Part 63

“Chance, according to me, or irregularity—that is, the absence of any coincidence,—calls for no explanation. If _law_ calls for explanation, as Dr. Carus admits it does, surely the mere absence of law calls for no further explanation than is afforded by the mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating the result.” (P. 559.)

Mr. Peirce is a great logician, but the logical arguments of his philosophy are not sound. If the absence of law, of coincidences, of regularities, did not require explanation, the scientist would (as is but right) still have to explain the uniformities of nature, but the miracle monger would have a good time; for he could tell us boldly that, according to the rules of modern logic he is not bound to give any explanation.

It is true that while everything must be explained, the absence of everything (i. e. nothing) need not be explained; but we cannot use this pattern as a schedule which can be filled out at our pleasure. The ideas “absence of,” “no,” “no one,” and “nothing” play a part in logic analogous to that of zero in mathematics. I need hardly remind the reader of the puzzling demonstration, that since one cat has one tail more than _no_ cat, and since no cat has eight tails, one cat must have nine tails. Operations with zero act like death in the realm of human conventionalities. Death makes the beggar equal to the king. Multiply any equation that is wrong with zero, and it will be correct. Operations with zero render the impossible possible.

But let us look closer at Mr. Peirce’s proposition. He avers that “the mere absence of any particular circumstance necessitating the result calls for no explanation.”

Should it ever happen that the absence of any particular circumstance necessitates the result, I do not see why this absence should remain unexplained. Say for instance, a certain stronghold is taken because the enemy discovers the absence of guards in a certain part of the walls. If this absence of guards be counted as an important circumstance helpful in the conquest of the citadel (and there is no reason why we should not count it as such) can we say that while the presence of guards on all other spots of the wall has to be and can be explained as an endeavor to secure the place against a _coup de main_, the mere absence of guards calls for no explanation? The absence of guards in a particular spot of the Capitol during the siege by the Gauls, was accounted for by the steepness of the place. This particular spot was regarded as safe on account of its inaccessibility. Similarly, the absence of guards in the citadel of the Messenians is explained by the idea that the Spartans would make no attack because in that particularly stormy night a cloudburst seemed to prevent all approach.

Obviously the necessity of explaining a rule, does not confer the privilege of neglecting to explain its exceptions.

It goes without saying that Mr. Peirce’s argument (even if it were formally faultless) can have no force with a necessitarian. Such a one, after having explained and proved to his satisfaction that _Gesetzmässigkeit_ (or regularity such as can be formulated in laws) is a characteristic feature of the universe, is not only asked to believe that there are after all exceptions to law, but is even told that according to some paragraph in Mr. Peirce’s unwritten logic of relatives no further argument is needed to prove the non-existence of law. Only Mr. Peirce’s extreme love of his pet theories can make him blind to such palpable fallacies. But such are the foundations of his philosophical architecture.

III. MR. PEIRCE AS A CRITIC.

A good general, who has to mask the weak points of his position, uses the strategem of making demonstrative sallies upon his enemy. Mr. Peirce, although apparently quite unconscious of the fact that his basic doctrines are untenable, instinctively imitates this maxim of warfare. His defence is mostly aggressive. Instead of replying to my arguments he endeavors to represent my views as incohesive and contradictory.

The present issue is not whether my views are tenable, but whether Mr. Peirce’s are. However, I am glad to have the benefit of the searching criticism of so subtle a thinker as Mr. Peirce. Therefore, I willingly appear before his tribunal to expurgate myself of his charges.

1. THE A PRIORI AND POSITIVISM.

Mr. Peirce is greatly puzzled with my position. He quotes several statements of mine which appear to him contradictory. I said: (1) that millions of _single_ experiences cannot establish a belief in necessity, (2) that necessitarianism must be founded upon the _a priori_, and (3) that the _a priori_ must be founded upon experience.[136] To him who overlooks the here italicised word “single” this may, indeed, seem to be a vicious circle.

All knowledge begins with experience. We define experience as the effects of events upon sentient beings, and these effects are sense-impressions of certain forms and interrelations. At an advanced stage of evolution, the formal and relational are first unconsciously, as, for instance, in counting, and then consciously, with scientific deliberation, abstracted from the sensory. Systems of pure forms are constructed out of the purely formal elements, thus gained from experience by abstraction, such as our system of numbers and the logical categories. Now the laws of these forms of thought are applicable to all formal and relational conditions of reality. The formal and relational of reality are known to us even in those regions of the universe and in those provinces of scientific investigation which have not as yet been explored. The scientist knows them _a priori_, even before he investigates objects which he never saw before. He is acquainted with certain of their qualities, viz., with the laws of their formal and relational conditions.

Thus the _a priori_, or, as I prefer to call it, formal thought, is a product of experience, and is again applicable to experience.

Single experiences, isolated observations, innumerable particular cases cannot directly yield or reveal the laws of formal thought. So long as they remain single and isolated they will never develop into mental factors; but such is the nature of reality that the single experiences will be built up and arranged in feeling substance as systematically as, for instance, the formation of crystals or the harmonious growth of cells in organisms? When sentient creatures become conscious not only of the sensory element of their experience, but also of this system of their soul, of the formal of their psychical existence, they become rational beings; and the formal which grows with their sentiency is not an exclusive and peculiar quality of theirs; it is not purely subjective, but it has been imparted to them, piecemeal, together with the single data of their experience. It constitutes a part of their _Anschauung_; it is found in the objective world and is a general feature of reality.

Out of the formal elements of our _Anschauungen_, of the facts of experience, that organ of cognition is developed which Kant calls “pure reason.”

Experience is often used to denote sense-experience only; thus Kant contrasts experience or sense-perception, which he calls _a posteriori_, with pure reason and formal thought, which he calls _a priori_. We use experience in the sense defined above, _so as to include the formal element_.

I am unable to form a clear conception of Mr. Peirce’s view of the _a priori_. Those systems of formal thought which I regard as constructions he regards as products of analysis. He says, “They are results dependent upon the action of reason in the depths of our own consciousness.” He only grants that “their abstract and distinct formulation comes very late.” He still holds that the _a priori_ is innate.

In my conception, mathematical ideas, like that of the contrivance of logarithms, are inventions; and they are constructions as much as the invention of the steam-engine by James Watt.

There is one peculiarity about the purely formal which is not found in the sensory elements of experience. Our knowledge of the various spheres of the purely formal is of a general nature; it applies to any form of the same kind. This gives system to our formal conceptions, and enables us to make statements which are rigidly and unequivocally determined. It is this quality which makes them available as an organ of cognition when dealing with facts of experience. They furnish us with methods, schedules of reference, and plans which like blanks have to be filled out.

Science begins with the application of formal thought, viz., with counting, measuring, and classifying. Only with the assistance of the formal sciences can we master the material of the sensory data of experience; and thus it happens that the formal is the condition, not of any kind of experience, but of every systematic experience.

The formal sciences are the tools of cognition. That to which they cannot be applied remains unexplained, and this is the ultimate reason why processes of nature can be regarded as explained only when recognised as processes of transformation. Cognition is the tracing of form. We can understand a change only if it is a change of form. We cannot understand how anything real can disappear into, or originate out of, nothing. We have no explanation for any actual increase or decrease either of matter or energy. Whenever we see something entirely new we regard it as a new combination, the elements of which existed before.

If there were processes in the universe which could positively be proved not to be transformations we should be confronted with an unfathomable mystery; and it is a matter of course that we must not be duped so easily by the appearance of problems which cannot be solved at first sight. The advance of science which has resolved so many mysterious phenomena into plain instances of transformation gives us confidence that this method is the only reliable maxim of inquiry. It has helped us so far, and it will help us in the future.

* * * * *

I call my views positivism, because like the French positivists and also like Locke and his school I maintain that all knowledge is to be derived from the positive facts of experience. But my positivism is not of the old kind; it is neither sensationalism nor materialism nor Comtism. It is a new positivism broadened by a study of Kantian philosophy and Kant’s problem of the _a priori_; and this new positivism, I hope, deserves the attention of the thinkers of mankind.

Mr. Peirce calls it a “straddling of the question,” by which he means that a man is “on both sides of the fence,” and has learned so to formulate the issues, “that both parties can readily subscribe to his propositions.”

2. DETERMINISM AND FATALISM.

Fatalism and determinism must not be confounded. We define determinism as that view, according to which every event is determined by its conditions. The decision of a man whose liberty is not curtailed by any compulsion, so that he can act as he pleases exactly in agreement with his character, is determined objectively by the motive and subjectively by his character. A man of a certain character in a given situation will act in a way that is perfectly determinable.

Determinism, as I take it, does not exclude free-will. Nor does it exclude such chance as is, for instance, the incidental turning up of the various faces of a die.

Determinism is the basis of science, and also of ethics as a science. If the decision of a free will were merely the result of chance, why should our teachers and preachers take so much trouble to form character?

While determinism is a sound doctrine, fatalism is a superstition. Fatalism excludes the idea of free will. We define fatalism as that view which regards the fate of a man, whatsoever he may do, as fixed. For instance, we call the orthodox Mohammedan a fatalist; he looks at the flame without quenching it, because he argues, “if it is Allah’s will that my house burn down, it will burn down, whatever I may do.”

In my reply to Mr. Peirce (_The Monist_, Vol. II, p. 572) I approvingly quoted from him a passage containing the word “fate,” adding that here “the word ‘fate’ must be understood as Mr. Peirce understands it.” In spite of this warning, Mr. Peirce employs this quotation made from _his_ writings as if it were mine, and calls attention to the inconsistency involved in the different application of the word. This charge of inconsistency is neither judicious nor fair!

We define “necessary” as “that which is determined.”

Determined means describable. Necessity is that feature of things which makes it possible that we can, in proportion to our knowledge, describe beforehand or predict the course of events.

Kant’s definition of “necessary,” as given in his “Critique of Pure Reason,” is narrower. He says:

“That the coherence of which with the real is determined according to universal conditions of experience is necessary, or exists necessarily.”

This means in our phraseology, “that feature of the real which is determined by the laws of form.”

The word “determinism” has been inappropriately used in the sense of fatalism, in which sense it has to be condemned as a superstition. The term is needed, however, to denote a basic principle of great value. “Determinism,” if used in the sense which the word literally indicates, means “that view which regards all events as determined by its conditions.” Determinism does not mean that everything is decreed by some fate, that some Deity or other power has determined the course of events. It means that definite conditions produce definite results, and that the results can be ascertained and described, if _all_ the conditions are known.

Fatalism is a peculiar kind of determinism, and, indeed, an obviously erroneous one. Fatalism rests upon a dualistic conception, regarding necessity as a foreign force residing outside and above things and compelling them to act in a special way. It is the Moira of the ancients and the Kismet of the Mohammedans. The monistic view knows nothing of a foreign force or supermundane _fatum_ enacting a special course of affairs. Necessity, in the monistic conception, simply denotes the determinedness of results by its conditions; it signifies that _Gesetzmässigkeit_, or regularity according to law, is a feature of reality. We need not repeat again that the monistic view of determinism excludes neither chance nor free-will. It only excludes “absolute” chance and that indeterminable arbitrariness which is sometimes said to be free-will.

If events were not determined, if under the very same conditions the same causes could bring about different results, so that no regularities formulable in laws existed, the world would be a chaos and no cosmos, absolute chance would prevail, and science would be impossible.

Mr. Peirce not only confounds fate and necessity, but he also identifies them with resistance, and with reality. My idea of necessity has as little to do with the experience of, reaction as, for instance, with the idea of density, or with pleasure and pain. To confound such heterogeneous concepts must be productive of confusion. No wonder that Mr. Peirce makes the confession that these ideas seem to him “of a mixed nature.”

That my presentation of the case of Determinism _versus_ Free-will results in “a doctrine to which the advocates of free-will will generally subscribe as readily as their opponents,” is used as a reproach; but I do not take it as such, for my intention is not to side with one party, but to bring out the truth of both views.

3. NATURAL LAWS, DESCRIPTIONS.

Mr. Peirce makes the following allegation of inconsistency. He says of me:

“The declaration (§ 198) that ‘natural laws are simply a description of nature as nature is,’ and that ‘the facts of nature express the character of nature,’ are nominalistic. But in another place (107-116) he says distinctly that uniformities are real.” (P. 531.)

I am unable to detect any inconsistency in these expressions. The gist of these three statements is this: the formulas usually called natural laws describe certain uniformities of reality.

The expression “description of nature” is by no means nominalistic. If law is said to be a description, it is not a mere name, but presupposes the existence of some objective reality for the description of which it has been formulated.

4. CAUSATION.

Mr. Peirce’s usage of the word “cause” is very unsettled. He says (p. 538):

“The original idea of an efficient cause is that of an agent, more or less like man.”

The original idea of “cause” is the struggle of reaching an end or bringing about a certain state of things. The Latin _causa_ means “a lawsuit.”

In a similar way, the German _Ursache_ does not mean the original thing, but a “seeking.” _Sache_ is the English _sake_ and Gothic _sakjô_, meaning “struggle,” or “quarrel.” It is derived from the same root as the verb “to seek.”

Like _causa_, the word _Ursache_ was used as a legal term.

Mr. Peirce further states:

“The modern mechanical conception, on the other hand, is that the relative positions of particles determine their accelerations at the instants when they occupy those positions.” (P. 538.)

“In dynamics, it is the fixed force, gravitation, or whatever else, together with those relative positions of the bodies that determine the intensity and direction of the forces, that is regarded as the cause.” (P. 540.)

“The practice which I endeavor to follow in regard to the word _cause_ is, to use it in the Aristotelian sense of an _efficient cause_ in all its crudeness.” (P. 541.)

“When my idea is a more general and logical one, I prefer to speak of the explanation.” (P. 541.)

No wonder that some causes are prior to their effects, others simultaneous, and that effects may even be prior to their causes! Using the word in various senses, Mr. Peirce becomes so entangled about causation, that in mustering the ideas force, position, reason, law, cause, and explanation, he no longer knows which is which.

* * * * *

Mr. Peirce being unable to bring any consistency into the usage of the term “cause,” drops it entirely as a philosophical word. This is Dr. Ironbeard’s method, who kills his patient to save him pain.

There was a time when I felt inclined to follow that plan of dealing with words in this predicament. But I found out very soon that there is not one difficult word in philosophical language which is not or was not at some time or other almost universally maltreated by the professional thinkers of mankind. What, then, is to be done? Shall we eradicate all old terms that are erroneously used and create a philosophical Volapük, which will have the advantage of being unincumbered with the errors of a long historical inheritance, but the disadvantage of being nowhere spoken and nowhere understood, except by its inventors?

Dr. Ironbeard’s method of dealing with terms is radical. It imitates the method of the social reformers who, on finding something wrong in society generally, propose to tear down the entire social structure, and begin the world over again from its beginning.

Most of the terms which have been in use for centuries and even millenniums, I have found to correspond to a special want of expressing some definite reality or constant group of realities or important relation among realities. The misuse of different words almost invariably has its origin in a consideration of the name alone, to the neglect of the reality denoted by the name. And misuses can be mended only by carefully investigating the realities themselves for the denotation of which the words have been invented. If we were to make a clean sweep of the “superstitions,” soul, God, cause, natural law, etc., because in many minds there are superstitious notions connected with these ideas, we should soon have to invent new terms for the realities which necessitated the formation of the old ones. The great bulk of religious and philosophical words originated because in each case there was an actual want of a phrase to denote some specific reality. The errors of the various terms arise because our ideas concerning the nature of these realities have not as yet been matured, and it is the office of the philosopher to contribute his mite toward their clarification.

Causation, in my conception, is transformation. Take any system of conditions and let it somehow be changed. The event which starts the change is called the cause, the new configuration produced, the effect. The various factors of the system are the conditions or circumstances.

Taking this view, I _do not say_ that the effect is the cause transformed. The total effect is the cause plus all the circumstances transformed. The effect is something radically different from the cause. The cause is always an event, that is a motion of some kind; the effect, a new arrangement, a new formation, a new state of things, or perhaps the dissolution of an old state of things.

While cause and effect are different, the whole process of causation, including cause, circumstances, and effect, is to be viewed as one fact, or, rather, as one system of facts; and a process of causation is explained, (as we have seen above) as soon as it is so described that we recognise it as a transformation.[137]

There is a popular usage which calls the cause of the falling stone gravitation. This kind of cause is not an event, not a motion, but a law of nature, and I prefer to call it “the reason” for the stone’s fall.

Mr. Peirce defines a reason as follows:

“A reason, in one sense, is the replacement of a multiple-subject of an observational proposition by a general subject, which by the very conditions of the special experience is predicable of the multiple subject.” (P. 558.)

This somewhat stilted definition seems upon the whole to agree with what I also call “a reason.” All the reasons by which we comprehend nature are formulated in statements which describe those general features of reality which we call “laws of nature.”

Who does not see that causes (i. e., events which produce effects) and reasons (i. e., the formulas by which we comprehend the uniformities of nature) are two radically different ideas, and who can deny that the denotation of these two radically different ideas, by one and the same term, must and actually does bring about lamentable confusion in the minds of philosophers! Accordingly, let us call them by different names; never mind what we call them, but let us distinguish them. I regard the usage stated here as the most appropriate. We call “the cause” of the stone’s fall that event which removed its support; but when we inquire after the reason why the stone falls, we want to know the law of nature which describes in a general formula that quality of stones which makes them fall.

5. THE FUTURE IN MENTAL CAUSATION.

It seems as if some evil genius had caused Mr. Peirce to cross my position everywhere, even where I should expect to find him in perfect agreement.

Concerning mental and mechanical causation he first startles me with an italicised proposition which declares:

“_There is no mechanical truth in saying that the past determines the future rather than the future the past._” (P. 539.)

Mr. Peirce apparently intends to discredit the belief that the past determines the future. He adds:

“We continue, for convenience, to talk of mechanical phenomena as if they were regulated, in the same manner in which our intentions regulate our actions, (which is essentially a determination of the future by the past,) although we are quite aware that it is not really so.” (P. 539.)