It may perhaps prove instructive if we carry this discussion somewhat further. There is, we have seen, no such thing as a continuance without change or as a self-contained and self-intelligible temporal process. But, it may be said, anyhow the existence of something at a certain moment, or up to a certain moment, is a rational ground for concluding to its continued existence at the next moment. Now this I take to be quite erroneous. I maintain on the contrary that no ground could either be more irrational in itself or more wanting in support from our ordinary practice. And first, by way of introduction, let me dispose of any doubt based on the idea of Possibility. The nature of our world is such that we see every day the existence of finite things terminated. The possible termination of any finite temporal existence is there- fore suggested by the known character of things. It is an abstract general possibility based on and motived by the known positive character of the world, and it cannot therefore as a possibility be rejected as meaningless. On the contrary, so far as it goes% it gives some ground for the conclusion, ' This existence will at this point be terminated.' And I will now dismiss the general question as to mere possibility. But for the actual continuance of a thing, so far as I see, no rational argument can be drawn from its mere presence or its mere continued duration in existence. To say, Because a thing is now at one time it therefore must be at another time, or Because it has been through one duration it therefore must be through another duration, and to offer this argument, not as merely for 602 EXPLANATORY NOTES.
some other reason admissible, but as expressing a principle — strikes my mind as surprising. It is to me much as if a man asserted baldly, ' Because it is here now, therefore it will be there then,' and declared that no further reason either was or ought to be wanted. And that mere ■ existence ' should be a reason for anything seems difficult to conceive, even if we suppose (as we cannot) that mere existence is itself anything but a false, self- contradictory, and in the end meaningless abstraction.
But the true reason why we judge that anything will continue (whenever and wherever we so judge) is radically different. It is an inference based not on ' existence ' but on ideal synthesis of content, and it concludes to and from an identity not of ' existence ' but character. It rests in a word upon the Principle of Ideal Identity. If a thing is connected with my world now, and if I assume that my world otherwise goes on, I must apart from other reasons conclude that the thing will be there. For otherwise the synthesis of content would be both true and false. And, if in my world are certain truths of succession, then another mere context cannot make them false, and hence, apart from some reason to the contrary, the succession A-B-C must infallibly repeat itself, if there is given at any time either A or A-B. This is how through ideal identity we rationally judge and conclude to continuance, and to judge otherwise to my mind is wholly irrational. And I have ventured to dwell on this point because of the light it seems to throw on the consequences which may follow, when, rejecting the true principle of identity, we consciously or unconsciously set up in its place the chimaera of identity of mere existence.
I will add that, so far as we take the whole state of the world at any one moment as causally producing the whole state of the world at the next moment, we do so rationally only so far as we rest the succession on a connection of content, and because otherwise this connection would not be a true one, as we have taken it to be. We can only however make use of the above idea in the end on sufferance. For the state of the world would not really be self-contained, nor could the connection really in the end be intelligible. And again to take any temporal process in the Absolute as the Absolute's own process would be a fundamental error.
I will append to this Note a warning about the Principle of Ideal Identity. This principle does not of course guarantee the original truth or intelligibility of a synthesis, and it is a very serious misunderstanding to take it as used in this sense. It merely insists that any truth, because not existence, is therefore true everywhere in existence and through all changes of context For Identity see further Notes B and C.
EXPLANATORY NOTES. 603 Note to Chapters vii and viii. — I have left these chapters unaltered, but I will ask the reader to remember that I am not urging that the ideas criticised arc not perfectly valid and even objectively necessary. I am condemning them so far as they are taken as ultimate answers to the question, What is Reality?
/. 65. I am not saying that we may not have a sense and even a rudimentary perception of passivity without having any perception of activity in the proper sense. The question, raised on p. 97, as to the possible absence of an outside not-self in activity, applies with its answer mutatis mutandis to passivity also.
/. 79. As to what is and is not individually necessary we are fortunately under the sway of beneficent illusion. The one necessary individual means usually the necessity for an individual more or less of the same kind. But there is no need to enlarge on this point except in answer to some view which would base a false theoretical conclusion on an attitude, natural and necessary in practice, but involving some illusion.
p. 83. On Memory compare the passages referred to in the Index. That Memory, in the ordinary sense of the word, is a special development of Reproduction I take to be beyond doubt, and that Reproduction, in its proper sense, is Redintegration through ideal identity is to my mind certain. The nature of the psychological difference between the memory of the past on one side, and on the other side the imagination of the same or the inference (proper) thereto, is a question, I venture to think, of no more than average difficulty. It seems to me, in comparison with the problem of Reproduction in general (including the perception of a series), to be neither very hard nor very important. It is a matter however which I cannot enter on here. I have discussed the subject of Memory in Afind, N.S. Nos. 30 and 66.
I would add here that to assume the infallibility of Memory as an ultimate postulate, seems to me wholly superfluous, to say nothing of its bringing us (as it does) into collision with indubit- able facts. There is of course a general presumption that memory is to be trusted But our warrant for this general presumption is in the end our criterion of a harmonious system. Our world is ordered most harmoniously by taking what is remembered as being in general remembered truly, whatever that is to mean. And this secondary character of memory's validity is, I submit, the only view which can be reconciled with our actual logical practice.
Note to pp. 96-100. The view as to the perception of activity laid down in these pages has been criticised by Mr. Stout in his excellent work on Psychology, Vol. i, pp. 173-7. With regard to Mr. Stout's own account I shall not venture to comment on it 604 EXPLANATORY NOTES.
here, partly because I have not yet been able to give sufficient attention to it, and partly because I do not take it to be offered as metaphysical doctrine. I shall confine myself therefore to some remarks in defence of my own position.
These pages, I must admit, were too short, and yet, if lengthened, I feared they would be too long; and it might have been better to have omitted them. But, after they have been censured, I cannot withdraw them; and I have left them, apart from a few verbal alterations, as they stood. The symbols that were perhaps misleading have, I hope, been amended. But I would ask the reader to depend less on them than on what follows in this Note.
With regard to the alleged confusion in my mind "between the fact of activity and the mere experience of being active on the one hand, and the idea or perception of activity on the other" (p. 174), I think that this confusion neither existed nor exists. I should have said on the other hand that, from first to last throughout this controversy, it was I that kept this distinction clearly in mind and strove in vain to get it recognized. This, right or wrong, is at least the view which the facts force me to take. The question, What is the content of activity as it appears to the soul at first, in distinction from it as it is for an outside observer, or for the soul later on? is exactly the question to which I failed throughout to get an intelligible reply. And if I myself in any place was blind to these distinctions — distinctions familiar even to the cursory reader of Hegel — that place has not yet been shown to me. But instead of going back on the past I will try at least to be explicit here.
(i) A man may take the view that there is an original experience of activity the content of which is complex and holds that which, when analyzed by reflection, becomes our developed idea of activity. Without of course venturing to say that this view is certainly false, I submit that we have no reason to believe it to be true.
(ii) A man may hold that we have an original experience which is not in itself complex nor has any internal diversity in its content. This experience, he may further hold, goes with (a) some or (£) all of those conditions, physical or psychical, which an outside observer would or might call an active state, and which the soul itself later would or might call so. And he may go on to maintain that this sensation or feeling (or call it what you will) is the differential condition, without the real or supposed presence of which no state, or no psychical state, would be called active at all.
Now this second doctrine is to my mind radically different from the first. Its truth or falsehood to my mind is an affair not of principle but of detail. Nay, to some extent and up to a certain point, I think it very probably is true. Why should there EXPLANATORY NOTES. 605 not be a sensation going with e.g. muscular contraction, or even possibly with what we may call the explosion of a psychical disposition? Why should this sensation not always colour our perception of activity (when we get it), so that without this sensation the perception would be something different, something that would fail, I will not say essentially in being what we call activity, but fail so far that we might no longer recognize it as being the same thing? This, so far as I see, may all be true to an extent which I do not discuss; and the same thing may hold good mutatis mutandis about passivity.
But on this comes a distinction — the distinction which Mr. Stout says that I have overlooked, and which I on the contrary claim to have preached in vain — the distinction between the psychical fact itself and what that becomes for reflection. A sensation or feeling or sense (/activity, as we have just described it, is not, looked at in another way, an experience of activity at all. If you keep to it it tells you nothing, just as pleasure and pain, I should add, tell you nothing. It is a mere sensation, shut up within which you could by no reflection get the idea of activity. For that is complex, while within the sensation there is given no diversity of aspects, such as could by reflection be developed into terms and relations. And therefore this ex- perience would differ, I presume, from an original sense of time, which I may in passing remark is neither asserted nor denied on page 206 of my book. It would differ because such a sense of time has, I understand, from the first in its content an internal diversity, while diversity is absent from the experience of activity, as we now are considering it. In short whether this experience is or is not later on a character essential to our perception and our idea of activity, it, as it comes first, is not in itself an experience of activity at all. It, as it comes first, is only so for extraneous reasons and only so for an outside observer.
This is all I think it well to say here on the head of confusion. But, before proceeding to consider the charge of inconsistency brought against me, I will venture to ask a question of the reader. Can any one tell me where I can find an experimental enquiry into the particular conditions under which in fact we feel ourselves to be active or passive? I find, for instance, Mr. Stout stating here and there as experienced facts what I for one am certainly not able to find in my experience. And if any one could direct me to an investigation of this subject, I should be grateful. I am forced at present to remain in doubt about much of the observed facts. I am led even to wonder whether we have here a difference only in the observations or in the observers also, a difference, that is, in the actual facts as they exist diversely in various subjects.
I will turn now to the special charge of inconsistency. For activity I take the presence of an idea to be necessary, and I 606 EXPLANATORY NOTES.
point out then that in some cases there is not what would be commonly called an idea. But I go on to distinguish between an idea which is explicit and one which is not so. Now certainly, if by this I had meant that an idea was not actually present but was present merely somehow potentially, I should have merely covered a failure in thought by a phrase, and Mr. Stout's censure would have been just. But my meaning was on the contrary that an idea is always present actually, though an idea which many persons (in my opinion wrongly) would not call an idea. Many persons would refuse to speak of an idea unless they had something separated in its existence from a sensation, and based on an image or something else, the exis- tence of which is distinguished from the existence of the sensation. And this separated idea I called (perhaps foolishly) an explicit idea, and I opposed it to the idea which is a mere qualification of sensation or perception — a qualification inconsistent with that sensation as existing, and yet possessed of no other psychical existence, such as that of an image or (as some perhaps may add) of a mere word. And I referred to a discussion with regard to the presence of an idea in Desire, where the same distinction was made.1 This distinction I would remark further is in my judgment essentially required for the theory of reason- ing, and indeed for a just view as to any aspect of the mind. And, not being originated by me at all, much less was it invented specially for the sake of saving any doctrine of mine about the nature of activity.
Let us take the instance, given by Mr. Stout, of a child or other young animal desiring milk. The perception, visual and other- wise, of the breast or teat suggests the sucking, but that sucking I take to qualify the perception and not to be an image apart. The breast becomes by ideal suggestion the breast sucked, while on the other hand by some failure of adjustment the breast is not sucked in fact. The perceived breast is therefore at once qualified doubly and inconsistently with itself, and the self of the animal also is qualified doubly and inconsistently. That self is both expanded by ideal success and contracted by actual failure in respect of one point, i.e. the sucking. And so far as the expansion, under the whole of the above conditions, becomes actual, we get the sense of activity. And there actually is an idea present here, though there is no image nor anything that could properly be called forethought Or take a dog who, coming to some grassy place, begins to run and feels himself to be active. Where is here the idea? It might be said that there is none, because there is no forethought nor any image. But this in my opinion would be an error, an error fatal to any sound theory of the mind. And I will 1 Mind, No. 49, pp. 22-4. In once more referring the reader to this dis- cussion I will ask him to delete the error "in " on p. 23, line 5.
EXPLANATORY NOTES. 607 briefly point out where the idea lies, without of course attempting to analyze fully the dog's complex state. The ground in front of the dog is a perception qualified on the one hand, not by images, but by an enlargement of its content so as to become "ground run over." It comes to the dog therefore at once as both " run over " and " not." And the "run over" is ideal, though it is not an explicit idea or a forethought or in any sense a separate image. Again the dog comes to himself as qualified by an actual run- ning, supplemented by an ideal running over what is seen in front of him. In his soul is a triumphant process of ideal expansion passing over unbrokenly into actual fruition, the negative perception of the ground as "not run over" serving only as the vanishing condition of a sense of activity with no cloud or check of failure. This is what I meant by an idea which is not explicit, nor, except that the name is perhaps a bad one, do I see anything in it deserving censure. I should perhaps have done better to have used no name at all. But the distinction itself, I must repeat, is throughout every aspect of mind of vital importance.
But that I failed to be clear is evident, both from Mr. Stout's criticism and also from some interesting remarks by Professor Baldwin in the Psychological Review% Vol. i, No. 6. The relation of felt activity to desire, and the possibility of their independence and of the priority of one to the other, is to my mind a very difficult question, but I should add that to my mind it is not a very important one. I hope that both Mr. Stout and Professor Baldwin will see from the above that my failure was to some extent one merely of expression, and that our respective diver- gence is not as great as at first sight it might appear to be. As to the absence of felt self-activity in certain states of mind I may add that I am wholly and entirely at one with Professor Baldwin.
The above remarks are offered mainly as a defence against the charge of inconsistency, and not as a proof that the view I take of activity and of passivity is in general true. I must hope, in spite of many disappointments, to address myself at some time elsewhere to a further discussion of the perception no less of passivity than of activity. [See now Mind% Nos. 40, 41 and 46.]
/. 143. I have in this edition re-written pp. 141-3, sin<x- their statement was in some points wanting in clearness. The objection, indicated in the text, which would refute the plurality of reals by an argument drawn from the fact of knowledge, may be stated here briefly and in outline.
The Many not only are independent but ex hyp. are also known to be so; and these two characters of the Many seem incompatible. Knowledge must somehow be a state of one or more of the Many, a state in which they are known to be plural; for except in the Many where can we suppose that any 608 EXPLANATORY NOTES.
knowledge falls? Even if relations are taken to exist somehow outside of the Many, the attempt to make knowledge fall merely in these relations leads to insoluble difficulties. And here, since the Many are taken to be the sole reality, such an attempt at escape is precluded. The knowledge therefore must fall somehow within the reals.
Now if the knowledge of each singly fell in each severally, each for itself would be the world, and there could nowhere be any knowledge of the many reals. But if, one or more, they know the others, such knowledge must qualify them necessarily, and it must qualify them reciprocally by the nature both of the known and of the knower. The knowledge in each knower — even if we abstract from what is known — seems an internal change supervening if not superinduced, and it is a change which cannot well be explained, given complete self-containedness. It involves certainly an alteration of the knower, and an alteration such as we cannot account for by any internal cause, and which therefore is an argument against, though it cannot disprove, mere self-existence. And in the second place, when we consider knowledge from the side of the known, this disproof seems complete. Knowledge apart from the known is a one-sided and inconsistent abstraction, and the assertion of a knowledge in which the known is not somehow and to some extent present and concerned, seems no knowledge at all. But such presence implies alteration and relativity in both knower and known. And it is in the end idle to strive to divide the being of the known, and to set up there a being-in-itself which remains outside and is independent of knowledge. For the being-in-itself of the known, if it were not itself experienced and known, would for the knower be nothing and could not possibly be asserted. Any knowledge which (wrongly) seems to fall outside of and to make no difference to the known, could in any case not be ultimate. It must rest on and pre-suppose a known the essence of which consists in being experienced, and which outside of knowledge is nothing. But, if so, the nature of the known must depend on the knower, just as the knower is qualified by the nature of the known. Each is relative and neither is self-contained, and otherwise knowledge, pre-supposed as a fact, is made impossible.
Suppose, in other words, that each of the Many could possess an existence merely for itself, that existence could not be known, and for the others would be nothing. But when one real becomes something for another, that makes a change in the being of each. For the relation, I presume, is an alteration of something, and there is by the hypothesis nothing else but the Many of which it could be the alteration. The knower is evidently and plainly altered; and, as to the known, if it remained unchanged, it would itself remain outside of the EXPLANATORY NOTES. 609 process, and it would not be with it that the knower would be concerned. And its existence asserted by the knower would be a self-contradiction.
Such is in outline the objection to a plurality of reals which can be based on the fact of knowledge. It would be idle to seek to anticipate attempts at a reply, or to criticise efforts made to give existence and ultimate reality to relations outside the reals. But I will venture to express my conviction that any such attempt must end in the unmeaning. And if any one seeks to turn against my own doctrine the argument which I have stated above, let me at least remind him of one great difference. For me every kind of process between the Many is a state of the Whole in and through which the Many subsist. The process of the Many, and the total being of the Many themselves, are mere aspects of the one Reality which moves and knows itself within them, and apart from which all things and their changes and every knower and every known is all absolutely nothing.
Note to pp. 155-8. I will add a few words in explanation of the position taken up in these pages, though I think the main point is fairly clear even if the result is unsatisfactory. If there is more pain than pleasure in the Universe, I at least could not call the Universe perfect. If on the other hand there is a balance of pleasure, however small, I find myself able to affirm perfection. I assume, on what I think sufficient ground, that pleasure and pain may in a mixed total state counterbalance one another, so that the whole state as a whole may be painful or pleasurable. And I insist that mere quantity has nothing whatever to do with perfection. The question therefore about pleasure and pain, and how far they give a quality to the Whole, may be viewed as a question about the overplus, whether of pain or pleasure. This I take to be the principle and the limit, and the criterion by which we decide against or for Optimism or Pessimism. And this is why we cannot endorse the charming creed of Dr. Pan gloss, " Les malheurs particuliers font le bien general, de sorte que plus il y a de malheurs particuliers et plus tout est bien."
It is therefore most important to understand (if possible) the ultimate nature both of pleasure and pain, the conditions of both and also their effects. For I would add in passing that to suppose that anything could happen uncaused, or could have no effects at all, seems, at least to me, most absurd. But un- fortunately a perfect knowledge about pain and pleasure, if attainable, is not yet attained. I am but very incompletely acquainted with the literature of the subject, but still this result, I fear, must be admitted as true. Mr. Marshall's interesting book on Pleasure and Pain, and the admirable chapter in Mr. Stout's Psychology both seem to me, the former especially, more 6lO EXPLANATORY NOTES.
or less to force their conclusions. And if, leaving psychology, we betake ourselves to abstract metaphysics, I do not see how we are able to draw any conclusions at all about pleasure or pain. Still, in general, though in this matter we have no proof, up to a certain point we possess, I think, a very strong probability. The compatibility of a balance of pain with general peace and rest of mind seems to me so improbable that I am inclined to give it but very little weight. But, this being granted, the question is whether it helps us to go forward. For it will be said, 'Admit that the Universe is such as not to be able to contradict itself in and for knowledge, yet why, none the less, should it not be loaded with a balance of misery and of practical unrest? Nay Hell itself, when once you have explained Hell, is for the intellect perfect, and itself is the intellect's Heaven.' But deferring for a moment the question about explanation, I make this reply. We can directly use the intellect pure, I believe, but indirectly the intellect I am sure is not pure, nor does any mere intellect exist. A merely intellectual harmony is an abstraction, and it is a legitimate abstraction, but if the harmony were merely intellectual it would be nothing at all. And, by an alteration in conditions which are not directly intellectual, you may thus in- directly ruin the intellectual world. Now this I take to be the case with our alleged possible surplus of pain. That surplus must, I consider, indirectly produce, and appear in the intellect as, a self-contradiction.