The Philosophical Review/Volume 1/The Problem of Epistemology

by Andrew Seth Pringle-Pattison

THE PROBLEM OF EPISTEMOLOGY.^[1]

THE problem of epistemology arises from the very nature of knowledge. Knowledge implies a reference to that which is known, and which is therefore to be distinguished from the knowledge itself considered subjectively as an act or process of the being who knows. What is known, the object of knowledge, may be styled most generally Reality. Knowledge bears in its heart, in its very notion, this reference to a reality distinct from itself. No idealist will deny, at all events, that knowledge seems to us to carry this reference with it. Hume himself speaks of it as "the universal and primary opinion of all men," it is "a natural instinct or presupposition,"^[2] 2 so that if its validity is not accepted, the illusion will at least require explanation. Knowledge as knowledge points beyond itself to a reality whose representation or symbol it is. This holds true, as a careful analysis would show, even in what is called self-knowledge, the reflective knowledge of one's own states, in which the act of knowledge and the object known might seem to fall together. But, without insisting at the outset on this refinement, let us take the general or typical case, in which the knowledge is knowledge of beings other than ourselves, a knowledge of the facts of the world around us. Here the very function of knowledge, as ordinarily understood, is to disclose to one being the nature of beings and things with which he is in relation, but which are different; i.e. numerically and existentially distinct from himself. One being or individual cannot go out of himself, so far as his being or existence is concerned. He is and remains himself so long as he exists at all. But though every individual, qua existent, remains thus anchored upon himself — rooted to his own centre, to the locus, as it were, assigned him in the process of the universal life — yet by the influence of other realities upon him and the response of his own being to these influences, — in other words, by means of his own subjective states, and without therefore performing the impossible feat of stepping out of himself, — he becomes aware of other existences, or, as we say, he comes to" know that other beings or things exist besides himself, and also what their nature is. This knowledge, as knowledge, is necessarily subjective, for no being can be present in existence within another being. In existence things necessarily remain apart or distinct: we can know things, therefore, only by report, only by their effect upon us.

That, then, is the problem or crux of knowledge which has vexed philosophers. Knowledge is necessarily subjective, so far as it is state or process of the knowing being ; but it as necessarily involves an objective reference. If it is not an illusion altogether, it is a knowledge of realities which are trans-subjective or extra-conscious; i.e. which exist beyond and independently of the consciousness of the individual knowing them. But all through the modern period philosophers have been turning the subjectivity of knowledge against its objectivity, and in the last resort converting the very notion of knowledge into an argument against the possibility of knowledge. If they have not gone to this extreme length, the possibility of real knowledge has been an ever present difficulty to modern thought, — a difficulty that has seemed to grow greater instead of less in the hands of successive thinkers, till it may be said since the time of Hume and Kant to have been the main subject of philosophical debate. Now, it can scarcely be doubted that in this respect philosophy has largely created the difficulties which it finds so hard to surmount, but at the same time we cannot wonder at or regret the time and labor expended on this question; for it is the business of philosophy to doubt wherever doubt is possible, and to probe its own doubts to the bottom, in order to discover whether they are really fatal to the faith we repose in the act of knowledge. A theory of knowledge or a philosophy of belief is a necessary preliminary of all scientific and metaphysical inquiry.

In endeavoring to establish such a theory, we must start from the ordinary consciousness. What does the plain man believe about perception and the real world of physical things? He believes that his senses, especially sight and touch, put him in immediate relation with real things. He has only to open his eyes or to stretch out his hand, and he is face to face or in actual contact with the realities themselves. The objects which he perceives are not dependent upon his perceiving them, which is a purely accidental fact both in their life-history and in his. Just as he himself existed as a real being before the act of perception, so they existed independently before he turned his eyes upon them, and they continue to exist after his vision is averted. He believes, in short, that he sees and touches the real thing as that exists in itself independent of perception. He draws no distinction between the existence of the thing in itself and its existence for him in the moment of perception. The appearance is the reality. "The vulgar," as Hume says, "confound perceptions and objects, and attribute a distinct continued existence to the very things they feel or see."^[3] "'Tis certain," he says again, "that almost all mankind, and even philosophers themselves, for the greatest part of their lives, take their perceptions to be their only objects, and suppose that the very being, which is intimately present to the mind, is the real body or material existence. 'Tis also certain that this very perception or object is supposed to have a continued, uninterrupted being, and neither to be annihilated by our absence nor to be brought into existence by our presence."^[4]

No doubt this is, as Hume says, the belief of "the vulgar"; it is what Mr. Spencer calls Crude, and what other writers call naïve or uncritical Realism. As such, it contains much that is untenable, and much that requires more careful sifting and definition. But what we have to note is that it is a primary, instinctive, and irresistible belief of all mankind, nay of the whole animal creation. Hume himself characterizes Realism as "a natural instinct or prepossession" which operates "without any reasoning or even almost before the use of reason." ^[5]

Even the sceptic, he says again, "must assent to the principle concerning the existence of body, though he cannot pretend by any arguments of philosophy to maintain its veracity. Nature has not left this to his choice, and has doubtless esteemed it an affair of too great importance to be trusted to our uncertain reasonings and speculations."^[6] It may be matter for consideration at a later stage whether the mere fact of this universal, primary, and ineradicable belief is not itself an element in the problem; except on the hypothesis of universal irrationality may it not be argued that the provision of nature in this respect is hardly likely to be a carefully organized deception? But here, we are merely concerned with the fact of what Mr. Spencer calls the priority of Realism. It cannot be too strongly insisted that in this respect Realism holds the field. As Mr. Spencer puts it, "I see no alternative but to affirm that the thing primarily known, is not that a sensation has been experienced, but that there exists an outer object."^[7] Mr. Spencer's position here is not essentially different from that of Reid when he insists in opposition to Hume that we do not start with ideas or, as Hume calls them, perceptions — unrelated mental states — but with judgments. Judgment, he argues, is the primitive act of mind and a knowledge of sensations per se is only reached at a much later stage" by resolving and analyzing a natural and original judgment." As I put it on a previous occasion, "we do not begin by studying the contents of our own minds and afterwards proceed by inference to realities beyond. We are never restricted to our own ideas, as ideas; from the first dawn of knowledge we treat the subjective excitation as the symbol or revealer to us of a real world."^[8]

Mr. Spencer, in the chapter from which I have quoted,^[9] gives an admirable exposure of the fallacy which underlies the opposite view. "The error has been in confounding two quite distinct things, — having a sensation, and being conscious of having a sensation." Certainly, sensations must be given as the conditions of perception or knowledge; they are unquestionably the immediate data upon which the perceptive judgment reposes. Mr. Spencer, it is true, guided by his idea of evolution, projects his imagination into "the dark backward and abysm of time" and seems to teach that "the simple consciousness of sensation, uncomplicated by any consciousness of subject or object, is primordial," and that, as he puts it, "through immeasurably long and complex differentiations and integrations of such primordial sensations and derived ideas, there develops a consciousness of self and a correlative not-self." But, as he adds, "it is one thing to say that in such a creature the sensations are the things originally given, and it is quite another thing to say these sensations can be known as sensations by such a creature." Such an argument "identifies two things which are at the very opposite extremes of the process of mental evolution." It is, in fact, only the psychologist who in his reflective analysis is conscious of sensations as sensations distinguished from and referred to their external causes. And we have here an example of what Professor James has dubbed "the psychologist's fallacy par excellence,"—the confusion by the psychologist of his own standpoint with that of the mental fact about which he is making his report. Mr. Spencer lays his finger most effectively upon the fallacy in the present case. But for myself, I question whether he does not go too far in admitting an undifferentiated sensuous consciousness as the primordial fact in the evolutionary process. It is in vain that we project our imaginations towards such a hypothetical beginning: it has nothing in common with what we understand by knowledge, and is therefore perfectly unrealizable by us. Being thus totally heterogeneous, it cannot form a step on the road to knowledge: I mean that it does not in any sense pave the way for it or render the emergence of cognition easier to conceive. Whether we interpolate this hypothetical sensuous consciousness as a time-prius or not, the appearance of perception or cognitive consciousness—the consciousness we know—remains equally an unexplained beginning, an absolute μετάβασις εἰς ἀλλὸ γένος.

It is not an essential point in our present argument, but I am disposed to question whether any animal consciousness can be fairly described as a "simple consciousness of sensation," that is to say, a state of pure internality, of diffused inward feeling, without a germinal consciousness of distinction between the feeling self and its surroundings. There is no question here of the developed or reflected consciousness of Ego and non-Ego, but only of that animal awareness of objective facts which is seen in reaction upon stimuli and in purposive adaptation of act to circumstance. It is in action that we have the surest clew to the early stages of the animal and the human consciousness. Knowledge in such creatures exists simply in a practical reference. Consciousness would be a useless luxury unless as putting them in relation to the surrounding world and enabling them to adapt their actions to its varying stimuli. In point of fact, this practical consciousness, so far as we can judge, accompanies animal life from the outset. At least we cannot even imagine a consciousness without the objective reference; i.e. without a felt distinction between the feeling subject and an object which it feels — something different, of whose presence to it it is aware. Once more let it be repeated, we are not speaking of the reflective realization of those distinctions which comes so much later — which comes to the non-human animal not at all, and to human beings only intermittently; we are speaking of the instinctive or direct consciousness which all living creatures possess (in greater or less degree) for the practical ends of living, to enable them to respond to external stimulus and to adapt themselves to their surroundings. Put on this broad ground, it may be said that the reaction off the sensitive organism is the practical recognition of an independent object, — it is the first or earliest form which that recognition takes. Further, there seems no reason to doubt that it is the contrast of activity, and passivity, — of resistance encountered and instinctive effort put forth against the resistance, to which may be added the contrast of want and satisfaction, of restless craving and the stilling of appetite by its appropriate gratification, — it is these contrasts which awaken and intensify the distinction between the sensitive subject and objects independent of itself. The infant whose pains of deprivation are ended by the presentation of the mother's breast, the snail which puts forth its horns and comes in contact with an object in its path,^[10] are alike in a fair way towards realizing the existence of independent objects. It may be taken as pretty generally acknowledged that the consciousness of independent externality is given chiefly in the sense of effort and the phenomena of resisted energy. Here we see the category of causality, as it were, alive before us in instinctive action. Hence, as Mr. Spencer says, "the root-conception of existence beyond consciousness becomes that of resistance plus some force which the resistance measures."^[11] Of such a simple quasi-reflex character are the experiences which "yield subject and object as independent existences."^[12] We do not require to go for them to the rational consciousness of man. In reacting upon a stimulus, the sensitive subject projects or reflects its feeling out, interprets it as the sign of an independent somewhat. In this sense we may agree with Mr. Spencer that " the Realistic interpretation of our states of consciousness" is "deep as the very structure of the nervous system, and cannot for an instant be actually expelled";^[13] or, as Professor Laurie puts it, the affirmation of independent externality is a necessary reflex movement of sense. "By a reflex action of consciousness things are constituted objects and external. This movement, moreover, lies in the heart of consciousness; and through it alone is consciousness possible."^[14]

This being so, then — Realism being incontestably prior — philosophical reflection supervenes, and subjects this primitive and instinctive consciousness to a sceptical criticism, which aims either at establishing some form of Idealism or at reducing us to complete Scepticism. This criticism, as already remarked, is both salutary and necessary ; for if Realism is to justify itself it must do so at the bar of Reason: it cannot save itself by a mere appeal to instinctive or unreasoned belief, especially when that belief may be seen at a glance to involve a number of unscientific and untenable assertions. Reflective criticism brings to light important and undeniable distinctions which are ignored in the primitive realistic beliefs of the race. The philosophical thinker will avail himself gladly of these distinctions to purge the crude or instinctive doctrine of the unscientific elements which bring it into discredit, while at the same time he endeavors, in view of this idealistic criticism, to state in an unexceptionable form the indestructible elements of truth which he believes the original belief to contain. In regard to this indestructible basis of truth he must meet the criticisms of the idealist by showing that Idealism as an epistemological doctrine only exists as a criticism of Realism, and derives any plausibility it possesses from the surreptitious or unobserved importation into its statement of our ineradicable realistic assumptions. Were it not for these assumptions the idealistic theory could not be stated in words. Idealism is really an attempt to obliterate the distinction between knowing and being, which it finds established in common belief and in the realistic theories. The gist of epistemological Idealism is that the knowing is the thing known; that being known to different consciousnesses is the only being or existence of the object; that cognitive states of a number of conscious beings exist, but that the "it," the object which we ordinarily suppose these cognitive states to refer to — which we suppose to be known by means of these cognitive states — is nothing beyond the cognitive states themselves.^[15] Now on such a theory it is pretty evident that the distinction of Knowing and Being, of independent subject and object, would never have arisen, and would not have required therefore to be explained away. Hence, it may be repeated, Idealism exists only as a criticism of Realism. When developed itself as a substantive theory, it leads to a view of existence which is a reductio ad absurdum of the doctrine in question. By such a line of argument Realism is left in possession of the field, and a critical or carefully guarded Realism is established as the only satisfactory, indeed the only sane, theory of knowledge.

The considerations on which a sceptical idealism, or an idealistic scepticism, founds are sufficiently obvious, and by no means profound. As Hume puts it, the " universal and primary opinion of all men is soon destroyed by the slightest philosophy."^[16] Possibly, therefore (to adapt Bacon's maxim), if a little philosophy inclines men's minds to idealism, depth in philosophy may bring them back to Realism. "The slightest philosophy teaches us," Hume proceeds, "that nothing can ever be present to the mind but an image or perception, and that the senses are only the inlets through which these images are conveyed, without being able to produce any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object." In other words, and to put it more modernly, the special arguments by which idealism is enforced are drawn from the physiology of the sense-organs. The general position on which it rests is that, physiologically, knowledge has for its immediate conditions certain processes in every organism, and, psychologically, knowledge consists of certain subjective experiences in me (whatever that may precisely mean, some denying the me and asserting simply the subjective experiences as such). As Hume says, we never get "any immediate intercourse between the mind and the object." Consciousness, as such, is shut up to its own contents or constituents. What transcends consciousness, i.e. any existence which is other than consciousness cannot be in consciousness; albeit the ordinary naïve idea seems to be that consciousness, as it were, goes out of itself, and actually lays hold of things, or throws its net over them. In literal fact, however, this is not so. The psychical experiences which constitute knowledge are one thing, and, according to the doctrine of a Realism that understands itself, the thing known is another. Their distinction is undeniable, though an ill-advised Realism and an all-advised Idealism alike try to undermine it or to explain it away. In fact, as we saw at the outset of this paper, the distinction may be said to be involved in the very nature or notion of knowledge. Knowledge means nothing if it does not mean the relation of two factors, knowledge of an object by a subject. But knowledge is not an entity stretching across, as it were, from subject to object, and uniting them; still less is knowledge the one reality of which subject and object are two sides or aspects. Knowledge is an activity, an activo-passive experience of the subject, whereby it becomes aware of what is not itself. The cognitive state is thus related psychologically to the subject whose state it is, and epistemologically to the object of which it is the knowledge. Epistemologically there is a union of subject and object: the knower and what he knows are in a sense, as Aristotle says, one. But ontologically, or as a matter of existence, they remain distinct—the one here and the other there—and nothing avails to bridge this chasm. The chasm, it is true, is not an absolute one, otherwise knowledge would be forever impossible. Across the inane there is no bridge. Both subject and object are members of one world. That may be taken as the ultimate and unavoidable presupposition. But separation and difference are the very conditions of knowledge; if it were not for the difference where would be the need of knowledge? Each thing would actually be everything else, or rather "each" would be an impossible conception. The ὁμοῦ πάντα of Anaxagoras would be realized in a more intimate and literal sense than its author ever imagined; all things would be together, an indistinguishable conglomerate of mutual interpenetration. It is individuation, distinctness in existence, that calls for knowledge and gives it scope. Feelings, images, ideas, beliefs, volitions—these are the components of consciousness, they have an existence of their own, but it is a mode of existence generically distinct from that we attribute to things as real beings, whether material or spiritual. By means of certain of these conscious facts—those called cognitive—the being in whom they occur believes that he is made aware of the existence, nature, and actions of existences other than himself. But he cannot by any possibility step out of himself and pass over into these other existences, or draw them into himself. In this respect Matthew Arnold's lines are as true as they are poignantly beautiful: —

Yes! in the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dotting the shoreless watery wild,
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.

But, as I have said, to wish to overpass these limits is to rebel against the very nature of selfhood, and epistemologically to kick against the very notion of knowledge. That very self which is a principle of isolation in existence is the principle on which all communion, all fellowship rests, alike in knowing and in feeling. But knowledge is not a fusion of knower and known, nor is it all explained by being regarded as a kind of physical continuity or immediate contact between the knowing subject and the object known. Though science may prove all perception to be dependent on the existence of a physical medium between the object perceived and the sense-organs, thus reducing all the senses to varieties of touch, the psychical facts which result are yet totally different, and as it were apart from the series of physical movements from which they result. Physical nearness or remoteness does not affect the epistemological question. The table which is in immediate contact with my organism is as completely and inexorably outside the world of my consciousness as the most distant "star and system" visible upon the bosom of the night. Though I press my hand against it, it is no more present in consciousness than is the friend on the other side of the globe whose image rises at the moment in my mind. There are in fact two worlds, and to that fundamental antithesis we return. To the one world belong, in Berkeley's language though not in Berkeley's sense, all the choir of heaven and furniture of the earth, to the other the thoughts and feelings of the individual who is consciously aware of this system of things in which he himself draws his breath and has his place. To use the well-worn words, there is the macrocosm and there is the microcosm. Ontologically or metaphysically, the microcosm must necessarily be viewed as a dependent part or function of the mighty whole; but epistemologically the microcosm rounds itself off within itself, and constitutes in perfect strictness a little world of its own. The world of consciousness, on the one hand, and the (so far hypothetical) world of real things, on the other, are two mutually exclusive spheres. No member of the real sphere can intrude itself into the conscious sphere, nor can consciousness go out into the real sphere and as it were lay hold with hands upon a real object. The two worlds are, to this extent and in this sense, totally disparate.

As soon as this is clearly recognized — and as Hume says, no very profound philosophical reflection is needed to reach this stage — it becomes evident that Realism cannot be maintained as a philosophical hypothesis in the uncritical form which it assumes in the mind of the plain man. And so far as the Realism of Scottish philosophy is merely an uncritical reassertion of our primitive beliefs, it is not to be wondered at that succeeding philosophers have so frequently treated their speculations as a negligible quantity. Immediacy must be given up before any tenable theory of perception and any philosophical doctrine of Realism can be established. The truth of the idealistic contentions must be acknowledged. It must be granted that in passing from the real to the ideal there is a solution of continuity, a leap, a passage from one world to another. The world of real things is transcendent with reference to the world of consciousness; the world of objects (as we customarily, though ambiguously speak of it) is trans-subjective or extra-conscious. In other words, it falls absolutely outside of, or beyond, the little world of consciousness, and the conscious being cannot in the nature of things overleap or transcend itself. The knowledge which we call most immediate or direct is only relatively so; so far as it is knowledge, it is mediate, or the result of a process. Knowledge puts a man in relation with things through the medium of his perceptions, but his perceptions are not the things; he does not pass over into the things, nor do the things pass over into him. At no point can the real world, as it were, force an entrance into the closed sphere of the ideal; nor does that sphere open at any point to receive into itself the smallest atom of the real world, quâ real, though it has room within itself ideally for the whole universe of God.

A critical Realism must start then with the acknowledgment of this fact. This is the truth which both Locke and Kant had got firm hold of. It is the basis of Locke's hypothetical Dualism, and, so far as our present argument is concerned, Kant's relativistic phenomenalism with its inferential background of things-in-themselves is substantially a similar theory with the sceptical suggestions of Lockianism unfortunately emphasized. From Locke and Kant as centres the epistemological speculations of modern philosophy may be conveniently viewed. Now, unquestionably, the transcendence of the real does give scepticism its opportunity. Scepticism takes up its position in the gap thus apparently made between the ideal and the real, and asks how we know that we know the real things, what assurance have we that the world of real things is as it appears to us to be, nay, in the last resort, what assurance have we that there is a world of real things at all. This sceptical insinuation requires to be fairly met, for, however little it avails to shake our practical certainty, the theoretic possibility of such a doubt lies in the very nature of the case. So long as the knower and that which he knows are not identical, so long is it possible that his knowledge may not be true, i.e. may not correctly render the nature of what is. Hence a succession of attempts to dispense with the otherness or transcendency of the object known. Thus we find Berkeley inveighing against this "groundless and absurd notion" as "the very root of scepticism."^[17] The arguments used by sceptics in all ages, he says, depend on the supposition of external objects.^[18] The temptation accordingly is to abolish the independent world of real existences altogether, and to manipulate our perceptions or ideas in such a way as to make them stand in its place. This is the plan we find adopted by Berkeley partially, and in more thorough-going fashion by Hume. Berkeley and Hume have been modernized by Mill. It was this sceptical development of Locke's "way of ideas" that drove some Scotch philosophers to seek refuge in the theory or no theory of Immediate Perception. By thus putting the mind with its nose up against things (to use a homely but graphic phrase of Von Hartmann's) they sought to cut off the very possibility of doubt. But this is to cut the Gordian knot in an inadmissible way. The doubt has been raised and is plainly possible. This is fully admitted and stated with admirable clearness by Hamilton, even while insisting most strenuously upon the testimony of consciousness to a duality of existence. "The facts of consciousness," he says, "are to be considered in two points of view, either as evidencing their own ideal or phenomenal existence, or as evidencing the objective existence of something else beyond them. A belief in the former is not identical with a belief in the latter. The one cannot, the other may possibly be refused. In the case of a common witness we cannot doubt the fact of his testimony as emitted, but we can always doubt the truth of that which his testimony avers. So it is with consciousness."^[19] Hence to shout Immediate Perception is no reply. It is to seek an imaginary security by shutting one's eyes to the danger, instead of boldly facing it. A more legitimate method is to show the inadequacy of the idealistic substitutes for a trans-subjective real world, to show, as I said before, that it is only in virtue of their borrowings from Realism that they can be stated and discussed. This indirect proof, proceeding by the exclusion of other possible theories, is declared by Hartmann^[20] to be the only way in which a critical Realism can be firmly established; or, to put it otherwise, the doubt must be redargued by showing its ultimate scope. This is to a certain extent what Reid does, and it is in his criticisms of the ideal theory conceived in this spirit, and not in his dogmatic assertion of immediate perception, that we must recognize his philosophical merit and his philosophical importance.

Andrew Seth.

UNIVERSITY OF EDINBURGH.

1. This article connects itself with the previous paper on "Psychology, Epistemology, and Metaphysics," which appeared in the second number of this journal.
2. Enquiry, section 12.
3. Treatise, Part IV. section 2.
4. Ibid.
5. Enquiry, section 12.
6. Treatise, Part IV. section 2.
7. Principles of Psychology, Vol. II. p. 369.
8. Scottish Philosophy, p. 103 (2d ed.).
9. Principles of Psychology, Part VII. chap. 6.
10. An example of Professor Laurie's.
11. Principles of Psychology, Part VII. chap. 18.
12. Ibid., chap. 13.
13. Ibid., chap. 14.
14. Metaphysica Nova et Vetusta, p. 74 (2d ed.).
15. Obviously on such a hypothesis the designation "cognitive" applied to the states is no longer appropriate, since they have ceased to be the instruments of knowledge.
16. Enquiry, section 12.
17. Principles of Human Knowledge, section 86.
18. Ibid., section 87.
19. Lectures on Metaphysics, I. p. 271.
20. See his Kritische Grundlegung des transcendentalen Realismus, and his Grundproblem der Erkenntnisstheorie, passim.