Now suppose this hypothetical consciousness ex¬ tended, so that it contains facts corresponding to my ideas of the ether-vibrations that fall upon or that are reflected from the face of this clock. Suppose that it further contains facts corresponding to each of my ideas of the relative position of this clock and of other objects. Suppose at last that the hypothet¬ ical consciousness is extended to all the facts of what I call my universe of actual and of possible sensa¬ tion. Suppose that each possible or actual experi¬ ence of each moment in my life or in the life of any other animal is represented by some actual momen¬ tarily present fact kin the hypothetical consciousness. Then consider the hypothetical consciousness at any moment, and see what it will contain. Every mate¬ rial atom, every wave of ether, every point of space, every configuration of material bodies, every possible geometrical relation, will be represented in the hypo¬ thetical consciousness by some definite fact. The relations of these facts will be in nature and in com¬ plexity similar to the relations among the facts of my actual or possible sensations. On the other hand, the limits of my possible consciousness at any moment will be determined by the actual conscious¬ ness of this supposed universal Knowing One. What it actually knows, I conceivably might now know. If it is conscious of a certain series of facts, then I 846 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY might be conscious, were I now on the other side of the moon, of living creatures there. If the hypo¬ thetical consciousness contains another set of facts, then I might be unable to find such living beings were I there. And so with all facts of possible ex¬ perience.
We can easily see how, under this supposition, conformity to the supposed universal consciousness will become on my part a goal of effort. Knowledge of possible experiences is useful to me. But all pos¬ sible experiences are or will be actual in the hypo¬ thetical consciousness. If I am standing near a con¬ cealed pitfall, or am in danger of a blow, or in dan¬ ger of death from poison, that fact, translated into ultimate terms, means, we may suppose, that in the universal consciousness there is now the knowledge of certain relative positions and motions of atoms. The sequence of states in the universal consciousness must be supposed to be a regular sequence, subject to fixed law. But sequence does not now especially concern us; since we speak only of the nature of this external consciousness. It is enough, therefore, to point out that this supposed universal knowing consciousness, this “ Not-Ourselves,” has, under the conditions stated, all the essential characteristics of a real world. It is beyond us; it is independent of us; its facts have a certain correspondence to our sensations. Under the supposition that by nature we tend to be in agreement with this consciousness, progress in the definiteness and extent of our asrree- ment with it may be both possible and practically useful. This agreement would constitute truth.
IDEALISM No other real world need be supposed behind or above this consciousness. Rejection of an old theory and acceptance of a new, as when the Copernican doctrine replaces the Ptolemaic, will mean the growth of a belief that the new system of ideas cor¬ responds more nearly than the old, not with dead matter, but with the sequence of states in the univer¬ sal consciousness. The universal consciousness it¬ self will be no illusory consciousness. It will not need a further consciousness to support it. It will need no dead matter outside of it. Our nature leads us to look up to it as to our model. Itself is the pattern, looking up to no other model. The purpose of thought will be conformity with this perfect, un¬ trammeled thought. For us there is a little range of actual sensation, in the midst of a vast ocean of possible sensation. For the universal consciousness there are at any moment only actual data. TFe see the clock-f&ce; and for us the inside of the clock is possible sensation only. For the supposed conscious¬ ness the inside will be as much present as the out¬ side. For us colors and odors suggest possible sen¬ sations, which science interprets as being in the last analysis the possible sensations known as atoms, mo¬ tions, velocities, distances. For the universal con¬ sciousness, these atoms, motions, velocities, and dis¬ tances, or the ultimate facts to which these notions correspond, are not possible but actual data. There need be then, in the last analysis, no dead uncon¬ scious atoms, nor yet unconscious little atom-souls, striving, fighting, loving, uniting; there need be in the last analysis only a consciousness of facts corre- 348 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY sponding to what we mean by motion, velocity, ex¬ tension, distance, impenetrability. Corresponding to the relation a: b in our consciousness there will then be the external fact A: B, whereof so much is supposed to be known: first, that the relation a: b is somewhat like the relation A: B; secondly, that the terms A and B, whatever their particular char¬ acter, are facts for a consciousness, and nothing but facts for a consciousness. And the hypothetical consciousness for which these facts are all present, together with their manifold relations, this we may call a World -Consciousness. An illusion in my consciousness will mean a failure to correspond with the world-consciousness. A truth for my conscious¬ ness will be a relation a: b that corresponds with some relation A: B in the world - consciousness. But for the world-consciousness itself there will be no question of its own truth or falsity. It will be for and in itself. It will not have to create a real world; it will be a real world. It will not have a Nature as its own Otherness, over against itself. It will be in its own facts and in their sequence a nature. As to the individual intelligences, its rela¬ tion to them is so far viewed as one of independence.
Whether hereafter we shall be forced to modify our view or not, so far we treat the individual intelli¬ gences as separate from the world consciousness. They are neither its “ emanations ” nor its “ modes.” But their whole business and purpose will be to carry out and to make full and definite that correspondence with this universal consciousness upon which their existence and their peace depend. A certain lack IDEALISM of correspondence with the universal consciousness on the part of any animal’s ideas will be followed by the cessation of that particular grouping of facts in the universal consciousness that is known to us as this animal’s body. With the dissolution of this animal’s body will cease his consciousness, his chance of disagreeing in his states with the states of the universal consciousness, and therefore his lack of correspondence. An ultimate law of sequence, with which, as with all causal connection, we have here nothing to do, thus binds the individual beings to the World-Consciousness. The whole universe ex¬ hibits the phenomenon, first, of one great conscious¬ ness, embracing an infinitude of geometrical, phys¬ ical, chemical, physiological facts; and, secondly, of a vast multitude of individual conscious beings, whose number and sorts we shall never be able to tell, whose destiny, however, demands of all of them a more or less imperfect likeness between their states and the relations thereof on the one hand, and the facts of the universal consciousness on the other hand. The universal consciousness, be it noted, is so called thus far as including in its ken all ultimate mathematical and physical facts. Of its nature beyond this we pretend to suppose nothing. And we have not sup¬ posed it to include the individual conscious beings. Our hypothesis is not yet pantheistic, nor theistic. We simply suppose a “ Not -Ourselves that in¬ cludes all natural knowledge. This is the External Reality.
We have omitted, moreover, all reference to the teleological element that is generally introduced into 350 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY any theory of a World-Spirit. So far, in fact, our World-Consciousness is not what people mean by a World-Spirit. A Spirit, “weaving the living robe of Deity,” our World-Consciousness is not; for as so far described it does nothing, it merely looks on. It looks at its own states, and these are supposed to be altogether its own, given from no higher source. But as to their succession or their worth, their be¬ ginning or their end, we have said nothing. This Consciousness has these states, but we have supposed them as yet to be attended by no emotion of pleas¬ ure or of pain, by no modifying reaction of will. This consciousness is not a Creator, it is a Seer. As for the individual conscious beings, it does not make or unmake them by an exercise of power. They, on the contrary, are made and unmade ac¬ cording as there arise or disappear in this universal consciousness certain groups of data that, as repre¬ sented in our mortal thought, are called organic living bodies, with tissues, motions, structures, func¬ tions. These groups pass, and with them the individ¬ ual consciousness that coexisted with each. This growth and decay is simply a law of experience, an ultimate and inexplicable sequence. But the uni¬ versal consciousness of nature, for which each of these groups of physical facts existed, that remains. In other words: Each animal body is represented in the universal consciousness, and exists only in so far as it is represented therein, or is known to its possessor or to other animals. The. individual mind that coexists with this body has thus far no represen¬ tative in the universal consciousness, but seems to IDEALISM exist and be real for itself. With the group of facts in the universal consciousness to which, as we say, corresponds our idea of the body, the independent group of facts called the animal s mind lives and dies. The universal consciousness and the individual minds make up together the sum total of reality. So far and so far only do we as yet go. The sequel will show whether we can rest content with this.
Continuing to mention the consequences of our hypothesis, we see that the well-known questions so often asked of idealists are no longer puzzling when we accept such an idea as the foregoing. Such questions are: What existed before there was any conscious life on the planet? In what sense was there light or heat, matter or motion, before there were eyes to see, tactile organs to feel, animal intel¬ ligence to understand these external facts? The question of Kant too about the subjectivity of space would seem to have been answered. Before there were conscious beings on this planet, this planet ex¬ isted only in and for the universal consciousness. In that consciousness were facts corresponding to all the phenomena, or possibilities of experience, that geological science may declare to have really existed at such a time. When the earth became filled with life, there appeared in the universal consciousness the data known as organisms. And at the same time, beside the universal consciousness, somehow related to it, there arose individual conscious beings, whose states were more or less imperfect copies of the universal consciousness in certain of its facts. Even so, empty space is now existent beyond the 352 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY borders of finite observation only as a group of states in the.world-consciousness. Space is subjec¬ tive, belonging to the states of the universal con¬ sciousness; and yet to us objective, since in think¬ ing it we merely conform ourselves to the universal consciousness. But the consequences of our hvpoth- esis are numberless. Enough has been said of them for the present purpose.
Wild and airy indeed! But why so? The ordi¬ nary uncritical Atomism is a worse hypothesis, be¬ cause we never get from it the least notion of how this eternally existent matter may look and feel when nobody sees or feels it. The mystical “ one sub¬ stance with two faces ” is worse, because that is no hypothesis, only a heap of words. Schopenhauer’s “ Wille is worse, because it is only a metaphor. The hypothesis that ascribes to the atoms independ¬ ent life and volition is no more adequate than our hypothesis, and much less simple. The old-fashioned pantheistic “ Welt-Geist ” of Schelling, and of the romantic philosophy generally, is more poetical than our hypothesis, but that Welt-Geist is a Power; and no one ever comes to understand how this One Spirit, who after all is represented as a sort of big half-con¬ scious Daemon, a gigantic worker, is related to the many individual minds. They are parts of him, or else apart from him. In the one case their confidence that they really exist as powers and are not “things in his dream,” is unfounded; in the other case his all-embracing unity is destroyed. In our hypothesis nothing is as yet wonderful but the one miracle of the series of orderly conscious states, following through IDEALISM all time according to fixed laws. Beyond that all is clear. That there should he a consciousness con¬ taining ideas of all material relations, is no harder to believe than it is to believe in the ordinary unin¬ telligible world of atoms. That beside this con¬ sciousness, and in fixed relation to its facts, there should exist a great number of different series of conscious states, each series being called an individ¬ ual, this is no harder to believe than are the ordi¬ nary facts of nervous physiology. In reality this hypothesis gives us a simple expression, easily intel¬ ligible, for all the facts and laws of physics, of ner¬ vous physiology, and of consciousness. Take, as a final case, Professor Clifford’s well-known example of the man looking at the candle. In the world-con¬ sciousness there is the group of states c, c', c"...That is the real candle. In the world-consciousness there is also the group of states h, h', h"...That is the “ cerebral image ” of the candle, a physiolog¬ ical fact. Finally, according to the laws of reality, the existence in the world-consciousness of the facts h, h\ hn, • • • grouped as they are, has coexistent with it the group of ideas C in the man s mind. This group C corresponds more or less completely to the group c, d d\...as that group exists beyond the man’s mind, in the world-consciousness. The group C is the man’s idea of the candle. Such is our hypothesis in a nut-shell. We urge for the mo¬ ment only this in its favor: that it is simple, intelli¬ gible, plausible. After all, it is but an hypothesis. We must now follow it until we shall find it, by vir¬ tue of one momentous consideration, suddenly trans- 354 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY formed from an hypothesis into a theory, and from a doctrine of an eternal normal thought into a doc¬ trine of an all-embracing Spirit.
HI.
In several respects our hypothesis needs explana¬ tion before it can well please a philosophic student. This explanation will next lead us into a decidedly technical discussion, and this a reader not specially accustomed to philosophic discussions, if such a reader we yet have, will do well to omit. We must in fact, in the present section, more particularly set forth the motives that have determined us to try just this hypothesis about Reality.
First, then, we are concerned to show why we have left out of view the causal element that popular thought makes so prominent in its conception of Reality. For popular thought, the world is a Power that causes our perceptions. But we, both here and in our subsequent religious discussion, shall consider the eternal not as Power, but as Thought. Why is this? We shall here try to explain, still regarding the real world merely as something postulated to meet the inner needs of our thought. Let us ask, without as yet going beyond this point of view, what is the deepest motive of our purely theoretic postu¬ lates about reality? Is it not to have something that corresponds to our ideas, and so gives them truth? Therefore is not the postulate that reality corre¬ sponds to our ideas, deeper than the postulate that a real world causes our ideas? And so is not the IDEALISM IDEALISM causal postulate in fact but a subordinate form in our theory of the world? To exemplify. When I say that my thought demands some cause, C, for a sensation, s, does not my thought even here actually demand something prior to the principle of causa¬ tion, and deeper than that? Does not my thought here demand that my idea c of cause in general, and my idea r of the causal relation R between C and s, shall cl priori somehow correspond to the truth of things? Can I conceive of a real cause save by vir¬ tue of a postulate that my conception of a real cause is like the real cause itself? Therefore, when men say: “ W e know external Reality because we know that our sensations need a cause, and that this cause must be external to us,” do they say more than this. “ We know (or postulate) that to one of our ideas, namely, the idea of a necessary causal relation, there corresponds a reality external to the idea? For surely I do not know the validity of my idea of a causal relation merely on the ground that I know that this idea of causal relation must itself have been caused by the real existence of causal relations in the world. Such an attempt to justify my idea would mean endless regress. The deeper notion that we have of the world is therefore founded on the insight or on the postulate that there must be, not merely a sufficient cause for our thought, but a sufficient counterpart thereto.
We can easily illustrate this view by considering the nature of our thought about past time. The judgment or assertion that there has actually been a series of past events, is not a judgment of causal- 356 THE RELIGIOUS ASPECT OF PHILOSOPHY ity. I believe in a past as I believe in a future, not to satisfy my faith in the principle of causality, but to satisfy my tendency to postulate an indefinite time-stream, like in nature to my present succession of immediately given states. I believe in a real time, not primarily as the cause but as the counter¬ part of my notion of time. How otherwise shall I form the idea of a cause at all, unless I have already assumed the reality of time? A cause for my be¬ lief in the past is to be conceived, if at all, only as already a past fact. The conception that it is to cre¬ ate is a condition of its own existence, unless indeed one has admitted what we wish admitted, that, how¬ ever the case may be with the belief in any one past fact, the belief in past reality as such is prior to our belief that our present state has been caused by the past. But the same priority of the belief in some agreement between my idea and the external reality, is found in all departments of thought. A material cause of my experience is a cause in space. But, however I came by the idea of space, my present be¬ lief in the reality of space precedes any particular belief in a material cause for a particular sensation, and renders the latter belief possible. The concep¬ tion of reality furnished by the search for causes is thus always subordinate to the conception of reality furnished by our first postulate. This first postu¬ late is, that our ideas have something beyond them and like them. So at each moment of my life I postulate a past and future of my own, like my pres¬ ent consciousness, but external thereto. So my so¬ cial consciousness, my original unrefleetive tendency IDEALISM to work with and for other beings, implies the pos¬ tulate of the external existence of my fellow-men, like myself and like my ideas of them. So to the present intuition of the space in the retinal field or at my finger tips I join the postulate of an infinitely extended not perceived space, like the perceived space, and like my space-ideas.