Part 39

Some of our liberal friends, foremost among them Professor Haeckel, deny the existence of a personal God and then proceed to declare that the God of science is nothing but matter and energy. We agree with Professor Haeckel in his rejection of anthropotheism; God is no supernatural being nor is he a huge world-ego. But we cannot accept his view of God as being only matter and energy. The idea of God is and always has been a moral idea. Thus we have come to regard all those features of nature as divine which condition the origin and existence of morality and we define God as the authority of moral conduct. This authority is not a person, not a sentient being, let alone a sentimental philanthropist; but it is, nevertheless, a reality, and, indeed, a stern reality.

Such is the God of science. God is that quality of existence through which we originated as feeling, thinking, and aspiring beings. He is the prototype of the human soul, and the condition under which develop man’s reason and morality. Obedience to him is indispensable for a continued existence, for further progress and a higher evolution of the human soul. That these features of reality can by a great number of keen and fearless modern thinkers be supposed to be a non-entity is difficult to understand. This negation of the reality of qualities of existence which are not individual things but intrinsically inherent in all the individual things, it appears to us, is an old heirloom of nominalism. The nominalistic philosophy represented by Roscellinus was suppressed at the council at Soissons 1092, only to rise more powerfully in the fourteenth century in William of Occam, and finally to exterminate realism with all its rubbish of errors together with the truth contained in these errors. Kant marks in many respects the culmination of the victorious movement of nominalism. With all the benefits modern thought derived from the philosophical work of nominalism, a reaction is needed against its purely negative spirit. There is a truth in the old realism which cannot be neglected with impunity.[64]

God (viz., the name of God) is, as Kant said, a noumenon, a thing of thought, an abstraction. God is not a thing, a concrete object, or an individual person. All the views of God which regard him as an individual being of some kind, or as a person only of infinite dimensions, are, closely considered, pagan notions which belittle God. But the name of God as a noumenon, a thought, an abstract idea, has a meaning. Abstract ideas are not nonentities, they represent some real features, some actual qualities, or properties, or relations; otherwise they would not be ideas, but unmeaning sounds.

Some of our abstract ideas are of a very delicate fibre, so that the coarse mental vision of the average Philistine is unable to see them in their reality and potency. But it so happens that exactly they are of a more important, more powerful, and inevitable presence than the simple generalisations of things that visibly and corporeally surround us. This, their peculiar nature, makes such ideas mysterious to those who instinctively feel their reality without being able to point it out and understand it. And the most subtle, imponderous, and sublimated of all ideas is the idea of God.

We have defined God as the ultimate authority of conduct, as the condition of our existence as rational and moral beings, as the all-power that enforces obedience, etc.; but we cannot in any one of our definitions exhaust the significance of the idea. We would by no means exclude from the idea of God anything without which reality would cease to be real. The qualities of matter and energy constitute that element in the God-idea which justify the old religions in speaking of him as omnipotent and everlasting. Thus they ought not to be excluded. But these qualities alone are insufficient to characterise his being. The sum-total of matter and energy as such and as such alone does not constitute any moral authority. Nature in her immeasurable greatness and oppressive vastness affects us with awe; but, after all, we look down upon her massive sublimity. Man is more than the biggest heap of crude matter and unintelligently operating energy. Says Professor Jodl:

“We stand amazed at her might and greatness, at the plentitude of her powers of creation, at her myriad play of forces, at the inexhaustible wealth of the relations with which she binds being to being, creates and mediates contrarieties, and amidst the most varied change and alternation, ever remains one and the same! But our prototype, our God, she can never be.”

This grandeur of nature is part of her divinity, but it alone does not constitute the character of God. Yet, observe that throughout nature there is an imponderable quality present which makes every atom move in a definite way, so that the whirl of gaseous masses, apparently a chaos, will be recognised as a cosmic whole developing in a certain way and describable in what is generally called natural laws. This subtle quality is the condition of the regularities which are found in all the infinite varieties and innumerable particularities, and all these regularities conceived in their systematic unity are called the order of the universe.

Man exists as a thinking being only because the immeasurable universe of which he is a part possesses this quality of order, and his reason is closely considered only a copy of it. Man’s reason was shaped into the image of the cosmic order, and suppose—a supposition which is very difficult to make and regarded by many as impossible or inconceivable—yet suppose that the world-order were radically different from what it actually is, man’s reason would accordingly be different too. Further, suppose that the whole frame and fundamental interrelations of the particles of reality were different from what they are, would not correspondingly the basic rules of conduct be changed too?

The author of this article, in the eyes of the so-called orthodox Christian, is most certainly an atheist. And if theism means the belief in a personal or extramundane God he is an atheist indeed. If there is any opprobrium in the name atheism we are willing to accept it; and certainly, we do not reject the label of atheism in order to escape any odium attached to that name. We do reject atheism simply because we see a great and potent truth in the idea of God which is but too often disregarded.

With Professor Haeckel and Professor Jodl we reject the conception of an anthropomorphic Deity. The anthropomorphic idol is doomed before the tribunal of science. But we see a deeper meaning in the idea of God which has formed through millenniums the very centre of the greatest religions on earth. Science has to recognise the reality of an all-presence in existence which is analogous to that which in a religious language is called God.

Considering the fact that humanity owes many great truths to religion, let us not be hasty in condemning the religions of the past as pure superstition. There are valuable seeds in the chaff. If we discard the wheat together with the tares, we shall have to rediscover them, for it is little probable that humanity can for any length of time be satisfied with beautiful phrases or live in its moral aspirations in a realm of mere dreams.

EDITOR.

FOOTNOTES:

[61] For a discussion of this point see _Fundamental Problems_, pp. 219-226.

[62] See the article in Nos. 239, 241, and 242 of _The Open Court: Nature and Morality_. An Examination of the Ethical Views of John Stuart Mill. I. The Meaning of Basing Ethics Upon Nature. II. The Ethics Taught by Nature. III. Intelligent Action and Moral Action. IV. The Anthropomorphic Standpoint of Mill.

[63] I purposely do not say _all_ maxims of conduct, because we can very well imagine that different conditions may produce some very important variations in the rules of conduct; but the main foundation of morality would be the same.

[64] There are two men at present who boldly fly the flag of the old realism again, both having our full sympathy in their aspirations, although we cannot agree with many of their teachings. The one is Mr. Charles S. Peirce, the other Dr. Francis E. Abbot.

THE SUPERSTITION OF NECESSITY.[65]

Lest my title give such offense as to prejudice unduly my contention, I may say that I use the term in the way indicated by its etymology: as a standing-still on the part of thought; a clinging to old ideas after those ideas have lost their use, and hence, like all superstitions, have become obstructions. For I shall try to show that the doctrine of necessity is a survival; that it holds over from an earlier and undeveloped period of knowledge; that as a means of getting out of and beyond that stage it had a certain value, but, having done its work, loses its significance. Halting judgment may, indeed, at one time have helped itself out of the slough of uncertainty, vagueness, and inadequacy on to ground of more solid and complete fact, by the use of necessity as a crutch; once upon the ground, the crutch makes progress slower and, preventing the full exercise of the natural means of locomotion, tends to paralyse science. The former support has become a burden, almost an intolerable one.

The beginning of wisdom in the matter of necessity is, I conceive, in realising that it is a term which has bearing or relevancy only with reference to the development of judgment, not with reference to objective things or events. I do not mean by this that necessity refers to the compelling force with which we are driven to make a given affirmation: I mean that it refers to the content of that affirmation, expressing the degree of coherence between its constituent factors. When we say something or other _must_ be so and so, the “must” does not indicate anything in the nature of the fact itself, but a trait in our _judgment_ of that fact; it indicates the degree with which we have succeeded in making a whole out of the various elements which have to be taken into account in forming the judgment. More specifically, it indicates a half-way stage. At one extreme we have two separate judgments, which, so far as consciousness is concerned, have nothing to do with each other; and at the other extreme we have one judgment into which the contents of the two former judgments have been so thoroughly organised as to lose all semblance of separateness. Necessity, as the middle term, is the midwife which, from the dying isolation of judgments, delivers the unified judgment just coming into life—it being understood that the separateness of the original judgments is not as yet quite negated, nor the unity of the coming judgment quite attained. The judgment of necessity, in other words, is exactly and solely the transition in our knowledge from unconnected judgments to a more comprehensive synthesis. Its value is just the value of this transition; as negating the old partial and isolated judgments—in its backward look—necessity has meaning; in its forward look—with reference to the resulting completely organised subject-matter—it is itself as false as the isolated judgments which it replaces. Its value is in what it rids judgment of. When it has succeeded, its value is nil. Like any go-between, its service consists in rendering itself uncalled for.

All science can ultimately do is to report or describe, to completely state, the reality. So far as we reach this standpoint regarding any fact or group of facts, we do not say that the fact _must_ be such and such, but simply that it _is_ such and such. There is no necessity attaching to the fact either as whole or as parts. _Qua_ whole, the fact simply is what it is; while the parts, instead of being necessitated either by one another or by the whole, are the analysed factors constituting, in their complete circuit, the whole. In stating the whole, we, as of course, state all that enters into it; if we speak of the various elements as _making_ the whole, it is only in the sense of making it _up_, not of causing it. The fallacy of the necessitarian theory consists in transforming the determinate in the sense of the wholly defined, into the determined in the sense of something externally made to be what it is.

The whole, although first in the order of reality, is last in the order of knowledge. The complete statement of the whole is the goal, not the beginning of wisdom. We begin, therefore, with fragments, which are taken for wholes; and it is only by piecing together these fragments, and by the transformation of them involved in this combination, that we arrive at the real fact. There comes a stage at which the recognition of the unity begins to dawn upon us, and yet, the tradition of the many distinct wholes survives; judgment has to combine these two contradictory conceptions; it does so by the theory that the dawning unity is an effect necessarily produced by the interaction of the former wholes. Only as the consciousness of the unity grows still more is it seen that instead of a group of independent facts, held together by “necessary” ties, there is one reality, of which we have been apprehending various fragments in succession and attributing to them a spurious wholeness and independence. We learn (but only at the end) that instead of discovering and then connecting together a number of separate realities, we have been engaged in the progressive definition of one fact.

There are certain points upon which there is now _practical_ agreement among all schools. What one school has got at by a logical analysis of science, another school has arrived at by the road of a psychological analysis of experience. What one school calls the unity of thought and reality, another school calls the relativity of knowledge. The metaphysical interpretation further given to these respective statements may be quite different, but, so far as they go, they come to the same thing: that objects, _as known_, are not independent of the process of knowing, but are the content of our judgments. One school, indeed, may conceive of judgment as a mere associative or habitual grouping of sensations, the other as the correlative diversification and synthesis of the self; but the practical outcome, that the “object” (anyway as known) is a form of judgment, is the same. This point being held in common, both schools must agree that _the progress of judgment is equivalent to a change in the value of objects_—that objects as they are for us, as known, change with the development of our judgments. If this be so, truth, however it be metaphysically defined, must attach to late rather than to early judgments.

I am fortunate in being able to quote from authors, who may be taken as typical of the two schools. Says Professor Caird in his article upon “Metaphysic,” (lately reprinted, “Essays in Philosophy and Literature,”):

“Our first consciousness of things is not an immovable foundation upon which science may build, but rather a hypothetical and self-contradictory starting-point of investigation, which becomes changed and transformed as we advance.” (“Essays,” Vol. II, p. 398.)

On the other hand, Mr. Venn writes (in the first chapter of his “Empirical Logic”):

“Select what object we please—the most apparently simple in itself, and the most definitely parted off from others that we can discover—yet we shall find ourselves constrained to admit that a considerable mental process has been passed through before that object could be recognised as being an object, that is, as possessing some degree of unity and as requiring to be distinguished from other such unities.”

He goes on to illustrate by such an apparently fixed and given object as the sun, pointing out how its unity as a persistent thing involves a continued synthesis of elements very diverse in time and space, and an analysis, a selection, from other elements in very close physical juxtaposition. He goes on to raise the question whether a dog, for example, may be said to “see” a rainbow at all, because of the complex analysis and synthesis involved in such an object. The “mental whole” (to use Mr. Venn’s words, the “ideal unity” as others might term it) is so extensive and intricate that

“One might almost as reasonably expect the dog to ‘see’ the progress of democracy in the place where he lives, of which course of events the ultimate sensible constituents are accessible to his observation precisely as they are to ours.”

As Mr. Venn is not discussing just the same point which I have raised, he does not refer to the partial and tentative character of our first judgments—our first objects. It is clear enough, however, that there will be all degrees between total failure to analyse and combine (as, say, in the case of the dog and rainbow) and fairly adequate grouping. The difference between the savage whose synthesis is so limited in scope that he sets up a new sun every day and the scientific man whose object is a unity comprehending differences through thousands of years of time and interactions going on through millions of miles of space is a case in point. The distinction between the respective objects is not simply a superimposition of new qualities upon an old object, that old object remaining the same; it is not getting new objects; it is a continual qualitative reconstruction of the object itself. This fact, which is the matter under consideration, is well stated by Mr. Venn, when he goes on to say:

“The act of predication, in its two-fold aspect of affirmation and denial, really is a process by which we are not only enabled to add to our information _about_ objects, _but is also the process by the continued performance of which the objects had been originally acquired, or rather produced_” (italics are mine).

This statement cannot be admitted at all without recognising that the first judgments do not make the object once for all, but that the continued process of judging is a continued process of “producing” the object.

Of course the confused and hypothetical character of our first objects does not force itself upon us when we are still engaged in constructing them. On the contrary, it is only when the original subject-matter has been overloaded with various and opposing predicates that we think of doubting the correctness of our first judgments, of putting our first objects under suspicion. At the start, these objects assert themselves as the baldest and solidest of hard facts. The dogmatic and naïve quality of the original judgment is in exact proportion to its crudeness and inadequacy. The objects which are the content of these judgments thus come to be identified with reality _par excellence_; they are _facts_, however doubtful everything else. They hang on obstinately. New judgments, instead of being regarded as better definitions of the actual fact and hence as displacing the prior object, are tacked on to the old as best they may be. Unless the contradiction is too flagrant, the new predicates are set side by side with the old as simply additional information; they do not react into the former qualities. If the contradiction is too obvious to be overlooked the new predicate is used, if possible, to constitute another object, independent of the former. So the savage, having to deal with the apparently incompatible predicates of light and darkness, makes two objects; two suns, for two successive days. Once the Ptolemaic conception is well rooted, cycles and epicycles, almost without end, are superadded, rather than reconstruct the original object. Here, then, is our starting point: when qualities arise so incompatible with the object already formed that they cannot be referred to that object, it is easier to form a new object on their basis than it is to doubt the correctness of the old, involving as that does the surrender of the _object_ (the fact, seemingly) and the formation of another object.

It is easier, I say, for there is no doubt that the reluctance of the mind to give up an object once made lies deep in its economies. I shall have occasion hereafter to point out the teleological character of the notions of necessity and chance, but I wish here to call attention to the fact that the forming of a number of distinct objects has its origin in practical needs of our nature. The analysis and synthesis which is first made is that of most practical importance; what is abstracted from the complex net-work of reality is some net outcome, some result which is of value for life. As Venn says:

“What the savage mostly wants to do is to produce something or to avert something, not to account for a thing which has already happened. What interests him is to know how to kill somebody, not to know how somebody has been killed.” (P. 62 of “Empirical Logic.”)

And again:

“What not only the savage, but also the practical man mostly wants, is a _general_ result, say the death of his enemy. It does not matter whether the symptoms, i. e., the qualifying circumstances, are those attendant on poison, or a blow from a club, or on incantation, provided the death is brought about. But they do desire _certainty_ in respect of this general result.” (P. 64.)

Now it is this “general result,” the net outcome for practical purposes, which is _the_ fact, _the_ object at first. Anything else is useless subtlety. That the man is dead—that is the fact; anything further is at most external circumstances which happen to accompany the fact. That the death is only a bare fraction of a fact; that the attendant “circumstances” are as much constituent factors of the real fact as the mere “death” itself (probably more so from the scientific point of view)—all this is foreign to conception. We pluck the fruit, and that fruit is the fact. Only when practical experience forces upon us the recognition that we cannot get the fruit without heeding certain other “conditions” do we consent to return upon our assumed object, put it under suspicion and question whether it is really what we took it to be. It is, we may presume, the savage who in order to get his living, has to regulate his conduct for long periods, through changes of seasons, in some continuous mode, who first makes the synthesis of one sun going through a recurring cycle of changes—the year.

As time goes on, the series of independent and isolated objects passes through a gradual change. Just as the recognition of incompatible qualities has led to setting up of separate things, so the growing recognition of similar qualities in these disparate objects begins to pull them together again. Some relation between the two objects is perceived; it is seen that neither object is just what it is in its isolation, but owes some of its meaning to the other objects. While in reality, (as I hope later to point out,) this “relationship” and mutual dependence means membership in a common whole, contribution to one and the same activity, a midway stage intervenes before this one fact, including as parts of itself the hitherto separate objects, comes to consciousness. The tradition of isolation is too strong to give way at the first suggestion of community. This passage-way from isolation to unity, denying the former but not admitting the latter, is necessity or determinism. The wall of partition between the two separate “objects” cannot be broken at one attack; they have to be worn away by the attrition arising from their slow movement into one another. It is the “necessary” influence which one exerts upon the other that finally rubs away the separateness and leaves them revealed as elements of one unified whole. This done, the determining influence has gone too.