agnosticism, and agnosticism, by elimination of the spiritualistic opposition of appearance and reality which it has unconsciously retained, returns to the naturalism of pure experience.[1] The various conceptions of spirit, including that of the unknowable, are the Schutzformen or Beibegriffe[2] through which the human mind has sought to maintain its inherited beliefs in face of the contrary evidence of pure experience. They are progressively modified to fit the facts as these become more fully known, but the completion of the adaptation coincides with their complete elimination. The following passage from Tylor’s Primitive Culture may be quoted as the source from which Avenarius probably gained his point of view: “The animism of savages stands for and by itself; it explains its own origin. The animism of civilised men, while more appropriate to advanced knowledge, is in great measure only explicable as a developed product of the older and ruder system. . . . As we explore human thought onward from savage into barbarian and civilised life, we find a state of theory more conformed to positive science, but in itself less complete and
- ↑ Menschlicher Weltbegriff, § 55 (cf. Kritik, vol. ii., p. 281, pp. 296-297). According to Avenarius this desertion of the attitude of pure experience and consequent development through spiritualism and agnosticism back to naturalism is not only inevitable, but also fruitful as leading to a naturalism which is conscious of its own meaning and so can never again be tempted to transcend possible experience. Fechner states in a less exaggerated and much more satisfactory manner a similar, though opposed, view of the development of knowledge (Zend-Avesta, first edition, vol. ii., pp. 87-96). He shares Avenarius’ belief in a primitive state of pure and true experience. Though the starting-point of human experience is the ‘unaufgeschlossenes Ei des Glaubens,’ in which the whole truth of the Universe is contained in germ, “it was so unstable that it yielded to every idle suggestion, so uncertain of itself that it fell victim to every deceptive appearance, so little capable of grasping the parts simultaneously with the whole, that every attempt to enter more fully into the parts caused it to lose the meaning of the whole. . . . And so reality divides and subdivides itself without ceasing, becoming always clearer and more intelligible in detail, and always more meaningless (todter) and self-contradictory as a whole” (Zend-Avesta, loc. cit.). While Avenarius regards the completion of this development as involving a return to that attitude of pure experience which he believes to have preceded animism, Fechner with more historical justification identifies both the primitive and the final attitudes with animism. ‘The axiom of the forms of knowledge,’ formulated by Avenarius in the Kritik (Vorwort, p. vii) and emphasised in his earlier Philosophie als Denken der Welt—that scientific forms of knowledge are in all cases developments of the pre-scientific—does not by itself in any way justify his naturalistic conclusions. It is accepted by Fechner, as well as by all idealist writers. This is one of the many points in which Avenarius’ view of the development of knowledge reveals kinship with the Hegelian philosophy.
- ↑ Cf. previous article, p. 27.
