philosophers nowadays, which by a very simple reduction may be seen to assert that two distinct things both are and are not distinct. A distinction is asserted; but it is also asserted that the things distinguished form an ‘organic unity’. But, forming such a unity, it is held, each would not be what it is apart from its relation to the other. Hence to consider either by itself is to make an illegitimate abstraction. ”

“ In general, it may be said, this phrase ‘reality is spiritual’ excites and expresses the belief that the whole universe possesses all the qualities the possession of which is held to make us so superior to things which seem to be inanimate: at least, if it does not possess exactly those which we possess, it possesses not one only, but several others, which, by the same ethical standard, would be judged equal to or better than our own. ”

“ I shall only attempt to arrive at the truth about a matter, which is in itself quite trivial and insignificant, and from which, so far as I can see and certainly so far as I shall say, no conclusions can be drawn about any of the subjects about which we most want to know. ”

“ Now why I mention these two points is that when engaged in the intricacies of philosophic discussion, we are apt to overlook the vastness of the difference between this idealistic view and the ordinary view of the world, and to overlook the number of different propositions which the idealist must prove. It is, I think, owing to the vastness of this difference and owing to the number of different excellencies which Idealists attribute to the universe, that it seems such an interesting and important question whether Idealism be true or not. ”

“ Accordingly, if the assertion that percipi forms part of the whole meant by reality is to have any importance, it must mean that the whole is organic, at least in this sense, that the other constituent or constituents of it cannot occur without percipi, even if percipi can occur without them. Let us call these other constituents x. The proposition that esse includes percipi, and that therefore from esse percipi can be inferred, can only be important if it is meant to assert that percipi can be inferred from x. ”

“ An abstraction is illegitimate, when and only when we attempt to assert of a part—of something abstracted—that which is true only of the whole to which it belongs: and it may perhaps be useful to point out that this should not be done. ”

“ It is, indeed, extremely unlikely that so essential a part of the historical meaning of ‘analytic’ and ‘synthetic’ should have been entirely discarded, especially since we find no express recognition that it is discarded. In that case it is fair to suppose that modern Idealists have been influenced by the view that certain truths can be proved by the law of contradiction alone. ”

“ The principle of organic unities, like that of combined analysis and synthesis, is mainly used to defend the practice of holding both of two contradictory propositions, wherever this may seem convenient. In this, as in other matters, Hegel’s main service to philosophy has consisted in giving a name to and erecting into a principle, a type of fallacy to which experience had shown philosophers, along with the rest of mankind, to be addicted. ”

“ The principle is used to assert that certain abstractions are in all cases illegitimate; that whenever you try to assert anything whatever of that which is part of an organic whole, what you assert can only be true of the whole. ”

“ Modern Idealism, if it asserts any general conclusion about the universe at all, asserts that it is spiritual. There are two points about this assertion to which I wish to call attention. These points are that, whatever be its exact meaning, it is certainly meant to assert (1) that the universe is very different indeed from what it seems, and (2) that it has quite a large number of properties which it does not seem to have. Chairs and tables and mountains seem to be very different from us ”

“ It is a well-known fact in the history of philosophy that necessary truths in general, but especially those of which it is said that the opposite is inconceivable, have been commonly supposed to be analytic, in the sense that the proposition denying them was self-contradictory. ”

“ If it has this importance, it will indeed follow that all the most striking results of philosophy—Sensationalism, Agnosticism and Idealism alike—have, for all that has hitherto been urged in their favour, no more foundation than the supposition that a chimera lives in the moon. ”

“ All other suppositions—the Agnostic’s, that something, at all events, does exist, as much as the Idealist’s, that spirit does—are, if we have no reason for believing in matter, as baseless as the grossest superstitions. ”

“ The idealist means to assert that they are in some sense neither lifeless nor unconscious, as they certainly seem to be; and I do not think his language is so grossly deceptive, but that we may assume him to believe that they really are very different indeed from what they seem. ”

“ I say this lest it should be thought that any of the arguments which will be advanced in this paper would be sufficient to disprove, or any refutation of them sufficient to prove, the truly interesting and important proposition that reality is spiritual. ”

“ When the whole universe is declared to be spiritual, it is meant not only that it is in some sense conscious, but that it has what we recognise in ourselves as the higher forms of consciousness. That it is intelligent ”