James Ward

“ Elated by the power and precision that generalisation secures, science was encouraged on the one hand to hope that by extending its network of general relations it would at length completely encompass the individual, on the other to despise the particular as mere ‘stuff’ of no account save as it was formed by participation in general ideas. It was mainly the former tendency that led to the philosophic indifference to mere history and experience as unscientific that characterizes Descartes, Bacon and Hobbes for example. ”

“ If however there were as many goods as there are individuals and all were disparate and independent, this would not help us much. But the individuals of history are none of them isolated, for though no two be altogether alike no two are altogether different. So community and co-operation become actual goods, struggle a possible evil calling for readjustment, and the harmonious realisation of individual ends the ideal consummation, the “one far off divine event to which the whole creation moves.” ”

“ But there is nothing to suggest that we have reached the limits of life: all we can say is that our senses and the artificial aids and methods of research at present available do not enable us to discriminate between yet simpler forms of life and their environment; not that these do not exist. There is then, it is contended, no warrant for the assumption of a completely inanimate environment at all: we ought rather with Spinoza to conclude that “all individual things are animated, albeit in diverse degrees.” ”

“ Regarding the scientific ideal of Nature as a rounded whole, we may safely say that the world of science and the world of history have little or nothing in common: their terminology, their categories, their problems are wholly different; and so too are the philosophical questions to which they severally and immediately give rise. The one never reaches the individual and concrete, the other never leaves them; for the one spontaneity and initiative are impossible, for the other inertia and rigorous concatenation ”

“ Of the greatest of these systems, that of Hegel, even its most sympathetic critics have allowed that, however perfect its ideal may be in itself, its attainment is, and must ever remain, humanly impossible. And this verdict, I do not think it audacious to say, is easy to justify: it simply amounts to protesting that we can never transcend ourselves. The first requisite of philosophy is organic coherence: it cannot, so to say, have two independent growing points, and so long as experience is the one there can be no finality about philosophy. ”

“ It is from this pluralistic standpoint that our experience has in fact developed, and it is here that we acquire the ideas that eventually lead us beyond it. For pluralism, though empirically warranted, we find defective and unsatisfactory: but the theism to which it points is only an ideal — an ideal however that, as both theoretically and practically rational, may claim our faith though it transcend our knowledge. Such is a meagre outline of the present lectures. ”

“ If we were capable of that intellectual intuition of which some philosophers have dreamt, there would be no enforced omissions, no intractable residuum, no sundering of ‘that’ and ‘what’ in our knowledge; history would not be left outside science, but rather science be taken up into history. ”

“ Having satisfied ourselves, then, that mechanism is not the secret of the universe; that, if it is to have any meaning, it must subserve some end; and finding generally that increased knowledge of Nature’s laws means increased control of Nature’s processes, we accept the facts of experience in which subject and object interact, rather than the conclusions of dualism, that mind and matter are for us two alien worlds and all knowledge of Nature an inexplicable mystery” [4] — we accept the spiritualistic standpoint and its Realm of Ends as the more fundamental. ”

“ It also indeed reveals the law and order that there prevail; but what the concrete world really is and what is the source of the law and order that it manifests are questions still wholly on our hands. But to call such descriptive scheme pure or rational science is to emphasize its source in mind; and when this intelligible scheme of our devising, with which the scientific inquirer greets Nature, is confirmed by Nature’s response, are we not justified in concluding that Nature is intelligent or that there is intelligence behind it? ”

“ In the first place a series of coincidences so vast cannot be casual and disconnected; and yet if the mechanism on the one side is a closed system, the living experience on the other cannot be even its ‘collateral product,’ as we have already seen. The hopeless impasse of dualism again confronts our naturalist, and he is fain to appeal to metaphysics; but the appeal he trusts is harmless, since he only asks for an Unknowable Reality to unite his mechanical phenomena with the psychical epiphenomena that run parallel with them. ”

“ This brings us to another inconsistency in which Naturalism is involved; for, even if conscious, the automata as part of the continuous mechanism are, as already said, powerless to withstand or to control it: consciousness is only comparable to a shadow that incidentally in some mysterious way accompanies their working. To be sure we seem active, ever striving for ends, and the historical world would become meaningless if we were not. We do not infer this activity: it is prima facie an ultimate and constitutive fact of our daily experience and of its historical development. ”

“ The unity of Nature is the ideal counterpart of the actual unity of each individual experience, where synthesis ever precedes analysis, and things are only distinguished relatively to each other so long as they are apperceived together by the one subject. The category of causality we owe to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and especially with each other, and we attribute it analogically to what we then call the interaction of natural agents. ”

“ Now for Hegel human history meant struggle for rational freedom, as for Darwin natural history meant struggle for existence: both are teleological concepts, both imply individual agents and unique events, for both the physical world is provisionally a means to ends. The historical method, then, we may say, is altogether the product of the nineteenth century and there we find it claiming “to have invaded and transformed all departments of thought.” ”

“ For we have had meantime to allow that millennial dreams of a liberation of Nature from the thraldom of so-called physical evil are as fanciful as the legends of this subjection as a consequence of moral evil. ”

“ Theism, however, promises to effect much in resolving the difficulties of pluralism, and to the careful discussion of theism I propose to devote the second part of these lectures. Meanwhile I think we must insist that the way cannot be cleared in any summary fashion by convicting the pluralist’s Weltanschauung not merely of incompleteness but of actual contradictions. In fact, if it were radically infected with contradictions, we have seen, I trust, that the way to theism would be hopelessly barred; for from pluralism speculation really always has and always must begin. ”

“ As experience advances its meaning will unfold itself to reflexion more and more: so further progress makes further regress possible and what is last in the order of experience brings us nearer to what is first in the order of knowledge. On experience as it develops the ideal of the pure reason may rise to perish never, but it was certainly not discernible at first ”

“ Here we are ever in the presence of individual things, from which science indeed sets out, but to which it can never return, individuals marked down by dates and places and actually designated or admitting of designation by proper names, [12] individuals who have no ‘doubles,’ whose like all in all we never shall meet again. The events with which we have here to deal are the unique acts and deeds that have their origin in individual centres of experience, not events that seem to occur uniformly as resultants of universal and unvarying law. ”

“ We should not start with the abstract and general, unable to reach the concrete and individual, but being fully acquainted with every individual we should be relieved of the incommensurability of fact and law. Omniscience of this sort would surely bring us nearer to reality than the omniscience of Laplace’s imaginary spirit with its completed world-formula. Order there would needs be in such a world, if it is to be a world at all. But In a realm of ends the order and meaning would be primarily the outcome of the purposes of the active beings composing it ”

“ Will a plurality of interacting subjects account for itself and for the unity which interaction implies? This is the question which in the following lectures we shall have carefully to discuss. Suppose we decide this question in the negative, that will not affect the main issue as between spiritualism and naturalism: for such ground of the world of living and acting things would — if we should be led to assume it — surely be itself living and acting. In any case then we have a realm of ends, the only question is: — what is its constitution, how is its harmony secured ”

“ Mr Bradley concludes his metaphysical essay entitled Appearance and Reality with the admission that science is a poor thing if measured by the wealth of the real universe: he finds that “in the end Reality is inscrutable,” and is confirmed in “the irresistible impression that all is beyond us.” Everyone must acknowledge this to be a more honest conclusion than the pretended demonstrations of many philosophers. Nobody now-a-days — save here and there a man of science off his beat, like Haeckel for example — has the hardihood to rush into print with a final explanation of the Universe. ”

“ There seems no end to the process of rationalising experience, but — as I said at the outset — at least there may be progress, and our confidence, that, as Hegel maintained, the real is rational and the rational real may deepen as we proceed. But we must start where we are and continue as we have begun, letting knowledge grow from more to more. ”

“ Pure mechanical science recognises neither activity nor passivity, but only mass that is inert and motions that are reversible. But inertia is a negative term and becomes meaningless if we have no experience of activity. Such activity, however, as the historical world implies could not be found in the physical world unless that showed signs of being intelligently directed: but then such evidence could only be appreciated by beings who were themselves active. ”

“ For instance, we say that ‘knowledge is power,’ and so ‘to be forewarned is to be forearmed.’ In proof we can point to instances innumerable in which the very knowledge of what in ‘the natural course of things’ will inevitably happen is the sure means of falsifying such a forecast. To take the very simplest illustration: lifeless masses do not get out of one another’s way as masses under living guidance almost invariably do. ”

“ But the principle of continuity is supposed to turn the edge of this objection, and to this principle panpsychism appeals, though it does not rest on that alone. “Nature never makes leaps,” said Leibniz. Every organism has its peculiar environment, the simpler the one is the simpler the other will be. Recent knowledge has shown the range of life to extend far into the region of what was once regarded as the inanimate, purely physical world, and it has further shown the lowest known organisms to be highly complex and extremely varied. ”

“ All this implies motives, implies ends to be attained : we seek knowledge primarily because it proves an aid to more and fuller life. Apart from this its quest would be unintelligible: this brings it within the scope of the realm of ends. Finally, if we consider the main structure of knowledge, we find that its fundamental principles of unity, causality and regularity are derived from this standpoint: in other words, the main structure of our concept of Nature is entirely anthropomorphic. ”

“ Again, the light which experience on its practical side throws on the whole process and progress of knowledge is of fundamental importance. We are not simply cognitive beings: moreover, knowledge does not evolve itself, as it were by some purely immanent process, while we merely look on. ”