Robert Adamson

“ Since that which stands in need of explanation is experience itself, we evidently cannot explain it otherwise than by looking at it. To look beyond experience is absurd; there is evidently nothing left but the examination of experience, and to this philosophy must needs be confined. ”

“ It seems evident to him that to the observer, regarded as standing apart from conscious experience, nothing can be presented but isolated, single states, connected externally or contingently, containing in themselves no reference to underlying substance or cause, and existing only as facts for an observer. The result is one aspect, unfortunately almost the only aspect known, of the Berkeleian idealism. Existence is the sum of states making up the experience of the individual; there is nothing beyond the mind and its own phenomena. ”

“ Conscious experience, that of which the individual subject becomes aware as making up his existence, is regarded as material upon which the processes of observation, classification, analysis, employed to good purpose in physical inquiries, are to be directed. At first sight, indeed, such a method appears not merely natural, but the only possible way in which a philosophical theory, granting such to be feasible, can be constructed. For is not a philosophical theory a kind of knowledge? ”

“ Any divergence arises, not from disagreement respecting the quite empty proposition, that there is nothing beyond experience, but from some difference in conception of experience and in the method of dealing with it. ”

“ Thus the psychological idealism, reached by application of the one method, was transformed by application of the other into a species of objective or theological idealism. The conception of a mere flux of conscious states was converted into the more complex notion of an intelligible system—a world of free and independent spirits, whose modes of action and passion are the several modifications of actual experience as known to us. Finite minds are related to one another and to the Infinite Mind by mutual action and reaction. ”

“ Beyond all question, Berkeley started, in his philosophical analysis, with a doctrine which in terms may be regarded as identical with the principle of the transcendental method. He proposed to investigate philosophical notions or terms in the light of the doctrine, that no fact can possibly be admitted which is not a fact for some conscious subject. Every metaphysical theorem or notion must be subjected to the same test, reduction of its terms to the experience of a thinking being. ”

“ His answer, given briefly and without adequate investigation of its real ground, was practically that for such a subject conscious experience must present itself as a conditioned and dependent fact, as a series of accidents of which intelligence or mind is the substance, as a series of effects of which intelligence or mind is the cause. ”

“ The naïve doctrine that since cognition is an aspect or form of conscious experience, its nature, extent, and validity are to be considered by investigating it according to the rules of scientific method,—just as we should investigate an object presented in outer experience,—is not to be identified with the truth which the most metaphysical thinker acknowledges, that only by thought can thought be tested and examined. ”

“ Why should either passive or active sensations, or any combinations of them, appear to the conscious subject himself as limitations? If we represent to ourselves the conscious subject as a thing acted upon and reacting, we may try by the help of this metaphor to render intelligible the fact that some states of his experience appear as objective and determined, while others are thought as subjective and relatively undetermined ”

“ Thus psychology, as ordinarily conceived—the scientific account of the phenomena to be observed in consciousness, the description, analysis, and history of mental phenomena—stands on precisely the same level as the natural sciences, and like them, leaves out of consideration the problem with which philosophy as such has to deal. ”

“ Critical examination often shows that under an apparently simple question or statement a whole theory lies concealed, and that the inferences drawn follow not from the fact contained in the query or proposition, but from the underlying theory. Thus, in the case in point, the restriction of philosophical inquiry to experience has always meant, to writers of the English school, that phenomena of inner and outer life are known in the same way, and that beyond the knowledge thus obtained there is nothing standing in need of investigation or capable of being investigated. ”

“ Philosophy is thus the subjective side of that which objectively appears or presents itself as reality, in ordinary life. The experience of the finite subject, an experience in which, so far as cognition is concerned, the inner and outer worlds are distinct ”

“ For, here, each fact is to be regarded, not only as a thing standing in relations to other things,—relations only conceivable when we secretly postulate the presence of some mind which relates the things to one another,—but as a fact for the conscious subject. ”

“ For Kant, as for Fichte, psychology is a science or doctrine subordinate to philosophy proper, involving in its method assumptions which it is the very business of philosophy to discuss, and employing notions which it is the function of philosophy to criticise. So far from speculative principles being generalisations from psychological data, they are antecedent to the establishment of such data as facts of experience. ”

“ Were we to begin our philosophical analysis, as psychology must begin, with the distinction as in some way a fact given, and assume simply that the thinking subject is confronted with two orders of phenomena to be interpreted through the same notions, we should commit a twofold error. ”

“ The world of external experience appears as a totality of existing things, reciprocally determining and being determined, each of which is what it is because the others are what they are. It matters not that, by the introduction of some subjective analysis, we reduce the supposed things to more or less permanent groups or series of sensations: the essential fact is, that they are thought as making up a mechanical whole. ”

“ The psychological method, starting from the point of view of ordinary consciousness, in which the individual subject is confronted with two dissimilar series of facts, inner and outer experience, and in which each series, as it presents itself separately, is viewed from the same quasi external position, proceeds to treat these facts by the help of the familiar category or notion of the thing and its relations to other things. ”

“ Apparent inversion, as we know, may arise either from the position of the things themselves, or from the inverted view of the observer; and the extraordinary difference between the English and the later German philosophy is merely the result of the fundamental difference in point of view from which they contemplate philosophical questions. The problems with which both are engaged are of necessity the same—no philosophy is ever new—but the methods employed are radically divergent, and not without careful analysis and criticism can they be brought within sight of one another. ”

“ We may assume hypothetically that there is system in human cognition, and if so, we assume that all principles can be shown to rest upon some one comprehensive absolute principle—a principle incapable of proof, but giving the ground of proof to all other principles. ”

“ Material substance as distinct from the varied and specifically qualified material things, unqualified matter as the cause of objective phenomena, things as existing out of relation to conscious intelligence, abstract ideas of facts of experience, are instances of such abstraction. Berkeley’s demand that, before discussing problems as to matter, cause, substance, and other metaphysical notions, we shall first determine what they mean for us, has the true note of the transcendental method. ”

“ We voluntarily abstract from the essential feature of the problem, the existence of the conscious subject for whom the orders of facts are there present, and must therefore recognise that any conclusions from investigation of the facts have validity only in subordination to the abstraction from which we start. ”

“ There is no resemblance between passive and active sensations, and the assumed actions and reactions from which they arise; and the only problem, how the consciousness of difference arises out of the sensations, is not answered by reference to actions and reactions which are not in the sensations at all, but, if in consciousness at all, are added by thought. ”

“ Berkeley’s thinking is in so many ways typical of the English spirit, his idealism has affected so much of current speculation, and his position in the general development of modern philosophy is so peculiar, that it is worth while here to scrutinise somewhat closely the principles upon which he proceeded. ”

“ A notion like this is essentially what Kant and Fichte call “dogmatic.” [6] It implies or starts from the assumption of an absolute opposition between two orders of real existences, the finite and the infinite mind, and endeavours to explain their reconciliation or conjunction by means of a conception which has validity only for the diverse objects of one conscious subject. A conscious subject can only think the objects which make up his experience as mutually determining, for only so do they compose one experience. ”

“ Such systematic explanation, embracing man and the entire round of his experiences, sensuous, intellectual, moral, religious, aesthetical, political, &c., is alone philosophy, and to that no repetition of without is within, or matter is phenomenal, will ever prove adequate.” [5] In short, the slightest reflection enables one to see that the most airy subjective idealism and the crassest materialism are one and the same. ”

“ He is even disposed at times to reject his underlying doctrine of the necessary implication of subject and object, and to regard mind itself as but a collection of particular ideas, as, indeed, mind necessarily is, for internal observation. In the first formal stage of his philosophy, the stage represented by the ‘Principles,’ the most characteristic features are due to the steady application of the individualist criterion. ”