The World and the Individual, First Series/Lecture 5

by Josiah Royce

LECTURE V

THE OUTCOME OF MYSTICISM, AND THE WORLD OF MODERN CRITICAL RATIONALISM

Mysticism, which our last lecture discussed, has one great advantage over Realism. The realist, namely, gives you a conception of Being which pretends to be authoritative; but this authority appears, like the realistic type of Being itself, something merely external and therefore opaque. The realist demands, as a matter of common sense, that you first accept as real his Independent Beings. Hence, if you are to comprehend the realist’s position, you must make your own reflections; you must do your own critical thinking. Realism is essentially dogmatic, and gives you no aid in your attempt to sound the inner meaning of the realistic doctrine. But Mysticism, on the contrary, is from the outset in a way reflective; it is founded upon an explicit appeal to your own experience. It points out to you first that if any object is real for you, it is you alone who can find, within yourself, the determining motive that leads you to call this object real. Hence Mysticism depends upon making you considerate of these, your metaphysical motives, aware of your meaning. You ascribe to this or that object reality. Mysticism is a practical doctrine. It observes at once that you merely express your own need as knower when you thus regard the object as existent. Mysticism asks you hereupon to define your needs in an absolutely general way. What do you want when you want Being? Mysticism replies to this question, as the sage Yâjnavalkya replies, in the Upanishads, to the questions of his wife Maitreyî: You want yourself, — the Self in its completeness, in its fulfilment, in its final expression. In brief, when you talk of reality, you talk of self-possession, of perfection, and of peace. And that is, therefore, all that you mean by the Being of the world or of any type of facts. Being therefore is nothing beyond yourself. You even now hold it within you, in your heart of hearts. Being therefore is just the purely immediate. To be means to quench thought in the presence of a final immediacy which completely satisfies all ideas. And by this simple reflection, the mystic undertakes to define the Absolute.

 

I

The advantage of this mystical method of dealing with the problem of Reality lies in the fact that Mysticism, because it is essentially a self-conscious and reflective doctrine, explicitly states its own defects, and points beyond its own abstractions. Realism actually asserts hopeless contradiction, and then stubbornly declines to take note of the fact that it does so. But philosophical Mysticism always expounds its own paradoxes, and actually glories in them. The process of getting beyond Realism therefore involves a hostile and paradoxical dialectic, whereby one exposes the realistic paradoxes. The realist himself takes as little part in this process as possible, and opposes to his critics merely the authority of sane common sense. Everybody knows, he insists, that the world is independently real. But to ask what independent reality means is, he remarks, mere morbid curiosity. To doubt the independence, would be to doubt the value of sanity. “When Bishop Berkeley said there was no matter, and proved it, ’twas no matter what he said.” Such is the spirit of any typically realistic reply to Berkeley. Hence to be realistic is essentially to ignore every fundamental criticism of the ontological predicate. Even Herbart, that most honest and critical of realists, could see no sense in trying to get behind the ultimate fact of what he called the Absolute Position of the real itself. If there is show or seeming, said Herbart, there is what points towards or hints at the real. But the real itself is the finally posited, that hints at nothing beyond itself, and that therefore is independent of the show. That, for such a realism, is the whole story of the ontological predicate, and to inquire further is vain. The rest, even for a man of Herbart’s minuteness and caution, consists in inquiring what subjects, what Wesen, are worthy to receive this predicate.

The only way to deal with Realism is therefore to insist, with equal obstinacy, that a realist shall explain, not what objects he takes to be real, but what he means by their independence. Such obstinacy is hostile. No realist willingly cooperates in the undertaking. The critical task is accordingly ungracious and abstract. For Realism depends upon not knowing what it does; and to point out to it what it is doing seems to it and to any mere bystander like a carping and unkindly assault. But the mystic, on the contrary, is in a much larger measure his own critic. He is essentially dialectical. And his dialectic process is very much that of Elaine in the song of Love and Death that Tennyson puts into her mouth. Like Elaine, the mystic is reflecting upon the final goal of his life-journey. That goal for him is the Reality, the Soul, the Self. It is as such infinitely precious to him. But what is this absolute goal, just in so far as it is Real at all? Is it a live Being, or after all is it not rather identical with mere Non-Being, with dreamless sleep, with that “rapture of repose” on the face of the dead that Byron’s well-known lines describe. Or, to use Elaine’s speech, is it Love or Death that the mystic defines as his Absolute? Like Elaine, the mystic equally defines both Love and Death, both the Perfect, and the Nothing; or if you like, he leaves both of them, and the whole difference between them, consciously and deliberately undefined, while his entire doctrine consists in saying, exactly as the adorable Elaine says, “I know not which is sweeter, No, not I.” That, as we in effect saw at the last time, is the precise technical sense of the

“Nescio, nescio

Quae jubilatio,

Lux tibi qualis.”

of Bernard’s hymn concerning the Urbs Sion unica, mansio mystica. That is the sense of Yâjnavalkya’s Neti, Neti. And Mysticism, curiously enough, has inspired whole nations and generations of mankind by saying essentially nothing whatever but what, in her despair, Tennyson’s Elaine so pathetically sings. Now so easy is it, from a merely external point of view, to see the formal defect of the outcome of this train of thinking, that the great difficulty in expounding the mystic position, is, not to destroy its illusions, but rather first dramatically to create them in the hearer’s mind, to the end that he may at least historically appreciate the meaning of the mystical definition of Being. But remember, in any case, that if it is thus easy from without to make naught of the mystic’s result, it is also fair to add that this refutation is itself made easy through the mystic’s own explicit confession. His doctrine has the honesty of reflective thought about it. He tells you where his own paradoxes are to be found. And the value of dealing with him lies not in refuting him, for in effect he already himself provides the whole refutation; but in comprehending both why he has inspired mankind, and why he creates the illusion that his empty, swept, and garnished dwelling is the very house of God. And yet after our foregoing account, it should not now be hard to see wherein the illusion and the truth of Mysticism are to be found.

The mystic asserts that the real cannot be wholly independent of knowledge. Herein he is right. He asserts that the reality of which you think and speak is first of all a reality meant by you. This is profoundly true. He declares that within yourself lies the sole motive that leads you to distinguish truth from error, reality from unreality, the world from the instant’s passing contents. And in all this the mystic, whether Hindoo or Christian, is a representative of the simple facts about Being, — facts which everybody concerned with the subject ought to know merely as a matter of general education.

And the mystic further observes that, despite all this, you have not now won, as finite thinker, the true presence of the very Being which you seek and which you still contain within your very meaning. He points out that, in your present poor form of self-consciousness, just now, you find within you what you do not wholly mean, and mean, as if it were beyond you, a truth that, although it is nigh you, even in your heart, you do not at present find. He insists that your finite disquietude is due to your restlessness in this essentially intolerable situation. He advises you that, in looking for Being, you are attempting to end this disquietude. Now in all this the mystic is distinctly an empiricist, a reporter of the facts, as you can at any moment see them for yourself if you will. Moreover, he is a decidedly practical thinker.

But as a religious teacher he is inspiring, first of all, just because he appeals to your own individuality. He breathes the common spirit of all the higher religions when he conceives your goal as an inner salvation, and your search for truth as essentially a practical effort to win personal perfection. It is no wonder then that the mystics have been the spiritual counsellors of humanity. Where the realist falsely sunders the what and the that, the outer world and the individual soul, the theoretical and the practical interests, the mystic sees the unity of life’s business, identifies the needful and the true, unites the moral Ought with the theoretical Ideal, teaches that the absolutely Real, by virtue of its very function as the Real, must also be the absolutely Good, gives life a genuine coherence of meaning, and defines the whole duty of man as simple fidelity to that meaning. To the mystics, then, has been historically committed the feeding of the flock of the faithful, the gathering of the heavenly manna, the saving of humanity from the abyss into which the mere respectability of dogmatic Realism, if left to itself, would have infallibly plunged all the deeper interests of the Spirit.

So much for the obvious positive efficacy of the mystical undertaking. But the undertaking itself takes the form, as we said, of a search for a certain limiting state of that finite variable which is called your knowledge, or your experience, or your insight, and for a definition of what happens when that state is reached. The mystic also attempts to define how this state is related to consciousness, and he tries to treat this limiting state very much as (if he were a mathematician) he might attempt to define, in a purely quantitative world, the limit of an infinite series of terms, and to consider how one series of values can be a function of another. The mystic ignores the sum of the series. He cares only for the final term itself, viewed as the limit which the other terms approach. And he attempts to define this limiting state of the finite variable by a process which is, as a fact, fallacious. His position is that since, in us mortals, consciousness means ignorance, and since, the less we observe our ignorance, the nearer we are to unconsciousness, therefore, at the limit, to be possessed of absolute knowledge is to be unconscious.

If you persist in asking how the mystic can thus conceive the zero of consciousness as also the goal of knowledge, then he replies with his endlessly repeated reductio ad absurdum. If, he says, you stopped anywhere short of unconsciousness in the series of states of finite consciousness, you would find yourself thinking of something beyond you, desiring another, less troubled, state, — confessing your imperfection. You would, therefore, be confessedly not in presence of Being. If you are to get into the presence of Being, and know what the Knower finally knows, you must then finally pass to the limit itself.^[1] But so to pass is to leave no variety, no external object, no passing moment’s ideas, no conscious content in the field of knowledge. It is, in short, to leave nothing present but the Knower alone, and the Knower as finally immediate datum, too completely immediate to be conscious at all.

If one hereupon replies that this paradox of the mystic, the passing to the limit, and undertaking to define it in terms of the vanishing series, deprives the Absolute of any value as a Being, by making the whole truth a mere zero, then the mystic assures you that just this zero has infinite value, because it is the goal of the series of states of finite consciousness. Do you not want peace? he says. Can anything be of more worth to you than attainment? If attainment involves what for finite consciousness means the quenching of desire, of thought, and of consciousness, does that deprive the search for attainment of meaning? For now that you are finite, all your passion is for attainment and for peace. But hereby the final sense of Mysticism, and the final reply to the mystic, once more clearly enough comes to sight. Overlooking the merely formal defect of the argument as to the limiting state of knowledge one can say: It is true, in arithmetic, that zero is a very important member of the number series. But it gets its whole importance by its contrasts and its definite quantitative relations with the other numbers. Just so here, if the Absolute is not only zero, but also real, also the goal, also the valuable, it is so by contrast with the finite search for that goal. But to suppose, as the mystic does, that the finite search has of itself no Being at all, is illusory, is Mâya, is itself nothing, this is also to deprive the Absolute of even its poor value as a contrasting goal. For a nothing that is merely other than another nothing, a goal that is a goal of no real process, a zero that merely differs from another zero, has as little value as it has content, as little Being as it has finitude. What the mystic has positively defined, then, is the law that our consciousness of Being depends upon a contrast whereby we set all our finite experience over against some other that we seek but do not yet possess. As a fact, however, it is not only the goal, but the whole series of stages on the way to this goal that is the Reality. It is the sum, then, or some other function of the terms of the series, that has Being. And, as a fact, Being must be attributed to both the principal members of the relation of contrast, both to the seeking and to the attainment. Else is the attainment the fulfilment of nothing. The finite then also is, even if imperfect. Its imperfection is not the same as any mere failure to be real in any degree. It is real in its own way, if the Absolute is real. And unless the imperfect has Reality, the Absolute has none. We must then abandon the mystic’s mere series of gradually vanishing terms for some view that unites these terms into a more connected whole. What is, is not then merely immediate, is not merely the limit of the finite series, is not merely the zero of consciousness. The result therefore is that Immediacy is but one aspect of Being. We must afresh begin our effort to define the ontological predicate, by taking account both of finite ideas, and of the sense in which they can be true.

Our result, in case of the mystic, is accordingly very simple. To the realist we formerly said: Your ideas are Independent Beings as surely as their objects are such. Hence your world is rent in twain, and you cannot put it together again. To the mystic we now say: Your Absolute is defined merely as the goal of the finite search. That it is such a goal, this alone, according to your own hypothesis, distinguishes it from mere nothing, for to save the unity of Being, you have deprived it of all other characters than this. Therefore, since your Absolute is only a goal, an attainment, and is naught else, its sole meaning is due to your process of search, in other words to your restless ideas that seek it. Annihilation is something to me only so long as I seek annihilation. Death is a positive ideal only so long as I strive for death. Pure immediacy has a content only so long as it fulfils ideas. In brief, by contrast with and by other relation to finite facts, your zero has its meaning. If, then, your conscious ideas are naught, your Absolute is naught in precisely the same sense, and in precisely the same degree as the ideas and as the finite facts are naught. On the other hand, if your Absolute is real, then, unless it has a distinguishing positive content of its own, unless it is more than mere finality and peace, the finite world of conscious strivings after it, is precisely as real as itself, since your Absolute borrows all its Being from its contrast with those strivings. Precisely, then, as we dealt with the realist by pointing out that his ideas are at least as real as their supposed independent objects, so now we bring the mystic’s case to its close, by pointing out that his Absolute, in its abstraction, is precisely as much, and in exactly the same sense of the terms a Nothing, as, by his hypothesis, his own consciousness is.

And herewith we indeed abandon the abstractions of both Realism and Mysticism. What we have learned from those abstractions is that our finite consciousness indeed seeks a meaning that it does not now find presented. We have learned too that this meaning is neither a merely independent Being, nor a merely immediate Datum. What else can it be?

 

II

Our answer to this question depends upon an effort to amend the extreme statement of Realism. I suppose that no realist, when once confronted with the consequences of the absolute mutual independence of the Real and of the Idea that from without refers to it, will be disposed to admit that he ever really meant such total independence. The Real, he will now admit, is not logically or in its true essence wholly indifferent to whether anybody knows it or not. It is only practically, or relatively, independent. If you still speak of it then as the relatively independent member of the relation, you must indeed, now and henceforth, say that the Real is essentially such that, under conditions, it would become knowable and known. This, the essential preparedness of Reality for knowledge, does, therefore, result from the foregoing criticism of Realism. In the light, then, of this consequence, we must proceed. This essential relation of Reality to knowledge already constitutes a part or an aspect of any real Being, even before it becomes known. Even the meteors, wandering there in interplanetary space, unseen, are already such that, if they were to become incandescent by entering our atmosphere, they would become visible to an eye that chanced to look their way. And knowledge comes to pass when things that possess reality apart from knowledge come to influence, as a consequence of the general laws governing interaction, the conscious states of knowing Beings. So at least a Realism, revised in the light of the foregoing, will next be led to maintain.

Such Realism may proceed as follows: “Perception, as a kind of knowledge, results when a real object, in accordance of course with its previous nature, causes impressions in a percipient. But of course no object is wholly indifferent to the effects that it causes. The incandescent meteor changes its physical and chemical properties, even at the moment when it becomes visible. And this change is due to the previous physical and chemical constitution of the meteor, which thereby was always prepared, in one way, to become known to a Being with a power of vision. And this case is a type of the way in which Being and Idea are related. Upon this basis must our metaphysic rest.”

I thus merely indicate a general and a well-known popular view as to the relatively independent reality of things — a view which usually passes, in the ordinary speech of common sense, for Realism; although, historically speaking, the most thoroughgoing realists have avoided such concessions to popular opinion, just because they really ruin the independence of the Real. Neither the Sânkhya, nor Herbart, regards the independent reality as in truth the genuinely physical cause of knowledge, and, as a fact, one who offers such popular compromises, familiar though they are to us all, must be prepared to go much further, on the way towards Idealism, than he at first imagines. Such a compromise is, in fact, an entire surrender of the realistic thesis.

I will not pause to develope, at any length, the various well-known theories that have been held by modified Realism as to the causation of perception, or as to the evolution of knowledge and of knowing beings, or as to the rest of the natural history, both of ideas and of relations of ideas and “real external things.” We are all familiar with such views. They have their important place in psychology and in cosmology. But they are here, in their details, simply not relevant. Our only interest, at present, in such theories, is an interest in seeing what manner of Reality can be ascribed to objects which you call real “apart from” or “externally to” or “in relative independence of” the experience of any particular observer, but which you, meanwhile, regard as, by nature, “sources” or “causes” or “possible causes” of knowledge. When you say, with such a consciously modified Realism, “The Real is not ever wholly independent of whether it is known or not; it is only relatively independent; and it is, in nature, such as to be knowable, or such as, under conditions, to become a cause or source of knowledge,” — when you modify Realism in this way, what is the true consequence for your fundamental Theory of Being?

The consequence, I insist, is deeper than you might at first suppose. For it is natural to imagine that you can still keep the convenient part of Realism, the practically unapproachable indifference, dignity, and compelling authority, of the Independent Beings, while sacrificing so much of the abstractions of pure Realism as it proves to be logically inconvenient to retain. “The world,” you perhaps now say, “is there, of course, whether or no this or that man knows it. And a man has practically to submit his knowledge to the Real, just as if it were wholly independent of him in every way. Of course no independence is ever really absolute. That has to be admitted. All things are always interrelated. But, practically speaking, the meteors are what they are, whether or no we men see them. And Neptune, when discovered, was not created by the astronomer’s computations nor by his telescope nor by his brain. Now this practical independence of any particular knowledge is what we mean by the Being of things. Before, after, and apart from anybody’s knowledge, things remain, on the whole, whatever they are. To be and to be known, to be knowable and to be actual, — these are of course ultimately related characters in any being. Yet they are characters that, on the whole, fall apart, in the nature of things as they are. Knowledge is, therefore, relatively speaking, an accident in the world. And its business is to conform to the facts, not to create them. Upon so much we still insist, despite the fate of an extreme and abstract, and of course in so far absurd, Realism.”

Yet one must now, in reply, insist upon yet a fresh criticism of the bases even of this modified Realism. And the criticism first takes a very simple form. It asks: Can we, then, divide the Being of things into two parts, as the primary and the secondary qualities of matter have been divided? Can we, then, say of one of these parts of Reality, “That is wholly independent of knowledge; that is entirely indifferent to whether anybody knows it or not?” And can we, then, say of the rest of the Being of things (namely, let us suppose, of the secondary qualities of matter), “That part is not indifferent to knowledge, but alters according to the nature of the particular being who happens to know it?”

The question is momentous for the fate of any modified Realism. It is usually supposed that such a division is easily possible, even if not verifiable in detail. What the meteor is, in so far as it either now flashes or is at least capable of visible incandescence, — that, one may suppose, is an aspect or part of the reality of the meteor which indeed would exist apart from this or that knowledge, but which cannot be expressed except by taking account of the actual or possible relation to knowledge. But that the meteor is external matter, and has mass, extension, or other primary qualities, — this aspect of the meteor would remain real if there never were any knowledge in the world; and this aspect is not altered in its character by taking account of our ideas about it. Some such division of the real into two parts, one closely and explicitly related to knowledge, and one independent of knowledge, is very commonly attempted. One supposes that one is able to say what the world would still be if knowledge vanished. The rest of the world, the phenomenal aspect of things, the part of Being that has explicit relation to knowledge, one supposes to be also capable of definition more or less by itself. Thus Being has two parts, an independent part, and a dependent part.

But our former analysis of pure Realism, by virtue of the very abstractness and one-sidedness that made it at the time so austere, gives us, as it were, a “razor” wherewith to cut away just the “independent” part of this now divided realistic universe. If the Real were wholly independent of knowledge, it would be self-contradictory. Well, just so, if any part of the Reality, if any division of it, if any group of substances or characters in it, were real in entire independence of knowledge, or were the same whether known by anybody or not, all of our former analysis would apply to just that portion of the real universe. Thus it would be vain to say that the Real is independent of knowledge when or in so far as it causes no knowledge of itself to exist, or is not a possible cause of knowledge; and that only when it is an actual or possible cause of knowledge it is in essential relation to the latter. Any such view would be destroyed by our former attack upon the Independent Beings. If no Reality can have entirely independent Being, no part of reality can win such Being. And this consideration ends at once every effort to divide off one section of Being as the independent part.

When we say, then, that the real is in any sense practically or partially independent of knowledge, we do not mean that it has two parts, one in essence independent of whether it is known or not, the other essentially linked to ideas. No, the Real must be through and through, to its very last quality, to its very inmost core, such as to be fitted to be known. Its nature is through and through thus tainted, if you please so to say, by adaptation to ideal purposes.

If, then, Being is to keep its practical independence of any particular knowledge, our modified Realism must indeed be not only modified, but transformed. Yet how?

In answer, one has merely to state afresh and more carefully the situation now reached. The Real, for our modified Realism, is to be somehow “outside of any particular knowledge.” It is to be “authoritative” over against our “mere ideas.” They must “conform” to it. On the other hand, it is such that, under conditions, they may "correspond" to it. If they do so “correspond,” they will be true. Independently of this essential relation to knowledge, Being is indefinable. It is there as that which, if known, is found giving to ideas their validity, as that to which ideas ought to correspond, and as that whose essential relation to ideas is that it is their model) and is adapted to their nature as such model. Now independently, I repeat, of this relation, the Real is for us henceforth simply indefinable. Nor can any part, or aspect, or quality of it be defined in logical independence of this relation.

But this new type of Being really involves a new fundamental conception of what it is to be real. To be real now means, primarily, to be valid, to be true, to be in essence the standard for ideas. Our transformed theory is now that our ideas have a standard external to themselves, to which they must correspond. If we retain Being in this sense, we still view it as Other than ideas that relate to it, and as outside of our present knowledge. But we do not, in this case, view the real as conceivable, either in whole or in part, in an entire abstraction from knowledge. It may be somehow real when knowledge is not. That we shall have to see. But in essence it is always related to the purpose of knowledge, and is altered when these relations alter.

And now let us proceed to define more specifically this new conception of Being. Let us take it first in one of its most recent forms.

 

III

Is it not indeed plain that, as we ourselves have often heretofore said, when we talk of Being, we are indeed seeking for what, if present, would satisfy or tend to satisfy our conscious needs and meanings? Let us take this very character as the sole basis of our definition of what it is to be. Let us first say that whenever we talk of Being we mean a definitely Possible Fact of experience, viewed just as something possible for us. Or, again, let us say that by Being in general we mean precisely what Kant called Mögliche Erfahrung. For is it not also plain that we are trying to find out, in all our search for Being, precisely what experience we may hope to get under given conditions, and what experience we may not expect to get? Can we not then reduce to just these terms the whole inquiry after Being in the province of common sense, in the world of science, and even in the more mysterious realms of religion? If, hearing strange sounds in the street, I look out of the window, am I not trying to define or to confirm some idea of a possible experience? If an astronomer searches a star-cluster for variables, or a stellar spectrum for familiar lines, is he not verifying assertions as to possible contents of experience? If the devout man prays, and expects an answer, or hopes for immortality, is he not looking for possible empirical data? What is, is then for me what, under certain definable conditions, I should experience. To be is precisely to fulfil or to give warrant to ideas by making possible the experience that the ideas define.

Well, let us next generalize this notion a little, let us state it more impersonally, and then let us see what we get. I have ideas; present experience does not present to me all that they mean. I look to see how they are related to Being. What then, apart from my private and momentary point of view, is Being in general? Is it not what renders my ideas Valid or Invalid? When I say, There is a real world, what do I mean except that some of my ideas are already, and apart from my private experience, valid, true, well-grounded? When the mystic himself defined his Absolute, what was he defining but the supposed possible goal of a process of finite purification of ideas and of experiences? When the realist spoke of the Independent Beings, what did he himself mean except that certain of our ideas are true or false despite our own desires, or even quite against our wishes? And to set aside as we have done either Mysticism or Realism, what was it but to point out that certain ideal definitions, being contradictory, are necessarily invalid? What is Being then but the Validity of Ideas?

Is not here, then, the true definition of Being? As you may remember, this was, in fact, the third on our list of the historical conceptions of Being. And to consider in detail this Third Conception, which identifies Reality with Validity, the Being of the world with the truth of certain ideas, is our next task.

This new conception of Being, as we shall at once be able to see, is one that, just at the present time, is of exceeding importance in connection with the contemporary discussion of all ultimate problems.

 

IV

True metaphysical Realism, in all its abstractness, still survives amongst us, and will no doubt, as an opinion, last as long as our race. For man might be defined as an animal who ought to reflect, but who very generally cannot. But you all know a class of persons whom I may as well call, at once, the Critical Rationalists of our own time. These thinkers are not mere empiricists. They are students of science, sometimes too of ethics, and frequently also of religion. They are doubtful, not infrequently quite negative, in their attitude towards Realism. They condemn the notion of things in themselves, and insist either that man’s limited insight can never reach the truth about any realistically conceived independent world, or else that there is no such world at all. On the other hand, they are hostile to constructive Idealism, regard the whole recent constructively idealistic movement as a mere dream, and often repeat that, in our philosophy, we must be guided solely by the spirit of Modern Science. In theology they condemn theoretical construction, and if they are positively disposed, prefer a reasonable and chastened moral faith. But the one thing to which they remain steadfastly loyal, is the Validity of some region of decidedly impersonal Truth. As such a realm of impersonal truth they conceive perhaps the moral law, perhaps the realm of natural law revealed to us by science, perhaps the lawful structure of that social order which is now so favorite a topic of study. Their spiritual father is Kant, although they often ignore their parentage. Their philosophical creations are a collection of impersonal principles in whose independent or realistic Being no one altogether believes, but whose value as giving reasonable unity to the realm of phenomena, justifies, to the present age, their validity. These principles are such as Energy; or in the modern sense of the term, Evolution, viewed as the name for a universal tendency in nature; or the Unconscious, taken as a principle for explaining mental life; or yet other of the frequently great creations of Nineteenth Century thought. These are names for abstractions, but for abstractions based in some cases upon a vast experience, and in these cases justified precisely as empirically valid conceptions. The world of these principles is neither independently real nor yet illusory, nor yet precisely a spiritual reality. It is said to be true for us men. In that world the older faiths may indeed seem endangered. God is, from such a point of view, no longer a person, not yet is he the mystical Absolute. The impersonal conception of a Righteous Order of the universe remains. Theology, one holds, must reconstruct its notions accordingly. What remain to us to-day are Virtual Entities, so to speak, — Laws and Orders of truth, — objects that are to us as if they were finally real. This as if, or as it were, becomes to some thinkers, a sort of ultimate category. One no longer proves that God exists, but only that, It is as if he were. God too, like a logarithm, or like a treaty of peace between two nations, is to be, to such minds, a virtual entity or else nothing.

Thinkers of this general type, I say, you all know. Their spirit, as you read modern books, you have constantly before you. Their characteristic metaphysical conceptions are founded upon this, our third view of the ontological predicate. In future this Third Conception may therefore come to be remembered as the typical ontological idea current in the Nineteenth Century, — in this age of critical rationalism, and of a cool respect for truths which do everything but take on the form of individual life. A close study of this notion of what it is to be real seems therefore justified by our situation. And so next, during the remainder of the present lecture, I shall illustrate by various cases how objects recognized in one way or another by our thought may suggest this form of the ontological predicate. Then, at the next lecture, I shall follow very briefly some of the earlier stages of the differentiation of this view from Realism in technical philosophy, shall deal very summarily with the history of the conception since Kant (because only since Kant it has come to be fully differentiated from Realism), and finally, I shall show how this conception leads us inevitably beyond itself to a fourth and final view of Being.

 

V

As one of the purely popular meanings of the ontological predicate we found, in our second lecture, the notion that to be real is to give warrant to ideas, to be genuine. By contrast we found popular speech calling an object whose unreality has been detected, an appearance, a myth, or even a lie. The unreal object thus often gets, by a certain transfer, names which first seem naturally to belong rather to the false opinion, to the idea itself, that has misled the too credulous mind. On the other hand, the real can be depended upon. It does not deceive. In a word, it is true, and its Being is, somehow or other, more or less the same as its truth.

Such usage is so far only popular. It implies no conscious final definition of Being. But this popular speech has undoubtedly been influenced by a philosophical tradition that dates, in our European thought, back to Plato, and that has been influenced both by theology and by mathematical science. The scholastic theory of Being gave expression to all of these influences together, when, developing a discussion of Aristotle’s Metaphysics, it expounded the well-known thesis: Omne Ens est Verum, or in another form: “Ens and Verum are convertible terms.”

It is, however, still the case that one who asserts this thesis, or its various popular equivalents, so far does not commit himself to any particular one of our four technical conceptions of what real Being itself fundamentally means. For the scholastics the epithet verum was only one of the so-called transcendental predicates of Being, which mentioned an universal character, rather than a defining mark, of Reality. We are now, however, to sketch a theory for which the truth belonging to any real object is to be viewed as the one essential mark in terms of which Reality may be defined. And this truth itself is defined in the main as something, external to a mere idea, to which that idea ought to correspond.

We are to begin, before following this theory into its technical philosophical forms, by naming some examples of objects which we ordinarily seem to call real mainly because we first call them true. As a fact, you cannot converse for a quarter of an hour upon topics of common human interest, without speaking of many things that all the company present will tacitly view as in some objective sense real objects, as not “mere ideas” of anybody, as in other words facts, while at the same time, if you look closer, you will find that these objects are not viewed by anybody present as real in the same sense in which physical bodies, or the atoms of Democritus, or the Monads of Leibniz, or Mr. Spencer’s Unknowable, have usually been regarded as real by the realistic metaphysicians who have believed in the latter entities. Those other objects of common human interest are viewed, by common sense, namely, not as Independent Beings, which would retain their reality unaltered even if nobody ever were able to think of them, but rather as objects such that, while people can, and often do think of them, their own sole Being consists in their character as rendering such thoughts about themselves objectively valid for everybody concerned. Their whole esse then consists in their value as giving warrant and validity to the thoughts that refer to them. They are external to any particular ideas, yet they cannot be defined independently of all ideas.

Do you ask me to name such objects of ordinary conversation? I answer at once by asking whether the credit of a commercial house, the debts that a man owes, the present price of a given stock in the stock market, yes, the market price current of any given commodity; or, again, whether the rank of a given official, the social status of any member of the community, the marks received by a student at any examination; or, to pass to another field, whether this or that commercial partnership, or international treaty, or still once more, whether the British Constitution, — whether, I say, any or all of the objects thus named, will not be regarded, in ordinary conversation, as in some sense real beings, facts possessed of a genuinely ontological character? One surely says: The debt exists; the credit is a fact; the constitution has objective Being. Yet none of these facts, prices, credits, debts, ranks, standings, marks, partnerships, Constitutions, are viewed as real independently of any and of all possible ideas that shall refer to them. The objects now under our notice have, moreover, like physical things, very various grades of supposed endurance and of recognized significance. Some vanish hourly. Others may outlast centuries. The prices vary from day to day; the credits may not survive the next panic; the Constitution may very slowly evolve for ages. None of these objects, moreover, can be called mere ideas inside of any man’s head. None of them are arbitrary creations of definition. The individual may find them as stubborn facts as are material objects. The prices in the stock market may behave like irresistible physical forces. And yet none of these objects would continue to exist, as they are now supposed to exist, unless somebody frequently thought of them, recognized them, and agreed with his fellows about them. Their fashion of supposed Being is thus ordinarily conceived as at once ideal and extra-ideal. They are not “things in themselves,” and they are not mere facts of private consciousness. You have to count upon them as objective. But if ideas vanished from the world, they would vanish also. They then are the objects of the relatively external meanings of ideas. Yet they are not wholly separable from internal meanings.

Well, all of these facts are examples of beings of which it seems easiest to say that they are real mainly in so far as they serve to give truth or validity to a certain group of assertions about each one of them.

I next turn to another region of examples. I have already more than once referred to the sort of Being that, in many minds, attaches to the moral law. What kind of Reality then, in the universe, has justice, or charity, or in general the good? Here indeed we are once more upon ground that the Platonic dialogues have rendered very familiar, — a ground too that the controversies of later forms of Realism and Idealism have caused to appear, to many minds, too much trampled over to be any longer fruitful. I venture only at the moment to insist that in this case familiarity has simply not meant clearness, and that it is far easier to talk of certain questions as hopelessly antiquated, than to give them any precise answer.

Of course it is possible to undertake to regard the moral law, or such objects as justice, in the same light in which we have just been viewing the facts that result from social law and from convention. Every student of Ethics knows, however, the arguments in favor of giving the ethical truths a more permanent type of validity than we assign to prices and to social conventions. In any case, however, the mention of this familiar Platonic group of instances carries us at once over to a form of reality whose formally eternal validity is, to the once awakened metaphysical sense, something both marvellous and unquestionable.  

VI

In what way, then, in the next place, is the value of π, that is, the ratio of diameter and circumference in the circle, a real fact in the universe? Physically, one can never verify the existence of any perfect circle in the natural world; empirically, one can never, by actual measurement, discover in experience the presence of two lengths thus related. But, geometrically and analytically, one can prove what is often called the “Existence,” as well as certain of what are often called the real properties of the ratio or quantity π. The late Professor Cayley, in a noted passage of his Presidential address before the British Association, asserted, as you may remember, that the mathematical objects, such as the true circles, are, if anything, more real than the physical imitations of circles that we can make, since, as he said, it is only by comparison with the true circle that the imperfections of the physical imitation of a circle can be defined. The Platonic spirit of this assertion is easily recognizable, and at all events it reminds us that a distinctly modern and scientific experience can lead a man to assert, without (as I suppose) any professionally metaphysical bias, that the most real objects are the ones of which it is hard to affirm any character except that they have an Eternal Truth. This case of the geometrical figures is of old a favorite one in philosophy. In recalling it here, I may also properly point out that the very latest discussions about what has been called the reality of Euclidean and non-Euclidean spaces, have given a wholly new life to this old story; and the realm of that which undertakes to be real only in so far as it is true, is a realm of very distinctly present interest for the philosophy of recent natural science.

As for the purely mathematical instances, in general, however, they are not at all limited to the geometrical ones. Modern Analysis, and the Theory of Functions, contain very many propositions of the class that are sometimes called “Existence-Theorems.” That there exists a root for any algebraic equation of the nth degree; that there exists a differential coefficient for a given function; that, on the other hand, there exist functions continuous throughout given intervals which still have within those intervals no differential coefficients; that the limits of this or that variable quantity (for instance, of convergent infinite series), exist: — such are examples that may be more or less familiar even to students who have, like myself, to confine themselves to decidedly elementary mathematics. Avoiding, however, the mathematical form of expression, one may here try to make clear the metaphysically important nature of theorems of this sort very much as follows: In pure mathematics, the student deals with certain objects that, upon their face, are the products of purely arbitrary definitions. The mathematician builds up these his objects, as, for instance, the objects of pure Analysis, very much as he pleases. His ideas are in so far his facts. So far one would suppose, then, that no questions about existence would trouble the mathematician. But when one looks closer, one sees that when the mathematician has once built up such a notion of some realm of ideal objects, there may then arise the further question whether, within that realm, an object that meets certain new requirements, the special requirements, let us say, of a given problem, can be found or not. And this question is one whose answer, for the mathematician, is indeed hereupon not at all a matter of his arbitrary choice. He has, to be sure, created his world of mathematical objects. This world is there, as it were, by his decree, or is real, as ordinary realists would say, only in his head. It is so far like a child’s fairyland. But once created, this world, in its own eternal and dignified way, is as stubborn as the rebellious spirits that a magician might have called out of the deep.

Even the poets have told us how their heroes, once created, have often become, as it were, alive after their own fashion, so that the poet could no longer voluntarily control how they should behave. Much more, and for a far more exact reason, are the mathematician’s objects, when once created, independent of his private will. Thus then there may indeed arise the question whether, as one may now express the matter, there exists any object, within a given mathematical realm, possessed of certain properties. The what of this now sought object is defined, in advance, in terms of these mentioned properties, — properties which, as just said, usually result from the conditions of a special problem. The that of the object, its presence as a member of the ideal realm which the mathematician has before defined, is a problem such as may cause almost endless trouble before it is solved. The processes involved in such ontological or existential solutions are, however, very instructive as to the nature of the ideal world; and every student of metaphysics ought to have at least an elementary acquaintance with a few concrete instances of just such investigations in mathematics.

If one hears children disputing over a fairyland of their own invention, and if the question arises whether or no there exists in that fairyland a particular being, say a fairy with six wings, a listener to the dispute easily grows impatient. “Why talk of reality or of unreality?” he says. “The six-winged fairy exists in your fairyland if you make him, and this is true because you are not talking of any real being at all, but only of make believe.” Yet in the mathematical realm it is not altogether so. Within limits, you create as you will, but the limits once found, are absolute. Unsubstantial, in one way, as fairyland, the creations of the pure mathematician’s ideality still may require of their maker as rigid, and often as baffling a search for a given kind or case of mathematical existence, as if he were an astronomer testing the existence of the fifth satellite of Jupiter, or of the variables of a telescopic star-cluster.

An equation of the wth degree, for instance, is such an ideal mathematical creation. I remember a teacher of mathematics in a far western American town, who used to scoff at the troubles of his historically more famous colleagues regarding the noted theorem as to the existence of a root of such an equation. The equation, as my friend in substance said, was a mathematician’s arbitrary creation. There was no use in calling it an equation unless it had a root. And since the mathematician made the equation, and called it such, it had a root if the mathematician said that it had. To discuss the question was thus as useless as to discuss the existence of the six-winged fairy in the fairyland of your own creation. My friend would only admit the significance of inquiring what the value of any of the n roots actually in question might be.

And, as a fact, of course, my friend’s argument, despite its quarrel with the labors of Gauss and the other algebraists, had its own relative force. A theory of algebraic quantities is conceivable which should arbitrarily begin one of its sections by defining certain symbols as the roots of algebraic equations, and which should then proceed to demonstrate the properties of these symbols, as well as of the equations in terms of the symbols. Such a method of procedure has indeed been proposed as a formal device in the course of the more recent history of the theory of equations. But as an historical fact, the mathematicians, in the first place, actually proceeded otherwise, defined, apart from the general theory of equations, their realm of algebraic quantities, both of those called “real” and of those called “complex,” defined also their general equations, and then, indeed, had upon their hands the problem of proving that within that realm of the algebraic quantities, as thus previously defined, there could be found such as would furnish their general equation with roots. Hereupon, indeed, the resulting problem was one whose solution was no longer, like the creation of the six-winged fairy, a matter of arbitrary choice. The ingenuity of a Gauss was taxed to furnish some of the known solutions. The problem has proved fundamental for algebraic theory. And so my Western friend was wrong.

Of course this is but a single instance. Very many other mathematical cases can be found where problems as to real Being, of the type here at issue, have been the topic not only of inquiry, but of serious and sometimes pretty persistent error on the part of even rioted mathematicians themselves. Such was the fortune of the older Theory of Functions with regard to the existence of the differential coefficients of continuous functions. This case cannot be fully explained in non-mathematical language. It is enough here to say that the mathematical world contains countless ideal entities of the type called Functions, and these are beings which have values corresponding to the values of certain quantities called “independent variables.” The values of the “functions” therefore, in general, vary when the “independent variables” vary. If the functions vary continuously, whenever the variables vary continuously, the variation of the functions may correspond to such a physical process as a movement, or to such a process as the description of a curve, on a surface, by a continuous motion. Now such an ideally definable process generally has properties corresponding to the rate of the physical motion, or to the instantaneous direction of movement of a point on the curve. And these properties of the functions in question may be investigated by constructing certain other ideal entities, related to the original functions, and derived by a well-known process from them. The new ideal entities are called Derived Functions, or Differential Coefficients, and for a long time it was assumed as almost an axiom that every function continuous within given intervals must have, within those intervals, a derived function, or differential coefficient. This seemed as axiomatic as the assertion that every movement must take place at a given, even if constantly altering speed, or that a point moving on a curve must at every instant be moving in a given instantaneous direction. For the derived function, or differential coefficient, was an ideal entity corresponding to such facts as momentary velocity, or instantaneous direction of movement. This assumption, namely the existence of objects called the differential coefficients in question, persisted in the text-books until instances, first few, and then many, were produced, where beings of the type in question, namely continuous functions, were discovered, which had no differential coefficients whatever. How this was possible, I cannot pause to define, but I mention this now noted example of a pretty persistent mathematical error, because it exemplifies how, in the world of pure mathematical creations, you can have problems about existence which for a while seem as baffling as similar problems in physics and in natural history. Even mathematical science, then, has had, within the eternal shadowland of its creations, to deal, as it has grown, with sharp contrasts between myth and fact, between false report and real existence, — with contrasts, I once more insist, as striking as those known in the realm of astronomy or of history. The difference between the one science and the others lies in the fact that the mathematician, because of his far more controllable subject-matter, is generally surer of finding his way erelong past these contrasts to the truth that he seeks, while in the physical sciences the ontological errors may persist longer.

As to the method of work used by mathematicians in such cases, where the existence of an object is in question, I again speak quite as a layman in this field; but, so far as I have observed, the mathematicians, in proving the sort of existence of which they speak, proceed very much like students of other types of real Being. To prove the existence of an object whose what is already stated, but whose that is in question, the mathematician may simply produce, as it were, before your eyes, an object of the desired type, and may then let you observe that it meets the requirement. In such cases he works somewhat as a naturalist might do. He shows you the object and says: “See, it exists.” Or again, he may be unable to do this; but instead he may try a sort of experiment with his already accessible ideal objects, and the result of this experiment may give you an indirect but infallible sign that a being of the precise sort here in question must exist, even if it cannot be directly produced. This more indirect method of showing that a being of a given type exists, may roughly be compared to the devices by which the spectroscope reveals the existence of an element in a star, by showing the characteristic lines of the element.

In brief, then, in talking of this his shadowland of ideal beings, the pure mathematician illustrates, in ways often very remarkable, how manifold may be the meanings that can attach to the word fact, and how ill those appreciate truth who suppose an object disposed of by relegating it to the world of “pure ideas.” An important elementary lesson in metaphysics comes when we liberalize somewhat our notions of what it is to be, not only by examining the various senses in which the word has been used, but by following these senses into the various sorts of examples which make their variety first really appreciated.

Nor are the foregoing the only marks of an ontological, or, so to speak, substantial character about the world of mathematical fact. A very extended, but recently very rapidly growing, series of developments in this mathematical realm tends constantly afresh to show the marvellous character of the world of validity by revealing unexpected unities and connections amongst those of its facts and laws which have been the result of seemingly quite independent definition, and which have been reached in the course of researches that originally had no connection whatever.

 

VII

By this long series of instances of our third type of real beings, I have meant to show that there are reasons why a philosophical conception, specially planned to meet such cases, should be attempted as a conception of the meaning of the ontological predicate. The obvious contrast between beings of this type and the beings of technical realism proper, in our former sense of that word, is that the entities of the metaphysical realist are supposed to be what they are quite independently of any knowledge, actual, or even possible, which may be supposed, from without, to refer to them, so that if such knowledge vanished from the universe, or if no external knowledge of them had ever come to be, the real beings would remain just what they are. On the other hand, however, the realities of the present type exist explicitly as Objects of Possible Knowledge. Their whole defined Being is exhausted by their validity when regarded from the point of view of such possible knowledge. If nobody had ever recognized the British Constitution, or the prices, credits, debts, marks, and ranks aforesaid, these objects could not be said to be able to retain any being, although now that they are recognized, such objects appear to have a genuine being, and to be relatively independent of this or that individual judgment.

The case of the eternal truths, such as the ethical, or still more obviously the mathematical truths, is more like the case of the atoms or monads of a thoroughgoing realism, since the eternal verities are said to have been valid before any human mathematician or moralist conceived them, and to remain true even if men forget them, or, as in case of the value of π, are physically unable to verify them in concrete circles. Yet, on the other hand, their case has its own peculiar puzzle, in that, when the mathematician himself first conceives of his equations and of his functions, he seems, as we have said, to be engaged in an act of perfectly free construction, as if he were building in fairyland. Yet the familiar miracle of this mathematical realm is that, after one has built, he discovers that the form of his edifice is somehow eternal, and that there are existences which this form has preëstablished, so that he himself looks with wonder to find whether this or that object exists in his new world at all. And meanwhile, despite this eternity and this relative independence of private ideas which characterize the mathematical objects, and give the world of Forms unity, the objects and the forms exist, if at all, not as the atoms and monads of realism exist, nor as the things in themselves of Kant. For nobody, according to Realism, is able to discover the things in themselves, the supposed entities of Realism, by any process of consciously free ideal construction, such as in fact produces the mathematician’s ideas. On the other hand, the mathematical beings undertake to be real just as objects of possible thought, as valid truths, and not as independent of all thinking processes, whether actual or possible.

These contrasts and problems may weary. But it is necessary to face them. The world of validity is indeed, in its ultimate constitution, the eternal world. It seems to us so far a very impersonal world and a very cold and unemotional realm, — the very opposite of that of the mystic. Before we are done with it we shall find it in fact the most personal and living of worlds. Just now it appears to us a realm of bodiless universal meanings. Erelong we shall discover that it is a realm of individuals, whose unity is in One Individual, and that theory means, in this eternal world, not mere theory, but Will and Life.

Notes

1. Nevertheless, as one must in any case point out, even this process might, at the limit, prove discontinuous. The Knower might possess some new type of consciousness. As a fact, he does.