Fichte's Science of Knowledge/Chapter III

by Charles Carroll Everett

CHAPTER III.

THE PROBLEMS CONSIDERED IN THEMSELVES.

WE have thus examined the principal problems with which the philosophy of Fichte has to do, so far as they are suggested by the system of Kant. Of these problems, the first—that of the deduction of the Categories—may be regarded as affecting the form of the system; though it must be remembered that in philosophy the form is also in part identical with the material. The others concern the material of the system and, indeed, the most fundamental and important elements of the material.

However interesting it may be to trace the growth of one system out of another, to see how the later is involved in the earlier, and how the thought of humanity develops as if it were the thought of an individual, such considerations affect chiefly the student of the history of philosophy. The interest is largely technical. A more important question, then, than that of the relation of Fichte to Kant is that of the significance of the problems considered in themselves. Indeed, the study of the history of philosophy fails of its true end when it is pursued merely as a matter of historical or curious interest. One might as well watch the changing forms in the kaleidoscope, or the shifting shadows of interlacing branches, as to study the changing forms of human thought, considered simply as changing forms. For one who feels no need of an answer to the questions with which a system of philosophy deals, that system has no significance. We have now, therefore, to ask what is the permanent human interest which is involved in the problems which Fichte undertakes to solve.

We shall here consider these under their most general form, thereby reducing them to two, namely: The place of the a priori method in philosophy, and the nature of the Ultimate Reality. My intention is not at all to discuss these problems, but merely to make it appear as clearly as possible that we have in them problems that deserve to be discussed.

I. The A PRIORI Method in Philosophy

The deduction of the Categories is a part of the general scheme of philosophy which Fichte held, and which he impressed upon the minds of his immediate successors. His idea was that a philosophy should be a system deduced from a single principle. It should thus possess an organic unity, and this unity should be the result of a priori reasoning. This constructive method is that which properly receives the name Speculative. Now this whole form of procedure is totally at variance with the methods most prized at present. The reliance of the present thought of the world is placed almost wholly upon induction. The systems that have been constructed according to the deductive method seem to many, at the present day, no more substantial than air castles.

Various grave objections are urged against the speculative method of thought. It is urged that we cannot reach, thereby, concrete realities. These must in every case be given. When the philosopher seems to have reached by his deduction anything of a nature at all concrete, let it be even the Faculties of the Mind or the Categories of Thought, these are in fact accepted by him as given. They are really the products of experience. Further, it is urged that no real unity is attained by this process, but only the semblance of unity. We have a generalization and classification; but we have just as many units as before. Still further, it is urged that the process of deduction is arbitrary. Not only are the so-called results given in advance, by experience, but the philosopher so frames and guides his reasoning as to reach these points already given; and thus, it is urged finally, the whole process is idle and delusive.

We must admit the charges thus urged to be in some respects well grounded. At the same time we must insist that the speculative method in philosophy has great claims to a respectful consideration. We here leave out of the account all discussion of the results actually reached by this method. Fichte’s attempt we have yet to study, and that of no other concerns us. We have to look upon this method largely as if it were yet untried; or, at least, to consider its accomplishments only in the most general and abstract way.

It must be admitted that speculative philosophy can never, by itself, reach concrete results; yet it accomplishes very much, if it have a place for these, if it show that the concrete fact represents some general principle or some moment in a process that by itself considered is purely formal. If it cannot construct in advance the content of experience, it is much if it can explain empirical results, when they are given. To take a very crude and inadequate example, the philosophy of history could not construct, in advance, the personalities, say, of Huss or Luther; it does much, if it can explain the relation of things which made a movement like that represented by Huss or Luther inevitable. A better example may be found in the applied mathematics. Take, for instance, the science of optics. As Mill insists, no reasoning can explain why any special form of undulation should produce upon us the definite sensation which in fact we find to correspond to it. This may illustrate the impotence of mathematics in general to account for the precise empirical result of any process. Yet none the less does the science of mathematics do a work of incalculable importance by giving a scheme, all the parts of which stand in a definite and necessary relation to all the rest; a scheme in which all these empirical elements have their place.

Fichte assigns precisely this work to speculative philosophy. He recognizes two classes of objects which cannot be deduced; namely, the irrational and the concrete. He says: How the accidental, the chance, or lawless, comes to pass cannot be told. Foolish people demand that we shall deduce, for them, their pens and the foolishness which they write. There is, however, no reason even for their own existence. Just as little can be deduced even that which stands under a law, that which is, in the strictest sense of the word, real. This is found only in empirical knowledge; and the science of knowledge, or philosophy, can only indicate its place—the vacancy which it fills, but by no means the content of this.^[1]

While the work of speculative philosophy is thus somewhat similar to that of applied mathematics, it is, so far as it can be accomplished, more important than this. This greater importance arises from two of its characteristics. In the first place, philosophy is more inclusive than mathematics, having, in fact, to do with all that is. In the second place, for this very reason its results are more complete, and thus more transparent, than those of mathematics. This latter has to do with sensible elements which admit of no solution. The moments of a speculative philosophy are more closely allied with the processes of thought, and are more easily perceived to be merely the nodes in a movement of spontaneous development.

The arbitrariness which is found in philosophy has also its counterpart in mathematics. This, also, out of many possible lines of movement, chooses that which will lead to a given point. In philosophy, often, a given course of reasoning can be with difficulty understood till we have looked forward and seen the point to which it is aiming. When we have seen this, then we can understand the turns of thought which are leading toward it. But the same is true in regard to the most solid scientific processes. “Tell me,” said Faraday to Tyndall, who was about to show him an experiment, “Tell me what I am to look for.”

It must be admitted that there are difficulties in the way of a speculative philosophy that no mathematical process has to meet. There are difficulties in finding the proper starting point. There are difficulties arising from the largeness and apparent vagueness of the elements and relations employed. There is possible an arbitrariness of treatment. The results reached bear witness to the narrowness or the prepossessions of the philosopher himself. Fichte deduces the position which woman holds in the family, according to the German notion, as confidently as he deduces any more fundamental and universal relation.^[2] A Frenchman or an American might have reached, with the same confidence, quite different results. The difficulty of an undertaking does not, however, prove its impossibility. Least of all does it prove its worthlessness. If the science of mathematics has contributed anything to our knowledge of the phenomena to which it can be applied, so that the scientist does not feel that he understands them till he has subjected them to mathematical formulas; still more must speculative philosophy, supposing it to be in any degree attainable, contribute to our thought of the larger realities with which it has to do.

What has been said suggests the kind of unity which philosophy may reach. It may at least reach the unity of the Idea. Thought, like spirit, involves in its very nature the coexistence, even the identification, of two elements that under all other forms are mutually exclusive; namely, Unity and Diversity. So far as the real may be regarded as the ideal, so far may it be regarded under the form of unity; and, since it is the nature of the mind to think, it cannot rest till it represents to itself all things under the form of thought; that is, till the real has become the ideal.

I repeat that we are not here concerned to prove that a philosophy such as has been indicated is possible, or to show how far it is possible. All that is here insisted on is that only so far as it is possible can we have any satisfactory thought of our own spirits or of the universe in which we live. This consideration may make us, at least, regard the attempt to reach such a philosophy as an important one. It may prepare us to follow with interest the attempt which Fichte makes to formulate such a system. We must remember, however, that no failures can prove that the undertaking itself attempts the impossible. We must remember that each attempt, although in part a failure, may be, at the same time, in part successful; and, at least, that every such attempt, though it may itself not fully succeed, may do something to make possible the final accomplishment.

II. The Ultimate Reality.

The real question that philosophy has to answer is this: What really is? Fichte recognized this as the problem with which philosophy has to deal.^[3] This question seems to common thought a very easy one. What is? We are, the world is, and all the persons and objects near and remote that make up the physical universe—these are. Perhaps there may be added to the list, with more or less confidence, spiritual beings. God may be recognized as being. Many would, however, make this last and grandest thought dependent upon those which were named before. To most the external universe is the most certain of realities.

A slight observation does something to disturb the completeness of the notion of the outward universe. Perhaps to few is it wholly rounded and complete. Among the first elements to be transferred from the outer to the inner world are heat and cold. We learn that a body which we call hot simply heats. What we call heat is simply our sensation. Perhaps the next element to be surrendered is sound. I think that nothing contributes more to the first disturbance of our confidence in the reality of the world about us, than the first noticing that one hears the sound of the distant woodsman’s axe, while the axe is rising. This disassociation of elements that seemed inseparable, affects us something as does an occasional tremor in the scenery of the stage. The illusion is for the moment broken. A closer analysis brings to view the fact that light and color are sensations of our own, and thus can, as such, have no external existence. An illustration has been suggested that makes all this very clear. Suppose an indestructible rod in a dark room to be made to vibrate, at first slowly, but with ever increasing rapidity. At first we should feel, if we were near enough, some disturbance of the air. Then we should hear a sound, first low and then continually higher. Then we should have a sense of warmth, if we were near enough; then of heat. Finally, we should see successive colors of the spectrum. These phenomena would not manifest themselves continuously; there would be intervals in which no one of them would be produced. This illustrates very well the fact that all the sensations which have been referred to, and which seem qualitatively distinct, are merely marks by which we check off difference in quantity. In other words, the changes in the rapidity of vibrations or undulations outside of us excite these varied forms of sensation within. We thus rest in the thought of the undulations as something final. But what are these undulations? Is not our idea of them made up of what we have seen or felt? These undulations are made up of sensations of our own, which we have combined and projected into the external world. The older school of English and Scotch philosophy made a distinction between the primary and secondary qualities of objects. The former, such as extension and solidity, were said to belong to the objects; the latter, like color, are the effects produced within our own sensations. Sir William Hamilton insists upon this distinction. He maintains that we must apply to consciousness the principle of evidence: Falsus in uno, falsus in omnibus;^[4] and that if the testimony of consciousness is broken in regard to these primary qualities of matter, its testimony is good for nothing. He forgets that the testimony of consciousness, or what he calls such, is already proved false by the recognition of the fact of the subjectivity of color and sound. Even the primary qualities of matter have, however, no meaning to us apart from sensation.

It would here be out of place to detail the methods by which the notion or the form of space is produced within us. There, is, however, no resting place between the position of Kant on the one side, that space is simply a subjective form of perception, originally belonging to the mind itself, and the results of our physiological psychologists on the other, who make it out to be the result of continued sensations to which we lend the form of externality. In either case it is of the mind alone.

Indeed, theoretically, the present age can make little objection to the results above stated. Physiology has proved the phenomenal character of the elements that make up the world of objects, in the midst of which we seem to live. It does not always remember that, thereby, it has taken the solid basis from beneath its own feet. It attempts to construct mental out of physical processes, feeling that thereby it has sufficiently explained them. It docs not always keep in mind that the physical facts upon which it bases its reasoning, are themselves a part of the phenomenal world; that is, that they are products of the mind itself. Herbert Spencer shows how absolutely nothing we know of the real things about us, by pointing out that they are at one end of the nerves, while our sensations are produced at the other.^[5] The argument loses nothing in force, although its own basis is swept away by it; for the nerves themselves belong to that phenomenal world of which they prove our ignorance. Herbert Spencer properly denies that he is a materialist. The reality which he recognizes is something which lies back of the distinction of matter and mind, and manifests itself in both. He insists that the relations of which he speaks may be expressed equally well in terms of mind or in those of matter, according to the point from which we start.^[6] He seems to forget for the moment that we have only terms that are derived from mental processes, and that we always start from the mind, which, indeed, we can never get beyond.

If, however, we grant that the world of visible and tangible objects is one of appearances, must we not recognize the fact that there is a world of reality beyond this, which manifests its existence by means of these appearances? Must we not insist, with Kant, upon the Thing-in-itself, apart from the phenomenon? Does not this reveal itself by the opposition which meets us at every point? I press my hand against a wall, and I feel the opposing pressure. Even though the wall, as I picture it to myself, may be a creation of my internal senses, is not the resistance at least real? But, replies Fichte, in effect, What is your hand, and how do you know that you have a hand? The hand and the wall belong alike to the world of appearances.^[7]

What do you mean, he urges further, by this reality behind the appearance? Do you not mean something that could be discerned by other senses if we had them, or by other intelligences if there are such? Thus, is not the something behind the appearance merely the possibility of another world of possible sensations? or, putting the matter in another light, is not what we mean, solidity? The appearance seems to us superficial, it has to do with surfaces; but behind these there is the solid reality. What do we mean by this, he asks, in effect, but that we should, could we examine, find ever new surfaces, the process of infinite divisibility being only the possibility of an infinitude of surfaces? Thus, from whatever point we start, we find it impossible to get beyond the world of mental feelings and processes. It is impossible, because we cannot get out of ourselves. We can use no terms but mental terms; thus it is impossible to state precisely what we mean by the something real outside the mind.

It is equally impossible to prove the existence of such a reality, let us speak of it by what abstract or inadequate terms we may. John Stuart Mill, indeed, maintained that the existence of one kind of being outside ourselves can be proved; namely, that of conscious personalities like our own.^[8] It is true that the evidence of an extra mentem subject-object can be conceived more easily than that of a mere object. We can use words in regard to it that have a positive meaning. It is, however, as impossible to prove the existence of the one as that of the other. The argument of Mill is substantially as follows: In our consciousness we find certain groups of sensations, each of which remains substantially the same, subject only to slight variations. One of these groups we learn to regard as representing ourself. We call it our body. This is subjected to some change, and responds to this by other changes. In our own case, between the antecedent and the consequent is a mean term; namely, consciousness. It is indeed a series of terms; namely, feeling, thought, will. Other groups closely resemble this. We notice like antecedents and like consequents. We assume that the mean term also exists.

In this discussion, his purpose is negative rather than positive—to maintain that the knowledge of such existences is not intuitive, rather than that it can be supported by absolute proof; yet he appears to assume that we have here a case of real and convincing induction. This reasoning he compares to that by which Newton proved that the force which keeps the planets in their place is identical with that by which an apple falls to the ground.

When we examine the argument, however, we find that it is evidently not at all a case of induction, but one of analogy. We reason from what accompanies the changes in one set of phenomena, to that which must accompany the resembling changes in innumerable other groups of phenomena. It is precisely as when we reason from the fact that this world is inhabited, to the belief that other worlds are inhabited.

It differs in another respect from the reasoning of Newton above referred to. In that, the force proved to exist was completely defined in the terms of its effect. A relation was shown to prevail wherever solid bodies exist. One might, have begun with the motion of the moon, and reasoned to that of the apple, as well as the reverse. In the case before us, these conditions do not exist. In this, an element is found to exist between the cause and effect, which is something more than a mean between the two. It is a complicated process, having relations of its own; and is so distinct from the terms which it unites, that Huxley and others can claim that it could be dropped out without affecting the result.

Analogy, however, when it is perfect, may produce a conviction as strong as can be produced by induction; and the resemblance in this case may, at first sight, seem so very perfect as to make the reasoning that is based upon it wholly convincing. There is, however, one great point of weakness which vitiates the whole argument. In the case from which we reason, it is the changes in our own consciousness that manifest themselves to our consciousness. We have a complete circle. Nothing is present that involves elements which are, in any strict sense, outside of our own minds. The result to which the argument leads, on the contrary, is the belief in something wholly outside our own mind; namely, the belief in lines of consciousness wholly foreign to our own. When we recognize, on the one side, the solitariness of the fact from which we reason, and, on the other, the vast number of the facts to which we apply our reasoning; and when we consider further the great flaw that has been shown to exist in the argument itself, we cannot attach much value to it.

We need not, however, spend much time in these a priori considerations. We have a practical test of the argument, that shows how little confidence can be placed in it. In dreams, the position is precisely that upon which the argument is based; but we know that in dreams the argument is wholly deceptive. We assume that the changing groups of phenomena represent personalities like our own. When we wake, we pronounce this to be a delusion. If the analogy deceives us at one time, it may at another. If the mind at one time may give an apparently distinct life to creations of its own, why may it not at another? I know that it will be said that dreams are fictitious reproductions of what has really presented itself to our waking consciousness. This, however, is simply to assume the whole question. So far as the argument is concerned, we might as well reason the other way; namely, that the experiences of our waking moments are the reproductions of the realities presented to our dreams.

A stronger way of putting the argument would be to base it neither upon induction nor upon analogy, but upon the fact that the assumption of personalities outside ourselves is a hypothesis that has always worked well. It has really met the facts of the case. This argument is not conclusive, as may be seen from the old astronomical theories of cycles and epicycles. The hypothesis worked well, but it introduced cumbersome elements which were needed to help it out. Might it not be said that the assumption of myriads of things outside ourselves introduces a machinery far more complicated than that beneath which the astronomical hypothesis gave way; while the opposing theory, which makes all these forms that fill our consciousness, the creation of our consciousness itself, has the advantage of extreme simplicity. The test from dreams, however, disposes of the form of the argument which is based upon the successful working of a hypothesis, as it did of the other.

It is not improbable that the facts recognized by the arguments thus considered may represent the method by which we really arrived at the belief of existences outside our own mind. It might even be applied to things as well as to persons. The consciousness that accompanies the group of phenomena representing what we call our own body, shows that this group has something behind it or connected with it; and something similar to this we ascribe to all similar groups. In all these cases, this something is consciousness. We may abstract, however, from the consciousness, and leave only a vague somewhat; and may thus reach the thought of unconscious things outside our own mind. Schopenhauer did something of this kind. He properly called the reasoning analogy.^[9] He found within himself, deeper than consciousness, the will. This he assumed to be the reality of our nature; and behind all groups of phenomena he put either a conscious or an unconscious will. Though this may represent more or less correctly the process which the mind has actually followed, the examination above given shows that as reasoning it is wholly unsound.

All that remains, then, would seem to be to say with Herbert Spencer, that the belief in a reality outside ourselves is something absolute and final; that it can neither be proved nor disproved;^[10] for either proof or disproof would involve the idea of something which we believe more strongly than we do the fact of external existence, whereas this latter belief is stronger than any other. The phenomena of dreams would not disturb this position, for we have to do with no fact except that of belief. We cannot help believing in our dreams while they last; we cannot help believing in our waking experiences while they last. All this, however, even though it should prove to be the final statement of the case, is extremely unsatisfactory from a philosophical point of view. We may indeed question, with some show of reason at least, the absolute certainty of the assumption that the belief in outward existence is so immovably fixed in the mind. We must recognize the fact that there are two kinds of belief, each real in its way: the one is an intellectual assent to a proposition which is supported by irresistible arguments; the other is that belief which we can make real to ourselves, of which we have, in the common phrase, a realizing sense. An example of the former, or purely intellectual, belief, is the assurance with which we accept the truth that sound and color are purely subjective experiences. We know that the tree is not green and that the rose is not red, in the only sense in which the terms green and red have any meaning to us; but of this we have no realizing sense—indeed, we cannot make; it real to us. We know, too, that the earth is round, and that it circles about the sun; this belief also, is, to most men, purely intellectual; it does not represent anything that is real to them. So it may not be impossible that one might, in the same intellectual way, prove to himself the non-existence of beings outside of himself, while he holds this belief in the same unreal way in which we hold the belief in the colorlessness and soundlessness of the external world.

However this may be, the position itself is one that offers a challenge to philosophic thought. This external reality is a crude fact which demands solution. It is not, like the existence of ourselves, absolutely given in consciousness. It is simply assumed by consciousness. The matter is not merely one of theoretical interest. We are moulded, we are told, by our environment. Now, here we have a real environment which hems us in on every side; which we assume; but of which we can confessedly know absolutely nothing. Now, if we could reach to any knowledge of this, if we could even have any plausible theory about it, if we could put our belief in it into any such shape as would throw light upon our real relation to it, this might seriously affect our lives. A materialistic view of this outlying reality might lower our natures; a spiritualistic view might exalt them. A view of our relations to it, or of the ground of our belief in it, might, in like manner, debase or exalt. Thought in this direction is then challenged. The problem it would seek to solve is one of the highest theoretical and practical interest, and no such problem can be pronounced in advance to be wholly insoluble.

In what has been said, it will be seen that I have not been discussing the problem suggested. I have merely wished to make it clear that it is a real problem. In special, I have wished to lead the reader to the point where he will fully understand the problem with which Fichte at first busied himself. In order to follow the reasoning of Fichte with any sort of sympathy, or even with any degree of real comprehension, it is necessary to realize that all that is directly given us, is a single moment in consciousness with whatever is actually contained in it. If one cannot fully accept this position, one must at least have it distinctly in mind, and must be able to understand how another might naturally and not unreasonably hold this position. It must be assumed, then, that this single moment of consciousness is the only fact that we hold in direct possession. We are like one who seems to himself to be sitting in a lofty and pillared hall, looking from it out upon the landscape that stretches beyond. Of the pillars that seem to rise near him, some he has been able to discover to be frescoed imitations upon a plain surface. Those more distant he cannot reach to determine whether they also are fictitious. Of the windows that seem to look out upon the world, some he has discovered to consist merely of painted screens. The others have been, thus far, inaccessible, so that he cannot test their real nature. Thus does the self sit in the centre of its world. It is surrounded by the semblance of reality. A part of this presentation it has found to be the product of its own imagination. The rest, so far as it is accepted at all, must be accepted on trust. I repeat that a single moment of consciousness is all that is directly given. We speak of the past. We do this in the confidence that our memory really represents what has actually occurred. This age professes to take nothing without verification. All verification depends upon the validity of memory. I do not mean merely on the accuracy of memory, so far as details are concerned, but on the validity of memory as representing a real past in the most general sense of the word. Who can verify this assumption? Who has ever gone back to see whether there be or be not a past?

I am not questioning the fact; I merely wish to make it clear that memory itself is purely of the mind, and that its testimony is accepted wholly on trust. I wish to make it clear that, so far as we are concerned, the effect would be the same if there were no past, if only there remained the mental condition that we regard as representing the past. We can understand this in matters of detail. People often are sure that they remember something that never occurred. Their mental condition is precisely what it would be if the event had occurred. Make for a moment the supposition that of all that, we seem to remember, nothing ever occurred; and our mental state would be as unaffected by the change as the mental state of any individual is unaffected by the falsity of his special memory in regard to special details. The same is true in regard to the outward world. If that should be destroyed, or if it had never existed, our mental state remaining the same, we should not know the difference; just as in dreams, our consciousness is precisely what it would be if the dreams represented a real world.

All this, I know, has to do with the very rudiments of philosophy. We have, in fact, escaped from the limitation of a purely subjective existence. We are like the Jin that, had escaped from the casket. He was at large, and there was no power on earth that could shut him up in it again. So we have escaped from this subjective imprisonment, and are free of the universe. By no effort of the imagination can we realize the limitation of which I have spoken. There is needed, however, a philosophy that shall deal with the rudiments, that shall start with an analysis of the consciousness itself. If we are at large, we need to know by what right, and especially under what conditions. If it should appear that we are disregarding the conditions under which we are made free of the world, that we are misinterpreting the tenure of our possession, it may be helpful that we should know it.

Notes

1. Nachgelassene Werke, II, 318.
2. Rechtslehre: Sämmtliche Werke, III, 325.
3. In my judgment, the question which philosophy has to answer is the following: What relation is there between our notions and their objects? How far can it be said that anything outside of us . . . answers to them?—Sämmtliche Werke, II, 435 and 410.
4. Discussions (London), 86.
5. Spencer’s Psychology, I, 207.
6. Spencer’s First Principles, 503.
7. Bestimmung des Menschen, Sämmtliche Werke, II, 207-211.
8. Examination of Sir William Hamilton’s Philosophy, I. Chapter XII.
9. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. I. 125.
10. Spencer’s Psychology. II, 452.