Hypothetical

“ “Either A is B or C is D,” means, “if A is not B, C is D; and if C is not D, A is B.” All hypothetical propositions, therefore, though disjunctive in form, are conditional in meaning; and the words hypothetical and conditional may be, as indeed they generally are, used synonymously. ”

“ So, then, an Absolute Experience could and would at once find its ideas adequately fulfilled in concrete fact, and also find this fulfilment as an individual collection of individuals exemplifying these ideas, while, as to other abstractly possible fulfilments of the same ideas, the Absolute Experience would find them as hypothetical or ideal entities, contrary to fact. ”

“ Apart from particular observations, science need presuppose nothing except the general principles of logic, and these principles are not laws of nature, for they are merely hypothetical, and apply not only to the actual world but to whatever is possible. ”

“ This is why the true universal judgment has long been seen by logicians to be essentially hypothetical, and why, again, thought or knowledge always appears to the common-sense man to be dealing with realities which have previously been given independently of the “work of the mind.” ”

“ Such difficulties have made people doubtful how far objective reality could be known by sense at all, and have made them suppose that there were positive arguments against the view that it can be so known. Our hypothetical construction meets these arguments, and shows that the account of the world given by common sense and physical science can be interpreted in a way which is logically unobjectionable, and finds a place for all the data, both hard and soft. It is this hypothetical construction, with its reconciliation of psychology and physics, which is the chief outcome of our discussion. ”

“ The hypothetical things that such men have invented, defined as they have defined them, are showing an extraordinary fertility in consequences verifiable by sense. Our logic can deduce from them a consequence due under certain conditions, we can then bring about the conditions, and presto, the consequence is there before our eyes. The scope of the practical control of nature newly put into our hand by scientific ways of thinking vastly exceeds the scope of the old control grounded on common sense. ”

“ And if this be your belief, as it doubtless is, is not your principle of causation for you a principle somehow first known to govern the real world which your experience of resistance is said to make manifest to your senses, before you can use the principle to prove the existence of matter? But if this be true, is not your principle of causation, your assurance that the real world is one where facts stand in rational relations, and where what happens is explicable, already presupposed not only as valid, but as valid for a real world beyond you, from the very outset of your whole inquiry? ”

“ But we also predicate equality in the judgment of reality; what can the empirical sense of such a proposition be when the sense of equality is alleged to be non-empirical? We present reality to ourselves in a space and time order. What sense has this idea? We ourselves and our body belong to the idea which we have of reality. We represent things as acting upon our sense-organs and connect these with our psychical processes. The actual coincidence of these results with what we actually experience, warrants our ideas of what we call objective reality. ”

“ All such conceptions can be viewed either as relatively valid, or as metaphysically final, only upon the basis to be established by a general theory of what constitutes our own type of knowledge. And for such a theory, — our whole present concern, — experience and reality alike contain only fulfilment of purpose, complete or incomplete, conditions of interest and attention, expressed or partially expressed in present consciousness, — acknowledgments of facts, and ignorance of facts, — beliefs, and truths related to beliefs. ”

“ What is the precise effect of our argument on the subject of the human mind? Its precise effect and bearing is to turn us to the study of fact—of a clear and a peculiar fact—from the contemplation of an object which is either an hypothesis, or else no object at all (not even an hypothesis but a contradiction) , or else an irrelevant object of research, and one which cannot by any conceivability contain the fact which it is our business to investigate. ”

“ Our systems of science, our conclusions in philosophy, our intuitions into first truths and laws, and all the confidence with which we accept truth in all these great realms of mental life, rest back on the observations, reasonings and conclusions for whose reality and order consciousness is our most fundamental voucher. To its tests and verifications all the processes of knowing must submit. No truth is even visible except in the light in which consciousness holds all our acts and forms of intelligence. ”

“ Upon the basis of the general theory of human knowledge thus broadly sketched, we shall next pass to a study of the questions offered to our scrutiny by Nature, when viewed in its relation to Man. Here our main purpose shall be to apply our general idealistic doctrine, concerning what is meant by Reality in general, to the problem as to the sense in which Nature and Man are real. ”

“ Present Being of two sorts, namely in nature and in minds, Past and Future Being, these four types of reality we have now enumerated as types recognized by common sense and natural science. Our study of the Third Conception of Being, some time since, made us familiar with the still different sort of reality ordinarily attributed to the realm of moral and of mathematical truth. This realm of eternal validity common sense as well as science recognizes ”

“ But if the universal character of the hypothesis and the tested theory belong to the instrumental character of thought in so reconstructing a world that has proved to be imperfect, and inadequate to conduct, the stuff of the world and of the new hypothesis are the same. ”

“ But when the hypothesis, of itself and without adjustment for the purpose, gives us the rule and reason of a class of facts not contemplated in its construction, we have a criterion of its reality, which has never yet been produced in favour of falsehood. ”

“ And since it is by these laws, combined with the facts of each particular case, that the whole of the phenomena of human action and feeling are produced, it is on these that every rational attempt to construct the science of human nature in the concrete, and for practical purposes, must proceed. ”

“ Where our consciousness recognizes between two phenomena an inherent distinction; where we are sensible of a difference which is not merely of degree, and feel that no adding one of the phenomena to itself would produce the other; any theory which attempts to bring either under the laws of the other must be false; though a theory which merely treats the one as a cause or condition of the other, may possibly be true. ”

“ A comparison of the two theories of truth examined in the last chapter will show that, whereas both rest on a logical quality in ideas, the first depends on an external view taken by the mind of an independent non-mental reality, whereas the second depends on the discovery of an inner meaning in experience itself. It is this inner meaning of experience that we seek to know when asking any question concerning reality. It is the development of this view, and what it implies as to the ultimate nature of reality and truth, that we are now to examine. ”

“ Are mind and matter, cause and effect, purpose, society, brain-processes and consciousness such well-established conceptions, are they such independent constants in the scientist's formulæ, that wholly uncritical questions of fact are all that one needs to ask about them? Why, when one really thinks about it, to assume, as the questions of fact of an objective science are made to assume, that anything either is or is not something else, is about as blinding and ill-advised as could well be. ”

“ I have tried to show that an idealist is not obliged either to ignore or to make light of physical facts in order to maintain his theory of the Absolute. That the latter theory is, in the only reasonable sense, itself an empirical doctrine, I have set forth in the former series of these lectures. Here I attempt to point out what links connect our general idealistic interpretation of all experience with our special interpretation of our experience of Nature. ”

“ In fact, no belief which we entertain has so complete a logical basis as that to which I have just referred. It tacitly underlies every process of reasoning; it is the foundation of every act of the will. ”

“ Now in this extremely elementary consideration, namely, in the consideration that unless ideas first voluntarily bind themselves to a given task, and so, by their internal purpose, already commit themselves to a certain selection of its object, they are neither true nor false, — in this consideration, I say, there may be hidden consequences that we shall later find momentous for the whole theory of Being and of truth. ”

“ Once more the difficulty is in the assumption, so natural to an objective science, of fixed conceptions. Are purpose and social feeling so fixed in their nature, and above all so well understood, that their presence or absence can be established by an experiment or two or ten thousand conducted on strictly objective principles? No conceptions are fixed, and instead of questions of fact we should have, what a strictly objective science cannot have, questions of meaning. ”

“ We ask only as to the most general theory of the constitution of any realistic world. And here we shall restate the precise sense of the realistic definition, and next shall develope, in a series of formal propositions, its inevitable consequences, until we see to what end they lead, both the realist himself, and all whose faith, whether in the world of science or in the realm of religion, depends upon realistic philosophical formulas. ”

“ In other words, the science of Human Nature may be said to exist in proportion as the approximate truths, which compose a practical knowledge of mankind, can be exhibited as corollaries from the universal laws of human nature on which they rest; whereby the proper limits of those approximate truths would be shown, and we should be enabled to deduce others for any new state of circumstances, in anticipation of specific experience. ”

“ Only on the basis of a rational theory as to the purposes subserved by the various mental sciences, and the possible limitations imposed by those purposes on the use of the corresponding categories, can we decide how far the interpretation of existence as a whole in terms of Psychology, Sociology, or Ethics, is legitimate. ”

“ Any means that really serves an end must have something in common with the end it serves; and, again, an end that really sanctions a means, whatever the means be, must itself be, at least potentially, which is after all to say essentially, in and of the means employed. Different sciences, then, even physics and psychology, or natural science and theology, cannot be even temporarily methods of each other without partaking in some way, under some disguise or other, through some peculiarity in their conceptions or in the relations of their conceptions, of each other's subject-matter. ”

“ That which they express is the True, if only the True for, and in, mankind. In this lies their worth; as worth in Science also, and in the Beautiful, lies in the truth of the Idea that is therein expressed. ”

“ The obvious value of such a theory is that it is at once idealistic in its analysis of the presuppositions of life, just to the direct and irresistible reality of the facts of experience, and disposed, after all, to go deeper than experience in its search for the ultimate truth of the world. ”

“ Thus our involuntary adhesion to the first, and our inability to hold the last, answer to their respective claims as measured by the fundamental test of credibility. The instinct justifies the logic: the logic accounts for the instinct. It was hinted at the outset, that an inquiry into our knowledge by means of our knowledge must, if rightly conducted, be consistent in its results—that the analysis of Philosophy must agree with the synthesis of Common Sense. ”

“ Thus, then, the words Use, Advantage, Interest, Good, find no application in a world in which no consciousness exists. [p. 7] Things there are neither good nor bad; they simply are or are not. Ideal truth-to exist at all requires that a mind also exist which shall deal with it as a judge deals with the law, really creating that which it professes only to declare. ”

“ But the reason, which is the faculty of the logical connection of ideas, and of the logical necessity which rules in that connection, often quits this safe and solid ground of reality, as presented to it in triple experience, whether of revelation and history, or of natural science, and resting entirely on itself, tries to build exclusively on its own foundation. ”

“ Not in the vast field of logic, of empirical psychology, in questions concerning the essence of bodies and their forces, in matters of mere history of philosophy; but in questions of views of the world and life, in metaphysics and ethics, it does. These, the highest questions, bearing on the direction and pursuit of human life, matters that most occupy the human mind, are at the same time subjects of revelation ”

“ And, as we have already seen, and in the present lecture shall further illustrate, the relation of partial and total meaning is, at the same time, the relation of any finite will to the expression of the complete intent of that same will. Without contradiction, therefore, you are unable to assert the real Being of any world, unless you conceive that world as the expressed will whose partial momentary embodiment you even now observe, whenever you get any rational idea before your mind. ”