Irregulars

“ In the eighth rank of prerogative instances, we will place deviating instances, such as the errors of nature, or strange and monstrous objects, in which nature deviates and turns from her ordinary course. ”

“ In the relations of this visible world we find them to have been as rational, and shrewd to detect an historic anomaly, as ourselves. But when once the invisible world was supposed to be opened, and the lawless agency of bad spirits assumed, what measures of probability, of decency, of fitness, or proportion—of that which distinguishes the likely from the palpable absurd—could they have to guide them in the rejection or admission of any particular testimony? ”

“ Where we see or conceive the whole at once we readily note the discriminations and decide the preference: but of two systems, of which neither can be surveyed by any human being in its full compass of magnitude and multiplicity of complication, where is the wonder, that judging of the whole by parts, I am affected by one or the other as either presses on my memory or fancy? ”

“ The class of errors that we shall first take seems, to common sense, common enough. It is the class known as errors about our neighbor’s states of mind. Let us then, for argument’s sake, assume without proof that our neighbors do exist. For we are not here concerned to answer Solipsism, but merely to exemplify the difficulties about the nature of error. If our neighbors did not exist, then the nature of the error that would lie in saying that they do exist would present almost exactly the same difficulties. ”

“ This world, too, is certainly a world of incongruities, and the more I see of it, the more I am biased in that way of reflection; and if any one will take the trouble to look at things as they are, abstractedly, and observe how good, bad and indifferent, black, white and blue, are jumbled together, he will not deny me his assent. ”

“ Nor is this particular conflict in our ordinary ideas yet before us in all its fatefulness, for—as if to defy the principle of consistency to the very last degree of its forbearance—we are often, if not usually, given not only to unifying our world of things in terms of just one more thing, or of persons in terms of just one more person, but also to thinking of this one more thing, or person as sui generis, as altogether different in nature and substance. ”

“ Whatever lay beyond the scope of their analysis and defied their laws, they disliked and dreaded. The outlying regions of mystery which hem life in on every side, are inaccessible to the intellect and irreducible in terms of its laws, were strangely repellent to them, and from such shadowy vistas they resolutely turned their eyes and fastened them on the solid ground at their feet. ”

“ In making error objective we have made all objectivity erroneous. We find ourselves obliged to say that the choir of Westminster Abbey, the Brooklyn bridge, the heads on our shoulders are all supported by logical errors!
Following these illustrations of ontological contradictions there is indeed this interesting statement: "Nature is so full of these mutually negative processes that we are moved to admiration when a few forces coöperate long enough to form what we call an organism."32 The implication is, apparently, that as an "opposition" of forces is error, "coöperation" of forces is truth. ”

“ But the varieties, inconsistencies, and contradictions of human manners are so numerous and glaring that it is scarcely possible to fix any general principle that will apply to all the incongruous races of mankind, or even to conceive an irregularity to which some or other of them have not been accustomed. ”

“ Such again was a note of these high existences—that made one content to ask of them no whit of other consistency than that of carrying off the particular occasion, whatever it might be, in a dazzle of amiability and felicity and leaving that as a sufficient trace of their passage. Sought and achieved consistency was but an angular, a secondary motion; compared with the air of complete freedom it might have an effect of deformity. ”

“ If we want to know the reason for our superior trust in irregularity in such cases, it is to be found in the fact that experience shows nature, in spite of all her marvelous orderliness in the large, to be completely free, and hence irregular in little things. ”

“ For every property, therefore, in facts, or in our mode of considering facts, which leads us to believe that they are habitually conjoined when they are not, or that they are not when in reality they are, there is a corresponding kind of Fallacy; and an enumeration of fallacies would consist in a specification of those properties in facts, and those peculiarities in our mode of considering them, which give rise to this erroneous opinion. ”

“ The illusion arises from our constitutional tendency to put the positive pole of the category of relation — Substance, Cause, Agent — as if it were something additional to the system of experience, instead of merely a term within this. It is thus itself a contradiction, one not simply functional but organic, and therefore provokes to endless other contradictions. ”

“ We are puzzled now to comprehend how that which was independent has been induced to leave its path. We begin to seek the cause which forces it to exert and to suffer influence; and, with this, we are well on the road to false theory and ruinous error. ”

“ Behind the loftiest estimates of value by which the history of thought has hitherto been governed, misunderstandings of the bodily constitution, either of individuals, classes, or entire races are concealed. ”

“ I can see now a significance back of these seemingly trivial things: they reveal an unenviable complexity of nature. In first one thing, then another, I have stood out against conforming to customs, if my own ideas of right and wrong prohibited me, but alas! so often has come the ultimate defeat—concessions to conventions, customs, overpowering circumstances, or instincts. ”

“ Hence the familiar idea of the universality, which is identical with the indeterminate character, of any side of human nature; of the political side, for example, or the religious or the physiological, of the lawful or of the lawless. Not any particular political status, nor any particular religion, nor any particular body is universal, but the political or the religious or the physiological is universal—as universal, to repeat, as it is indeterminate. Not any particular lawfulness or lawlessness, but the lawful or the lawless is universal. ”

“ In the Republic, we have a repetition and copious illustration of this antithesis between the world of Universals or Cogitables, which are the only unchangeable realities and the only objects of knowledge, — and the world of Sensible Particulars, which are transitory and confused shadows of these Universals, and are objects of opinion only. ”

“ Yes, they prove how common and pitifully uniform the mass are: are we to call the operation of gravity, of stupidity, of blind imitation, of love, and of hunger, laws? Well, suppose we do; but if so, it also holds good that so far as there are laws in history, the laws are worth nothing and the history is worth nothing." [5] Effect, permanence, success are no real argument. ”

“ The desirable things which the individuals of a people cannot do, or cannot well do, for themselves, fall into two classes: those which have relation to wrongs, and those which have not. Each of these branches off into an infinite variety of subdivisions. ”

“ It is certain that many things, which now seem miraculous, would not be so, if once we come to be fully acquainted with their Compositions and Operations. And it is also as true, that there are many Qualities, and Figures, and Powers of things, that break the common Laws, and transgress the standing Rules of Nature. ”

“ These themes are all-comprehensive: every truth and every error which any intellect can harbour, must find a place under one or other of these heads; and these, accordingly, are the departments into which philosophy is divided, inasmuch as these are the provinces where error has to be uprooted, and truth planted. ”

“ But if, which I suspect, they are intended to judge as they are, they will be in a rare difficulty. All the paradoxers are of like pretensions: they cannot, as a class, be right, for each one contradicts a great many of the rest. ”

“ In this irregular distribution of those human organs which polite society agrees to ignore, we get the clue to the irregularity of right and left in the human arm, and finally even the particular direction of the printed letters now before you. ”

“ But it is enough that such assertions should be either contradictory to the known laws of nature, or exceed the limits of our experience, that their fallacy or irrelevancy to our consideration should be demonstrated. ”

“ Destroy the volitional nature, the definite subjective purposes, preferences, fondnesses for certain effects, forms, orders, and not the slightest motive would remain for the brute order of our experience to be remodelled at all. But, as we have the elaborate volitional constitution we do have, the remodelling must be effected; there is no escape. ”

“ And a rough and provisional, though for our purpose sufficiently accurate, demarcation of the regions of the real and the illusory seems to coincide with the line which common sense draws between what all normal [Pg 8] men agree in holding and what the individual holds, whether temporarily or permanently, in contradiction to this. ”

“ Here, in the infinity of dialectics, and the endless dialectical disputes of an abstract and empty thinking, as well as in the false semblance of a logical necessity which prevails in these logical disputations, lies the source of the second leading error of philosophy. All erroneous systems, whether of philosophy or religion, lie somewhere between these two extremes of false thought. ”

“ Grown into their nook, crumpled into unrecognisability, constrained, deprived of their equilibrium, emaciated and angular everywhere, perfectly round only in one place,—we are moved and silent when we find them so. ”

“ Now let us suppose another being, possessing, in addition to the susceptibilities of the brute, certain other specific susceptibilities with their correlative objects, either in the sensible world, or in a future world, but that these are subjected, like the other, to the same binding and inalienable law of cause and effect. ”

“ For crude classifications and false generalisations are the curse of all organised human life. ”

“ The dead abstract notions of the intellect, the dialectical disputes of the reason, the purely subjective and one-sided apprehension of objects by a deluded fancy, and the absolute will, are the four sources of human error. ”

“ A certain impatience of decision leads people frequently to pronounce upon as anomalies, [Pg 185] what a severer scrutiny would prove to be well understood, and belonging to accredited divisions of human character. ”

“ But if, on the other hand, it be said that our character is not the mere fruit of our antecedents and surroundings, the law of uniformity is clearly broken. A new element has come into the world, namely, my character, which has not come out of the antecedents and surroundings according to any fixed law. ”

“ There thus emerges a distinction of vast importance, that of truth and falsehood, of reality and unreality, or between representation and reality. There arise two worlds, the world of ideas, and the world of reality which it is supposed to represent, and, in many cases, to represent badly. ”

“ XXI. Yet this division does not proceed from ignorance; for the soul admits of a twofold division, one of which partakes of reason, the other is without it. When, therefore, we are ordered to give a law to ourselves, the meaning is, that reason should restrain our rashness. ”

“ Thus what we have just said of human reason, which is extolled and decried by turns, and often without rule or measure, may show our lack of exactitude and how much we are accessary to our own errors. ”

“ Indecision, indefiniteness, inaccuracy grow more and more pronounced as the days draw by and an actual experience such as this compels one interested in our country’s development to cry out against permitting more time to be lost. ”

“ If the problems be vast, indeterminate, confused, and derived rather from the hopes, fears, love, hatred, astonishment, etc., of men, than from any genuine desire of knowledge,—so also does the received belief supply invisible agents in unlimited number, and with every variety of power and inclination. ”

“ MATTER AS THE INFINITE IN ITSELF.
15. Let us further examine if the indeterminate, or infinite, be an accident, or an attribute of some other nature; how it comes to be an accident, and whether privation ever can become an accident. The things that are numbers and reasons are exempt from all indetermination, because they are determinations, orders, and principles of order for the rest. ”

“ Every one, indeed, of the four fundamental faculties of the human mind contains, in itself, a faulty disposition and pernicious germ of a special and precise form of scientific error, which establishes and fully develops itself in its appropriate domain, and which, when circumstances are favorable, is matured and shaped into a system of falsehood. ”

“ But the history of the efforts made to satisfy these demands might be broadly described as a history of errors—the error consisting in ascribing fixity to that which is fluent, which varies as we vary, being gross when we are gross, and becoming, as our capacities widen, more abstract and sublime. ”

“ The problem of change is given up, and we fall back upon our laws, persisting and appearing in successions of fleeting elements. If so, phenomena seem now to have become temporal illustrations of laws. ”

“ It is, however, evident that, in the present state of our knowledge, all ideas respecting nature must refer either to the normal or to the abnormal; that is to say, they must be concerned either with what is regular, uniform, and obedient to recognized principles, or else with what is irregular, perturbed, and disobedient. ”