Part 19

If there _be_ real creative activities in being, radical empiricism must say, somewhere they must be immediately lived. Somewhere the _that_ of efficacious causing and the _what_ of it must be experienced in one, just as the what and the that of 'cold' are experienced in one whenever a man has the sensation of cold here and now. It boots not to say that our sensations are fallible. They are indeed; but to see the thermometer contradict us when we say 'it is cold' does not abolish cold as a specific nature from the universe. Cold is in the arctic circle if not here. Even so, to feel that our train is moving when the train beside our window moves, to see the moon through a telescope come twice as near, or to see two pictures as one solid when we look through a stereoscope at them, leaves motion, nearness, and solidity still in being--if not here, yet each in its proper seat elsewhere. And wherever the seat of real causality _is_, as ultimately known 'for true' (in nerve-processes, if you will, that cause our feelings of activity as well as the movements which these seem to prompt), a philosophy of pure experience can consider the real causation as no other _nature_ of thing than that which even in our most erroneous experiences appears to be at work. Exactly what appears there is what we _mean_ by working, tho we may later come to learn that working was not exactly _there_. Sustaining, persevering, striving, paying with effort as we go, hanging on, and finally achieving our intention--this _is_ action, this _is_ effectuation in the only shape in which, by a pure experience-philosophy, the whereabouts of it anywhere can be discussed. Here is creation in its first intention, here is causality at work.[1] To treat this offhand as the bare illusory

[Footnote 1: Let me not be told that this contradicts a former article of mine, 'Does consciousness exist?' in the _Journal of Philosophy_ for September 1, 1904 (see especially page 489), in which it was said that while 'thoughts' and 'things' have the same natures, the natures work 'energetically' on each other in the things (fire burns, water wets, etc.), but not in the thoughts. Mental activity-trains are composed of thoughts, yet their members do work on each other: they check, sustain, and introduce. They do so when the activity is merely associational as well as when effort is there. But, and this is my reply, they do so by other parts of their nature than those that energize physically. One thought in every developed activity-series is a desire or thought of purpose, and all the other thoughts acquire a feeling tone from their relation of harmony or oppugnancy to this. The interplay of these secondary tones (among which 'interest,' 'difficulty,' and 'effort' figure) runs the drama in the mental series. In what we term the physical drama these qualities play absolutely no part. The subject needs careful working out; but I can see no inconsistency.]

surface of a world whose real causality is an unimaginable ontological principle hidden in the cubic deeps, is, for the more empirical way of thinking, only animism in another shape. You explain your given fact by your 'principle,' but the principle itself, when you look clearly at it, turns out to be nothing but a previous little spiritual copy of the fact. Away from that one and only kind of fact your mind, considering causality, can never get.[1]

[Footnote 1: I have found myself more than once accused in print of being the assertor of a metaphysical principle of activity. Since literary misunderstandings retard the settlement of problems, I should like to say that such an interpretation of the pages I have published on effort and on will is absolutely foreign to what I meant to express. I owe all my doctrines on this subject to Renouvier; and Renouvier, as I understand him, is (or at any rate then was) an out and out phenomenist, a denier of 'forces' in the most strenuous sense. Single clauses in my writing, or sentences read out of their connexion, may possibly have been compatible with a transphenomenal principle of energy; but I defy any one to show a single sentence which, taken with its context, should be naturally held to advocate that view. The misinterpretation probably arose at first from my having defended (after Renouvier) the indeterminism of our efforts. 'Free will' was supposed by my critics to involve a supernatural agent. As a matter of plain history, the only 'free will' I have ever thought of defending is the character of novelty in fresh activity-situations. If an activity-process is the form of a whole 'field of consciousness,' and if each field of consciousness is not only in its totality unique (as is now commonly admitted), but has its elements unique (since in that situation they are all dyed in the total), then novelty is perpetually entering the world and what happens there is not pure _repetition_, as the dogma of the literal uniformity of nature requires. Activity-situations come, in short, each with an original touch. A 'principle' of free will, if there were one, would doubtless manifest itself in such phenomena, but I never saw, nor do I now see, what the principle could do except rehearse the phenomenon beforehand, or why it ever should be invoked.]

I conclude, then, that real effectual causation as an ultimate nature, as a 'category,' if you like, of reality, is _just what we feel it to be_, just that kind of conjunction which our own activity-series reveal. We have the whole butt and being of it in our hands; and the healthy thing for philosophy is to leave off grubbing underground for what effects effectuation, or what makes action act, and to try to solve the concrete questions of where effectuation in this world is located, of which things are the true causal agents there, and of what the more remote effects consist.

From this point of view the greater sublimity traditionally attributed to the metaphysical inquiry, the grubbing inquiry, entirely disappears. If we could know what causation really and transcendentally is in itself, the only _use_ of the knowledge would be to help us to recognize an actual cause when we had one, and so to track the future course of operations more intelligently out. The mere abstract inquiry into causation's hidden nature is not more sublime than any other inquiry equally abstract. Causation inhabits no more sublime level than anything else. It lives, apparently, in the dirt of the world as well as in the absolute, or in man's unconquerable mind. The worth and interest of the world consists not in its elements, be these elements things, or be they the conjunctions of things; it exists rather in the dramatic outcome of the whole process, and in the meaning of the succession stages which the elements work out.

My colleague and master, Josiah Royce, in a page of his review of Stout's _Analytic Psychology_, in _Mind_ for 1897, has some fine words on this point with which I cordially agree. I cannot agree with his separating the notion of efficacy from that of activity altogether (this I understand to be one contention of his), for activities are efficacious whenever they are real activities at all. But the inner nature both of efficacy and of activity are superficial problems, I understand Royce to say; and the only point for us in solving them would be their possible use in helping us to solve the far deeper problem of the course and meaning of the world of life. Life, says our colleague, is full of significance, of meaning, of success and of defeat, of hoping and of striving, of longing, of desire, and of inner value. It is a total presence that embodies worth. To live our own lives better in this presence is the true reason why we wish to know the elements of things; so even we psychologists must end on this pragmatic note.

The urgent problems of activity are thus more concrete. They all are problems of the true relation of longer-span to shorter-span activities. When, for example, a number of 'ideas' (to use the name traditional in psychology) grow confluent in a larger field of consciousness, do the smaller activities still coexist with the wider activities then experienced by the conscious subject? And, if so, do the wide activities accompany the narrow ones inertly, or do they exert control? Or do they perhaps utterly supplant and replace them and short-circuit their effects? Again, when a mental activity-process and a brain-cell series of activities both terminate in the same muscular movement, does the mental process steer the neural processes or not? Or, on the other hand, does it independently short-circuit their effects? Such are the questions that we must begin with. But so far am I from suggesting any definitive answer to such questions, that I hardly yet can put them clearly. They lead, however, into that region of panpsychic and ontologic speculation of which Professors Bergson and Strong have lately enlarged the literature in so able and interesting a way. The results of these authors seem in many respects dissimilar, and I understand them as yet but imperfectly; but I cannot help suspecting that the direction of their work is very promising, and that they have the hunter's instinct for the fruitful trails.

APPENDIX C

ON THE NOTION OF REALITY AS CHANGING

In my _Principles of Psychology_ (vol. ii, p. 646) I gave the name of the 'axiom of skipped intermediaries and transferred relations' to a serial principle of which the foundation of logic, the _dictum de omni et nullo_ (or, as I expressed it, the rule that what is of a kind is of that kind's kind), is the most familiar instance. More than the more is more than the less, equals of equals are equal, sames of the same are the same, the cause of a cause is the cause of its effects, are other examples of this serial law. Altho it applies infallibly and without restriction throughout certain abstract series, where the 'sames,' 'causes,' etc., spoken of, are 'pure,' and have no properties save their sameness, causality, etc., it cannot be applied offhand to concrete objects with numerous properties and relations, for it is hard to trace a straight line of sameness, causation, or whatever it may be, through a series of such objects without swerving into some 'respect' where the relation, as pursued originally, no longer holds: the objects have so many 'aspects' that we are constantly deflected from our original direction, and find, we know not why, that we are following something different from what we started with. Thus a cat is in a sense the same as a mouse-trap, and a mouse-trap the same as a bird-cage; but in no valuable or easily intelligible sense is a cat the same as a bird-cage. Commodore Perry was in a sense the cause of the new régime in Japan, and the new régime was the cause of the russian Douma; but it would hardly profit us to insist on holding to Perry as the cause of the Douma: the terms have grown too remote to have any real or practical relation to each other. In every series of real terms, not only do the terms themselves and their associates and environments change, but we change, and their _meaning_ for us changes, so that new kinds of sameness and types of causation continually come into view and appeal to our interest. Our earlier lines, having grown irrelevant, are then dropped. The old terms can no longer be substituted nor the relations 'transferred,' because of so many new dimensions into which experience has opened. Instead of a straight line, it now follows a zigzag; and to keep it straight, one must do violence to its spontaneous development. Not that one might not possibly, by careful seeking (tho I doubt it), _find_ some line in nature along which terms literally the same, or causes causal in the same way, might be serially strung without limit, if one's interest lay in such finding. Within such lines our axioms might hold, causes might cause their effect's effects, etc.; but such lines themselves would, if found, only be partial members of a vast natural network, within the other lines of which you could not say, in any sense that a wise man or a sane man would ever think of, in any sense that would not be concretely _silly_, that the principle of skipt intermediaries still held good. In the _practical_ world, the world whose significances we follow, sames of the same are certainly not sames of one another; and things constantly cause other things without being held responsible for everything of which those other things are causes.

Professor Bergson, believing as he does in a heraclitean 'devenir réel,' ought, if I rightly understand him, positively to deny that in the actual world the logical axioms hold good without qualification. Not only, according to him, do terms change, so that after a certain time the very elements of things are no longer what they were, but relations also change, so as no longer to obtain in the same identical way between the new things that have succeeded upon the old ones. If this were really so, then however indefinitely sames might still be substituted for sames in the logical world of nothing but pure sameness, in the world of real operations every line of sameness actually started and followed up would eventually give out, and cease to be traceable any farther. Sames of the same, in such a world, will not always (or rather, in a strict sense will never) be the same as one another, for in such a world there _is_ no literal or ideal sameness among numerical differents. Nor in such a world will it be true that the cause of the cause is unreservedly the cause of the effect; for if we follow lines of real causation, instead of contenting ourselves with Hume's and Kant's eviscerated schematism, we find that remoter effects are seldom aimed at by causal intentions,[1] that no one kind of causal activity continues indefinitely, and that the principle of skipt intermediaries can be talked of only _in abstracto_.[2]

Volumes i, ii, and iii of the _Monist_ (1890-1893) contain a number of articles by Mr. Charles S. Peirce, articles the originality of which has apparently prevented their making an immediate impression, but which, if I mistake not, will prove a gold-mine of ideas for thinkers of the coming generation. Mr. Peirce's views, tho reached so differently, are altogether congruous with Bergson's. Both philosophers believe that the appearance of novelty in things is genuine. To an observer standing outside of its generating causes, novelty can appear only as so much 'chance'; to one who stands inside it is the expression of 'free creative activity.' Peirce's 'tychism' is thus practically synonymous with Bergson's 'devenir réel.' The common objection to admitting novelties is that by jumping abruptly in, _ex nihilo_, they shatter the world's rational continuity. Peirce meets this objection by combining his tychism

[Footnote 1: Compare the douma with what Perry aimed at.]

[Footnote 2: Compare Appendix B, as to what I mean here by 'real' casual activity.]

with an express doctrine of 'synechism' or continuity, the two doctrines merging into the higher synthesis on which he bestows the name of 'agapasticism (_loc. cit._, iii, 188), which means exactly the same thing as Bergson's 'évolution créatrice.' Novelty, as empirically found, doesn't arrive by jumps and jolts, it leaks in insensibly, for adjacents in experience are always interfused, the smallest real datum being both a coming and a going, and even numerical distinctness being realized effectively only after a concrete interval has passed. The intervals also deflect us from the original paths of direction, and all the old identities at last give out, for the fatally continuous infiltration of otherness warps things out of every original rut. Just so, in a curve, the same direction is _never_ followed, and the conception of it as a myriad-sided polygon falsifies it by supposing it to do so for however short a time. Peirce speaks of an 'infinitesimal' tendency to diversification. The mathematical notion of an infinitesimal contains, in truth, the whole paradox of the same and yet the nascent other, of an identity that won't _keep_ except so far as it keeps _failing_, that won't _transfer_, any more than the serial relations in question transfer, when you apply them to reality instead of applying them to concepts alone.

A friend of mine has an idea, which illustrates on such a magnified scale the impossibility of tracing the same line through reality, that I will mention it here. He thinks that nothing more is needed to make history 'scientific' than to get the content of any two epochs (say the end of the thirteenth and the end of the nineteenth century) accurately defined, then accurately to define the direction of the change that led from the one epoch into the other, and finally to prolong the line of that direction into the future. So prolonging the line, he thinks, we ought to be able to define the actual state of things at any future date we please. We all feel the essential unreality of such a conception of 'history' as this; but if such a synechistic pluralism as Peirce, Bergson, and I believe in, be what really exists, every phenomenon of development, even the simplest, would prove equally rebellious to our science should the latter pretend to give us literally accurate instead of approximate, or statistically generalized, pictures of the development of reality.

I can give no further account of Mr. Peirce's ideas in this note, but I earnestly advise all students of Bergson to compare them with those of the french philosopher.

INDEX

INDEX TO THE LECTURES

Absolute, the, 49, 108-109, 114 ff., 173, 175, 190 ff., 203, 271, 292 ff., 311; not the same as God, 111, 134; its rationality, 114 f.; its irrationality, 117-129; difficulty of conceiving it, 195.

Absolutism, 34, 38, 40, 54, 72 f, 79, 122, 310. See Monism.

Achilles and tortoise, 228, 255.

All-form, the, 34, 324.

Analogy, 8, 151 f.

Angels, 164.

Antinomies, 231, 239.

ARISTIDES, 304.

BAILEY, S., 5.

BERGSON, H., Lecture VI, _passim_. His characteristics, 226 f, 266.

'Between,' 70.

Block-universe, 310, 328.

BRADLEY, F.H., 46, 69, 79, 211, 220, 296.

Brain, 160.

CAIRD, E., 89, 95, 137.

CATO, 304.

Causation, 258. See Influence.

Change, 231, 253.

CHESTERTON, 203, 303.

Compounding of mental states, 168, 173, 186 f., 268, 281, 284, 292, 296.

Concepts, 217, 234 f.

Conceptual method, 243 f., 246, 253.

Concrete reality, 283, 286.

Confluence, 326.

Conflux, 257.

Consciousness, superhuman, 156, 310 f.; its compound nature, 168, 173, 186 f., 289.

Continuity, 256 f., 325.

Contradiction, in Hegel, 89 f.

Creation, 29, 119.

Death, 303.

Degrees, 74.

Dialectic method, 89.

Difference, 257 f.

Diminutive epithets, 12, 24. Discreteness of change, 231.

'Each-form,' the, 34, 325.

Earth, the, in Fechner's philosophy, 156; is an angel, 164.

Earth-soul, 152 f.

Elan vital, 262.

Empiricism, 264, 277; and religion, 314; defined, 7.

Endosmosis, 257.

Epithets. See Diminutive.

Evil, 310.

Experience, 312; religious, 307.

Extremes, 67, 74.

'Faith-ladder,' 328.

'Fall,' the, 119, 310.

FECHNER, Lecture IV, _passim._ His life, 145-150; he reasons by analogy, 151; his genius, 154; compared with Royce, 173, 207; not a genuine monist, 293; his God; and religious experience, 308.

FERRIER, Jas., 13.

Finite experience, 39, 48, 182, 192-193.

Finiteness, of God, 111, 124, 294.

Foreignness, 31.

German manner of philosophizing, 17.

GOD, 24 f., 111, 124, 193, 240, 294.

GREEN, T.H., 6, 24, 137, 278.

HALDANE, R.B., 138.

HEGEL, Lecture III, _passim_, 11, 85, 207, 211, 219, 296. His vision, 88, 98 f., 104; his use of double negation, 102; his vicious intellectualism 106; Haldane on, 138; McTaggart on, 140; Royce on, 143.

HODGSON, S.H., 282.

Horse, 265.

HUME, 19, 267.

Idealism, 36. See Absolutism.

Identity, 93.

Immortality, Fechner's view of, 171.

'Independent' beings, 55, 58.

Indeterminism, 77.

Infinity, 229.

Influence, 258, 561.

Intellect, its function is practical, 247 f., 252.

Intellectualism, vicious, 60, 218.

Intellectualist logic, 216, 259, 261.

Intellectualist method, 291.

Interaction, 56.

Intimacy, 31.

Irrationality, 81; of the absolute, 117-129.

JACKS, L.P., 35.

JOACHIM, H., 121, 141.

JONES, H., 52.

KANT, 19, 199, 238, 240.

LEIBNITZ, 119.

Life, 523.

Log, 323.

Logic, 92, 211; Intellectualist, 217, 242.

LOTZE, 55, 120.

LUTHER, 304.

McTAGGART, 51, 74 f., 120, 140 f., 183.

Manyness in oneness, 322. See Compounding.

Mental chemistry, 185.

MILL, J.S., 242, 260.

Mind, dust theory, 189.

Mind, the eternal, 137. See Absolute.

Monism, 36, 117, 125, 201, 313, 321 f.; Fechner's, 153. See Absolutism.

Monomaniacs, 78.

Motion, 233, 238, 254; Zeno on, 228.

MYERS, F.W.H., 315.

Nature, 21, 286.

Negation, 93 f.; double, 102.

Newton, 260.

Other, 95, 312; 'its own other,' 108 f., 282.

Oxford, _3_, 313, 331.

Pantheism, 24, 28.

PAULSEN, 18, 22.

Personality, divided, 298.

Philosophers, their method, 9; their common desire, 11 f.; they must reason, 13.

Philosophies, their types, 23, 31.

PHOCION, 304.

Plant-soul, 165 f.

Pluralism, 45, 76, 79, 311, 319, 321 f.

Polytheism, 310.

Practical reason, 329.

Psychic synthesis, 185. See Compounding.

Psychical research, 299.

'Quâ,' 39, 47, 267, 270.

'Quatenus,' 47, 267.

Rationalism defined, 7, 98; its thinness, 144, 237.

Rationality, 81, 112 f., 319 f.

Reality, 262 f., 264, 283 f.

Reason, 286, 312.

Relating, 7.

Relations, 70, 278 ff.; 'external,' 80.

Religious experiences, 305 f.

RITCHIE, 72.

ROYCE, 61 f., 115, 173, 182 f., 197, 207, 212, 265, 296.

Same, 269, 281.

Savage philosophy, 21.

Science, 145.

Sensations, 279.

Socialism, 78.

SOCRATES, 284.

Soul, 199, 209.

'Some,' 79.

Sphinx, 22.

SPINOZA, 47.

Spiritualistic philosophy, 23.

Sugar, 220, 232.

Synthesis, psychic. See Compounding.

TAYLOR, A.E., 76, 139, 212.

Theism, 24.

Thick, the, 136.

'Thickness' of Fechner's philosophy, 144.

Thin, the, 136.

Thinness of the current transcendentalism, 144, 174 f.

Time, 232.

Units of reality, 287.

Vision, in philosophy, 20.

WELLS, H.G., 78.

Will to believe, 328.

Witnesses, as implied in experience, 200.

WUNDT, W., 185.

ZENO, 228.