The Idealistic Reaction Against Science/Chapter 1

by Antonio Aliotta

CHAPTER I
AGNOSTIC POSITIVISM

1. Agnosticism as the Consequence of the Traditional Mathematical Method. — Agnosticism was the logical outcome of a prejudice which had become more and more deeply rooted in thought from the time of the Renaissance on: a prejudice which affirms that there is no other form of knowledge save that of which we have the perfect model in mathematical physics. The rich results yielded by the quantitative method of studying natural phenomena which modern science had opposed to the fruitless multiplication of hypothetical qualities led to over-estimation of this type of knowledge: everything which could not be comprised in this scheme, everything which from its very nature could not be comprehended within the narrow limits of a precise formula, was for ever banned from the domain of knowledge. Even Kant could not wholly shake off this prejudice; for although the intuition of genius taught him to discern beyond the realm of mathematics and physics that of aesthetics and moral values, he yet considered them as being beyond the pale of true knowledge, and as belonging to the domain of feeling, contemplation, and faith. Positivism with its apotheosis of the scientific method, with its claim to give a comprehensive explanation not merely of natural reality, but also of ethics and aesthetics, by constructing the whole sphere of philosophy on scientific principles, carried this prejudice to its extreme consequences, declaring those problems for which, from its one-sided, restricted point of view, it could find no adequate solution to be insoluble, and was thus led by faulty perspective to attribute to the nature of human knowledge that inadequacy which was due rather to its own method and system.

2. The Ignorabimus of Du Bois-Reymond. — Du Bois-Reymond^[1] lays down the dogma that the one and only true exact science is mechanics; all points of view based on teleological, aesthetic, and qualitative principles are but anthropomorphic conceptions, from which we must free ourselves that we may consider nothing in the world but the quantitative aspects of the movement of material masses. What, then, is the essence and source of matter, force, motion, and of their distribution? A mystery which baffles human knowledge! How does the qualitative complexity of sensation and consciousness issue from this world of purely homogeneous magnitudes? Yet another mystery! How about the source of life, the finality of organisms, the highest functions of the mind and free will? These too are inscrutable enigmas, otherwise we might well ask ourselves: Are these bounds really the Pillars of Hercules of human knowledge? Do they not rather mark the limits of your partial and fragmentary conception? Du Bois-Reymond, taking as his starting-point the old prejudice that knowledge is but the power of formulating mechanically, unhesitatingly chooses the first alternative, and cries, “Ignorabimus!” But the mind of man with its higher ideals refused to submit to this “Ignorabimus,” and, since science had declared herself unable to satisfy its loftiest moral aspirations and attributed her failure to the congenital defects of our reason, what more natural than that it should seek to meet the requirements of life in some other way? Scientific intellectualism with its sceptical conclusions prepared the soil for the various forms of reaction; indeed it went farther, and sowed the seed, leaving, as did Spencer, the revelation of the Absolute to religious belief, and to a vague indefinite consciousness incapable of being expressed in precise concepts.

3. Criticism of Spencer’s Agnosticism. — The philosopher of First Principles goes even farther than Du Bois-Reymond, striving as he does to prove that the ultimate essence of things eludes not only scientific knowledge, but also speculative reason, and that because human knowledge can of necessity be but relative. Agnostic positivism, using as its weapons the transcendentalism of Kant, which Hamilton^[2] and Mansel^[3] had pressed into the service of faith, is forced back on its negative side, on the ancient forms of traditional mysticism, which, though latent, had never really perished, and was ever ready to rise again to do battle with the theological rationalism of the extreme school. In the theory of the Unknowable we see the reappearance of the mystical tendency, finding expression not in the moderate formula “Credo ut intelligam,” but rather in the blind aberration involved in “Credo quia absurdum,” since the absurd unknowable is in its ultimate analysis but the confession of the powerlessness of that rationalism which is supposed to reconcile the conflicting claims of science and theology. But, we may ask, must thought inevitably lead to such an absurd conclusion? If we examine the Unknowable closely, we shall find that it is simply something which we think or at least vaguely feel to be actual, but which we affirm that we cannot know. We must here make sure that we clearly understand in exactly what sense we use the word “know,” since it is just the arbitrary limitation of its meaning which has given rise to certain alleged antinomies.

Spencer admits no other knowledge than that which subjects fact to law, classifying it, resolving it into its abstract relations, determining in what respects it resembles other facts or differs from them; but side by side with this form of mediate knowledge which seeks the intelligible element in the phenomenon brought to its notice, there exists that immediate knowledge which consists in the direct life of conscious reality as manifested in its individual physiognomy. Any form of consciousness, however embryonic and rudimentary, is already a knowing of the content which is manifested in it. The pain which I feel at a given moment is an actual fact, known by me to be such, though I may not be able to subject it to law, classify it in a system of concepts, or explain it scientifically; real too is the world of colour, sound, and form in its unending variety. The error of abstract rationalism, in its scientific and speculative forms alike, lies in its claim to be able to reduce reality in its entirety to a system of relations, since there exists an individual aspect of things which cannot be expressed in its concreteness by means of abstract relations. It is for this reason that we find ourselves confronted by insoluble antinomies when we attempt to realise this pure system of relations, that we vainly endeavour to find a fixed point in the process of reasoning which leads us from one relation to another, a goal which cannot be in its turn a relation unless we are prepared to continue the process indefinitely. Thought, whose function is the establishment of relations, cannot reach this absolute goal, but our consciousness is not forced to seek it beyond the indefinite series of relations, since it is found within itself as an original possession in immediately experienced facts. Knowledge founded on pure logic is thus doomed to grope in the empty darkness of its own contradictions, unless it will take refuge in the luminous atmosphere of concrete consciousness. If by “knowing” we understand simply the reduction of phenomena to law and their dissolution into abstract elements, then the unknowable will be found, not beyond the bounds of experience, but in the facts themselves in as much as they possess a concrete physiognomy which cannot be translated into abstract relations, and even our own individuality, as presented to us by experience, will be unknown to us! If, on the other hand, we understand by the term “knowledge” not merely logical reflection, but also the immediate life of the real, nothing is unknowable, since everything which we regard as real becomes a content of our consciousness the very moment we recognise its reality. Try as it may, thought cannot call its own objective value in question, and, while endeavouring to prove its own relativity, posits as the absolute term of reference something made of like substance with itself! This is proved by Spencer’s Unknowable, which in the doctrine of transfigured realism is conceived of as the cause of phenomena, as being at once single and the manifold, in its variations which correspond to empirical changes; as a substance possessed of persistent modes connected by an indissoluble relation with their conditioned effects — space, time, motion, and force. And yet it is alleged that we know nothing about it! Moreover, we are supposed to have found an absolute model of reality face to face with which thought must perforce own its impotence, as if this model were not just as much a thought! Logical activity will brook no limits, since in the very act of denning these limits it comprehends and transcends them in its universal concepts. A reality absolutely eluding thought is an epistemological absurdity; how can we affirm that it exists without thinking of it in some way?

4. First Germs of the Reaction from Intellectualism in Spencer. — If Kant, Hamilton, and Mansel pronounce the Absolute to be unknowable, it is because they wrongly restrict the circle of knowledge to abstract intelligibility; yet at bottom they too grant the possibility of a revelation of this reality in the mind of man. Hamilton writes:

By virtue of a wonderful revelation we are thus, in the consciousness of our inability to conceive anything but the relative and the finite, inspired to believe in the existence of something unconditioned beyond the sphere of comprehensible reality.

And Spencer explicitly recognises that the so-called Unknowable does not absolutely elude consciousness, but is rather presented thereto in a form differing from precise and determined thought:

Besides that definite consciousness of which logic formulates the laws, there is also an indefinite consciousness which cannot be formulated. Besides complete thoughts, besides the thoughts which, though incomplete, admit of completion, there are thoughts which it is impossible to complete and yet which are still real in the sense that they are normal affections of the intellect. . . . The error fallen into by philosophers intent on demonstrating the limits and conditions of consciousness consists in assuming that consciousness contains nothing but limits, conditions, to the entire neglect of that which is limited and conditioned. It is forgotten that there is something which alike forms the raw material of definite thought and remains after the definiteness which thinking gave to it has been destroyed.^[4]

Does not this sound like the voice of Bergson?

. . . Autour de la pensée conceptuelle subsiste une frange indistincte qui en rappelle l’origine.^[5]

The indefinite consciousness of which Spencer speaks becomes the fundamental organ of philosophy in Bergson’s intuitive system. If it be this indefinite consciousness surrounding logical thought which presents to us the absolute, the culminating point of every reality, according to the opponents of intellectualism, has it not a cognitive value far beyond the limited, phenomenal consciousness of the intellect? But Spencer is still too much under the influence of the old mathematical prejudice to draw these bold conclusions from his own premisses; he therefore persists in designating as unknowable that aspect of reality which cannot be classified and ordered by the scientific method; he makes a tremendous effort to apply a single mathematical formula to the perennial evolution of mind and nature, to subject the concrete reality of becoming to a law of persistency, to a system of intelligible relations which is outside the limits of time. It is an endeavour which is doomed to failure, and will cause the final crash of the structure of scientific intellectualism, a structure whose foundations are already undermined by its own confession of impotence, by proving its inadequacy in the realm of phenomena as well.

5. The Evolutionary Method also leads to Reaction. — The law of preservation from which Spencer is deceived into deducing the necessity of the evolutionary process only applies to the quantitative relations of the forces at work in the system; hence it can give us no information as to the direction the changes will take. The qualitative transformation of forces, on the other hand, is subject to the law of degradation,^[6] according to which the imperceptible differences, and more especially the inequalities existing in the redistribution of energy in respect to masses, constantly tend to diminish, so that the natural course taken by physical phenomena makes for the greater homogeneity of the system, though this is diametrically opposed to Spencer’s assertion. As far as the principle of conservation is concerned, it is a matter of indifference whether we pass from the homogeneous form of heat to differing forms of energy, or whether the process be reversed, since in either case it remains unchanged in its totality.

As Lalande^[7] has well said, this permanency would be equally true even if the progress of the world were suddenly to be reversed, supposing, that is to say, trees were to grow smaller instead of taller, till they returned to the germs from which they had developed, and mankind were to grow towards youth instead of age, reaching the embryonic stage at the end of life instead of at the beginning. Nor is this hypothesis purely fantastical! There are many biological instances of retrogression or involution of organs,^[8] yet the law of the persistence of force is in no way affected thereby. For that matter, does not Spencer himself deduce from the law of conservation the necessary dissolution of the system when its cycle has been accomplished? How marvellous is this law, from which we may deduce on the one hand, when it suits us so to do, the necessity of passing to the heterogeneous, and on the other with equal facility the no less necessary return to primitive homogeneity!

The evolutionary process cannot be deduced from a system of mathematical laws. To the physicist, who would seek in the development of natural phenomena the permanent and universal relations of co-existence and succession, the world is ever the same in its totality and unchangeable in its inexorable mechanical laws. From this point of view the individual aspects of things must be considered as illusions of the senses; we are under the impression that we see an inexhaustible multiplicity of forms where objectively there merely exists a continual repetition of one and the same form, the same mechanism, a uniform play of forces whose action can be calculated and foreseen to a nicety by mathematical means. Since, then, the evolutionary process disappears when we exclude the possibility of the genesis of new forms, of the production of new characteristics, are we not perhaps justified in concluding that the mechanical theory of the universe, interpreted strictly, must also regard the evolutionary transformation of species as an illusory appearance? Mechanism and evolution are two concepts which cannot be derived from one another, since they correspond to two different aspects of nature: one is quantitative permanence and absolute determinism of mathematical law; the other qualitative transformation and fruitful genesis of individual forms, which no set of abstract formulas comprehends in the fulness of its living reality. The evolutionary conception of things could never be made to fit the Procrustean bed of the traditional mathematical method; it was inevitable that it should (if I may so say) insinuate the poison of dissolution into the veins of intellectualism. The living spirit of history, which had animated the idealistic speculation of the beginning of the century, finding its way with Darwinism into the domain of positive research, whilst thus endeavouring to find itself a place in the schemes of science, breaks down their mechanical rigidity, and exposes the tremendous gaps left by empty formulas in the sphere of experience. The scientific method is thus proved to be inadequate not only in the field of speculation, but also in that of phenomena itself. The theory of evolution, whilst thus calling attention to the new forms and new concrete aspects assumed by reality in the process of development, to the irreversible direction of development in time, and to the hierarchical order of the beings which rise little by little to higher forms of life, reveals a world beyond and above abstract mechanism and indifferent to every temporal and hierarchical order — the world of valuation and history, of which Kant caught a glimpse in his Kritik der Urteilskraft, and which achieves its triumph over intellectualism in the philosophy of Windelband, Bickert, Münsterberg, and Royce. It is, however, specially in another direction that Spencerian evolution prepares the ground for reaction, i.e. in its psychology which maintains that the explanation of all conscious life is to be found in the requirements of biological adaptation. The cognitive function thus becomes but a means for the preservation of the species, consciousness a weapon of defence against natural forces, valuable only for its utility in foreseeing facts, an instrument for the maintenance of organic equilibrium against the influence of perturbing actions in an ever-wider sphere, which is subject, like every other organ, to transformations corresponding to the altered conditions of the environment.^[9] Science is not then based on an eternal, universal model, as was asserted by traditional rationalism; scientific theories are born into the world just as are organic species, and like them they perish when they can no longer resist the shock of new experiences. Science, too, has its history, and if we would know the meaning of that history we must seek it, not in the tendency of speculation to grasp the absolute truth of the rational order which is immanent in things, but rather in the needs of life and action. This biological conception of knowledge will pass through the writings of Avenarius and Mach into almost every form of reaction from intellectualism, and will act more especially as the motive power of pragmatism. Spencer’s system with its theory of the Unknowable appealing to a belief, a feeling beyond conception, with its doctrine of the evolutionary intuition of the universe, discrediting, as it does, the traditional mathematical attitude, and putting science at the service of biological adaptation, is not only pregnant with the crisis of scientific intellectualism, but enfolds the first germs of that reaction whose development we shall follow as it strives in various ways to escape from the difficult position in which agnosticism has placed it.

Notes

1. Reden, two volumes (Leipzig, 1886-87), containing the two famous addresses: “Über die Grenzen des Naturkennens” (1873) and “Die sieben Welträtsel” (1880).
2. Discussions on Philosophy and Literature, Education and University Reform (London, 1853); Lectures on Metaphysics and Logic (Edinburgh, 1859-60).
3. The Limits of Religious Thought (London, 1858).
4. First Principles (chap. iv. section 26).
5. L’Évolution créatrice (Paris, 1907), p. 210.
6. Cp. on this point Chapter III. Part II.
7. La Dissolution opposée à l’Évolution (Paris, 1899), p. 47.
8. Demoor, Massart et Vandervelde: L’Évolution regressive en Biologie et en Sociologie (Paris, 1897).
9. Principles of Psychology, vol. i. pt. iii. chap. xi. p. 383 ff. (Third Edition.)