Henry Stephen

“ Indeed we may say: as the absolute is to absolute good, so is the relative being to relative good.
Hence the Idealistic conception of the World—We may here consider, then, the general conception of the world to which this theory leads. The energy which evolves the world is not self-existent and meaningless in itself. It does not work at random. It has its spring in Idea and purpose. Everything real has a reason for its existence. It is not due to chance or blind necessity, but to some need in the system of things, and it is in its fulfilment of purpose that reality consists. ”

“ Volition is merely an awareness of one set of feelings followed uniformly by another set. Energy is merely a peculiar kind of feeling, impressed upon us by changes in other things; the energy is not in us, but in the things. In short, mind is a purely passive product, having no consciousness of acting, but only of being acted on. Self is only the flow of present feelings, together with past ones preserved and revived. Therefore mind cannot be a source of energy. ”

“ But granted that Self has energy to produce change, the question remains; why should there be any such thing as change? Seeing that the meaning of energy is that it produces change, the great question comes to be: what is the meaning of change? Why should there be any change in the universe at all? Granted that there must be a self-existent world of being, why should it not remain always the same in eternal rest? Why is it a world of “striving and straining” to become something different? Why is it not a world of being so much as a world of becoming? Again, all force is the doing of something ”

“ Thus in the constant effort to acquire and elaborate ideas and preserve knowledge of things as necessary to its own preservation and higher development, the Self is working intellectually. Are we to say, then, that Intellect is the supreme function of mind, and that the Self is essentially Intellect—considering the other functions to be merely contributory? ”

“ But idea and matter could not come together of themselves, being both inert, having no energy of their own. But here the demiurgus came forward, and moulded self-existent matter into conformity with the self-existent Idea, and produced the world. But the world was imperfect, because matter, though called not-being, had, it seems, a nature of its own which could not be brought into harmony with that of idea or supreme Good. Hence the imperfection of the world. Here then, Plato claimed absolute reality for idea, but not active self-realising power. ”

“ In the Idea, the future Good and the present Want are both present, and the two together make the continuous flow of action—the élan vital or will to live—which constitutes the life of Self. And the analogy must be extended to the life of Nature. ”

“ These creative powers are many, but they are all included under one, which may be called the idea of Good. This supreme Idea is “the sun of the spiritual world,” that is, the power which gives life and action to all others. And they are perceived as eternal realities by the power of reason inherent in rational beings. They are therefore “Ideas”— forms of what is not, but should be,—and their essence is energy tending towards their own realisation, that is, to enter into and transform the world-substance to their own nature. ”

“ Ever so many-isms have been invented and vaunted for a time—neo-realism, neo-idealism, pragmatism, Bergsonism, intellectualism, voluntarism, behaviourism and others—each claiming to be the whole truth, obscured hitherto, but now unearthed at last, and destined to supersede everything that has gone before. ”

“ If we can show that the energy exercised by the self is originated by the mind in realising its own purposes, and that the highest kind of mental activity is that in which the Self reacts on the world in which it lives, and occasions changes in it which will promote its own highest good, then we shall be justified in drawing the conclusion that the energy which makes changes in nature, also, has its source in the realisation of a highest good. ”

“ And as its potentiality is unlimited and can never be exhausted, its actual reality consists in an eternal process of becoming. (Why incomplete and why inexhaustible? Because it is potentially infinite, and infinity cannot be exhausted in a world of finite things.) But Want is meaningless apart from a correlative Good. The Good is something which is not, but should be, and therefore Idea. Therefore the ultimate moving principle of the world is Idea. ”

“ But such inert things possess only a low kind of reality. A “real” in the highest sense is what not only maintains, but develops its own existence in interaction with other things, and thereby, realises an end and serves a purpose—i.e., a living something. Its stability is stability of purpose. It is not in filling space but in persistence of self-realisation that its reality consists—a reality of action, not of spatial passivity. What would deprive the self of reality is not the ideal theory, but that of the naturalistic school—that mind is only an ‘epiphenomenon’. ”

“ In this way the 18th century theory, “man is a machine” is revived.
If the self exercises energy of its own in Volition, where does it come from?—But this theory of automatism cannot be seriously entertained in the face of experience. In having feelings we cognise the things which give rise to the feelings; and form ideas of things and their properties of giving rise to feelings, pleasurable or painful; and foresee future things and feelings, and form an idea of future Good; and put forth energy to produce change in the world around us which will be conducive to our good. ”

“ But along with this painful feeling of Want (except in cases of despair and extreme despondency) there is also a feeling of Hope which is pleasurable, rising from thinking the probability of coming relief. Indeed there could be no feeling of want without the cognition of something which, if present, would remove the want. That something will be a good, leading on to a more remote highest Good. But this good is present only in Idea—the future in the present. Desire therefore is made to be what it is by the Idea of possible good or goods leading on to a highest Good. ”

“ Thus in every work of art, the maker first devises in his own mind an idea of what is wanted, as a mental picture; and then makes a copy of it in some material substance. This is the common way of applying ideas practically. But Idealism gives more reality to ideas than this way of thinking. Thus the highest ideas may be held to be— (1) Eternal realities seen by reason, and God’s models in creation.—The nature of Idea, in its fundamental sense, and its importance in the making of the world, seems to have been first considered by Plato. ”

“ There also, action must spring from a future Good present as Idea and removing a Want. But—
Does this take away the reality of Self? This view, that the Self is Idea, appears at first to be an idle paradox. The self has been considered the type of “reality,” and, as such, it has often been explained by the analogy of objects of sense-perception, as a grain of sand or flake of flint, which seems so indestructible. Thus reality has been identified with hardness and impenetrability of things in space. But Ideas are not particles of resisting substance. ”

“ Further, if we are taking away the reality of things by resolving them into energy, then Idealism is not alone at fault; the naturalistic philosophies do the same—With this difference that Idealism gives a reason for so doing; materialism does not.
It need not be assumed, however, that Idea and consciousness are fully co-extensive. Idea is a synthesis of tendencies which may exist without rising into consciousness. Full self-awareness and self-control are latent potentialities in that Idea which is the essence of the Self. ”

“ Then the practical knowledge thus obtained guides the energy of the Self to a life of activity for the realisation of its idea of highest Good—which is Volition.
Here then (viz. in a and b) we find the Self putting forth energy as Intellect or faculty of knowledge. And the knowledge which it gives is real and not merely phenomenal or apparent knowledge. Every finite thing manifests its real and essential nature in the energy of resisting and thereby affecting, in various ways, other finite things. ”

“ Hence some assume that “force” is a real substantial something which passes out of one thing into another. Or it may be the case, that all changes are so correlated in the absolute as means towards absolute Good that every change follows another in virtue of this universal correlativity. Hence all causality will lie ultimately in the absolute—which is the theory of universal relativity. But this question does not concern as here. What concerns us, is the source of that Energy in the Self which is followed by activity in the organism and change in external things—the energy of Volition. ”

“ These are not fancies merely, and only in individual minds; and are not things which come and go, like the fleeting objects of the sensible world around us. They are eternal realities, and their reality consists in this, that they are at the same time powers tending to realise themselves. He began to see that what does nothing has no reality, and that if Ideas are real, they must be made to be such by active power inherent in them. ”

“ This tendency may be carried so far as to separate action (volition) wholly from all dependence on Intellect, and make the person to be a self-regulating machine which operates automatically; and to make thought to be only a form of passive feeling—assuming feeling or consciousness to be only an occasional by-product given off by the working of the organic processes. Man is an accumulation of instincts, or habits of automatic movement without or with consciousness, acquired by the organism in adapting itself mechanically to the changes of the external world. ”

“ They thought it necessary to assume (apart from Idea) a self-existent world of material, somewhat disguised under the name of non-being, which resists the transforming influence of the good. And in religious thought this negative has appeared under various names, such as Ahriman, Satan, Mephistopheles. But absolute Idealism recognises only one ultimate principle, and has therefore no such resource. Even evil will have to be conceived as rising out of the Divine Idea. ”

“ Opposed by the Irrationalist—It is best understood when contrasted with the system to which it is opposed, viz., Realism in philosophy. That word has been used with different shades of meaning but (apart from realism in perception which need not be considered here) they may all be traced back to the following form as being implied in them all. The absolute is not what should be, but what is; and what is, is simply the ‘real’ world as presented in experience. This world, when resolved back into its primitive elements, is found to consist of material (i.e. space-filling) particles in motion. ”

“ And if we could distinguish all the elements contained in this process, we should be able to answer the questions: What is energy and change? What is life? What is the Self which lives and acts?
Here it is necessary to analyse Desire as the state out of which Volition rises—Now first of all, we see that voluntary action springs out of the mental state called Desire. Desire contains, so to speak, the whole Self with all its correlative functions fused into one. ”

“ It is useless to speak of reason or purpose in these things; they are antecedent to, and above all reason. We must assume, also, that though the particles are self-existent and each therefore sufficient to itself and independent of all others, yet they have the property of coming into collision in space, of resisting and changing each other’s motions and directions, and of holding one another in equilibrium, and producing compounds more or less stable, and forming themselves into worlds. ”

“ The feeling-theory is founded on one fundamental oversight—it overlooks the fact that feeling is always a feeling of something, i.e., that it is accompanied by a consciousness that the feeling consists in the Self’s being affected by something and therefore includes an awareness of something other than the Self which feels, and therefore a distinction between the Self which feels and a something which is felt. In other words, feeling contains an element of cognition, viz., a cognition of Self as having the feeling, and of something else as imposing it. ”

“ Action on the external world supposes causality. The realisation of the Good (in normal cases) involves the production of changes in the external world. This will require causality. The realising power is called cause and the realisation, effect. This introduces here the question of causation, which has been much dicussed in modern times. Can mind possess such causal power or energy? If it possesses energy, does its energy extend to producing changes in physical things? ”

“ Reason comes in at the end, not at the beginning. Reason is only an artifice discovered by finite minds for ameliorating their own condition; and that, though these minds themselves grew by a process in which there was no reason. Therefore Rationalism or Intellectualism which tries to explain everything by reason must be banished from philosophy, giving way to Irrationalism. ”

“ Has it got any root in reality, that is, in facts of consciousness? or does it rise out of any fundamental principle that will always force itself back into attention, however much obscured and disregarded it may have been for a time?
Common use of the word Idea.—What then are we to understand by Idealism? Ideas are commonly regarded as merely subjective reflections or shadows of realities—of all things the most fleeting and unreal. But Idealism gives to ideas a degree of reality and importance quite foreign to the common ways of thinking. ”

“ We have found that some hold mind to consist wholly in Feeling or that kind of consciousness which rises from being acted on by other things; while among others there has been a tendency to make it consist mainly in Intellect, i.e., in thinking and acquiring knowledge about things. Recently the tendency has become common to identify the self wholly with Volition as action on other things. ”