his final conclusion is that “existence—the absolute—is known
to us in feeling,” and “the external changes are symbolized as
motion, because that is the mode of feeling into which all others
are translated when objectively considered: objective consideration
being the attitude of looking at the phenomena, whereas
subjective consideration is the attitude of any other sensible
response.” He does not say what happens when we use vision
alone and still infer that an external stimulus causes the internal
sensation. But his metaphysics is an interesting example of a
phenomenalist, sympathizing with noumenalists so different as
Hegel and Fechner, and yet maintaining his phenomenalism.
In this feature the phenomenalism of Lewes is the English
parallel to the German phenomenalism of Wundt. At the same
time, and under the derivative influence of Wundt, rather than
the more original inspiration of Fechner, W. K. Clifford (q.v.) was
working out the hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism to a
conclusion different from that of Lewes, and more allied to that
of Leibnitz, the prime originator of all these hypotheses. Clifford
W. K. Clifford.
advanced the hypothesis that the supposed
unconscious units of feeling, or psychical atoms, are the
“mind-stuff” out of which everything physical and psychical
is composed, and are also things in themselves, such as Kant
supposed when he threw out the hint that after all “the Ding-an-sich
might be of the nature of mind” (see Mind, 1878, p. 67).
As a matter of fact, this “mind-stuff” of Clifford is far more
like the “petites perceptions” of Leibnitz, from which it is
indirectly derived. This hypothesis Clifford connected with the
hypothesis of psychophysical parallelism. He maintained that
the physical and the psychical are two orders which are parallel
without interference; that the physical or objective order is
merely phenomena, or groups of feelings, or “objects,” while the
psychical or subjective order is both a stream of feelings of which
we are conscious in ourselves, and similar streams which we infer
beyond ourselves, or, as he came to call them, “ejects”; that,
if we accept the doctrine of evolution at all, we must carry these
ejective streams of feelings through the whole organic world and
beyond it to the inorganic world, as a “quasimental fact”;
that at bottom both orders, the physical phenomena and the
psychical streams, are reducible to feelings; and that therefore
there is no reason against supposing that they are made out of the
same “mind-stuff,” which is the thing-in-itself. The resemblance
of this noumenal idealism to that of Fechner is unmistakable.
The difference is that Clifford considers “mind-stuff” to
be unconscious, and denies that there is any evidence of consciousness
apart from a nervous system. He agrees with du
Bois-Reymond in refusing to regard the universe as a vast brain
animated by conscious mind. He disagrees with Fechner’s
hypothesis of a world-soul, the highest spirit, God, who embraces
all psychophysical processes. Curiously enough, his follower
G. J. Romanes (q.v.) took the one step needed to bring Cliffordism
completely back to Fechnerism. In his Rede Lecture on Mind
and Motion (1885), he said that Clifford’s deduction, that the
G. J. Romanes.
universe, although entirely composed of “mind-stuff,”
is itself mindless, did not follow from his premisses.
Afterwards, when the lecture was published in Mind and
Motion and Monism (1895), this work also contained a chapter on
“The World as an Eject,” in which Romanes again contended
against Clifford that the world does admit of being regarded
as an eject, that is, as a mind beyond one’s own. At the same
time, he refused to regard this “world-eject” as personal,
because personality implies limitation. He concludes that the
integrating principle of the whole—the Spirit, as it were, of the
Universe—must be something akin to, but immeasurably superior
to, the “psychism” of man. Nothing can be more curious than
the way in which a school of English philosophers, which originally
started from Hume, the most sceptical of phenomenalists, thus
gradually passed over to Leibnitz and Fechner, the originators
of panpsychistic noumenalism. The Spirit of the Universe
contemplated by Romanes is identical with the World-soul
contemplated by Fechner.
Karl Pearson (The Grammar of Science, 1892, 2nd enlarged ed., 1900), starting from Hume’s phenomenal idealism, has developed views closely allied to Mach’s universal physical phenomenology. What Hume called repeated sequence Pearson calls “routine” of perceptions, and, like his master, holds that cause is an antecedent stage in a routine of perceptions; while he also acknowledges that his account of matter leads him very near to John Stuart Mill’s definition of matter as “a permanent possibility of sensations.” His views, in his chapter on the Laws of Motion, that the physicist forms a conceptional model of the universe by aid of corpuscles, that these corpuscles are only symbols for the component parts of perceptual bodies, and that force is a measure of motion, and not its cause, are the views of Mach. At the end of this chapter he says that the only published work from the perusal of which he received any help in working out his views in 1882 and 1884, was Mach’s Die Mechanik in ihrer Entwicklung (1883). Mach had begun to put them forward in 1872, and Kirchhoff in 1874. But they may very well have been developed independently in Germany and in England from their common source in Hume. Their point is to stretch Hume’s phenomenalism so as to embrace all science, by contending that mechanism is not at the bottom of phenomena, but is only the conceptual shorthand by aid of which men of science can briefly describe phenomena, and that all science is description and not explanation. These are the views of Mach and of Pearson, as we read them in the latter’s Preface. Nor can we find any difference, except the minute shade that Pearson takes up a position of agnosticism between Clifford’s assertion of “mind-stuff” and Mach’s denial of things in themselves.
James Ward (q.v.), in Naturalism and Agnosticism (1899), starts from the same phenomenalistic views of Mach and Kirchhoff about mechanics; he proceeds to the hypothesis of duality within experience, which we have traced in the phenomenalisms of Schuppe, Avenarius and Wundt, and to the hypothesis of one consciousness, which appears variously in James Ward. the German idealisms, not of Kant, as Ward thinks, but of Fichte, Hegel and Schuppe; and somehow he manages to end with the noumenalistic conclusion that Nature is God’s Spirit. Though this work evinces a thoroughly English love of compromise, yet it is not merely eclectic, but is animated throughout by the inspiration of his “old teacher, Lotze.” Lotze, as we saw, rejected bodily mechanism, reduced known bodies to phenomena, and concluded that reality is the life of God. Ward on the whole follows this triple scheme, but modifies it by new arguments founded on later German phenomenalism.
Under the first head he attacks mechanics precisely as Mach had done (see above); if this attack had been consistently carried out it would have carried him no further than Mach. Under the second head, according to Ward, as according to Wundt, knowledge is experience; we must start with the duality of subject and object, or perpetual reality, phenomenon, in the unity of experience, and not believe, as realists do, that either subject or object is distinct from this unity; moreover, experience requires “conation,” because it is to interesting objects that the subject attends; conation is required for all synthesis, associative and intellective; thinking is doing; presentation, feeling, conation are one inseparable whole; and the unity of the subject is due to activity and not to a substratum. But, in opposition to Wundt and in common with Schuppe, he believes that experience is (1) experience of the individual, and (2) experience of the race, which is but an extension of individual experience, and is variously called, in the course of the discussion, universal, collective, conceptual, rational experience, consciousness in general, absolute consciousness, intelligence, and even, after Caird, “a perfect intelligence.” He regards this universal experience as the result entirely of intersubjective intercourse, and concludes that its subject is not numerically distinct from the subject of individual experience, but is one and continuous with it, and that its conceptions depend on the perceptions of individual experience. He infers the corollary that universal experience contains the same duality of subjective and objective factors without dualism. He thinks that it is the origin of the categories of causality, which he refers to “conation,” and substance, which he attributes to the interaction of active subjects with their environment and to their intercourse with each other. He applies universal experience, as Schuppe does, to explain the unity of the object, and its independence of individual but not of universal experience, holding that the one sun, and the whole world of intersubjective intercourse, or the “trans-subjective” world, though “independent of the individual percipient as such,” is “not independent of the universal experience, but the object
of that experience” (ii. 196–197). He applies universal experience