By Charles Hartshorne
Introduction
The Unity of Being is Charles Hartshorne’s doctoral dissertation written at Harvard University in 1923. The dissertation is organized in two Parts with fourteen Sections. This presentation of The Unity of Being is divided into two Parts of Seven Sections each. Hartshorne’s Digest (or Preface) follows below which in turn is followed by a Table of Contents. The first Seven Sections follow the Table of Contents. Sections 8-14 are in a separate and second post.
Numbers in brackets reflect page numbers of the original 1923 typewritten manuscript. Double brackets enclose my comments about questions or observations about the manuscript, followed by my initials: HyC.
Two comments by Hartshorne about the dissertation seems worthy of mention:
(1) He wrote that he had the greatest rush of ideas in his life while writing it.
(2) My doctoral dissertation, “The Unity of Being,” was a fantastically bold and comprehensive project. I stated my position on many of the philosophical problems to which my teachers had introduced me, for instance the question of internal and external relations; and I gave arguments for the positions. Many of the ideas expressed in later writings are more or less clearly anticipated in it. As I recall, Peirce and Whitehead are not mentioned. I then had read nothing of Peirce and had never seen Whitehead or read any of his metaphysical works.
Here, then, in honor of Charles Hartshorne and his dissertation’s 100th anniversary, is the first presentation:
An Outline and Defense of the Argument for
The Unity of Being
in the Absolute or Divine Good.
By Charles Hartshorne
Thesis presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy
in the Department of Philosophy and Psychology
Harvard University.
May, 1923
Digest of Thesis presented for the
Degree of Doctor of Philosophy at Harvard University:
The position expounded may be defined as in the first place Monistic. This term is taken to denote the theory that there is one ultimate or uncompounded Principle or Reality, such that all things must be conceived as necessarily contained or present within its unitary nature or life. The position, in the second place, is that of Teleological Monism. The relation of the Many to the One becomes that of the valued to the valuer. Interest or appreciation, in a Perfect form, must register within its own life of significance all the qualities of its objects — so far at least as these are of value.
Viewing value as essentially a matter of social relations, we find that a human or conscious individual, at any rate, if the object of a perfected Beneficient Interest, must be entirely present, with all its qualities, in or to that Interest. What the man really is, that he must be to the perfect appraisal, or to the perfect friend. Thus, on the Personalistic or Theistic teleological view the first demand of Monism — that there be a One Principle embracing all — is so far met. The second demand — that this relation [2] to the One be essential to the Many — is likewise conceivable on the same view. Experience testifies that the consciousness of reality enjoyed by human beings is in part at least a function of their consciousness of value to others. As object of love, praise, admiration, or interest, alone do they seem or become fully themselves. The partial independence, from the fluctuating valuations of other human beings, may conceivably depend upon the existence of a constant valuation of which man is always the object and of which he is always obscurely conscious. This Standard and Universal Valuation becomes, then, the Principle of Being demanded by Monism. Objects are viewed as values in the life of selves, and selves are real by virtue of being, more or less consciously, the objects of a universal Valuation.
Individuality or diversity, and even freedom, are not suppressed. For precisely as a genuine self-active individual is the self of value to other selves; and the perfection of beneficient understanding is not consistent with the annihilation of all genuine objects of such understanding.
The arguments for the Monistic theory thus sketched are as follows.
[3] In the first place being itself, as a category, implies Monism. Without being, there could be nothing. Abstract the being of a thing from the thing and nothing remains. Therefore the being of the thing includes all that the thing is. But the being of the thing is nothing without being itself; for if each thing has its own being as something purely private, the word loses all common meaning. And the being of the world as a whole (what is predicated of it when we say: there is such a world) in any case resumes in itself all being. “Being” we conclude, must be taken to stand for a universal principle which constitutes all the concreteness of reality — since in abstraction from it there is no remainder.
The category of Individuality bears the same implications. In particular we see that a whole of parts, does not derive its individuality or oneness from the parts, which are many and are not the whole, yet the whole includes the parts in its oneness or individuality. It must therefore involve a genuinely unitary principle inclusive of the parts and endowing both parts and whole with individuality.
[4] Examining quality we find: first, that every entity has a “what” or nature distinguishable from itself as having the nature. Second, that every nature itself differs qualitatively from other natures, is measured by a further what or universal. Since we cannot be aware of every member of an endless series we must be aware of one What or Universal measuring all differences and likeness of character, but itself characterized in and of itself. Such a self-characterized and all-characterizing universal is mind, as Idealism sees it. It is what it is in and to itself, self-realization is of its essence. And it construes all things in the light of this self-realization of meanings — on our view, of values.
The view of Relations as merely external is criticized and found to imply a Monistic all-relating principle, in order to escape from the absurdity of a relation which does not enter in any sense into the being of the object, and is therefore “its” relation only by standing, at best, in some external relation to it — initiating an endless regress, besides split-[5]ting the idea of predicate or property into two contradictory halves. “Property” in one case equals something which the thing in part at least is. In the other: something which the thing merely is not. For Monism, all properties are relations to the One. Internal relations are those contributing to the intrinsic value which things have to the One; external those representing the value which things contribute by forming parts of a larger value — whole.
Space and Time are wholes not analyzable into complexes of points and instants. They are wholes not conceivable as such simply in their own terms, their infinity remaining a mere negation of finitude unless translated into terms of positive infinity, unless conceived as aspects of an Absolute Experience. Magnitude, likewise, implies a standard which is non-finite yet not quantitatively infinite, but rather absolute in the sense of self-limited or determined. Finally space and time cannot include minds unless they form a spiritual Whole.
[6] The problem of knowledge is to be solved only by admitting that objects must render up their natures in terms of their meaning to mind — their contribution to knowledge as a self-significant whole. This implies the identity of “quality” and “meaning-to-mind.”
The view of value as in principle social, or as satisfaction in conjunction with the satisfaction of another and of consciousness as essentially valuational enables us to view experience as the subject’s realization of values not simply his own. Objectivity is thus preserved, without hint of solipsism. Subjective and objective meaning or value “correspond” or are in a measure one, because both involve a common element measured by the Ultimate Valuation involved in both subject and object.
The concept of Perfection, or of the Ideal Personality, implies the existence of its object (Ontological Argument). We cannot conceive Perfection as nothing at all — a sheer non-entity. Nor as a mere element in our thought of Perfection — since no such mere element can be thought of as Perfect.
Hence we must think our concept to be a concept of nothing, a mere word without meaning; or else must [7] admit the object to be the Perfect itself, which exists inasmuch as its existence is just its internal self-sustained life, its being-for-itself. Thought to lack this, it is thought not to be itself, or not to be Perfect.
Moreover, if the concept of the Perfect Mind is an absurdity, having no object whatever, then all life and thought, with its criterion or ideal of perfect or wholly true knowledge and perfect or completely socialized and beneficient personality, is oriented inalienably toward self-contradiction and all consciousness implies the inconsistency of the self-existent Perfect as without that self-reality which is of its very essence.
* * *
[8] “You would say, would you not, that the sun is not only the author of visibility in all visible things, but of generation and nourishment and growth, though he himself is not generation?”
“Certainly.”
“In like manner the good may be said to be not only the author of knowledge to all things known, but of their being and essence, and yet the good is not essence, but far exceeds essence in dignity and power.” Plato. Republic. Bk. VI. (Jowett translation)
“The values of nature are perhaps the key to the metaphysical synthesis of existence.” A. N. Whitehead. The Concept of Nature.
“The birds in our forests praise God in diverse tones and fashions. Think you God is displeased at this multiplicity and desires to silence the discordant voices? All of the forms of being are dear to the Infinite Being Himself.”
[[Hartshorne does not identify the source of the above quotation nor have I been able to locate it. — HyC]
***
TABLE OF CONTENTS
PART I.
INTRODUCTION
SECTION 1.
Preliminary Definitions
1. Being and Monism
2. Whole and Part
3. The Absolute
SECTION 2.
Historical Affiliations of Teleological Monism
1. The Monism of Plato
2. Later Monistic Arguments
3. Hegel’s Argument
4. Teleological Monism
5. Spinoza
6. Kant
7. Royce
8. Conclusion
SECTION 3.
Monism and Present Controversy
1. The Persistence of Monism
2. Pluralistic Objections
3. Value of Monism
4. Monism Compatible with Diversity?
5. God and Human Freedom
6. Monism and experience. W. James
7. How does mind unify?
8. Alleged Abstractness of Ultimate Universals
9. Value as a self-differentiating Principle
10. The Limits of Philosophy
SECTION 4.
Assumptions or Principles of Method
1. Nature of a Philosophical Assumption
2. Inconsistency the Test of Falsity
3. Realism and Certitude
4. Assumptions Adopted
a. Consistency
b. Meaning of “Valuation”
c. Transferability of Ideas and their truth
d. Indefinabilism rejected
SECTION 5.
Plan and Division of the “Outline”
1. Division is by Categories
2. Order of Succession
3. Ultimate Basis of Knowledge
4. “Being” and “Existence”
5. Independence of the Arguments
6. “Outline” Form of the Argument
PART II.
THE ARGUMENT
SECTION 5A.
Prefatory Word to Sections 6-9
SECTION 6.
The Argument from the Category of Being
Conclusion
Final Summary
SECTION 7.
Individuality
Whole and Part
Conclusion
SECTION 8.
Quality
Necessity and Conditions of a “Form of Forms”
Conclusion
SECTION 9.
Relations
A. External Relations
Conclusion to Section 9A
B. Internal Relations
Conclusion to Section 9
SECTION 10.
Space and Time
1. Space and Time involve an ultimate Unity
2. The Ultimate Standard of Magnitude
3. Space and Time as a whole conceivable Idealistically only
4. The world — whole as including minds
5. Alexander’s System
Conclusion
SECTION 11.
Knowledge
1, 2, & 3. Knowledge not definable objectively
4 & 5. Objects essentially objects of thought
6. Qualities or meanings relative to mind
7. Knowledge is Immediate
Conclusion
SECTION 12.
Value
1. The Good not describable in neutral terms
2. The nature of value
3. Aesthetic valuation objective
4. Valuation the key to knowledge
McTaggart’s Absolute
5. Value as social the key to the
Problem of One and Many
6. Evil
Conclusion
Additional note on Evil
SECTION 13.
Perfection (The Ontological Argument)
Kant
The Argument.
Phase 1. Self-Existence
Phase 2. Ideal Personality implies Self-Existence
Phase 3. All thought implies the Ideal Personality
Conclusion
SECTION 14.
Conclusion
BIBLIOGRAPHY
***
The Unity of Being
Part I Section 1
Introduction
[1]
Section 1
Preliminary Definitions and Discussions of Terms
1. Being and Monism. The purpose of this study is to defend a certain type of Monism.
This term, like, we are tempted to say, almost all terms in philosophy, has occasioned so much difficulty and misunderstanding that it is often begrudged its very existence. However, we hold fast to the term in the present case, since we can find no other to express a certain quite definite conception. This conception is, namely, that all things have their being and nature in terms of one Ultimate Being, one “all-general and all-sufficient principle” or “World-Ground.”
If we are asked to define being, we reply that the being of a thing is that which is predicated of it when we say of it: there is such a thing. And our “monistic” thesis is that for any entity “to be” involves essentially a difference indicated thereby to one uncompounded absolute principle or Being, a difference which is what it is in terms of the intrinsic nature of that Being, and which yet exactly covers or represents the nature of the entity in question, and is a necessary aspect of what is meant by its being or existence.
[2] This conception, that being is always being-for- the-One, and must be exhaustively represented in the One, does not, as we view it, commit us to the view that everything is but an adjective or appearance of the One; that, for instance, man has no real freedom or power of initiative. We retain the term monism precisely because we believe that the logical (or any other valid) motives leading to the conclusion of a single all-embracing Ground of things or Concrete Universal, do not compel us to go on to the conclusion that all finite individuals are solely to be viewed as phases of the one Activity or Power.
Monism consists for us in the denial off any unmediated dualism or pluralism of qualities or substances, of any gap between realities such that there is no common principle realized in both as their sustaining and all-comprehending ground. And it consists in the assertion that whatever a thing is, it is that not in and for itself only, but in and for in all cases one and the same Ultimate Reality — which is not a totality nor even merely a system, but a single, fundamentally simple or unitary Power.1 But while we say that nothing is, save in the manner in which it is permitted and enabled to be by this Power, we do not thereby say that all action is but the one Action.2
All [3] action must carry with it the ultimate Action, or it could not even exist. But it cannot be straightway assumed that the supreme Agent determined altogether whither its action shall be thus carried. If it did, of course its action would not be carried at all, and there would be no action save that of the One. But we cannot infer that because a power is unlimited it will not suffer itself to be affected by other power. Perhaps it prefers to allow such a reciprocity. And to say it cannot do so seems after all to limit its power in a more grievous way than any voluntary limitation could be held to do so.
From another point of view, to say that any reality is present with all its qualities in the One, may imply that the thing is a phase or manifestation of the power of the One, but — we maintain — does not imply that it is simply and solely that. Everything qualifies or makes a difference to, the One; and so, if one wishes, it may be called an adjective of the One. But this is merely one necessary aspect of its being. The other aspect may turn out to be its being for itself, and indeed precisely in such a character as real for itself may it be of significance to or real in the One. My friend is real to me, and so — as we shall argue later — is actually present and real in me, precisely inasmuch as my friend is also real in and for himself. His self-reality is just what gets into my consciousness and contributes to it.3 We shall confess later [4] on to a firm conviction that this illustration is no mere fanciful or idle analogy, but is the revelation of the foundation principle of existence.
We have now defined the sense in which we shall use the word monism. We can find no other term which, while avoiding the implication of the “all-devouring” type of Absolute yet expresses the idea of a single register upon which all facts are inscribed, a mirror in which all things are reflected and must be so reflected in order to be. Yet the awkward implication of our term is undeniable — and leads Professor Ward, for example to prefer the term pluralism for a view which appears to be at one with our own. The contrast between the two types of monism might be expressed by employing the two phrases — Absolutistic and Personalistic Monism, the latter being of course the one to be hereinafter defended.
In regard to the idea of the Good, in relation to Monism, its significance will be made progressively apparent, it is hoped. Brief definitions are of no great “value” in the case of such a concrete conception and problem. But we may say that for us the Good ultimately is the Divine — as theologians commonly use that term: that is, to denote an all-powerful, all-knowing, and all-benevolent Being, a Person capable of social relations, and indeed finding His essential life therein.
[5]
2. Whole and Part. The word “whole” seems properly to mean — an organized aggregate of entities (called parts, in relation at least to this whole). The idealist is commonly regarded as holding that the whole is “prior” to the entities or parts composing it, or in other words that the whole somehow constitutes the parts out of itself — so that the parts are but adjectives of the whole. The realist retorts that the whole is definable only in terms of its parts, and hence is no more prior in logic or otherwise than the parts.
The monistic position to be defended in the present study holds to a clear distinction between the whole, as the organized totality of all beings, and the Ultimate One which is the sustaining and organizing principle of the very totality in which it occurs itself as a member. It is this ground or active Principle which is constitutive of the parts and of the whole at once and in relation to each other.
Idealists such as Bosanquet and Bradley certainly distinguish such a pervasive principle — but they do not seem to hold the distinction clear in all references and their realistic critics often speak as if the Absolute were but the Whole of all beings in a systematized totality. Refutation is then easy. However, we agree with such critics that the matter is not made as straightforward and consistent as could be desired — to put it mildly. In the present [6] “outline” at any rate, the One Being or Ultimate Reality is not a totality, though it holds the Absolute Totality within itself and may be said thus to include it. If we use the term God, we should say that the whole, of which God is a member, is therefore not God, but that the whole belongs absolutely to God and exists only in his all-sustaining life. This seems no contradiction (that the whole should include God and yet God include the whole) if we remember that include is here used in two quite divergent senses. Since all things are in God and God is in himself, the Absolute Totality of reals is comprehended in God — not as a member of a further, more inclusive system, but as the objective scope of the Divine self-possessed Life. God sustains in his being the system of which he is himself a member, and his inclusion as a member in that system is one with his self-inclusion of himself in it. And the comprehension of the system in God is just his holding and sustaining it within his own life.
In what sense the whole is prior to the parts is a. problem to be discussed later, but it seemed well to differentiate the monism to be expounded from the mere assertion of such priority.4
[7]
3. The Term Absolute. If “the Absolute” is to mean “the totality of all that is,” as it seems to for Bradley and Bosanquet, then we admit that the Absolute is not the One of which we are to speak. But this is not because that One is but an appearance of the Absolute, or God but a more or less contradictory conception. But because God is the principle through which the totalization of the items in His identity as the Ultimate Person, must be thought, God is not the Absolute because He is the Absolute as held within His own survey and power.
But, it will be asked, can God be more than himself plus every other individual. Not numerically, is the answer; but in another manner of comprehensiveness, yes. For in adding other entities to God we simply enumerate what already falls within the being of God. Myself plus my thoughts is not the I that thinks, but the I that thinks while it is numerically less than I together with my thoughts, yet includes those thoughts within the unity of its own consciousness — and includes manifestly therefore the totality of myself and my thoughts.
Although we hold God or the Ultimate Being to be absolute in power, it seems therefore better to refrain from employing the term Absolute as a synonym for God or “The One”— especially as we shall thereby more successfully avoid the implication of a nothing-but or all-destroying type of Monism.
——————————
Endnotes
1. The meaning of this word will be brought out later.
2. If the One be inactive, then “the one Inaction” would do as well here. But, again, we do not believe that Monism has any force to establish the existence of a Being unrelated to change.
3. Or else I do not really know my friend himself at all — Cf. Bradley on “The Real Julius Caesar,” Essays on Truth and Reality.
4. On the other hand, where the argument issues in a conclusion of any whole to part priority, we may regard pluralism as refuted and so far our own thesis as established. The remaining question will be an issue between monist and monist and will be discussed in its own place.
***
The Unity of Being
Part I Section 2
[8]
Section 2
Historical Affiliations of The Theory of Teleological Monism
1. The Monism of Plato. If philosophy may be said to have a tradition, then that tradition assuredly is more nearly summed up in the conception of Immaterial or Spiritual Monism than in any other. Indeed the philosophic quest has prevailingly appeared as the search not merely for first principles, but for The First Principle. And it has been readily seen that such an Ultimate Being can hardly be conceived of as, in the words of Plato: “without life or mind, in awful unmeaningness an everlasting fixture.”1
In the thought of Plato, the main foundations of a Spiritual Monism are, once and for all, established. In the first place the Parmenidean argument for the unity of being as such, is incorporated in the Theory of Ideas — and at the same time freed from its essential defect. Plato agrees that “to be” must have one ultimate identical meaning, and that nothing can be saved by entering into a relation to this one being which alone lifts it appreciably above the level of non-entity. The theory of matter is in some slight conflict with this principle, but the principle is not as such attacked. On the other hand, in the Parmenides, Plato points out that the “one” and “the many,” taken as such seem to contradict each other; while in the Sophist the conclusion is drawn that the one must enter into each [9] of the many, while yet remaining itself, or — the same conclusion from another angle — that “being” must partake of otherness or difference, which since it is not simply identical with “being,” is called not-being.
If being were merely itself, then as the Dialogue makes clear, it could not even be called one. For there must be a difference between “being” and “one,” and therefore both cannot have being as sole predicate.2 If there are other predicates than being, still these predicates partake of being and hence being enters into or itself partakes of an other than just itself as mere “being.”
“The One” may be called equally well Individuality, and Plato has here discovered a new argument for monism. Nothing can be except as individual, a one distinct and (at least numerically) unique something. In short every thing is a thing, and thinghood or entityness is essential to it. If it ceased to be a definite determinate being, it would cease to be anything other than nothing. Whatever this one-ness or this-ness or uniqueness, or determinateness, is, it is clear all things are internally related to it. Moreover, as Plato acutely shows, the many as a whole, as a many, becomes also a one, an individual, possesses the very same element as each of its members. Thus “the one” is a concrete universal, a one expressing itself in many as entering into their very essence, and also into the many as a whole or totality.
[10] “Being” thus, is shown to be essentially capable of differentiation without destroying its identity. All differences must affect being or they are nothing. Yet being must not cease to be itself. Hence “not-being” is concluded to belong to the nature of being. Self-differentiation is the interpretation of this conclusion. In a sense, as Parmenides said, nothing can have more or less being than anything else, since all must have being as a whole, or in its identity. It cannot have merely a part of being, because into such a part being in its identity or wholeness must enter. What is sought then is a principle capable of modes of self-manifestation or self-activity, in the very texture of which the principle is immanent as their sustaining creative ground, and yet though present everywhere in its self-identity or — in that sense — in its wholeness, does not manifest the full richness of its power equally or entirely at every point, but only in all taken together.
The whole structure of Monism depends upon this point. Plato leaves the problem without further development on its abstract or rigorously analytical side. On the other hand he bequeathed us some immortal suggestions, drawn from his fundamental insight into the nature of man and human powers and hence into that which is capable of being indicated by the human concepts of truth or goodness, immortal suggestions toward the last possible solution of the last problems.
In the first place, Plato perceives, the “ideas” or [11] universals are not what they are merely in their own or private terms; but are essentially related to each other. In the end this leads logically to a supreme Idea, on pain of an endless regress which would contradict all determinate knowledge.3 Without any complete analysis, the author of the Dialogues appears to have seen the necessity of this monistic conclusion. What, however, of the supreme Idea —must it remain mere Being, — as it stands (or without elucidation) a pale empty word? By a variety of avenues the conviction becomes clear and profound in Plato’s mind that the key principle of the system of the ideas is to be sought in the nature of the good. The good is declared to be superior to being and essence, not only in “dignity,” but in power. Only mind is powerful, for only mind is “self-moved.” But the essence of mind is its pursuit and realization of the good. The good is that which draws it onward, is the secret of its activity, the creative principle and explanation of its knowledge. In the symposium, we have the essence of the soul portrayed as the love of the absolute beauty, the ultimate good.
Again, there is in the Dialogues a sublime apprehension of the infinite value of the truth. “The whole soul must be turned toward the truth,” as its supreme good or ultimate and ideal fruition. If the truth were not knowledge of being as perfection, the entire enthusiasm for truth (amounting, in the genuine philosopher, to reverence and a love without [12] reserve) could find no reasonable account, except as a supreme illusion.
Argue it as we will the soul’s homage to truth transcends all utilitarian and practical implications and aims at a supremely worthy reality, the knowledge of which is bliss because it is the conscious possession of an infinitely precious object. The value of knowledge implies the value of reality simply because a worthless reality could not be greatly worth knowing. No sacred obligation can attach to the truth if the truth is merely the fact that the universe is a gaping inanity or a makeshift of partial goods and bads. Unless the entire scheme of things is divine, the conscious harmony with it which is knowledge cannot be a supreme good either. Hence we have no cause to reproach ourselves in the name of truth for our efforts to justify a faith which alone gives that name authority and power.
Plato’s conscience, at any rate is clear — although he is careful to confess that his manner of expressing the supremacy of the good, and his ability to demonstrate it, are doubtless inadequate enough. He even declares that “God only knows if his opinion is true or false.” But serious doubt of its truth is nowhere apparent, and the faith that the good is the ultimate principle of the intellectual world, the genuine author or “parent of reason and truth,” shines forth from and illuminates the pages of the Dialogues at almost innumerable points.
[13] As to the nature of the Good, it is really not difficult4 to detect a strong tendency at least toward a virtual identification of goodness with the Divine, with the nature of a God in whom is no jealousy, whom to resemble is perfect happiness, and who is possessed of all righteousness. The convergence of the two ideas of value and deity is indicated for example by the parallelism between the treatment of the Good as the source of the being of all things good, and of God as likewise the author of all goodness in the world. It is also to be approached by way of the discussions of the primacy of mind in reality, as the sole principle of self-motion5 — and by the kinship declared to obtain between the mind and the ideas generally — a kinship not to be interpreted as a mere leveling of mind to the character of the ideas, or the reduction of it to a relation between them. For Plato is quite aware that mind actually includes the ideas (like birds in a bird cage) and yet remains a simple uncompounded entity (unlike “the day” in the Parmenides, which is composed of parts).
The manner of this inclusion which is thus obviously very different in the end from that of birds in a cage o. any such spatial analogy, is left obscure enough; but that [14] the conception of mind supplies something not provided for explicitly in the conception of the ideas as purely objective forms, is seen very well.
We may refer once more to the absolute refusal to countenance even for a moment, the hypothesis that the idea of being, or Ultimate Being, can fail to possess life and thought. Thus the kindred nature of mind and idea is taken perhaps even more as a means of interpreting the ideas by the mind, than the mind by the ideas. Lutoslawski goes so far as to regard the Platonic discovery of the soul or self, in the proper sense, as of greater significance than the Platonic Ideenlehre (The Origin and Growth of Plato’s Logic).
Finally, in regard to the Platonic good we may mention the remarkable passage describing the misery of the unjust man as the tragic fact that he is cut off from genuine social intercourse or “communion” (Jowett’s Translation) which, with fellowship and harmony, are declared to bind together men and gods and the entire universe. This is a way of stating that view of the absolute primacy of social values which we wish to defend, and which reappears today in Professor Ward’s The Realm of Ends or — minus the religious aspect in McTaggart’s form of “Hegelianism.”
In contrast to the foregoing discussion of Plato from the monistic angle, an insistence might be made upon the recalcitrance of the Platonic “matter” to the ordering [15] Good. Creation finds its materials, matter appears as “a datum objective to God.” Two points may be stressed in answer. One, that the existence of matter is very shadowy indeed in Platonism except when it is called upon to stand between the Creator and the evil of the world.
In other contexts it appears as falling short of being by a far greater gulf than it surpasses non-being — it appears at most as something which might be if true being allow. The other point in that a fuller discussion of freedom, responsibility, and ethical values might have made the existence of evil a fact referable to the action of the creatures rather than to the primordial nature of matter. This most difficult of all problems for the Monist is indeed incapable of any sort of solution in the Greek Pre-Christian atmosphere. It remains the great obstacle to a monistic faith, but it does not stand with quite the implications indicated in the Platonic dialogues.
On the whole we believe it is just to regard Plato as the great founder of Teleological Monism. Subsequent philosophy has been overwhelmingly an attempt to elaborate and fortify the grand structure whose foundations he so well established.
2. Later Monistic Arguments. In this subsequent development further arguments for the general view were discovered. The Ontological argument is the chief addition, unless perhaps we except the explicated form of Plato’s [16] implied argument from the identity of mind and its objects in knowledge — the two-fold character of ideas as essentially of the nature of mind, and at the same time the inner realities of things. In short, the “Cardinal Principle of Idealism.”
Both these modern forms of argument have suffered considerable bombardment by bitterly hostile attacking critics; but we are unable to perceive the relevancy of these criticisms to the genuine issues involved, even though these issues are sufficiently subtle to fall an easy prey to misstatement, or misinterpretation of insufficiently guarded statement. Whether the subtlety is not so great as to render impossible a completely guarded statement is a question which may as well be left open, although an affirmative answer is only too plausible. Something perhaps can be done to show how the criticisms do not reach the real thought of the men they attack, their basic logical insights, whether we consider Anselm or Berkeley.6
3. Hegel’s Argument. The mode of argument we find in Hegel is really an elaborate statement of the Platonic perception of the interdependence of universals, and hence their dissolution into one another unless there is [17] an ultimate Universal which sustains them in interdependence and yet distinguishes them as varying manifestations of itself.
The Concrete Universal is the Platonic highest unhypothetical first principle reached by a self-establishing or indubitable dialectic. It is also one with the Idea of the Good, or of “Perfect Being,” as expressing the nature of the Ultimate Universal. However differently Hegel may have interpreted the Supreme Reality, he has not discovered a radically new mode of demonstrating the Monistic hypothesis. Still, as novelty is in general a matter of degree, it may be true that the conception of the contradictions inherent in any statement of the ultimate truth of things in terms of subordinate or partial ideas, is brought to such unprecedented distinctness and fullness by Hegel as to entitle him to the credit of having discovered its fuller possibilities. On the other hand the Hegelian argument is attended with many excrescences which are less and less thought to be defensible, and is nowhere carried out in a manner that from step to step is satisfactory. The simpler and less pretentious forms of the demonstration that the whole truth is somehow inherent in every part, the supreme idea in all concepts, appear to us the better. And the notion that the replacement of partial or inadequate ideas by adequate ones is a literal analogue of the movement of all reality, and its motive-force, is a gratuitous outgrowth from the perfectly modest [18] contention that to comprehend our ideas and their objects we must behold all as the expression of one highest principle. The manner in which we criticize concepts and thus elevate ourselves to a complete point of view is in a sense arbitrary, and not the very movement of the real and. its self-relation of part to whole. It is but analogous and the degree of analogy is no readily soluble question — and must be discovered for itself. In some sense the immanence of the One in the many must be represented in the relations of our ideas to ourselves as subjects, for this is the sole type off immanence we experience; but the same principle is involved in the identity of self and object in emotional experience or experience explicitly of value, and the merely conceptual identity in difference may after all be but a partial aspect of a unity which at bottom is a matter of value. In that case contradictions are but conflicts in valuations, their failure to realize in harmony the ultimate or whole value they seek, and the attempt to overcome contradictions by adequate ideas may be viewed as really the attempt to attain a full realization of the essential values of experience and reality. If so, it is not a case of “Panlogism” but only of Teleology, which is another matter.
4. Teleological Monism. This principle of the primacy of value is largely recognized by the great constructive successors of Plato, from Aristotle downwards. But it is imperfectly carried out in the dualism of [19] Descartes; in the somewhat equivocal implications of value transcendence in the Spinozistic Substance; in the subordination off the good, as free self-realization, to logical necessity, in the Monadism of Leibniz; and notably in the subjectivist interpretation of aesthetics in Kant’s Critique of Judgement. Moreover, throughout the history of philosophy, until the recent work of Royce and the pragmatists (and in considerable degree, of Bradley and Bosanquet) there is a large measure of failure to develop the full implications of the Platonic suggestion that the good is to knowing what light is to seeing, the very principle that interprets the relation of knower to the known. We shall discuss this in later sections. We hold the neglect of the conception of knowledge as essentially and in principle knowledge of the good or valuation, to lie at the root of the (on other grounds) insoluble epistemological antinomies of subjectivism, immanence, transcendence, etc., which rise from the history of philosophy like impassable reefs, strewn with the wrecks of epistemologies!
In regard to the teleological view in relation to the ontological problems of philosophy, we would note that although from Aristotle downward, with the not unambiguous exception of Spinoza (for whom God was not only an object of “love,” but “infinitely perfect” in all positive qualifications) the coextensiveness of value and being are recognized (even, by Kant in the end) the idea of value is [20] not the less neglected in endeavoring to interpret the fundamental ontological relations. The relation of the finite to the Ultimate Being is left in the contradictory state of total dependence plus externality — e.g., in the scholastic system in its accept ed. form.7 Or, where the many are included in the One, as in Leibniz, as the “objective thoughts of God,” the difficulty of conceiving self-active or rational individuals as mere aspects of the thinking of the One Individual is left in rather bald relief and there seems to be little or perhaps no suggestion as to how its acuteness may be mitigated.
5. Spinoza. In Spinoza the relation is one of logical implication, so far as it can be discovered at all. But then freedom indeed vanishes, even if we could form any conception of an implication of the particular by the universal.
6. Kant. Kant admits the highest or most complete form of unity we can imagine is one of “Zweckmäszigkeit,” and in his final view of things he admits such unity as the actual scheme of reality; but he does not with any thoroughness apply the notion to the discussion of the ontological antinomies in the first Critique,8 and hence is led to [21] reject a rational metaphysics as out of the question.
7. Royce. In the work of Professor Royce, the relation of the one and the many, and of idea and object, are interpreted in teleological terms. But the fundamental concept employed is that of purpose or will. The result is that the unity of many wills in One has to be regarded as a sheer identity. Each will is the One, the One is merely any of the many seen in its completeness. The upshot is a collision of the whole system with the facts of evil and error. A perfect will which divides itself into parts, in order to oppose itself, injure itself, and fall into innumerable misunderstandings of itself, is not a satisfactory solution.9 If each will is but a meaning or purpose of the One Will, the errors and evils in such meanings must be regarded as absolutely good and best in the end. And there remains but one real agent in the world, the One which ultimately means all meanings and so makes them what they are. If it does not so make them, then there is no power or self-determination in the world at all, and the concept of will is robbed of its contents. On the other hand, the meanings of the One cannot determine themselves, for then their status as nothing but meanings or purposes of the One is jeopardized. The sole agent must be the One in [22] each of its meanings, or we do not know what the “its” is to denote.
And if the sole agent is the One, the acts it brings about are strangely inadequate to its perfection; and at any rate the finite individuals as self-active beings, are banished from the universe.
8. Conclusion. Our own departure from Professor Royce consists briefly in a view of value as more than purpose or will, in an interpretation of these concepts themselves in terms of the more ultimate category of social harmony or identity with respect to interests which is given the name of love. The good for me must be felt by me as at the same time good for another, and felt as good in part for that very reason of being shared. The good, in other words, must not be simply purpose or self-realization. Purpose to do what? How does the self realize itself?
Let us answer, in joy. But what is joy. No joy is ever profoundly felt and comprehended in life except as a joy in something not merely ourselves but good to another in precisely the same sense as the joy itself is a good to us who experience it. The rejoicing in another’s joy, the happiness because we see and assist in the happiness about us, are the very essentials of joy and happiness. An unshared purely self-centered well-being is we believe an unrealizable because in essence a contradictory conception. In brief to experience the good is to love — to [23] unite with another in a satisfaction which is so to each because it is so to the other.
If this category be employed, the relation of the many to the Ultimate Reality can be conceived in outlines which we believe involve no genuine contradiction. These outlines will be significant in so far as the spiritual categories employed have been consciously realized in our experience. In the end philosophy must descend into the full concreteness of experience if it is to get its abstract or logical outlines filled with any significant meaning. It must rely above all upon that most profoundly empirical of all modes of apprehension — the religious. Otherwise it will fail, as in a measure philosophy has always failed, simply for lack of sufficiently profound (i.e., spiritual or valuational) conceptions to deal with.
Nevertheless, the history of philosophy, in its constant impetus toward spiritual unity has not — so far as our opinion goes — wandered so far from a truly concrete and adequate point of view as harsher critics may suppose. The great value aspects of experience philosophers have always endeavored significantly to relate to being as it is in itself, to the principle with reference to which alone it can be said of anything — There is such a thing.10
Herewith we close our rough and hasty review of some historical aspects of the problem.
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Endnotes
1. Sophist — Jowett’s Translation.
2. This is not quite the step taken by Plato’s argument at this point — though the conclusion is the same.
3. See Section 8.
4. Zeller, Grundriss der Geschichte der Griechischen Philosophie, p. 157.
5. To be correlated with the Good as the ordering and controlling principle of things.
6. Other modern arguments of which we hold the same view are those from the categories of space and time (Zeno, however) and of relation.
7. Although on the other hand, God being everywhere, everything after all may be said to be in God, on the Scholastic view.
8. Nor to the problems of knowledge.
9. If the injuries and misunderstandings are unreal as such, so much the worse, one would say, for ethics or else for the system.
10. Certainly Spinoza or Aristotle — in our own day Professor Alexander — have made this attempt.
***
The Unity of Being
Part I Section 3
[24]
Section 3
Present Controversies on the Issues of Monism
1. The Persistence of Monism. The notable place of the monistic principle in philosophic thought is still illustrated in contemporary conditions. The most impressive realistic metaphysician of today is a thorough going monist —Professor Alexander. The thesis of monism is represented even in the realistic pluralism of the Orthodox Scholastics, from the time of Aquinas to the present. God is coextensive with being, and nothing could be if it were not present within the compass of the divine knowledge and life-giving power. Green, Royce, Bradley, Bosanquet, even Bergson, and such a careful student as Mackenzie in England or as Creighton in America, — these and many other names recall the vitality of the conception of Unity in terms of spirit and value as the foundation of a reasonable metaphysical view.
2. Pluralistic Objections. But the pluralistic protest is also vigorously alive, indeed with a vitality never shown before. The attempt of monism, says Mr. Russell, has broken down, and we have left only the piecemeal world of everyday experience. But the answer of the monist is that those competent to judge have not yet, with any decisive unanimity, been able to detect the failure of monism; that to be left with the piecemeal world that [25] is said to be given us is to be left with sensation and the special sciences perhaps, but not with that interpreted experience which philosophy set out at the beginning to achieve, and still in notable instances does achieve; and finally that the position of pluralism as such is still as much as ever infected with the inconsistency and irrationality which Parmenides and the vast majority of philosophic geniuses since Parmenides have detected in it, and that nothing in “modern logic” or anything else obviates but only at most ignores or dogmatically denies, these difficulties or contradictions.
3. The Value of Monism. As for the alleged refutations of Monism, they all proceed by prejudging the root-point. It is said first of all that it is no advantage to know that all things have being. For the nature of things remains unaltered by this fact. The bad things remain bad, the good things become no better. This contention is found in Professors Perry and Spaulding, and in pragmatists such as Schiller. It seems to us open to the following objections. (1) We cannot tell what difference Ultimate Being makes to the things that have being until we discover some clue to the nature of that Being. For the ultimate destiny of any individual obviously depends upon the nature of the One upon which it utterly depends. Now all monists, even Parmenides, have provided at least something of a clue of this sort. And even if the One proved to be a power not disposed to pre- [26] serve finite individuals, it has almost always appeared as of such a nature that we could regard our genuine interests, the real values of our life, as preserved in its eternal self-existence. At least it has appeared so to the philosopher in question himself.1 And, to repeat, the existence of a unitary Being is of a value which cannot be determined until we know the nature of this Being; but the pluralist must not simply assume that from the knowledge of its existence no inference as to its nature can take place. The entire history of philosophy indicates that it is only mind or spirit that unifies; and that history also provides, as we shall urge later, strong evidence for the conception of the unifying principle as not simply mind as bare thought or awareness (no such entity may exist) but as that identification of self with another in terms of value, which is suggested by such terms as sympathy, love, fellowship, or any term signifying a unity in respect of purpose and valuation.2 (2) In the second place, if Monism is true, whether or not it seems to offer any advantage that it should be [27] true, still if we are interested in the truth then such a comprehensive generalization, if it can be rationally supported, cannot be rejected as of no concern.
After all we want to know, not simply to view with favor or disfavor.
4. Does Monism Contradict Diversity? A second objection to monism is that it makes the variety of experienced things inconceivable. The answer to this is simply that to say all things share in one Life, is not at all to say all things are simply one. Why should not, for instance, all things be represented in the one Mirror or registering Ground in terms of their value to One all-valuing person? If the essence of ourselves is our self-realization or self-value, may it not be, indeed (we shall argue) must it not be, that the qualities which things have in and to our experience are to be viewed in terms of the contribution such things are capable of waking to our value — experience, or “self-enjoyment” as Alexander calls it? In other words things have quality or nature to us by being valuable to us.3 This does not imply subjectivism. My friend is to me, any man indeed, is to me, what I can by some degree (however partial and grudging) of sympathetic “putting of myself in his place,” make real to myself in terms of my imagined self-realization. To put the matter more [28] clearly, knowledge may be that process of taking another’s good or evil as so to oneself which is called love.
If so, then all qualities are nothing for knowledge except as kinds and degrees of good (and evil). Purpose, value, love, are the ultimate categories.
Now, if we interpret Monism to mean such a dependence of all that is upon the all-valuing love of an ultimate Being, can it be said that the existence of a variety of objects of such love is contradictory of the dependence of these objects upon the ultimate Valuation? Now it seems clear enough that the existence of a Perfect Love is not in conflict with the existence of objects of that love. Plato’s quaint statement4 of the sublime thought that God is by nature the very opposite of envious, but rather glad to endow finite beings with life and power similar in kind at least to his own, seems a reasonable solution of the problem of the existence of a many as well as a One, if we are able to view that One as divinely good, using the word goodness in a significant sense, to denote a mode of being and an attitude known in human life by that term. And finally it seems no less consistent to hold. that such a Principle of Good would not endow its creatures with a being apart from itself, but rather would wish to hold them within itself as in being dependent upon itself in order to be able to control their destiny to their own highest interest. Such control is only conceivable if the very meaning of the [29] existence of the creatures at any time involves as its inseparable aspect the sustaining Will of God.
Only if an act of that Will is an essential part of the mere being of a thing can it be meaningful to say that the latter is wholly under the control of the former.
5. God and Human Freedom. On the other hand there is only one good which can be imported to his creatures even by God. And that good is the possession of something of his own nature. This nature is of a freely or spontaneously exercised benevolence, involving in its conception the aspect of self-initiation or self-determination. Hence the One, although all-powerful must not determine each act of the creature. Have we here a contradiction between omnipotence and other-freedom? The only and a forceful answer lies in the perception that an omnipotence incapable of providing for itself the power of watching over the development of genuine and hence in some degree self-active individuals is a shorn and assuredly a contradictory all-powerfulness. While, on the contrary, a voluntary self-limitation of the Perfect Control over finite beings to some extent in order that those beings may not be entirely extinguished (since their identity as separate beings depends upon their reality as agents) as distinct entities, — such a self-limitation seems no genuine contradiction but rather a reasonable exercise of infinitely good Omnipotence. To Use a phrase employed earlier, [30] omnipotence is preserved in the fact that every finite act must carry with it the Divine Act, so that the extent to which the latter is thus influenced, and so the character of the finite act, never escapes the potential control of the Ultimate Act, The latter determines how far it shall allow itself to be born in a given direction, the only necessity being that it shall allow some finitely originated deflection if it desires to continue the finite agent in being at all.
But, finally, it might be asked, how can this situation of an insight capable of exercising control beyond any limit, and therefore exhaustively and instantaneously penetrative of the finite individual, be conceived — together with the inclusion of the finite in the Infinite as having its very being only there? How can the finite deflect the Infinite, when the act of the former is only real as decreed by the sustaining act of the latter. This sustaining act cannot come afterwards, as a ratification of the act sustained. Both must be simultaneous. How then can the self-determination of the relative being be a cause of the direction in which the absolute Being is “carried?” Must not cause precede effect? Now certainly the relation here must not be conceived as an ordinary cause-effect relation. The One is born along by the finite act in a relation which we cannot imagine, but which after all is not contradictory. For we simply maintain that the Self-[31] Determined One sustains the finite within its own life, as an element in that life and yet allows that element to exercise some control over its own nature. If such a relation could be imagined by finite beings, then finite beings would possess substantial equality of comprehension with the Infinite.5 Since we cannot experience absolute power as our own, we cannot picture concretely the nature of its operations. Nonetheless we can conceive in outline an utter dependence which allows the exercise of freedom. For in human relations, it is an empirical fact that our sense of reality is, in a genuine degree, a function of our knowledge of significance or value to others. The belief that all other beings are utterly indifferent toward us is — if it were realizable at all — identical with the belief that we are as nothing.6 Our reality as human being is, in part, so far as we are concerned, our value to other beings. Carry this principle to an ideal limit and we have the relation we are seeking. If we depend in part, as creatures conscious of our worth, upon the sympathy of others, may it not be that there is an Ultimate Valuation upon which our existence as possessors of value, is dependent? And if this Valuation is interpreted upon the social analogy of interest or love, it is also clear that such a Valuation — although that upon which the finite valued individuals [32] depend — must endow the latter with some circle of free-play.
Put once more, carry friendship to perfection and you have a case of a reality which is all that it is to another reality — and is wholly represented in terms of the consciousness of that other. Moreover, if the consciousness of being the object of friendship enters into and forms a part of the consciousness of our being as valuable, then conceivably the abiding sense of reality and value which seems in a measure independent of human relationships, may actually be a consciousness of value in terms of the ideal friendship we have suggested, which is constantly in relation to us, and for which we are, and at bottom feel ourselves to be, permanently significant. Finally such a friendship would no more deprive us of all independence than any other, for here would be a contradiction — a friendship which took away all power and individual reality or initiative from its object.7 For aside from a self-active or spontaneous agent we can find no sufficient definition of individuality. And certainly all that we mean by a social relation is destroyed if one party and that relation is to contribute all the activity or choice.
We claim, therefore that an all-powerful Being is con-[33]sistent with a plurality of beings, if the relationships involved be interpreted in terms of spiritual concepts — those concerned with the good as it is revealed in the profoundest human experiences of fellowship and interest in the nobler or social sense. And we find no remaining view which is possible for a moment if this possibility be rejected..
6. Absolutism. A passage from Mr. Bradley (Essays, p. 10, note 1.) is in point here: “There is no higher form of unity (than love), I can agree. But we do not know love as the complete union of individuals, such that we can predicate of it the entirety of what belongs to them. And, if we extend the sense of love and make it higher than what we experience, I do not see myself that we are sure of preserving that amount of self-existence which seems necessary for love.”
Here is the issue we are ultimately concerned with, stated with Mr. Bradley’s admirable clarity and directness. Can the unity of love be such that the entire being of one person so related should be included in the love of which it is the object. Mr. Bradley declares that we experience no such inter-penetration in human life; and that if we postulate a higher form of the same principle we must ask whether we can be sure that it must not, in order to supply the unity desired, abolish distinctions of individuality altogether.
[34] Now we certainly experience no human relation in which there is a complete inclusion of one person in the experience of another. If, however, the idea of friendship or love be carried to its ideal perfection, we certainly have the conception of a consciousness which should wholly comprehend its object in all its detail. Whatever the object of such a friendship might be, that it would certainly be to the friend. On the other hand it seems not only not necessary but unwarranted and even inconsistent with the hypothesis, to suppose that such a relation would destroy its object as such. Complete understanding and sympathy are precisely what we instinctively feel would contribute to our reality and not detract from it. In short, perfect love might not constitute the very being of its object, but it must certainly both reflect every aspect of its object in terms of the difference that aspect makes to it as exhaustively and with all understanding interested in the object, and on the other hand, it must respect the individuality of the latter. Perfect love implies both aspects, and there seems no inconsistency between them.
The question then appears primarily as to the possibility of supposing that such a comprehending Interest could stand in an absolutely essential and constitutive relation to its object. In a previous phrase, we observed that whatever the object of a perfect interest may [35] be, that the object must be to the interest. Nowhere we speak as if the object, on the one hand simply is something, and on the other is that something to the mind interested in it. The being of the object, and its being for the interested other appear as two, although the second being exactly reproduces the first.8 Can the relation justifiably be regarded as more intimate. We reply here merely in brief:—
(1) If we consider ourselves, we find that the question as to what exactly our reality is raises a puzzle. None of us knows completely. If we say we are what we are to ourselves, what we take ourselves to be, there are a host of criticisms to be advanced against such an answer. We feel we are more than we know or experience of ourselves. Some standard other than our being-for-self seems required.
(2) Considering ourselves fundamentally in terms of value, we perceive that after all our worth cannot be measured except in reference to an ideal standard of personal worth. Such a standard cannot successfully be conceived as impersonal; [36] or, in the end as other than a perfect personality, or an absolutely unselfish and all-comprehending interest.
Again, to be of worth is to be of worth to someone, and mere worth to oneself is insufficient to account for the reference to another involved. Our experience shows us that merely private value is in principle the denial of value. On the other hand we know that the ultimate dignity of the human person is not exhaustively described in terms of human relations. Robinson Crusoe may still retain in his solitude the sense of significance and even of duty. Once more we are led to infer a One to whom we are of significance at all times and in all cases, as opposed to the fluctuating and uncertain character of human associations.
(3) The conception of perfect Interest itself implies the dependence of the object of that interest upon the interest itself. For in no other way can the desire to assist which attends such a relation of love, reach the capability of expressing itself proportionate to the perfection of the Interest in question. Dependence of one being upon another is conceivable solely as an identity of being, so that a change of state in the one has, as its logically inevitable aspect, a change in the other; so that what one is to the other is the very essence of its reality, the relation of being to standing as fundamental to being as a mere an sich affair. For God to value us in a certain manner and for us to feel ourselves as possessed [37] of a certain value, become aspects of the same indivisible or uncompounded though differentiatable reality. Only if this is so can the love of God be capable of controlling our being, as well as creating it.
(4) Thus the idea of love, carried to its implied perfection, appears to imply the identity of being in One Foundational Reality which monism asserts, and to imply it in such a fashion as to involve no inconsistency between the type of unity and the type of plurality it contends for.
In this apparently sentimental view of ultimate facts, we seem to find the only possibility of consistency which all the explorations of human thought have discovered.
(5) In the experiences most properly called religious, there is in actual fact a sense of an all-embracing Interest upon which we do depend, and precisely that sense is the ground of all the specifically religious emotions and ideas. The joy, the humility, the confidence and trust, the gratitude, the all-epitomizing fact of prayer, — all are oriented toward just such a conception as is in question. And finite individuality is not (by most persons) felt to be removed or even threatened, but rather enhanced, by such an experience.
(6) We conclude therefore that a just comprehension of genuinely religious concepts supplies the sole possible basis for a consistent and all inclusive synthesis of ex-[38] perience, and that the difficulties of philosophy proceed among other causes from a greater or less degree of intellectual pride or of insufficient experiential acquaintance with those spiritual and religious factors which, whether detected there or not, stand at the center of life, and endow it with whatever of reality of every kind it may have.
If the universe be exclusively spiritual in the end, then it is quite to be supposed that unspiritualized, materialistic, neutral, or abstractly intellectual conceptions can never succeed in squaring themselves with it, or in giving a really plausible account of it.
(7) Is Monism Unempirical? Another complaint brought against the monist, — i.e., by James in The Pluralistic Universe is that experience does not give us unity, but ratter a higgledy piggledy variety. The terse answer here seems also a fair one — experience may give us variety, but only a variety in terms of the common element of experience. This simple, perfectly indubitable and unfabricated unity of actual awareness is precisely the aspect or element the monist is seeking to bring into clearer light. He is as empirical as the next man, with even a modest addition or two. What we know as most certain is precisely knowledge itself — which is a registering of a number of factors within a single unity of self-recording significance. We know that our awareness has its objects — but we [39] do not know that these objects are not created out of the very principle or life of awareness or mind itself. Let it be granted to the realists that an act of awareness cannot have only itself as object — and therefore, that in any such act or state there is something not that act or state, this implies necessarily a plurality, but the plurality may turn out to be one of a number of beings possessed, not simply of bare awareness (there not necessarily being any such thing) but of the concrete life in terms of feeling and valuation which every awareness involves. We therefore conclude that though plurality is given, a plurality of mind and not-mind is not indubitably given, but seems rather a contradiction of the fact from which we start, namely that all that we experience must inscribe itself as fact for us in terms of the self-significance of that experience from which we start and which gives rise, of its own voice, in its own terms and for its own purposes, to all the problems of philosophy. The indubitable data are not awareness or mind and things known, as two independent factors, but the one reality of elements-in-knowledge, forming a whole permeated throughout by a common principle of self-registering awareness.9
[40]
(8) How Does Mind Unify? One or two further objections to monism as such in the current literature deserve consideration. There is the statement of Professor Perry, that the unifying activity of mind is something of which no account has ever been given, something ineffable which refuses to run the gauntlet of analysis, and is really accepted only on pain of the abandonment of logic for mere emotion and poetry. Now if mind be viewed as concerned wholly with value, and value as constituting the essence of things, then — as we have in some aspects already argued — it is not utterly impossible to furnish an account of the manner in which mind serves as the Unifier of things. For value is, by Professor Perry himself as well as by the great majority of thinkers, pluralists as well as monists, regarded as essentially relative to mind. Value is inherently value to an interested consciousness. Many values may be realized in one consciousness, and become thus in this sense embraced within it. By the unity of all in the One we mean the universality of the relation of significance to the One. And that this unity is not merely external to the things, but of the essence of their reality as significant we have already endeavored to show as a view not incapable of giving an account of itself.
Even mind as knowing is obviously an agency of unification in that it indubitably brings its objects within the scope of a single knowledge or state of awareness. But [41] the point of Professor Perry’s remark is the belief that this inclusion in one knowledge is purely external to the being of the objects. From the standpoint of value, however, it appears far less plausible that to be of value should contribute nothing to what is valued. If the realities in question be human individuals they as a fact cannot consider themselves in exactly the same light independently of what they take to be their significance to others. The relation here is internal, if anything is anything.
And if all reality falls within the sphere of personality then values are simply experiences of individuals with the proviso only — on our view — that the experiences are essentially shared. All the objects to be unified thus fall into the unity we have described.10
This defense against Professor Perry’s criticism depends obviously for its force upon the possibility of justifying and carrying out the program of the identification of quality and value, knowledge and valuation — depends thus upon the entire structure of our argument. It accordingly can not be further substantiated here. We are justified only in pointing out that the idea of unity as relative to the power of mind, is — so far from something of which we offer no analysis — precisely a conception which it is proposed to subject to a great variety of analyses, which indeed provide the sole significance of the Theory of Valuational Monism as an explanatory hypothesis.
[42]
9. Alleged Abstractness of The Ultimate Universals. A common charge against Monism is that Being as the most general of all universals is also the most empty and void of content. Thus, in any case of higher and lower generality we find the higher to be the more abstract. “Blue” is more concrete, carries more significant content than “color.” And color is certainly more illuminating than quality, or finally than “entity.” Again “animal” tells us less than “dog,” and “thing” than either. And yet the matter is not so simple or clear as it seems. For to be blue is not really more than to be colored. We do not know what color is unless we know the whole color scale. The concept of color gets its meaning from a richer experience than the concept of blue, and it contains that experience implicitly. In order to be blue, a thing must so far reject green and red, but to possess color as such would be to possess all colors in such a way that the possession of one offers no bar to the possession of another.
Higher Universals, are clearly those which can manifest themselves in a variety of lower without losing their identity. Since they can thus be wrung into any shape, as it were, and still remain themselves, it is hence inferred that they are essentially or relatively shapeless and formless — indeterminate, in a word.
Now all depends on the meaning of form or determination. In the sense in which “square” is the form of a box, [43] “shape” is something without the form squareness. For what is square is not also in the same sense round. While if shape is square it is quite equally and without conflict round. Hence the “squareness of shape” becomes absurd.
Let us consider, however, the relation of such universals as “Color” or “shape” to the universal “experience.” If idealism is in any sense true (and in some sense our monism is idealistic) then experience is a reality which actually possesses colors and shapes and all other qualities, and is their sustaining life or creative principle. If, in the end, to be is to be experienced, to be a phase in the intercourse of minds, then “mind” or “experience” are universals of equal generality and concreteness. Mind does not possess either one color or another — but all colors. Hence it is richer in content than the apparently concrete “blue” or “green.”
If, finally, experience is essentially a realization of values, capable of no other operation, then value becomes a quality which accounts for all qualities. And in any case, value is not obviously less concrete than color, though on our view, it is far more general.
Our proposition is that the abstractness of general concepts is a matter of preponderance, in many of them, of an implicit or unanalyzed element of meaning by which their employment is guided, but which is not ordinarily brought into explicit apprehension. “Quality” is used, [44] in a discussion, with perfect propriety; but if we ask the user of this term what exactly he means by it, he will hesitate — and probably then use a synonym equally mysterious, such as character or nature. But if we are right in thinking that “to have quality” means solely to be something to mind, to fulfill some interest or stand as object to some valuation, then quality is really an implicitly concrete conception. Taken merely pragmatically, without regard to its ultimate meaning it is abstract, precisely because in so using it we are (to speak no paradox) adopting a subjective point of view, abstracting from what the quality of the thing is ultimately and considering only what we can do with it, by way of relating it to certain purposes, practical or theoretical. The abstractness comes from the omission of other more objective or disinterested valuations. “Red is a quality of the rose” is a thought which may primarily mean: to recognize a rose I must relate it to certain other objects as identical in respect to color. Or, in a philosophical argument, it means, perhaps: I can prove that without redness, rose is a mere abstraction, not a physical reality. In neither case may we be concerned to ask what we really say about a thing when we ascribe it a quality. What we actually do is to relate it to our interests, but it is not necessary to note this explicitly in order for the purpose in hand to get itself accomplished. In knowing that the rose is [45] red, I prepare myself to recognize that flower, to expect a pleasant odor, etc., More is implied, but this more is little attended to and far from adequately grasped. Hence the abstractness of the ordinary understanding of universals. It is all a matter of the predominant purpose in hand. “Person” as a legal concept is a highly abstract term, but personality in the end is the richest and most concrete of all ideas. “To be,” similarly is abstract as applied by the farmer who exclaimed of the giraffe at the zoo: “But there ain’t no such animal!” The difference between the plain man and the philosopher in such a matter is (or, we contend, ought to be) that the former is interested in the being of things more primarily than the latter in terms of the consequences in practical sensuous experience, actual or imagined, to himself. If giraffes are not ordinary features of the experience of himself and others, not a part of his everyday “world,” he suspects them of unreality. In short the real is what makes a difference in terms of the interests we have in hand. This is the aspect we ordinarily utilize in employing the word “is.” Yet, unless we are to frankly accept pragmatism, and admit that truth is the success of the purposes11 for which concepts are employed, and that alone, we must admit that “to be” is not adequately defined in terms of the practical and sensuous experience of man. The reality of things is more than their relation to us, as possible contents of our finite [46] experience. Yet this more is very little our usual concern, and if challenged to give its meaning we can see no ready answer.
But a meaning there must be, and to call it abstract is beside the point. When the largely undisinterested attitude of practical living, or of thought in a partial aspect (as in science where to be is still primarily to be humanly and sensuously perceivable)12 is transcended and the curiosity which is also reverence and love, in the philosophical, or the religious attitude, the genuine abstractness of instrumental qualifications should be transcended in a direct study of our fundamental principles of thought and life, in their full significance (i.e., relative not merely to our more or less external and sensuous interests and activities, but to our capacity for self-absorption in the truth, for our enjoyment of reality for its own sake — as one appreciates a friend or a sublime ideal. From this point of view the abstractness of “being” may be seen as but our own self-absorption and narrowness; since we may find that all that is by virtue of that fact as its essential meaning stands included in one all-comprehending scheme which is of the highest intrinsic worth and excellence, and eventually or as a whole itself is by virtue of the Principle of Divine Self-existence or Self- enjoyment) which, being immanent in us as in all else, is [47] the ultimate reference of the phrase, “there is.”13
In short, as Bosanquet says, “every abstract tends to return to its concrete,” is ultimately dependent upon an implicit element of meaning which is rooted in the last ground of things, even though before it reaches this ground it vanishes from our ordinary consciousness as self-understood. It is precisely the business of philosophy (as both Bergson and Mr. Bradley are perhaps equally concerned to point out) to detect this plunge or reference of meanings to a fully concrete reality, and to follow them there so far as it can.
On the other hand, arguments have been advanced to show that even if Being includes all things, it is a logical impossibility that it should have any concrete identifiable nature. Professor Spaulding’s discussion of this issue (The New Rationalism, pp. 354-356) contains a number of errors.
He thinks that the Concrete Universal of Monism must be a kind of which everything else is an instance, as everything is an instance of the genus “thing.” Then, if it is to be given any positive quality or character, this can only be done by providing it with the character of one of its subspecies. But this is impossible with a summum [48] genus.
Thus “entity” loses its generality if defined as “spiritua1 entity” — since the latter is obviously a sub-class of entities. The principle which conflicts with the Monistic position; on the basis of the “Old Logic” is the following: “a characteristic which differentiates one species of a genus from another species cannot also be a characteristic of that genus.”
Spaulding’s employment of this principle against monism depends upon the assumption that any quality ascribed to the One will be one which some of the many possess but others are wholly without. As a fact, the Monist is concerned with a quality which is not in its presence or absence the differentia of any species (save that of the One itself) but only in the degree and manner of its presence. It is in no sub-species fully realized, and in none is it wholly lacking. Thus if we take Life as the Ultimate Category, on the Monistic View all is alive, but there is only one Perfect Life — i.e., one all aspects of which depend intimately upon its own power. The various species of lives or living beings are none of them differentiated by some characteristic which belongs to the One, but by the fullness of their realization or possession of the One Life. The differentia are in terms of degrees. We conceive the nature of the One not by attaching to it any such finite degree, but by drawing the immanent Standard of degree we are throughout employing, from the region of implicit and [49] instrumental apprehension to that of conscious enjoyment or explicit knowledge. In knowing any species we are already knowing it through the Highest Nature.
But, in the second place, Spaulding’s discussion assumes that the One must include the many as a class includes all its members. “The genus includes in its connotation only that which is common to the several species (the Monist admits that spirituality is common to everything in its degree) while the species are differentiated from each other by characteristics which the genus cannot have in its function of including them, and of denoting all the individuals that the species denotes.”
We have here an almost pathetic irrelevance of argument. One can only say that no one ever imagined that the terms God, or The Supreme Being, or the Absolute Mind, have been used to denote all individuals as instances of the class or kind of Divinity, or of Absoluteness. The One is not a class of members, but a Reality with contents or included elements. And the character of that Reality is not known through a selection of one of its elements as typifying it, but is known directly through that immediate approach indicated by the words of Tolstoy:
“While there is life, there is enjoyment of the self-consciousness of the Deity.” (War and Peace) On the other hand the contents of the One Life are characterized in terms of the relative richness with which they reproduce their [50] Prototype and author.
Finally the Ultimate or Perfect Being includes the finite beings, not as instances of the class Perfection or Ultimateness, as “animal” includes dog and horse, but includes them by owning them, by their entering into Its Life and being of value there.
Such arguments as Professor Spaulding’s thus seem to have no just bearing at all upon the problem. The same may be said of the view that the absolute cannot be characterized because all form is limitation or — as Spinoza said — negation. But if the form of the One is essentially a self-sustained quality of life, a process essentially spontaneous and free, it is consistent with infinitude in any sense not itself a pure negation. “Independence” is equivalent to self-mastery or it becomes negative and empty. Nor is there any reason why the Ultimate Being should be such a negation or an emptiness, inasmuch as positive Perfection and Infinity are conceivable, and as we hope to show, in the end demonstrable.
Finally, we may point out that if we endeavor to discover conceptions revealing the nature of life, experience, and being, in their ultimate essence, this is not as if we chose one among many merely disparate concepts — equating the whole of mind to a part. It is to beg the question to suppose that concepts do not involve in greater or less degrees the One Principle which gives meaning to all, and which is present in every concept as an implicit meaning, [51] but in some with a far higher degree of explicitness.
In short we are always aware of the Meaning of meanings, but not always to the fullest advantage. No concept, however explicit its meaning, can perhaps give us explicitly the full riches of the Ultimate Meaning, indeed this is impossible to the finite mind. Yet, if we use a concept like mind, or interest, or love, not as one idea among others simply, but as one with manifest intrinsic relations to others (as interest and value are obviously related) by analyzing these relations we derive the maximum amount of inter-connection and mutual illumination between ideas, we behold them as a living system, a functioning whole, and we make thus real to ourselves in the highest degree attainable by man, the principle which animates the whole and forms the law of the system. Without an at least unselfconscious or intuitive dependence upon that principle we could not think at all; the degree of explicit apprehension of it we attain depends upon the possibility of developing a concept in which the remaining conceptions find their own explicit meanings contained with as much clearness as possible. We believe that experience on its higher religious and spiritual levels provides us with concepts which do in significant degree bring into explicitness the place of the lower ideas in the meaning-whole they intend. To say the One is an entity is true, but leaves all in nearly utter darkness. To say it is a Force brings out its inclusion of change and vaguely [52] suggests intention or Will.
To employ the word Power is more vividly suggestive in the same direction. If we go on to Life or Will, we understand how purpose and value gets into reality, but are in some doubt as to what Will is to strive against or — if there are many wills, how they are related to the One. Moreover Will does not explain the social aspect of values — the essential communicativeness and interpenetration of the self-realization of beings. Transcending Will we conceive of Love or Benevolent Interest; related to will or purpose as revealing the essential loyalty or trans-identification of purposes with respect to one another; related to pleasure or joy inasmuch as to love is to rejoice in the joy of another; related to sorrow inasmuch as to love is to sorrow in the sorrow of another, and even in the loss or lack of a greater joy in the life of another — or in the mere absence of improvement (love is insatiable by ought but perfection); related to the ideal good inasmuch as the latter is at any rate14 an altogether comprehending and benevolent love, a rejoicing in all joy and a sorrowing in all sorrow; related to nature as the Good Will which sustains life in an orderly fashion and fills its experience with an endless variety of values of all kinds, including those of vague glimpses of kindred beings whose life is mainly hid from us — as in flowers, or perhaps the inorganic systems.
[53] Or at any rate of some sort of spiritual well-being revealed in the flaming heavens of sunset or in the glowing sun or other heavenly bodies themselves, and in all colors; related to evil and tragedy in virtue of the earnestness and self-sacrifice inherent in love, at its best; related to the problems of unity and plurality, of knower and object in virtue of the principle it involves as of a complete reproduction (in a perfect realization of the principle) of the being of one in terms of the comprehending interest of another and the fact that such inclusion is what love desires and counts as its very being.
Such a principle is no mere abstraction — no “intellectualist” formula — but that living realization of Living Unity and Ground of Things which as we believe, man’s social and religious experience has gradually enabled him to attain.
10. The Self-Differentiation of Value. A final question may be how a single principle can generate differences which are real as such only in terms of that one identical principle itself.15
In conceiving this situation, we fall almost inevitably into a fallacy. The One differentiates itself — [54] but this is nothing to be conceived from without the One — in sheer externality to it.
We are once and for all within reality or the One Experience. To say “difference” is to think with and by means of the One’s self-differentiation. We cannot begin with the One as undifferentiated — for the One lives and is only as distinguishing aspects of its being. The Supreme, Interest is essentially and eternally creative of objects of its regard and there is no other way to conceive it on our view.16
But we are met by Professor Perry’s criticism that even if the good, say, be defined as the fulfillment of human nature, the latter then is defined in terms other than the good. But we employ no such definition of value in neutral or objective terms. For us all terms are fully grasped only as denoting value — the self-enjoying mind is the first and last principle of all its concepts. Every thing is good, but in varying degrees and manners. To determine the meaning of value we need not go outside value-concepts. If we did we should get no light upon the problem. The only way to know value is to enjoy it.17
[55] And the only ray to achieve the fullest possible understanding of value is to penetrate beneath the surface significance and utility of things to their ultimate worth in terms of the Standard Valuation; making this worth our own not by a supposedly neutral description of it, but by the most explicitly evaluational, i.e., the most fully self-conscious value-conceptions (all meanings for us are values) we can attain. Knowledge of value and consciousness are one, there is no need for the self to transcend its essential life of enjoyment to discover the nature of value in “other” or “objective” terms. And if this is so, we do not readily see the need for an extrinsic principle to differentiate values from each other. Differences of value depend upon being valued as different — and difference is itself a function of valuation. Love or sympathy relates itself to another, and it is essentially at least such a self-relation.
If a difference in value be put in neutral terms, these terms must be translated back again in order to allow for their comparison as values. If the difference between value and a certain kind of neutrally describable situation be merely that value happens to be the name of this purely objective complex, then “value” becomes but of verbal significance (or value) and life is worthless or not according as we choose to talk in detail or in conventional shorthand18 [56] (cf. Sections 12 and 13). On any other view of value only value itself can differentiate itself.
Finally, on a non-valuational view of reality, as we shall see, no barest hint can be offered. as to how two colors, (colors, not invisible quota or wave-lengths) for example can differ from each other, nor, again how space-magnitudes can be compared (Section 10), or, in many philosophies, how “being” is in its essential meaning, different from anything else. Aside from the idea of value, it is impossible to explain how “quality” can take a variety of forms. The new-realist entities we shall argue are really undifferentiated in the end, cannot have a variety of natures, because they are nothing with respect to any common standard. While Monists and Valuationalists are accused of deriving all differences from one Principle, the pluralists must derive them by a comparison of each thing with — nothing. Nothing must measure how the thing differs from nothing — where being is purely private or unmediated.19 If value-differences are ineffable and uninte1ligible, they at least are implied by the idea of value we employ; while the idea of logical simples or of any ultimate pluralism contradicts the very idea of comparison, because things are relative to no common standard of quality.
In contrast to [57] this, a Monism of the Good, implies a standard or universal Ideal of value, and a plurality of valued beings, the distinguishing of which as different in terms of value, is an indissoluble and inherent aspect of their being value. Love is the supreme “principle of individuation,” for it alone cares entirely for the unique as such, and not merely as a member of a class.
11. The Limits of Philosophy. We end here our discussion of current criticisms of the Monistic idea as such. Hereafter we shall be concerned primarily with the argument for that conception, rather than with an attempt to anticipate every counter-attack. The issues of philosophy can never be put under lock and key. Objections can always be found and every answer is open to its own self-suggested attacks The gain in consistency and reality achieved in the development of any system may be perceived and enjoyed; but it can also always meet with an all-inclusive rejection, upon the basis of some manner of formulating an objection which seems not specifically and finally to have been met. Philosophy is thus an eternal or never-ending quest. It sails, we may say, by a compass which can never be permanently “boxed,” for good or for ill, and upon seas which can never be exhaustively charted. Nonetheless may the voyager behold above the breaking storm, the Eternal Sunshine, and carry ever and enrich in his mind and spirit that home of conscious unity with the supreme Goodness and Wisdom which [58] alone, as he may believe, called him forth upon the adventurous and never-ending voyage of discovery.
Some such faith, at any rate, has from the beginning appealed to the philosophic minds to whom our philosophy is largely due, and appealed to them not only on the concrete and emotional side — ethical, religious, or aesthetic — but equally on the intellectual and rational: as the sole possible direction of escape from the contradictions inherent in the partial abstractions (taken as the full experienced or knowable truth) of the ordinary understanding, operating as it does within the unity of mind and its objects, (and of mind and mind), assumed as a constant and therefore not analyzed or grasped in its full meaning for both mind and objects, or for the universe. It is above all the direction of escape that may be detected, not the final haven or refuge, the movement away from propositions which taken together radically contradict and destroy one another and toward those which, while we may not be able to know that we have them perfectly adjusted to each other, yet are manifestly proclamations of meanings which in their main intent reinforce and assist one another, contributing to a resultant in which a real place is clearly provided for all the large aspects of truth with which experience and its analysis supplies us. It is upon this principle of relative truth (itself requiring a guarded or qualified formulation20) that we rest [59] our case, not upon a claim to complete and unexceptionable demonstration or utter and indubitable consistency.
The Individual variation, in some degree at least ineradicable, in the meanings of words — at least of those which, on our view, are sufficiently concrete to essentially comprehend and illuminate reality — is but one of the causes which render such a claim, even in the mouth of a Hegel, in principle idle and pretentious. And certainly another cause is the finiteness of the human mind, in whatever degree the individual formulator may possess that limitation.
In summary we may say that, learning from Plato once more, the philosopher must ask consideration ultimately not for the possibility that what he says, but that “something like” what he is able to say, may or must be the truth.21
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Endnotes
1. As certainly to Spinoza.
2. In regard to religious values all mystics (practically speaking) at least have found Monism in conformity with religion. Also it seems clear, did St. Paul (who however was a mystic) Anselm and in our day such leading students of religion as Mr. C.C.J. Webb (Problems in The Relations of God and Man, p. 159), or Professor Hocking (The Meaning of God in Human Experience, Ch. XIV, “The Need of an Absolute”). The matter will be further discussed in Section 12.
3. Positively or negatively, as good or evil.
4. The Timaeus.
5. Cf. Section 3 — “The Limits of Philosophy.”
6. This statement is capable of a vast deal and variety of support drawn from both literary and scientific psychology.
7. We assume here that individuality implies a degree of freedom (cf. Varisco: The Great Problems, p [[no page number legible]] An effort to justify this assumption will be found in Section II.
8. In so far as Mr. Bradley regards Reality as utterly “above” relations, in the sense of standing itself for instance in no relations, of course we can give no answer to his argument; except to accuse it of resting upon an unprovable because inconsistent or absurd assumption. Whatever the Absolute may do with its appearances, or they have to do with it, it must, one would say, be related to them.
9. Cf. Webb, loc. cit: “Thus our consciousness of self, the Cartesian bed-rock of certainty, when reflected upon, resolves itself into a consciousness of self, of not-self, and of the unity in which self and not-self are related to each other” (italics mine)
10. See Section 12.
11. In their given narrowness or selfishness, as the case may be.
12. Or, formulatable in terms of mathematics.
13. So that, in raising the question of the being of the One Perfect Being, we are really asking whether the principle of “reality” or “is,” which is the ultimate meaning of those words, is possessed of perfection, and is immanent in our minds as the standard and ground of all our meanings.
14. We admit that no concept is adequate to the One Good since no one capable of conceiving it adequately by any means, can exist among men. But some concepts carry us about as far as we can go — and vastly further than others.
15. Cf. in Section 2, the discussion of Being in Plato, an the Definition of Monism in Section 1.
16. The One Interest takes its objects as different in virtue of this very taking of them as different. Their uniqueness is their unique value in terms of the differentiation of the Perfect Interest which is an ultimate aspect of what we mean by that Interest. If it be said that the latter hence is complex we reply that since a self as a whole is in all its interests, the unity is preserved.
17. Classifying a happy experience under a universal — such as “happiness,” is not the essential aspect of understanding what its being of value to us means.
18. The worthlessness and the explicitness of detail being correlated!
19. To say the thing itself measures the difference repeats the problem — as to what, in comparison with other things, the thing is.
20. Cf. Section 4.
21. Cf. The next Section.
***
The Unity of Being
Part I Section 4
[60]
Section 4
Assumption or Principles of Method
1. The Nature of a Philosophical Assumption.
The only “assumptions” which perhaps ought to be made in philosophy are — as we have suggested in the section heading — those which are really implied in the very undertaking of philosophy, as a rational inquiry into the meaning of life as a whole. If life as a whole has no meaning, then philosophy discovering this will proceed to endow it with the degree of meaning attaching to the words — “no meaning.” In any case, what is assumed is the self-awareness of a living experience seeking to “understand” itself and its contents — in other words, to determine how it should relate these contents in and to itself, or, putting it in another fashion, how it shall best make real to itself their natures and connections. Since philosophy is a social activity, it seems absurd for it to consider the existence of personal individuals, capable of intercourse with one another, as a matter to be put in doubt for any philosophical purpose.
In short philosophy naturally assumes its own existence. Whatever it attempts to do, it asserts that that attempt is real — and the chief problem is for the philosopher to determine more explicitly what his aspiration is really directed towards, and what its very existence implies. For many purposes, doubtless, and purposes which [61] may well be called philosophical, such a self-examination of the inquiring activity is not what is mainly in point. Certainly, for example, in a philosophy of history, this could hardly be the case. Arid in a philosophical survey of the sciences, it is perfectly admissible to undertake a criticism of the categories and hypotheses of science without having first demonstrated the existence of a coherent body of scientific or reliable data, through an inquiry into the validity of memory, perception and the like. Nevertheless, in so far as philosophy is a last stand of the reason, a final return of knowledge from the region of possible error to the assured certainty which it enjoys in the possession of itself, as the self-verifying source and ground of all inquiry, in so far it is the philosopher’s task to display the whole structure of probable and relative knowledge as standing firm (in its genuine probability or relative truth) upon the inalienable powers and privileges of the knowing mind.1 From this point of view, at least, the primary assumption of philosophic inquiry is not an assumption in any proper sense. It is just knowledge. As Hegel well puts it:
“It may seem as if philosophy, in order to start on [62] its course, had, like the rest of the sciences, to begin with a subjective presupposition. The sciences postulate their respective objects, such as space, number, or whatever it be; and it might be supposed that philosophy had also to postulate the existence of thought. But the two cases are not exactly parallel. It is by the free act of thought that it occupies a point of view, in which it is for its own self, and thus gives itself an object of its own production. Nor is this all. The very point of view, which originally is taken on its own evidence only, must in the course of the science be converted to a result, — the ultimate result in which philosophy returns into itself and reaches the point where it began. This is in short the one single aim, action, and goal of philosophy — to arrive at the notion of its notion, and thus secure its return and its satisfaction.”
Opposed to such a conception of the ground on which philosophy stands is the essentially false view that knowledge must begin with a “leap in the dark” — must assume something it does not know. If this were so it could not even know when its leap had taken place, but must make another leap for the purpose. The simple truth is that to know is not merely to believe or to infer from premisses. It is at bottom to see, to possess, to hold inalienably within oneself.
[63]
2. Inconsistency as the Test of Falsity.
Even granting this, we are left with the problem: what can be elicited by the mind as the content and implications of its inherent self-knowledge. Must it not assume principles of analysis or of inference? The answer would appear to be, as before, no. The principle upon which mind proceeds is that it knows what it wants and can tell when it gets it — can see when its self-analysis is giving it its own nature. This principle is not an arbitrary assumption. To suppose so is such an assumption. On the contrary, mind may very well possess an insight into its own goal which enables it to know when it is progressing toward that goal. There has been much analysis of the idea of self-evidence — analysis which is often critical but which is sometimes at the same time put forward as self-evident or indubitable. In the present essay, we will take it that the basis of philosophy is an insight belonging to mind into the success of its own combinations of meanings to serve its own fundamental or unitary purpose: into, in other words, the consistency of its ideas.2 This insight is imperfect in a very real sense — but it cannot be a sheer assumption.
The mind that should suppose it were so, could [64] succeed in doing this only by failing to really apply the principle involved to its own case. We cannot admit that we can never know when we contradict ourselves — when we mean something and also mean not to mean it — and we likewise know very well, when this is so, by a fashion the reverse of guess-work, that we are not getting what we seek under the word “truth.”
3. Realism and Certitude. If the question be asked how we ultimately know that the inconsistent cannot be, the only answer that presents itself is to admit that being and consistency are known as somehow in an identity, so that we are implicitly aware that the first without the second is the first without an essential element of its nature. Whatever the implications of this may be, if we ask: what is the final evidence that forces us to admit the significance of contradiction with regard to truth, several answers may be attempted. We may suppose that the identity of truth and consistency, reality and compatibility, is self-evident, or immediately perceived. If, however, this be the case, we must certainly possess a considerable insight into the nature of “truth” and of “reality” or “being” as such. In philosophies which declare truth to be an indefinable qualia of propositions (Mr. Russell) such insight appears in very little evidence. The same is true if we consider “being” — which is likewise, as we have noted, “internally” related to consistency. Professor Spaulding, indeed, appears to [65] define it as: “That which can be consistently thought.” But here he falls into an implication of idealism — which he wishes no doubt to avoid. Thought, with its internal consistency gives the meaning of being, and the latter hence includes thought as part of what it essentially or logically is.
If being and truth be defined in terms of propositions and their relations, then the proposition as a whole is prior to the entities composing a proposition, and the atomism of such systems falls.
In philosophies which define truth as correspondence of idea and object, the conviction that two conflicting ideas cannot apply to one and the same object, is really indefensible on a realistic basis. Why should they not both apply? Because then the object could not be one and the same. But how do we know what constituted individuality or identity — why should it not consist in two conflicting elements standing each other off as it were? As a fact it seems apparent that our conviction here is based on the fact that in destroying one idea with another, we are making no progress, that, to put it in a fitting colloquialism, “it isn’t getting us anything.” Our ideas nullify each other and we are left in darkness. But the question to be put is: is this a darkness purely relative to us, one in which the object may continue nonetheless to exist for all our being unable to think it in its inconsistency, — or does [66] the object vanish also at this point. The only answer, of course, is in the affirmative, — but for the clear reason that the “object” is only what we are able to mean by that word. We can only mean by it what we do mean; and if, contradicting ourselves, we mean nothing — then nothing is our object, and that alone. The object must be consistent because the object is defined as object, as something opposed to mind and meant by it.
In short the idealistic argument, that without subject there can be no object, is no fallacy of definition by initial predication, but is the only genuine explanation of the basis of knowledge.3 The quality of meanings, as reinforcing and fulfilling, or frustrating one another, is foundational to the universe. And in the end we agree with Mr. Bradley (Essays — Introduction) and the entire school of pragmatists in viewing the decisive rejection of inconsistency explicable only in terms of meaning as expressive of purpose. We know we are safe in insisting upon harmony among meanings because short of such harmony the good we seek is not attained.
Truth and the success of thought in [67] getting what it wants, must be seen as one; and all ideation admitted as either instrumental or in some sense valuational. The certain insight into the conflict of meanings rests on the fact that insight and object are here in one — that our meanings are what we make them to be, in terms of the self-illuminated purposes or values of the life of mind.4
Thus we believe that even the working principles or underived knowledge, of philosophy — can best be understood on an idealistic and valuational view of reality. But we do not assume this as a premiss in the argument — outline. The point of the discussion here is that we do not deny the assertion of pragmatism that value is essential to the meaning of truth. We urge only that contradiction be admitted as an appearance of failure in the purpose in hand, and that the doctrine of truth as successful valuation be held absolutely free from any suggestion that valuation is necessarily subjective or relative to the selfish and peculiar interests of the individual.
It must not be assumed that interest or purpose need be lacking in [68] a capacity to appreciate values in an objective and self-less fashion, as good not because they serve oneself, but as serving oneself because they are good. To be good may in fact be the highest service anything can do us — be it a person or a sunset. During the earlier sections of the argument, until the section on Value, we shall indeed assume that such a disinterested appreciation, enjoyment, or valuation is at least conceivable. For our object in the earlier steps of the argument will be to show the unique power of consistent application to the problems of the ultimate categories possessed by such view of value in contrast to the inconsistencies more or less radically attaching — we shall hope to show — to alternate views, and especially to all pluralisms without a genuine Ultimate Ground or Monistic Foundation.
4. “Assumptions” Adopted. We begin our list of “assumptions” then as follows:
(a) Consistency. That consistency is a legitimate criterion of truth.
(b) The Meaning of “Valuation” That valuation is capable of appraising an object in terms of a worth possessed as such by the object in substantial independence of the appraising or of any particular finite mind. (This assumption will be specifically defended in Section 12, and has already been discussed in some aspects throughout the introduction).
It will be used prior to Section 12 only [69] as a possible hypothesis to supplant those which in the earlier sections we shall be endeavoring to disprove.
(c) Transferability of Ideas and Their Truth. That maximum ease and reliability of transference of thought from one mind to another is not a primary test either of the truth or even of the philosophic value of these ideas. That consistency is the primary test in metaphysics as the science which investigates the nature of Being as such. It is the crucial test to be applied in the present essay in that field.
Consistency, and in the end therefore, nothing but truth, being the primary object, it will be no fatal defect in the execution of the design undertaken if maximum communicability with reference to all intelligent and technically trained minds, (whatever their cast of experience and character may be) is not represented. The maximum communicability of a given truth is to be desired; but the truth must be found first, and not predefined in terms of the most convenient and readily transferable ideas. The degree of universal intelligibility attainable with respect to any idea is doubtless sufficiently far above that ordinarily attained to properly induce humility among defenders of any school. Idealists have too much written for each other, or even in some cases, as Santayana says, too much for themselves, and the following pages may prove very far from the exception.
[70] On the other hand we cannot but repeat that if the groundwork of things is not merely ingenious complex or intricate but also spiritual and a realm of values, the possibility of philosophic truth may depend upon patience, humility, and the character of one’s experience of values, as well as upon technique. And if this is so, then there is no way of ensuring that it should become not so — or of compelling the universe to become a picture puzzle of abstractions in answer to our desire for perfect intellectual explicitness and glib transferability.
On a view of life indeed which seems to us to sum up and contain all that man has and is, the only concrete conceptions are those of a personal, ethical, aesthetic, or spiritual character. Upon this view, a philosophy which culminates not in the mere surrender of the abstracting intellect, nor in its self-enthronement as sufficient — which it is not — but in its indicating both the need for more concrete and profoundly experiential concepts and the direction in which they are to be sought5 and found, if they are to be found at all, — is a philosophy of a very considerable value; while a philosophy which permanently distracts and alienates thought from the concrete and experiential, that is to say — according to the religious [71]
Point of view at least — from the realm of the personal and spiritual, is so far quite the reverse. It has almost every defect except that of difficulty in transference — which is poor compensation for the doubtful value which it has to offer.
On the other hand, the inevitability of some uncertainty and difficulty in the transfer of ultimate ideas appears to attach reasonably only to ideas which are concrete — and thus more than bare logical outlines or relations. As we have defined Monism in general (i.e., as an outline of Being conceivable apart from any particular meaning or inner nature assigned to the One) our arguments for this view from the more abstract categories at least, ought not to appear obscure. If, however, as unfortunately may here and there or in many instances, prove to be the case, they do so appear, we cannot pretend to exempt the mode of expression adopted from censure justly based upon this fact. On the other hand, in view of the fate — so far as many students are concerned — of the masters of philosophic thought and expression, who have already expressed themselves, upon the present problem, in many cases with what is to us manifest conclusiveness, there remains always the possibility of viewing our fault as primarily the mere attempt to succeed where those infinitely more qualified, have in a measure failed — to the extent, that is, of their failure to secure universal conviction and [72] understanding. We can only remain in our faith that understanding here is conviction, and leave the matter to whatever judgment may be passed upon it, adding only, as the sole explanation or apology which can be offered in behalf of our perhaps barren and feeble repetitions of old views, that it is the thus exhibited ensemble or total pictures of a single seldom so sharply isolated although comprehensive and fundamental philosophical theory, together with its rational justification, that imparts to our program whatever significance and appropriateness it may have.
(d) Indefinablism Not Accepted. Although imperfectly communicable formulas and ideas appear to us of genuine value in philosophy, — inasmuch as it is better for a fair degree of cooperation to accompany us in a direction which may lead to truth6 than for philosophy to be limited at the start to a type of formulation which relatively all students might perhaps learn to comprehend, but which cannot be known in advance to lead toward the important truths we seek,7 yet on the other hand, we equally refuse to be limited by another and almost opposite assumption or dogma.
This is, namely, the oft-repeated [73] assertion that in any system of thought some ideas must be left wholly undefined. The argument for this assertion seems sufficiently loose and ill-conceived. It is held to be supported by the argument that if we necessarily define one thing in terms of another, either we can never complete the process, or else we must be guilty of the circular procedure of defining A in terms of B (directly or indirectly) and subsequently B in terms of A. Now the answer is, why should we not do so? Because we seek to illuminate our concept of A, by defining its relation to the concept of B, we cannot therefore infer that concept A has no meaning for us except as we view it in such connection with B. Both concepts may, indeed must, have a meaning of their own prior to the comparison of A and B, or else they are not concepts but merely words. Such terms as thought, feeling, self, value — all have a meaning for us, whether we have formulated any definition of one in terms of others, or of anything else, or not. All are aspects of experience with an actual content of their own. But in the case of all, this content is more fully apprehended the more we seek to define their exact interrelations with each other.
The reason for this may be that all concepts are the expression of a common principle or life — which we grasp with greater or less fullness in the case of each one. Thus “cognition” may be a relatively barren or partial conception of a process or actuality more fully and ade-[74]quately to be described as an act of evaluation.8 To assume that no such relation can obtain between concepts is to assume that monism in any significant form is inconceivable. For without such a scale of ascending concreteness among concepts, the One would be a mere word, as much of one nature as of another, equally and indifferently everything and nothing. The only question is: can it be shown there is such a hierarchy? If so, the dogmatic assumption there can not be may be neglected.
It is to be noted that in defining thought, e.g., in terms of evaluation we do not define it properly speaking in terms of “something else.” Wedefine it in terms of a concept which repeats the distinctive element given in bare “thought,” “cognition,” or “awareness” (these words again having their community and their differences), but adds a further element actually present as a fact, it may be, in every real thought or awareness, but not quite brought into attention by the abstract terms or concepts mentioned.
[75] The matter cannot be discussed fully here. But we deny the self-evident rationality of the dogma of indefinablism,9 and substitute for it the view that very few concepts can be fully, completely, and with all clearness and communicability defined; but that every concept (even “blueness”) can be defined to an extent sufficient to throw genuine light upon its essential nature. It tray be added that the attempt to banish all imperfectly communicable or definable concepts from a fundamental place has its own revenge in an outcome essentially in contradiction to that intention. In new realism for example we are rendered totally incapable of signifying the kind of thing that any of the myriad atomic entities postulated actually is. For any definition that really indicated the nature of a thing would of course accomplish this only by introducing internal complexity into the term besides showing it to be the embodiment of a universal as a reality both within and without the term, thus destroying the latter as a sheerly independent entity.
We may mention in passing Professor Spaulding’s contention that ultimately there must be simple terms, since otherwise complexity is impossible.
But it may be replied [76] to this that individuality may in the end be relative to the point of view, except in the case of individuals as unities for themselves, or as unique psychic “centers” or “foci” of experience. In any other case, perhaps, there is no end to possible differentiation from some point of view or other. On the other hand, if one takes internal relations as essential to an entity this does not destroy its oneness from the standpoint from which it is regarded as one individual — whatever this standpoint may be. If by “a point” I mean essentially, such-and-such-a-factor or aspect-of-space, then the point does not, as a point, become two, or multiple because this belonging to space is an internal relation of “point.” For by our one individual point we mean just one particular “here-now” of spatial experience. The relations being involved in the individual destroy it as an “independent” ultimate simple; but they do not disturb its unity as a single member in the system of spatial positions. (For further discussion the reader is referred to the conclusions of Sections 8 and 10).
Our assumption is, then, that there is no impossibility in a genuine definition of all categories, and that if the “circularity” involved rendered the definitions idle or superfluous this must imply either that the fundamental concepts have a completely clear meaning to everyone, and need no definition; or that at least some of them have [77] no meaning at all except upon explicit relation to, or definition in terms of, other terms or conceptions. Either assumption appears to us monstrous, and certainly far from self-evident. It is once more a case of prejudging the monistic issue in order to combat it; and once more the procedure is not only dogmatic, but appears to us to result in a manifest absurdity or untruth. To define “will” partly in terms of “feeling” and feeling partly in terms of will seems to us perfectly rational and significant — inasmuch as with both concepts there is a manifest element of meaning we are not quite sure of at first in the case of the other, but which may appear to belong also to the other, although as an aspect subordinated in it to others. If feeling involves, as McDougal holds, the presence in it, of the “striving” of the ever-active self; and on the other hand, if volition is unthinkable except as in part at least a relation among elements of positive or negative affectivity, then circularity seems quite clearly to yield results and to be so far from pernicious as to constitute precisely what is desired in definition.
If, finally, we close upon a set of kindred or practically synonymous concepts, as expressing the Principle involved in, and serviceable as roughly defining, all others, and on the other hand if, when challenged, we resort to definitions of this ultimate principle in terms again of the subordinate concepts, there is no inconsistency or [78] absurdity involved. For we are thus using concepts both as explicitly attended with some meaning-value, however vague, of their own, and as deriving their full significance from the concrete and complete state of apprehension enjoyed by the mind employing them in connection with each other, in order to build up a total apprehension or realization of the Living Principle expressed in and organizing all concepts. It is as a clue to the employment of ideas together that ultimate ideas are of use, and on the other hand the method of comprehending these ideas themselves is accordingly to discover the place of the remaining ideas in the idea-system which implicitly — (and, by means of definition, explicitly) the ultimate idea is in addition to its quality of apparent, intrinsic meaning — i.e., the degree to which meaning aspects which might be brought out by employing other terms denoting these aspects in detail, are already — to most minds — awakened by the word in question. What “love” or “interest” denotes to a given person may be an open question — but in any case we can secure the meaning we like — if the other person’s experience is equally comprehensive — by emphasizing the aspects of “unselfishness” or of “sympathy” and the like, which we wish to be included.10
[79] Ultimately the definition of all things in terms of an Ultimate Principle and of the principle in terms of all things, carried out in an imperfect fashion, but so as to bring all ideas into some genuine and illuminating relation to the entire scheme, is so far from the hypostacizing of a concept as to be precisely the use of a leading idea in order to set all ideas in their proper place in the life of mind, not as the mere juggler of concepts, but as the appreciative being which apprehends and possesses reality not as composed of concepts, but as delivered into its hands through the use of concept-terms as stimuli to a properly awakened sense of the value of things — an enjoyment or possession which takes place in the midst of the succession of concepts but is the pervading life only partially expressed and realized in each, and fully itself only in the direct intuition of value which is something superior to and the foundation of all mere conception. Its full reality must lie in a valuation not dependent upon concepts or discursive thinking at all, but upon immediate comprehension or experience of all values — “the Divine Good” as it is called in our title. In short to know what Being is, is simply to know what values should be ascribed to it in relation to the various types of realities that may have being, and this ascription or sense of values is mediated by concepts, and by their interrelations, no matter [80] how circular.11
The entire matter will receive illustrations and development in the section on value, and therefore must not be carried further here. We may say only that the possibility of some degree of definition in all cases appears to us open to no conclusive objection, and that any view which brings us to a dead stop before an essentially and irremediably mysterious conception or quality is so far infected with weakness. As Plato pointed out (Theatetus: 203, 206 — Jowett) long ago, if we know things only in terms of parts or elements which are indefinable, then all our knowledge is in the end a compounding of bits of ignorance. The phrase “knowledge by acquaintance” cannot obviate the inconsistency of a view of entities which we know, and know that we know, and yet are in principle incapable of telling in the least what we know them to be. We may well as a fact be so incapable,12 but that the very nature of knowledge and of reality should imply [81] the impossibility of a knowledge of what things, in their natures, are — seems to us absurd, and the contradiction of knowledge as the characterization of things in terms of the natures which belong to them.
In only a few points will this conclusion be employed as a premiss of argument, and the fact will there be noted. But it seems to us a decided advantage that our system not only owes nothing to the dogma of Indefinablism, but is able to reach and illustrate the opposite view: that definition, while always incomplete and in many cases rough and approximate in high degree, is nevertheless, in principle, a universal possibility.
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Endnotes
1. Thus Schelling: “The affirmation There are things outside of us, will therefore be certain for the transcendental philosopher, solely because of its identity with the affirmation I am.” (Rand: Modern Classical Philosophers, p. 539)
2. If it be asked whether we must assume the mind to have such insight, the reply must be: no, we see it to have it and that he who lays no claim to such perception, must refrain from attaching any significance to thought or argument of any kind, so far as he is concerned.
3. If the realist asserts a direct insight into the necessary consistency of reality, he must admit: (a) That we perceive the nature of reality or being as such, and (b) That being is internally related throughout by a relation of consistency. Otherwise to the question why blue may not be both exactly the same as and yet different from green; or, if he is an atomist, why a logical simple could not be both one and many at once, there seems to be no answer on realistic premisses.
4. The introduction of the value-concept here may appear superfluous — and is admittedly hasty. Nothing is made to depend upon it, however. The advantage of construing meaning as value here is (1) that meaning is otherwise a blind concept throwing with it vagueness little light on our certain knowledge of the consistency of meanings — whereas to purpose is clearly to know in some degree at least, what we purpose; and (2) that the loyalty of the mind to truth is also better accounted for.
5. Thus it succeeds in retaining the situation under its control — in the only sense in which this is feasible or desirable.
6. Even if to a truth not so readily and perfectly controllable as is truth attained in mathematics or other highly abstract inquiries.
7. Indeed to many appears quite certainly to lead away from any complete or fundamental idea of truth.
8. A word subject to its own further illumination or definition. If this is secured in part by a backward reference to “awareness” in order to avoid any interpretation of “valuation” as a process carried on blindly, there seems no fatal circularity here. “Awareness” communicates some meaning without its definition (as we offer it) in terms of value. And “value” likewise conveys something in isolation. But the full meanings of all words depend on a full consciousness of their relations, as forming the system in which, as functions of the One Mind, they are organized — expressing one ultimate and all-pervading purpose which in this system (as brought out by “circular” definition) is revealed to and apprehended by the Mind.
9. Or of the viciousness of circular definition — a process which is vicious in fact only upon pluralistic assumptions under which the only form of interrelation of A and B which can illuminate the nature of either is where the other is a simple atomic part of it in a sense which cannot be reciprocal.
10. On the other hand, nothing involved in “love” may be found to be lacking completely or in principle in what is intended by sympathy. The difference may be in the degree to which some aspect is present in a developed or in an undeveloped form.
11. The circularity of geometrical definitions — “point” in terms of “line” and vice versa, leaves us with no great sense of advance because we already know by our spatial intuitions the general relations of these concepts with each other. What we do not know, and our ignorance of which leaves us dissatisfied and with a sense of mystery, is the relations of point and line to space as a whole and of that to non-spatial characters of experience. Only the circle or system of all ideas can yield a definition as satisfactory as it is circular.
12. If without analytic training for example.
***
The Unity of Being
Part I Section 5
[82]
Section 5
Plan and Divisions of the Outline
1. Division by Categories. The argument is divided according to categories. Each division represents a phase of the necessity for a Monistic view of Being — the first of the categories considered — a necessity which becomes apparent when any category is sought to be applied in accordance with a pluralistic view of the category of Being. The inconsistencies arising in each case prove to be insuperable unless that view be abandoned.
2. The Order of Succession. The advance from category to category is from the abstract to the concrete — understanding this distinction in the main as it has been dealt with in a foregoing section. For, as every universal category is ultimately an aspect of the one ultimate idea — the idea of the Absolute Being — every category is thus infinitely concrete in its ultimate reference, and will appear so when its meaning becomes subject to an adequate apprehension. Nevertheless, in their proximate reference, in the degree to which their ordinary employment involves such an apprehension of essential meaning, categories undoubtedly vary widely. Such words as “being”or “quality” in ordinary use are mysteriously devoid of almost any meaning over and above an intuitive ability to employ them correctly, a fact which strongly suggests the purely pragmatic interpretation of concepts. Yet, aside from that interpretation, [83] a meaning of another sort there must be.
In the series of categories which follows — Being, Individuality, Quality,Relation, Space and Time, Knowledge, Value, and Perfection — the order is in general intended to be such that each category should render more explicit than the previous ones, its own ultimate character as an aspect of Being, hence also should throw the nature of the latter into clearer light and aid in the interpretation of the previous categories as in their own way likewise functions of the One. In each case the reference to an Ultimate One, or the truth of the Monistic thesis, will appear as substantiated independently of the earlier or later divisions. In each case also the particular interpretation of Monism which is to be defended by the argument as a whole, and which will appear as the specific conclusion of the argument in the section on Perfection (and, to a large extent also, in the sections on Knowledge and Value), will, in the earlier sections be employed as a suggested hypothesis to supplant the pluralistic conceptions subjected to attack on the score of inconsistency..
The advantages — if there are such — of the order adopted, are thus as follows:
In the earlier steps, dealing as we there do with highly abstract conceptions, the logical requirements involved can be rendered with the greater precision, and the more elusive concrete conceptions of knowledge and value [84] which are to follow will thus appear, in presenting their requirements, not as imposing their more dubious demands upon matters subject the most definitive logical determinations, but rather as providing with these demands, pragmatic and interested as they may appear to be,1 precisely the concrete meanings required to fulfill the more abstract outline already exhibited as necessary. Instead of value calling upon logic to bow itself to the needs of life, as best it may, we shall find logic confessing its status as merely the ordering of those needs, and as referring in all its abstractions to the central and all-pervasive fact of worth or the good. In a purely metaphysical inquiry into the nature and meaning of the category of Being, such a priority of abstract logic seems more in order, than an effort to achieve a theory of Being from the standpoint of the actual wealth of scientific, ethical and epistemological, data and principles, considering with a view to their unification. For as the ultimate demonstration of the knowledge, so far as such be possible, philosophy must begin with the most indubitable of data and principles.
We must show that doubts of the validity of science, ethics, and [85] the religious or ultimate hopes of man, are precisely as intolerable, when fully thought out, to the mode of rational reflection which gives rise to these doubts, as they are to the ethical or practical or scientific or aesthetic or religious interests brought into question. Thus all modes of reflection, all faculties — if we may use the word — or all powers of the mind, will be shown to unite in a single ultimate attitude, affirmation, or consciousness of truth. Human nature will recognize itself as, in the end, a unity — as incapable of division against itself except by a species of self-deception or illusion. The “war between the head and the heart” will exhibit itself as possible only because of an imperfect development or internal disharmony existing in each. We shall know that it is “with his whole soul” that man turns toward the truth, whether as the good, or as the merely factual, and that, in the end, it is the same fact-of-the-good, or goodness of the comprehensive fact, that he encounters and possesses.
3. The Last Starting Point of Knowledge. In our view of the basis of philosophy as the mind’s self-knowledge, the manner of attaining such an assured outcome2 is indicated. The mind flees from all its doubts to discover itself as anterior to doubt and therefore indubitable.
It finds, [86] moreover, in the very texture of such doubts or questionings, certain recurrent or fundamental meanings, or at least words. Upon the meanings which these words do or do not have depends whatever significance is to attach to the questions which they enable the mind to formulate. At first glance, the meanings in question appear obscure and unattainable. Nevertheless, the mind may make the discovery that certain alternatives can be clearly detected in terms of the conceivable relations between the various root-ideas or categories. Thus taking Being (“is”), Individuality (“thing”) quality (“kind” or “nature”) and Relation, it may ask: is the being of a thing, of such and such a nature, (at least) its sustaining such and such a relation to One Ultimate or Universal Being — and must the sustaining of such a relation enter into the nature of Being and register itself as a difference there entirely containing, or at least reflecting the nature of the thing in question? Or, may a thing be, without effecting any universally identical object or reference of the word “is” in such a representative fashion. In short, it is possible to see that the doubt, for instance, as to the “existence” and nature of a world over and above the mind which is undergoing the doubt, may depend in part upon the meaning of existence in relation to “world” as a set or system of objects or things upon whether existence is something which includes all somethings in terms of its own nature as their necessary standard and locus of being, or [87] whether it is not. For starting, as final reflection does, with reflection itself, as the rock which shatters but which cannot itself be wrecked or destroyed, it is obvious to such reflection that if “to be” is to fall within an all-inclusive principle in terms of which all entities and natures must be characterized, then this Ultimate Being must be capable of representing in its own nature, the quality or nature of reflection itself — which is absolutely known to be.3 This fact may enable us to characterize “existence” or “being” if only we can discover it as universal in the Monistic fashion described.
4. Being and Existence. As to the distinction between Being and Existence, it is irrelevant here; since the question is, in reference to this or that type of world or object: is there such a thing or is there not? — and Being thus covers all possible entities with which we are concerned. The question of existence as contrasted with Being will receive some notice in our time and space section.
5. The Arguments Independent Yet Cumulative. It has been said that each section on Division reaches its monistic conclusion independently of all the others. This is true as already noted, only in so far as the conclusion is limited in its concreteness to the point in the series [88] of progressively more concrete categories.
Monism is — it is hoped — subject to proof in each case, but the valuational interpretation of the Monistic outline is only indicated; with more and more explicitness and directness, until it becomes the very conclusion necessitated by the argument. This occurs, not by way of hypothesis or conceivable explanation of things merely, but by the final attainment of a point of view from which the denial of a given hypothesis is seen as implying a contradiction in the hypothesis, while on the other hand the consistency of the hypothesis appears necessitated by the consistency of thought as such — so that all thinking appears as necessarily andradically absurd unless the hypothesis in question be regarded as true. Such is the ambitious scope of the outline.
It may be said, finally, that although each phase or division is intended as an internally complete course of reasoning to a definitive conclusion (Monism as such, and, in later sections, in a more and more definitive form) there is nevertheless a cumulative development in that each shows itself capable of incorporating the preceding as a more abstract or relatively blind expression of the same truth, and in that the conclusion in each case directly necessitated tends to become, as already indicated, more and more concrete — or, on the advocated view of concreteness more and more explicitly and richly in terms of value.
Metaphysics thus appears, not as a congeries of [89] abstractions irrelevant to life, and to reality as given in the admittedly valuational phases of life, but as the inquiry which determines in a manner subject to no ulterior doubt, — to none that is, not based upon a hypothetical failure of the inquiry to utilize correctly its own intrinsic principles, the precise scope and validity, from the ultimate standpoint of truth and reality, of the most general forms assumed by the consciousness of value.
6. The “Outline” Form of the Argument. A few remarks should be added in explanation of the use of the word “Outline.” The purpose of this word is of course in general to prepare the reader for a somewhat summary mode of statement; but also and in particular for on the one hand a subordination of the historical and current formulations and fortunes of the problems to what is taken to be their essential logical skeleton, and on the other for a comparative neglect of issues which it seems unnecessary to determine in order to exhibit the major logical motives which bespeak a Monistic, or a Teleologically Monistic theory of the mature of Being. The aim is above all to set forth the comprehensiveness of the argument for an Ultimate and Spiritual Unity, the completeness with which every great discovery, by a constructive thinker, of ultimate logical connections or relations of categories, is included and incorporated in the argument against the various aspects of an ultimately pluralistic view of things. We cannot [90] endeavor to meet in advance every possible objection to the mode of formulation adopted, but must rest content with pointing out the contradictions which appear to us involved in the disjointed or anti-spiritualistic conception of the universe, and leave the reader to develop his own mode of evasion or counter-attack, with reference to these alleged contradictions, if he feels so impelled. We have already noted that philosophy cannot be final in the sense of rendering counter-attack illegitimate, or beyond all reason absurd. On the other hand, so far as the bare or logical conception of Monism or Unity is concerned, the work of Plato and of the great successors of Plato who have accepted the chief results of his reasoning upon this problem, seem to us to have accomplished a demonstration against which all objections are of exceptionally little weight and relevance — even though advanced in the name of Modern Logic. Considerations of convenience4 and a dogmatic denial or suppression of the inconsistencies long ago revealed in an unqualified or unmediated pluralism, seem to us the basis for all such objections.
The history of philosophy seems to us to have a meaning, and that meaning to be the gradually deepened, reinforced, and enriched perception or [91] rational discovery of the self-dependence and all-inclusiveness of Life, Mind, or Spirit, — as in its own inward or self-apprehended unity the very being of things, and the principle of all their organization and connection. A system of philosophy becomes thus the mind discovering the place of things in the universal Life of Mind, not a vain attempt to deal with them as they might be merely among themselves. Such isolated entities, matter, or what-not, have been seen as abstractions affirmed as complete in the face of their manifest abstractness or relativity, and the derivation of all meaning from the central activity or self-realization of mind, functioning for its own ends in the form of concepts or of values which it creates only in and for itself, has been grasped with inalienable and calm assurance by the great succession of the most earnest and gifted minds who have devoted themselves to metaphysics. It is the logical foundations of this assurance as we see them, which in the large or in outline fashion we desire to set forth, exhibiting on the one hand the rational justification for this primary conviction of philosophers; and, on the other, the plausibility, which at least on one mode of interpreting it, appears to us from every point of view, to attach to it, as a conception of life and reality.
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Endnotes
1. Although having, in truth, a genuine logic or consistency of their own, which cannot be denied save on pain of contradiction. Nevertheless, this consistency is more difficult to determine and more effectively subject to the suspicion of bias in its exposition.
2. Subject to the difficulties and obscurities of the final concepts taken in their concrete or fully explicated meanings.
3. And to be as reflection. Cf. Section 13.
4. For the purpose primarily of maximum communicability and fixity of concepts — a matter already discussed, and arraigned as at least perilously close to a begging of the question.
***
The Unity of Being
Part II Section 5A
[92]
PART II. THE ARGUMENT.
Section 5A
Prefatory Word to Sections 6-9.
The rise of the problems of unity in connection with the Categories of Being, Individuality or Uniqueness, Quality, and Relation may be indicated in the following manner. The pluralist and the monist alike might readily agree, — certainly the pluralist and the monist in so far as we would wish to defend him, — might agree to the truth of the statement — “There are many things” or “Many things or entities exist or have being.” The Monist however immediately proceeds to argue, thus: —
In the first place, you say that many things “are” or “exist” or “have being.” Or, of each thing you say, There “is” such a thing. In any mode of expression, you manifestly predicate one and the sane isness, areness, existence or being, of all the things, objects, or realities alike. The isness or whatever it be called, cannot be regarded as simply different in the case of each thing — any more than redness can be quite different in each red object. “Are” in “the things which there are” or “existence” in “things which exist” or “reality” in “things which are real” is indubitably some sort of a factor which is common to each and every thing — unless such a word as “is” is to [93] mean something totally different in each case, which is one with saying that it has no meaning at all. And in any case each of the many meanings of “is” must itself be, and we have the problem over again and may as well admit the ultimate identity of meaning conveyed by the word “being” at. Whatever this meaning may be it is clearly fundamental to all things, since the idea that anything might be if there were no such thing as to be is plainly enough nonsense.
In the second place, the Monist points out, if “There are zany things,” then each and all of the things must resemble every other in so far as each and all must share in the common status or quality of being a “thing.” Whatever it is to be a thing, everything must be that — it must have thinghood, uniqueness, or individuality.
In the third place, continues the arraignment of our apparently harmless purely pluralistic thesis, the letter “s” in the word “things” calls for inquiry. For, in spite of the fact that each thing is a thing, as much as any other, yet “thing” in one case and “thing” in another are to mean differently. Thing must somehow always have the same meaning — or mean the same thing — since otherwise we should have no right to employ the same word. If “entity” is preferred to “thing” well and good, then it becomes the something in every something in virtue of which it is a something or distinct entity.
On the other hand, though entity somehow means the same thing in every case, yet every thing is somehow to be [94] different or distinct; in order that there may be not merely “thing” but “things.” We have here an implication of difference in some sense. Perhaps mere numerical difference is all that is demanded, but no doubt the pluralist is willing to admit difference of nature or quality. But here we have a new something-in-all-things — namely, quality. And, since things must have not merely quality but different qualities, the problem of difference or plurality breaks out at a new level.
Every quality is “quality” no less than any other. If there are to be differences of quality, then either one quality differs from another only numerically — as quality is the same as others, but in respect to number only is different — or else one quality differs from another according must to its nature or quality. The qualities must have different qualities or natures in order to be different qualities. Thus an inquiry is initiated that seems to lead to a regress and in any case confronts us with the problem, how with reference to “quality” which is always and everywhere the same something or meaning — namely that indicated by the word quality — things are nonetheless to be rendered or considered as different.
In the fourth place and finally, we may consider the last unmolested word in our sentence, the word “Many.” This word appears to be predicated of “things.” Now many-ness cannot belong to things as “red” belongs to “roses.” No one of the “many things” can be described as [95] many. If the latter word be taken to characterize all of the things, even we must add that it yet characterizes none of them, and that we mean that it characterizes all taken together or as a sum, collection, or totality, “The things” when taken together or added to each other somehow become something which is many. This something, and not any one nor each and every one of the many things, possesses many-ness.
We have here the problem of whole and part and of the relation of “togetherness” or “addition” or collectedness or what-not. The various things, through an “additive relation,” are rendered also a many or whole. This whole is an “a” or one or individual, and it also possesses a manyness which its parts do not apparently have. Thus we have the paradox of an “individuality” or “oneness” which is essentially the opposite of plurality — in the case of each of the parts — and of a “one” which is essentially manyness or diversity. This extraordinary one-many reality is the product of the mere ones plus a relation of “and.” In other words, the ones with one more of themselves — a relation, become something equally one and many at once. Since the relation is thus a member of the many of all entities including relations, it must stand related by itself to other things, as other things are related by it to each other.
Thus we have two paradoxes — that of a unity or singleness which is equally compatible with the absence or the presence of its opposite, namely diversity, [96] and of a relation which must stand as its own object, and which must by virtue of its relating of the ones, create thereby an entirely new one — which however is not this relating function itself, but somehow its product. Thus the ones by virtue of the further items of the relatednesses of each, suddenly become quite another one. In short, the ones taken together with their properties of being related, form a whole. But this drives us to a new relatedness. The ones taken together with their relatednesses leads to: the ones as related by an additive relation to their properties of being — related by the additive relation. And then we see that the whole involves really; the ones together with or as additively related to their being related by an additive relation to their properties of being — related by the additive relation.
Here, then, in the idea of relation in reference to whole and part, we come to a fourth paradox in the pluralistic formula. The four paradoxes when followed out in detail develop into the four arguments we have grouped under the categories of Being, Individuality, Quality, and Relation. The first three present universals without which no entity is, or is in any way different from mere nothing. Therefore they seem all to be involved in each and everything as essential to its nature, as part of what it irreducibly is. And moreover not only is everything alike possessed of these somethings in every aspect of its nature (all alike are, are distinct or individual, and [97] possess quality) but only with reference to them can things differ. Only by a different form of one and the same “quality” or “nature” — can one thing have different quality from others. For the difference again is in terms of quality.
Thus quality, or likewise uniqueness or individuality, appear to be omnipresent and of their own natures or resources to differentiate objects. The suggested conclusion, which we shall try to justify in some detail, is that such universals are all modes of predicating one concrete universal — which we may call “being” as well as anything else. For clearly being is never to be found or thought except as determinate being — even being “as such” is thereby distinguished as a unique entity — is always, that is, individual, and obviously it must represent quality in itself and is absolutely nothing without quality. A “bare that” is not a possible conception but only an attempt to escape from one aspect of things which, if once wholly banished from view must carry all significant thought away with it. The “being of a thing” is used indifferently by language to indicate its having being, its membership in the totality of what is, and its particular nature.
Being, determination or distinction, and quality are then clearly not concepts posed by the mind in mere separation from each other — but are interpenetrating ideas, not an aggregate of distinct entities but modes of viewing substantially the same object or feature of reality. This feature — determinate being — is of fundamental and universal [98] importance — that it must in fact be a concrete universal or real unitary principle embracing things we shall try to prove in the first three of the sections following. Each section thus deals with the same problem,1 substantially, in our view, but yet with surface differences rendering possible the display of a perhaps interesting versatility achieved by the Monistic Argument.
The Section on Relations will have its own approach, also to the same problem in the end. For, aside from Professors Bradley and Taylor, all might perhaps agree that “to be” involves “to be related” (to being, to the things own nature, etc.) and hence that “being” really involves relation together with uniqueness and quality, as part of its most essential meaning. And in this section, too, the concrete universal or embracing principle, as that which relates2 will appear to be the only self-consistent theory.
We herewith end these anticipatory remarks and proceed to Section 6.
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Endnotes
1. Although the argument does not in each or any case assume this.
2. A function which the relations themselves are quite incapable of performing, since they are themselves the performance.
***
The Unity of Being
Part II Section 6
[99]
Section 6
The Argument from the Category of Being
Argument 1. Thesis: Whatever “Being” may be, all things are related to this something by a relation which is indispensable or internal to them, and which alone renders them other than nothing.
Whether “to be” denotes membership in a class simply, or the actual possession of a universal element or principle identical in all things, it is certain that without this membership or this possession, or some relation or other to Being, no entity can be — or differ in the least from nothing (even a merely possible object has being as such — there is such a possibility).
It may be protested: but a thing might be, by itself, and in no relation to any Being common to it and other things. Now in this hypothesis it is clearly supposed that the “to be,” in the case of the thing which is to be just in and of itself, has something in common with “to be” as applied to the actual case of a world in which there are a number of things. For otherwise the supposition of there being just one thing rather than of there being many, becomes a comparison of two situations of being in which the word has totally different meanings and so becomes useless and contradictory.
We conclude, then, that except in relation to one and the same Being, or that which is predicated by the words to [100] be, a thing is simply the opposite of a thing and equal to nothing. It can have no qualities, except as there are such qualities: all that it is and has is possible only by virtue of a relation to Being which it can not be thought apart from and still be thought in any other way than as nothing. Given a thing and its qualities, except as we think that (either as an actuality or as an actual possibility) there is such a thing and such qualities, we are not framing any judgment which could possibly be true or false, and we are conceiving no object to be anything in particular. We are not in short really thinking — as Parmenides declared.
Thus the relation to Being alone separates an object from sheer non-entity. No trace of quality is conceivable except as term to the relation in question. The latter thus becomes a manifestly and a supremely “internal” relation. It contributes not merely a necessary part of the thing or entity, but contributes all parts. The difference between the thing with its being and the thing quite without it is the difference between all that the thing is and zero or nothing. The relatedness to Being thus is qualitatively adequate to the entire nature of the thing and is or at least reproduces that entire nature.
At the very least we can reject the view of Reality or of the Universe, as a mere externally related collection. For with each thing there is a relation to Being which is all that the thing is — a relation which by imparting [101] relatedness to being imparts all quality or nature. No quality conceived in any way prior to this relation, is really conceived as anything at all.
The further implications of the internality of the Being-Relation are developed In the next Argument.
Argument 2. Thesis: Since the difference between the being of a thing and its entire non-being or unrelatedness to Being, is equivalent to all that the thing in any way is, the nature of the thing must be conceived as expressible in terms of the nature of the relation.
Think the thing as having being, and you think it in whatever nature it has. Think it as out of relation to being, and you are thinking it as a mere word for the absence of anything or as nothing. The difference between the being-related and the not-being related to Being is the full measure of what the thing is. The only way one can fail to see this is to persist in imagining that we can conceive the thing in its character without troubling about their being such a thing. The point is, there must at least be such a character — or our thought is only of itself as bare thought and is identical with infinite indeterminateness of thought, a meaning which means nothing, and so is nonsense. And so, if we are to know ourselves to be thinking any character we must know it in some way to be, as a definite object of our thought, in short we must [102] think the relation to Being. Remove this relation and you remove all.
The strict implication, then, seems quite safely to be that as we have said, the relation to Being in so relating a thing endows it with its entire nature, this entire nature being, (as it is) quite absent and nullified without the relation. If the relatedness thus produced is to supply the entire quality of the term related, clearly it must derive this quality from itself and include it in itself in terms of its own reality or nature. For any other reality turns out to be itself anything only through its relatedness to Being; so that in the end all qualities are equivalent to the variety of relatedness-to-Being. Not to the variety of things related-to-Being; for the nature of each of these is measured by its relatedness and not vice versa. There is no opportunity to characterize a thing apart and then to attach the relation. The relation is thought from the beginning and in specifying its term one simply specifies what the relation bestows upon the term as its very all.
Let us consider it from another angle. The difference between the thing’s being, (i.e., having relation to being) and its not standing in any relation to being, must make a difference to something, be real for thought as a difference somehow. Any proposition of which the opposite is mere non-sense, is itself nonsense. Now, the difference here [103] in question cannot be made to the thing. For the thing here, upon one of the two alternatives, vanishes altogether and is nothing. The difference between nothing and the thing is made very well to the mind viewing the situation — in the one case its concept of thing reaches an object, in the other it loses itself in the void of indetermination and nescience. But this fact is no help to the realistic pluralist, at any rate, who must consider “being” as in no essential way dependent upon mind. The difference in question, then, for him cannot lie in a difference to the thing. It can only lie then in a difference to the relation. The entire difference between the thing and nothing becomes represented in terms of the relation itself and its own nature. Thus the Being-relation is shown to contain all qualities somehow in terms of its own quality or resources. Different characters must be fully paralleled or mirrored by the different relations to Being and their characters.
Argument 3. Thesis: Considering all entities as members of the class of things having Being, and a class as constituted by a relation of similarity between its members (Professor Spaulding’s view) all members of the class Being are seen to be similar in an aspect which in the case of any member, includes all its aspects.
This is manifestly the case, if our previous dis-[104]cussion is at all sound. And obviously the Being of a thing cannot be regarded as merely one aspect among others — but rather must be admitted to register and account for and even to contribute all: inasmuch as the removal of this aspect is one with the removal of all.
Argument 4. Thesis: The various forms of relation to Being (or the various Being-Relations) themselves have Being and nature only in terms of the nature of Being itself.
These relations, with their relatings which are one with the bestowal of reality and character to the things related, are of course items in Being, are qualified by “is” as much as the objects whose nature and being they make possible. Shall we therefore relate the relations to Being, and if so through themselves, or through further relations? The latter course appears futile owing to the directly necessitated regress. The former course implies that a relation is somehow capable of being distinct from itself, as both a relation and a term related by that relation. Thus there must be the relations of identity and of distinction uniting the relation as relating itself, and the relation as related by itself. But the relations of identity and distinction repeat the same problem. The original relation must stand at both ends of the relation of identity — or there is no relating. No doubt in logic a thing may be called identical with itself — but only [105] because the mind taking the thing over again, can oppose the thing as taken once and as taken or considered a second time. The identity is relative to a difference introduced by the mental function of comparison and reconsideration. Aside from such a function for one thing to be related to itself or by itself is nonsense, and destroys all meaning to the idea of unity or oneness.1
In any case, if the Being-Relation derives its being from its self-relation to Being, then this self-relation must have being, and once more we appear not to have put the matter correctly, since the only meaning our words seem to bear is self-destroying unless an endless process be viewed as carried to completion.
The only mode of escape from such a consequence is thus to view the Being-Relations as essentially aspects of the very nature or reality of the One Being itself. For then we are recognizing that in conceiving the Being-Relations of things, and so their essence and reality, we are really conceiving elements within the One Being, or manifestations of its all-embracing power, life, or reality. Need we then relate these manifestations to Being by further relations in an endless chain? We reply, no: for we have now admitted the presence of the One as the very being of all things, a single and universal principle which needs [106] no chain of relations to itself because — on our view — its essence is the self-relation, or self-realizing power of a spontaneous and self-sustained life.
Since its relations are internal to it and conceived as partial conceptions of it, in thinking them at all we have thought their presence to Being, and there are no two separate items to be connected: the Being-relation, and its own Being or relation to Being. By relation-to-Being we mean a function of Being, not something over and above the encircling life of Being, and requiring connection with it. Connection with Being is one with actual participation or dwelling within Being. If we think at all we think the One and everything else essentially as meaning for the One, as one glimpse into its life of meaning and value. Never pretending to think something external to Being we face neither a futile chain of relations suspended in this externality of non-Being between the external something and Being itself; nor on the other hand (and this is our main point), do we face the contradiction of a relation endowing its terms with all reality and yet regarded as a mere empty abstraction or link, without internal possession, in terms of its own inherent quality, of the natures of things, and of the power to create, or in good faith to stand as the inclusive basis of the potentiality of all natures.
A truly concrete Universal Being alone can relate itself to objects in a manner capable of characterizing them, of registering the [107] difference between their being and their not-being, and of standing as the complete ground of its possibility. A relation wholly internal, as we have shown the Being-Relation to be, is really a contradiction unless it is a creative relation — one capable of producing the object. For to declare that we can conceive the object as other than nothing only by conceiving it in a certain relation, is to say that in that relation lies the very essence of the thing, and therefore the relation has only to be in order for the thing to be.
But a relation to a thing which contains the essence of the thing is precisely that creative relation which according to the Theologians is the same act in the original creation of a being as in its constant maintenance in Being. The nature of the thing is derived from the nature and power of the Ultimate Being which contains all capabilities and all riches within itself.
The essential inconsistency, then, of which we accuse pluralism is its pretension that “being,” in the ultimate reference or root-meaning of that term, is a mere abstract universal: something, that is, essentially thin, or barren, or empty in character, while on the other hand no account of the situation can avoid or obviate the fact that all that is concrete, or rich, or explicit, is all this only by virtue of a relation to the emptiness of the universal in question. If these two propositions do not [108] destroy each other — do not hopelessly conflict — no one at least has been able to detect and to point out what there is in one which is consistent with anything in the other. And the second of the two is indubitable — “to be” is certainly utterly fundamental to all that can be said to be. The first therefore may with the best of reasons be abandoned..
As for the idea that a universal capable of so many forms must therefore be formless, — or, again, a mere abstraction, — the proper reply is that if the capacity to assume all forms implies complete indifference to form, then such a universal must be quite without any character or meaning at all; and that, on the contrary the true assumption is that that which can take or constitute the being of many forms, is that which is capable of assuming form, not as limitation, or in a manner exclusive of other forms, but as self-determination or possession, expressing its infinite and ever identical power in a variety of manifestations all of which fall within its embracing life of significance or value, and the maintenance of each of which is no bar to the maintenance and possession of a vast variety of others.
Such a concrete Universal can with manifest consistency be regarded as that which, in terms of an internal relation to itself, can characterize and register the being and nature of all things — represent the meaning of the proposition — “There is such and such a thing.”
[109]
Argument 5. Thesis: The same as above. If we pass from a consideration of individual entities to a survey of the world or Universe, we find the same implication. Describe the whole in all its nature and interrelations and there still seems a residual factor in the ascription of being or there — isness to the whole. “There is such a whole.” What does it mean for the whole to be? This seems to denote some relation within the whole — yet a relation by which alone the whole is anything, one which must be thought in thinking of the whole at all. Take this relation as one of whole to a part or parts and we reply: that there is such a whole so related to its parts is clearly more than just the relation which the whole in fact has to its parts. If it is a relation of the whole to itself we deny the meaning or consistency of such a self-relation, — as argued out above.
The only escape from these paradoxes is to admit that the being of the whole is a mirror in which every item of the whole, including its wholeness, is registered, and which itself has being in its being-for-self as a self- reflecting Mind. To ask what is, would thus be to ask what the Ultimate Interest, in terms of worth to which we ourselves have being, possesses in the full scope of its life, of values. To predicate Being of this ultimate Interest is to proclaim it as the final reference or meaning of the [110] word “is,”2 as, in its infinite self-reality, precisely Being itself, which forever is in its eternal self-realization. In knowing that the One is the very Principle or immanent Ground of our existence, we know all we want to know in asking if an Ultimate Being exists.
On a monistic or immanentist view this is perfectly consistent; on an ultimate pluralism it is on the contrary fatal to declare that the Being of the world is its relation to the mind thinking it. On the latter view all becomes pendent from the one mind, or internally related to it, and the pluralism vanishes. On the former, since the One is immanent in all minds, the relativity of Being to any experience which raises the question — what is? — turns out to be only a relativity to the One which is immanent in that mind as sustaining it in being — i.e., in its own Life. “God is” is seen to mean: that ultimate principle in terms of which I am real, and all else likewise is real, is divine and Perfect. Or, it means: in beholding anything, I am beholding phases of one Power, which is real to itself with an infinite fullness, and of which my knowledge of reality is but the slightest of glimpses; a power which [111] sustains all things, and which I actually embrace and possess in myself in a degree capable conceivably of indefinite increase.
No more could be intended by the existence of God. And the universe receives its definition of Being, as the total wealth and system of values in the Divine Life. We are driven to no endless regress in the direction of the being of the Being of the One, etc., For the self-reality of the One is the single all-inclusive register both of the One and all things else and is present in my questioning as the immanent Meaning of my word “is.”3 To know that a thing is, is merely to discover what that Meaning as the One Self-Existent Life involves. Knowing what it involves, the question is answered.
In short, if “what is” is rendered equivalent — as Bosanquet suggests — to “what is affirmed by thought,” — ultimately by one Thinker everywhere involved in thought, then this Thinker Himself, since he affirms or recognizes Himself by an intrinsic and eternal Self-Realization or enjoyment, may be viewed as having Being in terms of the same register of Reality, upon which all other instances of “is” are inscribed.
On a pluralistic view no such genuine self-reflection which reflects all things else, is to be found, and hence we are left with no real answer to the paradox of a universe which besides all its qualities, is with those qualities — the “is” thus falling forever outside, and yet remaining [112] within as the most essential factor of all.
For Monism the “is” of the Divine Life with all it includes is, once more, the self-reflection which at the same time reflects all. The “is” of the whole with all its qualities becomes then not something above them, but their indwelling Life. There is no need to consider it as anything extra, and yet also as wholly essential; but just as it is essential so it is wholly intrinsic and all-pervading, and, in truth, the very essence of things. Either you admit Being to thus permeate things and reflect and register itself and all things at once, or you are left forever with it as something over and above things, and then something over and above itself: and as a thing among things, yet essential to and constitutive of things.
Argument 6. If Existence be regarded as prior to Being, then Existence becomes our concrete Monistic Universal.
The difference between my existence and my non-existence cannot be essentially a difference to me. For in the second case I am not to be found at all “on the view of being as essentially located in time” and can register no difference. One can only say that “existence” or the realm of existence, or the world-whole, undergoes a. certain determinate change. Thus we get the whole, or some universal principle of reality, as constitutive of, and as measuring in its own terms, my entire being and nature — the [113] difference between it and its sheer absence.
We may observe here that if mind is regarded as irreducible to entities non-mental or independent of mind, then the world-whole, or “existence,” must be a spiritual unity or principle — and materialism or agnosticism fall. This point however depends upon the problem of the nature of mind (discussed in Section 11).
The present argument meets those who neglect Being-as-such and regard things as parts of the world-requiring no tie or tag of “is” to trouble us. They still reduce things to essentially parts of the whole, and one form of Monism at least appears. The problem of the existence of the world as a whole, over and above its nature, still remains. Plus all qualities, things and relations, we have one more thing — their existence. For spiritual monism this means that all things are essentially reflected into a final self-reflector, this relation of reflecting not being, another entity additional to things but their indwelling all constitutive life. But any mere link or non-constitutive relation is just one more thing to be given being.
7. Conclusion. We conclude as follows. At least we know that Being is a one something the relation to which of having being is wholly internal to all things, Internal relations then exist. Secondly we feel justified in concluding that a relation without which a thing is nothing, is manifestly that which endows it with all that it has.
[114] In the relation is the entire measure of the thing. The concreteness of the relation becomes evident. Since the relation clearly derives its being from Being itself, the latter is seen to be a wholly concrete principle in the end. Its alleged abstractness means only the meagerness of our grasp of it. If more it contradicts the constitutive character of the relation.
From another point of view — a relation which makes its object must be a creative relation. A relation without which its term is literally nothing is a contradiction unless the thing is all that it is by virtue of the relation. Concreteness falls again to the Universal.
Finally, whatever Being may be, Being itself is, and we get a self-relation which is a contradiction of identity unless the essence of the thing is in the relations of identity and of difference by which it is divided, not as by relations which are entities over and above the thing (thus breaking it into bits) but are its own inner self-contrasting and relating life. Thus Being sweeps the relations of identity and difference into itself, destroying its unity, or else compelling us to view it as essentially a self-reflecting process, in terms of which all identity and difference must be conceived. Otherwise we have being disrupted by relations which are essential elements of it and yet external to or other than its own [115] nature. Once more we are led to mind as such a self-contrasting process.
Final Statement. We might perhaps put the issue in this ultimate compact form. One cannot predicate being of a thing (as one entity or element, of another) for unless one has already in thinking the thing, thought its being, one has thought nothing. For the same reason, things cannot be predicated of being. All that remains to do is to admit that things are, as objects of thought, other than being only in the sense of constituting various expressions or differentiations of the principle of being itself; so that what may be predicated are various elements-of-being, defined in terms of this relation and predicated of being as the universal identity for and in terms of the nature of which the things are what they are. A relation without which a thing is just nothing must contain all that a thing is in terms of its own being.
And since the relation to Being is also literally nothing without Being itself, the nature of Being measures and contains in itself the differences separating all things from zero or a blank nothing. The concreteness and constitutive character of Being is only avoided by the contradiction of maintaining that that in which all is contained (since subtracting it we get no remainder) is nevertheless empty or a mere abstraction. If in thought to remove something from a thing is by logical necessity to remove all, then by an equal logical necessity [116] that something must be all that the thing is. And since the relation to Being is nothing without Being, Being itself as the identical or real meaning of “to be” must be all that all things are — must be infinitely concrete and utterly all-embracing.
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Endnotes
1. See Bradley, Essays, p. 283.
2. For the realist such an escape from the regress would imply a relativity of all being to a human meaning. For the immanentist the ultimate meaning involved or indicated is always the Universal or Divine Self-Meaning. We begin with an “is” or register of fact which includes all things in its identity and not only is what it is, but, with all its quality, is or has being in its being — itself for itself — in its self-reflection. If, again one should say, given what a thing is you are given that it is, or its being — still that and what are clearly not identical — the “is” is something left over the quality.
3. Self-consciousness as self-realization or self-enjoyment is not two halves of a mind in relation but an ultimate inwardly illuminated life — the relating or self-reflection is the essence of its nature.
***
The Unity of Being
Part II Section 7
[117]
Section 7
Individuality
Thesis: The category of individuality or distinct identity (or thisness) is in the same foundational or constitutive relation to all entities as, we have held, is the category of being.
Argument 1. The present category is sometimes treated as though a thing (in the broadest sense) were individuated by the unique assortment or combination of qualities composing it. But as a quality is itself an individual or distinct entity, we are not in the least advanced by such a view. There is no escaping the fact that “identity” or “uniqueness” is something not analyzable into other factors — since these become quite as much in need of individuation.
Individuality thus reveals itself as an ultimate, unitary, and all-foundational principle. For without it nothing can be itself, rather than something else. To differ in quality or in relations is not sufficient since the quality and relations are so many more distinct somethings to be individuated.
If, moreover, individuality is an irreducible conception, it is also one capable of comprehending every conceivable difference in its own terms — precisely as (we urged) must be the case with Being. The Individuality of a thing is nothing merely additional to its other [118] qualities, but their common all-pervading principle. Every aspect of a thing differs from nothing only by reference to this principle. The unitary and indivisible aspect of a thing called its individuality is just that aspect of it which comprehends all the rest — which, in short, is the very fullness and completeness of the thing.
Being and Determinate or individual Being are thus one and the same element in Reality. All being is determinate — even Being-as-such — and is individual.
The argument for monism, then, practically repeats itself under our second category. The phrase introduced in the previous section — “there is such and such an entity,” exhibits Being, the universal identical reference of “there is,” as something registering equally the fact that something is and what it is. If there is no such register then to say there is this or that, is to use words without meaning. If the register is abstract, meaning by this that it is mental or pale or empty, then what is inscribed on it and measured by this difference to it, must be equally mental or pale or empty. If Being is not concrete, the latter word refers to nothing — since whatever concrete things may be they are that in terms of the nature of Being, and they cannot be richer in qualities than the latter.
Note. The scholastic difficulties over the principium individuationis and the various solutions, are all set into their true light for us by the saying of Aquinas: that [119] “the one (or oneness) is identical with being.” (Harper — Metaphysics of the School). Identity is but an aspect of the being, and the problem of the individuation of things is one with the problem of their existence. Both depend upon a concrete universal supplying differences out of its own identical nature.
Argument 2. The individuality of a thing, we have said, is that aspect of it which includes all aspects, which is therefore the entire fullness of the thing. Yet here is an aspect in which somehow everything is similar, in all its fullness, to everything else, and yet at the same time which expresses precisely the width of the differences between things. The similarity follows from the fact that we cannot allow individuality to lose all identity of meaning in reference to the many individuals. Ultimately its meaning would necessarily turn out to be one and somehow invariant, and yet just this invariant meaning must be able to express in its own terms all the concreteness and difference of things. In terms of an aspect of ultimate similarity, as variations or differentiations of this very aspect, all aspects must be conceived. Again we have the concreteness of the universal, its capacity to measure, in terms of the difference to itself, the differences of reality. For surely a change from one nature to another is a change in individuality, and likewise a change in individuality is the sole manner in which a [120] change in nature can be conceived. Only by passing from one this, or — unique quality — to another do we realize change to ourselves or conceive it. Yet the second this remains a this, and is differentiated as a this this. In other words “this” differentiates itself, divides and yet as dividing retains itself. Without this self-division of “this,” all differences are absolutely nothing for thought. Hence the very fullness of differences must lie in this identical while different (or inwardly differentiated) nature of the universal which we have called individuality or determinate being. It is concrete and full or there can be no concreteness as a different nature or “this” from abstractness!
Argument 3. Defining individuality as determinate or definite being, which appears a perfectly unobjectionable and accurate mode of definition, we see still more readily, if possible, its concrete character. For determinate being is obviously, being in a definite form. But if we try to regard this form, or definiteness, as bestowed or as existing in terms of, something other than being, we see that this something itself requires determinate being (not merely determinateness, which is not or is without being) so that we contradict ourselves in defining definiteness in any other way than purely as a self-manifestation or self-defined mode of just being. Except in Being, in its own nature, as productive of its own forms, we can conceive no [121] forms with which to determine being. Any such forms go back to Being, and find in it their sole guarantee of more-than-nothingness or of positive character.
Argument 4. Any complex of ones or individuals, itself is a one or individual. In this case many ones are also one one, multiplying individuals both increases their umber and leaves it the same. Clearly either the new one is something over and above the many ones or else we have a contradiction. Something new has come in, a whole not just its parts. If the whole is just the parts, then why distinguish or how distinguish at all. If it is not the parts, what is it? The parts as together or related, you say. Now the relation of together becomes another entity, one, or part. The whole becomes the parts, including this additional part, and including their characters of being-related, or their relational properties. But these are further items. Surely the whole is not identical with the parts even though in “parts” we include parts or aspects or properties of parts. There still is a sheer contradiction between the whole as one and the whole as many. Admit the whole is the parts and you destroy the meaning of both terms. Admit it is more than the parts, and yet of course as including them, and you have another part of the whole in this “more.” And then we ask, is it the parts, as including this final part. This again is a denial of an admitted distinction.
[122] The conclusion thus necessitated is that the one-ness of a complex, that a whole as such is not its parts as such (even if possessed off relations as included elements or parts of the whole) and that to account for wholes it is not sufficient to predicate relations or more parts of parts, and that the whole if definable at all is not definable in this manner. It must be an individual, as the parts are individuals, but yet it is precisely a many and the parts are precisely a one. Individuality thus splits into two irreconcilable or hopelessly repugnant meanings, on pluralistic premisses see of a whole as merely the parts, including relations and relational properties as parts or aspects of parts.
We may further note that if a whole as such is indefinable on the pluralist’s view, then parts as such are also. Then, since nothing is known, except as a whole or a part (of experience, e.g.) clearly no definitions can be offered of the fundamental categories out of which the atomistic pluralist builds his conceptual world. We do not know what a thing is, nor what a combination of things are.
The solution of the paradox and the avoidance of the contradictions is readily achieved on the Monistic path of speculation. A whole is not the entities and their relations which form its parts. It is not the parts as related. It is the result of the relating of the parts. But [123] a result of something is not that something. The distinction of whole and its parts and relations must be maintained or both terms vanish. The result of the relating of the parts must include parts and relations but be something more than these. And it must have one-ness in the same sense as the parts — if oneness or individuality is to retain in any root-meaning and avoid destroying itself.
The Monist then says that the whole is the parts in their effect upon or significance to a single interest or mind by which they are related. The unity or oneness comes in the unity of the one embracing experience. The parts when taken together result in or “form” a whole, but obviously that which results or is formed is not simply that which results in or forms, and furthermore the “taken together” is not simply the parts with (related to) relations and relational properties. The taking together, or collecting of the collection, is a single act which includes the entities related in its own unity and so enables them to result, in spite of their manyness, in a whole or a one which, embracing the many in itself as parts — contributions to a total effect or whole significance belonging to the one act, is able to regard parts and whole as not identical and yet as related.
The point is here, then, that the unity of the whole must be something over and above parts and relations, and yet must as a unitary something include the parts in itself, [124] within its own singleness or whole-nature. Thus we must have many in a one not just the many over again, yet as truly one as each of the many. This again is our concrete or embracing universal. The many must be parts or elements of the unitary whole-mature as such. The whole must include its parts in relation, it must be them, or they must express each in their degree its nature, but this inclusion, this identity, this expression, must be an affair of a unitary or genuinely one individual essence or nature1 capable of differentiating itself into elements of its own including life.
From another angle, inasmuch as we found it necessary to view the oneness of the whole as relative to a genuine individual not merely another word for the parts and their relations, and inasmuch as the very being of the whole thus becomes rendered in terms of a one principle above mere parts or individual entities as such, — if the being of a whole must thus be viewed as solely a result in terms of the single nature of a principle relating the parts and including them within its one life or reality as an outcome or unitary significance attaching to the act of holding them in relation, — if being can in the case of a whole (thus of the universe) be regarded as absolutely relative to such an inclusive or concrete universal, then being in the case of the parts must be so relative also — or “being” falls into discordant halves and loses all rational meaning.
Thus all being is [125] seen once more as essentially being for one embracing reality, expressing itself in the parts as the sustaining principle of all their fullness or concreteness of character. One-ness or this-ness or individuality, likewise, are seen to be relative to a principle of One in a many, — the whole is one by the very same principle of unity in differentiation by which the supposed ultimate ones are in reality themselves always both one and many, and by which the being which enables any one of them to be is yet identical with itself as likewise present in every other, in a similar constitutive relation.
Many as one, and the One in the many are thus wholly concordant halves of the same whole. The many as such are each one because they are objects of the individuating Interest of the One, and the many as a many is likewise one by being drawn into the inclusive focus of the same Interest — the ultimate this-giving principle.
5. Conclusion. Even more obviously than with Being, does the self individuating character of the universal appear from the aspect of Individuality itself. If Individuality does not make the thing individual, given it its individuality or differentiating fullness of nature, then certainly, one would say, nothing whatever can. For any other something must first secure its individuality before coming to the help of its featureless brother: all thus derives from the ultimate meaning of this and differs from this meaning itself [126] only by means of it and in its own terms. To repeat our formula of Section 3, you cannot predicate this-ness of a thing; for the thing is nothing at all over and above its thisness (remove the latter in thought and see!) hence you must predicate a this of this, you must differentiate this-ness as a concrete self-distinguishing, particularizing, and all-characterizing potency or principle.
Secondly, we saw that since oneness applies to a many as well as to a one, one-ness must be conceived able to realize itself or produce itself out of manyness, its opposite, by including the many within itself as contributing to a unitary experience possession, or value (to suggest our ultimate hypothesis). Taking the meaning of unity or of uniqueness or this-ness as dependent upon the distinguishing and at the same time the uniting or collecting (in a single survey or apprehension) of objects of interest, or of valued individuals, which form aspects of the capacity of mind, we can secure a unitary and consistent meaning for thing — whether a many or a one. In either case we have an experience of value as a unity, whatever differences may be involved.
The matter must here be left to await further discussion in Section 12.
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Endnotes
1. Which, be it observed, is not just the Whole but the one uniting and relating Principle which sustains and forms the whole as a single element in its life — an element of interest as one.
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