to explain how we come, falsely in his opinion, to believe that the object of experience is an independent thing; and he uses three arguments, which are respectively those of Schuppe, Avenarius and Wundt. He supposes first, that we falsely conclude from the sun being independent of each to being independent of all; secondly, that by “introjection” we falsely conclude that another’s experience is in him and therefore one’s own in oneself, while the sun remains outside; and thirdly, that by “reification” of abstractions, natural science having abstracted the object and psychology the subject, each falsely believes that its own abstract, the sun or the subject, is an independent thing. What, then, could we know from this “duality in experience”? He hardly has a formal theory of inference, but implies throughout that it only transcends perceptions, and perceptual realities or phenomena, in order to conclude with ideas, not facts. When we combine his view of Nature under the first head that whatever is inferred in the natural sciences is ideas, with his view of knowledge under the second head that knowledge is experience, and experience, individual or universal, is of duality of subject and object in the unity of experience, it follows that all we could know from the data would be one experience of the race, one subject consisting of individual subjects, and in Nature single objects in the unity of this universal experience; and beyond we should be able to form conceptions dependent on the perceptions of individual experience in the unity of universal experience: that is all. There can be no doubt that Mach, Schuppe and Wundt drew the right phenomenalistic conclusions from such phenomenalistic data. Not so Ward, who proceeds to a Natural Theology, on the ground that “from a world of spirits to a Supreme Spirit is a possible step.” He had definitely confined universal experience to the one experience of the race. But perhaps Caird’s phrase “a perfect intelligence” has beguiled him into thinking that the one subject of universal experience is not mere mankind, but God Himself. Under the third head, however, his guide is Lotze. The argument may be shortly put as follows: As the Nature which is the object of mechanics and all natural sciences is not natural substances, but phenomena and ideas; as mass is not substance, and force is not cause; as activity is not in the physical but in the psychical world; as the laws of Nature are not facts but teleological conceptions, and Nature is teleological, as well as not mechanical but kinematical; as the category of causality is to be referred to “conation”; as, in short, “mind is active and matter inert,” what then? One subject of universal experience, one with the subjects of individual experience, you would suppose, and that Nature as a whole is its one object. Not so, according to Ward; but “God as the living unity of all,” and “no longer things, but the connecting conserving acts of the one Supreme.” What, then, is the relation of God to the one universal experience, the experience of the race, which was under the second head the unity in duality of all knowledge? He does not say. But instead of any longer identifying the experience of the race and universal experience, he concludes his book by saying “our reason is confronted and determined by universal reason.” This is his way of destroying Naturalism and Agnosticism.
4. Personal Idealism.—The various forms of idealism which have been described naturally led in England, even among idealists themselves, to a reaction against all systems which involve the denial of personality. English moral philosophy cannot long tolerate a metaphysics which by merging all minds in one would destroy personality, personal causation and moral responsibility, as James Martineau well said. A new school, therefore, arose of which the protagonist was Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison (b. 1856; professor of logic and metaphysics at Edinburgh University from 1880) in his Scottish Philosophy (1885), and Hegelianism and Personality (1887).
“Each of us is a self,” he says, and in another passage, “The real self is one and indivisible, and is unique in each individual. This is the unequivocal testimony of consciousness.” What makes his vindication of conscious personality all the more interesting is that he has so much in common with the Hegelians; agreeing as he does with Hegel that self-consciousness is the highest fact, the ultimate category of thought through which alone the universe is intelligible, and an adequate account of the great fact of existence. He agrees also that there is no object without subject. It is difficult to see exactly where he begins to differ from Hegel; but at any rate he believes in different self-conscious persons; he does not accept the dialectical method, but believes in beginning from the personal experience of one’s own self-consciousness; and, though he is not very clear on the subject, he would have to admit that a thing, such as the sun, is a different object in each person’s consciousness. He is not a systematic thinker, but is too much affected by the eclectic notion of reconciling all philosophies. F. C. S. Schiller (b. 1864, fellow of Corpus Christi College, Oxford), in Riddles of the Sphinx (1891), is a more systematic thinker. He rejects the difference between matter and spirit. He agrees with Leibnitz in the analysis of the material into the immaterial, but with Lotze in holding that the many immaterial elements coexist and interact. At the same time he differs from Lotze’s conclusion that their union requires one absolute substance. Again, he thinks that substance is activity; differing from both Leibnitz and Lotze herein, and still more in not allowing the existence of the many beyond experience. Hence his personal or pluralistic idealism is the view that the world is a plurality of many coexisting and interacting centres of experience, while will is the most fundamental form of experience.[1] In connexion with these views reference should be made to a work entitled Personal Idealism, Philosophical Essays by Eight Members of the University of Oxford (1902), edited by H. Sturt, and numbering Schiller, as well as G. F. Stout, H. Rashdall and others among its contributors (cf. also H. Sturt, Idola theatri, 1908). They do not all agree with one another, or perhaps even with the title. Nevertheless, there is a common tendency in them, and in the university of Oxford, towards the belief that, to use the words of the editor, “We are free moral agents in a sense which cannot apply to what is merely natural.” There is indeed much more activity of thought at Oxford than the world suspects. Mansel and Jowett, Green and Caird, Bradley and Bosanquet arose in quick succession, the predecessors of a generation which aims at a new metaphysics. The same sort of antithesis between the one and the many has appeared in the United States. Josiah Royce (b. 1855, professor of philosophy, Harvard) believes in the absolute like Green and Bradley, in “the unity of a single self-consciousness, which includes both our own and all finite conscious meanings in one final eternally present insight,” as he says in The World and the Individual (1900; see also later works). G. T. Ladd (q.v.) also believes in “a larger all-inclusive self,” and goes so far as the paradox that perfect personality is only reconcilable with one infinite being. While Royce is Hegelian, Ladd prefers Lotze, but both believe in one mind. William James (q.v.), on the other hand, in his psychological works shows that the tendency of recent psychology is to personality, interpreted idealistically; though without a very clear appreciation of what a person is, and personality means. By a curious coincidence, almost at the time of the appearance of the Essays on Personal Idealism, an American writer, G. H. Howison, published The Limits of Evolution, and other Essays illustrating the Metaphysical Theory of Personal Idealism (1901). In fact there has been an increase of philosophical intercourse between English and American universities, which is a hopeful sign of progress.
The advent of personal idealism is a welcome protest against the confusion of God and man in one mind, and against the confusion of one man’s mind with another’s. The school undoubtedly tends towards realism. I am conscious only of myself as a person, and of my bodily signs. I know the existence of other human persons and minds only through their giving similar bodily signs. If the personal idealist consistently denies other bodies, then the bodily signs become, according to him, only part of his experience, which can prove only the existence of himself. To infer another mind he must infer another body, and the bodily environment including his and other bodies. Again, in being conscious of myself, I am not conscious of my mind in the abstract without my body. I cannot separate touching from my tactile organs, seeing from my eyes, or hearing from my ears. I cannot think my body away. Moreover, I am not conscious of my whole personal life at all. How do I know that I was born, though I cannot remember it, and that I shall die, though I am not now conscious of death? How do I know that I am the same person from birth to death? Not by my consciousness, but by knowing the bodies of others—of babies on the one hand, and of old men on the other hand. It is usual to say that the body has not enough unity to be part of the person: the objection is much more true of conscious mind. The truth is that not the unity of consciousness but the fact of its existence is the important point. The existence of my consciousness is my evidence for my soul. But it does not prove that I am nothing but soul. As a human person, I am body and soul; and the idealistic identification of the Ego with soul or mind, involving the corollary that my body belongs to the non-Ego and is no part of myself, is the reductio ad absurdum of idealism. Lastly, though the personal idealists are right in rejecting the hypothesis of one mind, they are too hasty in supposing that the hypothesis is useless for idealistic purposes. No idealism can explain how we all know one sun, except by supposing that we all have one mind. The difficulty of personal idealism, on the other hand, is to reconcile the unity of the thing with the plurality of thinkers. The unity of the sun can only be explained either idealistically
- ↑ For Dr Schiller’s views, see further Pragmatism.
