The Limits of Evolution/Preface

by George Holmes Howison

PREFACE

The thread connecting the following essays is already indicated on the title-page. They all illustrate, each from the field of its own subject, the metaphysical theory which I venture to call Personal Idealism. Partly, they show how this theory draws its arguments, as if unexpectedly, from the discussion now of this topic taken up for its own philosophical interest, and now of that; partly, they in turn reflect the light of the theory upon the discussion of the topic. To the running reader, the several papers, with titles so widely divergent, would hardly suggest any common trend of thought. They all have it, however; in fact, taken together, they may be said to present the mentioned philosophic theory in its bearings on all the chief human concerns,—on knowledge, joy, and devotion; on Science, Art, and Religion. Still, in view of the great diversity of their subjects, one might easily fail of a clear and firm seizure of the thought that unites them, unless the clue were given by some words of introduction.

Just what, then, does Personal Idealism as a philosophical theory mean? I can best reply, I suspect, by anticipating another question, which can hardly fail to be asked: Why should the word “personal” come into the title of the theory at all? Is not idealism the doctrine that mind is the only primary or absolute reality?—and so is it not always the assertion that personality is the central source of things? Why, then, isn’t the prefix superfluous? The answer is, that the actual history of philosophic thought, even after philosophy attains to the view that rational consciousness is the First Principle, exhibits a singular arrest of the movement toward putting complete personality at the centre of things. Historic idealism is, in fact, far from being personal; rather, it is well-nigh overwhelmingly impersonal.

Philosophy, it is often said, is the search after unity. As a statement of one philosophic aim, this is true enough; and certain it is that in this search after unity philosophy has almost always lost sight of its other interests, some of which are at least as great. The prevailing tendency in the history of thought, if we leave rigidly agnostic philosophers out of the account, has been to some form of monism; and idealistic philosophy, despite its diligent hostility to materialism, has usually been at one with its foe in absorption with the One-and-All. The only vital difference it introduces is to substitute for the one material Substance a single conscious Subject, or Universal Mind, through which, and in which, and for which, all things subsist — all things, including the so-called other minds. In the long history of idealistic thinking, even in the Western world from Plato to the present day, there is but one very eminent mind, the justly celebrated Leibnitz, who distinctly and systematically breaks with the monistic tradition. In recent times, particularly, through the influence of Hegel and his later school, idealistic thought, under the usurped name of Absolute Idealism, has shared the field with its rival Evolutionism in advancing the doctrine of the One. The only important difference — no doubt a great one — is this: where evolutionism says the One Unknowable (if it refrains from saying Matter), this idealism says the One Mind, or the One Absolute Experience, all-embracing, all-sustaining, all-determining.

To the ordinary mind of our Occidental world, alive with the spirit of Western civilisation, acting instinctively from the principle of individual responsibility, and of philosophy and its history as unexpert as Milton’s Moloch was of wiles, it would doubtless come as a surprise to learn that the main drift of philosophic thought in the Western world for the past century had been increasingly toward the Oriental view of things, and that amid Western civilisation individualism was not a philosophic matter-of-course. Yet such is the unmistakable fact. With this everyday Occidental’s instinctive preference for personal initiative, responsibility, and credit, I confess myself in strong sympathy; and though from my acquaintance with the facts I cannot share in his surprise, I am glad of an opportunity to protest with him against this all-engulfing monism, fatal to our moral freedom even when taking on the plausible form of monistic idealism. Idealistic monism, though indeed a real philosophic advance as compared with other monism, is in the last resort irreconcilable with personality. By its unmitigated and immitigable determinism, with its one sole Real Agent, it directly annuls moral agency and personal freedom in all the conscious beings other than its so-called God. Accordingly, it leaves this professed God himself without genuine personality; for his consciousness is void of that recognition and reverence of the personal initiative of other minds which is at once the sign and the test of the true person.

The aim throughout the following papers, on the contrary, is to present, and in one way or another enforce, an idealistic system that shall be thoroughly personal in the sense just implied. Instead of any monism, these essays put forward a Pluralism: they advocate an eternal or metaphysical world of many minds, all alike possessing personal initiative, real self-direction, instead of an all-predestinating single Mind that alone has real free-agency. At the same time the aim is not at all to promote a certain other style of pluralism, which one might well enough call individualistic in the bad sense, whose dogmatic ideal is the dissolution of reality into a radically disjunct and wild “multiverse,” — to borrow Professor James’s expressive coinage, — instead of the universe of final harmony which is the ideal of our reason.

The pluralism here set forth is far removed from the anarchic individualism that seems to be advocated by such thinkers as, for instance. Professor Lutoslawski;^[1] nor is it to be confounded with that “pluralistic or individualistic philosophy” which Professor James himself, while brilliantly supporting it, defines^[2] by saying, “According to that philosophy, the truth is too great for any one actual mind, even though that mind be dubbed ‘the Absolute,’ to know the whole of it. . . . There is no point of view absolutely public and universal.” Rather, to the theory here set forth, the point of view of every actual mind, as that mind in its eternal wholeness is, is absolutely public and universal; and even in the mind’s temporal aspect, the aspect of its struggle toward knowledge over the rugged road of experience, such a public and universal view must in every mind be potential. I confess, however, that I am almost ashamed to record, here and elsewhere in these pages, this dissent from Professor James, — a writer for whose genius I feel so warm an admiration, and with whom, on the great main matter, pluralism, I am in such hearty accord. Only, I cannot consent to put our common metaphysics at such risk and disadvantage, in comparison with monism, as a confessed and despairing ultimate irrationalism involves.

Something of the same tenor I might say, too, of my relation to the views of Mr. F. C. S. Schiller, the versatile author of that striking book. Riddles of the Sphinx. But in his case, it is chiefly his finite and pathological “God” that I am unwilling to admit as an implication of pluralism, much as I delight in the point and force of what he advances in support of our common view.

To put the theory of the present book in a clearer light, its chief points had best be summarised one by one. They may be stated as follows:

I. All existence is either (1) the existence of minds, or (2) the existence of the items and order of their experience; all the existences known as “material” consisting in certain of these experiences, with an order organised by the self-active forms of consciousness that in their unity constitute the substantial being of a mind, in distinction from its phenomenal life.

II. Accordingly, Time and Space, and all that both “contain,” owe their entire existence to the essential correlation and coexistence of minds. This coexistence is not to be thought of as either their simultaneity or their contiguity. It is not at all spatial, nor temporal, but must be regarded as simply their logical implication of each other in the self-defining consciousness of each. And this recognition of each other as all alike self-determining, renders their coexistence a moral order.

III. These many minds, being in this mutual recognition of their moral reality the determining ground of all events and all mere “things,” form the eternal (i.e. unconditionally real) world; and by a fitting metaphor, consecrated in the usage of ages, they may be said to constitute the “City of God.” In this, all the members have the equality belonging to their common aim of fulfilling their one Rational Ideal; and God, the fulfilled Type of every mind, the living Bond of their union, reigns in it, not by the exercise of power, but solely by light; not by authority, but by reason; not by efficient, but by final causation, — that is, simply by being the impersonated Ideal of every mind.

IV. The members of this Eternal Republic have no origin but their purely logical one of reference to each other, including thus their primary reference to God. That is, in the literal sense of the word, they have no origin at all — no source in time whatever. There is nothing at all, prior to them, out of which their being arises; they are not “things” in the chain of eiificient causation. They simply are, and together constitute the eternal order.

V. Still, they exist only in and through their mutually thought correlation, their eternal “City,” and out of it would be non-existent. But through their thought-reciprocity with each other, God being included in the circle, they are the ground of all literally originated, all temporal and spatial existences.

VI. Hence, relatively to the natural world, they are free, in the sense of being in control of it: so far from being bound by it and its laws, they are the very source of all the law there is or can be in it. Relatively to God also, and to each other, all minds other than God are free, in the still higher sense that nothing but their own light and conviction determines their actions toward each other or toward God. This freedom belongs to every one of them in their total or eternal reality, be it burdened and obscured as it may in the world of their temporal experience; and its intrinsic tendency must be to fulfil itself in this external world also.

VII. This Pluralism held in union by reason, this World of Spirits, is thus the genuine Unmoved One that moves all Things.^[3] Not the solitary God, but the whole World of Spirits including God, and united through recognition of him, is the real “Prime Mover” of which since the culmination of Greek philosophy we have heard so much. Its oneness is not that of a single inflexible Unit, leaving no room for freedom in the many, for a many that is really many, but is the oneness of uniting harmony, of spontaneous cooperation, in which every member, from inner initiative, from native contemplation of the same Ideal, joins in moving all things changeable toward the common goal.

VIII. This movement of things changeable toward the goal of a common Ideal is what we have in these days learned to call the process of Evolution. The World of Spirits, as the ground of it, can therefore neither be the product of evolution nor in any way subject to evolution; except that in the case of minds other than God, who have their differentiation from him in a side of their being which is in one aspect contradictory of their Ideal, this sense-world of theirs is by its very nature, in its conjunction with their total nature, under the law of return toward the essential Ideal. In this world of sense, this essentially incomplete and tentative world of experience, evolution must therefore reign universally; but beyond this world of phenomena it cannot go. Every mind has an eternal reality that did not arise out of change, and that cannot by change pass away.

IX. These several conceptions, founded in the idea of the World of Spirits as a circuit of moral relationship, carry with them a profound change in our habitual notions of the creative office of God. Creation, so far as it can be an office of God toward other spirits, is not an event — not an act causative and effective in time. It is not an occurrence, dated at some instant in the life of God, after the lapse of aeons of his solitary being. God has no being subject to time, such as we have; nor is the fundamental relation which minds bear to him a temporal relation. So far as it concerns minds, then, creation must simply mean the eternal fact that God is a complete moral agent, that his essence is just a perfect Conscience — the immutable recognition of the world of spirits as having each a reality as inexpugnable as his own, as sacred as his own, with rights to be revered; supremely, the right of self-direction from personal conviction. This immutable perfection of the moral recognition by God, let it be repeated, is the living Bond in the whole world of spirits. Did it not exist, did God not exist, there would be, there could be, no such world; there could be no other spirit at all. Real creation, then, means such an eternal dependence of other souls upon God that the non-existence of God would involve the non-existence of all souls, while his existence is the essential supplementing Reality that raises them, to reality; without him, they would be but void names and bare possibilities. Thus in the Divine office designated “Creation,” exactly as in that denoted by “Redemption” or “Regeneration,” the word is a metaphor; but in the one case as in the other, it symbolises a reality eternal and essential, of a significance no less than stupendous.

X. The key to the whole view is found in its doctrine concerning the “system” of causation. It reduces Efficient Cause from that supreme place in philosophy which this has hitherto held, and gives the highest, the organising place to Final Cause instead. Final Cause becomes now not merely the guiding and regulative, but actually the grounding and constitutive principle of real existence; all the other causes, Material, Formal, Efficient, become its derivatives as well as the objects of its systematising control. A philosophy is thus presented in which the Ideal is indeed central and determining, and therefore real, and the measure of all other reality; a philosophy that, for the first time, might with accuracy be named Absolute Idealism, did not the title Personal express its nature still better.

For this metaphysical scheme I am not here arguing, of course. I am simply putting it forward in all its naked dogmatism, with no other object, just now, than to get its points apprehended. For this purpose it may be further helpful to point out its historical affiliations. A natural mistake would be to confound it with the theory of Berkeley;^[4] and certainly its first proposition substantially repeats Berkeley’s main assertion, that nothing really exists but “spirits and their ideas,” — taking Berkeley to mean by “ideas,” in every spirit but God, conscious experiences, whether “inner” or “outer.” But with this single proposition, the resemblance of the present theory to Berkeley’s doctrine ends. Its kinship is rather with the system of Kant; and yet there would be a great misapprehension in identifying it with Kantianism. It certainly agrees with Kant, as it departs from Berkeley, in two chief matters: it maintains the a priori character of all the connecting and inference-supporting elements in human consciousness, and it consequently removes the centre of the permanent order in Nature from the Divine mind to the human, — understanding by the human the type of every mind other than God. It thus aims with Kant to avoid the merely theocentric or theological idealism of Berkeley, which rests on bare empiricism as an account of human knowledge; an idealism — or a sensationalism, rather — that at bottom is a mere assumption of a Divine Mind, as it permits to our intelligence no transcendental principle by which to reach the belief through a logical continuum.

Like Kant’s, the present system finds the basis for its theory of knowledge in the native spontaneity of the human mind, — of all minds not divine; and, again like Kant’s, it provides for the “transcendental” efficacy of this spontaneous intelligence, for the power to go beyond past experience and judge of the future in perpetuum with unreserved universality, by the hypothesis that Nature is a system of experiences, the “matter” of which is sensation, while the “form” or fixed order of it is determined by the elements — Space, Time, Cause, and so forth — that the self-active consciousness supplies. But from this point onward its adherence to Kant ceases. It does not, like Kantian idealism, restrict the applicability of a priori principles to the world of sense, to mere phenomena, and thus confine knowledge to natural science; nor does it make of the distinction between our a priori scientific and our a priori ethical equipment a disjunct and impassable difference in kind. On the contrary, a leading aim with it is to break down the Kantian barrier between the “practical” and the “theoretical” consciousness, and to open a continuous theoretical highway for reason in both its scientific and its ethical uses. It seeks to raise our ethical intuition into the region of intelligence instead of feeling, and to do this by showing that the ethical first-principle is not only itself an act of knowledge, but is the principle of all knowledge, and of all real experience as distinguished from illusion.

In further consistency with this, in its philosophy of Nature it departs from Kant on the question of the origin of the “contents” in experience, the “matter” in natural objects. Whichever of the two views ascribed to Kant may really be his, — whether this "matter" of sensation, which he says is strictly “given,” be taken as given (1) in the sense of being produced in us by the agency of some other being, or (2) in the sense of simply being there inexplicably, as a dead datum, back of which we cannot get, and from which we must take our whole cognitive start, — the theory here set forth accepts neither, but the rather abandons both. It neither accepts sensation as an unfathomable datum merely, nor does it entertain the hypothesis that it is an effect produced in the mind by some foreign agent acting as an efficient cause. Its aim, so far as explanation through efficient causation is concerned, is to explain Nature wholly from the resources of the individual mind; and to explain it further, and in the full sense, by referring it beyond the individual to the whole world of minds in which every individual essentially belongs; but here the principle of explanation changes from efficient to final causation.

In detail, the explanation is this: Each mind other than God no doubt organises its own sense-contents directly by its own a priori formative consciousness, for spontaneity is meaningless unless it is individual; and Nature is, in so far, a product of the individual’s efficient causality. But all this organising of a sense-world, and the having of it, falls within the logical compass of each mind’s central and eternal act of defining itself as individual; and this it does, this it can do, only in terms of the world of other minds, — in the final resort, in terms of God, the Type of all intelligence. Thus the primordial self-consciousness of every mind with a sense-world, though receiving no contribution from the efficiency of any other mind, has even with regard to Nature a spontaneous and constant reference to every other, and so to the Divine Mind. In this way, the mutual recognition of all minds which is essential to the very existence of each as a conscious individual, and which is the cognition that constitutes them ethically rational, becomes also the constitutive principle in the world of Nature. In fact, its entrance as a principle into the natural order is precisely what raises Nature out of being a mere private show for each mind into a universal experience, with an aspect common to all minds alike. It is this that lifts it out of resilient manifoldness and mere disjunction, and carries it into unity — the unity of a communal system of experience, in which the dissents of individuals are reduced and harmonised by the deeper principle in their being, out of which their total nature flows by the self-defining act of each. Such an essential reference from each to other and to all, and from all to God, operates, however, and can operate, by no process of efficient causation. The whole operation is ideal; and what is called final causality, the influence of an ideal, which is now generally acknowledged to be the only causation in the moral world, is thus brought to be also the true primary causation in the world of Nature.

So much for the divergence from Kant. There is but one other modern philosophical theory with which readers would be likely to connect the present one, — the system of Leibnitz. The scheme certainly does approach to the Leibnitian monadology more closely than to any other form of idealism that has preceded it. But while it so largely agrees with Leibnitz, it also departs from him seriously, — if indeed one can always be sure of what Leibnitz really means by his persistently metaphorical expressions.

Upon three very important counts, at any rate, the present scheme aims to avoid what seems to be the shortcoming of the monadology: —

(1) It dislodges the self-enclosed isolation of the individual, and finds a social consciousness, a tacit reference to others and a more or less developed recognition of them, to be inwrought in the very self-defining thought whereby each exists; it accordingly replaces the theory of Preëstablished Harmony by that of Spontaneous Harmony, and moreover provides for a world of efficient-causal communication between the individuals other than God — the real world of physical science — by its further development of the Kantian doctrine of Space as contrasted with the nature of Time, pushing the distinction between these two Sense-Forms to its foundations in the double aspect of self-consciousness itself, and reaching the proof, missing in Kant’s own research, that the Sense-Forms must be two, and only two.

(2) It thus parts company with that “gradation among the monads” which, as Leibnitz manages it, — with his conception of “body” as an assemblage of monads subject to a higher “regnant” monad, and of “God” as the Monad of monads, the Supreme Regnant under whom all these bodies arc formed into a “System of Nature,” — amounts to a system of caste in the world of real individuals, annulling universal freedom, and therefore abrogating the asserted “System of Grace,” by leaving to but one individual any being but process, and that a process directed exclusively by the so-called God, of whom all the other monads are but so many “fulgurations.”

(3) It equally leaves aside that illusory character of extension and duration which Leibnitz so bluntly affirms, when he proposes to account for the apparent extending and lasting of sensible things by saying that these qualities are owing merely to “confusion and obscurity of thought”: with thought distinct and clear, he holds, the real is seen as the monad, the bare “metaphysical point.” The theory offered in these essays, on the contrary, gives to natural objects, as items in the real experience of minds, a reality, secondary and derivative indeed, but still unquestionable, and associated essentially with the self-defining activity of every mind other than God, while it provides for the great and signal fact of evolution, which Leibnitz appears to have been aiming at in his doctrines of “gradation” and “aggrandisement,” by its view of the progressive character of the sense-world as a phase in the being of minds attracted by a divine Ideal.

These relations to Leibnitz, particularly when set in connexion with the higher rating of individuality and of final cause that characterises the theory now offered, suggest its close relationship with Aristotle, or even its direct derivation from him. Indeed, were it not for the profound ambiguity that marks Aristotle’s thought, its cloudy vacillation between pluralism and monism, one might well find in his repeated insistence on the dominantly individual character of Substance and on the distinctness of God from the entire world of sense and passivity, joined with his emphasis on final causation, the complete anticipation of the central features of the present view. But, taken on the whole, the main drift of Aristotle seems unmistakably to monism after all, and his frequent elevation of final cause, en passant, to the apparently foremost place, is at last cancelled in the asserted efficient causality of God as the Prime Mover. Aristotle’s “real world,” combining ideal form with real matter, appears to be enclosed by him in the all-determining single-conscious compass of his Divine θεωρία, which he makes the synthetic “Entelechy” that unites in its action efficient and final causation at once, and thus besets all individual existence both behind and before.

The character of the present theory, relatively to Aristotle, is to be found in its attempt to carry out the individualistic tendencies in Aristotelianism to a conclusion consistently coherent; just as it likewise attempts a consistent continuation and development of the pluralism begun by Leibnitz and carried forward by Kant to his unfortunate point of arrest. In short, the new attempt may be described as an effort to relieve the cardinal new insights of Aristotle, Leibnitz, and Kant, alike, of a common group of inherited inconsistencies, and to continue the pluralistic aperçu, which undergoes a growing clarification in the thinking of these great minds, onward toward its proper fulfilment.

To all the great systems thus far mentioned, I am of course in a debt that can never be cancelled. I am only too glad to acknowledge it, and my only hope is to have added to the borrowed capital, for the common use, some small increment that may render the whole more available for human demands. To the great representatives of monism, too, I feel a special indebtedness; for one owes a peculiar as well as great obligation to the thought from which he feels obliged to dissent. Particularly am I sensible of this in the case of Hegel, to whom I owe many years of light and guidance, and who must always remain for me one of the world’s great minds. He has left us in his Logic, I am persuaded, a permanent inheritance, which despite his metaphysical abuses of it, and despite its sundry slips and gaps, only awaits the labours of some sufficiently powerful successor to become a complete system of our experiential ascent out of inadequate to adequate categories. May we not hope that this service may yet be performed for us by the Master of Balliol, or by our own National Commissioner of Education?

In the various essays, the new pluralistic theory of ultimate reality is presented now in one of its factors, now in another; in none of them, however, is any exposition of it as a systematic whole undertaken. Proofs of this or that part of it are attempted in each paper, and, in the course of the volume, of all its ten propositions above laid down, but no establishment of the system as such; this must wait for another place and occasion. The fullest discussions of important phases in the theory are contained in the first essay and the last; and for this reason these were given the two most prominent places in the book. The intervening essays are placed nearly in the order of their original production, though the central theme of the theory, which may very properly be called The eternal reality of the individual, undoubtedly comes out with increasing articulateness and emphasis as they go on towards the end of the volume.

The several papers have been very variously occasioned, and have been written at varying dates, covering a period of something like twenty years. The reader who cares to do so can follow up their chronology in the appended foot-notes. In the earlier papers considerable changes have here and there been made from the form in which they were originally printed, in order to bring all their statements into harmony with the governing view. In their original form, monism of an Hegelian type played no small part, side by side with the strongest affirmations of personal reality and individual freedom, — a collocation, it would seem, rather characteristic of Hegelianism than not. At the date of their first production I had not become aware of the hopeless contradiction between the two views. Those who feel the curiosity, can dig the originals out of their hiding-places in the journals, and see them with all their sins of inconsistency upon their heads. But I trust these earlier attempts may be left to a natural oblivion. It is only to the form given them in this volume, that I should wish readers to refer for the expression of my mature opinions.

I have to thank the editors of the New World, the Journal of Speculative Philosophy, and the Overland Monthly for their kindness in permitting me to use the matter printed as articles in their respective journals: more definite acknowledgments are made in the appropriate foot-notes. For the very full Index I am indebted to Mr. H. A. Overstreet, student of Balliol College, Oxford; earlier, B.A. of this University, and long an undergraduate member of its department of philosophy.

University of California,

Berkeley, November, 1900.

Notes

1. W. Lutoslawski: Ueber die Grundvoraussetzungen und Consequenzen der individualistischen Weltanschauung. Helsingfors, 1898.
2. W. James: Talks to Teachers on Psychology, etc., Preface, page v. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1900.
3. Aristotle’s well-known definition of God, Metaphys. xi, 7.
4. As a reviewer of The Conception of God, in the New York Nation, not long since did.