Chapter 2

Our fundamental conceptions of the external world are therefore derived from and are built up out of the data of our exertional Activity combined with the interruptions which that Activity perpetually encounters, and in which sensations arise. It would indeed be a useful work of psychological analysis if the conditions of exertional action were carefully and systematically investigated--much more useful than most of the trifling experiments to which psychological laboratories are usually devoted.

The principal elements of such a scheme would be--

(1) The force of gravity. This force constantly operating constrains the organism to be in constant contact with the earth on which we live. But, further, it gives us the definite idea of _Direction_. It is from the action of gravity that we derive our distinction between Up and Down from which as a starting-point we build up our conception of tridimensional Space. And in this respect it must be remembered that as the areas of spheres are proportional to the squares of their radii it necessarily follows that gravity if it acts uniformly in tridimensional Space _must_ vary in intensity in proportion to the square of the distance of the point of application from the centre of origin. Gravity and tridimensionality are in short necessarily connected.

(2) The same law which determines the force of gravity seems to determine also the force of cohesion, and therefore the form of material bodies. These, therefore, are necessarily subject also to tridimensionality, and in the force which generates solid form we find a second source of our elementary spatial ideas.

Such form is the expression of an obstacle to action which determines all our movements, and in which we discover those forms of the limitations of activity which we call spatial characters.

(3) Organic Dualism is a third determinant of activity, and thus also a source of spatial ideas.

The structural dualism of the human body, its right and left, its front and back, etc., furnish our activity with a set of constant forms to which its action must conform, and which necessarily also partake of, and help us to conceive of tridimensional form. It is interesting to note that this dualism characterises the organs specially adapted to serve exertional action rather than those which serve our vegetal or nutrient life.

The way in which our spatial conceptions are ever extended and built up out of the data of action is also well illustrated in the case of the blind, and to this also M. Villey devotes an interesting chapter under the title _La conquête des représentations spatiales_.

This is effected in their case by the high development of what we must call active touch. Just as we distinguish between hearing and listening, between seeing and looking, so must we distinguish between touching and _palpation_.

Mere passive touch gives a certain amount of information, but comparatively little. It is necessary to _explore_; that is what is done in active touch--palpation--of different degrees.

The sensitiveness of the skin varies at different places from the tongue downwards. Palpation by the fingers marks a further stage. The blind also, we are told, largely employ the feet in walking as a source of locative data.

To the concepts reached by such palpation with the hand, M. Villey gives the name of Manual Space. In this connection he thinks it necessary to distinguish between synthetic touch and analytic touch--the former resulting from the simultaneous application of different parts of the hand on the surface of a body, the latter that which we owe to the movements of our fingers when having only one point of contact with the object the fingers follow its contour. Various examples of the delicacy of the information thus obtainable are given. Following two straight lines with the thumb and index respectively, a blind man can acquire by practice a sensibility so complete as to enable him to detect the slightest divergence from parallelism.

The analysis passes on from the data of Space manual to those of Space brachial; then to the information derived from walking and other movements of the lower limbs, and then to the co-ordination of the information derived from the sensations of hearing, which is necessarily very important to the blind.

The conclusion of the whole matter is that our principal spatial ideas are common alike to the blind and the vident. Both can be taught and are taught the same geometry. Both understand one another in the description of spatial conditions. The common element cannot possibly be supplied either by the data of visual sensation which the blind do not possess, or by the data of passive tactual sensation which the vident hardly ever employ. _Une étendue commune se retrouverait à la fois dans les données de la vue et dans celles du toucher._ The common element is furnished by the common laws and forms of our exertional Activity by means of which and in terms of which we all construct our conceptions of the dynamic world of our environment.

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It is from our dynamic Activity also that we derive our conception of Force. Force, though it is studied scientifically in the measurement of the great natural forces which operate constantly, is originally known to us in the stress or pressure to which muscular exertion in contact with a material body gives rise. Such a force if it could be correctly measured, would record the rate at which Energy was undergoing transmutation, and it is from such experience of pressure that our idea of Force is originally derived.

The mass of bodies is usually measured by their weight, _i.e._ by gravity. Its absolute measurement must be in terms of momentum. The true estimate of the Energy of a body moving under the impulse of a constant Force is stated in the formula 1/2MV{2}. To ascertain M, therefore, we must have given F and V, and these are both conceptions the original idea of which is derived from our exertional activity.

Quantity of Matter originally means the same as amount of resistance to initiation of motion, at first estimated by the varying amount of personal muscular energy required to effect the motion in question, thereafter objectively and scientifically by comparison with some independent standard whereby a more exact estimation can be attained than was possible by a mere reference to the varying inferences of the individual who might exert the force.

Space, Mass, Force are all therefore ideas which are furnished to us out of our experience as potent actors, and the recognition of this great truth provides us with the means of clearly apprehending and co-relating our conceptions of the external world, the framework of our Knowledge.

The true distinction between a _percept_ and a _concept_ is just that a percept is a concept associated with the dynamic system discovered in and by our exertional activity.

In like manner we find here the true solution of the many questions which have been raised as to the distinction between general and abstract, singular and concrete terms.

Language expresses action: the roots of language are expressions of the elementary acts which make up experience. They are therefore general. Each applies to every act of the class in question. They are also concrete. That is so because they refer to exertional activities. Abstract terms are terms abstracted from this dynamic reference. Thus _white_ is concrete because colour is a property of the dynamic world. But when this property is considered apart from its dynamic support it is called _whiteness_, and becomes abstract. In the case of purely mental qualities the term is regarded as abstract simply because the quality is in every reference extra dynamic. Thus _candour_, _justice_ are called abstract terms; they are properties of the Mind. But a property of the dynamic system, _e.g._ Gravitation, does not strike us as abstract--the sole distinction being the dynamic reference which the latter term implies.

It will even be seen that there is sometimes a shading off of abstract quality. Thus _Justice_ as an attribute of the Mind strikes us as a purely abstract term. But as the word takes up a dynamic reference so does its abstraction diminish. Thus in the expression "Administration of Justice" the abstractive suggestion is less pronounced; till in the person of Justice Shallow it vanishes in the very concrete.

Behind and beneath all these considerations we should never lose sight of the great main facts--that thought is an activity; that its function therefore is to represent or reproduce our pure exertional activity; that such representation is _at the basis_ of all our concepts of externality; that sensation, _per se_ is mere interruption of activity; that _per se_ it possesses no spatial or extensive or external suggestiveness; that sensations nevertheless serve to denote or give feature and particularity to our experience of activity; that all perception of the external is at bottom therefore a mental representation of exertional activity and its forms, denoted, punctuated, identified by sensation, which latter by itself, we repeat, carries no suggestion of externality. This view revolutionises the whole psychology of Perception, and therefore, though it at once gives to that science a much-needed unity, clarity, and simplicity, it will naturally be accepted with reluctance by the laborious authors of the cumbrous theories still generally current.

FOOTNOTES:

[18:1] His reason is that we _ab origine_ localise sensations with reference to our organism. This, of course, means by reference to the system of potent energy in which our organism essentially consists.

III

THE TWO TYPICAL THEORIES OF KNOWLEDGE

The evolution of living organisms is in general a gradual and continuous process. But it is nevertheless true that it presents well-marked stages and can best be described by reference to these. Frequently, moreover, the meaning and true nature of the movement at one stage is only revealed after a subsequent stage has been reached.

The development of a brain or cerebrum marks one important advance. The presence of this organ renders possible to the animal in varying degree what are called representations of objects, and the faculty of making such representations appears to be a condition precedent to the development of deliberation, volition, and purposive action as opposed to reflex or instinctive activity. The latter is specially characteristic of other orders of organic existence such as the Articulata--being remarkably exemplified in the activities of the social insects such as the bee.

The advent of man with his faculty of Discourse may be regarded as marking another distinct stage in the evolutionary movement--a stage, moreover, the operations of which throw light upon the whole nature of cerebral representations. The faculty of rational Discourse, as Max Müller pointed out, is denominated in Greek by the word +logos+, applicable at once to the mental activity and to its appropriate expression in speech. Discourse is an instrument by means of which man has been enabled to construct his whole system of representations of the world in which he lives, the system of what is commonly called his Knowledge. Human Knowledge just is the body of man's representations of his Experience in the world of which he forms a part. It is not necessary to insist here on the gradual but remarkable growth and extension which Human Knowledge has undergone during the last two thousand years. Concurrently with its extension man's ability to control the forces of Nature has been enlarged and increased. At the same time, however, that extension has rendered possible false developments and aberrations to which the more limited representations of the brute are less liable.

With the faculty of rational Discourse constantly striving to extend the bounds of Knowledge, man came in time to attempt to give an account not only of the immediate objects which surround him, but of the whole choir of Heaven and furniture of Earth. In this advance the Greeks took a leading part.

When we first make acquaintance through historical records with the intellectual activity of the Greek mind, we find it engaged in the construction of various such schemes for an explanation of the world--usually called cosmogonies.

It was at this stage of intellectual progress that what we might call an interruption occurred in the normal process of evolution. Great intellectual activity had for some time prevailed in the Greek communities; several men of conspicuous genius--notably Heracleitus and Parmenides--had carried speculation as to the origin and nature of the world to a height hitherto undreamt of. These achievements and the consciousness of continual progress had engendered in Athens particularly what might be called an epidemic of intellectual pride.

On this scene Socrates appeared, plain, blunt, critical. His teaching was in effect an appeal to men to reflect: to turn their attention away from the world which they were supposed to be explaining to the contemplation of their own Minds by which the explanation was furnished. +gnôthi seauton+ was his motto. All explanations of the Universe or of Experience were, as he showed, vain unless the Cognitive Faculty by which they were constructed were operating truly. In particular, the process of Rational Discourse implied the use of concrete general terms, which were recognised to be the essential instruments of Cognition. Socrates therefore devoted his attention specially to a critical examination of these general terms and also of the abstract terms which were the familiar instruments of Discourse.

The Greeks of that day were endowed with a singular clearness of intellectual vision. They readily recognised that Knowledge was an intellectual process; they appreciated the activity of Thought or Rational Discourse as essential to its formation. They quite understood that Knowledge is not of the nature of a photograph--a resemblant pictorial reproduction of the data furnished by sensation. Only very casually and occasionally do we ever attempt to supply ourselves with a resemblant reproduction of our sensations. Obviously such a reproduction would only be of value memorially and could tell us nothing new.

These early Greeks realised this, and they appear to have realised also pretty clearly that it would be impossible by means of such pictorial impressions to establish any community of Knowledge. It is of the essence of Knowledge that it is something which can be communicated to, and which is the common possession of, several individuals. That can never be true of sensation. We can never tell whether our sensations are the same as those of other people--never at any rate by means of sensations themselves; never unless and until such sensations have been inter-related by some other instrument. A mere photographic reproduction of sensation is thus quite useless as a means of Knowledge.

In some way or other general terms supply the common bond. The recognition of this fact was one of the great results of the Socratic discussion. This explains the immense importance which Socrates naturally attached to the criticism of general and abstract terms.

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The work of Socrates in this direction was immediately taken up and carried much further by Plato. Plato maintained that these general and abstract terms were in truth the names of ideas (+eidê+) with which the mind is naturally furnished, and further that these ideas corresponded to and typified the eternal forms of things--the essential constituents of the real world. Knowledge was possible because there were such eternal forms or ideal elements--the archetypes--of which the +eidê+ were the counterparts and representations.

Knowledge, Plato held, was concerned solely with these eternal forms, not with sensation at all. The sensible world was in a state of constant flux and could not be the object of true science. Its apprehension was effected by a faculty or capacity (_Republic_, v. 478-79) midway between Knowledge and nescience to which he applied the term +doxa+, frequently translated _opinion_, but which in this connection would be much more accurately rendered, _sensible impression_, or even perception. At any rate, the term _opinion_ is a very unhappy one, and does not convey the true meaning at all, for no voluntary intellective act on the part of the subject was implied by the term. Now intelligence in constructing a scheme of Knowledge is active. The ideas are the instruments of this activity.

Plato's doctrine of ideas was probably designed or conceived by him as affording an explanation also of the community of Knowledge. He emphasised the fluent instability of the sensible impression, and as we have already pointed out, sensation in itself labours also under this drawback that it contains and affords no common nexus whereby the conceptions or perceptions of one man can be compared or related with those of another.

Indeed, if Experience were composed solely of sensations, each individual would be an isolated solipsistic unit--incapable of rational Discourse or communication with his fellow-men. To cure this defect, Plato offered the ideas--universal forms common to the intelligence of every rational being. Not only would they render possible a common Knowledge of Reality--the existence of such ideas would necessarily also give permanence, fixity, law, and order to our intellectual activity. Our Knowledge would not be a mere random succession of impressions, but a definitely determined organic unity.

In all this argument it must be remembered Plato never said or suggested that the intellect of man--thus equipped with ideal forms--was thereby enabled to become, or did become, the creator of the world by and in which each one believes himself to be surrounded and included. He always distinguished between Idea and Reality, between Thought and Thing. The ideas were types of the forms immanent in things themselves. It has been said by some scholars that he generally distinguished between the two by the employment of distinct terms, applying +eidos+ to the mental conception and +idea+ to the substantial form. This verbal distinction was accepted by many scholars of the epoch of Liddell and Scott and Davies and Vaughan. A reference to this distinction in the present writer's essay on _The Dynamic Foundation of Knowledge_ provoked at the instance of one critic the allegation that it is not borne out by a critical study of the Platonic texts. That is a matter of little moment and one upon which the writer cannot claim to pronounce. The important point is that in one way or another Plato undoubtedly distinguished between and indeed contrasted the idea and the substantial form. No trace of the solipsism which results from their being confounded and which has ultimately brought to destruction the imposing edifice of Hegelian Thought is to be found in his writings.

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The Platonic doctrine of ideas speedily found an energetic critic in Aristotle. In Aristotle's view, it was quite unnecessary and unwarrantable to postulate the existence in the Mind of ideal forms or counterparts of the substantial forms of Reality. This, according to him, was a wholly unnecessary reduplication. He was content to believe that the mind found and recognised the essential forms of things when they were presented to it in perceptive Experience. _Universalia in re_ were conceived by him as sufficiently explaining the genesis of cognition without the postulation of any such _universalia extra rem_.

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To the Platonic doctrine he offered the further objection that the eternal forms of things which that doctrine affirmed and which it declared to be represented in their ideal types were necessarily impotential. There was no generative power in the pure activity of Thought. If, therefore, the essentials of Reality were ideal, it followed that they also were impotent, and incapable of causative efficacy. The sensible world, however, was a fluent and perpetually generated stream, which required some potent cause to uphold it.

The eternal Reality which sustained the world was for him an Energy constantly generating the actual, and no conception which failed to provide for this process of causative generation of the things of Sense could in his view adequately account for the phenomena of Nature nor consequently could constitute the system of science.

In this argument Aristotle undoubtedly expressed a profound truth, but it may perhaps be admitted that he rather failed to appreciate fully the difficulty which the Platonic doctrine was designed to meet--that, namely, of providing some sort of common nexus or unifying principle by which the validity of Knowledge could be maintained. For he had no certain means of showing that the potent energy of Nature was unitary and homogeneous.

He is frequently described as a sensationalist, but such a view is certainly incorrect. This, however, may be admitted--that he sought the essentials of Reality not in the Mind but in the Object. It may be fairly claimed that to this extent he occupied common ground with the sensationalists, in that he was an adherent of the _tabula rasa_ view of the Mind, expressed in the maxim:--

_Nihil est in intellectu quod non fuit in sensu._

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Plato and Aristotle may be taken as typical of the two principal intellectual tendencies which have characterised all subsequent speculation--the Platonist, he who finds in the constitution of the Mind the eternal principles or at least the types of the eternal principles of Reality; the Aristotelian, he for whom these seem to reside in the object and, in the act of Cognition, are merely impressed upon, transferred to, presented to, or otherwise introduced into or apprehended by the Mind.

The Aristotelian view of Nature as an energetic process failed to impress itself upon his successors. Greek Philosophy soon after Aristotle's death decayed or was deprived of its early vigour, and the doctrine which survived the wreck was essentially derived, however imperfectly, from the Platonic theory.

Throughout the first fifteen hundred years of the Christian era this doctrine undoubtedly dominated the course of speculation--a speculation of which much is now forgotten and almost as much was certainly barren and unfruitful, but of which we would entertain a very mistaken notion if we were to imagine that it was not often pursued with great subtlety and acumen.

One natural result of the fact that such a principle dominated human thought was the prevalence of a belief that the explanation of Nature and natural processes could be derived from the cognitive faculty itself. Our cognition of our immediate surroundings was doubtless continuously corrected by immediate practical tests. But the science of a more extended view of Nature was vitiated by this false principle and in consequence for many centuries our whole Knowledge of Nature remained unprogressive and unfruitful.

_Causa æquat effectum_, Nature abhors a vacuum, are examples of the maxims derived or supposed to be derived from the necessities of our Reason, and by the aid of which it was vainly hoped to attain a knowledge of Nature and natural laws.

The principle was in itself unsound.

The necessary laws of our rational faculty could discover to us only the essentials of that faculty itself.